11 minute read
Springmaker Spotlight
Becoming an Industry Character:
A Profile of Damon Kaufman and Stalder Spring
By Gary McCoy, Managing Editor
Like many in the spring industry, Damon Kaufman was born into his life’s work in a career that now spans 52 years. Kaufman is the longtime president of Stalder Spring in Springfield, Ohio.
Looking back on his time in the industry, Kaufman says he enjoys what he does and it’s a feeling that continues to this day. “I’ve made a lot of friends in the industry,” he said. “I’ve ruffled a lot of feathers, but I’m sort of a feather ruffler anyway. If I’ve got something to say, I say it. I know the right thing to say, but I usually say something else.”
Since its founding in 1946 by Kaufman’s maternal grandfather, Delmar L. Staldler, Stalder Spring has specialized in producing custom compression, torsion and extension springs, along with wireforms and a few specialty flat parts.
In 2021 the company will mark 75 years in business, but Kaufman says there are no current plans to celebrate.
Kaufman says that as a fourth-generation family-run business, “Business has always been kind to us. That’s why my grandfather started the company and he always wanted family to run it.”
Damon Kaufman
Five Men and the Ohio Spring Industry
Delmar Stalder was among five men who were mainstays at The Yost Superior Co. in Springfield. Many of these men shared the experience of working at the company during the Great Depression. Between 1943 and 1948, four of the men branched out from Yost to start their own companies.
In addition to Stalder, Pyrl E. Van Horn, Sr. started Ohio Wire Form and Spring in Columbus, Ohio, Hugh Hill formed Capital Spring also in Columbus and Ray McIntire established Tremac and Dayton Coil in Xenia, Ohio. The fifth member of the group, Bill Craig, remained at Yost and logged more than 50 years with the company. Kaufman says it was remarkable how all five of the men stayed in touch over the years.
Kaufman says Stalder Spring began in the basement of his grandfather’s house with two coiling machines, a Torington W-11 and an old, “beat up” Sleeper and Hartley #2. Kaufman says one of his grandfather’s early customers was the Lima (Ohio) Register Company.
“They used to wind a double torsion spring by hand for this customer,” explained Kaufman. “Every month they would produce 30,000 of these springs for a heating register.”
To keep up with the demand, Stalder Spring hired high school students to work at the company when they got out of school in the afternoon. Remarkably, they continued to produce the part by hand until the early 60s.
Kaufman’s grandfather owned the house next door to his, and when business started to expand, he tunneled between the two basements to accommodate all the work. In 1954, they moved out of the two houses and bought a working farm on the south side of Springfield.
“They moved the equipment into the basement of the barn,” said Kaufman. He said the original plan was to put up a building on the lot beside the barn in the nearby pasture.
“They never did get that building erected, and we pushed out the building into that area when we added an addition in 1989,” said Kaufman.
No longer a working farm, Stalder Spring is still located at that same address with 16,000 sq. ft. of manufacturing space and 2,000 ft. of office space. “People see a barn and a white house and don’t realize how large our operation is,” explained Kaufman.
Stalder Spring became ISO 9001 certified in the mid-90s. Over the years, quality auditors have arrived at the company and would see the barn and the white house.
“They couldn’t figure why they needed to do a two-day audit,” said Kaufman. “It’s always fun to see the look on
Dana Kaufman
Family is an important part of Stalder Spring, including (l-to-r): Daniel Kaufman, Dana Kaufman, Sue Exelby-Kaufman, Damon Kaufman and D.L. Kaufman.
their face when they discovered that we are larger and more sophisticated in the quality area than they anticipated.”
Doing What Can’t Be Done
Proving people wrong has always been something that Kaufman has enjoyed. When the company needed a computer system, Kaufman ended up doing it himself. He originally programmed the system in dBase 2 using an IBM PC with a five-megabyte hard drive. He even printed invoices on an old Olympus typewriter by hooking up the computer system to the serial port on the typewriter.
“Over the years, I have kept doing things like this that people said couldn’t be done,” said Kaufman with a laugh. “That’s why when I come to work, I come to play.”
Kaufman said he really enjoys what he does and working with his customers.
“A lot of my customers have become personal friends over the years and it’s the same thing with my suppliers,” said Kaufman.
“It’s all customer service. That’s what we’re doing on everything.”
Kaufman said Stalder Spring focuses on solving a customer’s wants, desires and needs. “When you do that, it’s pretty easy to sell springs, even when you don’t have a sales force.”
With a laugh, he continued, “Our sales force is one engineer telling another engineer, ‘Hey, call Stalder. They can do something like that.’”
All in the Family
Family is important at Stalder Spring. Out of the company’s 12 employees, five are family members.
Kaufman’s brother, Dana, is the company’s vice president of manufacturing, and has worked at the company since 1977.
His wife, Sue Exelby-Kaufman, initially joined the company in 2004 in secondary operations and now runs the office. The couple got married in August 2005.
Travis Riggs
His oldest son, D. L. Kaufman, has been on and off with the company since 2001 and helps with sales and marketing.
Kaufman’s younger son, Daniel, started in 2005 after graduating from high school. He oversees coiling operations and CNC machines.
“Daniel really took an interest in the business about five years ago, so I have been grooming him and his brother so they can someday take over the business,” said Kaufman with pride.
D.L. has two sons and a daughter, while Daniel has a son.
“My sons are the fourth generation of the business, and in a few years their kids could be part of the fifth generation,” Kaufman said.
Kaufman says there are a couple of other employees who have practically been adopted into the family. “They are almost like my kids.”
Kaufman’s father, Damon Kaufman Jr., was married to his mother, Corella (daughter of Stalder Spring founder Delmar Stalder) for 54 years before his death Oct. 13, 2005. Kaufman’s dad had worked with his father-in-law until 1963, when he left the company to work at another spring company in Detroit.
Corella Kaufman worked in the secondary department at Stalder Spring while in high school. She later rejoined the company in the early 80s and became secretary/treasurer in 1982. Affectionally known as GG, she died Dec. 30, 2018, at the age of 88.
Business During the Pandemic
Like many spring companies, Stalder Spring has been challenged during the current COVID-19 crisis. One employee in their shipping department tested positive for the virus. Kaufman said she only felt sick for three days but did quarantine for two weeks, and so far no one else has tested positive at the company.
Stalder Spring was never required to shut down during the pandemic because they fell under the definition of a critical infrastructure business. Kaufman said several of his customers did have to shut down for a long as eight weeks, primarily those manufacturing in Mexico or sourcing parts from Mexico and Canada.
“Business was off about 50 to 60 percent due to COVID, so it has [taken] a hit,” explained Kaufman. “Other than one employee getting sick, we’ve gotten through this remarkably well and things are coming back.”
He comments further, “I feel like there’s always a market for what we do. I think we are going to come through this fine, just like we did with everything else.”
Making it Hard to Replace
Kaufman says he has seen the booms and the busts over the years, whether it was the oil shortages in the 70s or the most recent Great Recession in 2008. Kaufman said there was a time when their workforce numbered nearly 35 in the late 80s.
“Sometimes it takes a recession to shake companies out,” explained Kaufman. “Those who have problems don’t survive it.”
“The only way to survive is to be very good at what you do and to be very tenacious at what you do.”
He advises that companies must never think that a customer can’t make it without you. Kaufman has found that anyone is replaceable.
He says it comes down to how much time, money and effort a company wants to spend to replace you as a supplier.
“So, I try to make it real hard to replace me,” Kaufman said with a chuckle. “I know they can do it, but I’m not going to make it cheap for them.”
Looking back to the late ‘80s, Kaufman says a customer challenged him with seven issues at Stalder Spring that needed to be fixed, “which was essentially every aspect of my business.”
He said the buyer told him that if Stalder Spring didn’t fix those issues, they would have to re-source their business to other suppliers over the next 10 years. They advised Kaufman, “You’ll slowly lose our business.”
Kaufman said after that wake-up call, the company dedicated 40 percent of its sales to upgrading its quality standards. “We did that, and in two years we were up to the quality standards the customer wanted.”
It was through that impetus that Stalder Spring became ISO certified.
In terms of equipment, Kaufman says Stalder Spring was slow to adopt computerized equipment. “With family involved and everyone making decisions, you don’t always make the right equipment decisions,” Kaufman admitted of a culture that resisted change.
Stalder Spring added their first CNC machine in 2005, and later added more in 2014 and 2019. The company still has three forming machines in its equipment inventory, along with several machines for secondary operations.
“We still run some of the automatics in our business, but not the old knuckle-busters we used to have,” said Kaufman.
Valuing Institutional Knowledge
Stalder Spring is working toward becoming somewhat paperless.
“We are taking all our old estimate books and everything most people throw away, and we’re scanning it into the system,” explained Kaufman. He says it’s a project that will probably cost up to $70,000 to complete. Eventually they will have all the company estimates from the 50s, 60s and 70s to the present scanned into the company’s computer system so they can be easily identified.
“Is it something I need? Probably not,” explained Kaufman. “What I’ve found is that with a number of things we’ve thrown out, the institutional knowledge is the one thing that we cannot replace.”
Kaufman said he’s especially noticed this with the passing of his dad and grandfather. “I would always go to them for pearls of wisdom, such as: ‘You know I’m fighting this, what’s it doing?’”
He remembers the help he received from his dad on a part Stalder Spring was making for a farm equipment manufacturer that was suddenly breaking prematurely.
He called his dad and got wisdom about how to run the job. “If I hadn’t heard this old thing from my dad in the 1980s, I probably would have never figured it out.”
Kaufman places a high value on institutional knowledge. “It’s stuff you’ve already paid for,” he explained. “A lot of times people just want to toss out the old stuff.”
Kaufman admits that often it is information that can be tossed, but he says sometimes you have to look at what you have and decide if it’s worth the effort to keep it.
With the low cost of disk drives, Kaufman decided it was worth the overall effort and cost to scan the estimate materials just in case they might someday need that information.
Still Having Fun
When asked about retirement, Kaufman joked that he plans to stay at the company until “they bury me.”
“I say that strictly because when I first started running Stalder, I thought: ‘You know I’m going to keep doing this as long as I have fun,’” Kaufman explained.
“I’ve got a good group of people I work with. I’ve got a very loyal, wonderful customer base and they give me challenges almost every day. As long as I’m having fun I’m going to keep doing it.”
In reflecting back on his career, Kaufman says he’s enjoyed all the “characters” he’s known in the spring industry and admits, “I’ve grown up to be one of them!”
He says that is probably one of the best things he’s done in his life, “to grow up to be one of those characters that I always looked up to. They had the stories and they didn’t take themselves too seriously. They enjoyed what they did and enjoyed their life.” n
