Think a company´s fortunes have to rise and fall with the local economy? Rubbish, says O´Brian Mfg.

With its tin-roofed houses, fragrant pine woods, and abundant barbecue joints, Wilson, N.C., still evokes images of the Old South. But O´Brian Mfg. Co., an industrial-fabrics firm located just off Highway 301 north of town, has a firm grasp of the new economy.

Originally founded to serve the state´s then-burgeoning tobacco industry, the company has responded to changes in the local business climate by branching out into broader territory.

His son Woody, now chief executive officer, says business fluctuated with the vagaries of farmers´ fortunes. "One year, a cotton or tobacco farmer would have a really good year and order plenty of tarps. Then the next year it wouldn´t be good at all, so we´d be stuck standing there with nothing to do," he says. "That was one of the reasons we switched."

O´Brian still serves local farmers by making hand tarps and covers, but the company has widened its scope. First, it added commercial and residential awnings to its repertoire. It also diversified into compactor curtains, or "diapers," for garbage trucks.

Then one day, a friend of Winnie O´Brian—Woody´s wife and the firm´s chief financial officer—suggested that the company ought to design automatic tarp systems for the waste industry.

The tarp-system units are simple in construction, but inspired in engineering. A giant pair of hydraulic arms unrolls a tarp from the back of the truck cab to the end of the container, neatly covering the cargo.

Drivers don´t need to risk injury by climbing all over the truck to attach the tarp; they simply operate a joystick. The O´Brians tout the systems as being versatile—they cover anything from a 10- to a 50-cubic-yard container. And they´re also easy to maintain, they say, since their hydraulics are enclosed and the arms rest below the level where they´re likely to get crunched by a container.

Having made significant inroads into the rubbish market, Woody says his company is tackling the dump-truck market, too. "We´re pretty much into covering and containment," he says. "As long as it falls under that, we try to get into it, but if it doesn´t, we try to stay away from it. You don´t want to get too diversified."

It was this series of changes that spurred the company´s explosive growth—from just a few family members to 31 employees in two facilities—in recent years.

Now, with its cavernous warehouse and cheery clerical staff, the firm resembles any number of other medium-sized industrial-fabrics companies. Still, it´s a little unusual at its core, and that may be one of the keys to its success.

Let the four winds blow
A loud jingling sound, like a behemoth bicycle bell, shatters the relative quiet of O´Brian´s 22,500-foot main facility. It´s the end of break, and a seamstress tucks a bookmark in her book and returns to work.

It´s a scene you might glimpse in hundreds of sewing rooms all over the country. Except for one small detail: The woman is only visible from the waist upward. The rest of her is concealed in a concrete foxhole in the middle of the floor. A glance around the room reveals several more foxholes, each outlined with yellow-and-black warning tape.

Sean O´Brian, Winnie and Woody´s 26-year-old son and the company´s sales and technical point man, explains: "A lot of other places have to build up tables around the sewing machines. But when we built this shop, we decided where we wanted the machines and just put holes in the floor." The result is that the floor acts as one giant sewing table.

Overall, the O´Brians have been happy with the innovation. According to Woody, it´s a lot easier for seamstresses to feed large tarps through the machines when they don´t have to hoist them over the edges of tables.

The system certainly frees up a lot of room to walk, and the building contractor´s initial fears of a leaky foundation have proved groundless. There is one drawback, though, Woody says. With a typical wooden table, a coating of silicone spray can render the surface extra-smooth for easy fabric movement.

With the foxhole system, a friction-free surface might translate into shop-floor accidents. "We kind of had to play with this," he says. "You can get the floor slick up to a point, but once you pass that, then you run into a danger of someone falling down."

The foxholes aren´t the only evidence of inventiveness in this shop. In an adjoining room, separate from the squeaky-clean sewing area, the shop´s dustier, greasier operations take place.

Fourteen-foot-high garage doors allow "anything that´s street-legal" to be driven in and fitted with a tarp. Here, too, awning frames are welded, products are developed, and boxes are shipped. In one corner, traumatized truck tarps are dragged in for repairs, facilitated by another clever invention—a long, skinny light table. "A lot of people do repairs on the floor," Sean says. "But Woody designed and fabricated this, which shows any and every hole in the tarp." For ease of use, there´s a metal roller attached to the long side of the table.

"You just hook the tarp up to the roller, and roll the truck top as needed. There´s a little rotary switch in the back," Sean explains proudly.

It wasn´t always this way. Until 1998, the entirety of O´Brian Mfg. was confined to a 15,000-sq.-ft. space across town, crowded with tables, equipment, and people. But in November of that year, the firm opened its brand-new, custom-built facility off Highway 301 and turned the smaller building into a metal-fabrication shop for its automatic tarping system frames.

It turned out they made the change just in time for Hurricane Floyd, which immersed the metal-fab shop—but not the main facility—in seven feet of water. The storm KO´d many neighboring businesses, but it only inconvenienced O´Brian; it turns out the metal-fabrication equipment was surprisingly resilient.

"All our hydraulic suppliers were really, really helpful," Winnie says. "They told us to pull the plugs [on our hydraulic equipment], drain all the water out, and soak it in a bath of hydraulic fluid. It was recoverable." The welders received the same treatment, as did a waterlogged forklift.

The only major casualty was a plasma table (a piece of equipment that cuts steel by generating electrical arcs) that racked up a massive repair bill; yet even that had a silver lining. "The table hadn´t run that well up until that point, and now it´s never run better," Sean says, laughing.

Like father, like son
"I started working summers with dad when I was in school," remembers Woody O´Brian. "After I graduated, I moved to Durham and worked at an accounting firm for a couple of years. Then, at my mother´s persistence, I came back and started working at the company."

That was in 1974. He´s stayed ever since, and says his venture into the outside world helped him learn to work for others without any special treatment.

Good thing, too, because with the entire nuclear family on site, the O´Brians go out of their way to maintain a businesslike dynamic. No one seems to use the words "Mom" or "Dad," let alone a term of endearment, at the office; it´s first names for everyone. It´s all part of keeping things running smoothly, Woody says.

"Winnie and I, we´ve always put it down to trying to keep the marriage relationship separate from business," he explains. "We play out the business roles when we´re at work, and then when we leave work, we take up husband and wife roles. When you get home, you try and talk about other things."

He says family members also stake out their own territory at the office, and rarely see each other during the day. That helps, he points out, when family resemblances kick in. "It´s just that he and I are so alike in so many respects," Sean says, agreeing with his father.

"Sometimes we can work together fine, but other times, after about five or ten minutes we need to go work on different things. We´re so near alike, we just get on each other´s nerves."

Father and son share a love of design and engineering. If left to their own devices, they say, each would while away the day puttering with new prototypes for the company´s automatic tarping systems.

They´ve even created a faux truck bed—a steel frame on blocks—in the warehouse, ready to be fitted with new pieces of machinery. "We get feedback from the end user on different products," Woody says. "And so I guess that´s my small expertise. I´ll come back and visualize it and design it on paper, then do a prototype. Then we put it in our research department and test it, improve on it, redesign it, and get it ready for the market."

Sean´s the same way, and has taken the design process one step further by mapping ideas out in DataCAD, a computer-aided design software package. And right now, he says, he´s got the ultimate in hands-on jobs: One of the company´s welders is out with a bad back, so Sean has volunteered for machine-shop duty for the next few weeks.

"Of course, while you´re doing all this, you still have the day-to-day activities of running the business," sighs Woody. "You´ve got to stop whatever you´re doing and talk to the customer that wants to talk to you. Or you´ve got to talk to the two plant managers and make sure things are getting done at both locations."

Nevertheless, both he and his son insist that they´re not as comfortable in front of customers, and would rather leave sales to the salespeople. They´re always ready to help clients in need, but their favorite activity is research.

Sean, with typical youthful enthusiasm, carries over his favorite aspects of work to his leisure time. His father points to a truck body wedged on top of a storage unit in the warehouse. "This is what he likes to do—he´s building a vehicle from scratch for four-wheeling. He built a chassis, and he´s going to put that body on it."

Woody´s leisure pursuits tend more toward escapism. Back in the days when Sean was a Boy Scout, Woody developed a love of kayaking, and continues the activity to this day. "When you´re paddling whitewater, you can´t think about business," he says. "If you do, you turn over and you get wet. So it keeps your concentration, and it keeps your mind off work." Winnie, he says, prefers to sit outside the family´s beachside trailer, engrossed in a book.

Far afield
In the company boardroom, Sean waves a hand in the direction of a large U.S. map studded with thumbtacks. "We haven´t updated it in a while, but all the pins you see here are our dealers," he says. "There are more in the Midwest now than we´ve put in."

The automatic tarping systems, he explains, are sold throughout the United States and via one dealer in Canada. Winnie adds that recently O´Brian Mfg. set up a dealership in Venezuela to supply tarping systems for dumptrucks, and it´s struck a manufacturing agreement with a company in the United Kingdom.

"We take care of the local stuff here," Woody says, referring to the truck tarps and awnings his company sells in North Carolina. "But [for the automatic tarping systems] we need a dealer in the customer´s area to provide good service to the customer." The dealers are encouraged to provide full installation and warranty service to buyers, he says.

"What we send out is actually something in kit form," Sean says. "They´ll get all the parts with the instruction manual, and possibly an instructional video if they´ve never done one before. In addition to that, they can call us if they have any problems, and we can walk them through it."

Service, quality and consistency, Woody says, lie at the core of the company´s reputation. That´s why an ISO 9000 certification is on the agenda for late summer. "We´re getting excited about it, the closer we get," he says. "I think it´s something that´s coming down the road, that everybody will be required to do if they´re going to do business with the big companies. We like to think we´re ahead of the game on that."

He adds that the firm is also concerned with providing a safe and pleasant work environment. That could be why, even though the entire O´Brian clan has just returned from a week away at a conference, none of them appears stressed out. Apparently, the business hummed along like a finely tuned machine while they were gone.

Woody shrugs, taking it as a matter of course. "You´ve got to look after your employees, and then your employees will look after you," he says, smiling. And then he quietly slips back into the warehouse to continue his work.

Reprinted from April 2001 issue of the Industrial Fabric Products Review, with permission from the Industrial Fabrics Association International. By Jamie Swedberg

Profiles of business owners respected in their industry appear in our newsletter and are available on our web site. We encourage association executives to tell us about their members who are leveraging their inherent advantages (trusted brand, excellent service, etc.) by embracing a "doing it right" attitude into their strategy for growth.

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