Hartford Business Journal

HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM | NOVEMBER 11, 2024 15 Building Ideas That Work... Building Ideas That Work... © 2011 BlueScope Buildings North America, Inc. All rights reserved. Butler Manufacturing ™ is a division of BlueScope Buildings North America, Inc. For more than 80 years, Borghesi Building & Engineering Co., Inc. has provided quality and reliability with design and energy efficient construction. 860.482.7613 | BorghesiBuilding.com 2155 East Main Street, Torrington, Connecticut 06790 With an attractive design, it presents to your customers a comfortable relaxing environment to help promote sales. PROJECT SPOTLIGHT: COUNTER WEIGHT BREWING When quality finishes and an attractive functional interior are required, our fine craftsmen provide the ultimate details. the governorship of Kentucky. Enter cousin Cici. "I just reached out and said, 'hey, you might want another Bevin leading the company.' And he was very pleased to have that happen," she said. "I really never had a title, to be honest with you. When I first came, it was just sort of come in and do what you can do." And she had barely started her tenure when Doug Dilla, the man who had been running the company's oper- ations for some three decades, and held a lot of the institutional knowl- edge in his head, suffered a health emergency and ended up in a coma. "So, I went from the frying pan right into the fire," Bevin said. "I had about six months of a level of stress that's really hard to replicate. It was a very, very steep learning curve." To add to the stress, Bevin's marketing expertise occasionally proved challenging for a company that still relied on the old way of doing things, and has only around 25 to 30 employees, depending on the season. The game plan Her strategy has been to boost sales of specific bells by placing them in gift catalogs. Her first foray was with a boxing ring bell that she had featured in Uncommon Goods, as a potential man-cave holiday gift. "The catalog dropped on November 1st and on November 3rd they called and they said 'we're gonna need 2,500 more of that bell,'" she recalls. All good except that bell is by far the company's most complex and labor-intensive item, built of more than 20 components. The same happened with one of the company's most famous bells, the Christmas-themed ornament linked to the movie "It's a Wonderful Life." Bevin again cut a deal with a catalog to feature the bell — this time on the cover. The buyer had asked for an initial run of 2,500. "Ultimately, they sold 15,000 pieces," Bevin said. To keep up with demand, Bevin said she personally drove bells across state lines — to Rhode Island and Massachusetts — to get them silver plated and engraved. All of this activity has been reflected in the company's financial results. According to Bevin, between 2016 and 2023, the company's total income rose 86% while gross profit went up 195%. And in 2018, she drove Bevin Bros.' net income into the black for the first time in many years. A blip followed during COVID, but she says 2022 was the company's biggest year for revenues in recent history, and she expects 2024 to match it. She declined to disclose specific numbers on financial performance. 'Drive for growth' Dilla, the former operations overseer, has now retired, and the production supervisor role is filled by Ben Favreau, who joined Bevin after a career with specialty engineered materials manufacturer Rogers Corp. in Moosup. He and Bevin have been working together on several initiatives aimed at modernizing the manufacturing floor so that it can keep up with its new marketing reach. Favreau has taken the lead on smoothing out production sched- ules so that the company isn't strained every year by the inevi- table pre-Christmas rush. The two have also brought in consultants to implement new smart manu- facturing techniques, giving each employee new tasks or training to bring the company up to date with 21st-century practices. "Seeing the drive for growth that both Cici and I have has been amazing," Favreau said. He has his eye particularly on expanding Bevin's secondary cylinders business. "The bells are the legacy," Favreau said. "The cylinders are where the growth is." Rapid growth in that side of the business is one of the pillars driving a new plan that Bevin has dubbed Vision 200. "What's this company going to look like when we turn 200 in 2032?" she asks. "That's eight years from now. … We have an aggressive plan that we've put forth to triple the size of this business in the next eight years." Another question she's mulling — is there a seventh-generation Bevin that will step up to keep this busi- ness in the family? So far, she says, there's no sign of it. "Matt and I have acknowledged together, that's kind of the next big thing he and I have to work out," she said. Bevin's production foreman Abdirahim Hussein works with scrap metal created in the production of cowbells.

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