Philadelphia Business Journal - November 9 - 15, 2001

Crafting Worker Morale
By: Adam Stone - Special to the Business Journal

North Wales- Once a month, the management of Timberlane open up the books, telling employees just how much money has been made and giving each worker a share of the profits.

As growth strategies go, it’s a fairly direct one and also highly effective.

“For me, it is definitely a motivator. When you look at the numbers and you can see for yourself the productivity and the profitability, it makes it a lot easier t strive toward concrete goals,” said Dave Seelig, director of operations at the North Wales-based manufacturer of wooden window shutters.

Richard M. Skidmore established Timberlane in 1995 after working for many years with Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in sales and marketing. The idea for the business came to him as he was renovating an old house in Doylestown and having a hard time finding replacements for the home’s vintage shutters.

“I realized that if I was sitting here in Doylestown, where there are thousands of homes that need new shutters, there had to be a market for this,” Skidmore said. “There were a few competitors out there, but they were more woodworker than businessmen. I was confident in my own ability to market this thing effectively.”

At the same time, Skidmore also had the woodworking experience he needed to get his operations up and running. His father was a master carpenter and cabinetmaker, and Skidmore had helped finance his own college education by operating a small construction company. For many years he’s built his own furniture in a home workshop.

Still, it’s a long way from there to running one’s own manufacturing plant. In the first place, a commercial operation costs money. Skidmore drained his 401(k) right off the bat, then continued to live off his personal savings, reinvesting all the firm’s income into capital investments, which have totaled some $1 million dollars to date.

He spent about four months in product development before taking his shutters to market in mid-1996, and it has been on onward and upward since then. He ended 1996 with five employees. By 1997 he had a dozen workers; he now employs 40 people. He’s upgraded the digs, too, moving from a 1,500-square-foot workspace to his present 20,000-square-foot manufacturing facility.

He has taken only a few small bank loans along the way. “We wanted to stay lean and mean,” he said.
Mean? Hardly. Those who have worked with Skidmore say his prevailing characteristic as an entrepreneur is his niceness.
Take for instance David Bassion, an information-technology consultant with software firm DBA Inc. in New Britain. In order to help Skidmore automate his operations, Bassion sent out questionnaires to all Timberlane employees asking about existing processes with in the organization.

Usually when you sent out these questionnaires, you get back at least a few where people say the company sucks,” Bassion said. “ I have never before seen it happen where every single employee says: “Yeah, I want to do what can I do to help.” At Timberlane, every single one of them cares about the well-being of that company. As an IT consultant I have never see that. It was amazing.”

Such a high level of employee morale does not come around accidentally.

“Rick wants to do the right thing in terms of making the business better for the people who work with them,” Said Tom Martin, who as president of the New Hope management consulting firm Rethink Inc. helped Skidmore to craft his policy of open financial ledgers and employee profit-sharing.

Martin lauded the entrepreneur’s willingness to admit when he lacked to managerial skills to reach his goals in terms of human resource development.

“A lot of people want to do the right thing, but they become prisoners of their own thinking,” he said. Skidmore “realized he was a little stuck and he didn’t let his ego get in the way of moving the business forward. He was very open to learning, even when he saw that doing the right thing would end up increasing his costs.”

Skidmore has no qualms about the extra expense associated with the profit-sharing plan, which has proven to be a potent motivational tool. “We have $10 an hour line workers with little if any education who understand gross profit and cost of goods sold,” he said. “They understand how their work impacts the company’s bottom line, and as a result, the impact that they have here is far greater than if they did not have that knowledge.”

To be eligible for the profit-sharing, employee must work with the firm for at least three months must meet minimum attendance requirements. Some months worker see no bonus checks, but in other months bonuses can range from $300 to $500 per person. The monthly payout has even reached as high as $700 per person at times.

For further motivation, Skidmore encourages workers to pursue educational opportunities. He offers on-site training classes in new technologies, occasional seminars on diverse performances issues, and also voluntary, after-work training sessions. Despite a weak economy, Skidmore said demand remains high. He speculated that most of his clients come form “old money,” and are therefore not as negatively affected by the current economic climate as other types of clientele might be.
With this in mind, he continues to strive toward the growth goals he knows he must meet in order to ensure the longevity of the business.

This year, Timberlane will spend about $250,000 on marketing.

“We are turning up the juice, being far more aggressive than we have been with more aggressive marketing campaigns, more tenacidus follow-up work, Skidmore said.”