Business View Magazine | December 2018

294 295 BARBCO INC. Congratulating Barbco Inc. on 30 years of success! Full service locations: Illinois | California | Texas | Ontario, Canada 800-229-6872 Toll free nationaltubesupply.com sales@nationaltubesupply.com NATIONAL TUBE SUPPLY Exceptional people. Exceptional products. Our customers are extremely important to us. We form strong relationships, so we can deliver answers that give strong results. Whether specialist advice or technical solutions delivered from a vast inventory of carbon and alloy mechanical tubing, we’ll not merely find answers. That’s too easy. We’ll find the right answers. own and started Barbco. He took everything he learned, and all of his dealer connections, and started it from the ground up.” Today, Barbco has 105 employees at its East Canton, Ohio headquarters, as well as distri- bution subsidiaries around the globe. “Our two primary ones are here in the U.S.,” says Barbera. “One, called TRS, is here in Ohio, right next to us. It’s a rental/service company that my grandpa also started. The other one, which is probably our largest dealer, is a company in Texas called U.S. Shoring. Outside the U.S., we have a dealer in Lebanon; we have a contractor in Russia, who also operates as a dealer.We have a dealer in Mexico, as well, and we’ve just recently acquired a new dealer in Warsaw, Poland.” “Here at Barbco, we sell,” Barbera continues, “but most of our dealers, predominantly, rent their equipment; they do have sales capabilities, but they’re more there for rental purposes. TRS and U.S. Shoring are renting out our equipment 90 percent of the time.We also deal in used equip- ment.We work very closely with our dealers, so if somebody is looking for a used piece of equip- ment, we direct them to any one of our dealers that might have that piece of equipment.” Barbera believes that Barbco’s competitive ad- vantages are twofold. “It’s the way we work with people,” he avers. “Our customers and our dealers are people that we’re in contact with a lot and I think that sets us apart from other companies. But also, it’s the equipment.We’re very big on showing people the numbers - the specifications of our equipment: the thrust rating, torque, and horse power are the big three - in comparison with our com- petitors. And the numbers show, time and time again, that we come out on top.” Regarding the company’s marketing activities, Bar- bera says that the company goes to a lot of trade shows, and, most recently, decided to produce its own show of sorts at its corporate headquarters. “We call it Barbco Demo Days, and this is the second year we had it,” he reports. “It’s not as much a hard sales pitch as it is an educational seminar.We bring in a lot of custom- ers and teach them the way we like to handle things out in the field, and then we do a live demonstration with some of our equipment. At that point, the ma- chines sell themselves, because we’re doing live bores right on our property.” Teaching the next generation of workers is also a key