Troubled waters
Accu-Fab CEO Gregg Page took a detour or two before he "got convicted," as he puts it, and devoted himself to his religion. In the 1980s he spent five years on the road as a stage manager for a rock band called Nantucket, which opened for high-volume headliners like AC/DC, Ted Nugent, and Kiss, and yes, he says, he joined in the usual activities of rock-band life. Burned out on the constant travel, he eventually went to work in the custom-sheet-metal business, joining Accu-Fab as a sales rep in 1991. But despite his Southern Baptist upbringing, he was blowing his paychecks on new cars and golf and fishing trips, and was living what he calls a "carnal Christian life." Page says he came to realize that that wasn't enough, and he began to ask himself some larger questions. Those questions came to a head one night in 1993, when he was away on a sales call in Orlando, alone in a Ramada Inn. "I remember being on my hands and knees on the floor of my hotel room, praying," he says. "I had gotten very material focused and wasn't happy." That night, Page recommitted himself to Christ.
He started studying Scripture seriously, and he and his wife got involved with a local Sunday school program, but he was also consumed with work. In 1994 he managed to raise $2.2 million to buy out Accu-Fab's former owners. He began bringing in new customers like Gilbarco and Nortel, as well as new product lines. He drove up annual sales from $4 million to nearly $11 million and designed and built a new 12-acre company headquarters and plant. Yet at times he found that his zeal to grow Accu-Fab and his professed Christian beliefs weren't entirely in sync. He was frequently impatient and intolerant of mistakes. In one two-year stretch in the late 1990s several quality managers and manufacturing managers and a customer-service rep walked out. "I was very performance driven at the expense of courtesy and kindness," says Page. "The Lord sent me through some troubled waters."
MAN WITH A MISSION: A former rock 'n' roll roadie, Gregg Page decided to change his life one night in a Ramada Inn.
Nonetheless, Page is convinced that God stuck with his company. He's certain that divine intervention played a part in sending Dennis Zullig, a veteran corporate manager with experience in sheet-metal manufacturing, to take over as head of Accu-Fab operations in mid-1999. Zullig, who owns a 20% stake in Accu-Fab, has played a key role in prodding Page further along the Christian path. It was Zullig who went to a fall 1999 luncheon that the FCCI organized in downtown Raleigh. From there, he signed up for an eight-week FCCI-sponsored seminar on operating a Christian business. With each session, he grew more certain that Accu-Fab needed to step up its commitment to Christian values.
The idea was hardly a complete departure. Accu-Fab's former owners had also been committed born-again Christians, and when Zullig joined the company, the vast majority of managers, including accountant Tony Strickland and plant manager Jim Nance, shared the faith.
Even so, while Page tried to run the company ethically, in keeping with Christian values, its focus was the same as any other business's, he says: "We were driven by P&L statements and profitability." In talking with Zullig, he became convinced that that wasn't enough. As a Christian CEO, he felt he was called to a "higher performance standard." That, to him, required a deeper commitment to treating customers and employees honestly and fairly -- and to serving as a real witness for his faith. "I wanted us to be a model that would hopefully energize others," he says.
In late 1999 he and Zullig drafted a new company mission statement, which made "operating for the glory of God" Accu-Fab's number one priority. And they soon revamped the company's Web site, phone message, and even its PowerPoint sales pitch to spread the word that Accu-Fab's priorities had changed. Page and Zullig say they knew that making such a public declaration was risky: they might alienate non-Christian customers and would certainly be setting themselves up for more scrutiny. "If you put it out there," says Page, "you gotta live with it."
Can I tell you what the Bible says?
The real challenge was putting the company's new priorities into practice. In early 2000, Accu-Fab was awash in profitable orders from big telecom customers like IBM, Alcatel, and Ericsson, and the company had the means to promote "the Christian-management paradigm shift," as Page puts it.
Early on, at least, that meant more sharing of the wealth. Accu-Fab had long had profit sharing for managers, but in early 2000, Page and Zullig revamped the program to include all employees, and at year-end they passed out $112,000, or 17.2% of net operating income, in bonus checks. The program wasn't entirely magnanimous: part of what the company was aiming to do was to create new incentives to boost productivity. But as Page saw it, divvying up profits was also scripturally sound. "Biblical principles wouldn't support anything else," he says. "You can't amass a personal fortune at the expense of your employees."
Likewise, Page and Zullig tried to impose stricter ethical standards in dealings with customers. "If you're profit motivated, there are plenty of opportunities to take pricing to an extreme," says Page. Plus, it's easy to add charges "where there's a high probability they won't come under scrutiny," he says. Resisting the temptation can be tough. Page, for example, recalls that in mid-2001, Accu-Fab had sent out an invoice to Siemens that included a high markup for copper parts. That prompted a call from a buyer at Siemens who complained that he'd been overcharged. Page says it wasn't a clear case of overbilling, but ultimately he did agree that the pricing had been too aggressive, and he wound up writing Siemens a $16,000 rebate check. And though Page says the refund was probably necessary to salvage a longtime customer, he also believed it was the right thing to do. "The ultimate decision is what is ethically right," he says.
Even before Zullig joined Accu-Fab, Page had tried to spread the Christian message by promoting lunchtime Bible-study sessions and by concluding employee meetings with prayers. With the new mission statement, the two stepped up those efforts. In early 2000 they started a regular Monday-morning corporate prayer time for Accu-Fab's managers. In April of that year they hired Tim Roth, a Christian chaplain from the Raleigh-based Corporate Chaplains of America, to spend two days a week ministering to Accu-Fab's then 140 employees. The staff, says Page, included Muslims, Vietnamese-born Buddhists, "and probably a few agnostics and atheists," along with at least three or four dozen practicing born-again Christians. (He adds that he'd "absolutely" hire a Jewish employee, but he's not aware of any Jews who have applied.)
