Business Lessons Sealed With a Kiss

My “baby” sister is only two and one-half years younger than me, and she lives just one hour from central Pennsylvania. So, when it was decided I’d be going to the summer meeting of the American Architectural Manufacturers Association (AAMA); there seemed a plan to be hatched. We’d both arrive at the Hotel Hershey in Pennsylvania late Saturday, have dinner and do a little sightseeing Sunday morning before she headed back to Delaware when the meeting started.

After all, why would AAMA have a meeting in the middle of an amusement-park, tourist-attraction-land if they didn’t expect us to check it out?

Well, I found out why. In the course of our half-day sightseeing, which included the obligatory visit to Chocolate World and the exquisite Hershey Gardens, we toured the Hershey Museum. Yes, it seemed a little scattered with its three separate collections (Native American, German Dutch and Hershey history) but what it really provided was a reminder of just what entrepreneurs do and how much of a difference one person can make to the business landscape.

Milton Hershey grew up in a household of very modest means and was sent to New York in his late teens to become a candy maker’s apprentice. A failure at the candy business in three cities, he returned to this area in Pennsylvania and set up shop there. He achieved some notoriety in standardizing the manufacture of caramel candies and become known for them. Then he set his sights on chocolate, then a strictly European delicacy. He then began incorporating milk (thus keeping local farmers in business) and sugar.

Convinced that there would be a market for “milk” chocolate, he sold his caramel business in 1900 for one million dollars. Let me write that again. That’s one million dollars in 1900 (approximately equal to $25 million today). He used the proceeds of the sale to perfect his milk chocolate process and the Hershey bar was born. Hershey’s Kisses followed a few years later and still look the same today—except their price has increased considerably from the half penny they were in 1903.

Hershey eventually made the decision to sell the caramel company and to concentrate on making only a few products on a massive scale, thus turning candy making from a local “mom and pop” industry in a nationwide one. Hershey’s entrepreneurialism led to mass production in an industry where it had never existed before and led to massive changes in an industry.

Hershey was quite the philanthropist in his day, using his profits to build the town of Hershey, then to build the attractions to bring tourists to town and fund a wide variety of causes including disadvantaged youth.

Of course, Milton Hershey is basically canonized everywhere you go in Hershey. One display in the museum quotes an employee of the 1930s saying how working at Hershey was really just fun all day, while the display on the opposite side of the room mentions the strike of 1937 and the subsequent unionization of Hershey’s plants. But leave it to those folks at AAMA to remind us how great success in business can be built on a conviction and a bowl of beans. Cacao beans.

Please visit http://www.usgnn.com/ for updates about the AAMA meeting.

Memorial Day Travels

Even though Memorial Day weekend is known as a great travel weekend, sometimes the time you spend on the road is all in your head. My trip started when USGlass editor Megan Headley asked if I would rustle up some old issues of the magazine. The June issue of USGlass includes our 25th Annual New Products Guide and Megan wanted to scour the very first New Products Guides for ideas and artwork. Megan knew that I (like so many of you, I am sure) keep a complete set of every issue of USGlass magazine in “archives” in my basement (fear not, we have a true offsite archives as well) and that borrowing the issues wouldn’t involve more than a trip to the cellar for me.

Now Megan is usually spot-on, but when she suggested this would be a quick and simple task, she was dead wrong. Once I’d brought the requisite issues out, I just had to go through them. So I sat down with a cup of tea, and away I went through a time tunnel.

What a trip it was! Names that I hadn’t heard for years kept flowing through my brain: PTI had a new adhesive … Tempglass (long since acquired) was advertising “flat, clear distortion-free tempered glass” (funny, we have an article about this in the June ’08 issue too) and Hordis Brothers was heralding the machinery systems to make it. Vistawall trumpeted its 11 locations round the country … PPG was celebrating Solarcool’s 15th anniversary … Interpane was announcing its first plant in the United States, to be located in Deerfield, Wis.; the company planned to make a little-known, misunderstood product called low-emissivity glass.

I saw the names of companies that had faded away or gotten out of the industry, such as Ateco and Morton Thiokol. Binswanger was hiring “contract management professionals,” and the Flat Glass Marketing Association was selling its Glazing Manual (in this case, the name of the organization has changed, but its Glazing Manual is still going strong). An ad for J. Sussman had a picture of daughter Erin in it—in diapers—and Glass Medic was explaining this thing called “glass repair.” Glastec ’88 (one “s” in it then) was being heavily promoted as attracting 30,000 attendees and being held in Dusseldorf, West Germany. In a few months, more than 60,000 will attend glasstec ’08 (double s) in a unified Germany.

There were some constants too, such as Palmer Mirro-Mastic, C.R. Laurence and USGlass itself. The only primary manufacturer that bridged the time warp was PPG, but I wonder how much longer that will last. Pilkington didn’t own LOF yet, AGC didn’t own AFG, Cardinal wasn’t a manufacturer and Guardian was still a very quiet company, though you can see in the news stories that it was growing fast.

The people in the news gave me pause as well. Don Goldfus had just been named chairman of Apogee Enterprises … a guy named Rick Wright of Hordis Brothers had been appointed chair of the Glazing Committee of the Sealed Insulating Glass Manufacturers Association (SIGMA) … and there was a picture of Rick Cunningham at a trade show …

In 1986, we were just beginning to talk about the idea of the value-added glass products. Well, that’s an idea that took more than 20 years to stick. I don’t think anyone thought then that U.S. manufacturers would finally move toward value-added products because so much of the commodity glass business has moved offshore.

You can see why it was a trip I could take for hours on end. So even though I didn’t use a single gallon of gas this holiday weekend, I went far and away and back again.

Yee-haw!

Glass TEXpo ’08 was a mighty fine event. Nearly 500 industry professionals from Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana—along with a smattering of attendees from as far away as Calgary and Pittsburgh—came together for a great two days of education and exhibition. There were three things that made me feel especially good about TEXpo.

First was the number of first-time attendees at the show. I stopped counting at ten, but had at least ten shop owners tell me that this year’s TEXpo was the first industry event they’d ever attended. Most mentioned how hard it is to get time away from their shops and how having something relatively close by made it so they could attend. That gives me a really good feeling because it was one of our goals when we started providing regional education in 1994.
I also was heartened to see a number of new products introduced at the show. One exhibitor from Germany showed a great new glass handler that was no bigger than the palm of a large hand. (CLICK HERE for more information.)

Another exhibitor from Japan showed examples of 3D glass that mimics a beveled appearance at a fraction of the cost. (CLICK HERE for more information. ). And first-time exhibitor Techniform had this to say about TEXpo:



But most memorable moment came toward the end of the first day of the show, when Lou Green of A1 Glass Co. in Beaumont, Donald Day of the Texas Glass Association in Victoria, Texas, and Bob Lawrence of Craftsman Fabricated Glass in Houston got together and reminisced about the formation of the Texas Glass Association (which co-sponsors the event) and the various and assorted characters they’ve come to know in the industry and the association over the years. Boy, do they have some stories. I could have listened to their colorful tales all night, but had some business to attend to just as they were talking about a former employee who had been married 11 times.

As the saying goes, everything is bigger in Texas.

Glass TEXpo will return to San Antonio in Spring 2010. I am already looking forward to it.

P.S. After TEXpo was over on Saturday afternoon, Tina Czar and I headed back to Dallas (see previous blog). Let me just say that even though Hertz advertises its GPS as “Never Lost,” it shouldn’t, that downtown Dallas is lovely at midnight and that when the shuttle bus driver looks at you with nine bags, laptops, cameras, LCDs and boxes between you and says “take the elevator to the skywalk,” you shouldn’t listen. The skywalk is actually three long flights up and three long flights down. The bus driver is probably still laughing at us now.

San Antonio Bound … and Princesses for a Night

“You know, we have three or four things we have to do in Dallas,” said our ace event planner Tina Czar to me one afternoon nearly six months ago. “Why don’t we go to Glass TEXpo a day earlier than usual, do our stuff and drive down to San Antonio?” Now the fact that Tina was planning this nearly half a year ago would surprise anyone until they met Tina. She is planner extraordinaire and that means she plans well, often—and early. She was to handle everything, except our leg from Dallas to San Antonio. That was my job.

So I decided to show Tina that I could plan a few things of my own. And, while not six months ahead of time, I did decide SIX WHOLE DAYS ahead of time that I wanted us to spend the night in Waxahachie. I’d been there a number of times before. (USGlass has a great advertiser there, U.S. Aluminum) and been enchanted by the old downtown feeling, the magnificent Courthouse (at right) and the beautiful homes along Main Street. It would be a straight shot from there down to San Antonio.

There are no chain motels in the old downtown area of Waxahachie. So I started looking at bed and breakfasts (B&B) and found one right on Main Street. Now, I’ve never stayed in a B&B before, but knowing Tina would be with me gave me the courage to try something new. And we both have spent more than our fair share of time in Hampton Inns and other assorted motels so I thought such a visit would be something different for a change. So I booked two rooms at the Chaska House on Main Street in Waxahachie. If nothing else, Tina would know I’d done my homework.

You know the drill. We’d both gotten up around 4 a.m., driven to the airport, taken our respective flights, got the car, had the meetings and driven almost 90 minutes in rush hour when we arrived there around 7 p.m. We were greeted by the notes of some very peaceful music escaping out of the home’s beautiful wrap-around porch. Our hosts, Linda and Louis Brown, had raised their family in the house, then moved out for a year, gutted and had converted to a B&B nearly 20 years ago. It’s an exquisite home.

Louis is a retired engineer and Linda, who hails from Atlanta, was kind enough to show me some of the unique glass features in the home. Each guest room had a unique glass door leading inside to a distinct theme. (One room, the Mark Twain, looked like the inside of a treehouse). I slept in the Teddy Roosevelt room, with a skylight directly over the bed (at left). “That’s got to leak,” I said to myself as I eyed the room with trepidation. It didn’t. The heavy rain and hail storm that woke me in the middle of the night proved that.

In the morning, Linda showed me the front door of the house. It was an almost full glass door (at right) with exquisitely beveled edges on all four side—and a big bullet hole right at eye level. “Some boys got real mischievous one night and shot it will a B-B gun,” said Linda. “We were going to replace it, then we found out it wasn’t just glass, it was crystal, real crystal. We decided to keep it as is.”

If you have never stayed in a B&B before it does feel a bit strange in the beginning—like you are intruding in a stranger’s home. But the graciousness and hospitality of the innkeepers quickly overtake any such feelings and their desire to see you have a good time is so genuine it’s easy to feel like family quickly.

“No, you sit,” said Linda to Tina (who had emerged from the Great Gatsby room as refreshed as Daisy Buchanan herself) as she tried to help clear the breakfast dishes, “you both are princesses while you are here.”

But, alas, it was time to go.

Louis and Linda were great hosts. Linda even tracked me down after I left an important folder behind and was kind enough to take it to Fedex it to me. I know, I know—poor planning on my part. Please don’t tell Tina when you see her.

-Deb

P.S.: We have made it to San Antonio now and are staying at the historic Menger Hotel, where TR himself recruited his Rough Riders (and check out that unique skylight!). I hope you get a chance to join us here at Glass TEXpo Friday and Saturday. It’s going to be a great event. See you there.

What’s the Story, Deb?

Like a lot of people, I usually end up working over the weekend when it’s quiet and I can catch up (and write things like this). It’s just a usual part of a routine. So taking a whole day to play hookey is an unusual occurrence and, to my mind, sure better be worth it.

Well this past Saturday, it was. The main purpose of my trip was to visit the Nationals' new stadium and see the first (though exhibition) game played there. (It’s a nice stadium, but more on this another time.) So I made an outing of it and spent the whole day tooling around Washington D.C. like a tourist. I had a great time in the process.

First, I got to see the cherry blossoms in full bloom. I'd never seen them before. Now you may laugh at this, but it’s been my experience that most people never play tourist in their native land. I grew up in New York (but don’t hold that against me) and have never been to the Statue of Liberty. I didn’t see the Empire State Building until just a few years ago when visiting friends from Spain dragged me there with them. I never went to the top of the World Trade Center. It’s just that, when you live somewhere, you think you’ll get there someday, but without a sense of urgency (or a guest from out-of-town) someday never comes.

I’ve lived in the D.C. area for 28 years and that’s how long it took to get me to see the area’s famous cherry blossoms. I should have gone sooner. They are well worth the visit.

From there, I headed over the 42nd annual Smithsonian Kite Festival on the mall. The mall is not your typical mall. Instead, it’s a rectangular area with the Capitol at one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other. The buildings of the Smithsonian make up the other two sides, and the White House sits among them as well. The Washington Memorial is sort of in the middle of the rectangle. It was great windy day when I visited, and there were thousands of kites of assorted shapes, sizes and heights billowed through the sky. I had to laugh at the image of the kites flying about the IRS Building, the Justice Department and the other bureaus. It is the one day a year you can tell the government to go fly a kite and mean it.

After that high-faluting fun, my day turned serious. I was lucky to be one of a select group of journalists who was invited to tour the new “Newseum” scheduled to open on April 11. The Newseum is a 250,000 square foot museum dedicated to news reporting that moved its headquarters from cramped quarters in Virginia to a brand new location on Pennsylvania Blvd. (Here’s some info.) The most moving item in the Newseum is the actual broadcast tower that once stood atop the World Trade Center and rode down 107 floors to the ground as the building collapsed. It is such a mass of twisted broken pieces and wires fused with molten metal that it takes your breath away when you come upon it. A somber reminder, as the Newseum wanted, of how important news is every day.

Yet what was the first thing I saw when a entered the cavernous building? A lite of broken glass in a railing. “Oh,” I thought I’d murmured to myself, “that’s a story.” Now I say “thought” I’d whispered the comment, but even whispering “that’s a story” in group of journalists is enough to get 15 of them to stop talking and quickly look at you then decide to follow you to the glass. It was a pretty humorous sight.

In fact, a lot of the glass looked like it had just been put in and, despite the preview, a lot more had to be put in. One person who’d joined the parade commented that the glass guys didn’t seem to have their act together. No, I explained, it’s probably that the glass guys are always among the last in the construction process and have to make up for everyone else being behind. You can’t assume it’s their fault, although the unique design of the railings make me think the glass guys have a lot to do in the next few days.

And so you can see how, for me, even on a crisp day in D.C. spent playing tourist, the story is that the glass is always the story.

What A Response …

Boy, are you angry.

Not since I wrote about my father’s love of hockey have I seen such emotion pour forth in response to something I’d written. In this case, though, instead of sharing stories about their dads and their hobbies, our readers are sharing their concern and anger.

I’d venture to say I’ve heard from more than 100 people about their concern with what the National Fenestration Rating Council (NFRC) is attempting to inflict on the glass industry and the methods they are using to do so.

In fact, some are so upset that that they are forming a coalition to fight against the group. I’ve heard suggestions in these last weeks of everything from public relations campaigns to legal action. Keep checking back to this blog—and to our daily newsletter, USGNN.com—for more on this in the next week or so.

What’s interesting to me, too, is that not one person has said they are against some type of energy coding and testing. The problem is how the program is being developed and the lack of the democratic process being used to do so.

A Crying Sham(e)

“Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it …”

It is time for members of the glass industry to re-evaluate their participation in the National Fenestration Rating Council (NFRC) with careful thought. The NFRC board of directors continues to ignore the votes of the Council regarding the Component Modeling Approach (CMA) as well as a variety of other topics.

The NFRC likes to create the illusion that the commercial glass industry is a participant in the process, but its participation is just that—an illusion.

Instead, the NFRC board of directors has ignored the voices of the commercial glass industry on the Council and continues to do as it wishes without regard for the opinions of stakeholders.

What makes the effort especially distressing is the perception that certain members of NFRC continue to advance. They say that NFRC is a participatory Council open to the opinions of all. If participatory means you can talk, but won’t be heard, then it is. If participatory means you can vote, but that vote will be overridden by the board, then it is. If participatory means anything beyond this, then NFRC is a sham and it’s time to call it so.

The participatory illusion is being created in an attempt to make other groups—most notably architects—believe that the CMA was developed with input from the commercial glass industry and, the story would go, since the glass industry was involved with its development, shouldn’t architects embrace it as well? The individuals and groups from the glass industry involved in NFRC form a very well respected list. But they are attempting to hold back an NFRC
locomotive called the Railroad Express and that is an impossible task.

Reality is not perception. These pages have continued to monitor NFRC and have seen instances in which input has been ignored and votes overridden. If the NFRC board does not begin to follow the wishes of its committees, then those committees are meaningless and those who serve on them merely shills in a public relations war. If our industry’s voices cannot be heard within the Council, then our industry should recognize the Council as flawed and move on to a better form of governance. It should not allow itself to be used as pawn in a game of public relations.

The words above ring as true today with regard to the NFRC as they did the day Thomas Jefferson wrote them in the Declaration of Independence. When government, or regulators, ignore the will of the governed, or regulated, it is time for independence from the oppressor. NFRC members in the commercial glass industry will want to evaluate whether or not being part of the Council really serves a purpose. As Jefferson wrote:

“… when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”