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Thursday, Mar 28, 2024

Sisters Help Move Industrial Company to New Levels

Kathleen Durbin, Karen Boyle and Joan Hoppock realize that they are an unusual group, the three sisters are not only running their family business together, they’re succeeding in an industry, selling industrial tools and supplies, historically dominated by men. Under their leadership, General Industrial Tool & Supply has grown from a business relying primarily on aerospace firms to one with clients in all types of manufacturing. After acquiring another business earlier this year, the company expects its annual sales to grow by 40 percent at year’s end. Charles Sawin, a World War II veteran and graduate of USC, worked during the post-war years selling power tools. Most of his clients were contractors building houses to keep up with increasing demand generated by veterans moving into the Valley. After a few years Sawin opened his own business on Sherman Way in North Hollywood, selling mainly cutting tools to the aerospace industry that was providing much of the Valley’s employment at the time. Sawin died in 1983, and his wife Mary decided that she would buy out her husband’s partner and keep the company alive. The Sawins three daughters, who had all graduated from UCLA and were working in jobs ranging from real estate to selling copiers, all returned to help keep the business going. “She elected to buy the business, and all of a sudden we owned the company completely. You make your choices and live with them,” said General Industries CEO Kathleen Durbin. “We all came to the business in low level capacities and worked our way up to the levels we’re at today. It was an extremely steep learning curve, but I think that what we brought to the business was an intense curiosity and dedication to the business because it was our business.” Losing clients As the aerospace industry started to leave the Valley in the 1980s, General Industrial was losing clients. Hoppock credits her mother with helping the company find a new focus. “During that whole aerospace downturn she basically moved the company into a whole different direction, to begin supplying a much broader customer base,” said Hoppock. “Where previously we were very focused on the aerospace business, now we needed to be very focused on mid-sized machine shop businesses where they make a variety of products from baby products to very high tech aerospace products.” Still, with every new client the business managed to catch, they were losing some older customers to relocations or outsourcing. The company managed to ride the improving economy of the last few years and post sales growth between 8 and 12 percent before this year. “You can certainly do well when the economy is strong, but you do have to realize the overriding issue is that business is leaving the United States,” said Durbin. The only way to grow at a significant rate, she realized, was to buy competitors. “We have a good relationship with a business broker that we’ve developed over the last year and a half, we’ve worked to identify potential targets, but it’s a time-consuming process,” said Durbin. The company did purchase another firm earlier this year, increasing its employees from 27 to 35, and sales for 2005 are expected to be 40 percent higher than the previous year. General Industrial has plenty of room to grow four and half years ago the company moved from its original 18,000 square foot location on Sherman Way, partly because too much space was devoted to a showroom in a business that is no longer looking to bring people off the street, into a 22,000-square-foot Sun Valley building. Over the past several years the company has also worked to integrate a “value-added” sales approach. Rather than use the term as a general phrase the include all of the company’s services, General Industrial has worked hard to show customers exactly where they can save money. “It’s identifying our value in a dollar figure,” said Hoppock. “From the customer’s side, they’re saying ‘why should I change?’ If they’re going to change, there’s going to be a reason and the reason they’re changing is usually because they want to increase productivity or they want to lower costs. If we can see how they’re doing and show them what productivity costs were before and what productivity costs will be, and just basically do the simple math, we can show savings.” Working together Personally, the three have learned to work well together, said Durbin, because they’ve each developed their own expertise and learned to trust each others decisions. “We all have the same values, which is really important when you don’t know what your partner is doing,” said Hoppock, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. “I know that Kathy is going to handle the finances exactly the same way that I would if that were my job. I never look over her shoulder, even though I don’t know exactly what she does. I just have total faith in her.” Durbin said that she and her sisters have found that, as female executives, they are dealing with advantages and drawbacks at the same time,” said Durbin. “As women you managed to have a lot of doors opened to you, but once you get the door open you’d better be able to perform on your feet or you’ll find the door rudely closed in your face. You can’t be wasting a manufacturer’s time, many of our customers are running two shifts a day, maybe three shifts a day, and we have to have information that applies to them.”

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