After working in the building materials industry since he was a boy and for a wholesale distribution company since 1999, Kory Klein resigned earlier this year to start Scissortail Building Supply with his wife, Kayla. Through their focus on service, communication, and education, the couple hopes their company will remain in the industry they love for decades to come.
30 More Years
Kory: In our mission statement for the company, one of the things we talk about is education. A lot of times you don’t see someone putting the word education in their mission statement. I believe it is our responsibility to educate everyone that does business with us. We have to constantly to learn and adapt, there are always going to be ways to learn and construct things better.
Kayla: Kory embraces new technology. He is very good at educating, and I follow suit trying to stay current. That is really going to help our business prepare for the future, by trying to stay as current as we possibly can and showing our clients new opportunities for improvement.
Couple’s Partnership
Kayla: I think what makes us good partners is that we’re partners for life, we’re a married couple. We’ve been through ups and downs and we understand that to run a successful family is much like running a successful business. A lot of what Kory does is relationships and because we are working with one another day-in and day-out, it will strengthen our relationship and in turn help us build a very successful business for the future.
Kory: With our relationship, you’ve got to keep it simple. Open, honest, respectful communication is important. I think when our clients, see that kind of relationship, that they know that we’re going to treat them the same way. It really helps establish a two-way trust whether it’s with a supply partner or client. They see how we treat each other and how we communicate and to me it just speeds the process up to that development of the trust factor. At the end of the day, people buy from people, and they’re not going buy from us if they don’t trust us.
A Mission to Teach
Kory: There was a lot of careful consideration, a lot of preparation, and though about if this was the direction we should go as a family. There’s a lot of things that can happen, but we knew that for our family short-term and long-term, we thought this would be the best avenue for us to go down. I tell customers this all the time, I’m not looking for a one-time sale and I’m never going to get rich after one sale. I’ve got basically thirty years more of providing these services to our customers. My goal is to show a track record of success, build partnerships, and bring value to our customers.
Kayla: It was a bit of a mixed emotion for me, in that it’s scary going out on your own. But just having the confidence in my husband and knowing what he brings to his customers and suppliers. His number one goal is to deliver value to our business partners. If that is his number one goal, then I have complete confidence that the business is going to be a success. At the end of the day, he wants to be here, doing what he’s doing for another thirty years. And the only way he can do that is by being that something special in the industry and I think Scissortail Building Supply is that something special.
