Headquartered in Brighton, Michigan, with offices in Cleveland, Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Greenville, South Carolina, the company has also recently made a geographical expansion in order to serve even more customers.

“Prior to COVID hitting, several of our suppliers approached us and asked us if we would be interested in expanding further south,” says Spencer Sargeant, President. “Originally, it was just southern Ohio and southern Indiana and potentially Kentucky, and we jumped at the opportunity to do that.”

The onset of the pandemic, however, threw a wrench into those plans. “In our business there are a lot of face-to-face meetings and there’s a lot of onsite work,” says Sargeant. “But we hired some people who managed through that, and we also made some significant investments in inventory. Coming out of COVID, we were positioned to take some market share from some competitors who went the opposite way in basically decreasing their stocking levels and getting rid of as much product as they could as they figured this lull on business was going to stick around for a while.”

The company continues to invest in more people in those southern markets, he adds, as H.H. Barnum feels it’s a good market where the company can bring value to customers via stock, value-added product, and value-added services.

“We did buy a lot of inventory, and after COVID ended, it took us over a year to get our inventory down to where it normally would be,” says Ed Koza, Owner and CEO. “But it was worth the move.”

This ongoing commitment to quality service and growth has resulted in admirable recognition for the company, winning SMC distributor of the year in 2024 and previously in 2017—the only two years it was awarded. The company has also been named among the Top Workplaces USA for three years running. “We’re very proud of that. We have a great, great staff,” Koza says. “They’re the heart and soul of the business. We take recruiting extremely seriously and we have a reputation for taking very good care of our employees. That helps with our recruiting.”

Approximately 95 percent of H. H. Barnum’s recruiting is through word-of-mouth, he adds. When the company announces it’s expanding and is looking for certain job functions, it’s almost always somebody within the company who finds a qualified candidate, an impressive feat.

“We realized the employees are the lifeblood of our business, and we don’t just say it, we take it extremely seriously,” Koza says. “We do everything we can to provide value to our employees. We have a matching 401(k) and a very nice working environment. We pay above scale because we know we’ve got the best in the business, and we don’t want to lose them to somebody offering them more money.”

Respect is a vital component at H.H. Barnum Company, especially when it comes to the company’s 280 employees who may have family or health issues to deal with. “We throw the vacation policy out the window when somebody’s in trouble,” says Koza. “When people have to take six months off, we keep paying them, because we want them to go take care of their family and then come back to work when they’re ready.”

This compassionate mindset has predictably resulted in “almost no turnover,” Koza adds.

The company is also pet-friendly, complete with a dog park so employees can bring their dogs to work. “It started when I got a dog, because I’d never had a dog before,” he shares. “I thought, ‘why don’t we have this?’ I started bringing my dog to work and thought everybody should be able to bring their dog to work. So we probably have a half a dozen dogs in the building every day.”

“We have a wall of pets, too, on our back wall,” adds Sargeant. “There are probably 60 or 70 dog and cat portraits up there.”

Creating that kind of atmosphere and showing employees you care about them in all facets of their lives goes a long way to fostering loyalty within the company. “We also have a lot of smart people,” says Koza. “We have good systems and we’ve always been very conservative,” which has meant, for example, having the cash on hand to expand without the need to borrow. “We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’ve always been smart with money. The owners don’t try to suck the money out of the company—we keep investing in it.”

H.H. Barnum also houses more inventory than its competitors and turns quotes around quickly, he adds.

“Our response time is the key,” Sargeant agrees. “Especially with the internet these days, and with younger generations who are looking for answers or looking to purchase something. They want to take care of it right away.”

As a company, this means being “very responsive” to customers and giving good answers that provide value. “There are a lot of people in our business who sell everything under the sun,” says Sargeant. “If you try to do everything, you end up not being good at anything. We try to limit our line card, and we try to focus on those products and pay attention to the suppliers who support us.”

H.H. Barnum’s suppliers appreciate that. “They know if they’re on our line card we’re going to pay attention to their product, and we’re going to try to grow it as best we can.”

Barnum’s exemplary company morale and excellent customer service are “cornerstones” of the business, says Koza. “I’m a really demanding shopper; from the beginning, I wanted to model Nordstrom’s. I just cannot stand subpar service, so we’ve always set the bar really high. Our customer service manager is an engineer. We sell technical products, and we want somebody who can help educate our customer service team.”

This is another nod to the company’s ongoing dedication to value-added service. Prior to Koza taking over the business from his father, H.H. Barnum was focused more on the process side, but has changed direction toward the automation space, which has been growing a great deal for many years.

“That’s primarily been our focus, the automation side of the business,” says Sargeant. “I think that’s been very helpful in terms of us finding new markets and in growing the company.”

Koza estimates that around 20 percent of sales is hands-on value-added work, going through the shop doing some kind of assembly or modification action to a standard product, which a lot of the company’s competitors don’t do. “We also have tech support staff of 30 people—a very high ratio for the total number of employees we have. We have a lot of customers that call and ask us to help them integrate our products and even our competitors’ products into their control platforms. So there’s a lot of value as far as a tech support side of the equation as well.”

“We can generally take care of most customer problems, and do it quicker—and a lot of times better—than they might see from the actual manufacturer,” Sargeant says.

The company has also increased its kitting over the past few years: taking a variety of different components, putting them together in a package, and giving it one part number so the customer can order and invoice one part number.

“It’s everything they need for maybe one specific machine they’re building,” he says. “It saves them a lot of time and money on the purchasing side as well as on the receiving side. They know when they get that box it’s going to go to a certain type of machine and it’s everything they need for that machine in one box.”

Although the end result is what has kept the company successful for so many years, H.H. Barnum’s employees and its people are what make the difference, agree both Koza and Sargeant. “We’re always trying to bring in somebody better than ourselves,” says Sargeant. “And it’s a real testament to the company itself that people don’t want to leave. They stay and they do the work, and they don’t want to leave.”

Being “great at the basics” is a point of pride for H.H. Barnum, adds Koza.

“We never want to lose anybody, so we try really hard,” he says. “If you were to ask us what’s the key to our success, I would say maybe 90 percent of it is the people. And when you have great people working together as a team, you can figure anything out.”

The post Keys to Success: Providing Value to People and Products<p class="company">H.H. Barnum Company</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

“We believe we’re leaders in the industry,” says Tom Todoruk, National Sales Manager. “We operate under the belief that we want to drive the bus and we want to lead the industry. We have a crack R&D team here that spent a great deal of time and energy reviewing and evaluating our equipment and making changes to the equipment.”

Once you look through the history of this technology, he adds, it becomes clear that others in the industry are essentially following Tempeff’s lead.

“If we do something or we incorporate something in the equipment, we find our competitors will say, ‘that’s a great idea, let’s do it,’” says Todoruk. “We spend a lot of time, energy, and of course, resources, on improving and innovating our equipment. We’ve never told a customer, engineer, contractor, or rep that we don’t or won’t do something. That’s not what we do.”

Tempeff takes requests, suggestions, and requirements from customers and will spend the time and money to evaluate those requests for changes or modifications. If the team can accommodate, they will, and if not—which rarely happens—they will provide alternatives.

“If you give us an idea, we’ll evaluate that and if we think it’s marketable, we’re going to start to incorporate that in our equipment,” Todoruk says. “It’s a symbiotic relationship between our customers and us. Ideas we originate here from R&D we incorporate into our designs, and inform our rep network, which means engineers, contractors, and government entities.”

Customers also ask Tempeff to develop innovations with them, putting ideas together and incorporating them into equipment to make the mechanical design a little more seamless. “That’s one of the things that I’m proud of,” Todoruk adds.

Customer service is indeed a top priority for the company, although Todoruk prefers using a different term. “I would phrase it more as being responsive to customers’ needs. It’s not just service, because service implies that it’s an after-the-fact thing; whenever I hear service, I always think something’s wrong. We’re responsive to customers’ needs. If a customer wants to put a non-traditional component in our unit, we look at putting it in and nine times out of 10, it will be incorporated.”

In looking at seamless design from the engineering point of view as far as installation and ultimately, the end customer’s usage of the product, Tempeff has also started to incorporate other companies’ equipment into its own, such as controls. This helps reduce footprint and create a seamless operation—if there’s an issue, there’s only one person to contact.

This extends to Tempeff’s desire to always include the human factor in its operations, particularly to help customers when assistance is required. “We still have a little bit of automation, but once you figure out if you need to talk to R&D, sales, shipping, or accounting, when that phone rings, there will be a human there to answer your questions or give you advice. And that’s extremely significant.”

Those questions could pertain to Tempeff’s innovative DualCore products that help form the backbone of the company.

Because of the harsh environments in many parts of North America, air treatment is expensive. Air ventilation is crucial to the health of a building and, consequently, the well-being and productivity of occupants. Due to its extreme efficiency and resistance to frost, DualCore® technology upends the current state of heat recovery systems on the market, utilizing technology that constantly recovers energy throughout the day, preventing frost from accumulating.

This offers greater energy efficiency independent of outdoor air temperatures, resolving the long-standing issue of energy-robbing defrost techniques. Since there is no need for a defrost strategy, DualCore® architecture is far more energy-efficient under all circumstances, making true operating costs attractive in terms of efficiency and savings.

“The advantage of a DualCore Plus product is it will help reduce condenser sizes,” Todoruk explains. “This has the tendency to bring down your total mechanical costs because you can now use smaller condensers and smaller condensing units and reduce peak demand charges because of the high efficiency you’re gaining from the equipment itself.”

With conventional equipment, once it starts getting cold outside and the outside air temperature is freezing, traditional energy recovery equipment will have to incorporate a defrost mode in their equipment. When you incorporate a defrost mode, you’re designing your mechanical design as if you do not have any energy recovery because your system isn’t functioning during colder temperatures. “There’s no requirement for that defrost strategy with our equipment—none whatsoever. The cores won’t frost up, you’ll get continued energy efficiency.”

This technology is also part of the company’s commitment to helping create a greener, more sustainable environment. “The product itself screams energy efficiency and reduction in greenhouse gases,” Todoruk says. “If you’re using natural gas, you’re burning a lot of gas during the winter months to heat your space. To take that down from 100 degrees to 15 degrees or 12 degrees, that’s a lot of savings and a lot less greenhouse gas could be hitting the atmosphere. And this is equipment that can be installed commercially, industrially, and residentially.”

And Tempeff’s commitment to the environment is present in more than just the equipment it manufactures, he adds. The company is also dedicated to reducing and recycling waste—for instance, the aluminum sheets used for its heat exchangers are specially sized to limit waste.

“What we’re ultimately doing is paying more money to have this aluminum manufactured in a particular size for us to limit waste, and any waste we have on the aluminum is recycled,” Todoruk says. “Whatever it is we’re using, we tend to purchase as close to local as possible. We’re going to try and buy locally first and if that’s not the case, we’re going to go further until we can find a place close to us that offers good product at competitive price.”

This is done both for efficiency and to cut down on transportation costs and reduce diesel fuel emissions. “That’s part of the thought process here of ‘recycle and reuse.’ We do try to practice what we’re preaching.”

Tempeff is also looking to expand. Using manufacturers’ reps to go to market means it has local representatives in all the Canadian provinces and a majority of the U.S. states that represent its product.

“One of the reasons for the bigger push into the U.S. is it’s just a darn big market,” Todoruk says. “There are a lot of people there. It gets cold in certain parts of the U.S., but because the winters aren’t as long nor as severe, they’ve had a slower adoption process. They’ve looked at things a little bit differently, but now, through a lot of government initiatives, requirements, the change in standards, they’re crying out for this type of equipment, things that meet certain efficiencies and goals, and our product definitely fits that bill.”

Tempeff has been working with its rep networks and as a manufacturer will go out with its reps to various engineering firms to demonstrate the virtues and value of a product, including the benefits of green energy and overall system simplification.

“If you have equipment that’s constantly needing maintenance, what does that involve? That involves a phone call to somebody: somebody has to jump in a truck, or parts have to be flown in, and there’s a greenhouse gas effect. So, if you build reliable and durable equipment, you’re eliminating a lot of that, or at the very least reducing that. It’s greater than the sum of its parts here. It’s not just our equipment, it’s what our equipment allows within the boundaries.”

To that end, Tempeff is involved with industry groups such as NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) in New York State, and NEEA (Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance) in the Pacific Northwest, which has done an “amazing” job through the BetterBricks program to increase awareness into what’s available as far as equipment to bring down energy costs—and to create the desire to do it. Ultimately, it’s not just going out and trying to sell the product, Todoruk says; you’re also extolling the virtues of going green overall.

“Not only do we talk the talk, we walk the walk,” Todoruk says. “We actually care. If there’s a problem with our equipment, we’re going to fix it. If you need something specifically done, if you want to make our equipment dance, we’re going to do our best to get that equipment to dance to your tune.”

There’s a company-wide desire to do that, he adds, and that all dovetails back to being a leader in the industry. “I believe it’s that commitment that keeps us out in front—the fact that we believe in this technology for a whole bunch of reasons, not just because it’s simply a business.”

Of course, there is an altruistic factor, he adds. Most rational people believe that greenhouse gas emissions are harming the environment and impacting the climate, and if there is viable technology out there that is reasonable and cost-effective and can be easily implemented, Tempeff will strive to do its best to bring it to fruition.

“I think it’s our duty to relay that information to end users and to engineers to draw their attention to the availability of this product and what it can do not only for the building, but what it can do for the world in general,” he says. “We hold it to our heart here, the way that we manufacture the equipment.”

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