Business View Magazine | April 2020

21 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE APRIL 2020 President of Marketing. “We took one of our box heaters and modified it – put some wheels on it and did some other things to it – and we started using a product that we had on the agriculture side to heat backyard tents, and then bigger corporate tents, and things like that.” Today, L.B. White has about 160 employees and two main U.S. locations. “We have the Onalaska, Wisconsin location, which is our main headquarters and main manufacturing plant, and then we have a manufacturing plant in Franklin, Georgia,” reports John Funke, VP of Operations. “We also have an office in Tianjin, China, and we’ve got some warehouses around the U.S. and internationally.” “We have many legs to our stool - the swine segment, the poultry segment, the portable temporary heat segment, the horticulture segment for greenhouses, and the events segments. And we make many heat products for all those markets,” Smith explains. “One main product is the Guardian Forced Air heater that we sell in the poultry and swine markets, but other than that, the rest is spread throughout everything else. We ship a lot to China, Southeast Asia, Thailand; we’re very popular over there with our agricultural products. On the construction, portable heat side, we ship all through North America; we sell quite a few of our Premier Portable heaters up in Canada and the States on the construction side, and around the world with our agricultural products.” “We sell through distribution,” Smith continues. “We’ve got sales managers that cover specific regions of the country and the world. Those sales managers call on distributors, dealers, integrators; they’re also selling to the end- users on the ag side, making sure they have what they need and that the products work. On the construction portable heat side, we have sales managers and sales reps throughout the country, and they call on equipment dealers or heat specialists and they call on the end-users – construction workers, laborers, etc.” L . B . WHI TE CEO, Kevin Gagermeier