Harris Thermal Transfer Products/Harris Manufacturing

HARR I S THERMAL TRANSFER PRODUCTS/HARR I S MANUFACTUR ING as far as the amount of work going through there and add more employees,” he remarks. “It’s been a process and it’s taking a little longer because the oil industry has really affected the power sector, and that has hurt.” Meanwhile, the company has found itself in the position of owning way more land than it needs in Bonner, with the responsibility of figuring out what to do with it. “When we purchased that facility in Montana, we purchased 115 acres - all zoned heavy industrial land,” Groenweghe recounts. “It kind of dropped in our lap. We wanted to be located in that area, this land was available, so we purchased it. The question is: what do you do with the rest of the land?” Groenweghe answers his own query, suggesting that once he’s satisfied that the progress at Harris Manufacturing is on track, he’ll turn his attention to developing the spare acreage into a general business park. “Development has been on the back burner,” he admits. “Our first focus is our business. Anything else takes a back seat. When we’re happy with the growth of the manufacturing facility, we’ll go forward with development.” A challenge that the Harris companies share with many other manufacturers is finding enough skilled labor to feed their intended growth. That challenge has been addressed with what Groenweghe describes as an in-house, non-formal, apprentice program. “In Montana, we’ve teamed up with two technical colleges – Helena College and the University of Montana at Missoula’s Welding School,” he reports. “We’ve been able to get their curriculum geared a little bit more towards our industry and have started pulling employees out of that educational system. We’ve done a similar thing here in Oregon with Portland Community College. At the high school level, we give tours for technical classes. We hope they remember us and if we make an impression on them, and they continue on with some further education in the community college system that we work with, then we can start pulling employees from there. And we’ve been successful doing that.” Thatch notes that the “friendly and caring” culture at the Harris companies is an added