Brenner Materials

7 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 8 to even bigger things in the future. They recently purchased a new plant and will be adding a new location later this year. “I’d like to expand to maybe three more locations, probably double our staff and sales revenue and then we probably need to fine tune everything that we are doing,” Travas says. “There might be a few years there where we go back through our processes and the tools that we use – not that we aren’t always honing as we go.” Travas is realistic about the challenges that come with expanding. He likens it to having successive children. “It’s kind of like kids. If you have one kid, it’s pretty easy to have two kids. Then you have three and all of a sudden it’s 400 times harder,” he explains. “It’s not linear, so growth in a business can be that same way. Us having three locations is being managed fairly well, but if we were to double to six, the assumption that it will be managed the same way that we manage three or that we don’t need to change lots of things, I know that not to be true. As you grow, what you did as a small company doesn’t always work in the next evolution of it.” So Travas anticipates taking some time to breathe and evaluate as Brenner Materials grows into the future, so they always keep that small, family-run feel that comes with the Brenner name. He shares, “At some point, if you get too big without working at it, you can create a culture similar to the one that we didn’t like. We want to be successful, but we don’t want to lose what makes us a better company in that growth.”