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
About the author: O´Brian Manufacturing can be reached at
http://www.obrianmfg.com.
