Hawaii may be a laid back locale for tourists, but not so for DSRs. "On the island, everyone's a stone's throw away from another distributor. You have to work hard to set yourself apart from the next guy," says Lisa Nakagawa, a DSR at Y. Hata & Co., a broadline distributor based in Honolulu.

Nakagawa has done that and more. In her 13 years at Y. Hata, she's built an $8-million route currently made up of 44 accounts located throughout Hawaii's "Big Island." Most are in the casual and family-restaurant segments and roughly 40 percent rely on her for the majority of their needs. She's done it by adhering strictly to her consultative sales approach, which she sums up as "never chase the ketchup."

 "A lot of reps go in focused on what they're going to sell. My approach is to step outside of that box and focus instead on becoming a solution for my customers, someone they're going to turn to when they have problems or need suggestions," she says. "If you're going to chase an item—ketchup, or whatever—you might sell it but you'll lose something else to another rep because you're not adding value. If you're selling solutions, you remove yourself from that kind of give and take and can build a relationship."

Nakagawa works to educate customers about the economics of distribution and the benefits of going with a primary distributor. In doing so, she's successfully fended off competitors' attempts to grab business with low-ball pricing and steadily increased her volume. "I point out that if they just shop by price, they become unimportant to everyone when it comes to the distributors' willingness and ability to provide great, responsive service. And I let customers who may consider switching when another DSR comes in promising to beat everyone else's prices that, while it may sound good, there's only so much margin a distributor can give up. It's not sustainable. Through the services I provide and the partnership approach I take, I make it clear without having to say so that there's a lot more to the distributor-operator relationship than price."

The past two years, with the economic tsunami hitting Hawaii's hospitality industry just as it has the mainland's, Nakagawa has focused her efforts on helping customers control costs and build traffic. She's helped with value menu development and promotion, and spent time in customers' kitchens observing operations with an eye toward reducing waste and shrink. She's focused hard on soliciting promotional resources and rebates available from manufacturers to help customers weather the storm.

She's also expanded her own horizons by zeroing in on nonfood categories with which to grow sales. "I've been working closely with our company's nonfoods specialists and bringing them in as team players to help consult with customers and make the sale. As a result," she says, "I've added a lot of new lines to my business beyond just selling food and I'm more valuable to my accounts because I can deliver more expertise and more of what they need."

Having grown her sales from just over $6 million two years ago, at the start of the recession, to more than $8 million now with no new accounts added, she's proven that her approach works. By not chasing the "ketchup," it turns out she's selling a whole lot of it.