Randy Breaux, Group President, GPC North America, Talks to AMN Drivetime

Well good morning and thanks for having me today. I really appreciate it.

Well look, most of my friends all call me Bro, you know. So if I stop you in mid-sentence and ask you to call me Randy, we probably got a problem there. But most of my friends all call me Bro. It started when I was a kid and it's just kind of stuck all these years. I did have another company I worked for and there were three Randies in the organization, so we all just went by last name, and it even stuck even more at that point. But it's my name, and if you call me Randy I may or may not answer sometime, so you're better off calling me Bro if you want to get a response.

Yeah, so look, I started early. You're right, I have been in the NAPA role for just under a year, well anniversary one year here in the next month. But I started working real early. I grew up in South Louisiana, working class family. Both my father and grandfather were machinists, so blue collar workers, and they ran their little business. I wouldn't necessarily say I started my career when I was nine years old, but that's when I really got my first job, and then I began working regularly after that. I received my first paycheck when I was 15 years old, the day after I got my driver's license I went to work. I still have that, found it when my mother passed away she saved it, and I have that in my office just as a reminder to me of who FICA is. But I had my first paycheck back then at 15 and I've been working ever since.

So when I look back, I spent 26 years on the manufacturing side after I graduated from college, and 21 of those years was with Baldor Electric Company. Baldor Electric Company manufactures electric motors in North America. They were bought by ABB out of Europe in 2011, which was the same time I left to join the distribution side of the business. So I joined Motion, which was Baldor Electric Company's largest customer. I had a very good relationship with the executive management at Motion and they had a couple of executives retiring and asked me if I would come over and take over those roles. So after some discussions over about five months I agreed, and in May of 2011 I joined the Motion team, which is part of Genuine Parts Company. It was the industrial arm of Genuine Parts Company at the time. That is really my step into the distribution world back in 2011.

If I take it from there forward, I started at Motion over the marketing, product management, and strategic planning for the business. Then in 2018 I stepped into the role of President of Motion. I ran Motion up until just this past April as president, and we named a new president there.

But it was back in March of 2023 when the president and COO Will Stingle of GPC reached out to me and asked me if I would consider being the group president for GPC in North America, covering both the industrial and the automotive businesses. During that time period, initially running both Motion and running NAPA. So I agreed to do that and went on my listening tour for NAPA in June of 2023. So I'm coming up on a year here of actually being in the role as president of NAPA. It's been a great career. My time with GPC has been fantastic, over 13 years now, and I certainly look forward to finishing my career here.

Well, over the years I've been fortunate to have some really good mentors that have given me my PhD in business, in life, in how to treat people. So what I find myself doing a lot these days is sharing that with others, particularly our employees. The Bro Knows really comes from a presentation I did where I thought, what can I share with these people, and I tagged it Bro Knows. One of the first things, I pride myself on being a strategic thinker. One of my philosophies is that to run a successful business, you have to have a very clear vision first. That vision needs to be supported by a very sound strategy, then a structure that can deliver the strategy, and all of that has to be underpinned by a very good culture. Those are the four tenets I focus on: vision, strategy, structure, and culture. If I can get those right, then I know I've got a good chance at winning in the market.

So the ABCs is something that a mentor taught me long ago. For a successful business to operate, it has to be void of the ABCs. The ABCs are simple: you can't have arrogance in the business, you can't have bureaucracy in the business, and you can't have complacency. To run a successful business, you have to eliminate those three ABCs as quickly and as efficiently as you possibly can to run a high-performing business. That's what we focus on, and that ties right back to the culture that the business operates in. Hope that makes sense.

Let me just hit on the complacency part. One of the things that I pride myself on is building a high-performing team, and you can't build a high-performing team when you don't have all of the players performing at an extremely high level. When I talk about complacency, what I really talk about is I want players on the team that are giving 100% effort every day on the field. If you have A and B players, you can get the results you're looking for. You don't have to have A players every day, but if you've got A and B players you can get the results. If you have C players or D players on the team, you're better off moving them off the team, because you're never going to be able to coach up a C or D player to become an A or B player; they just don't have the right attitude and they're not going to give you 100% all the time. So that's a big thing for me. I talk about that a lot in the organization about the need to be better than average. C is average, so we need to get the average players off and get the high-performing players on the team. That's important things we focus on regularly. The other thing I would add is that transparency is critical in leading an organization. A mentor once told me when I was on the manufacturing side, he said, 'Bro, just tell them the truth. They can handle the truth. What people can't handle is not knowing what the truth is.' So I try to be very transparent with the team and make sure they understand what we're doing and why. Sometimes it's not comfortable, but if you tell them the truth, they'll figure out how to handle it. That's the way I've always run the businesses and the way I run my life. You'll always find me to be very transparent, very open and direct. I think that is the best way to build those relationships with your people, with your customers, with your shareholders. You build relationships based on transparency and trust. And then the relationship first, success follows - I think that's really relevant in all businesses, but in my experience in the aftermarket, relationships are a big deal. I was fortunate that the chairman and CEO of Baldor Electric Company allowed me to help him with writing a book he wrote called 'Relationships First, Success Follows.' The bottom line is we are in a relationship business. It's still a people-to-people business. If you can develop sound, solid relationships built on honesty, trust, transparency, I do believe that success will follow shortly thereafter. And it's not only with your customers, it's with your employees and your shareholders as well.

Well look, I think time is better spent understanding what your customers want and need rather than trying to follow and monitor every step that your competitor is making. At the end of the day, it's your customers that make you successful. I don't want to ignore my competitors, but I would much rather spend my time and energy focusing on the customers and what we can do to be a better partner with our customers rather than spending all my time worrying about our competitors. It's just that simple. I've always managed the business that way, I've always managed myself that way. I'm not saying it's not important to think about and watch your competitors, but it's more important to follow your customers and make sure you're doing everything you need to do to create more value and build that relationship with your customers first.

Well, it's definitely a fragmented and a very large market. It's a bit different than the industrial market, particularly in the sense that when we sell products in the industrial market, we typically have means to create additional value with the products we sell. It seems that in the industrial market, those opportunities and those customers are focused on different value criteria than in the automotive market to some degree. But the automotive market I think is also very, very ripe for those distributors that can come in and differentiate themselves on something other than price. So when I look at the two markets, there are similarities but there are large differences. NAPA has a reputation of being that know-how or that NAPA expertise. For us, I think it is critical that we continue to figure out how to bring that expertise to the market. That is the main value driver that we're focused on in the NAPA business.

Yeah, what I mean by that is when you look at the customer base that we serve at NAPA, it's typically the professional repair shops, the fleet managers, the fleets. We do have a good retail DIY business, but at the end of the day, when you look at the NAPA business, it's that professional that we're serving. NAPA has an iconic 100-year reputation of being that person that you go to if you're the professional to solve the problem. That is really what I mean by that. The DIY business is certainly important to us, but that professional repair and the large fleet business and the more business-to-business relationship is also critically important to us. So that's where we focus most of our time and energy. That's what I mean about B2B versus B2C.

100%. And when you look at vehicles today, they're becoming more and more technically difficult to work on. If you're an individual, you may not have the tools and equipment, you may not even be able to access some of the parts on the vehicle. So the professional repair shop is the customer that we focus on day in and day out.

Well, it was funny to me, it may not be funny to anybody else, but I'm happy to share it. So Charles Barkley played college ball at Auburn and grew up in the Birmingham, Alabama area where Motion Industries is headquartered. There's a steakhouse there in town that he would frequent and had a table reserved all the time. We were eating there one day with a vendor. As we were having our dinner, Charles Barkley walks in, sits at his table. When Charles comes in, you can't miss him. So he's holding court there at his table. We wrap up dinner, and after dinner I said to the supplier partner that I was with, 'I'm going to pop in the restroom before I leave.' He said he'd go as well. So we go to the restroom, and as we're walking back out, it was easier to go through the area where Charles was standing by his table rather than go back through the dining room. As we walk up, he has his back to us, he's holding court, gesturing with his hands. I reach up and tap him on the shoulder and I said, 'Hey Charles, you mind if we come by?' And he says, 'No problem, bro, come on through.' So we walk on through the restaurant. We get outside, and the vendor turns to me and says, 'Hey, why didn't you introduce me to Charles? You guys are on a first-name basis.' I said, 'Now come on, how many people do you really think Charles Barkley calls bro?' And we both laughed, and he said, 'I get you, I get you.' That was the end of that. About a year later, I'm sitting in there next to the table that Charles was at, and Charles starts talking to me. I tell him the story, and he puts his big old arm around me, grabs my neck, squeezes me, and says, 'Come on over here, bro, let's get a picture.' So the story is, I'm Bro. A lot of people, Charles included, just called me Bro. That was the story, no big deal, it was comical at the time. But again, how many people does Charles reach out and call Bro? I'm sure there's quite a few of them.

I'm ready.

Whoa, there's quite a few of them in there. I like all right. Fishing I love, it takes me back to my days with my grandfather and father when they took me fishing as a young boy. Golf I would like to get better at, but I don't have enough time to play it on a regular basis, and like many things, if you don't do it often, you just can't be proficient at it. Shooting or hunting takes me back to the time when my son was young and we spent a lot of time in the woods together hunting. I look forward to those days again in the future with my son and my grandchildren when the days come about. Hiking, swimming, anything like that - nah, that's for somebody else, not for me. Bro doesn't know and Bro doesn't care about that.

Baseball and basketball I played both sports when I was younger, I was fairly good at both of those. But I played football one day. I say that because the first day I went out for football as a freshman in high school, they put me on a blocking dummy and this guy about 240 pounds hit me. I was about 120 pounds, went about 12 feet in the air, got up through the blocking dummy down and said, 'I quit,' walked off the field.

Probably a beach vacation. My wife and I just got back from Turks and Caicos and we had a great time laying on the beach and sitting around doing absolutely nothing for two days, just trying to put everything else aside. So beach vacation.

Oh, another tough one. I would have to say it just depends on what's available. I'll leave the one.

I would say watch a movie. My attention span is not extremely long, so to read a long novel is not something I do very often. I like to read short books and various magazines and whatnot, but if I can watch a good movie, I would take the movie over a book or magazine.

I'll tell you what, my wife gives me a lot of grief over the amount of texting that I do. I'm a text guy. It's fast, it's quick, I get immediate gratification. So I would say text over email.

I think it's always about attitude. Look, for many years people thought I was an engineer, I'm not an engineer, but I had the right attitude. Aptitude, you've got to have it, but there are skill sets that I can teach you that can supplement aptitude. But if you don't have the right attitude at the beginning, it's just not going to work for me. So it's always attitude over aptitude.

Great to be here. I hope we get together again soon.