CUMMING, Ga. — DeJazz Woods has always had a love for sports. He has been around athletic equipment since childhood football, leading him to play at the collegiate level as an outside linebacker for the University of Illinois from 2010 – 2014. Upon graduation, armed with a master’s degree, his career would take off in the athletic equipment industry. As a Business Development Manager for three major athletic equipment manufacturers, Woods would cross paths with Jeff Hodge, President of H.E. Hodge Company, and Bud Hodge, the company’s founder, who are both huge college football fans. They began mentoring Woods in the athletic equipment industry, which would score a winning touchdown for each team.
In the late 60s, Bud Hodge, Jeff’s father, served as Southeast Regional Manager with Brunswick Bowling which had diversified into a school division. This division specialized in school equipment, and Bud called on school systems to offer classroom, athletic, and institutional equipment solutions. Under his leadership and partnership with his wife, June, sales in the Southeast rocketed from $300K to over $3.5M in 3 years. With these impressive results, he was offered the Brunswick School Division Dealership for the Southeast in 1972. This dealership offering was the beginning of the H. E. Hodge Company. Eventually, Jeff took the company reins and has built a strong reputation as a merit-based business with a tradition of success in providing quality facility solutions. For 50 years, H.E. Hodge company’s objectives have been to exceed customer expectations. With Jeff eyeing retirement, he considered passing the company on to the next generation. Woods met the owners of H.E. Hodge in 2016 at a job site for a customer in Chamblee, GA. After several years of mentoring Woods, they realized they had found their successor. Woods became the new owner in November 2022 and is poised to take the company to the next level.
Woods is carrying on the family-owned tradition, bringing his fiancé Karina Gomez onto his leadership team. Her role at H.E. Hodge focuses on marketing, branding, communications, lead generation, and other functions that facilitate daily operations. He is focusing on cultivating improvements within the company processes and developing the company’s product offering. Woods is also working on improving the customer experience and creating resolutions for the customer’s complex needs. His strategy is to provide a quality turn-key solution for all H.E. Hodges customers. H.E. Hodge’s standards will exceed customer expectations with innovation and integrity.
Today, H.E. Hodge Company specializes in the preliminary planning, specification writing, budgeting, engineering, field measuring, project managing, and installation of specialty athletic equipment such as goals, lockers, and bleachers for schools and municipalities. H.E. Hodge Company will continue to evolve. Its mission moving forward is to serve our customers based on their need for efficient facility operations and services that ensure our clients have fully operable facilities to coordinate their programming and facilitate their community needs. While the ownership has changed, the winning spirit of the business remains the same.
Learn more: https://www.hehodge.com/
H.E. Hodge Company, 2393 Pendley Road, Suite 200, Cumming, GA 30041.
Related link: https://www.hehodge.com/
This news story was published by the Neotrope® News Network – all rights reserved. ID:NEO2022