March 2007: The 100 best companies to work for in Oregon
NO. 2 SMALL COMPANY: COLUMBIA PRINTING
Nurija Tuka, left, and Esmeralda Zepeda assemble
notebooks in Columbia’s clean room.
Photo by Leah Nash
|
Two brothers and a growing family
Scott Treadwell has been working for Columbia Printing and
Graphics for nearly five years, but he’s still a relative
newcomer. In fact, the 45-year-old production manager will be
closing in on retirement by the time he reaches the average
employee tenure of 13 years.
With so few employees going anywhere, brothers Rob and Tim
Wehrley talk about staff turnover unlike other business
managers. They don’t talk about the number of workers
lost and gained in a year, they talk about generational
turnover. For instance, about half of the generation of people
hired in the 1980s still work at the company today.
What’s the source of that staying power? Accountant John
Sherlock took Columbia on as a client in 1980 when the printing
company was 2 years old. When he retired in 1997, Sherlock
joined the company part time, and has continued to do their
books to this day. “Clearly, they feel everyone is
family,” he says.
The word “family” is nearly a cliché when
it comes to describing work environments. But at Columbia,
employees — the number ranges from 29-39 depending on the
amount of work — deeply see themselves as part of a
family created by the Wehrleys.
Part of that comes from their upbringing. Raised in a Catholic
family in Northeast Portland, they describe their parents the
same way their employees describe their bosses: honest,
hard-working, caring.
The brothers modestly attribute the family-like environment to
the practice of hiring people who’re imbued with those
qualities. But it’s clear that they also play a major, if
quiet, role. Along with heaping devoted praise on the
management for the family-like feel, staffers regularly mention
how much the company cares about them.
Working for business owners who are that devoted to their
employees can be surprising. Treadwell says that if someone is
having family issues, the Wehrleys virtually will walk them to
the door and kick them out so that they can go deal with
it.
“It’s how they are deep inside. In their eyes,
this is the only way to do it,” he says.
Columbia’s headquarters — they also have a
production facility in Portland and a sales office in San Jose,
Calif. — is in Southeast Portland in a nondescript
building off Hawthorne Boulevard. There are a few modest
offices, including Rob’s and Tim’s. Whirring
presses and the smell of hot metal fill one large room;
computers and desks occupy another. Around a corner and through
a doorway is a clean room, part of the company’s
high-tech future.
Companies that use clean rooms to make microprocessors or
semiconductors need printed materials that won’t leave
microscopic bits of particulate matter in the hyper-clean
environments. That’s where Columbia comes in. In its own
clean room, masked and gloved workers in all-white full-body
suits create spiral-bound notebooks, notepads, labels, forms,
and even custom instruction manuals.
It wasn’t cheap to build: Tim estimates that clean rooms
cost about $2,500 a square foot. It’s been a good
investment. Rob declines to talk about the company’s
sales figures, but in the next two years, he estimates the
company’s print and digital output will grow 20% and 50%,
respectively. Business from Columbia’s U.S. and European
clean-room customers, on the other hand, will grow by 300%.
Standing in front of the clear plastic walls of the room, the
brothers — Rob is 56 and Tim is 46 — talk about how
excited some of their employees are about the future.
Then Rob speaks up, and as he does, his bro-ther nods in
agreement.
“But if you took away this values-driven
culture,” Rob says, “they’d probably just as
soon work anywhere else.”
— Abraham Hyatt
Have an opinion? E-mail feedback@oregonbusiness.com
