It is not surprising that the offices of TLC Adcentives, a full-service promotional products company, are filled with logo-embellished samples of everything from pens, flashlights, and stress balls to designer leather bags and crystal vases. TLC Adcentives can apply its clients’ logos to just about anything, but owner and president Terri Hornsby is more excited to tell you about the wide range of services her company offers its corporate clients: everything from creating and implementing safety incentive or employee recognition programs to warehousing inventory and managing a turn-key fulfillment process through either a catalogue or the web.
In Terri’s book service is key, so regardless of whether her client orders a plastic paper clip or a Tiffany paper weight, she delivers each order with the same high-end customer service her clients have come to expect from TLC Adcentives. Terri acknowledges that having TLC Adcentives certified as a woman- and minority-owned business has helped open doors for her at Fortune 500 companies like Shell where supplier diversity is a focus, but she knows that it is the quality and service she consistently delivers that keeps her clients coming back year after year. That client loyalty recently saw Terri and TLC Adcentives through a very difficult time. Terri was diagnosed with breast cancer in early 2003. Her clients, many of who had become friends, promised Terri that her business would not suffer and their promises proved to be true. During the course of two surgeries and more than twelve months of treatment, Terri continued to operate TLC Adcentives. Regardless of her condition, she was committed to consistently delivering quality promotional items to her clients on time and in superb condition. Through grace and good fortune as well as her own diligence, Terri managed to grow TLC Adcentive’s sales modestly during that time. Now, Terri is nearly two years cancer-free, and thanks to her clients’ continued loyalty, TLC Adcentives is able to enter a period of “re-growth.” Shell recently conducted a review to limit the number of vendors licensed to produce Shell-branded merchandise. Terri’s TLC Adcentives was one of only six firms Shell named as an approved vendor. Since then, her business with Shell has nearly doubled and that relationship has helped to open doors for TLC Adcentives at other large corporations as well. Terri is pleased that companies like Shell are committed to supplier diversity, but she is more satisfied that Shell values quality service and remains loyal to vendors that consistently deliver.
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