Gov. Mike Beebe, officials from the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and representatives of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority met Friday afternoon in Malvern as businessman Brian Feeney announced plans to build a new plant for Prime-Line.
“The state has helped our company three times, and they have always been great,” he said.
The two state agencies helped Feeney finance not only a new building for his company that manufactures crown mouldings, baseboards, frames for doors and windows, shelves and other wood millwork, but also loaned money for new automated equipment.
“The expansion is a $6.7 million project,” Feeney said, “with a $5.2 million loan for the building and $1.5 for the equipment.”
The company, which earned $31 million this year, also plans on creating 50 new jobs over the next three years, which will more than double Feeney’s workforce of 46 employees.
The new factory will be on 66 acres near the intersection of U.S. 67 and Arkansas 171. Feeney told the Tri-Lakes Edition that the building will include 90,000 square feet for manufacturing, storage and delivery, and 3,000 square feet for offices.
The Prime-Line expansion will also help another Malvern company, said Nikki Launius, executive director of the Malvern/Hot Spring County Chamber of Commerce.
“It is also good news for Flakeboard Malvern MDF,” she said. “They are Prime-Line’s biggest vendor. The new factory is next door to Flakeboard.”
“The move is strategic. We will lower costs being close to our biggest vendor,” Feeney said. “It will take longer to load and unload our trucks with supplies from Flakeboard than it will be to make the delivery. Our trucks will get from their plant to ours without having to hit the road.”
The company owners said Prime-Line will save $16,000 a month in transportation costs by being next to Flakeboard.
“That is a really conservative estimate,” Feeney said. “It could be $20,000 to $25,000 a month.”
Prime-Line, which opened in 1996, is located in a building of the old Reynolds Aluminum Plant on U.S. 270. The site has functioned as an industrial park, with other companies moving into some of the existing buildings over the years.
“The building is long but narrow, and it limits what we can do sometimes,” Feeney said. “But the space has been inexpensive and helped us survive and grow.”
The new equipment will also help the company increase its manufacturing capacity.
“With the automated line, we can make more shelving than we think we could ever sell, but that’s today,” Feeney said. “Work at the new site will start in January, and we should be able to move in next November, and we hope to have the plant running at 100 percent capacity in January 2015.”
Feeney said his company can make up to 1.3 million linear feet of shelving a month — that’s a little more than 2,462 miles of shelves.
The 17-year-old company is moving now because Feeney said he has high expectations for the future.
“All the economists we have heard from say 2015, 2016 and 2017 could be the best years for housing we may have ever seen,” he said. “There is a major shortage of housing in Texas and in other parts of the country, and it should go nationwide. Another major reason is because money is cheap now, and so it is a good time to build a permanent home for the business. Now is the time to invest in the future.”
Prime-Line has tripled its profits in the past four years, Feeney said. The boom started in 2010.
“There was an earthquake in Chile in 2010 that pretty well wiped out the moulding industry there, and all the retailers were looking for a source in the domestic market,” Feeney said. “Everyone was in a panic, and we were taking every order we could get, including promising a large customer that we could get them all they needed.
“We were not sure we could actually do that, but we did, and they are now our largest customer.”
He said the company didn’t really make money during the panic, but it gained market share, and that has made the company’s recent success possible.
“This is my dad’s idea; I just make it work,” Feeney said. “He was a manufacturer’s representative, a salesman. A customer told him moulded trim would be a major product for construction, and he was right.”
Doug Feeney, who then lived with his family in the Northwest, did some market research and decided to move to Malvern. Being close to Flakeboard and its medium-density fiberboard made from wood was a major consideration from the very beginning.
“It is in the middle of the country, so we send trucks out in every direction,” Brian Feeney said. “It was also close to the wood, so it was a very strategic move, for sure.”
Meanwhile, Feeney was in college studying psychology.
“I never took wood shop or anything like that,” Feeney said. “I wasn’t interested. I didn’t know what a saw blade looked like or how to use a tape measure.”
The current CEO said he learned the job by doing it, including spending a summer while in school stacking product and loading the trucks.
“As CEO, I have had to figure out how to keep the business running,” Feeney said. “I have created positions like production supervisor and maintenance.”
He said the company had some hard times, once even being given the advice to shut down.
“I got kicked out of that meeting after I told the experts they were wrong,” Feeney said.
Once he even read in the business newspapers that the company had been sold. It had not.
With new equipment in a new location and big plans ahead, Feeney said, the company has already hired some new people.
“With the automated equipment, we will need higher-skilled labor,” he said. “We used to need people who could stand and feed the wood to the line, but that’s done automatically now.”
He said the recruiting would be handled by Express Personnel Services of Hot Springs.
“We plan on having the hiring spaced out evenly over three years, but if 2015 is as good as they expect, we could do the majority of the hiring then.”
Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (501) 244-4460 or wbryan@arkansasonline.com.