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TANNIS TOOHEY/TORONTO STAR

Hardware supply firm a true sister act

Vinnie and Rose, and a brother, helped turn Woodbridge
Investments Hardware into a $40 million a year operation

DAVID BRUSER
BUSINESS REPORTER

Take two siblings — Vinnie and Rose — and you might be surprised who's in charge of collecting timely payments for the power-tool supply business they co-own.

"Rose does a lot of that. She's the tough one that enforces, makes sure the money gets collected," Vinnie said, looking at her sister and chuckling. "One (customer) calls you The Rose With The Thorns."

Rose, true to the good sister-bad sister routine, pointed across the table and said, "They call her My Cousin Vinnie."

Vincenzina "Vinnie" De Francesco, 38, and Rose Martino, 36, along with their brother Domenic De Giorgio, run Investments Hardware Ltd. in Woodbridge, a supplier of construction materials, including Bosch, Makita, DeWALT and other brand-name power tools.

The business opened in 1985 when the sisters' father Nicola De Giorgio started selling hammers, nails and other supplies to augment his carpentry and contracting business.

"We've been asked many times: Why Investments Hardware? People call us and they think we're an investment company or they think we're in computer hardware," Vinnie said.

"My father is from the old school, the Italian old school. He just thought, `I'm going to make an investment for my future, for my kids.' That's why he did this."

Vinnie's husband, Pino, and Rose's husband, Joe, work at IHL, and Domenic's wife, Rina, just joined the company.

"Usually the Italian culture is very family oriented, very close. But we are too close," Vinnie said. "When we get together for Sunday dinners or Christmas, it was always about business, our clients. We eat, sleep and breathe hardware, and that's it."

What started in a modest industrial strip mall storefront recently moved to a 50,000 square-foot showroom/warehouse, a business that pulls in $40 million in sales annually.

The two women figure they started learning how to run a company as pre-teens, when their father conscripted them to manage his paperwork from house building jobs.

"He couldn't even write or spell in English," Vinnie said. "When we got old enough that we could actually write — Grade 2, 3 — we'd write his cheques."

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`We are too close ... When we get together for Sunday dinners or Christmas, it was always about business, our clients. We eat, sleep and breathe hardware,

and that's it'
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The sisters say they have helped grow the company 25 times since starting fulltime after high school, from a staff of five to 30 that speaks Portuguese, Italian and other languages. And as long as the GTA development boom continues, tools will be in demand.

"It's a dream," Rose said. "We're sitting here today and I can't believe we started from where we did.

"I was really shy coming out of high school. If you hear me on the phone now, I'm surprised myself. It's just come over the years. You just get tough."

One of the keys to IHL's success and also a reason the sisters enjoy little time off, is their inability to delegate, they say.

"My accountant says, `you shouldn't be opening up your mail. You're too big,' " Rose said. "I need to see the cheques come in. I have to call my customers.

"I can't get someone else to call because I don't know if they'll talk the same way I do. Asking for money, you want to have that personal relationship."

Order receipts find their way onto Vinnie's desk, so she can monitor whether customers' orders are varying from month to month.

"(Customers) call and they get to speak to an owner. If they're having a problem, they can get to us," she said. "There's no, `You get her voice mail. She's not available.' We're always the ones."

Increasingly the emphasis is on becoming a one-stop shop with a willingness to open outside of regular hours for a customer in a jam.

To patriarch Nicola De Giorgio, 62, who now runs his own concrete and drain company, the success of IHL is not surprising.

"I remember one time Vinnie was missing three pennies from the book. She said, `I have to balance out the book.' She went crazy to find the three pennies. She worked for three days."

But the 13-year-old Vinnie, already a veteran of the family business, did find it.

"That's how you had to learn the business," added De Giorgio.

"I have really bright kids. I'm very proud. They are like a gold mine, all three."