PRIVATE TOUR – Hussey Seating

Primo Seats

Hussey Seating is one of Maine’s oldest family-owned companies. Once plow-fabricators, the company now keeps spectators worldwide safely and comfortably seated in their high-tech product lines.

In a small-town gymnasium somewhere in America, a high school basketball game comes down to the wire. The coach calls time out, the cheerleaders circle to the center of the court, and several hundred parents and fans rise to their feet, stomping out a rhythm on the wooden bleachers as they root their team to victory.

No one thinks about the stress and strain on the bleachers beneath the feet of all those hometown fans. When the bleachers are folded against the wall after the game, clearing the room for a dance, a school fundraiser, or a gym class, no one will give the technology that allows such flexibility of use a second thought. No one, that is, except the workers at Hussey Seating, the North Berwick company where those seats were likely built.

“We are the world’s largest manufacturer of telescopic gymnasium seats,” says Tim Hussey, the company’s chief executive officer. “We have almost half the market share in North America.”

The Hussey family has been in business in Maine for at least six generations, ever since a farmer named William Hussey came up with an idea for a better plow. It was then, as now, mostly about metalworking. With wooden bleachers, the “stringers” are the pieces of metal that hold the seating together and allow it to move. Hussey’s stringer design is unique, leading to a stronger yet lighter seating section.

“None of our competitors have that,” Hussey says. “It provides more compression strength. It’s really an engineering feat, and it allows us to be more efficient with our material.”

In Hussey’s office is a seat from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, signed by several members of the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots. Hussey has done seating installations for many other major sports venues, including Invesco Field in Denver (pictured on the cover), The National Stadium in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and American Airlines Arena in Miami. If you go to a professional baseball or football game in Kansas City, you will sit in a Hussey seat. They’ve done seating for countless colleges and universities, from outdoor amphitheaters to indoor performing arts centers.

Those seats were mostly manufactured in Maine. Hussey also owns a plant in England, and contracts with manufacturing partners in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Canada, and China. Hussey rode a wave of stadium-building in the 1980s to spectacular success. But in recent years, the company has pulled back to concentrate on what Tim Hussey calls its “bread and butter”—telescopic bleacher seating.

On the 50-acre campus in North Berwick, that’s what they build. A cavernous warehouse is filled with boxed shipments bearing the addresses of schools around the country, as well as a few international shipments. The warehouse lies at the end of a production line where workers—both human and robotic—turn strips of raw metal and planks of wood into ready-to-assemble bleachers that can withstand the enthusiasm of charged-up sports fans.

The company uses 8 million pounds of raw steel a year, shipped in from Connecticut. Bleachers, and the material that goes into making them, are heavy. The wood is southern yellow pine plywood from Louisiana.

While it may seem strange for a company in Maine, the nation’s most heavily forested state, to be using wood shipped in from a thousand miles away, product marketing manager Ron Bilodeau says it’s because southern pine provides better structural value. “If we used white pine, we’d need up to three-quarters of an inch in thickness, whereas with southern pine we can use five-eighths.” This saves the company money without sacrificing sturdiness or comfort. An eighth of an inch may not seem like much, but multiplied over the thousands of seating units Hussey produces each year, it makes a big difference to both bottoms and the bottom line.

But metalworking is at the heart of the business, as it has been since the company’s founding in 1835. There were no high school basketball teams back then—the game of basketball hadn’t yet been invented. New England was mostly farm country, and Hussey Seating got its start as a manufacturer of metal plows.

An on-site museum documents the company’s history. There, visitors can see some of the early plows, as well as other farm equipment and photographs of the foundry that burned down in 1895. Though the plow business slowed, the company’s core expertise in metalworking remained. In 1931, Hussey built its first set of outdoor grandstands.

“We weren’t the first company to come out with telescoping bleachers, but we had the best design,” Tim Hussey says. “We had a breakthrough design in the 1950s, just when the baby boom and the school construction boom were starting to hit. We went from there and took the same bleacher concept into civic centers and convention centers. They needed recoverable seating, just like you have in a gymnasium, except with chairs on them instead of bleachers. Then in the 1980s, we got into the stadium seating business.”

Though that business continues, Hussey has downsized in the past decade and refocused on smaller markets. Tom Hussey, Tim’s younger cousin, is the continuous improvement coordinator. “Back in about 2000, which was the peak of our stadium business, we had about 600 employees here,” he says. “Today we are down to about 200, but that is because we have refocused on the rollout bleachers, which we’ve been doing forever. We still do a lot of Triple-A baseball parks, college arenas, from 6,000 to 10,000 seats, but we do it through our dealer network. We still do some large jobs. We just finished a soccer stadium down in Mexico, which is 45,000 seats.”

While the engineering and project coordination were completed in Maine, the manufacturing work was done by the company’s manufacturing partners. In North Berwick, it’s all about the telescopic bleachers.

It starts with coils of steel, which are cut and bent and shaped by human and robot workers. There’s a fair amount of heavy machinery, but computers also abound. “It’s an interesting blend of old and new technology,” Bilodeau says.

After each piece is fabricated, it goes to a “supermarket” for the welding stations—most of which are staffed by robots. These stations are surrounded by translucent orange curtains, which can be seen through, but shelter human eyes from the brightness of the welding torches.

Quality control is carefully maintained. Each weld is stamped with information allowing it to be traced back to a certain date, time, welding station, and batch of steel. Pieces are periodically tested. They’re placed under stress until they break, under the watchful electronic eye of a computer. “The only way to test it is to break it,” Bilodeau says. The broken steel is then recycled.

“We’ve never had a collapse,” Tom Hussey says.

A paint room resembles, more than anything, a car wash. Components come in on a hanging conveyor belt and are sprayed with a type of paint that acts like a plastic coating. Each piece is slightly different, because each set of bleachers is designed for a different space. The final kit consists of the metal framework and the wooden or polymer seats, and is trucked to its destination (or shipped by rail to some clients on the West Coast) and assembled on-site.

When they’re finished, the bleachers will be the sturdiest seating available, thanks to Hussey’s unique support design. “The slanted supports are built so that the more weight you put on it, the stronger the structure gets,” Bilodeau says.

The company has invested heavily in engineering, computer technology, and robotics, according to Tim Hussey. But equally important has been the ability to attract and keep good employees. “The automation and robotics represent a pretty big investment,” he says. “We have moved some stuff to China. But what we have here is intellectual capital. We are happy with the workforce we have here, the work ethic and the commitment level. We have been able to attract, for the most part, the professionals we need. A lot of that has to do with the quality of life in Maine.”

Being located in the very southern part of the state certainly helps. “We are an hour and a half from Boston,” he says. “I can be at Logan Airport in 80 minutes. So we aren’t stuck out in a corner at the end of the world as some people think. We have a decent supply base within 100 to 150 miles.”

He also values the access to government officials here that isn’t always possible elsewhere. “Maine is small,” he says. “It is not hard to get attention. We’re on a first-name basis with the governor and his cabinet and members of the legislature, so if we need help on something, we can get it.”

Downsides include the cost of energy and health care, concerns shared across the spectrum of Maine businesses. “We are not a huge energy consumer; some of our neighbors in the business community have a much tougher time with that,” Hussey says. “But the cost of health care is something that continues to concern us. Five or six years ago, we put in a workplace wellness program here, and our employees are involved and engaged. Everybody has to have a wellness plan. We have a full-time company nurse. So we made a big investment, but it is paying off. In fact, this year we were able not to have an increase in healthcare costs for our employees. So even though Maine has a high-cost healthcare infrastructure, we are finding ways to be proactive about keeping our costs down.”

About 100 employees are involved directly in manufacturing, shipping, and receiving; the engineering staff numbers around 35. The rest are in sales, accounting, and office positions.

“One way we were able to save on our energy costs was to go to a four-day, 10-hour workweek for our manufacturing employees,” Tim Hussey says. “They start at 5:30 in the morning and work through until 3:30. We started that two or three years ago, thinking that we could take Fridays and shut down the ovens and the gas lines and conserve electricity, which we did. We did that through the winter and went to go back to five days, and 90% of the factory people said, ‘Don’t do that; we like those four 10s.’ So we said okay. Then of course the office people wanted to get in on that four-day workweek, but we have customers who expect phones to be answered all five days.”

Despite the uncertain economic times, the company seems to be holding its own, and at this writing is actually looking to expand its workforce by approximately a dozen employees. But challenges lie ahead.

“We’re seeing commodity prices going up and down like we never have before,” Hussey says. “The way our business cycle works, we are putting out bids on projects today that won’t deliver for one or maybe two years. Trying to forecast the prices of materials in advance is not easy.

“The other major challenge is just where our next cycle of growth is going to come from,” he says. “We are just now being impacted by the recession, while many companies are starting to come out of it. A lot of our construction projects are funded by bond issues that were in place before the recession hit. That is going to dry up in another year or two; in many states, it’s already drying up. In 2011 it could be down even more, so we are actively looking for other opportunities.”

But as the head of a company that’s been around for 175 years, Hussey takes the long view. “Maine is connected to the rest of the world,” he says. “Encouraging innovation and participation on the world stage is what we have to do. We need an environment that is friendly to business. And that involves skills development and investment in our university system and our workforce.”

Hussey says being family-owned means the company can “control our own destiny and set the right values. We can invest in new products and programs and people, for returns that might be several years down the road.”

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Firmly Planted: Hardworking Husseys have been in Maine since the 1800s

It’s the oldest family-owned manufacturing business in Maine.

The Husseys may not have come over on the Mayflower, but their New England roots are deeply embedded in the soil they plowed with their first business venture in 1835.

A company history written by Philip Hussey Jr. in 1960 traces the family’s roots all the way back to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. One Christopher Hussey immigrated to Massachusetts in 1632, and a descendant, James Hussey, settled in North Berwick in 1770, and became affiliated with the Society of Friends, or Quakers. His son William, born in 1800, was the founder of the company that would become Hussey Seating, and the great-great-great-grandfather of Timothy B. Hussey, who heads the company today.

“William was a farmer who invented a better plow and started having it built,” Tim Hussey says. “His son Timothy, who I am named after, was the guy who really built up the plow business, which was a pretty big business in the 19th century.”

Hussey plows tilled the soil on farms throughout the eastern U.S. Then, in 1895, tragedy struck.

“Timothy was in the process of turning over the business to his three sons when the plow factory burned to the ground,” his namesake says. “I always say that this was probably one of the best things that happened to us, because out of adversity comes change, right? They didn’t lose the entire business. The foundry burned, but they didn’t lose all their inventory. The plow business kept going for awhile, but never fully recovered. So one of the brothers, my great-grandfather, Augustine, started doing some other kinds of metal fabrication. Ladders were the next big product. Then it became a desire to find the next proprietary product. We did ladders and fire escapes and manhole covers, and really developed the metal fabrication business. My grandfather, Philip Sr., ran the company from 1913 until 1967, when my dad took over.”

Philip Sr. showed up for work almost every day from 1913 through 1977, except for a couple of years he spent in France during the First World War. “He was a classic entrepreneur,” Hussey says. “And he was the one who stumbled upon seating in the 1930s.”

Despite the long legacy, Tim Hussey wasn’t always sure he wanted to work in the family business. “When I got out of college, I wanted to go out and make my own mark. I went into banking for a couple of years in Boston before I decided to get my MBA and come to work for the company. We had just bought a company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that was struggling, so my dad said, ‘Out you go.’ I was assistant plant manager and then plant manager, and then I had a stint in sales for a while. I got a lot of exposure to different parts of the operation.”

As the company nears its 175th anniversary, Tim Hussey says he’s been reflecting on the lessons of his ancestors. “Although we aren’t Quakers anymore, a lot of what we try to do here goes back to those Quaker values,” he says. “It’s the honesty and integrity, a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, and commitment to action and community involvement. These are the reasons to keep the legacy going.”

Another reason is the next generation of Hussey family members. “There are 15 children between the ages of 5 and 20. It is a little early for them to know, but it is my hope that some of them will want to come into the business.”

Company Brief: Hussey Seating • North Berwick, Maine

Year founded:

1835

Ownership:

Still owned by the descendants of founder William Hussey, making Hussey Seating the oldest family-owned manufacturing business in Maine.

Creation details:

Hussey plows dominated the U.S. market east of the Mississippi River for much of the 19th century. A fire in 1895 destroyed the plow factory, and the company began diversifying into ski slope equipment and, eventually, seating.

Employees:

Approximately 200

Production schedule:

One full daytime shift, one smaller second shift, four days per week.

Products:

Telescopic bleacher seating. Other Hussey affiliates build outdoor stadium, auditorium, and arena seating.

Materials:

Raw steel, southern yellow pine, HPDE polymer, and cast and extruded aluminum.

Innovations:

Hussey’s slanted “stringer” design allows bleachers to absorb more weight using less material than its competitors. The metal framework becomes stronger as more weight is placed upon it.

Current challenges:

Fluctuating cost of materials, impending end of pre-recession municipal bond issues, energy and healthcare costs.

Distribution:

Hussey ships telescopic bleacher seating throughout the U.S. and Canada as well as overseas. The bulk of the market is high school gymnasiums and multipurpose rooms. The company also builds seating for stadiums and auditoriums on contract all over the world.

To learn more:

Visit husseyseating.com.