Aspen Inc. - Strategies, Solutions and Best Practices for Business Leaders

As Connie Anderson puts it, anyone can rent a truck, take an order or store product properly. However, the president of Aspen Inc. says her family’s company forms relationships with its clients to better understand the intricacies of their business and the needs they have.

“Relationships give us insight as to what drives other companies,” Anderson says. “There’s so many times where you do all the right things but it’s not connecting with the customer, so you still lose the business. That’s when you don’t know what is important to them or what’s driving them.”
Anderson means what she says, even if that means losing one of their top employees for 12 months. Aspen sent the head of its IT department to Moscow for a year so he could set up a customer’s new operations there.

“He spent most of the time in Russia at one of their sites to implement what we were doing in the United States,” Anderson says. “You don’t just give core people to customers to use for their projects, but that’s what we did.”

Long-Term Strategy
Aspen Inc. has been forging relationships with its clients ever since Dan Sample – Anderson’s father – founded the business in 1978. Sample purchased the assets and business of Wycoff Warehouse Co. in Salt Lake City. In 1981, Sample expanded the company’s service offering to an asset-based transportation company that grew to handle the entire inter-mountain region for its customer base.

In the early 1990s, Aspen expanded its services into California with co-packing, plant support and IT services. Anderson purchased Aspen in 2006, making her one of the few female owners of a third party logistics company. Aspen was certified in 2008 as a women-owned business and continues to build on the legacy of service through defined values. She believes that these values are the foundation that fosters relationships which continues to brand the company’s success.

Managing Outreach
Recently, Aspen Inc. hired Ron Speer as manager of outreach services, which Anderson describes as a training manager who is also in charge of ensuring associates know how to best serve customers.
“If your vision is to serve then it’s important that your team knows what that means. “Development is not just on the day-to-day operations, but at the highest level of leadership,” Anderson says. “We can do things better, but how do we bring that to customers? We need to know how to create a serving environment at all levels of the process.”

Speer is in charge of empowering associates to bring their customer service to a level that exceeds the competition. Anderson says this is the philosophy Sample used to guide the company until his retirement in 2006.

“My father really understood the customer and what it meant to make the customer first,” Anderson says. “We’ll go into an operation and say, ‘Why are we doing it this way?’ The big no-no response is, ‘That’s the way we’ve always done it.’ We want people to look at doing things better.”
Anderson says Aspen is always focused on the basics. While others are cutting back on peripheral departments, Aspen is keeping in stride with its corporate vision.

“Everyone is concentrating on how to survive right now,” she adds. “That’s why I’m really happy we’re doing this. You’ve got to maintain training by putting an emphasis on your resources in making sure associates know what they need to know. This commitment to training allows us to be prepared no matter what market conditions are.”

Best of the Best
Aspen Inc. intends to continue strengthening its position in the western United States where the bulk of its facilities are located. The company’s focus on unraveling client needs by employing their core principles into their relationships is the value they bring to the table. This philosophy has won them unmatched loyalty in the areas and industries they service.

“I don’t approach the business side as getting bigger just for more money,” she says. “I want to make a difference, and I’m a firm believer that bigger does not always mean better – we need to make an impact by serving.”