For more than 140 years, Bradford White has been manufacturing and innovating high-quality water heating products and solutions, and has grown to become a world-wide leader in the plumbing and HVAC industries.
Throughout that journey, the values of the company—some from its founding, others embraced along the way—have served as an inspiration to its employees and a promise to its customers. Keeping true to those values has been the not-so-secret ingredient to creating one of the most trusted brands in the trades.
Dustin Bowerman, Senior Director, Field Services for Bradford White has been with the company nearly three decades. During that time, he has worked and lived those values and seen them in action daily. He spoke with CONTRACTOR about what they mean and how they are practiced.
CONTRACTOR: Can you first give us a quick overview of what the company values are at Bradford White?
Bowerman: I'm approaching 28 years with Bradford White. I've said it's like I've grown up there—I’ve worked there longer than I haven't. I had a buddy working there and he said man, it's just different (whatever that means to a 20-something). Time goes forward, and time and time again I’ve met internal customers, external customers and they’re all saying the same thing: it’s different—and it is different, right?
When I go back to the ’90s when Bradford White formed the company it is today, dedicated to the professional contractor and wholesale channels, the customer was at the center. Today, first and foremost, our top core value is customer, then collaboration, innovation, and community. At the foundation to all of those are integrity, empathy and transparency. What they all have in common is people working with people.
CONTRACTOR: How did those particular values come to be the Bradford White values?
Bowerman: Our former Founder, the late Bob Carnevale, was one of the key visionaries in my early days. His idea was, we're going to help people and we're going to be easy to work with, and that's what I grew up learning at the company. Recently we formalized our core values, but I'm going to say that Mr. Carnevale and his leadership team are the ones who set us on this course back in the early 1990s.
CONTRACTOR: What did living those values as a Bradford White employee mean to you and the teams that you worked with?
Bowerman: Everyone's working towards the external customer, but inside our four walls—and there's a lot of walls here—everyone views their neighboring business partner, their co-worker, as a customer. And if you maintain that customer relationship inside, it just naturally flows to the outside.
So, if my purchasing team says, hey, we need to do X or we need to do Y, you internalize that information and call it an opportunity. It's not a challenge or problem, but an opportunity. Sometimes that piece of innovation is needed to satisfy my internal customer and can then be used to help an external customer.
CONTRACTOR: When it then comes to that external customer, do you think that most of your customers have come to recognize the Bradford White brand as being bound up in those values?
Bowerman: We manufacture water heating products. There's always going to be challenges regardless of the brand. But our customers see our passion to help and to resolve their problems. When you do that with sincerity, people notice it—it's hard not to.
We’re constantly asking, are we doing the right things? Is it good for the customer? If it's good for them, we'll find a way to make it good for us. You have to listen. And, when we need to go find a solution, that's always done with the customer benefit in mind.
For example, IoT is a growing sector in the water heating world, and part of the way our industry is growing in complexity. So, if IoT is not a core competency, finding other companies that have those competencies and share our values is how our team continues to grow.
And when I talk about the growth of our offering, it's about opportunities. Problems are all opportunities. As our company footprint grows outside of Ambler, PA or Middleville, MI, and we start to reach out to the Carolinas or New England and places like that, we are able to better meet and exceed customer expectations and we're ultimately impacting more communities.
To me, that's the cool part of it. That's the piece—I don't want to call it the “secret sauce”—but if you help everyone around you, you're going to do okay.
CONTRACTOR: And at Bradford White that extends from employees to customers and even out to the wider community.
Bowerman: We support our communities. I can say hey team, let's go to the local Barry County food bank or a Habitat for Humanity project site, or whatever the local community thing is that given day or week and the team responds. There’s this energy created from giving back that’s really special to be part of.
And again, that goes all the way back to Mr. Carnevale: help people, help people. Pretty easy recipe.