Kevin Massey of World Electric wants to make one thing perfectly clear — a distributor’s online portal is a labor-saving, solution-providing tool for the electrical contractor and not a sales tool for the company. 

“Our industry as a whole does not take advantage of the online tools in place to make their jobs easier even though everyone has a smartphone attached to their hand or always in their pockets,” Kevin says. “The online portals that I have at my fingertips after hours on the weekends, especially when I’m traveling, help me catch up and get work done. I can get a response. I can get an answer. I can track product. I can get pricing. I can check inventory. I can do an awful lot of things now via the portals that I couldn’t even do four or five years ago. Electrical just does not embrace this anywhere near the level that they should.” 

Kevin believes having ecommerce, or online portals, available is even more important for the smaller companies with 10 associates or less. The owner is not sitting in an office all day behind a computer; that owner is out running and organizing and estimating and project managing, and wearing the multitude of hats that I see these guys and gals wear, he says.

“The reality is, they blink and it’s 5:30 and every distributor is closed,” Kevin says. “And they go, ‘rats, I wish I’d gotten that order on the truck or if I could just have that invoice at my fingertips right now, I could reconcile my billing.’ If they had registered for our online portal, they could get that invoice or place that order. That’s why it’s important to reach out to your local electrical distributor and ask about their online solutions.” 

It is Kevin’s hope that as a result of what he shares during his session, electrical contractors will utilize tech tools to streamline their business operations, similar to how they use ecommerce and online portals in their personal lives. 

“Think of how the average consumer uses Amazon,” Kevin says. “The Amazon experience is the model for most business ecommerce sites today. You can see what you ordered before and easily reorder. You can track shipments. You can set up your desired notifications. World Electric models this experience.” 

Being sure that all his customers are aware of the technology available to them through World Electric ecommerce fits in perfectly with Kevin’s overall passion for educating the next generation of electricians. He, himself, came up through the ranks from service electrician to electrical distribution (truck driver to job site laborer to project manager to regional sales manager) to rolling out his first ecommerce platform in the late 2000s. This path provided him with a full understanding of the daily needs of electrical contractors. 

“The current generation is retiring at an accelerated pace, and when we lose those seasoned associates, it’s not easy to back fill those positions. I know. I see it with electricians, I see it with our ownership, and I certainly see it at the distribution level. The more we can do to promote and educate the industry the better we’re all going to be. We want to leave the industry in a much better place than when we arrived.”