The Quirks of Business

West Brookfield Wire Company Is a Model for Employee-owned Ventures

They call themselves ‘Quirkers.’
It’s just one way the employees at Quirk Wire — named (actually renamed) for its former owners, Harrison ‘Hoddy’ and Diane ‘Dee’ Quirk — take ownership of their work and show an appreciation for their jobs.

A hardbound volume created for the Quirks last year on the occasion of their retirement shows another, and proves that sometimes, this company loyalty knows no bounds. It includes a photo of employee Shaun Long with ‘Quirk Wire’ shaved into the back of his head.

Daredevil hair-cutting aside, Quirk Wire is a company with an intriguing business model, focused as much on its employees as it is on its contracts. From his second-floor office, Quirk’s current president, David Thibodeau, explained that, even though Dee and Hoddy Quirk said goodbye to the business last year, they left behind a legacy that explains why ‘Quirker’ pride is such a pervasive theme within the walls of this wire and cable manufacturer.

“I joined the company in 2000,” he began. “I jumped at the chance to work for someone who had built a business from scratch; I knew when he bought this company, his goal was to bring it back to life.”

Thibodeau said that Harrison Quirk achieved that goal and sustained it for nearly three decades before moving on at the age of 75. Today, the company specializes in short runs of specific types of wire and cabling, serving a wide range of customers in industries such as aerospace, oil exploration, and power generation. Healthy business within these sectors, coupled with Quirk’s focus on niche markets, has created a strong presence in the wire industry for this outfit, which serves a number of international clients in addition to domestic customers. Thibodeau said the company averages 15% growth in sales each year, and that pace has earned it some impressive accolades, including the ‘Business of the Year’ award from the Quaboag Valley Chamber of Commerce in 2007.

Awards undoubtedly add to the ‘Quirker’ spirit, but the company’s namesakes left more behind than goodwill and good business when they retired. Indeed, they left the entire company in the hands of its staff.

“They realized that selling the company to another owner would tear down the basic business model they’d worked so hard to create,” said Thibodeau, noting that Quirk Wire’s transformation into an ‘ESOP’ (employee stock ownership plan) began in 2003. “Now, the company is 100% owned by its employees, and the change from how it was managed for so many years to being an ESOP was not a big stretch. Mr. Quirk’s business philosophy was always a generous one.”

Wired for Success

Quirk Wire got its start as Wirecraft Products in 1956, in a basement not far from its current headquarters. Walter Poti, the company’s founder, began wrapping wire with Teflon, a then-new product (the unbranded name for the compound is polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE; DuPont trademarked it as Teflon in 1938.)

Teflon’s primary use in the wire business is to cover wire and cabling, thus making it more resilient and resistant to high temperatures. Poti recognized a potential niche, and was able to build the business gradually during the late ’50s and early ’60s, when he moved it from his home to its current location on Route 9.

While he had indeed hit upon a specialty that persists today, Poti became ill with rheumatoid arthritis in the mid-’60s and sold the company to another entrepreneur. However, soon after the sale, business began to decline, and the outfit closed its doors after only a year.

At this point, Thibodeau explained, Harrison Quirk, a veteran of Michigan’s paper mills, relocated to Western Mass. in search of new ventures. He began working at a paper plant in Ware, but three years later, he went looking for a business of his own.

“I don’t think he wanted to take orders from anyone — he wanted to run his own company his own way,” said Thibodeau. “He literally went looking for a business to buy, and an associate suggested the wire company.”

At the time, the facility housed little more than a few spare pieces of equipment and stock, but Thibodeau said Quirk’s unique skill set was well-suited to resurrect the company.

“Mr. Quirk is an unusually talented man,” he explained. “He is very mechanically adept, but also has a head for business. He rebuilt many of the machines himself at home, hired four people from the original company to help him understand the wire and cable business, and, in 1978, reopened the doors.”

Coiled Again

Since then, those doors have remained open, providing quality jobs for a number of area residents and also welcoming new opportunities for the region. There have been seven additions to the property to date, including a $750,000 expansion in 2001 that doubled the company’s production capacity.

Quirk also established an ‘open-book’ management policy, both figuratively and literally, that persists today.

“Every employee is aware of what business is coming in and going out,” said Thibodeau. “Mr. Quirk had a ledger on his desk that anyone could look at. My system is of course a little different, but the idea is the same.”

That’s just one aspect of a unique management structure at Quirk Wire that places great importance on the needs of its employees. In many ways, the company was ahead of its time in areas such as profit-sharing and flex time — Thibodeau said every employee has a key to the building, and they choose their own schedules. Some work a standard 9-to-5 workweek, but others come in during the early morning hours or in the afternoon, or work overtime hours on weekends.

“We don’t have supervisors on the floor — it’s a flat-management structure,” he added. “All of the employees are cross-trained, and we believe the freedom they have makes them self-motivated. People feel committed to doing the right thing.”

Further, the flexible work environment at Quirk is complemented by a long-held commitment on the part of its management to treat staff as the company’s most important commodity. For many years, said Thibodeau, between 20% and 30% of its profits were returned to the employee pool through profit-sharing, raises, and bonuses.

“That has created a big nest egg for the old-timers,” said Thibodeau, adding that many of Quirk’s 39 employees have been with the company for a decade or longer.

But it also set the stage for the next chapter in Quirk Wire’s story, as it morphed into an employee-owned company.

According to the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO), the ESOP is the most common form of employee ownership among companies in the U.S. (other options include worker cooperatives, through which every employee has an equal vote, and direct stock-purchasing plans).

Approximately 11,000 U.S. companies employing about 8 million people now qualify as ESOPs, and while press attention is often given to those firms that use the model as a takeover defense or to buy out a failing company, these situations apply to only 3% of ESOPs.

Instead, NCEO reports that ESOPs are usually created to provide a market for the shares of departing owners of successful closely held companies, and Thibodeau said Quirk Wire exemplifies this description.

“The jump from how he’d always managed the company to an ESOP was not great,” he said. “In fact, I think it was a natural fit. The better the business does, the better the employees do.”

Thibodeau explained that employees are allotted shares of the company based on their salaries, and when that employee retires, the stock is repurchased using funds from an account the company is required to maintain as part of the ESOP model. The value is determined by independent valuation companies; in the meantime, management remains ‘top-down’ at Quirk Wire; Thibodeau serves as president; Mary Falardeau, who’s been with the company since 1984, is its CFO; and Peter Schlichting, who started in 1982, is vice president of Sales and Marketing.

“It’s a lot of work for employers and employees,” Thibodeau said of the ESOP model. “There is a lot of learning, and a lot of questions to be both asked and answered. But the more information that is shared, the more engaged the employees are. It keeps them interested, but on task — our employees know we’re not in the business of being an ESOP. We’re in the business of wire and cable.”

Quirk Product

A board of directors made up of three internal employees and four community members, including Dee and Hoddy Quirk, rounds out the company structure and keeps tabs on Quirk Wire’s performance.

As the business moves forward, said Thibodeau, new opportunities are presenting themselves in the wire and cable sector, including the emerging area of energy conservation. Quirk Wire’s facilities sit on 14 acres in West Brookfield, and Thibodeau added that, if further expansions are desired or necessary, that footprint can accommodate them.

“Business is good, and this is a big industry,” he said. “We have a good cross-section of customers, and I don’t think we’re ever going to put all of our eggs in one basket.”

Indeed, there are many lines of business running in and out of Quirk Wire, and now more than ever, its employees are wearing many hats.

But those hats, and sometimes the hairstyles under them, are signs of a business moving full steam ahead. A letter included in the back of the hardcover book compiled for Dee and Hoddy Quirk probably says it best.

“We are both thankful for the great place that Quirk Wire has become and that we have been given the rare opportunity to share in its success,” it reads.

Signed, the Quirkers.