Lessons From the School of Hard Knocks
Jean Ann Harcourt calls her company’s global competition survival strategy “guerilla manufacturing.” Her battle plan: 1) Avoid head-to-head confrontation with low-cost foreign competition and 2) Go where China can’t go.
Harcourt Industries, the school-products company she and her brother inherited from their parents, doesn’t even try to compete on price for commodity items like paper tablets. Instead, the company markets short-run orders of tablets that are silk-screened with individual school logos.
Same with pencils. Customers who need a million number twos will go elsewhere, but Milroy, Ind.-based Harcourt Industries has carved a niche by assembling and painting small quantities of pencils with logos or targeted advertising messages.
One of the company’s most profitable products is the plywood vending machine that schools keep stocked with supplies. And now the Harcourts are getting into prepackaged school supplies, with orders customized for each student in each school. Let Thailand try that.
“You have to do what you have to do to compete,” says Harcourt.
Although they’ve trimmed their workforce from 100 to 85 employees in the last year, the Harcourts are making it. And they’re discovering that survival is a lesson you only learn in the school of hard knocks.
Retiree? Not Me
When you’re 69 years old and foreign competition is siphoning off huge chunks of your customer base and bottom line, would you throw in the towel and take that well-earned retirement?
Not if you’re Richard Kelch, president of Ashton Plastic Products in Xenia, Ohio.
Instead of taking up shuffleboard when his customers began looking offshore, the veteran custom plastic-molding manufacturer launched a new product line and started selling his own inventions via new distribution channels.
His age and his wife’s arthritis gave him the idea for the Home Helper line of simple, ergonomic, labor-saving devices such as an easier-to-use lawn rake handle and an oversized pot-lid holder. He sells 11 new products through catalogs, on the Home Shopping Network and in independent hardware stores.
The new products now account for 40 percent of Ashton’s sales, and Kelch expects that percentage to rise.
“I’m having the time of my life,” he said. And he’s saving some local jobs in the process. Ashton Plastic Products had lost nearly half of its 48-employee workforce until Kelch took action. Now he’s actually had to hire a few people.
Means the article is accessible only to our magazine subscribers.
