OFS Brands is a privately held, family owned business in which three generations of the family are actively involved. Talk to any family member about what’s important about the business, and two words come up repeatedly: people and wood. Not market share or net profit or any of the financial ratios, but people and wood.
At 91, Phyllis Menke, the first of the aforementioned three generations, plays an important role in the company. She greets visitors to its headquarters in Huntingburg, IN, as well as many of the visitors to the NeoCon showroom each year. In her greeting to the Huntingburg campus, she talks about the company’s connection to wood and shares her memories of planting trees on what was a sustainability project before the word sustainability was in the common lexicon – the company tree farm her father stated out of concern for conservation and for access to wood in perpetuity.While it has been involved in the workplace furnishings industry for only 30 years, the sense of heritage imbued in its current leadership goes back at least 135 years to a time when previous generations were manufacturing wooden covered wagons.[Image: 2016.0822.OFS2.Hank Menke][Caption: Hank Menke, President and CEO of OFS Brands. Photo by Jeff Beck for officeinsight]
Some branches of the family tree have been making furniture for more than 80 years and on both his parents’ sides of the family, president and CEO Hank Menke says they have been in the furniture business for at least 50 years; residential at first and then office furniture 30 years ago, when as the young leader of the organization, he didn’t like what he saw happening to the residential industry and pivoted from producing residential furniture to office furniture, renaming the company OFS
The thing Mr. Menke saw in the residential industry that he didn’t like was the trend of moving the manufacturing to China. He was committed to keeping his employees employed. “Our most important asset is our people,” is a cliché that spills off the lips of executives easily, even as they are planning to move whole departments overseas, but when any of the Menke family says it, you can believe it.
In a recent interview with Ryan Menke, senior vice president, sales and marketing, he said ”The great thing about being family owned is that we are able to take the long view and do what we think is best for the business and for our 1,700
employees, and that has always been good for the family.”
Applying that long term thinking to growth, over the years OFS has evolved into OFS Brands through the acquisition of companies that complemented the parent in one way or another. Buying Carolina Furniture gave OFS access to the healthcare market, buying Loewenstein brought access to the hospitality sector and Highmark filled a void in the company’s ergonomic seating offering.
But while access to markets was a factor in the acquisitions, Ryan Menke says, “We start with people first. That’s our brand in a word, ‘people.’ You look at other companies out there, and if you think of their brand in a word, it may be design or research or marketing, but we’ve always thought the word that best describes our brand is people. And that drives our decision making.
“Our most recent acquisition, Highmark, has an outstanding product portfolio that 
fills a gap in our product offering, but most important to us was the people that came with it; the new talent and the new relationships. And the relationships in this instance are really from around the world. This week, we’ve had folks in from England and Australia working on new product designs, and those relationships came with the Highmark acquisition.”
As an outside observer, I think it’s important to draw a distinction between companies that integrate acquisitions in a positive way, honoring and learning from the people in the acquired company and those companies that for a variety of reasons, including overreaching financial goals, or worse, management arrogance, never actually reap the potential benefits of the transaction. It seems that OFS Brands, even in the choice of its name falls into the former category.
According to Ryan Menke the key to getting the most out of an acquisition is listening and being empathetic but obsessively asking “Why?” It is this essential respect for people’s perspective that allows a company to build upon what it has acquired instead of shrinking it.
“John Phillips, our new VP of design development, came to us through the Highmark acquisition, and his design background in the auto industry has brought us a lot of new ideas and perspectives. We’ve also asked many of our distribution partners what they are seeing in their businesses and what they need.”
Not all new people, relationships and ideas have come to OFS through acquisition. Says Mr. Menke, “Over the years we’ve been fortunate to work with some very talented thought leaders in the industry, from Pam Light and John Duffy to Primo Orpilla, Daniel Korb and more recently Brian Graham.
“I believe if you are truly empathetic and you’re keenly interested in what people are saying, you’re going to be more pragmatic and you’re going to arrive at different and better results long term.”
Listening to people and being empathetic doesn’t mean not making changes. In fact, Mr. Menke says, “All the asking why and the discussions and responses have led us to reorganize my team to get a hyper-focus on solutions to settings regardless of our various brands. We understand that our clients are looking for solutions for various work settings and we need to tune our business with that understanding.
“So in a major shift, we’ve taken Stan Gray, who has done a fantastic job with our Carolina brand, and made him VP of brand experience across all the brands. He now has responsibility for insuring that every company – customer touch point conveys our brand value proposition consistently.”
Being open and empathetic can also bring rewards from unexpected places. While engaged in philanthropic work in the community, Mr, Menke met Joe Deetz, president and CEO of Visual Magnetics, an innovative company making “wide format magnetic materials.” The two struck up a friendship that has blossomed into the partnership that produced the printed super-graphic that was magnetically attached to the front wall of the OFS NeoCon showroom as well as the magnetically attached shelves shown at the show. The potential for cooperation and product development seems great with development plans underway for quick-change magnetically attached wall coverings of everything from dry erase material to fabric and veneer.
Access to capital as a result of a history of success, long-term thinking, and being people centered and empathetic are all favorable indicators of the future success and wellbeing of the company and its 1,700 employees. OFS seems poised for more growth and even better results in the future.
