Emerging Leader program takeaways From Jim Hoffa, President, West Tennessee Ornamental Door
Employee training. What I realized most was that as your business grows you need to improve the training of all your employees’ understanding of your business vision and mission. To be successful, every employee must serve your customers with high quality, competitively price products that satisfy our customers’ needs. We revised all our job descriptions and are discussing them with employee. We cannot do it alone; everyone must know . . . where they can help us improve our product quality and manufacturing processes to lower our cost and provide cost competitive pricing to our customers. Learn to tell your story. Your success is in understanding the details in your business. As it grows, improving your systems and allowing them to tell your story is imperative. The story is your financials, and if you do a good job in detailing your inventory and manufacturing costs, you will see a story unfold. Compare the results against others in your industry and determine where you can improve. Continue the education. I also realized that I needed to be away from the business to learn with some of my peers how to develop and grow our business. The CEO mentoring groups [in the SBA program] allowed each of us to share the successes that we discovered in our business and to challenge each other when we saw an area that we thought could be improved in our operations. Now I need to find other learning opportunities and to join other groups of business leaders that are continuing their education.
attacks. After that, Jim acknowledges that business probably slowed down. “But it was all new to us, so we didn’t know any better,” he says. By the following year, he was looking for sales nationwide. In 2005, he purchased a small retail ornamental iron shop, Cash Iron Works, Memphis, TN, where he had moved West Tennessee Ornamental Door. The business produced cus-
tom ornamental iron fence, gates, and railing for contractors and the retail market in Memphis. The same year, Jim bought the assets and inventory of Vanguard Manufacturing, Memphis, TN, a “friendly competitor,” and begin selling across the country. He added the Ornamental Iron Division of Universal Manufacturing, also in Memphis, TN, in 2007 and got access to another nationwide customer
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base. After that purchase, Jim changed his business model, deciding to make West Tennessee Ornamental Door his focus. So in 2008, he sold Cash Iron Works to Jake Michel. By 2011, West Tennessee Ornamental Door had grown to 18 employees and was bursting at the seams. Jim purchased the 56,000-square-foot manufacturing building next door. “We had just paid off our SBA loan on the business, which allowed us to make the investment into a larger building to create excess capacity for future growth. We could not continue to grow in the original building. We could not even hire another person, as we were out of parking spots.” In the new building, Jim says, “We created a new manufacturing plant that was laid out to be safe and eliminate steps in our manufacturing system. We added new workstations to double our capacity at each station. All the extra equipment we had purchased from the Vanguard asset acquisition and Universal Manufacturing could now be used by our employees. “We also created a new fence and gate fabrication area where we can now safely manufacture the 50-foot-long slide gates that were a real challenge in our old building. We now have four overhead cranes that allow us to lift, transport, and move heavy products safely. Goals to grow our security door, fence, gate, and access control product sales are no longer limited by our building.” Now, Jim realized that he couldn’t afford to make any mistakes. He had a bigger footprint, higher overhead, and families for whom he was responsible. “I thought I needed to get away from the business and have a reason to create a three-year plan,” Jim says. This final plan is the objective of the SBA program. “The Emerging Leaders program would let me get together with other business leaders who have similar challenges and problems. We all have the same need — we have to grow our business,” Jim says. “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.” His former customer, Jake Michel, recommended the program highly. It helped Jake look at his business in a more analytic and strategic way. Fabricator n May / June 2013