Bruce Davis is searching for a way to redefine Kanawha Manufacturing the same way his grandfather did when he transitioned the business from building mine cars to creating and servicing parts for coal-fired power plants in the 1960s.
As the fourth-generation owner and operator of the Charleston-based business, Davis is eager to find new opportunities for his 113-year-old company and to ensure that Kanawha Manufacturing continues to serve businesses in West Virginia.
Kanawha Manufacturing, which has operated out of the East End of Charleston since 1902, has been serving its industrial customers for decades by fabricating steel and other metal parts from scratch.
Davis refers to the business as a "jobs shop." The company has no product lines that it creates on a regular basis, leaving it to rely on the market for custom-made parts - specialty items that industrial customers can't find anywhere else.
"If the customer has a problem they need to solve, we can solve that for them," Davis said as he toured the company's large industrial workshop, located off Dixie Street.
While that business model has served Kanawha Manufacturing well in previous decades, Davis has had to shrink his operations recently to reduce costs and bring the company in line with the shrinking market it serves. To do so, Davis has had to lay off dozens of longtime employees, some of whom had been with the company for decades.
That decision was not an easy one to make for Davis and Kanawha Manufacturing's other executives. For years, Davis said, he has prided himself on keeping his staff employed, even when the company has suffered from cyclical downturns in business. He would find general maintenance work around the shop for the underutilized employees until business improved.
But the demise of several coal-fired power plants in the region and the slumping economy in West Virginia has recently forced Davis' hand. In a news release sent out to announce the recent layoffs, Davis wrote, "We have to downsize to be able to continue to serve our customers and employ as many people as possible."
The need to tighten up the company's operations isn't because Davis and his employees can't compete with other shops. The East End manufacturing facility has everything needed to handle even the largest custom manufacturing job, including plasma cutters that can slice through steel plating, metal brakes capable of bending steel over an inch thick and overhead cranes capable of lifting the largest projects in and out of the workshop.
"We're a general shop," Davis said. "We can do pretty much anything."
As Davis walked through the shop Wednesday, his remaining employees were hard at work reconstructing coal pulverizers - large disks used to crush coal into a powder - that would be installed at power plants all over the East Coast. Others were busy welding parts for gas turbines that would be bought by Siemens. Another group - employed by subsidiary Quail Ridge Construction Co. - was preparing to sandblast, weld and repaint two 42,000-pound tanks that would be shipped to coal-fired power plants near Cincinnati.
Making sure the company continues to operate isn't just about making a profit for Davis or saving the jobs of his remaining employees. It also is about preserving what his family created.
"There's a lot of history here," Davis said as he walked over the metal shavings and welding slag left from previous jobs. He recounted the fire that burned part of the workshop in the 1930s, and excitedly explained how a metal boring machine had served the company from the early 1900s up until a few years ago.
Davis remembers listening to stories about how his father watched from the workshop as the old West Virginia state Capitol, in downtown Charleston, burned in 1921, and how the East End sprung up around the Dixie Street location after the new Capitol was created.
He is imminently proud of the families that have had multiple generations of employees who worked at Kanawha Manufacturing. He was able to point out numerous surnames adorning a stone monument in front of the company office that had father-and-son pairs that labored in the workshop.
While the company has continually had to reinvent itself and find additional markets over the past 100 years, Davis said the need to diversify and find new clients has become more common over the past decade.
"It used to be once in a generation," Davis said. "Now it's once every five years."
Most of Kanawha Manufacturing's difficulties stem from the closure of several regional coal-fired power plants that were shut down because of the plants' age and recent regulations on sulfur and mercury emissions.
The Kanawha River Power Plant, located in Glasgow, was one of his primary customers, Davis said. But with that power station closed, Kanawha Manufacturing no longer profits from repairing the plant's ductwork and boilers or refurbishing pieces of the plant's pulverizers, chutes and hoppers that handled the coal.
The company still repairs equipment at the John Amos plant near Winfield and other newer power plants, but Davis said those plants don't require as many repairs as the Kanawha River and the other recently retired plants.
"The older power plants needed more maintenance," Davis said.
In the past five years, Davis had been hopeful that the influx of natural gas development in West Virginia would benefit his business and his employees, offering another avenue for business, but as the price of natural gas has plummeted because of overproduction, Davis has begun to worry that market might have dried up, too.
Next to the company's gravel parking lot, sit several custom-made pieces of equipment needed for the construction and maintenance of gas pipelines. Davis said he received the order for the 20-foot-long "launchers and receivers" - pieces of pipeline that allow operators to clean out any liquids that are trapped inside sections of the line - several months ago.
After ordering the parts, though, Davis said EQT, one of the largest gas producers in the state, hasn't come to pick them up.
Still, Davis said the welded sections of pipe are an example of the type of high-quality work his employees can perform. He said every component of the EQT project had to be by the book, including the seamless welding beads, the 90-degree elbows bent into the pipes and the final coat of glossy paint that covers even the base.
Davis said every aspect of the project underwent quality-control testing. The welds were X-rayed, to look for weaknesses, the angles of the elbows were double checked and the entire apparatus was pressure tested at 2,400 psi for four hours - 50 percent higher than the pipeline's operating pressure - to make sure it could stand up to the rigors to the job.
"Everything is documented," Davis said, as he stood back to appreciate the work.
Even if the price of gas goes back up, Davis said he is aware that natural gas extraction won't maintain the same amount of work that Kanawha Manufacturing received from coal mining and coal-fired power plants. He said the initial gas development - drilling the wells, building pipelines and constructing the condensing stations - could provide some work, but once that development phase is complete, there won't be as much recurring business.
"Once the build-out is done, there's basically no maintenance," Davis said. "The boom can last for years, but not for fabrication."
Davis is doing everything he can to improve his customer base. In sales calls and business meetings, he has pitched Kanawha Manufacturing's prices, flexibility, quality assurance and delivery service.
Right now, Davis said, he is focusing on building clientele in the immediate area, but if that isn't enough to sustain his business, he will market the company's services to industries farther afield.
Either way, he said, the amount of jobs that his employees work on every week might need to increase by three times the current rate.
"The intent is not only to maintain the customer base that we have, but to expand that," Davis said, adding that he has no plan to give up on his family's business anytime soon.