Profiting from financial stability

CLEAR VISION: Taco Comfort Solutions Chairman John Hazen White Jr. has methodically taken his family's company from a position of high debt and low growth in a shrinking domestic market to one of global growth, with a strategy that relies on employee input. Here he speaks with Jay Ratanasim, a spray booth operator at the company's Cranston manufacturing facility. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
CLEAR VISION: Taco Comfort Solutions Chairman John Hazen White Jr. has methodically taken his family's company from a position of high debt and low growth in a shrinking domestic market to one of global growth, with a strategy that relies on employee input. Here he speaks with Jay Ratanasim, a spray booth operator at the company's Cranston manufacturing facility. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

Considering the success and renown built by the family company now known as Taco Comfort Solutions, it’s perhaps surprising to hear Chairman John Hazen White Jr. say that he’s not a businessman.

The company’s considerable growth, capped by significant entries in both new international markets and new product lines, seems to contradict that assertion. But for White, being successful in business has simply meant following a path other than the typical MBA-consultant-C-suite pipeline. Though he once fancied himself a fiction writer, having been an English major in college, White’s organic and holistic exposure to the family business took hold in a quieter way. He recalled working in nearly every company division, starting on the factory floor in high school, eventually rising through the ranks to become president in 1996, the third generation of his family to lead the company.

“I consider my fundamental responsibility to develop, grow and sustain the financial stability of the company. And though I’m not a businessman, I do understand the need for this underlying strength. Whatever strategy, whatever plans, whatever growth we anticipate or want can never happen without that financial stability beneath us,” he said.

It might be another surprise that Taco, one of the state’s most recognizable homegrown businesses, a manufacturer of heating, cooling and plumbing products, has not always had that financial stability. New England was hard-hit in the recession of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and Taco was “riding that curve,” said White.

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“We couldn’t continue to grow into a declining market when we were on the top of that market. It was kind of a perfect storm at that point; we had a significant debt load as a small company,” he said.

So White, who was at the time one of Taco’s strategic leaders overseeing the various divisions of the company’s Cranston operation, worked to find ways to raise profit margins while reducing debt. Together, the leadership broke the business down into siloed units, and from there was able to more accurately assess opportunities to cut costs and raise profit, while empowering experts in each area to drive strategy. “If you ask the guy making the thing, ‘How can I do this better?’ he’ll show you. We focused on that,” he said.

Even though White’s perspective and initiatives have an obvious heft, it’s hard to get him to make statements that begin with “I” or “me,” rather than “we.”

“I didn’t have a textbook in front of me,” he said. “The approach was to come up with solutions that worked for us, and we spent a lot of time brainstorming. We did what worked for Taco.”

Perhaps ironically, the solutions that Taco would find – cellular manufacturing, business units, profit centers – eventually would become standard in those industry texts. This is probably no surprise to Robert Lee, who began with the company as a welder 35 years ago and rose to become its executive vice president of operations, who praised White’s vision. “He has the innate ability to see things before they happen,” he said. “He provides a very clear direction for the executive group and then of course it works its way down.”

Lee also lauded White’s decision to bring in a new president and chief operating officer, Wil VandeWiel, just over a year ago as part of that forward-thinking vision. “[White] recognized the fact that Taco has been too small to be big and too big to be small, and that we compete with multibillion dollar companies worldwide. In his estimation, it was time to get extremely impressive in terms of growth. … So he has decided it’s time to bring in someone from the outside to help us do that,” said Lee.

That thinking also played into the company’s purchase in the fall of Italian pump maker Askoll Sei, a division of Askoll Holding. Taco will operate its new property as is, both for its expertise in making high-efficiency pumps, but also as entry into the European market. In fact, the company is now truly global, with operations in the United States, Canada, Panama, Italy, Dubai, South Korea, China and Vietnam.

And all thanks to a nonbusinessman. •

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