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Component Manufacturing dverti$ dverti $ er
Don’t Forget! You Saw it in the
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August 2023 #15289 Page #136
The Last Word Two Titans: Denig and Toombs ith the recent passing of Tom Denig, which was not long after Gene Toombs’, we should take a moment to reflect on their stunning Joe Kannapell, P.E. success, gained while working separately and together. They both took over highly technical companies in the early 1990s, Denig at Trus Joist and Toombs at MiTek, transformed them into world class businesses, folded them into top flight corporations, and then joined together to create winning software.
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Both of their companies arose in the 1960s, capitalizing on their innovations in wood structures – Trus Joist in commercial, tubular-webbed trusses, and MiTek’s predecessors in residential woodwebbed roof trusses. Their businesses began overlapping in the 1970s as pioneering component manufacturers, led by Frank Novak’s Truss Span, went head-to-head with Trus Joist in the Northwest. Other CMs followed across the country, taking advantage of their local sales and manufacturing. Trus Joist had to ship from plants in the West until 1973 when they opened a plant north of Columbus, Ohio to service the East, and that year they became a public company. The same year, Gang-Nail also went public. And they became ardent competitors. Trus Joist’s sales accelerated through the rest of the 1970s and 1980s, spurred on by its breakthrough LVL technology. Yet in its dizzying quest to reach $500 million in sales, it squandered its capital and energies on unwise acquisitions. In 1991, it suffered its first-ever loss. During this same period MiTek, without any comparable innovations, struggled as an also-ran in the plate business. Yet that would soon change. In 1991, Gene Toombs took over MiTek and quickly transformed it into a software powerhouse. Capitalizing on his recent acquisition of a 3D layout software, he marshalled all MiTek resources to develop whole house software, releasing his own breakthrough product, MiTek 2000, in 1993. The following year, Tom Denig took over Trus Joist and rapidly expanded its manufacturing and sales. By the end of the 1990s, both Denig and Toombs had doubled their sales. Yet that was not enough for either of them. Gene Toombs
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