Incentivizing Learning: A Southern Pipe Case Study

Challenge 

How could Southern Pipe and Supply utilize their family-oriented culture of appreciation and recognition to pursue self-motivated training growth and provide exceptional customer service? 

Solution 

Southern Pipe and Supply utilizes BlueVolt’s integrations to incentivize training, encouraging employees to pursue learning and provide more value to customers. 

Story 

Southern Pipe and Supply, a family-owned wholesaler in the plumbing and HVAC industry, operates 140 branches across seven states and employs roughly 1,300 people, referred to as family members. 

Southern Pipe has been with BlueVolt since 2003, using the platform primarily to train internally. According to Director of Culture and Development Doug Kennedy, the company wants to encourage learners to take initiative with training. 

“We don’t force anybody to do anything, but we make it available through BlueVolt,” Kennedy said. “We want to reward that action, as opposed to having something where you have to take five training courses this month.” 

Southern Pipe utilized BlueVolt’s reporting API to implement an incentive-based training program that aligns with their culture of recognition and appreciation. Through an integration with an outside platform, family members receive Southern Pipe Points—worth $1 each in gift card credits—for taking training. 

The result was a seamless experience where training incentives, peer recognition, and rewards are centralized in one place. Southern Pipe’s approach reflects its core value: to achieve high results through improvement and continuous learning. 

“How are you going to be the best in the industry? You’re going to learn. And our product is our knowledge because we’re a wholesaler. We don’t manufacture anything at all, so really our people make the difference,” Kennedy explained.  

“By incentivizing them to train and learn, it gives them that added empowerment of ‘I’m doing this for myself, I’m doing this for my career because I want to have new opportunities. I want to increase my value to the customer so that my customer wants to buy more from me.’ They see it as a competitive advantage on an individual level.” 

With incentivized training, employees view learning as career development rather than a mandate: as Kennedy explained, “They see it as the company investing in their growth.” 

According to Kennedy, they track engagement across learners. For those who pursue a high volume of training, the reward is recognition as potential for advancement. 

“Those are the people that we identify as true high achievers. They want to do more with their careers. They’re invested in Southern Pipe and in themselves,” Kennedy said. 

Conclusion 

Southern Pipe’s partnership with BlueVolt transforms training from a compliance task into a cultural advantage. By integrating incentives into learning, they empowered employees to grow professionally while reinforcing the company’s family-first values. 

“Ours is a culture of recognition and appreciation,” Kennedy said. “We motivate our people to want to be better.”