GlenMartin, Inc.
13620 Old Hwy 40 • Boonville, MO 65233
Telephone (660) 882-2734 • Fax (660) 882-7200
www.glenmartin.com
For more information, please contact:
Beau Aero , (660) 882-2734 x209
By JUSTIN WILLETT Columbia Tribune business editor
Published Saturday, October 11, 2008, reprinted with permission. (link)
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| Don Shrubshell photo |
| Chris Rentschler assembles a Martin Aluminum Tower at the Martin Die and Machine Shop in Boonville. The shop is one of three Boonville facilities operated by GlenMartin Inc., which manufactures telecommunication and power transmission towers. |
BOONVILLE - W.C. Martin would hardly recognize the company that has evolved from the small blacksmith shop he started 90 years ago in northwestern Cooper County.
The company, today called GlenMartin Inc., still has Martins at the helm and still is driven by invention and innovation. But its work force and products have changed dramatically over the past nine decades.
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| Don Shrubshell photos |
| Above, Dan Randolph, a welder for GlenMartin Inc., works on a 30-foot tower section at the GlenMartin headquarters in Boonville. The company has 150 employees in Boonville. Below, W.C. Martin works in his machine shop in 1942. Martin began his business as a blacksmith shop in 1918. |
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| Don Shrubshell photos |
| Above, a computer-operated acetylene torch cuts a part from a sheet of steel at GlenMartin. Below, GlenMartin Inc. is celebrating its 90th anniversary on Oct. 24. Glen Martin, second from left, has passed the company to daughter-in-law Sandra Martin, third from left, her husband, Gary (not pictured), and their four sons, from left: Tatum, Beau Aero, Sky and Christopher. |
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| Above, W.C. Martin, right, is shown with his son Glen Martin. |
Today, GlenMartin is a leading designer, manufacturer and installer of towers for telecommunications and power transmission and is being led by the fourth generation of Martins. The company that never had a work force of more than 15 during its first 80 years now has 600 employees who are from - and working on - nearly every continent.
"Each generation took it to a different level," said Glen Martin, who at 85 is long removed from the day-to-day operation of the company but still enjoys "tinkering" in the machine shop. "My son and daughter-in-law grew it ... and all the boys took up different avenues for the company."
The boys are Glen Martin’s grandsons - Christopher, Tatum and Sky Martin and Beau Aero - who each took a different path to a leadership position in the company and together are attracting talented employees, expanding into new markets and developing innovative products.
"It’s been a learning curve," said 28-year-old Beau Aero, purchasing and project manager and de facto family spokesman. "We took good ol’ American ingenuity and mixed it with hard work, and what you see is what you get."
But Aero and his mother, Sandra Martin, president of GlenMartin Inc., are quick to point out that the company’s story is about more than just the Martin family.
"We have really good employees," Aero said. "There is no project that we cannot complete."
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"My dad was an inventor out of necessity," he said, noting that W.C. Martin made furniture, gun stocks and other products.
Glen Martin caught on quickly. He worked alongside his father before joining the Coast Guard in the early 1940s. In the service, Glen Martin was trained as a diesel engineer, but his superiors soon moved him to the machine shop, where he spent the war making parts for German engines at a California base.
After the war, Glen Martin moved to Chicago with his wife, Helen. But when W.C. Martin died in 1960, Glen Martin moved back to Cooper County and took over the family business. He tried to carry on as his father had, but "there wasn’t enough work," he said.
So Glen Martin began seeking contracts for tool and die work and started his career inventing machinery for manufacturers. One of his main contracts was with Rival Co. The Kansas City company hired Glen Martin to figure out how to make the Crock-Pot concept a reality. Glen Martin and his son, Gary Martin, who was working with him by this time, had to figure out a way to incorporate the heating coils into the pot.
Aero said they began with the premise that the coils had to be in the ceramic pot but eventually figured out to separate the pot from the base. Then, they manufactured the machines necessary to produce the Crock-Pots. Glen Martin said the machines they built were capable of producing 100,000 Crock-Pots a week.
But Glen Martin said such work eventually slowed in the late 1970s as manufacturing went overseas, and he had to explore other metalwork. The first product he came up with would put the company on a course that it’s still on today.
The Hazer Tram System attaches to a tower and can be used to lower and raise antennas or other equipment. Glen Martin said Gary Martin developed the name, borrowing the term Hazer from the rodeo world. (In steer wrestling, a hazer keeps a running steer close to the wrestler who is trying to take it down.)
Aero said the Hazer was a big hit because when it was developed in the early 1980s, many amateur radio enthusiasts who picked up the hobby during World War II were not able to climb towers. And being radio operators, they spread the news of the new system. The real breakthrough, however, came when Gary Martin asked a simple question.
The father-and-son duo had developed and demonstrated the Hazer using another company’s tower, but Gary Martin wondered, "Why don’t we make our own tower?"
So they did. They used anodized aluminum, which is strong but lightweight, to create a structure that could be shipped in pieces and bolted together during assembly. They marketed the tower to meteorologists and fellow amateur radio enthusiasts.
The Martin Aluminum Tower, as it became known, still is sold today and is the basis for one of the company’s best-selling towers, a foldable aluminum model that is used by state highway departments for collecting and transmitting data about weather and road conditions.
The Iowa Department of Transportation purchased 10 structures from GlenMartin for its statewide tower replacement program, and Calhoun County, Texas - a rural county on the Gulf Coast - bought a tower to expand the reach of its communications signals.
Neil Fritsch, Precinct 3 Commissioner for Calhoun County, said the 100-foot tower arrived last month and will be used to hold antennas that will boost signals for the sheriff’s office, the fire department, the courthouse and emergency management services.
"We gave them what we were looking for, and they engineered it and delivered it," Fritsch said. "They’ve really given us good customer service. It was a very pleasant experience."
GlenMartin has two other Boonville facilities: MIB, or Martin Industrial Building, which serves as a warehouse and manufacturing facility for the company’s aluminum structures; and its 40,000-square-foot headquarters and manufacturing facility, which the company opened in 1999 at 13620 Old Highway 40, about 1 mile east of the tool and die shop. The company employs about 150 people in Boonville.
Sandra Martin became president of GlenMartin about 12 years ago, around the time the Telecommunications Act of 2006 was signed into law and set the stage for the expansion of the country’s cell phone infrastructure.
"That’s when the boom started for cell phones," Aero said.
The company ramped up production of its galvanized steel self-supporting towers, which are used to hold the antennas of cell phone carriers. The three-legged structures have angular cross braces and don’t require guys to stay up. GlenMartin now produces about 360 of the 250- to 300-foot structures each month, Aero said. Clients include AT&T, Nextel, Verizon, T-Mobile and other carriers as well as tower site leasing companies such as American Tower.
The company also produces monopole towers, which come in "stealth" variations that are disguised as flagpoles or trees. With these towers, the cell phone antennas are on the inside instead of the outside. A couple of GlenMartin’s stealth towers are in Columbia: at Patricia’s on Keene Street and at the Columbia/Boone County Department of Public Health and Human Services on Worley Street.
The company established a manufacturing and trading facility in Tiajian, China, about five years ago, then followed that with an engineering and professional services office in Mexico City about three years ago.
The international growth is spearheaded by Gary Martin (who currently is in China and was unavailable for interview) and his four sons. Sandra Martin jokes that she has to stay on top of every aspect of the business because there have been times when her husband and all of her sons are out of the country. She said Gary Martin often spends about six to eight months overseas each year.
Three of Gary and Sandra Martin’s sons graduated from the University of Missouri: Aero (journalism), Tatum (marketing) and Christopher (engineering) all play big roles in the company. Tatum Martin, 33, is vice president of operations, and Christopher, 34, is director of engineering. Sky, 25, specializes in business management and is manager of the company’s transportation business, Martin Rider LLC. (GlenMartin also has a construction division, Glen Martin Services, and an online supply company called GME Supply.)
"We’ve taken this knowledge and philosophy we’ve got here ... and our long-term goal is to establish other manufacturing locations," Aero said. "By far the strongest growth is happening in the developing world."
Christopher Martin said Mexico City was chosen because it serves as a hub for Latin America. It also helps that the Mexican capital is the home of Latin America’s largest cell phone provider, América Móvil, which is owned by megabillionaire Carlos Slim. América Móvil is one the world’s largest mobile network operators and provides service to more than 150 million wireless subscribers, mostly in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Christopher Martin said most of the towers that GlenMartin designs and builds in Latin America are for América Móvil or one of its companies. He said governments in the region are opening up competition for providers and there is huge demand for the infrastructure.
GlenMartin has projects in Haiti, El Salvador, Mexico and Honduras, and in the past two years has opened locations in Beijing; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Tegucigalpa, Honduras; Kingston, Jamaica; and Panama.
Despite its many successes, there are some challenges: Chief among them is the cost of steel. Aero said the price has gone up 67 percent since the beginning of the year, which hurts when 85 percent of the price the company bids on projects is based on steel. That leaves 15 percent for labor, overhead and profit.
But, as Christopher Martin notes, the company doesn’t want to just sell more steel. It’s developing ways to retrofit existing towers to accommodate heavier loads, reducing the amount of steel needed.
So, in other words, the focus at GlenMartin remains on innovation and invention.
"Our company’s core roots, we’re mechanical engineers," Christopher Martin said. "We apply mechanics to simple structures."