By Joel Burstein, CEO, BEAM Collaborative

It’s a known fact – when dollars are spent at local small businesses, they generally stay within
the community. But that becomes more challenging when you’re dealing with a huge corporate
supplier.

By leveraging its reputation and relationship with the University of Pittsburgh, BEAM was able
to realign the university’s need for certain tools and industrial supplies with a local business’s
desire to increase both its revenues and customer base.

BEAM’s Joe Massaro said, “it turned out to be a win/win for everyone involved.”
The University was buying various tools and industrial products from Chicago-based W.W.
Grainger. But because both the school and Grainger believe in supporting local businesses, they
worked with BEAM to establish Reed Building Supply, located just outside of Pittsburgh, as the
school’s supplier of Grainger products.

The cost to the University for those products is exactly the same as it was when the school
purchased directly from Grainger. Except now, the University of Pennsylvania is dealing directly
with, and supporting a local business and by doing so, it’s putting money back into the local
economy. It also has convenient local point of contact.

Grainger’s Distributor Alliance Program is aimed at establishing local small businesses as
authorized resellers of its products. Grainger benefits by having its products sold by local
businesses, which will ultimately grow and bring more sales to the corporation.
The program was started in New York, but Grainger wanted to expand it, so they spoke with the
University of Pennsylvania, which in turn recommended that they speak with BEAM
Collaborative.

Massaro said when a Grainger representative told him about their program, he replied “I have
the perfect company for you.” He said, “Grainger and the University know we’re interested in
the same thing they are, in developing small businesses, and we also talk their talk.”
Unfortunately, many large corporations only pay lip service to supporting small business, but
Massaro said Grainger actually put reality in its rhetoric.