Bonnie Spencer Swayze

Correction: Former President Bill Clinton graduated from Hot Springs High School. This article misidentified the high school from which Clinton graduated.

HOT SPRINGS -- As president of Alliance Rubber Co. since 2008, Bonnie Spencer Swayze is like the product her family-owned, privately held company produces -- rubber bands. She's strong, steadfast, reliable, and can be stretched without breaking.

In the early 1970s, Swayze was 17 and a freshman beginning her studies in marketing and business at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. She would never complete that degree. Instead, her father, William H. Spencer, then 80 and the founder of the company, tapped her to drop out of school and begin working full time at the company he'd founded.

"He wanted me to work in the business and I realized it was an offer I wasn't going to be able to refuse," Swayze, now 61, recalls with a chuckle. "But it worked out great."

She began in production and later worked as an accounting administrator.

Her father, who had an eighth-grade education and had attended school in a one-room schoolhouse, was very set in his ways, she says. "And this was back in 1971."

Spencer began the company in Alliance, Ohio, in 1923, a year after he'd begun cutting bicycle tire inner tubes into thin strips to produce rubber bands.

Today, Swayze logs 70- to 80-hour work weeks leading the charge at the company, which remains the nation's largest manufacturer of rubber bands. Her staff of 178 employees is expected to churn out 15 million pounds of product this year and an estimated 17 million in 2016 in the 150,000-square-foot factory.

She attended some night courses in business at Western Kentucky University, and she has attended business seminars for the last 30 years. Much of her education comes from experience.

"My brother, sister and the associates taught me, and I learned by doing," she says.

"I have a Ph.D. from the School of Hard Knocks from being in a family business," she explains. "You are expected to be Dr. Phil, Dr. Drew, Oprah, a Shark Tanker, a fortuneteller about raw materials, a lawyer, a CPA, a negotiator, an HR specialist, and a security guard, all the while searching for the most talented people who can help you develop new products to compete with vicious and brutal offshore competition. I have alligator skin from fighting importers who pay $1.50 per hour and no benefits to their Thai and Chinese workers.

"I have a deep appreciation for why Dr. Phil is worth $280 million," Swayze says. "It's because he does not sugarcoat the truth when he helps people. People need to hear the truth."

Despite the challenges she faces daily, it's obvious she has a passion for the family business and revels in it.

Swayze's longtime friend Sondra Seba Hemenway of McLean, Va., agrees that the rubber band analogy is a good one for describing Swayze.

"Bonnie always bounces back," she says. "In high school, she was voted Most Likely to Succeed, but I think she's surpassed even those expectations."

The two met in grade school at Lakeside Elementary in Hot Springs and went on to graduate together in 1971 from former President Bill Clinton's alma mater, Lakeside High. Hemenway, who worked for the Clinton presidential campaign and then in his administration for several years, is currently a managing partner of Seba Hemenway Enterprises, a Washington-based consulting firm specializing in global public relations, outreach and women's issues.

She believes the secret to her friend's success is her passion and dedication to the business.

"She loves Alliance Rubber," Hemenway says of Swayze. "She lives and breathes it."

"When I think of Bonnie, a smile comes to my face," Hemenway says. "I call her Big, Bold, Brassy, Beautiful Bonnie. She really is a marketing genius, but even more important than that is that she is kind. Bonnie has spunk and humanity and she gets both of those qualities from her mother."

"The real challenge is balancing a lot of things at once," says sister Wanda Spencer, 57, of Truth or Consequences, N.M. Swayze's sister worked at the company for 24 years, 18 as president. She said her strong suit was accounting; Swayze's is sales and marketing.

"You have to wear a whole lot of hats at once and have to do it well," Spencer says. "And Bonnie does. She is a Renaissance woman."

Their father expected all four of his children to be involved in the family business.

"He was a very powerful businessman and a very powerful personality," Spencer says. "And he didn't want to retire. He ... came home one day and finally said, 'I'm not going back to the office anymore.'"

Spencer retired in 2004 and began Spiritiles, an Atlanta-based art tiles company, with her son. The copper and vitreous ceramic tiles with inspirational sayings are sold in more than 200 galleries across the nation.

STRETCHING FOR

NEW DEMAND

The company reached its height of production in the early 2000s when it reached an annual production of 25 million pounds. But in recent years, demand has decreased in two industries that used rubber bands the most -- newspapers and the postal industry.

In turn, Swayze set the company's sights on filling the void and creating a new demand -- and markets -- for the classic rubber bands made of latex rubber imported from Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

And as technology races forward, Swayze is looking for ways to stretch the once simple tool with new uses -- as large straps used for exercise or physical therapy, crafting, electronic cable wraps, even securing daily-changing restaurant menus to clipboards.

There are also lobster bands, fragrance bands, nonlatex bands, corner-to-corner bands, eraselets (which can also be used as erasers), craft bands, and imprinted ones like the yellow "Live Strong" wristbands cyclist Lance Armstrong made popular in 2004. The military's special forces units use some of the factory's products to silence and secure soldiers' gear on the front lines where any slight, unintentional noise can expose soldiers' locations and mean the difference between life and death.

The company has entered the advertising specialty market with new technology that allows photographs and full-color, digital-quality graphics to be printed on larger bands.

"The ad specialty section is the company's smallest but is where the more innovative products are made," Swayze says.

Oaklawn has been a big customer of Alliance bands. The jockeys use wristbands to hold the cuffs of their silks in place, and they tossed wristbands to the crowds at Hot Springs' St. Patrick's Day parade.

The company is also hoping to adopt cheap, practical products to buffer personal technology (laptops and smartphones) against bangs and breaks.

"You either adapt or you die," Swayze says.

THE TIES THAT BIND

Today the expansive factory is a two-story metal building with wide open spaces inside and a concrete floor on 33 acres. Machinery on the upper level drops out the rubber bands in 425-pound bales from the upper floor to the first level.

In 1944, Swayze's father opened the Hot Springs shop on its original 19 acres.

Before he entered the rubber band business, he'd grown up on a farm in Franklin, Ky., and first visited Hot Springs in 1921 when he was working on the Pennsylvania Railroad. He had arthritis and loved Hot Springs for the baths.

Swayze's mother, Anna Jean, who currently owns a majority share of the company, began working for Alliance in 1945 when the company was still based in Cleveland. He was 18 years older and the two later married in Hot Springs.

"Mom was the corporate secretary," Swayze says of her mother, who recently turned 91. "She was always a kind and giving and loving person; everything we learned about humanity we learned from our mother."

For a while the company also had factories in Franklin at a 50,000-square-foot plant there that closed in 1997 as well as in Ohio and Arkansas with the family having homes in all three locales. But today, the business is based solely in Hot Springs, where Swayze spent the majority of her childhood.

Swayze's father worked at the business until retiring in 1976 at age 85. He passed away in 1986 at 94.

Today, Swayze's older brother Richard, who earlier served as president for about eight years (1976-1978 and 2004-2008), still works for Alliance; so does their younger sister Susie. And a new generation of the family is aboard with two of Swayze's cousins employed there -- Michelle Spencer Hitt, who is in charge of social media, and Brandi Spencer, who works as the comptroller.

"It's long hours when you have a family business," Swayze says, adding that her husband, Bruce, also works there in outside sales.

The two met and married in 1978 and he joined the business in the early 1980s. When they met, Bruce was working professionally as a wrestler known as "Beautiful Bruce Swayze" and living in Nashville, close to Franklin. The couple have two sons. Beau, now 30, lives and works in Los Angeles in music management, and Billy, 28, works as a musician in Nashville.

Bonnie Swayze is also involved in the music industry -- she's a part-time lyricist, writing the words to dozens of country music songs, most notably Billy Currington's 2008 single, "Heal Me," which appeared on his album A Little Bit of Everything. She's been writing poetry since high school.

In her 20s Swayze was a part-time model, you might say. A friend in Nashville sent her on some auditions, and Swayze appeared in national commercials including one with country musician Roy Clark for Pringles potato chips, and another one for Dr Pepper with actor David Naughton (who, wearing a vest, sang and danced his way through "Be a Pepper" commercials -- it helped launch his career).

And for those wondering about her surname, yes, Bruce Swayze is related to the late actor Patrick Swayze. "My husband is distantly -- distantly -- distantly -- very remotely related to Patrick Swayze," she says. But he did visit with the actor on the set of Road House.

THE RIGHT MOTIVATION

Most of her company's competition is overseas in places like Thailand and China. Despite the fierce competition, Alliance survives because it's a superior quality product made by Arkansans with a strong work ethic, she says. "Our average wage is 11 times [theirs] with the fringe benefits on top of that," Swayze says. "More than two-thirds of the company's employees have been there for more than five years."

Alliance's employee turnover rate last year was less than 5 percent, Swayze says. The average is 11 percent to 15 percent depending on industry and region.

"Happy people give you happy customers," she explains, adding that her employees are also offered benefits and incentives such as a health and wellness initiative that includes a Biggest Loser contest, paid gym memberships and boot camps, and annual health fairs and paid health checkups.

There used to be more American competition.

"There were about 10 manufacturing companies like ours in the United States 25 years ago," she says.

"When you manufacture in the United States, there are several advantages for the buyer, including shorter lead time and fresher supply," Swayze says of her company, which has more than 2,000 customers in 55 countries.

What would her father think of the state of the business he began nearly a century ago?

"I think he would be proud," Swayze says, smiling. "He would be happy to see the company thriving and growing."

High Profile on 07/05/2015