For that, Blaine Wieland could thank his company's close 11-year relationship with Grabill Bank. The bank had been instrumental in bringing Wieland Furniture to Grabill from Bay City, Mich., in the first place. It had been a willing partner in the company's growth, a constant in good times and bad. But lately the relationship had grown more strained. Here, then, was one more cost: Blaine Wieland had spent all those years building trust, only to have the bankers start giving him funny looks. It was as if Wieland and the bank didn't understand each other anymore. "We're comfortable lending money to a furniture company" was the explicit message Wieland was getting from the bank. "We're not comfortable lending to a trucking company."
In May Blaine Wieland met with the bank again. This time it was painful. Wieland's prediction that the trucking operation would break even in April had fallen short by about $20,000. By now the aggregate loss for Wieland Transportation, including bad debts, was approaching $300,000. Meanwhile, the new loan officer had learned his accounts. Knowing more, he was more worried. Like a lawyer patiently building his case, he recapped the whole sorry sequence of events for the benefit of everyone present. Then he asked the unanswerable question, "Why would you have gotten into trucking?"
"I just felt so low," says Blaine Wieland, "just so inept." During all those years working with his father and his brothers, building Wieland Furniture, he had come to think of himself as "a disciplined person, a learner," able to apply himself successfully to almost any task. The trucking fiasco had taught him otherwise. "Why was I not able to hold that together?" he had to ask himself now.
And what of his plans for the family business? It would be a cruel irony if the trucking operation edged those off the road. His father, Roy Wieland, had toiled 30 years in the old family furniture business with his own three brothers, and for what? Hard times drove Roy and his brothers apart. They eventually lost that business, handing it over to another company to escape debt; that company later sold off the assets and shut it down. Blaine and his brothers remember the day their father came home from the office for good, carrying a box that held only the contents of his desk.
Which is how Blaine, the third son, came to lead Wieland Furniture -- the company he and his father started together after Roy's old business dissolved -- into the next generation. There had been nothing left for the older brothers; they'd gone off in other directions. Blaine was lucky. By the time he came of age, a new market had sprung up in Michigan, the result of a new law requiring state hospitals to use furnishings that looked as if they belonged in a home, not an institution. Roy and Blaine conceived the idea of "renewable furniture" -- attractive pieces with interchangeable parts, easy and economical to restore. The new Wieland Furniture caught the market and grew, and in time Blaine's brothers joined in.
Brad, Brace, Blaine, and Blair -- four sons determined to succeed where their father and uncles had failed. That has meant staying together as a family as well as staying in business. "I've always had a need for the family to be in business together," says Blaine Wieland. "It may have been because I was raised expecting that, and it was taken away. Now that it has returned, it's still more precious."
After the May meeting Blaine Wieland performed a little exercise at the bankers' request. He ran spreadsheets on half a dozen trucking scenarios, which included reducing the size of the fleet, signing a contract with an outside operator, and just shutting the operation down. The last option was tempting. These were exciting times in the furniture business. The brothers were branching out. They were in the midst of creating two new divisions -- Wieland Residential and Wieland Direct -- and were in the early stages of an alliance with Herman Miller, one they hoped would catapult Wieland Furniture into markets previously beyond its reach. All that would require capital -- retained earnings, which were diminishing with each monthly transfer to Wieland Transportation; and debt capital, to which Blaine Wieland's access was rapidly becoming problematic. All in all, Wieland had to admit, it would be nice not to have to worry about the trucking operation.
Unfortunately, quitting wouldn't be easy. Already Wieland Transportation is $300,000 in the hole. To back out of the company's leases now would cost another $200,000. "That's $500,000," Blaine Wieland says wearily. "There aren't many $17-million companies that can pay $500,000 and not really think twice about it."
Not that diversification is a bad idea. Even after all he's been through, Blaine Wieland doesn't believe that. He still wants a company that's involved in more than one business. He'd rather preside over 10 $10-million businesses than run just one doing $100 million. "I'm not afraid of doing something I don't know," he insists. "But it takes a little bit more, I think, deliberateness than what we applied here."
Realistically, he thinks, his job now is to right the situation. So he's spending at least half his time on trucking -- checking in with Stoller every few hours, tracking revenues daily, putting in place new procedures that he hopes will allow him to begin backing off by the end of the summer.
But it won't be easy. "The business has built up several hundred thousand dollars of backward momentum," he says. "I wish I could change it all next week, but I can't. It's going to take discipline, every day a little advance, every day a little better than yesterday. We've got a ways to go."
