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OPERATIONS BY JEREMYNEDELKA HLA and House of Oxford: Putting Customers First DISTRIBUTOR PROFILE
The team at Harold Levinson Associates includes, from left, Mark Ciavarella, Alex Goldman, Michael Berro and Dennis Williams
E 28 OCTOBER 2011
VEN AT A COMPANY WITH MORE THAN $1 billion in annual sales, every cus- tomer is important. That's the driving force at Harold Levinson Associates (HLA), a New York-based full-line
C-store distributor that recently increased its presence in the tobacco industry with the acquisi- tion of House of Oxford in October 2010. House of Oxford president Alex Goldman says despite the difference in size (HLA has approximately ten times the 2,500 accounts that House of Oxford had prior to the merger), the companies' cultures were a perfect match. "No one else in the country can offer so many SKU's of tobacco plus thousands of additional
products, making this one stop shopping for all our customers," Goldman says. "Even at such a large company, the owners still sit among the customer service personnel, answer phones and make cus- tomer decisions every day." Before merging with HLA, Goldman's company
offered 2,200 SKU's and had approximately $100 million in annual sales, all via mail order. He was the fourth generation of his family to run House of Oxford and well acquainted with the families that owned HLA. "We entered into negotiations because my fam-
ily has a long history with the company, the econo- mies of scale worked and there was minimal over- lap of customers," Goldman says. "HLA's strength
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