For our next visit, we turned our spotlight to the McElroy Metal Service Center (MMSC) side of our business and visited with the newest member of our Area Manager team, Matt Snudden. Matt recently relocated from Fenton, MO, to the Bossier City, LA area when he became the Area Manager for the South Central region. His stores include Alexandria, MS; Bossier, LA; North Little Rock, AR: & Pearl, MS.
While he was recently promoted (Congrats, Matt!), he certainly isn’t new to the McElroy family. In fact, he celebrates 25 years with us on February 2nd. But that isn’t the only milestone he’s accomplished. The team he assembled and led at our Fenton, MO store is one of the most decorated for the Service Center side of our business. They won the MMSC Store of the Year award 5-times and also received numerous awards for the highest product sales.
Let’s dive in and get to know Matt a bit better.
What are your responsibilities as an MMSC Area Manager? I’m basically here to guide and train our store managers. I also get to brainstorm ways with them to improve their business, which I really enjoy. And when the manager is out, I often fill in for them. I liken that opportunity to being a closer for baseball. You don’t get to play every day, but when you do play, they want you to be good.
What do you like about your job? I like to travel, especially with shorter day trips like I have now. And I like the people I’ve met at our locations. Ultimately, I really enjoy meshing my experience with what they’re doing in their stores. Sometimes I learn a new approach from them that is better than what I did as a store manager, and other times I share things I did that might help them more than their current approach.
Share something you’ve learned in the last month. I’ve realized that some of the new guys we’ve recently hired have brought some great ideas to make us better. They are IT savvy, think outside of the box, and have some great marketing ideas. I’ve been really impressed.
Who has been your biggest mentor at McElroy? I can’t say that I’ve actually had one mentor. Rather, I’ve tried to learn something from everyone I’ve worked with at McElroy.
If you could switch jobs with anyone else in the company, who would it be and why? I’m not after his job, so Ian McElroy can relax. I actually don’t want to switch jobs with anyone. I really enjoy what I’m doing.
What advice would you give to new hires? Stay the course. There are a lot of good opportunities at McElroy. There’s a big difference between the locations and product offerings we had when I started compared to now. And we’re not done yet. We’re still growing and have a long way to go. I’m excited to see what new things we accomplish in the next 15 years.
If you could change one thing about your time with McElroy, what would it be? I probably wish I had been more open to our CI (Continuous Improvement) efforts in the early days instead of being so skeptical. People still give me a hard time about it because I was initially so outspoken. At the time, I was in a bubble and only knew what I knew. It just felt like another flavor of the month. But it’s obvious that it’s been a really great move for the company.
What’s something not many people know about you? I really like pranking people and never revealing that I was the prankster. For example, I once called a former MMSC Store Manager and identified myself as Don Cherry with our IT department. I told him that we had identified some inappropriate downloads on his computer and asked if anyone else had access to it. He immediately sold out his boss by saying he looked at that kind of stuff all the time. Beyond that, I'm also a really big family guy.
Matt and his son Brandon
What has been the biggest challenge in your career? The depth of our product offering and being able to pursue weathertightness warranty (WTW) projects have really been the biggest challenge. In the early 2000s, you might get one WTW project a year, so it wasn’t hard to manage. Now we’ve become so much more respected in the commercial architectural market and have the necessary products that you can easily have 3-4 projects going on at the same time. That can be a lot to keep your arms around. It’s a lot more technical now. But we’ve come a long way, and it’s pretty impressive.
What’s the best part of working at McElroy Metal? I still remember the first guy that walked into my store: Forrest Dunn with Structural Systems. And the first guy that bought from me was Overhead Door of St. Louis. They’re both still customers of ours to this day. That’s one of the amazing things about this job. We build lasting relationships with our customers and get to hear about everything, from weddings to births and graduations, while we’re growing our business and helping them do the same.
Have you ever considered leaving McElroy, and if so, why did you stay? I’ve been approached several times, but I never seriously considered leaving for several reasons. When my location flooded in 2008, I moved the office to my dining room at home so we could keep operating. Ian McElroy called me and told me to hang in there. I felt like that gesture was above and beyond what he had to do, and it meant a great deal to me.
I also like working for a company that invests in its people the way McElroy does. I remember my first sales meeting when I came to Bossier. I literally felt like the dumbest person in the room. Back then, we didn’t get the training that we do now.
And it would be hard to give up the respect people have here for both me and my abilities. Knowing that I can walk into any room at McElroy and have my ideas taken seriously means something to me. It would be really hard to leave that.
Besides, I’ve always really loved what I do. Our service center concept is like running your own business without financial worries. It’s an incredible concept.
What’s your favorite form of entertainment? I don’t watch TV very much, but I am a big St. Louis Blues & St. Louis Cardinal fan. As far as music, my tastes are all over the place. I spent a lot of time with my Grandma when I was younger, and she always listened to the classics like Little Jimmy Dickens, Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin, so I enjoy those. My parents exposed me to music like Bobby Vinton & The Association, so I find those fun too. And I like grunge and heavy metal. I’m seriously all over the place regarding music.
What does your ideal weekend look like? Someone else making me breakfast for a change instead of me doing the cooking on the Blackstone. Rachel and I also like going to small towns nearby and checking out what they have to offer. It doesn’t matter if it’s a winery or a town with a german background; we just like experiencing new things. We also have some local bands that we like to follow and are always down for a live music festival.
Matt and his girlfriend Rachel.
If you had to eat one food every day for the rest of your life, what would it be? It’s always pizza. I like it all. In fact, I’ve never had bad pizza, but I have had some better than others. I like New York style the most, but Chicago style is pretty hard to argue with too.
What’s something on your bucket list and why? I’d really like to go to Alaska to see the glaciers and Kodiak bears.
Name one item you can’t live without. That would probably be my iPhone. I use it a lot for personal development, especially with the travel I’m doing now. It seems like I’m always downloading a new podcast to try and raise my game.
What else should we know about you? I was in the Marine corp 7 ½ years as an Aviation Supply Clerk. I re-enlisted once and then left the military to work at McDonnell Douglas. Shortly after I left, the news broke that Boeing was buying McDonnel Douglas. That’s what prompted me to look for something different. And the rest is history.
From day one here, I’ve cared. Once McElroy put that investment in me, it became my passion. I just couldn’t believe that they would invest money in someone that just left the marine corp with no experience in this industry. The fact that they believed in me was very powerful, so I’ve never considered it work. Instead, it’s always been something fun because I like helping people. The biggest thank you possible is when customers come back and tell you how well something you did worked out for them and how much they appreciate your help.
Where are you happiest? When I’m with my family and my dogs.
Matt & Rachel’s dogs: Ellie, a Siberian Husky, is on the left & Winter,
an Alaskan Husky, is on the right.