Photograph by Shane Van Boxtel, Image Studios
The wood smell and “ker-chunk, ker-chunk” sound made it easy for Oshkosh Door President and Chief Operating Officer Chris Calawerts, an admitted manufacturing and construction junkie, to fall in love with the company he leads today.
It’s a company where, over the course of nearly two centuries, love may have been lost and found again many times.
Like many enterprises in Oshkosh, the heritage of Oshkosh Door Company originates with the behemoth Paine Lumber Company. From 1900-1940, Paine was widely recognized as the largest door manufacturer in the world, pioneering technologies that transformed both product and industry. More than 170 years after its founding, the company remains a leader in architectural grade, solid core and flush wood doors — but its trajectory has been far from a straight, happy line.
“I don’t know how it all fell apart, but they went from being the largest manufacturer in our area to almost gone,” Calawerts says.
Today, under the ownership of North Carolina-based Todd Robinson and the leadership of Calawerts, the company is building back up with ambitious growth goals, as well as an internal attitude Calawerts can best describe as leading with love.
Maybe it’s cheesy or cliché, Calawerts says, but he doesn’t care.
“I’ll stand in front of 136 people and tell them I love them,” he says. “There’s probably half of them that go, ‘What the hell’s this guy talking about?’ But I always explain it. You know that this is my favorite place to be. You are my favorite friends, and I love you guys …
Because if you love somebody, you’re not gonna screw them over.”
Jumping in
Calawerts came to Oshkosh Door in 2014, accepting a role as sales and marketing manager through a corporate recruiter. He had cut his teeth in the family business VerHalen, Inc., a construction firm and Pella window dealer, and the desire to get back into the construction industry felt “like home.”
After a short stint shadowing the company’s long-time business developer, Calawerts picked up the business quickly and proved a great fit for his job, which he describes primarily as building and maintaining customer relationships — something that comes naturally to the fun-loving, gregarious father of six.
But while he was on the road meeting customers, Calawerts in many ways had the luxury of ignoring the warning signs that would contribute to a 2017 incident that brought the company to a screeching halt, and Calawerts to his knees.
“Our pumps went out in a piece of equipment that they couldn’t repair. We were shut down for 17 days,” Calawerts says. “People canceled orders. People charged us fees for not delivering doors to the job site. It was a horrible mess of an insurance claim, and our president at the time couldn’t pull us out of it.”
Calawerts had spent his first year in the sales manager role selling, he says, and the second year apologizing. He was treading water.
“I approached Todd, the owner. It wasn’t getting any better, so I said it’s going to be time for me to go,” Calawerts remembers. “And he said, ‘What would you do?’”
Over a steak dinner at Lombardi’s, Calawerts shared about 20 answers to that question. The next day, Robinson called and made him president. And that’s when Calawerts’ real work started.
“I started to understand: Oh my God, these people don’t really want to be here. They’re not happy, or all they care about is their wages,” he says, adding that favoritism ran rampant on the plant floor.
“I had jumped into the middle of a fire that I didn’t understand.”
‘We can do it’
Calawerts recruited seasoned manufacturing leader Mark Westemeier to Oshkosh Door as operations director in 2017, and Westemeier says he accepted because he likes a challenge.
“I always tell people I like fixer-uppers,” Westemeier says. “However, this one was a little bit more than a fixer-upper.”
Westemeier, who is now a company vice president, describes inheriting a culture of bad pay, unfair work hours, infighting, lack of accountability and favoritism. Calawerts put his full trust in Westemeier to help turn operations around.
“He allows me to do things,” Westemeier says of his boss. “I don’t think he’s turned down any of my proposals since I’ve been here, and … we’ve been moving this freight train forward, constantly improving, which has been a fun, fun thing.”
Westemeier has helped the company make critical equipment investments, add a second shift, and create the company’s “SOS” program that allows a custom door to reach a customer in mere days. The average wage has increased from $13 to $23 per hour, and door output in Oshkosh has increased from 280 to 700 per day. Claims, Westemeier says, have dropped from about $342,000 five years ago to $78,000 today. In addition to the SOS program, Oshkosh Door’s lead times are three to four weeks, compared to six to 13 weeks offered by competitors, Westemeier says: “We’re all about flexibility.” [continued] »
In 2018, Oshkosh Door acquired Neenah-based Edgewater Door, which plans to construct a brand-new, 45,000-square-foot facility on Schultz Drive next year. Today, Calawerts holds the title of president and COO for Oshkosh Door, Edgewater Door and sister company Oregon Door in Winston, Oregon. Oshkosh Door has grown 211%, Calawerts says, with “more on the way.”
But for every example of success, there are still examples of adversity. Calawerts was working on site at Oregon Door Jan. 28, 2022 when his phone started buzzing in his Portland hotel room at 3:30 a.m.
“I let it go, and then it did it again,” he recalls. “I picked it up, and it’s Mark saying the building’s on fire.”
A glue pot had overheated, starting a fire that caused more than $3 million in damage, including destruction of the plant’s main assembly line for cutting doors and adhering edge banding. The building’s sprinklers deployed as expected to douse the fire, and the best news of all was that no one was injured, Calawerts says, but the fire “could have burned the entire plant down.”
Looking back today, Calawerts marvels at the contrast between how Oshkosh Door responded to the 2017 equipment failure and to the 2022 fire.
Whereas many employees threw up their hands in 2017, the team in 2022 “all kicked in and did what we had to do to make it happen,” Calawerts says. “That adversity challenged everybody and revealed character we hadn’t seen before. It’s that attitude of ‘we can do it; we can make it happen’ that has now become our personality.”
‘We hire for heart’
Julie Holcomb, Oshkosh Door’s VP of human resources, remembers the scene: Gelid sprinkler water filling the hallways
on a cold winter morning she was supposed to have off. After surveying the scene, she hopped in her car, drove to Fleet Farm and bought up all the rubber boots, warm socks and squeegees she could find.
“We were making sure that we could get it cleaned up as quickly as possible, yet we were still trying to take care of people,” says Holcomb, an experienced HR pro who acknowledges the company culture is something that has kept her in her role at Oshkosh Door longer than she had initially planned. She says she has seen company turnover drop from close to 99% down to about 15% this year. Calawerts says hiring Holcomb in 2017 was his first key move in transforming company culture, and it has paid dividends.
“I’ve seen such a change in people here,” says Westemeier, who along with Holcomb credits Calawerts’ unique spirit and positivity for setting up success.
“Every day he would walk into my office and say ‘What can I do for you today? I know you’ve got a lot going on here; what can I do to help out?’” Holcomb says. “And that’s just sort of the theme we have here. You know, we want people to be successful.”
“We hire for heart. We can teach them how to do anything if they have a good heart,” says Westemeier, who adds that most employees are now extensively cross-trained and willing to pitch in where needed. “We know what we need to do and have fun doing it.”
Calawerts, who loves hugs, jokes, gifts, country music and impromptu dance parties in addition to making his 45-minute commute to work every day, relishes meeting prospective employees on “day zero” — meaning he intercepts them in the lobby when they come for a job interview and strikes up a conversation, then puts in a good word with Holcomb. If they’re hired, they get a special “day zero” shout-out from the boss at company meetings. (“It lets people know that he sees them,” Holcomb says.)
The heart-centered approach to HR is non-negotiable for Calawerts, who asks prospective employees questions like what motivates them and what makes them proud.
“It’s about bringing in people for the right reason,” he says. “It’s about loving everybody, and if you do that, every decision you make is done out of love and care and concern. You can make tough decisions if you’re doing it for that reason.”
‘It’s who they are’
Gina Angeli, an organizational design and leadership consultant who has known Calawerts for about a decade, says Calawerts is doing exactly the job he’s meant to be doing. While his caring nature is what stands out the most, she says, his business acumen is equally impressive.
“Chris has evolved the organization and the leadership team,” Angeli says. “He has high expectations of them, knowing that he has to be focused on how the organization is growing.”
Calawerts is proud to say Oshkosh Door is “people-centered,” but he also knows such labels can induce eye-rolling.
“It’s probably overused,” he says.
But in a sea of organizations that promote themselves as caring about people, Angeli says Oshkosh Door truly deserves the label.
“A lot of organizations talk about doing community outreach, or that they’re supportive of the community, they’re supportive of the family and their employees, they do leadership development and all this stuff, all these programs — but they’re programs,” she says. “The difference with the Oshkosh Door crew is that they don’t have to do a program for it, it’s just who they are.”
