The Decade-Long Overnight Success

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"I had never seen that kind of trauma," Raimondo says now. "It was terrible," agrees Bob West, CEO of competitor Butler Manufacturing.

If Behlen was to salvage anything, Raimondo had to act fast, and he'd need everyone's help. The future hinged on the union's decertification. Tensions shot heart-attack high on the day of management's last appeal. Many workers showed up at the meeting displaying union buttons. Raimondo coached his managers to "thank people for wearing their buttons, because that means they want a better company." It was close. "We won by a whisker," he says. "That was just good fortune."

In the gut-wrenching months that followed, Raimondo reflected often upon that election. "It was a tremendous vote of confidence that really inspired me to say, 'We need to find a way to do this.' I'm not sure we would have had the courage or the determination without it."

January, 1984. The Wickes-owned Behlen posted a shocking $7-million loss. The parent company wanted either to sell or to liquidate the once-profitable division.

"Guys got together, saying, 'How can we pool our money?'" recalls Bill Kubas, a 42-year veteran in shipping. "I was even counting my pennies to see if I could buy it." So was Raimondo. With his personal savings, he, his lawyer, and two Behlen managers feverishly pursued a leveraged buyout. The company was seeing red ink, but its assets were worth some $32 million. When the group finally located two banks willing to take the risk, Raimondo kept a promise to his wife: he did not pledge their home to the LBO.

Just after midnight on May 5, 1984, Behlen returned to local ownership. Later Raimondo and his partners staged a poignant ceremony. They played "Take This Job and Shove It" as they lowered the Wickes flag, and they served a barbecue lunch for their 500 employees, who sang "Happy Days Are Here Again."

The truth is, things didn't improve for a while. Raimondo's vision of a profit-sharing environment would have to wait. In his first months as chief executive he was forced to let 200 people go. Layoffs were continual. "You saw people coming and going all the time," says Dave Streeter, a welder in those years. "The mood out in the plant was, 'This company ain't gonna make it.' It was very bad. In the pit, the hatred was thick."

Raimondo didn't make too many friends among managers, either. He'd replaced the authoritative structure with participative management, boldly stripping off layers of vice-presidents and reorganizing the company into horizontal business units, each with an eye on its particular market. A few managers couldn't get past their obsession with turf. "We found the trauma of trying to change some people just very hard," Raimondo recalls. "We finally gave up and took those superintendents out and moved them into technical jobs." That's when Raimondo started to search out natural leaders to replace the supervisors.

As the new president he resolved to share all news -- good and bad -- with employees throughout the plant. But sagging gross margins, mounting losses, and a pile of debt forced him to stop. The details were simply too bloody. "I could see the fear in their eyes," he says.

In Raimondo's first year at the helm, Behlen was losing close to $20,000 a day. Everyone in Columbus knew the pillar of the community was in a heap of trouble. "You couldn't go downtown without someone's saying, 'Gee, I hear they're going to close the doors,'" recalls longtime Behlen employee George Werner. "People were ashamed even to work there." Gayle Gerber, a 25-year veteran, recalls, "Everyone was wondering, 'How can we lose so much money and stay open?'" Dale Buell, another worker, agrees: "You could almost feel the bankers' eyes on you."

"You had to put the rumors into perspective, because they were true," says Raimondo. "I didn't think we could fail; I knew we could fail. Every step of the way, we had to overcome that $7-million loss and get some positive cash flow."

Despite pressure from the bank, Raimondo refused to sell plant assets, as was then in vogue. "I said, 'Absolutely not.' With 17 football fields, I wouldn't know how to make it work." His strategy was to make acquisitions that would enhance Behlen's manufacturing strengths and bring the plant back to full capacity. "We were driven. We knew this big elephant would not be profitable until we got more than $50 million in sales."

Raimondo believed the company could successfully switch its focus from regional agricultural sales to the national markets for livestock equipment -- gates, cattle chutes, stock tanks -- and dozens of other steel products. He wanted to keep Behlen headed in the direction he'd set with his initial acquisition, of the Farmaster line, the year before the LBO. With that purchase Behlen had gained not only a name well-known to cattlemen but also a new sales manager, Farmaster's former sales chief Allen Cooke.

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