Pro, in short, resembled a million other family businesses on Main Street, USA. "It was a little, small operation," says Joe Varela, a senior quality engineer with Applied Materials, making it clear he's referring to Pro's ambitions and vision as well as its head count. "If you walked in there now, you'd say, 'I can't believe this is the same company.' "
The transformation began in 1990 -- coinciding, not by chance, with Braccini's transformation of himself.
Braccini is a big man, age 39, warm and engaging but perpetually restless, a friendly bear with a Type A personality. In the early years he seemed to make Pro grow by sheer force of will. He'd get in early and spend his days working the phones, giving orders, his fingers in every company pie. Evenings he would unwind with a bottle. Pro's future? More of the same, so it seemed. Braccini had little vision of where he wanted to go, still less a plan of how to get there. Do tomorrow what you did today -- only try to do a little more.
That spring Braccini decided he'd better get on top of his drinking; checking into the Betty Ford Clinic, he spent 28 days learning to live without alcohol. When he got out, not only was he dry, he was a man with a mission.
"I began to realize a lot of things about myself," he says now, "and the theories I had about myself for some reason corresponded to the business. The better I took care of myself, for example, the better I felt and the better I did. It was like this light went on. 'Oh -- so the better I take care of the customers, the better they'll feel about me. . . .' And it just went on from there." Cinde Braccini, who's been married to Steve for 16 years, remembers the change with a laugh. "Oh, God! They warned me! When you take an energetic and knowledge-hungry mind like his . . . They said, 'When he comes home, he's going to have all that energy back.' Boy, were they right. The improvement he had chosen for himself he also imposed on Pro Fasteners. It was like, 'I've now realized something about myself -- and we are going to change.' "
Braccini plunged into reading. Articles in the business press. Books such as Philip B. Crosby's Quality Without Tears. ("Every new hire at Pro still gets a copy of this book," he says.) He began talking to other company presidents; he joined a chapter of the Executive Committee, an organization of CEOs and entrepreneurs. He noticed there were a small number of companies -- Nordstrom, for one -- that everyone regarded as models for business in the 1990s. Pro Fasteners, he decided, would join the ranks of those exemplary enterprises. He would reexamine every facet of Pro's operations. He would transform its internal operations to ensure first-rate quality and service.
It was an auspicious time to be thinking about such matters, for Pro's marketplace was evolving quickly. In the early years the company had sold most of its parts much as a retail store does. Customers called with orders. Braccini's employees pulled the items off the shelf or ordered them from the manufacturer, then shipped them out with an invoice. By the late 1980s many customers had begun asking for more. "It wasn't just, 'I want this part,' " says Braccini. "It was, 'I want it on my shelf all the time. And I want you to make sure it's there all the time.' " Implicit in each request were a promise and a threat. The promise -- if you could deliver the goods -- was a long-term contract, ensuring a certain volume of business. The threat was elimination as an approved vendor. Like manufacturers all over America, Pro's customers were slashing their supplier lists, and distributors hoping to make the cut would have to dance to a new tune.
The contracts side of Pro's business had begun to grow as early as 1988. But it wasn't until he returned from Betty Ford, his mind now hitting on all cylinders, that Braccini spotted the long-term potential for his company. What customers were really saying was that they didn't want to manage their parts inventory. It was too costly for them, and they weren't good at it. Pro, he realized, could do it for them. It could take responsibility not just for nuts and bolts but for hundreds of a customer's parts. It could guarantee not only that the parts would be on the shelf when needed but that they would be checked for quality. "Suddenly, the customer could cut his in-house staff," Braccini explains, summarizing what turned out to be a compelling marketing pitch. "He'd have no purchasing costs, no receiving costs, no quality-assurance costs." Per-part prices, moreover, could actually be lowered, because Pro's buying power would increase.
It was an enticing vision. Pro as inventory manager for any number of big customers. Pro opening up branches elsewhere in the country, cloning its procedures and practices, ultimately becoming a $50-million business. Granted, the little company faced huge challenges. It would have to anticipate customer needs rather than simply respond to phone calls. It would have to learn state-of-the-art quality-assurance techniques. It would need a computer system capable of tracking tens of thousands of parts for hundreds of customers. From his reading, Braccini understood it would need something else, too: people in every job who wanted the company to succeed, who were eager to learn and adapt and change and grow, who would apply their new abilities to helping Pro.
To Braccini, that meant imbuing the employees with a sense of responsibility for the business. Henceforth, he proclaimed, the pyramid structure of the traditional company would be inverted. Ultimate responsibility for the business's operation would lie with each employee. Day-to-day managerial responsibility would rest with the line managers. He, Steve, the hands-on, work-the-phones CEO, would pull back, ceding line authority to his managers and concentrating instead on long-term planning. To implement the new structure, employees would be organized into cross-functional action teams, no managers allowed. The teams would meet at least weekly, sometimes for training, sometimes to focus on particular problems.
