The right attitude makes them successful!
Bob Bowlin Sr. had a passion for engineering. He attended engineering classes and went to work for a local packaging manufacturer, a company that was streamlined for efficiency and profit. Bob, however, wanted to do application-driven customization; his vision was a company that developed and manufactured customized product packaging as a distributor.
In the beginning, 1986, Bob worked out of his garage, selling used stretch wrap and packaging material. When he had a custom job, he’d hire his friends’ teenage sons and church peers, and they would gather in his basement helping him to build a customized machine to apply wrap to it. As he acquired more business, people from his previous job came to work with him and they brought a lot of experience with them. And while Bob dreamed of a small company, both nimble and intimate, the company just kept growing.
Ameripak Enters The Construction Industry
In 1995, the company received a custom project for a horizontal stretch wrapper for a customer that had a rollforming machine and wanted to wrap standing seam panels, an improvement from what most companies in the “baby metal industry” were doing. They built four or five more machines in the next few years.
In 2002, the company moved 12 miles into the next county to the biggest building they had ever had. Moving was challenging, but it was a good change; it meant they could reinvest revenue into the company, rather than renting.
Hurricane Katrina had a large impact on the industry in 2007. Bowlin said it was hard watching some customers and competitors go out of business. It was a time of making do and watching money closely. Some people left and others absorbed their duties.
Then in 2010, the company attended their first construction show and started getting some exposure in the industry, though Rob Bowlin Jr., owner since 2004, said that it was about four or five years before they started getting good leads from the show. They have continued to attend shows, and word of mouth from customers has helped expand their reach. As this type of machine has become more common in the metal industry, it has also become easier to sell them.
Challenges Are Opportunities in Disguise
Rapid growth brings its own set of problems with it. Sometimes, in their efforts not to disappoint anyone, they took on more orders than they could fill. In those cases, they worked with partners who took on some of the more time-consuming aspects of the build to alleviate bottlenecks. They have attained greater efficiency through rearrangement of their shop to improve workflow, and they acquired new machinery, using any resource they could find to provide timely delivery to their customers.
“As a small company navigating in a large market with bigger players, always fighting for market share,” Bowlin said, “we were surprised that sometimes we could win jobs away from big players, and it’s not because of price. We are very candid, accessible, and I am happy to say our customers believe in us.”
Recently the COVID-19 epidemic challenged the whole industry. Ameripak was fortunate that when new sales went down, the demand for servicing of older machines and selling used equipment increased and they were able to react quickly.
Bowlin attributes their success through all their ups and downs to a dedicated team of people, some of whom have been with them for 10 or 20 years. The team is very experienced, really cares about customers, and has fun working together.
Services and Products
The company has two main product lines: the metal construction industry and a line that covers consumables. They make protective films, packaging, dust covers, and equipment for these various applications. Because they do customized items, their products can be fluid. For example, they are located in LaGrange, Kentucky, the heart of bourbon country, and when COVID-19 hit and the bourbon makers all started producing sanitizer, Ameripak began producing the pumps to dispense it.
The company services any packaging equipment. They have everything from a hand taping gun up to an automated machine that fills and tapes the package closed. Their signature product is their horizontal wrappers for the construction industry.
Services include sales, machine servicing, and engineering. What sets the company apart is their ability to customize for almost any packaging needs.
Their primary customer base includes pole-frame building contractors who roll their own metal, particularly those who are just getting started in rollforming, and building contractors in the mason industry.
Ameripak has only one location and solid, heavy equipment, so historically their reach was regional. Today, they are a national company; they will deliver, or will travel to set up lines wherever needed across the USA.
The Perfect Business Package
Bowlin’s guidelines for successful business are as follows:
1. Keep the customer’s needs in mind when designing and quoting machinery.
2. Be cost conscious while producing high quality, robust equipment.
3. Deliver what you say you will.
4. Find the right employees. Attitude is more important than skills.
Attitude is more important than skills because skills can be learned if a person has the right attitude. Generous benefits combined with transparency about the company and its sales and position, and showing employees that you care is the company’s recipe for retaining those positive-attitude employees. Management is accessible and works to ensure everyone is properly rewarded.
Everyone at the company has taken a personality profile test and newcomers take it too. In this way, they understand some things about how each employee is wired and everyone is open about their expectations of each other.
Bowlin characterizes the employees as hardworking professionals who understand how to have a bit of fun throughout the day. There is great camaraderie. In winter, someone may make a chili lunch, and the company also provides occasional lunches. They also support charitable organizations together. When they came up short for the Salvation Army’s Angel Tree, they gathered up some steel scraps, recycled them, and raised over $600, enabling them to provide dinner for 25 families.
When they hire young people, as they usually do in the summer, they become their mentors. “We feel it is our duty to teach them a skill they can take with them. Some have learned how to build an electrical panel, some have learned how to use hand tools, while others might have learned to read blueprints,” Bowlin said.
No company is successful all alone and Bowlin is grateful for their customers and vendors. He finds Bradbury to be an amazing partner to work with. “They have identified the advantage of having our equipment downstream from theirs,” he said.
“Graber Post is an amazing customer; they believed in what we were doing, and they have some of the original equipment that my father built,” he added.
Lessons Learned
Streamlining your production flow is important and better done sooner than later. Their quest for continual improvement began when they started measuring production and times. When conducting process improvement, you need to look at the process and analyze how to do it more efficiently. They found they had failed to improve efficiency by simply automating a process because they didn’t pinpoint the exact point where things bottlenecked or went off-track. For example, they were fabricating metal and storing it outside because the painting system was busy. By the time they brought the panels in, they had rust. Then they had to be sanded, cleaned, and recoated, adding on time and labor.
Sometimes business debt is necessary, but 10 years ago the company made the last payment on their building. They have operated as a debt-free company ever since and that gives them freedom to focus on other important matters like improvements.
Wrapping it Up
Bowlin and team are optimistic about the future. Their customer base is robust and they hope to grow it by hiring salespeople to expand some territories. They are constantly looking for ways to improve.
The metal industry as a whole is growing and technology is helping to make continued growth feasible. This team believes the economy will continue to strengthen and grow and they are ready to do their part.
