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Changing with the Times Is Crucial for Businesses With apologies to Thomas WoIfe, sometimes you can go home again. In the case of Bill Merry, Jr., president of Herndon & Merry, Inc., going home meant returning to Nashville, Tennessee, the place of his birth. It also meant joining the family business, leading it through a remarkable sales resurgence and positioning it for the 21st century. Merry's father, Bill Merry, Sr., and a partner started Herndon & Merry, Inc. Today the company specializes in the design and production of custom driveway gates, stairway and balcony railings and other architectural metalwork for high end homes and buildings nationwide. Most of its work is done for individual homeowners, although it also takes some commercial contracts. The company's client list is dazzling: Garth Brooks, Ronnie Milsap, Crystal Gayle and Waylon Jennings, to name a few. In the early years, however, the company's products and target market were decidedly more downscale. "Through the `60s and `70s and into the early 1980s, most of what we did was carport and patio covers," Merry relates.Herndon & Merry's bread and butter business took a one two punch in the late `70s and early `80s. Inflation was pricing its carport covers out of reach of its core middle class market, and a wave of cheap, snap together aluminum carport kits began flooding the market from Mexico. Demand for the company's flagship product fell from a high of about 300 carports a year in the 1960s to just 10 or 20 by the end of the 1980s. The company had already established a reputation for itself as a supplier of ornamental ironwork to the high end architectural market in the Nashville area. The problem was, customers for that kind of work tended to be in the top 3 or 4 percent of the population, income wise, and there just weren't enough of them locally. Herndon & Merry was faced with making two, tough choices: abandoning the flagship product the company had relied on for decades and expanding into a national marketplace.
"We had to take a hard look at what we were doing. That meant looking at how many of each product we were selling, what the cost was to make those products, the time and effort involved and the profitability or lack of it," Merry says. "We came to the decision that we needed to stop selling some of those products." Looking at the numbers, the wisdom of that decision was undeniable. Still, emotionally, it was a tough one to make. "Some of those products had put food on my family's table for years. They helped get me through college," Merry recalls. "Sometimes, you become emotionally attached to things that you really shouldn't be doing anymore. But letting that go freed us up to focus on other projects where the long term dollars and profitability were." NO GUARANTEES Merry learned an important lesson from his experience, one that every business owner and aspiring business owner should take to heart: Yesterday's success doesn't guarantee tomorrow's. Business owners must be prepared to change, as their markets change even when that means making tough emotional decisions. Growing up in an entrepreneurial family, Merry got the entrepreneurial bug early. "No doubt about it, even from a very young age I looked at different ways to make money, and I always saw myself in the position of an owner and creator," he says. After college, however, Merry chose not to go to work for Herndon & Merry. Like most young people, he says, he wanted to make it on his own. He admits that the prospect of spending all his time with family members was not particularly appealing, and he had reservations about how "professionally" the business was being run."I had gone to college, and I thought I needed to be in the world of big business," Merry says. He got a job with a big steel warehousing firm that supplied raw materials to companies just like Herndon & Merry. He found being on the supply side of the business a very useful experience. "I saw a lot of different management styles there, since it was a big company," he says. "I got to see some good selling techniques, and I learned a lot about how a corporation works. I was able to draw on those things when I came to my current position." Merry also got married and started a family during that period, an experience that has also been useful to him as a manager. "It has helped me learn about patience and about people," he says. Merry has come to accept the fact that "people aren't perfect, as much as we might want them to be sometimes." That has helped him learn to delegate and to make more realistic assessments about what is and is not acceptable.
As Merry discovered, acquiring business and management skills is a lifetime proposition. What you learn today from many different sources can prove to be useful later. By the beginning of the 1990's, Herndon & Merry was struggling, a victim of recession and an obsolescent product line. The Merry family was looking to bring some managerial experience into the firm, and at the same time, Bill Merry, Jr. was about ready for a change. The chance to help engineer a turnaround at Herndon & Merry and give something back to his family had a lot of appeal to Merry. With Bill Merry, Jr., now at the helm, the company made the hard decision to Abandon. its roots in carports metal sheds and other small projects and focus all its resources on driveway gates and more ambitious ornamental and architectural metalwork.More attention was also given to Garden Park Antiques, a related business venture started by Merry's brother Keith that deals in architectural and ironwork antiques, decorative pieces and furniture. The synergy between the two businesses is strong, since both target the same upper-income market of high-end residential homeowners.
GROWING THE PIE Marketing Herndon & Merry to, the nationwide customer base it would need to support the new business model was Merry's next challenge. "We realized that the only way we were going to get a bigger piece of the pie was to grow the pie so, to speak," he says. "We had to get our message out to high end customers in other parts of the country."To do that, Herndon & Merry has developed a sales system that combines advertising in national magazines that cater to the high end residential and architectural market, direct mail arid a referral network of contractors and satisfied customers that has grown steadily over the years. Much of the company's work is also repeat business. "Typically, a customer calls in and says they saw our ad somewhere, and we send them our marketing package," Merry says. Those marketing materials are designed not to sell a prospect on a particular item, but rather to sell them on the idea that Herndon & Merry has the capabilities to do whatever it is they want done. One way the company differentiates itself is by emphasizing its design capabilities. "Almost everything we do is custom made. We produce the icing on the cake for the homes our customers are building," Merry explains. The company meets with the customer, discusses design concepts arid draws up a set of plans for the customer's review. The plans are tweaked to reflect the customer's input before they are finalized. Herndon & Merry charges a design fee for that service, but the clientele it deals with is used to paying such fees for service such as interior design work, Merry points out.
"Creativity is really integral to the process. That's what allows us to beat out the competition," he says. Garden Park Antiques plays a role in that regard as well. It's not unusual for the company to do a driveway gate and a front porch railing through Herndon & Merry, supply a console or a coffee table to the same customer through Garden Park Antiques, then step out the back door and do a pool fence, Merry says. "The two businesses are married together and let us cover several different categories on the same job." As Herndon & Merry's story illustrates, marketing should focus on a business's strengths and ability to meet individual customers' needs, not just products and services. |
