Growing up in the business

Charles Kennedy Sr. founded Kennedy Office in Raleigh on June 1, 1960. It started small. The business spent about a year in the family’s basement, then moved to a small location on Peace Street. By 1963 or 1964 it was downtown on Salisbury Street, under the Andrew Johnson Hotel. His children grew up inside it. “We just worked at Kennedy all our lives,” Mary Catherine says, “because that’s what families used to do.”

Her mother was a nurse who worked nights. On evenings and weekends when her father had to work, the kids came along, and he put them to work to keep them out of trouble. When a job was due at the print shop in the basement of the downtown office, that meant sorting and stapling. “No idle hands,” she says. When the work ran out, they raced each other around in the office chairs.

As she got older, she worked every part of the business. She delivered orders, ran errands, answered phones and handled purchasing. Her father also put her in the accounting department. It was a challenge, and she made her share of errors. He made her find each one herself, however long it took. He was patient, and it taught her to work a problem through. She was glad for the experience, and glad when she moved on to work that fit her better.

This was in the days before email, and before even fax machines. Every order came by phone or in person. “We didn’t have a lot of role division,” she says. “You picked up and did whatever needed to be done.”

The company still had a large retail business then, and professionals dressed up for work. So she did too, even while moving cases of copy paper around the warehouse. “In three-inch heels,” she says. “I don’t even know how I did it.”

As Kennedy added locations and product categories, her work shifted to transferring product, HR and supervising people. One thing stayed constant. “We’re always in the sales mode, because that’s what we do,” she says. “But we’re service heavy. Sell what we sell, service what we sell, and the next day comes.”

What hasn’t changed in 66 years

Asked what was true when she started and is still true today, Mary Catherine doesn’t hesitate. “It’s always a human connection,” she says. “It was always personal. Everything we do is personal, in that we aim to please and create a solution that works for people. That’s what they need out of the partnership.” Inside the company, that idea has a name. Kennedy calls itself a high-touch relationship business.

The second constant is a willingness to find whatever the customer needs. Kennedy started with office products, but it never stopped there. She remembers selling refrigerators long before a break room was a normal thing for an office supplier to furnish. “If you wanted to buy it and we could help provide it, then we always have.” That instinct is how Kennedy grew into a solutions provider for the whole workplace. Furniture, break room and coffee service, janitorial, technology and print sit alongside office products today, and the same service stands behind every one of them.

What customers mean by service

When a customer says Kennedy gives great service, Mary Catherine says they usually mean one thing. “We make their day easier.” That can mean delivering an order to the exact spot they need it. It can mean billing the way their accounting department needs to receive it, or communicating with them in the way that works best for them.

“It’s tailored to every need,” she says. She admits that is getting harder. Tailoring service means knowing the customer, and that takes real conversation.

The delivery is the thank-you

Kennedy drivers carry orders inside instead of leaving them at the door. It takes longer, and it adds time to every route. Mary Catherine sees it as one of the most important things the company does.

“We understand customers have lots of choices in where they buy their products,” she says. “So if we get to connect, then we can say thanks and appreciate them.” Kennedy has always had its own delivery team, she adds, “whether it was Dad or me or Charlie or the people we hire to do that now.”

“We have somebody that delivers right to you. Not drop it off at your door for you to have to bring it in.”

Betty JonesKennedy Office & Furniture

A real person picks up the phone

Call Kennedy and a real person answers. There is no automated menu. If no one can pick up within a few rings, the call rolls to a voicemail that alerts the team, and someone calls back right away.

Mary Catherine explains why that matters. “Most people call because they have a problem they can’t solve themselves, and they don’t know where to get started,” she says. “They want somebody to own the concern and take care of it for them. The fastest way to have that happen is for somebody to answer the phone. So that’s what we do.”

Going past the job

Asked for one story of an employee going above and beyond, Mary Catherine couldn’t pick. “There’s not one,” she says. “They happen frequently.”

She lists the kinds of things she hears about every week. A rep drives back to the office to bring a customer something they need. A delivery driver spends far longer than scheduled helping move furniture. Customer care searches everywhere for an item someone has to have today. Kennedy calls these out at company meetings as “caught in the act” moments. “Their servant hearts,” she says. “That’s just what they do.”

When something goes wrong

Every supplier makes mistakes. Often the problem starts further up the supply chain, before an order ever reaches Kennedy. Mary Catherine says that doesn’t change who is responsible. “We have to own the process, because we are who they know to call,” she says.

The approach is simple:

1. Own the problem and apologize for it.
2. Ask the customer how they want it resolved.
3. Take it, run with it and follow through.
4. Check back to make sure everything went well.

“Sometimes it’s not complicated. Sometimes it is,” she says. “But mostly it’s just simply owning it and fixing it.”

Price, and the pricing game

Kennedy recently published a side-by-side copy paper comparison showing it beats the national sellers on every carton. Mary Catherine is clear that price matters. Most of what Kennedy sells is a commodity, and there is plenty of competition. “Price is always part of the conversation,” she says.

But the goal is bigger than the price of any one item. Kennedy looks at the whole purchasing experience. It wants to keep the total cost of buying low, including the time and effort it takes a customer to order, receive and pay. And it wants to be consistent. “We want to be trustworthy. We want to provide the best overall experience,” she says.

That is what she means when she says Kennedy won’t play the pricing game. At many competitors, she says, “today a price is one thing, and tomorrow it will be something else, depending on how badly they want a customer or want to move some product. It’s not trustworthy or consistent or right. So we’re just not going to do that.”

“It’s just easier to be civil and straight up and fair.”

Mary Catherine SigmonCo-owner, Kennedy Office & Furniture

Could someone find copy paper cheaper somewhere for a day, or a few hours, from a seller no one thought to compare? Maybe, she says. Kennedy sets a price and holds it, with no membership program required. “We offer good service at fair pricing, however competitive. Sometimes that just means we’re also cheapest.”

Through the superstores and the internet

Kennedy was in business before the office superstores arrived, and it was still standing after online ordering changed the industry again. Many competitors from those years are gone. Mary Catherine doesn’t pretend it was easy. “Some of that stuff is hard, and still is,” she says. At first, Kennedy didn’t know how to deal with it. But it learned.

That willingness to learn and change is what carried Kennedy through. The company learned to buy better and price better. It learned to talk to its customers and not take them for granted. And it learned some hard lessons about its own limits. “We can’t be all things to all people. We have to know who our customer is,” she says. “We can’t sell everything that is out in the marketplace, and we’re not always going to be cheapest.”

Once the company accepted that, the rest became clear. “Value matters. Consistency, fairness, trustworthiness do count,” she says. “They’re not everything, but they count.” Kennedy always had knowledgeable people helping customers decide what they needed and spend their money wisely. “It’s always been about the people, the connection and problem solving.”

She calls it simple. “It’s not complicated at all. We just have to stay light on our feet, because you never know what tomorrow brings.”

The people behind it

Service depends on who is doing the work. When Mary Catherine thinks about the best people Kennedy has hired, a few traits come up again and again: positive, conscientious, thorough and focused on solving problems.

Listening matters most. “Every situation is different. Every customer’s needs are different,” she says. The job is to listen and understand what a customer is asking for, so the team can bring the best solution. That takes people who know their products well enough to come up with an answer.

Even when Kennedy can’t solve a problem itself, she says, helping the customer find a solution still counts. “If we help them solve their problem, they will be back, and we will have another opportunity. Then we become a resource. And being a resource is really what it’s all about.”

The people who work that way, she adds, also tend to be the happiest at Kennedy.

Service also takes the whole company. Customer service, delivery, furniture, office coffee service technicians, purchasing and finance all work together to support the sales and marketing teams. “It is the Kennedy secret sauce,” she says.

A better day for everyone

For Mary Catherine, service is about more than the products. It is about the quality of a workday. A vendor you can lean on and enjoy working with makes your job easier. “That’s got nothing to do with office products and everything to do with quality of life,” she says.

She sees the benefit running both ways. “We can go home and feel good about what we did today,” she says. “And our customers can feel good that they worked with people who care, right in their own community. They got treated well, they got a good deal, and they didn’t have to hassle with anybody.”