Hooper Launches Advisory & Recruitment Service

Ken Hooper, the former President & CEO of NEMRA, has announced the formation of a new consulting firm focused on electrical equipment manufacturers and independent manufacturer representative firms.  Hayward Hooper LLC works with both manufacturers and representatives in two distinct practice areas. 

For manufacturers, we assist firms seeking to improve their go-to-customer value initiatives through more effective interaction with their independent sales representative networks.  With a significant percentage of a company’s value creation derived from their sales forces, optimizing the effectiveness between manufacturers and their reps can yield significant results.

“The pressure to grow shareholder value is omnipresent. The effectiveness of sales force motions and improving the customer experience are integral parts of the value growth toolbox. We believe many manufacturers can unlock significant growth potential with a better understanding of how to work with their independent representatives. We can provide an unbiased assessment of your current sales force effectiveness and offer actionable recommendations to senior leadership on how to capture more selling time and support from your representative selling organizations.”, said Ken Hooper.

Hayward Hooper’s second practice area helps both independent representative firms and manufacturers find the sales talent needed to execute their go-to-customer sales initiatives. This side of the firm’s practice will be led by Dana Hooper. Dana started her career in the electrical industry with GE before launching her own firm, which for past thirty years, has performed retained searches for publicly held, private equity, and family firms primarily in the B2B industrial space. With the launch of this new venture, Hayward Hooper will be recruiting exclusively in the electrical channel.

“We see the two practice areas in our firm as complementary. Today’s ever larger rep firms are expanding their organizations with dedicated sales specialists, digital marketing talent, as well as expanding their geographic footprint. Having the next level of leadership under the principal(s), we call it the succession level, capable of creating end market demand and hitting sales goals for their manufacturers is a critical need. For manufacturers, sales leaders who can drive initiatives, have established relationships with distribution, know how to work collaboratively with independent reps and “move the needle” in terms of results are in high demand. Our deep knowledge of the electrical channel combined with our retained search experience will enable us to present highly qualified candidates to our clients.” added Hooper.

Helping manufacturers and manufacturer representative firms improve their joint go-to-customer proposition is Hayward Hooper’s business mission and passion. With over 50 years of electrical channel experience, the last decade at NEMRA working alongside the leading manufacturers and rep firms in the electrical industry, combined with over 30 years of retained search  experience, we have a powerful lens through which we see the industry and with that, a unique value proposition for our clients.

Ken and Dana can be reached at  khooper@haywardhooper.com,  dhooper@haywardhooper.com or 603-553-0828.

Congratulations Ken on the new endeavor. Click here to see Ken’s industry background.