Conversation Series: Bob Walker, Walker Mfg.

Those words were on the cover of the program to Walker Manufacturing’s Family Reunion, a celebration of the company’s 50,000th mower. That quote and the commemorative occasion probably represent the company and Bob Walker more than any of his yellow mowers ever will.

Although the company’s history includes a series of starts and stops as Max Walker, Bob’s father and founder of the company, produced a variety of products through the late 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, mowers and people define the company today.

The first 25 Walker mowers were built and sold in 1980 and 1981. The company’s first dedicated mower employees were hired in 1982, and the company fully committed itself to mower manufacturing in 1984.

Throughout the course of producing the next 49,975 mowers, Walker Manufacturing established itself as a producer of quality products, but what stands out about the company is its emphasis on being about more than just money. I traveled to Fort Collins, Colo., to sit down with Bob Walker, president of the company, and learn about what he wants this company to be, not to mention where he thinks the commercial mower industry is headed.

Lawn & Landscape (L&L): Tell me a little about the company’s history.

Bob Walker (BW): My dad started the company in 1957 by manufacturing the first gas-powered golf cart. From there, he moved on to making the Walker Power Truck.

The company moved to Casper, Wyo., but it eventually went broke. My parents lost everything, but my dad was able to get restarted again when some people had an evaporative cooler. That’s when we moved here, to Fort Collins, in 1974.

After a few years, we started off on the lawn mower project, and we’ve had tremendous progress that we never saw with any of those other products. There is definitely an aspect of being at the right place at the right time involved in our success. Some people call that luck, but we don’t necessarily believe in blind luck.

L&L: How did you come to join the company, and how thoroughly does the family approach permeate the organization?

BW: When my dad got started in Colorado, he asked me to come work with him, which had always been a dream of mine. I have a degree in mechanical engineering with some emphasis on aircraft design and structures. I worked in the aircraft industry for six years and learned a lot that has served me well in this business.

I think if you’re going to work in the family business, it can be a great help to a young person to work outside of the family first and basically prove that you’re able to have a degree of performance and accomplishment outside of saying if it wasn’t for your mom or dad you couldn’t make it in the business world.

People quite often will say, ‘I’m not going to sacrifice my family for my business.’ But there’s a corollary point that you shouldn’t sacrifice your business for your family. There have been a lot of good businesses that have been sacrificed over a family – bringing junior in and letting him run a business that he has no real aptitude to run, and he runs it into the ground. Then look at all of the people who get hurt.

So it’s a balancing act between family and business, and that’s not easy to do.

L&L: But it seems as though the family philosophy includes more than just the Walker family for you.

BW: Manufacturing is an exciting business in the sense of the ripple effect. Every day we make mowers here and there’s a group of people in Wisconsin and Iowa who manufacture the component parts we use, such as engines and transmissions, so there’s a degree of employment created by us creating the product here. Of course, we’ve got our factory employees working here to produce the equipment every day, and their families, so there’s a degree of livelihood. Then you produce the product and we’ve got a group of distributors and about 1,000 dealers that have some livelihood from selling, servicing and supporting the product out to the customer. And then you’ve got the customer who’s using the product.

Add all that up and look at all of the jobs and all of the revenue. We make a little money when we sell a machine, and that could be the focus. But look at all of the other people, jobs and opportunity. And we’re just one little company out here in Colorado.

L&L: Why has Walker Manufacturing with its 145 employees been successful competing against so many bigger companies?

BW: We compete by playing to our strengths. There are some things that little companies can do that big companies can’t do. One of our strengths is that we can be close to the customer. We can go to a trade show and stand in the booth and talk face-to-face with real customers, whereas the big companies have to stay close to their businesses because they’re in a position where they can’t really afford to have their top decision-making people stand in a trade show booth.

Another area of strength is focus. We consider ourselves a specialized company. So many of the bigger companies, in order to get to the size that they are, have become very diverse in their product base and market base. They’re not just building a riding lawn mower like we are – they’ve got all kinds of power equipment. Some of them take the approach that they want to be the one source for everything you need. Well, that’s a grand idea and quite a good thought, but the truth is, they’re really compromising since they don’t get the focus of someone who really concentrates, and that goes back to the smaller company. We can say that we’re not everything – we’ve only got one product, so we’re trying to do an exceptionally good job with that product.

The other thing I like to talk about is rapid response. While our competitors are still drinking coffee and making drawings, we’ve already made the design change. We’ve literally made design changes where we heard about a problem, my brother comes in and designs a new part, and we’ll have that on the production line that afternoon.

L&L: Is keeping that one-product focus difficult to do?

BW: One of the things that I think drives people in the wrong direction is ego. The desire to get big with all of the fulfillment that comes from success, but really not knowing who you are. We’re not Toro and we’re not going to be Toro or one of the other big manufacturers, and we’re not on the fast track to try to get there. That helps you use what you do have.

I believe a lot of people have worked with that ‘when my ship comes in’ mentality when their biggest opportunity was right in front of them and they couldn’t see it because they were so busy looking out on the horizon. The real opportunity wasn’t nearly as exciting and it looked small, but it was their opportunity and they didn’t take it. Companies need to keep a sense of what they are and not get drawn off into comparisons.

It has been interesting how many times in recent years we’ve heard about the landscape contractor who started off by himself, started to build up his business, had to hire some crews and then woke up one day with the realization that he was handling a lot more money than he used to but he wasn’t putting any more of it in his pocket. Yet he was still paying a big price with his family. That’s a real interesting trend that you can see where people downsize their business and are more successful and happier. You think people would never want to go back and get smaller once they get to a certain level, but that’s not the case.

L&L: How has the design of mowers changed since you’ve been involved?

BW: There’s been a real move, and we think we have something to do with it, toward the compact, maneuverable rider. This was a key idea for us.

Back in 1977, my father decided to buy a riding mower, and I bought a riding mower for my yard. We made a terrible mistake. The problem was the maneuverability and the inability to fit in and trim the whole property. The rider was nice on straight-aways, but it was an awkward and clumsy machine. So that gave us the idea.

We decided to make the mower as small as we could and make a new combination using zero-turn technology. That has played out very well not only for us, but I believe the whole industry has moved in the direction of making a compact, maneuverable machine, which has allowed riders to take a big portion of what was being done with walk-behind mowers.

Today, the figures prove that there’s still a place for walk-behinds, especially mid-size walk-behinds, but there was a crossover a few years ago so now more riders are being used and the walk-behinds have gone flat or plateaued. Last year, about 50,000 walk-behinds were produced against 100,000 riders. That’s a dramatic shift.

L&L: What’s driving mower design now?

BW: I believe that the productivity issue is going to continue to impact the machines – how much can one man or one woman produce? A lot of people say that we’re talking about how fast the mower goes, but that’s deceptive. Mowing is a combination of movement across the ground, turns and maneuvering. The more variables that go into the equation, the more important working speed contributes to the overall job time. What you’re trying to do is cut grass, and if you’re just cutting straight-aways mowing speed is obviously king. But a lot of mowing is trimming and maneuvering.

The perfect illustration I like to use here is the turtle and rabbit story. The turtle won the race because he consistently kept moving. The rabbit lost because he was fast but he kept stopping. This is the classic deal. We’ve literally beat some rabbits on the job with our little turtle machine here, and some of these machines run twice as fast as ours.

L&L: You and I talked a couple of years ago and you said there was too many mower manufacturers. Is that still true?

BW: I think so. I’ve heard of a manufacturer’s study that was done to forecast the future and it concluded that by 2010 there would be five manufacturers of commercial mowing equipment. I think that’s probably extreme, but I do think that 30-some manufacturers is too many. Again, if you divide the production levels up among 30 or so manufacturers, the volumes are just not that interesting for the investment to be in the manufacturing business, so I think that will drive more consolidation than we’ve seen before.

L&L: What about your company’s future?

BW: We have a vision of it continuing to be a family business. Some people start a business with the thought of taking it public or cashing out to do something else, but that’s not an objective of ours.

One of the reasons why we’re maybe a little different from other companies is that while we think about ourselves – it would be silly talk to say we only think about other people – the important principle to us is that you should be thinking about not only yourself but other people’s interests. In this case, we have a lot of other people who have invested a lot of their lives and their efforts toward what’s being accomplished here.

I like to say that for every dollar we’ve invested here there have been four or five dollars invested by people outside of the company to help bring the product to market, sell it and service it. So when you think about selling a company or going into an acquisition or a merger, quite often you can buy and sell the assets of the company but you’re skipping over the investments by the other people who really depend on their investment being protected or considered.

Of course, a common quote with mergers is, ‘We’re going to join forces with this other company, and everything is going to stay the same.’ That never happens. When people pour money into an enterprise, they want to have a lot to say about what’s going on with the business, and the original people who were part of the investment on the peripheral outside of the ownership aren’t considered.

I know it’s not illegal, but I think it’s immoral in a lot of ways, and I believe that these companies don’t prosper on that kind of stuff. When you take somebody else’s money, blood, sweat and tears, I don’t see that as a way to profit on a long-term basis. Even if a deal was a good thing for us personally, we’re not of the mindset to walk away from a lot of people who helped us get here. That sounds pretty philosophical, but you’ve got to be able to live with your conscience and your morals.

Interestingly enough, we’ve had almost any company you can name talk to us. Of course, we’re flattered that they tell us they would like to have their name on our product or have product made by us, but we haven’t seriously entertained any of those offers.

L&L: If you could get contractors to understand one thing better than they seem to know, what would it be?

BW: What the mower will produce is more important than what it costs. The one thing I believe a lot of them don’t understand is what a machine will produce for them. How much will it produce for what it costs? The actual cost really becomes a small part of the equation over the life of the machine.

The cost of ownership is also something that’s not well understood. For example, a lot of times a contractor purchasing equipment will look at $500 or $1,000 as a big deal, but if you divide that up into the hours of production that machine can deliver, then $500 doesn’t add up to hardly anything when the mower runs for 3,000 or 4,000 hours.

Yes, the purchase price is a factor in the overall cost of ownership, and that price looms big when you’re buying, but when you consider potential downtime, cost of repairs, cost of maintenance, operating costs and depreciation the purchase price doesn’t mean nearly as much. But too many contractors look at a lawn mower as a commodity, almost a consumable, and that’s not good business sense. You’ll not be competitive with those who understand that.

L&L: When you celebrated making your 50,000th mower, why did you use a family reunion as the celebration?

BW: That was a natural for us. A lot of companies throw around terms, and a popular one is, ‘We’re your business partner.’ Or they use the word ‘team’ a lot to describe the relationship they think they have with people.

But talk is cheap. Acting out and living out a relationship goes deeper than just the mechanics of selling and producing equipment. This was a natural extension of the way we try to live. A lot of our suppliers are people that we’ve worked with and known for quite a few years, and we consider them like family. That sounds silly in one way, but that’s the way we think about it. For example, we don’t try to go out to bid every year. We try to build relationships, and that stands us in good stead. Sometimes when there are problems it’s amazing how you can find your way through them if you’ve had a long-standing relationship with a supplier.

I wanted to stand out front when the event opened and shake hands like the Wal-Mart greeter, and I was able to do that and thank those people. I had so much fun. We had 1,700 people and almost 200 of them came from overseas, and that’s amazing. So the idea of a family reunion was a pretty accurate description of what happened here.

L&L: What do you expect from the mower industry in the next few years?

BW: As I said earlier, I think there’s too many people producing too much product for the market, and that will cause some people to merge or sell.

I believe a real pendulum swing has taken place. Obviously, there are two styles of machines – the mid-mounts and the front-cut mowers, and we’re a front-cut company. The mid-mounts have really become the dominant machine in our industry. Right now, according to OPEI figures, there are eight mid-mounts produced for each front-cut mower, so what’s going to happen there?

Mid-mounts certainly are going to continue being a major factor in the market, but I think front-cut machines are not getting their due share of the market. A lot of people have jumped into manufacturing mid-mount mowers, and that has created some of the demand.

L&L: Is there anything else that’s important to note about the company?

BW: I believe we have exceptionally good people. Most companies say that, but you have a keen sense in a smaller business of how much you depend on people. And we always try to recognize the divine help.

I never get into the deal of saying, ‘I’m a religious person and if you’ll be like I am then you’ll be successful too.’ There have been a lot of good people who lived a wonderful life of faith and never saw anything in business to succeed. But I think we should acknowledge and be thankful when we’ve received help. There are people, I suppose, who think that what they’ve accomplished is because of them, but we have no sense of that. That’s not us.