Wal-Tech Valve © 2009
"We're going to change the way business is done," says Wal-Tech Valve CEO Darrell Roberts.
Wal-Tech Valve is based in Mobile, Alabama and has grown rapidly since Roberts took it over in 2007. To understand what Roberts is getting at, it helps to understand the split nature of the business.
On the one hand, it involves a great deal of hard physical work on mechanical systems that sometimes are located in harsh industrial environments. There's no getting away from it. But on the other hand, it requires a mountain of paperwork and data management, from the certification of technicians to the testing and documentation required by insurance companies and regulatory agencies.
Where others see a headache, Roberts sees an opportunity. Wal-Tech Valve is already a front-runner in some areas, such as its straightforward, secure system for making clients' valve service records fully available to them online.
Roberts sees other opportunities as well. Internally, he sees what a company can be if it works to bring in the best people and let them do their jobs. He strives to "provide a place where people feel like they're part of the organization."
"We take that approach and treat people right, and we've had some success," he says.
Jason Lowe, Wal-Tech Valve's director of operations, says that from the beginning, Roberts has given his management team a free hand.
"One thing he said was that anyone we hire has got to have good character," Lowe said. "He said if we hire somebody without good character, they're not going to be here long."
"Darrell wants to be a part of something special," Lowe said. "Darrell wants to exceed everyone's expectations."
Roberts also sees some new opportunities for the way a valve company interacts with its clients.
Valves don't work in isolation. They work within systems, which work within plants. If a valve company has people with the proper experience, education and outlook, they should be able to do more than work on valves while ignoring their context. They should be able to offer advice on efficiency, energy use, safety and other plant-wide concerns.
"My goal is to be a business partner," Roberts says. That means going beyond fixing the valve, he says. That means helping the customer make a profit, helping the customer cut costs.
Maybe it sounds like a high-flown ambition. But like all Roberts' ideas, it is grounded in extremely down-to-earth fundamental principles.
"People don't do business with companies," Roberts says. People do business with people."
With Wal-Tech Valve, Roberts is making his case. And if the company's growth is any indication, he's not only right, he's found the right people.
Tap most any key manager at Wal-Tech Valve, and you're talking to someone who's been building experience in the valve business for at least a decade, and maybe two or three. Darrell Roberts, the CEO of the company since 2007, will be the first to tell you that he's the exception to that rule.
Roberts, a native and lifelong resident of coastal Mississippi, had one perfectly fine career under his belt by 2007, having worked 25 years for a major petroleum company. Finishing that out and moving on to a sedate retirement was certainly an option.
But he had an itch: "I've always had a great desire to do something beside working in a plant," he says.
And then came that metaphorical knock at the door: Roberts' son Matt, who'd enjoyed success as a guitarist in the rock band 3 Doors Down, offered to support an investment in a new venture. And a colleague told Roberts about a small Mobile valve company that was ripe for a turnaround after the death of its founder.
He investigated. He weighed advice from friends who said the challenge was daunting and any real payoff was a long shot. He bought the company anyway.
Two and a half years later, despite challenging economic conditions, Wal-Tech Valve has tripled its annual revenue and isn't about to slow down.
At the heart of the company is a management team made of a mix of longtime Wal-Tech Valve veterans and newcomers. What binds them together is Roberts' guiding principles.
"I really have a strong belief in empowering people and allowing them to make decisions," he says.
His job is to set company goals and policies, establish a framework, and find the right people. Once they're in place, he says, his job is to "allow the managers to manage" - which, all too often, is something a CEO finds easier to say than to do.
But Roberts' philosophy has a very down to earth basis: "You can't operate a place this size, and micromanage it, " he says.
So if Roberts can't answer a customer's valve questions himself, why should a prospective customer care what he thinks?
Roberts' philosophy means that if you talk to Wal-Tech Valve's sales manager, or general manager, or director of operations, or shop superintendent, then you're talking to someone who has full authority to make a decision and see it through, without reversing himself once he hears from the boss.
Wal-Tech Valve has "the best management staff on the planet," Roberts says. And he won't tell you his job is to control them. "My role is to support them," he says.
Is it strange that the subject of customer service keeps coming up when Amy English talks about her role at Wal-Tech Valve?
After all, she's the office manager. Most of her duties involve in-house paperwork and personnel matters, and at a growing company, that makes for a full plate.
On paper, dealing with customers isn't a big part of the job. But still, it's something she keeps coming back to: "It's a shame when we're surprised that we're treated nicely at a drive-through," she says, of the scarcity of good customer service.
Here's why it isn't strange that she gives the topic so much consideration:
She knows that while a valve shop might look like a purely industrial proposition, it isn't.
"We're a service industry," she says, putting the company's real work in focus.
So her first order of business is to make sure that the customers know her name, and know she will call back. English wants them to know they've got "an inside connection."
"If I can step into a situation and ease a customer's mind," she says, "I want them to understand that I'm going to see it through to completion."
She hopes they know something else, by the time she's done: "That I truly believe in customer service 100 percent."
As General Manager for Wal-Tech Valve, Frank Reeves is deeply involved in the intricate planning that any major valve shop requires. For a big scheduled outage, the process doesn't start days or even weeks in advance. The manpower has to be on hand, the shop has to be clear, parts and other resources have to be at the ready. Preparations might start months in advance. And then, the day before the work starts, a late-night phone call might change the whole picture: Another client, or a potential client, has an unexpected problem and needs work done now. Reeves has more than 20 years worth of experience at Wal-Tech Valve. Surprises like this don't surprise him.
"We get those calls all the time," he says.
The key word is how: How do you change the plan, how do you see to it that every customer knows that they are getting the service they need? It doesn't hurt that Reeves' history at Wal-Tech Valve includes time as shop foreman. Like shop superintendant Larry Jernigan - another longtime Wal-Tech Valve employee and an experienced machinist - it doesn't bother him to take off his management cap at the end of the day and spend the evening on the shop floor, getting his hands dirty.
There's another aspect to Reeves' work that he seems particularly to enjoy. Sometimes a valve tests just fine in the shop, but seems to have problems in operation. In a case like this, Reeves is eager to see the context. Maybe the problem is really a gauge in need of calibration; maybe it's a plant modification that had unintended consequences. Either way, it's a problem that can't be solved in the valve shop - or by an operations manager who stays in the shop.
Wal-Tech Valve is a hands-on operation, because that's what it takes. "It's a big business and there's a lot of competition," Reeves says. "The one that can step in is the one who's going to keep growing."
Jack Roubik figures that in a little over two years, Wal-Tech Valve, has gone from being dead last in the Mobile market to a place at the front of the pack. "We're doing more valve service work than any company in Mobile," he says of the company's rapid climb.
Roubik is Wal-Tech Valve's sales manager. You naturally would expect him to say that the key factor in Wal-Tech Valve's rise has been salesmanship. That is not what he says. Instead, he focuses on what comes after the sale.
In other businesses, it's not unheard of for the salesperson to move on once the deal is struck. The responsibility to see that his promises are fulfilled lies with someone else. "If we were in a corporate setting, that would be pretty standard," Roubik says.
That approach doesn't fit this business, however. And it doesn't fit this company. "In our situation, the valve business is very personal, it's a very relationship-oriented business," Roubik says. "For our sales force it's imperative to not only sell the job, but to follow it through. It's a complete circle."
One example: "We try to have the salesman there for the initial work on new accounts," Roubik says. Why? So the lines of communications are open. So that the Wal-Tech Valve team knows the customer's expectations. So that the customer never has to hunt around to figure out who's in charge of answering his questions or solving his problems. So that there's no doubt on either side about what the task is or whether it's been done.
At Wal-Tech Valve, it's not about the fluff. It's about the substance. It's about an approach to doing business that has resulted in rapid growth despite widespread economic turmoil.
It's something anyone would be pleased to take credit for. But again, Roubik says it comes down to something more than salesmanship.
"The reason that we've grown the way we have... it's the whole organization," he says. "You can have 100 attaboys, and that last job there's a disruption that causes a problem, that's what they remember," he says.
In short, it's not how you sell it: It's how you deliver.
"Bite off more than you can chew, then chew like hell" may be a time-honored way of doing business, but it is not the Wal-Tech Valve way.
Jason Lowe makes that clear right up front, and he should know. He has a big say in deciding how much Wal-Tech Valve can bite off. And he has a simple rule of thumb: "We're only going to do what we can do right," he says.
As simple as that statement is, it involves a complex web of considerations, from bidding on a job to working out a schedule with the shop superintendent. It involves the logistics of work done both at Wal-Tech Valve's headquarters and at customer sites all over the country, and in other countries. "We're everywhere, we don't have a territory," he says. "We're open 24 hours a day, seven days a week."
Naturally, all this involves a lot of direct communication with customers. "I spend most of the day on the phone with customers," he says. And what he most wants for the customer to take away from those conversations is an understanding that he's working on their behalf.
"Number one, "I want to solve his problem. If I can solve it for free on the phone, that's great."
Lowe has 20 years of experience in the valve business, but came to Wal-Tech Valve two years ago at the invitation of new owner Darrell Roberts Sr. He's seen rapid growth fueled by a willingness to do whatever was necessary. He's seen his fellow executives in the shop on weekends; he's seen the CEO driving a truck to make deliveries.
All that work is focused on one very specific goal, he says. "It's not who owns the company or how big the company is, it's about trust," he says. "It takes a long time to build that trust."
"If we can do one job for somebody, they're going to come back," he says.
Larry Jernigan describes himself as a longtime machinist "who got talked into" accepting the responsibilities of a shop superintendent.
But if he didn't exactly go looking for the headaches that come with that title, he has no difficulty whatsoever boiling the job down to simple terms.
"I basically make sure things get done," he says. And he makes sure they get done to Wal-Tech Valve's standards of quality.
With business doubling and tripling since CEO Darrell Roberts Sr. took over Wal-Tech Valve two years ago, Jernigan has had to oversee a rapidly expanding portfolio of purchasing, scheduling and providing technical support to customers. "It's been a learning curve," he says.
And yet, like others at Wal-Tech Valve, he says it's people, not numbers, that matter most. "My responsibilities are in supervising the 25 guys out there in the shop," he says. "I've got 25 guys out there and I've got a good relationship with all of them."
Speaking of that shop, it's impressively clean.
"It's a really big deal to Darrell," Jernigan says of the stress on housekeeping. "It opens up avenues with customers."
When he talks to customers, though, Jernigan says there's a different point he wants to get across.
"What the customer is going to get out of talking to me is, there's going to be action taken," he says. "Immediate action. That's a must."
When it comes to providing technical support, he's ready to dig for the answers to customer questions. "If I don't have 'em, I'll get 'em," he says.
And when it comes to covering the Wal-Tech Valve territory, he says, there are no limits. "We'll go anywhere," he says. "We don't care."
Steve "Speedy" Rowell spends most of his time on software. Computer work is his business, but he resists the usual job descriptions. He doesn't really have a title, he says. He doesn't consider himself an IT guy.
"I'm not a programmer. If anything, I'm a developer," he says. "You could call me an efficiency expert. I find simple solutions for complex problems."
Rowell sees to it that Wal-Tech Valve makes the best use of its software resources, that's well and good - but what difference does that make to any customer or potential customer? The difference, simply put, is this: A company that doesn't waste its own time isn't wasting the customers' time either.
In today's world, the most common "solution" to any software problem is to reach for a new piece of software. All too often that cost multiplies as new hardware is needed to carry the additional burden and personnel have to be trained on another piece of a puzzle that just keeps getting bigger.
Rowell takes a different approach before reaching for something new. "I don't believe in reinventing the wheel. I believe in using what we have in innovative ways," he says. "If you can say to yourself, It looks like this program ought to be able to do this,' it probably can."
For customers, this philosophy is shown in Wal-Tech Valve's online record system. Clients who want it can have their valve service records available online, available to their own engineers whenever needed. There probably was a complex, finicky, expensive way to do this, but Rowell went with time-tested tools. Want your Wal-Tech Valve service history online? It's there. And you already have the software you need to see it.
It's one example of Rowell's passion for taking complex problems and making them simple.
"You use the tool that does the job best," Rowell says.
And you want to use the company that takes the straightest line to getting the job done.
"If they give Wal-Tech Valve a chance, Wal-Tech Valve will step up to the plate for them," Rowell says.
