In 2022, a year when many had trouble finding or keeping employees, Windward doubled down on its focus on people.
“We rolled into 2023 with a pretty large backlog and we are able to hire people for the first time in about three years,” says Charlie Emmons, Windward’s executive vice president of sales. “We have a full staff in the factory now, and every morning we pull up and there are people waiting outside the door to fill out an application.”
Because of that, the company has been able to reduce its lead times significantly. They were at 20 weeks for the majority of 2022 and they peeled that back to 15 weeks by the fourth quarter.
The company is now shipping with 12- to 14-week lead times, but Emmons says it will be 10 to 12 weeks very soon.
“We’ve been working very hard to grow our business profitably,” Emmons adds. “And we have been weeding out some of the customers who weren’t working or profitable for us. Those changes helped us have the best year we’ve ever had. 2022 was a killer year for us, the biggest year we’ve ever had. We also rolled into 2023 with a large backlog as well, larger than it has ever been before.”
Both in the MGP business and the aluminum business, changes to production have included creating parts out of MGP that replace the aluminum parts that are hard to get a hold of.
“It’s pretty easy for us to increase our MGP capacity,” Emmons says. “We’re getting very clever with building MGP parts that replace the aluminum parts to streamline our business and our processes. We also took a look at our product line — our colors, samples or fabrics, every little piece of the puzzle. We just asked ourselves what we can do to become a better manufacturer and continue to build and grow in a healthy way.”
And as for a recession throwing a wrench in things, Emmons is optimistic that the company can not only survive, but thrive.
“The feedback that we’ve gotten from dealers so far has been great,” he says. “We were all nervous when the interest rates were going up so quickly and the housing market came to a screeching halt in so many areas. There’s definitely a slowdown overall in the market because of the pandemonium that existed for the past two years was just not sustainable. But the feedback we’re getting from dealers is that it hasn’t cooled off as much as everybody was afraid it was going to.”
He adds that what the pandemic did was make a much larger pie of the outdoor industry, so the overall market is larger than it was going into the pandemic and the frenzy that existed during it is not sustainable.
“I wholeheartedly believe we expanded our market,” Emmons says. “There are so many people in affluent areas that bought outdoor furniture who didn’t previously have plans to do that. The faster that market grows, the more exposure we get as an industry.”
Emmons also says that recession is a mindset. What he means is, there are always opportunities to grow your business if you think proactively.
“You have to make the opportunities work for you,” he says. “We can’t focus on what we can’t control. But we can focus on bringing in new business that’s still out there. And that’s what it’s all about — just go find a way to grab it and make it yours.”
