Leadership Excellence with NAI Global and The Sherwin Williams® Paint Company
In commercial real estate, the main product is service and sometimes it is hard to tell one company from another. For these firms and their supply chains, differentiation based on quality of service is essential and impacts the bottom line. That is why developing reliable business relationships that are more like collaborative partnerships is also so critical.
Commercial real estate services provider, NAI Global, is proud to work with The Sherwin-Williams Company as a supplier/vendor, in addition to being a client and customer —
to each other. Sherwin-Williams is a major sponsor of NAI Global conferences in the U.S. and provides a myriad of paint and painting supplies, along with its trademark service, to NAI Global’s commercial property owners and management companies.
“With the best service providers and corporate sponsors, there is often a turning point when the vendor-client relationship evolves to more of a partnership and it simply isn’t appropriate to refer to these companies as vendors, because the relationship is much more than that,” says Lindsay Fierro, Senior Vice President of Operations with NAI Global.
“To us,” she adds, “The Sherwin-Williams Paint Company is that kind of partner.”
Sherwin-Williams has sponsored NAI Global’s major national conferences for a number of years and was the headline sponsor last fall when nearly 1,000 NAI real estate professionals from over 30 U.S. states and 20 countries gathered in San Diego for the company’s Global Summit.
“NAI Global’s U.S. footprint alone is so substantial that we do millions of dollars a year with NAI offices in multiple markets. As commercial real estate services firms go, they are definitely one of our top customers and we truly value the relationship,” said Jim Cooley, National Account Executive with The Sherwin-Williams Company, Cooley is based near Boston, MA.
“Our partnership with NAI Global provides unique value as both a supplier and tenant. The company supports our business by helping us find quality spaces to do business and maximize our productivity and conversely, Sherwin-Williams offers NAI high-quality product performance with great service and a worldwide brand that promotes the level of service NAI promises its clients,” Cooley added.
NAI Black in Spokane, WA and NAI Latter & Blum in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, LA, are two NAI Global companies that work extensively with Sherwin-Williams.
“We have more than 3,000 apartment units under management in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho and buy paints, tiles, vinyl flooring, carpeting and faux-wood flooring from Sherwin-Williams. I can’t put my finger on the total volume of business we do with them but in the past five or six years, it has been significant,” said NAI Black’s Tom Hix, President of the firm’s Management Division.
NAI Black has approximately 150 employees in its management division and over 25 brokers serving commercial, retail, office, industrial and multifamily property owners, investors and occupiers in Spokane, the Tri-Cities of the Columbia River (Richland, Kennewick, Pasco), Pullman, Lewiston-Clarkston, Coeur d’Alene and Sand Point submarkets in the region.
In Louisiana, NAI Latter & Blum manages over 6 million square feet of commercial property, 9,500 multifamily units and about 1,000 single-family homes. The firm recently built a new 15,000-square-foot regional office in Baton Rouge to house its team of commercial brokers and the management division.
“We worked with Sherwin-Williams for all the paint, carpet, ceramic tiles and other finishes on that project, and I am quite sure that not a month goes by in which they are not working in one of the properties we manage. We work with a lot of suppliers and vendors and Sherwin-Williams is always among the most reliable of them,” said NAI Latter & Blum Executive Vice President/COO Debbie Harvill.
In every market Sherwin-Williams serves, one of the most popular services the company offers when a property owner decides to repaint the exterior of a building, are commercial paint color previews and color-rendering work. Photos are taken of the existing building and then sent to Sherwin-Williams headquarters in Cleveland for color imaging. Sherwin- Williams color design specialists then color the building photos with proposed or potential paint selections for the building, allowing the owner – and property management team, to see what the building would look like with a fresh coat of paint and new color scheme.
“This is a great service and takes about a week. They can even give us different looks for building trim and windows. It really accelerates the decision-making process and even better, it makes our clients happier with the outcome,” said Hix.
NAI Offices also complete leasing transactions with Sherwin-Williams as it did recently in a Houston suburb representing the property owner while at other times NAI represents Sherwin-Williams in lease transactions. In Cypress, TX, for example, NAI Partners (the NAI Global Houston, Austin and San Antonio Offices) recently arranged a 5,000-square-foot lease for Sherwin-Williams at 3200 N. Fry and Rustic Ln. Jason Gaines and Chris Holder represented the landlord, SGRE Cypress Retail 1 LTD in the lease.
Perhaps the relationships between companies becoming “partners” in spirit can be summed up best by the American philosopher, self-help author (Your Erroneous Zones, 1976) and motivational speaker, Wayne Dyer, who once said:
“How people treat you is their karma, how you react is yours.”
The Sherwin-Williams Company at a Glance
Headquarters: Cleveland, OH
Year established: 1866
Fortune 500 Company (NYSE: SHW)
Number of employees: 42,550 (Dec. 2017)
Number of Sherwin-Williams stores in North America: 4,200+ (2018)
Business: Manufactures and distributes the sale of paints, coatings and related products to professional, industrial, commercial and retail outlets primarily in North and South America and Europe.