Pipeline to Power: BE’s Industrial/Service Company of the Year

It is also important to the elder Hightower that Hightowers Petroleum extends relationship-building inside the office by maintaining a family-friendly atmosphere. “We still try to keep that closeness. It’s not an easy thing to do,” says Visher. “He pushes us to maintain that because happy, motivated employees give you more.”

They extend those values to their vendors as well. “Our method of managing our carriers throughout the U.S. has been extremely effective and we have some very loyal relationships that allow us to deliver product almost every seven minutes, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” says the elder Hightower, who attended executive programs at the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. “We have more than 400 trucks available to us for emergency response and we have close to 1,000 trucks available to us for our daily business.”

In fact, after Hurricane Sandy stripped the Northeast of power last fall, Hightowers helped fuel utility company Con Edison’s emergency response vehicles. Hightowers dispensed carriers to New York and New Jersey to stage fueling sites at shopping centers and hotels, and fuel the trucks of Con Ed contractors at night.

“The extraordinary thing there is Hightower came through for us at a time when it was hard for anyone to find fuel,” explains Michael Jones-Bey, director of supplier diversity at Con Edison. “It was really tough and he came through in a big way. We’re really proud of him.”

Topping Off Innovation
Hightowers has sustained customer satisfaction by upgrading its IT system and including value-added services that aren’t typically found across the industry. For example, this spring, the company upgraded from Quickbooks to DM2, a petroleum-specific ERP (enterprise resource planning) system that is designed to calculate federal, state, and local tax reporting for fuels and lubricants. As opposed to the old way of calculating taxes manually for every state it did business in, DM2 will allow Hightowers to give its customers more accurate, flexible reports about real time volume and production. Adding the system was a considerable financial and time investment–every staff member has to be trained on the system–but Hightower believes its implementation will improve the lives of its customers and employees.

Finally, the company provides back-office services for its customers. For instance, Duke doesn’t need to hire an employee to order fuel for its facilities. Because of telemetry equipment on Hightowers tanks, the company is able to monitor each customer’s historical fuel use, forecast their needs, remotely measure tank levels, and automatically send out tankers to refuel their facilities.

As the company’s customer base grows, and as it adds additional lines of revenue, the leadership team continues to diligently service existing customers.

“We’ve been very careful not to lose our focus on our baseline business and customers. We feel that a distraction to our core business could be fatal, particularly in this growth that we’re experiencing,” says Hightower, who likes to mock naysayers who told him minority businesses are not legitimate businesses. “There is only one way to sell fuel. There’s not a black way and a white way. There’s only the right way.”