When the waters from the Pawcatuck River kept rising and eventually swamped Napa Auto Parts in March 2010, owner James “Jamie” Silvestri thought it marked the end for his family-owned business. But Silvestri recovered, moving the business from Canal Street in Westerly to a location off Route 1 and securing a $300,000 loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration to cover his costs.
This month he heads to Washington, D.C., to receive a Phoenix Award from the SBA. The annual awards recognize business owners, public officials and volunteers who display selflessness, ingenuity and tenacity in the aftermath of a disaster. Silvestri spoke recently with Providence Business News about the award and long road to recovery.
PBN: How did it feel to receive the award?
SILVESTRI: I was surprised. I was humbled. There were a lot of people that were involved in order to get us where we are today. There were just so many people that were instrumental in the success of what we did and what happened.
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PBN: When you looked at what happened, did you think it was the end of the store?
SILVESTRI: That response definitely happened. [The flood] did happen so quick it really didn’t give us a lot of time to think about the future because at that point we were swamped and literally lost a boatload of our inventory. We knew we did not have flood insurance and to be able to work out of that same location and still be operating was really questionable.
We immediately started to look for another place, which we did find on Route 1. Then it was just coordinating and scheduling and getting all the manpower here to actually make that happen in the shortest amount of time so as not to lose business.
PBN: Was that important that you found another location so quickly?
PBN: How did you maintain those customers even with the move?
SILVESTRI: Directly after the flood we transferred some of our crew from the Westerly store to our Mystic store – which is the closest one to us – to help maintain the Westerly customers. We supported it as best we could and our customers were extremely understanding, knowing that the delivery times would be exaggerated a little bit.
PBN: It sounds like you were lucky to have that Mystic store. Did you have a disaster plan?
SILVESTRI: There was no pre-planning for this whatsoever but what was instrumental in the success of our move-in and our quick startup was our parent company, Napa Auto Parts out of Atlanta, Ga. Their support staff [from local company offices] and Connecticut warehouse General Manager Greg Sargeant immediately got on the phone as soon as the flood happened and reached out to the other distribution centers that were close to us, like Syracuse and New York, Buffalo and Maine and New Jersey. They sent their personnel here to help us. So we had 40 people for almost two weeks.
PBN: Did you pay those people?
SILVESTRI: No, that’s part of the deal I guess when [there’s a natural disaster]; they’re here to help.
PBN: How long did it take to get back in operation? PBN: Was the move tough on the business? PBN: How has the business model changed? PBN: Are you still feeling the flood on your balance sheet? PBN: Would you have reopened without the SBA loan? PBN: Any advice for business owners near the water? INTERVIEW
SILVESTRI: Eight days and we went from a bare-shell store to a completely stocked lobby and inventory warehouse.
SILVESTRI: The demographics of where we’re located now to where we were changed our business model a little bit. We were down kind of on the outskirts of town. Now we’re up on the main strip on Route 1 right through the center of town. Lot of exposure.
SILVESTRI: We’ve had to add more staff, a lot more customer training on the retail side because those people who come in really are looking for information and instruction, not only the part. Typically, who we serviced [in the former location] was the wholesale side and now it’s more [individual consumers].
SILVESTRI: We’ll be feeling the flood on our balance sheet for the next 30 years. We had to take out that SBA loan, that was $300,000 and that’s a 30-year loan at 4 percent. That wasn’t anywhere incorporated into the pro forma that we did for the new location. Plus rent is more here, insurance is more, payroll is more, replacing the inventory was more.
SILVESTRI: Absolutely not. At that point, we were pretty much leveraged. We had just acquired the third store in 2008 and there were a lot of growing pains in that so our balance sheet was really pretty leveraged.
SILVESTRI: Know exactly what you have and try to affix a dollar cost to that, especially in your depreciated equipment and stuff. We lost a lot of stuff we had to replace that we really didn’t know what kind of money that was worth. •
JAMES “JAMIE” SILVESTRI
POSITION: Owner of Napa Auto Parts in Westerly and president of Westerly Auto Parts Corp.
BACKGROUND: James Silvestri started working at Napa, purchased by his father, during his teenage years. In 1985, he left New Hampshire College to assist at the store after the death of his father in 1983.
EDUCATION: Attended New Hampshire College
FIRST JOB: Newspaper delivery boy in Westerly at age 12
RESIDENCE: Westerly
AGE: 45
