Set back just off Goodwin Street in East Hartford, the 135,000-square-foot building appears as non-descript as any other industrial facility.
Even at nightfall, with the building all decked out in holiday lights to celebrate the season, few might know that the next great business success in the Greater Hartford area might be sitting just inside those walls.
Nestled within the confines of residential homes on three sides, the management and 90 “owners” of Dur-A-Flex go about their work — quietly, efficiently, and, perhaps most importantly, together.
Dur-A-Flex, founded in 1966 by Mitch and Betty Andreski, is now owned by Bob Smith, who purchased the company in 1986. The company focuses on seamless commercial and industrial flooring systems and polymer components such as epoxies, urethanes and methyl methacrylates.
Its flooring is typically seen in grocery, food service, food processing, and healthcare applications. The company’s products can be found in places such as Hartford Hospital, the Space Needle in Seattle, and both Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium.
The common thread is that its customers demand quality, said Peter Ferris, president and chief operating officer.
Dur-A-Flex offers a number of flooring systems and related products such as primers, sealers, topcoats and cleaners. Much of its product line is divided into four types of flooring systems — its Cryl-A-Flex, Poly-Crete, Dur-A-Flex and Hybri-Flex lines.
All the systems come in a variety of color options with custom coloring possible with a turnaround as quick as 24 hours. The floors are comprised of primer coats, topcoats and various aggregates that provide differing strength, color and textures.
The Cryl-A-Flex flooring system cures quickly, in as fast as one day, while offering resistance to acids and alkali with a low-glare satin finish.
For customers looking for a little something different, Dur-A-Flex offers its Poly-Crete, a polyurethane product that has no volatile organic compounds and contains renewable resources to make the flooring eligible for LEED credits. The Poly-Crete system is non-porous so it is impervious to chemicals, making it ideal for environments where chemical spillage is a concern.
The Dur-A-Flex line is an epoxy system, similar to the company’s first offering in 1966, the Dur-A-Poxy water-based epoxy coating system. It is a seamless system that resists chemical spills and stands up to the movement of equipment, the company noted.
The Hybri-Flex products include any of the company’s three application-specific build and topcoats and combine those with a basecoat system that resists moisture and adheres better to concrete than competitive systems, Dur-A-Flex said.
The company’s fastest growing product is its cementitious urethane, found now in its Poly-Crete line of urethane floors. “This is our Jell-O. It is the product that will drive our growth,” Ferris said. “The way it goes down, the way it colors, the way it lasts; it’s a world-class product.”
Until now, though, Dur-A-Flex has been a successful Connecticut company that has generated nearly 99 percent of its revenue domestically, but that’s about to change.
Ferris, who will be celebrating his second anniversary with the company this month, was brought in by Smith to take Dur-A-Flex to a different level, and part of that is growing sales globally.
To expand its global reach, in early December Dur-A-Flex announced that Hiep Hiep Phat Trading Co. of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam, had joined on as a distributor, contractor and installer of its products in that country. That followed a September agreement with IL DO Trading Co. of Seoul, Korea, to serve as exclusive distributor for the supply and installation of Dur-A-Flex’s systems in that country.
Mexico is also an area where Dur-A-Flex has started making investments.
“We look at markets outside the U.S. where there is positive core GDP growth and where construction growth is higher than GDP,” Ferris said. “Our recent decision to invest in Mexico is a good example where GDP is approximately 5 percent and construction is approximately 8 percent. We’ve recently appointed contractors in Vietnam and South Korea to meet growing demand for our systems and we see steady growth here in the years to come.”
The changing regulatory environment in Europe, though, has Ferris in wait-and-see mode. “We continue to evaluate Europe but the changing regulatory environment for chemicals and minimal growth in GDP currently makes these markets less attractive given the opportunities in Asia and Latin America,” he said.
Upon his arrival, Ferris did turn over the executive suite, adding “top talent” from places such as General Electric, United Technologies and the Barnes Group. He has installed a system of “operational metrics” to monitor performance. The company also installed Lean Six Sigma principles.
So far, Ferris said, the strategy is paying off. He noted that 2012 revenue was up from $27 million two years ago to approximately $32 million, near company record levels, “with significant improvement in the bottom line.”
“It was very different for me because I was used to working in a very corporate environment,” said Ferris, who has done stints with Dexter Polymer Systems, Tyco International and most recently Pennsylvania-based Charter Medical. At Charter Medical, Ferris, serving as president, was tasked with turning the company around in the immediate aftermath of an FDA drug recall.
As COO at Dur-A-Flex, Ferris faces a different challenge, one he links directly with Smith.
“When you meet Bob, he is this blend between Jesus Christ and Santa Claus and he has a really unique perspective on life,” remarked Ferris. “We had a series of meetings and it was clear that Bob wanted something different for the company.”
Given the opportunity to return to Connecticut, where he grew up tagging along with his father Edmund Wittenmeyer (E.W.) Ferris to his job as president of Roytype some 45 years earlier, Ferris signed on.
“I learned from my dad,” he said. “He explained to me that the number-one asset of any company is the people, it’s not the equipment. Here (at Dur-A-Flex), it’s not just that we have 90 owners, we have 90 families.”
What makes Dur-A-Flex unique, Ferris said, is the employees. Each employee, referred to as “owners,” enjoys a generous benefits package that includes profit sharing, medical benefits and includes access to a comprehensive wellness program. Each has access to the company’s in-house gym, recreation room that includes ping pong and pool tables, and a lounge with a flat-screen television and kitchen. Those facilities are open 24 hours a day, seven-days a week to employees and their families and friends to use, Ferris said. Dur-A-Flex also pays for a trainer to come in twice a week to conduct exercise classes. Nearly one-quarter of the staff takes advantage of this service.
With an ingrained culture of family at Dur-A-Flex (there is a wall in the facility dedicated to family pictures and each conference room is named after a prominent figure in the company’s history), it became Ferris’ job to not only take the company to the next level, but to do so without disrupting the environment.
“The difference here [compared to other jobs] is that we didn’t want to disrupt the culture,” said Ferris. “Yet there was a need to make operational changes. Bob was taking a long-term view to the business, so we had the time to bring in the best talent.”
Dur-A-Flex has made a number of changes — both internally and externally. A new logo reflecting the company’s global initiative was introduced as was a new marketing strategy. “We are now focusing some of our energy on the end-user,” said Ferris. “It’s more of a pull-marketing strategy.”
Nearly $1.2 million has been invested in the past two years to modernize the facility, which is an old A&P warehouse that Dur-A-Flex moved into in 1993. A capital improvement project in 2013 will provide modern equipment in the factory portion that will allow the company to purchase its chemicals in bulk and then automate some of the processes through programming logic computing.
And Smith’s hand-picked person overseeing the growth is Ferris, a 53-year-old who said he is just “a steward of Dur-A-Flex — hopefully for the rest of my career.”
Just like the close-knit family of Dur-A-Flex, Ferris himself maintains connections to his family’s past, using a desk that belonged to both his father and grandfather.
“Bob refers to Dur-A-Flex as an idea and an idea attracts what it needs when it needs it,” said Ferris, “and the company found me when it needed me and I found it.”
As to the future, Ferris said in addition to looking for overseas growth, the company is exploring the possibility of products designed for residential installations. Despite the presence of a new 15,000-square-foot facility in Fontana, Calif., and additional facilities globally if needed, Ferris said East Hartford will remain the centerpiece of manufacturing for the company.
“Everything is made here and that’s why East Hartford is so important to us,” he said.
