This month marks my 14 year anniversary at Walters & Wolf. This is the forth company I’ve worked for in this industry and I have great respect and admiration for the company that Randy Wolf has built. I thought I’d take a minute and post about the different companies I’ve worked for and contrast that with what I have found here.
My first experience was working for a replacement branch for Cobbledick and Kibbe. This was in the early 80’s. The branch I worked at in San Jose sold paints and stains and wall mirrors out of a retail shop in the front of the store. We had a small shop with a cutting table and we stocked some basic glass that we could cut if someone came in to buy a piece of glass. We also sold wood and aluminum windows for new homes or remodels and we sold insulated units to retrofit residential windows which were mostly single glazed at the time. This was a fun company and I worked for one of my favorite people and my early mentor Frank Barbaccia. I learned how to build relationships, how to service customers and how to run a small company. The branch was pretty much Frank’s to run how he saw fit and he had lots of local connections he utilized to generate business.
As many companies in the early 80’s, Cobbledick and Kibbe went through a leveraged buy-out. This was a 100 year old company with wholesale, contract and retail branches. The new owners decided that it wasn’t in their interest to have retail branches and they only wanted to do contract work and the bigger the better. We consolidated three replacement branches and formed a contract branch in San Jose. This was my first exposure to larger projects. I ran several projects for the San Jose branch and made a ton of mistakes. No training, no supervision, just “sink or swim”. I learned a lot but it cost the company a lot of money for those lessons.
I then heard about an opportunity to work at our LA branch. This was a good opportunity for me to move up and I jumped at the chance. I was given the opportunity to run a 22 story unitized curtain wall project in Woodland Hills. Again, no training or oversight. My manager, Jim Koch also became a mentor to me. I learned that sometimes you just need to wade in and get things done. He had been an estimator and several of the jobs he bid were in LA. They were not going very well so he decided to move to LA and run the branch to make sure his projects were on budget.
It took a few years, but the new owners ran Cobbledick and Kibbe Glass Company out of business. I then began looking for a job in the Bay Area since my wife and I wanted to move back. I landed a job at Midwest Plate Glass.
One thing I wanted to do was get experience with a lot of projects. Large projects are great, but it takes a long time to complete them. Midwest did contract work in the Bay Area and they didn’t do anything over a million dollars. I was the only PM so I was running about 20 – 25 jobs at a time. We did mostly buy-out Kawneer systems. This was a great experience of running lots of work and touching lots of materials. I taught myself Autocad and began doing my own shop drawings to make my process smoother and faster. Bill Finnegan, one of the owners, was another great mentor for me. He was unique, as anyone in the industry will tell you, but he treated me like a son and I learned a lot from him. I had a couple of jobs using panel systems and I contracted these out to a company called C/S Erectors. Mike Carvin was the owner and we would go out to lunch when he was down and talk about his company and what they were doing. In the end, as the Midwest owners decided to retire, I called Mike up and got a job there.
C/S Erectors was primarily a panel company. My first day there, I was handed 4 projects to run. I didn’t know much about panels but I knew a lot about developing relationships with customers, running projects and working with vendors. I also knew how to draw shop drawings and I drew my own shop drawings here also. There were a lot of tedious processes with panels. I taught myself to program and began building some database programs to make this easier. I wrote my first panel optimization program, my first program to draw fabrication drawings for the extrusions we used on the back of the panels and created databases that could make the releases and quantities easier to manage. Mike Carvin became another one of my mentors. He taught me a lot about running a business, how to work with architects to get specified, how to create products that other people would have a hard time copying, and even helped me out with some personal issues I had.
So, the pattern so far is this. I worked at mostly smaller companies. The owner or manager became a mentor to me and showed me the ropes. There was no training, no instruction anywhere. I kept learning new skills and growing to try to deliver as much value as possible. I’d draw my own shop drawings, write my own programs, whatever it took to be able to run more projects and be more valuable.
14 years ago, I accepted a job at Walters & Wolf. My position was to write a program that would help with our material takeoffs and fabrication drawings. This was the year 2000 and the dot com boom was in full swing. The company had grown enormously but mostly by adding people. This was my first experience of being in a large company. There were few standards in place and people were just doing their best to get the work done. I spent my first few years writing code, doing takeoffs and doing fabrication drawings with the program I was building. As things began to click, I added a couple of people to my team and we started doing more and more of the process. As the company started looking at automated equipment, I got to be part of that process and develop the interfaces to the machines. By doing fabrication tickets, I learned all about the systems that Walters & Wolf was developing and with all the things I had learned in my other companies, I was able to help develop our new standard systems. When my boss was promoted to COO, he asked me to become VP of Operations.
Contrasting Walters & Wolf to my other company experiences, here is what I find. Randy became successful by developing great relationships and being fully engaged with what was happening on the job sites. But he trusted other people to run parts of the company. Skip Weltz ran the field, Rod West ran the shop, Nick ran operations, etc.. This enabled the company to grow. If you can’t trust people with more and more responsibility then you won’t be able to grow beyond the owner’s ability to oversee things. My opportunities here were endless. I got to help design systems, set up our Autocad system, build the SQL Server database, create all of our portal and wiki infrastructure, work with our shop on equipment purchases, work with the purchasing department on stream lining their process, all while I was just a programmer. Anything I wanted to help with, people were willing to give me the chance. There are unlimited opportunities for people to grow here. You might have to invent the job you want, but if you prove you can do it, people will let you. There is a lot of trust and camaraderie and very little politics. We struggle with communication at times because of the size of the company but we acknowledge that weakness and are working on it.
The last 14 years have been excellent. I’ve been challenged to learn and grow. When I was in this business 5 years, I thought to myself “man, I didn’t know anything 5 years ago!”. Then when I was in the business about 10 years I looked back and said “wow, I didn’t know anything at 5 years”. And every 5 years I could see my growth. When I started here, I felt I could say that every year “wow, I didn’t know anything a year ago”. And today, I feel like I can say that every month “wow, I didn’t know any of these things a month ago”.
The other amazing thing here is the people. We have hired very few people from our industry. Most of our hiring has been entry level. In our management group, I’m one of the least tenured people in the group at 14 years. We have a great combination of young and upcoming talent along with long term (over 30 year) veterans. I learn so much from the people around me.
So, after 14 years, I’m very grateful for the company that I work for. I look forward to the challenges I get to help solve and the people I get to work with each and every day. Life is good!
