Larry Davis and the business of keeping a promise

In June 2016, Larry Davis had a reason to leave a senior job that required very little management jargon: he wanted to work closer to his young family. He was executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Stellar Industrial Supply, a Tacoma-based distributor. His departure was scheduled for June 30. The explanation was offered by Stellar’s president and CEO, John Wiborg, who credited Davis with helping accelerate the company’s progress over the preceding two years.

It is a useful place to begin a business life. Executive biographies usually move from one title to the next as though the person holding them were a parcel on a conveyor belt. This move had a destination outside the office. Work mattered, and so did where it happened. A career could be progressing nicely and still need a different geography.

Later that year, Davis helped launch AgoNow in Tulsa. The venture put him back in a familiar industrial world, with an unfamiliar opportunity: build a wholesaler around the changing needs of independent distributors. The sequence makes an interesting opening chapter. First came a decision about proximity. Then came a business about connections.

A startup with a carefully drawn boundary

Davis brought substantial experience to the venture. He had been president of ORS Nasco before moving into commercial leadership at Stellar. By the time Fairmont Supply recruited him in 2019, he had accumulated more than 30 years in sales and distribution. These were businesses concerned with getting useful things to customers: maintenance supplies, tools, components and the materials that keep other businesses operating.

AgoNow’s October 2016 announcement introduced Davis as chairman and CEO and John Allenbach, previously a senior sales and marketing executive at Apex Tool Group, as president of sales. Their proposition addressed both sides of a trading relationship. Manufacturers wanted distributors to buy more of their product ranges. Distributors wanted help finding opportunities and competing effectively. AgoNow proposed to support the connection between them.

The company also drew a boundary. It would sell to distributors and resellers, rather than compete with them for their customers. Davis offered contractual assurances covering confidentiality, competition and solicitation. That detail gives the word partnership some weight. For an independent distributor, a helpful supplier that also covets the same customer can be an awkward dinner guest. AgoNow’s answer was to put the seating arrangement in writing.

Six months of listening

In 2018, Davis described six months spent researching the needs of customers and suppliers. Three recurring problems emerged: an inefficient supply chain, the demands of rapid digital change, and money trapped in inventory that moved too slowly. Those findings gave AgoNow a practical agenda. Distribution was simultaneously a movement-of-goods problem, an information problem and a use-of-cash problem.

The distinction matters. A shelf full of products can look reassuring until the balance sheet explains what it costs. A website can look modern while leaving a buyer unable to find the information needed to make a purchase. A delivery operation can function well in isolation while adding friction elsewhere in the chain. Davis’s description joined these concerns together rather than treating each as a separate project.

That is also a revealing way to frame entrepreneurship. The starting point was a set of complaints from people already doing the work. AgoNow proposed to earn its place by making their existing businesses function better. It offered the less theatrical kind of innovation: fewer obstacles between a customer’s need and a useful result.

The first year revised the plan

AgoNow’s first-anniversary account, published in December 2017, described the work behind its launch: a new Tulsa distribution center and headquarters, industry events, and hundreds of meetings with suppliers and distributors. The company planned additional digital services for 2018, including e-commerce hosting, content syndication and order management. Those were plans, a distinction that matters when a young business describes its future.

Davis’s own assessment was less polished than the usual anniversary confection. “Nothing goes the way you plan or expect it to,” he said. The remark is funny only until one has tried to start a business. Then it becomes a fairly efficient description of the working week. His response was to listen and adapt as the market revealed what customers actually valued.

He also worried about the durability of a competitor’s digital advantage. The question was whether distributors could remain profitable and still be around years later. This gave the technology discussion an unusually practical time horizon. The point of a new tool was its contribution to the company’s future ability to serve customers.

“Nothing goes the way you plan or expect it to.”Larry Davis · AgoNow’s first anniversary, 2017

Partnership has an operating cost

When Davis explained AgoNow’s founding in January 2017, he emphasized that its leadership team owned the business. He connected that arrangement to taking a longer view of decisions, instead of concentrating only on the next quarter. Ownership, in his account, was a way to give the company room to build the relationships it had promised.

He also supplied a demanding definition of partnership. A business needed the ability to carry out its commitments, align with others, measure results and adjust. A promise without the resources to fulfill it could become somebody else’s problem. In a supply chain, that somebody may be waiting for an order before their own work can continue.

There is a dry elegance to this standard. The word partner is inexpensive to print on a brochure. Warehousing, information systems, people and dependable execution cost actual money. Davis’s argument placed the expense inside the definition. A company had to organize itself well enough that its good intentions survived contact with a customer’s working day.

When the departments disagree

His customer-retention advice took that concern inside the company. In 2017, Davis argued that sales and operations needed compatible incentives. Rewarding operations for low inventory while rewarding sales for growth could send the two teams in different directions. Each department might satisfy its own scorecard while the customer wondered where the order had gone.

He urged businesses to define the value customers expected, build processes around it, and measure what mattered to the buyer. Communication belonged in that system too, especially when something went wrong. A customer should hear how a problem was being addressed. The relationship had to continue after the initial sale, through the ordinary disappointments and corrections of doing business.

The advice has a distinctly operational temperament. It asks what people are paid to do, what they can see and what they tell each other. These questions are smaller than a grand strategy presentation and considerably harder to escape. A customer experiences the combined result. They have little reason to admire a beautifully managed disagreement between departments.

The sales rep becomes a scout

By February 2022, Davis was discussing digital procurement and changing sales roles with Tom Gale. His view allowed a continuing place for personal relationships, alongside better digital support. The field salesperson’s job was changing as buyers handled more of their purchasing process through digital channels.

His metaphor shifted the salesperson from quarterback to scout. The rep could look for opportunities, observe what was happening in a customer’s facilities and identify evidence of value being created or lost. That interpretation gives human judgment a specific assignment. The relationship remains useful because the person can notice something the transaction alone does not explain.

Davis also questioned the economics of trying to source everything. Businesses needed to make deliberate choices about what they sold and where they could add value. It is an appealingly unfashionable restraint in a world fond of endless aisles. An aisle can be endless; a company’s money and attention cannot. His argument favored a clearer purpose for both the digital channel and the people working beside it.

The difficult arithmetic

In July 2019, Fairmont Supply announced Davis as its new president. Its family of businesses had more than 20 locations nationwide and supplied industrial maintenance products, pipes, valves, fittings and fasteners. He spoke about restructuring around customers, suppliers, products, facilities and employees. Profitability was the objective, and the changes were presented as a means to reach it.

The subsequent history belongs in the same story. Fairmont closed and liquidated in mid-2020. Davis had remained a co-owner of AgoNow during his Fairmont appointment and later continued as AgoNow’s CEO. In May 2024, AgoNow’s closure and liquidation were reported as well. A profile of an operator has to leave room for outcomes that interrupt the founding ambition.

Those events put a limit on any easy success narrative. They also make his earlier insistence on execution more consequential. Listening, relationships and a clear proposition are decisions a business can make. Remaining commercially viable is an outcome it must keep earning. The difference is uncomfortable, and it is central to the career of anyone who takes responsibility for operating a company.

A different trade, familiar questions

Davis’s later work connects him with Columbia Home Services, a platform focused on repair, maintenance, replacement and installation in secondary markets across the United States. Columbia’s older leadership page named him chief executive officer. Its expanded team page now lists him as a Tenex operating advisor, with Gary Campbell as CEO. The work has moved into a setting where local service businesses and their established customer relationships matter.

Tenex’s published materials place operating advisors among the resources supporting its funds and portfolio companies. That description supplies a useful boundary: operational advice is a defined role, and the firm distinguishes it from investment advisory services. For Davis, the recurring subject is how a business organizes its work and its people.

His public LinkedIn introduction emphasizes developing operators. Outside work, his biography describes time with his wife and four children, being outdoors in Arizona, and cooking for family and friends. The family detail returns us to the decision in 2016. Titles have changed. The life around the work has remained part of the story.

The thread through that story is a question a customer could ask without attending business school: can you do what you said you would do? Davis has considered it through distribution, digital buying, company restructuring and home services. It is a short question with a long invoice. Answering it takes people, judgment and the daily discipline of making an organization useful.