Conklin Company

8 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 10, ISSUE 4 CONKL IN COMPANY On the subject of technology, Herbster says his personal leadership style is more face-to-face or by telephone where people can hear his tone and enthusiasm. He relays, “In our type of business, where you are dealing with farmers who spend several million dollars a year to put a crop in, and people who have millions of dollars in buildings and real estate property, I find that most people still want to be able to talk face-to-face. They want to be able to look you in the eye, to determine if you are someone they can trust to do business with.” Amanda A. Raithel, Charles W. Herbster’s Marketing Director acknowledges that the company does use digital and print media to get information out, as well as providing marketing materials for distributors. “Conklin is a face-to-face business,” she maintains. “I think that’s one of the things Charles has taught us over the years, if you really want to do business with someone, make the effort to sit across the table from them. Social Media is great, and it plays a lot of roles in all of Charles’ companies, but it’s still those personal relationships that really get things done.” With the recent growth Conklin has experienced, a second manufacturing building is in the plans. This new facility will be located in Kansas City, and roofing operations, which currently happen in the Minneapolis manufacturing plant, will be moved to the new location. Herbster explains the reasoning behind this change, saying, “Moving the manufacturing of our roofing products to Kansas City will take our largest division and separate it out to allow the other divisions to grow in the Minneapolis plant. It will also allow us to manufacture here in the Midwest, where we’re more centrally located.” Describing the challenges of shipping during the cold months in Minneapolis he says, “When it is freezing, we can’t ship any of our acrylic coatings unless we ship in temperature-controlled trucks. So, we’re going to move that to Kansas City, that will be a real positive. Plus, it doesn’t put everything under one roof, should something happen in some way with a fire, or a tornado, or whatever else arises. It’s just smart when you get to our size to divide up those locations, and not have everything in one place.” Since the Conklin Company unveiled its acrylic latex roof coating in 1977, the roofing division has taken off. Although the invention was an accident at the time, the result has brought continued success for the company. Evolving from an attempt to develop a durable red barn paint for farming communities, Rapid Roof, the first elastomeric acrylic roofing product in the world, was born. “If you have a metal roof that leaks, you really only have two choices. It’s either using the Conklin system over the metal, which will stretch 300% and make the roof look new, or you take all the metal off and put on a new metal roof. Putting on a new roof is going to be at least two times the cost of using the Conklin system over the existing metal, and in five to seven years you’re back to square one because due to expansion and contraction, that new metal roof is going to leak,” Herbster relates. “Last year, we sold over $100 million just in that one division. So, our roofing division is the leader today in Conklin, and we see that division doubling in three to five years.”