Business Spotlight: Battlefield Wire Inc.

Owner: James Sparkman

Founded: 1971

Address: 4243 W. Third St., Battlefield, MO 65619

Phone: (417) 883-4972

Fax: (417) 883-4972

Web site: www.buzzblade.com

Products/Services: Manufacturer of component parts for fishing lures

Employees: 9 full-time

Fishing is really big in Missouri and the Ozarks.

How big?

In 2006, more than $1 billion was spent on all types of fishing in Missouri, according to the American Sportfishing Association’s January 2008 report. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that 1 million jobs in the United States are related to recreational fishing.

Those staggering numbers trickle down to tiny Battlefield and an unmarked building on Third Street. Inside is Battlefield Wire, home to nine of Missouri’s more than 21,000 fishing-related jobs. Those employees are called wire benders, working with machinery to form wires used in fishing lures for Battlefield Wire founder and CEO James Sparkman and President Lana Rush, his daughter.

On the hook

Sparkman was in Battlefield in 1970 talking with a man who made lures. Sparkman’s career had been in manufacturing and working for others to that point, including stints at Boeing Aircraft, Coleman and Paul Mueller Co.

“I’d been looking for (something else to do for) three years or so,” Sparkman remembers. “I saw this wire on his work table, picked it up and I asked if he made it or bought it.”

The man, Joe Keltner of now-defunct 3-J Baits, said he bought it. “So I asked him what he paid for it,” Sparkman recalls. The response: 4.5 cents apiece, eliciting Sparkman’s query: “If I could make this wire cheaper, would you buy it?”

A business was born.

Sparkman spent the next year trying to get a machine to do the type of wire bending needed to make spinner bait and buzz bait. He created his own solution, and in 1971, Sparkman bent his first wire. Keltner was his first customer.

There are different types of lures. Spinner bait is a type of lure with a spinning part that mimics small fish. Buzz bait skims along the top of the water.

At the core of each lure is wire, which comes in various shapes with different types of eyes where line is attached.

Battlefield Wire has provided components to more than 600 lure-makers around the world. The company doesn’t, however, make the actual lures.

“We sell a lot of stuff that winds up in products (at) Bass Pro Shops and Wal-Mart,” Sparkman says, pointing to Tornado lures made by Current River Bait & Tackle in Winona.

At Battlefield Wire, employees work 7 a.m.–3:30 p.m. five days a week, bending or stamping out the components for more than 100 different types of lures for manufacturers in the United States, Australia, Korea and the Netherlands, for example.

Dave Trantham, owner of Vision Lures in Republic, buys from Battlefield Wire.

“We make buzz bait and spinner bait,” Trantham says. “This is a crowded industry with more than 100 manufacturers. Battlefield Wire provides us with quality custom work. They specialize in their field to help us stand out in ours.”

Heavy metal

According to Rush, who runs the day-to-day operation, last year Battlefield Wire bought more than 12,000 pounds of steel, more than 24,000 pounds of aluminum and just more than 2,000 pounds of brass.

The wire arrives in rolls. It is then straightened before it goes to be bent. At one of several stations, an air-powered machine bends it into a specific shape for each lure.

Sparkman designed the machines and is most proud of what he calls the “blue box.” This allows a wire to have an eye tied on one end, while the shaft of the wire does not spin, making it possible to add an eye to a wire that has other components attached.

Another machine, called a four-slide, is a staple of the manufacturing business. A four-slide wraps wire around a form mounted on a post. The machine commonly has “four slides” arranged at 90 degrees to each other. Forming tools are attached to the slides, and when they move in time, they form the material.

Sparkman spent an entire year trying to get the timing just right back in 1970. The frustration mounted until he quit on the idea.

Then, one Sunday after church, he gave it another shot. Sparkman says God showed him what to do, and “within 10 minutes, I had figured it out and made my first wire.”

This may not sound like much, but the machine now cranks out cut or stamped pieces at a rate of up to 6,000 an hour.

Sparkman doesn’t advertise. He made only one sales trip in his career, and that was back in the 1970s. His building doesn’t even have a sign.

“Wire means a lot of different things to a lot of people,” Sparkman says. “I don’t sell retail, and I don’t have the time to deal with people walking in wanting to buy something.”

Sea of ideas

Sparkman incorporates experience from his previous jobs. At Boeing, he saw jet engines cleaned using walnut shells. “They’d run the engine at about 50 percent and throw a shovelful of shells into it,” he recalls, adding that the abrasiveness of the shells helped to clean the engine.

In Battlefield Wire’s back room, a cement mixer full of spoons and shells runs all day and night. Spoons for bait are stamped out of strips of steel. But the process can leave burrs on the edges; like the jet-engine trick, 24 hours in a cement mixer with walnut shells leaves the spoons burr-free.

Rush would like to see more expansion into the export market “to take advantage of the devaluation of the dollar. While it is a terrible thing, it expands our contacts in other countries – and when the dollar pick backs up, we’ll have those relationships established.”

Sparkman, 73, is retired from day-to-day operations, but he provides some parting advice. “Keep an open mind,” he says. “Look for something unique – cause I’m sure I didn’t find the last one on the table.”

Like that wire he picked up back in 1970.