LH Industrial Supplies is a family business, and its president, Kregg Cheek, has two sons working alongside him. The company has had a couple of strong years running, and he would like to leave them something that can keep growing without a new hire every time it does. That was the bind he was in. More orders meant more quotes, and more quotes meant another person typing them.
Most of the AI being pitched to him was about efficiency in the back office: purchasing, stock levels, inventory forecasting. He wanted AI that would help him sell. That meant salespeople quoting faster, getting answers back to customers quicker, and spending their day with accounts instead of two hours at a keyboard after every visit.
“If I’m going to invest in AI, I need something that’s going to help me with sales, because that’s where you’re going to see your biggest bang for your buck.”
Kregg Cheek, President, LH Industrial Supplies
He had been waiting for exactly this. When the Prophet 21 users group put on a webinar about Distro, he and his son sat down with it and said the same thing: we need to listen to this. “Nobody ever shows you how to use AI in your business. I always said I wanted somebody to show me.”
Core Challenges
01
Manual Entry on High-Volume Repeat Orders
Each rep was building 15 to 30 quotes a day, some five lines long and some over a hundred. One had spent four hours on a single morning’s batch. The work was repetitive more than hard: the same customers, the same few hundred items, every order a PDF stapled to an email.
02
Product Knowledge Locked Inside People
LH carries hundreds of supplier lines, and nobody can be an expert in all of them. Answering a customer’s question meant finding the person who was, or spending ten minutes looking it up with the customer waiting on the line.
03
Every Bit of Growth Cost Another Hire
When the quotes piled up, the only answer LH had was another pair of hands. Kregg Cheek put the decision this way: “I’m hiring another person, or I’m not hiring another person.”
Connected to Prophet 21 through the transaction API. No data migrated, nothing changed about the way LH runs P21, and people got in through a code emailed to them.
Green light on day 29, a week early, with eleven users named on the same call and the whole team trained the following week.
“It is so user-friendly. It’s pretty hard to screw it up. And I say that because we definitely have some older gentlemen here. If we can teach those guys how to do it in about a day, we can teach anybody.”
Inside sales, LH Industrial Supplies
A six-hour batch of emailed POs now takes about one.
93% of the line items LH puts through Distro come back with the correct match on the first pass, across roughly 200 quotes a month from the regular users.
One rep ran 80 quotes and 263 line items at a 98% top match. Another put through more than 1,000 line items and never touched 92.7% of them.
All that time goes back into selling. The rep who used to spend a whole day on one account’s orders is now on the road with the accounts LH is trying to grow, and orders turn faster, so they ship faster. “I’m making his job easier and him more valuable to his company,” he says of the buyer on the other end. The business result underneath all of it is a person LH never had to put on the payroll.
“If I had to hire another inside salesperson just to help everybody with quotes, I didn’t have to hire that person. I hired this.”
Kregg Cheek, President, LH Industrial Supplies
And unlike a new hire, as he points out, “it doesn’t take a day off. It doesn’t show up late to work. It doesn’t get sick.”
Anyone at LH can put a question to Distro Agent the way they would put it to a coworker, and get an answer out of P21, out of the documents LH has loaded in, or off the open web. It shows its source every time.
“We sell so many products that we can’t be experts in all of them, so we have to be able to find the expert. Now that expert is right there on our computer. Instead of calling someone or researching for five or ten minutes, we have the answer in five seconds.”
Kregg Cheek, President, LH Industrial Supplies
A photograph of a competitor’s label comes back as LH’s own part number, which saved them weeks. And when a rep mentioned that HHCS is how his customers say hex head cap screw, it was in the system that week.
Release notes every week, a check-in every two weeks, a monthly call with Distro’s CEO, and a support chat answered by the same people who ran the onboarding.
The call where LH went live was run by a Distro customer success lead who was home sick that day. Kregg Cheek opened by telling his own guys to go easy on her. She said she wanted to make sure they were up and running.
“You’ve been there every step of the way to help us. You’ve realized our pain points, and you’re trying to make sure that we’re successful at it.”
Kregg Cheek, President, LH Industrial Supplies
What Happens Next
The rest of the team is coming across one rep at a time. Accounts payable is next, and LH will not need a second vendor for it. Distro runs AP as well, so the same platform that turns a customer’s PO into an order can take the supplier invoice at the other end of the transaction and close the loop on the whole thing.
The part that compounds is the matching. Every quote LH runs teaches the system more about how their customers order, and the accuracy climbs without anyone doing anything about it. That head start is the one thing a distributor cannot buy back later, and LH started banking theirs in April. Its president is not building toward an exit. He is building something his sons can run.