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100 Years at Norwalk
A single company experiences the outgrowth
of the precast industry from infancy to maturity – from
horse-drawn wagon to the computer age.
By Ron Hyink
The years either flash by like a
falcon in flight or drift lazily along like a carefree cloud,
depending on how you look at it, but any time you can witness
the turn of a new century, you can’t help but reflect
on man’s progress through the ages. As Norwalk Concrete
Industries of Norwalk, Ohio, celebrates its first centennial
this year, the owners and employees can take pride in the
fact that their company has evolved through the most remarkable
technological achievements that man has ever seen.
By the time the 20th century rolled around,
electricity had made its way into businesses and homes, the
automobile was pushing the horse out to pasture, and the Wright
Brothers were about to astonish the entire world with controlled,
powered flight.
Although precast concrete had been around
in North America for a few decades, it didn’t seem to
hold much interest for products other than burial vaults.
But those were good sellers and reason enough for someone
with a little wooden shack and big dreams to invest in the
precast industry.
The Norwalk Vault Co. began operations in
1906 as a licensor of its patented precast burial vault and
mold equipment, and soon more than a hundred companies around
the country were making the Norwalk brand. The entrepreneurs
at Norwalk cast their own brand as well, of course, but long-range
transportation for such heavy products limited sales to the
local Norwalk market. “At one time, they loaded the
burial vaults on board railroad cars and sent them down to
Wakeman – which is down the line here about 11 miles
– then picked them up with horse and buggy and took
them to the cemetery,” said Tom Lendrum, a former owner
of Norwalk Concrete Industries.
In 1914, a group of investors out of New
York bought the company and hired a man by the name of John
Cox to manage it, but by 1922 the investment group bailed
out and sold the business to Cox, who ran it until his death
in 1931. His nephew, A.M. Lendrum – Tom’s father
– became the manager and ran the business for more than
40 years before retiring.
Since the time Tom’s ancestors latched
onto Norwalk Vault Co. until the 1950s, two world wars had
come and gone, and Tom found himself being pulled in two directions
– the “business” of war and the “war”
of business – as America turned its attention toward
the Korean War. Although Tom was serving as an Army officer,
he and his father’s business partner, Reese Lawyer,
bought the company from the Cox family in 1953, and Tom wouldn’t
return to the business until 1960.
The company was very small and still clinging
almost exclusively to its burial vault and steel mold business,
which was conveniently located right across the street from
the largest cemetery in the area. “All we had to do
was load the vault on the back of the horse and wagon and
take it over to the cemetery,” Tom recalled of the era
leading up to World War II. Despite having a truck, transporting
the vaults or any other products to other locations meant
a lot of grunt work. “Everything was done by hand. We
unloaded things off the truck with skids and rollers –
we didn’t have any crane equipment on board the trucks.”
But that would soon change.
“After World War II, we started making
septic tanks and other precast concrete products,” said
Tom, and since necessity is usually the mother of invention,
they started manufacturing A-frame septic tank trucks with
hydraulic equipment to handle the loads. “We manufactured
a number of those in conjunction with our mold business. From
the end of World War II, we were in the septic tank business,
and then into catch basins, and then into a wider range of
highway products. This was the evolution of the precast concrete
products business.”
The evolution of the precast industry followed
the evolution of the equipment that could handle and transport
the products, according to Tom. “The truth is that precast
concrete is made possible by materials-handling equipment,”
he said. “We’ve been able to have trucks and cranes
that can handle products for the job site, and that’s
every bit as much a material-handling problem as it is a precast
problem, in my opinion.”
It stands to reason, then, that the precast
industry would expand into new and innovative products as
the ability to handle and transport them evolved – and
that the mold business would feed off that new energy as well.
“The molds have become far more complicated, and it’s
amazing the things that you can do, the shapes you can make
with a good piece of mold equipment,” said Tom.
But the company would eventually shed its
mold business. Tom and Reese ran the business for several
years, but then Tom took over when Reese passed away in 1973.
In 1978, as more precast products were added to the company’s
lineup, Tom sold the burial vault business – and with
it the mold business – and renamed the company Norwalk
Concrete Industries, as it is called today.
Within another decade, during the mid to
late ’80s, Tom’s sons, John Lendrum and Jeff Malcolm,
began working at the company – but only after they had
invested some time and serious thought away from the company.
“I said to them, ‘Go spend five years making mistakes
on somebody else’s time and money, and then come back,’”
quipped Tom. Then in a more earnest tone: “Any one of
my children who wanted to was free to come back to the company,
and these two gentlemen did.”
Jeff was first to return after graduating
from college and working in sales and marketing for two different
steel producers. John, who originally had no intention of
returning to Norwalk, graduated from college and entered the
Army, and he still serves as an Army Reserve officer with
the Corps of Engineers.
After 50 years of ownership – in 1993
– Tom sold the business to John and Jeff, who continue
to run it today. Jeff handles the sales and marketing end
of the company, while John handles production and operations.
“And then for long-term planning and the big-picture
stuff, we put our heads together,” said Jeff.
“I do very little bid work, because
Jeff does all that,” said John. “By the same token,
he doesn’t get too involved with what’s cast on
a day-to-day basis on the plant floor.”
Jeff adds that it may be a bit of a unique
style of management. “There are probably not a whole
lot of companies out there, whether precast or any other business,
where two people are equal partners in the business,”
he said. “So I think it’s worked well for us that
we keep it separate. There’s enough work for both of
us, so we don’t really need to be in each other’s
hair.”
And it has worked well, as evidenced by
the phenomenal growth over the past few years. The company
grew slowly at first with Tom at the helm, and then took off
from there. “In 1960, which is when I came back (from
the Army), the company had eight employees and since then
grown to about 80 employees now,” said Tom.
Early growth came as a result of increasing
the number of product offerings and acquiring other plants
in which to manufacture them. It follows a certain trend in
the industry, according to John. “The late ’80s
is about the time a lot of smaller operations started to either
grow or sell out,” he said.
It was also in the late ’80s when
Norwalk Concrete Industries became serious about offering
value-added products – those that are packaged with
components built into the product at the plant and sold as
“one-stop shopping” items to cut costs at the
job site. As it turns out, value-added products have also
become a trend that further defines the “grow or die”
phenomenon in the precast industry. “At one time, if
you sold electrical manholes to somebody, you just sold the
manhole – a piece of concrete. Now they’re sold
as a package with hardware and, in some cases, electronic
components as one package,” added John.
Perhaps one of the most significant technological
changes in the precast industry, though, was the introduction
of admixtures. Admixtures have enabled precasters to build
a higher-quality product through improved mix designs, and
Norwalk Concrete Industries has learned the benefits. John
said the new technology has significantly increased their
options by opening up the possibility for custom mix designs
they can offer to their customers. Using one mix design for
every product is no longer the norm for economy and ultimate
strength reasons. A typical day may see three to five different
mixes used.
As the value-added products and enhanced
quality gained popularity, they helped perpetuate company
growth. “We’ve grown a lot,” said office
manager Kathy Leak, who has been with the company for 35 years.
She arrived just as the company was withdrawing from the burial
vault business to focus on residential and then commercial
septic tanks and aerobic treatment units. “We were just
getting into the home units when I started. We had maybe 500
in the ground, and now I think we have 6,000.”
While everyone else at the company plunged
into the learning curve brought about by new technology as
well as value-added and other products, Kathy coped with her
own learning curve when the personal computer burst on the
scene. “I started out on a little board, writing handwritten
checks and things like that, and had little card files,”
she said. “And now we’ve got this big computer
system. It’s amazing when you think back to how we did
it by hand and what we do now.”
Kathy recalled the progress from hand-written
files to a mechanical bookkeeping machine. “They actually
put me in a little closet room, because it was so loud,”
she said. “And then we went to a card system, and then
we started going into the computer systems.”
The Norwalk employees coped well with all
the changes, but they were running out of room due to rapid
growth and expansion. “We were crawling all over each
other,” said Kathy. “We had to do something.”
So they built a new plant. From 1999 to 2000, with the old
plant bursting at the seams, a new one was finally completed.
The employees continue to operate from both plants, which
are located within minutes of one another.
Shane Horner and Scott Priest were also
happy to see the new plant open, which gave them more elbow
room at the original plant. Shane, an 11-year veteran with
the company, became plant supervisor at the original plant
once the new facility began operations. He and Scott, quality
control supervisor, have been around long enough to witness
plenty of growth, not only in the number of employees but
in the number of product offerings as well.
“When I first started, it was just
this shop here,” recalled Shane, referring to the original
building. “Then we added on that back building and a
new mixer.” He recounted other updates the company made
to keep pace with the rapid expansion of the workforce and
the resulting disappearance of work space. “It’s
grown tremendously since I started.”
Scott recalled the expansion into new products
during his 19 years at the company. “Back when I first
started here, we didn’t do storm and sanitary manholes,”
he said. “Basically all we did was just septic tanks,
barrier, catch basins and some bigger structures, but nothing
like what we’re doing now. Utility vaults are double
the volume of what we used to do.”
The original plant – known as the
Woodlawn Plant to Norwalk employees because of its location
on Woodlawn Avenue across from Woodlawn Cemetery – still
incites vivid memories among the long-term employees. Gary
Edler, who started with the company in 1967, now works part
time in the service department at the new plant. “Most
of the time, when they were pouring over at the old shop,
they poured steps and burial vaults, and then of course we
handled funerals at that time,” said Gary. “So
we would go right out to the cemetery and set the tent and
all that kind of stuff. I did that for years too, because
you had to be a jack-of-all-trades – you didn’t
just have one job.”
Gary also recalls Tom’s occasional
dramatic visits to the plant. “He used to fly his helicopter
in at the old shop, an Army helicopter. He used to bring it
over there at Woodlawn, and then we’d tie the blades
down,” he said. “It was kind of nice to see that
helicopter parked out there.”
The Norwalk employees all take great pride
in their work and especially in the people they work for.
And the feeling is mutual. Tom, John and Jeff take great pride
in their employees, and in fact give credit not to themselves
but to the dedicated employees for the company’s success.
John summed it up nicely: “Every business goes through
cycles when they have good times and bad times – and
a lot of those people have been with us through both. You’re
not successful unless you have people like that for their
willingness to support you and work with you.”
With 100 years worth of success and growth,
how does a company begin its second century? “We don’t
have any huge plan, but the business survived because we had
good employees who were able to step up to the plate,”
said John.
The bottom line, then, according to John
and Jeff, is that their next century will start out with more
of the same: success and growth. “You have to grow,
and there are a lot of different ways to do that,” said
John. “If you try and stay at the same level –
the same dollar volume, the same product line, the same profit
margin – you’re not going to be successful. But
we have to be very careful to make sure that we’re looking
at measured growth, what we can afford and what we can do.
What is the next new product down the road? What is the next
piece of equipment we need? We have to be thinking out in
that area.”
Jeff agrees. “We’ve adopted
several new product lines here within the last few years.
There’s a lot of fresh stuff going on with an emphasis
on product development and making these new products commercially
successful,” he said. “At the same time you have
to be looking out for the next opportunity.”
But there are many other things on their
minds besides the products they offer, such as customers and
employees. “Celebrating 100 years is great, but your
customer wants to know what you’re going to do for him
next week,” said John. “That’s important
to us as we grow and make the right decisions and provide
a value-added product to our customers.”
John also described other needs for the
future that are more inwardly focused. “More training
for our employees, labor saving equipment, additional forms,
partnerships with people to be their precaster of choice.
That’s a good foundation to build for the future, and
it’s nice to have that history going back to draw from.”
What will the next hundred years bring to
the precast concrete industry? What hot commodities will Norwalk
Concrete Industries be producing in the 22nd century? The
future owners will have to answer those questions. But in
2106, as the employees celebrate the company’s second
hundred years, they’ll probably reflect on the amazing
technology that another century has brought them.
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Industry Leaders
Precast concrete industry leadership
has become somewhat of a family tradition at Norwalk Concrete
Industries. Tom Lendrum, former owner of the company, and
John Lendrum, current co-owner, each have served as NPCA’s
chairman of the Board of Directors, and both were recipients
of the Robert E. Yoakum Award, the highest honor NPCA can
bestow upon its members.
Not only was Tom one of NPCA’s founding
fathers, he also served as its chairman during 1975 and won
the Yoakum Award in 1976. John followed suit years later when
he served as chairman during 2002 and won the Yoakum Award
in 2005. The Yoakum Award is presented to NPCA members who
exhibit outstanding service and leadership in the industry
and to the association.
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