Business Spotlight: Rolling Along

Fifty-year-old Delden Manufacturing Co. Inc. almost was never born.

A few years before the garage door manufacturer got rolling, Kansas City lumber salesman Gene Renner converted to overhead door sales with less than stellar results. Partnered with his father, Elmer Renner, the two started R&R Garage Door in 1956 and recorded only $65,000 in first-year sales.

Gene Renner was ready to return to lumber. A few months later, a natural disaster on the Kansas-Missouri line shifted his thoughts. “It didn’t work out very good the first year,” Renner says from his Kansas City home. “Then the tornado came through in ’57, and we sold a bunch of doors.”

The rebuilding work as a result of that 71-mile deadly twister, dubbed the Ruskin Heights tornado, kept the Renners in the garage door business, and the acquisition of a door clamp company in 1964 enabled full manufacturing. At its start, Delden Manufacturing Co. was selling 8-by-7-foot overhead doors for less than $30.

“When we started, everything was a wood door. And if they had a garage, it was a one-car garage,” says Renner, 86, who still holds the CEO title but has put operations in the hands of his daughter, President Denise Dahms. “Before, everybody didn’t get an opener.”

Today, Delden Manufacturing operates six Midwestern door centers for wholesale supply, along with sister company Renner Supply Co. for retail sales. The company grossed $20 million in revenue last year, with $5 million produced in its 22-year-old Springfield operation.

Market entry
Residential development in Springfield was attractive in the early 1990s, and Delden officials were in the market seeking a distributor. They found HPT Materials Co., owned and operated by the Turner family.

After negotiations, Delden acquired HPT in 1992, and a year later Springfield General Manager Mike George was recruited as lead installer and later warehouse manager to improve organization and efficiencies in the shop.

George, who was promoted to GM in 2001, says 10-15 garage doors leave the warehouse each day, and the Delden and Renner operations do $400,000 in sales each month. Two-thirds of the  business is in retail sales to homeowners and homebuilders, such as Cantrell’s Patriot Homes, Bussell Building, Ramsey Building and J. Russell MacLachlan Custom Homes.

“When we first started, retail was a little lower,” says commercial estimator Rob Turner, who has stayed on board after his family sold to Delden.

Turner chalks up the shift from wholesale to 20 years of market penetration.

The company previously shipped wholesale product from the Kansas City region. Now, Delden operates in Kansas City, Springfield, St. Louis, Camdenton, Wichita, Kan., and Des Moines, Iowa.

Moving trends
On the wholesale side, Delden stretches down into Arkansas and parts of Missouri that Renner Supply’s retail sales don’t reach. Working with several exclusive dealers, such as Felker & Sons in Norwood, Davidson Door Service in Lockwood and A-Z Overhead Doors in Siloam Springs, Ark., the wholesalers represent the product in their given territories.

With prices for standard 16-by-7-foot doors ranging from $650 to $2,000 and up, the suppliers say options have moved well beyond the traditional raised-panel garage doors.

“Used to be, you only had three or four models to choose from. Now, you’ve got a hundred,” George says, noting there are some 20 designer glass insert options and the vintage Carriage House line is growing popular.

Inside the vast warehouse, Delden staff members shape steel for high-lift doors, cut out windows in the aluminum-wrapped Styrofoam doors and load up the two delivery trucks. In the corner woodshop, Berlin Coble trims lumber to fit a high-end Biltmore custom door built in-house.

“We’re seeing more and more of a designer door – something with curb appeal, different than the neighbor,” George adds.

The bells and whistles carry over to the electric garage door operators, too. George says users can raise and lower doors from their smartphones and receive alerts if a door is left open.

Ironically, another tornado proved to stabilize the company in more recent years. The May 2011 EF5 tornado in Joplin increased demand in the rebuilding efforts, and it came at a time when residential development was still dragging from the Great Recession and the housing market crash.

“A lot of our builders who build here were asked to go out there. That’s how we ended up doing stuff over in Joplin,” George says, noting the area is generally handled by wholesale dealers. “We have had retail installations because of the devastation. We follow them where they need to go.”

The industry is far removed from the days when Renner just needed a clamp to finalize the manufacturing process. But his long view puts it into perspective: “It’s been just one step at a time,” Renner says.[[In-content Ad]]