The Power of Listening

Of course, the proof of Altas's cultural pudding comes when the company buys another business. In a mature industry like boxes, acquisitions are the surest and fastest -- maybe the only -- route to rapid growth, and hence to the Centenaris' dream. But what happens when you try to impose the togetherness approach on a company that may have a quite different set of expectations and practices?

The question, it turns out, is being answered even as we speak in Meriden, Conn., where in October 2001, Atlas bought a 200,000-square-foot box plant from Weyerhaeuser. The plant was by all accounts a microcosm of corporate America -- a facility that was well equipped but had a toxic atmosphere, the kind of place where managers perpetually told employees what they were doing wrong and union workers retaliated by finding excuses not to work. "We had monthly reports, but they were always negative," says Walter Vazquez, now a supervisor but then a union steward. "There was always finger-pointing." When Atlas bought the plant, its on-time delivery stood at about 60%. It was losing between $150,000 and $250,000 a month.

By year-end 2002, however, a turnaround was in full swing. The union was history, decertified in a formal National Labor Relations Board­supervised vote by a whopping 40 to 17. Average monthly sales were up 30%; on-time delivery was up to 97%; labor costs had dropped. New customers were being courted for higher-value projects such as complex point-of-sale display boxes. The bottom line -- net profit -- turned positive in about a month and a half, and at the end of 2002, it stood at more than $500,000. The adversaryism was drying up as well: Rather than working on only one machine, for instance, shop-floor employees moved from one to another to help jobs get out the door more quickly. "When Atlas came in, it was, 'Everybody's equal," says Vazquez. "Everybody works together."

It's been just a little more than a year since Atlas bought the plant, so it's wise to withhold final judgment. But there's no doubt that the Centenaris had learned something in Maryland, something they could put to work in Meriden. Paul hired Shaun Teevens, a college friend and "open-book nut," to manage the plant. Teevens promptly began doing things like learning everybody's name, listening to complaints, asking for suggestions, and spending days out on the shop floor getting to know how to run the machinery. He showed people the plant's numbers. He had them vote on matters like which forklift to buy. Along the way, he cleaned what had become a top-heavy house, ridding the company of several well-paid managers. ("We probably took out $300,000 or $400,000 worth of salary," he says.) He also began paying bonuses connected to profitability, a practice that in the first year put an average of roughly $1,000 in every worker's pocket.

He says there are still miles to go. "We're not anywhere near there yet," says Teevens. "We're not even as good as we think we are." But neither does he minimize the accomplishments. Where the employees are concerned, "It's no longer, 'This is my job, and I don't do that.' It's more, 'Okay, this job is more important. It creates more revenue. I'll go over and help these people get the product out the door."

The thing about dreams, of course, is that they multiply.

Plenty of the people at the Severn plant have come to share the Centenaris' dream of building a big company -- particularly when Paul predicts, as he did at one recent meeting, how much their stock appreciation rights will rise in value if Atlas keeps growing at its current pace. Now Teevens and his charges at Meriden are no doubt coming to share in the dream, as will future acquirees. There's something in this for everybody.

But sometimes the most powerful dreams are those of a single individual, maybe of an individual like Bruce Foster. Foster, 37, has worked at Atlas's facility for 15 years. He ran the three-color die-cut press for 10 years; recently, he was promoted to lead man in that area. He took immediately to the business training that the company offered when it opened its books, and now he can talk SG&A or EBITDA with the authority of an accountant. "Open-book management has bettered me as a person," he says frankly. Foster also began to realize that there might be alternatives to working on the shop floor, even though he had no college education. So recently, in his off-hours, he started selling boxes. He recalls how he began: "On Saturday I went to EZ Storage. I talked to the person and looked at their boxes. I said, 'I'm trying to get into sales. How would you like to get better quality boxes? And better on-time delivery?' They said, 'Yeah.' So I talked to the vice president."

Foster beams. "It was all downhill after that." One of his accounts will generate an estimated $450,000 in revenue for Atlas this year.

That, of course, is the attitude that Paul and Peter Centenari have been dreaming about and building their business around. And who knows? What they've done in Maryland and what they're doing in Connecticut and what they hope to do soon in Virginia and other locations up and down the East Coast may turn out to be the foundation of an iconic, visionary company -- one that really does work differently from most companies, and better.

Are Your Meetings Like This?

It's 2 in the afternoon, and about 150 people, most of Atlas Container Corp.'s Maryland employees, are filing noisily into the big room off the shop floor known as the Learning Center. As the room fills up, there's a scramble for seats: Managers and sales reps plop down beside first-shift machine operators coming off nine hours of work and second-shift people who've come in early, still yawning. Pretty soon a five-line financial statement for the month is on the screen at the front, and CEO Paul Centenari is deep into a discussion of Atlas's recent performance.