Published April 2002

2002 Executive of the Year:

Bill Weaver enjoys seeing
BUSINESS & PEOPLE GROW

Canyon Creek Cabinet CEO has led company
to increased sales, new markets

By John Wolcott
Herald Business Journal Editor

Bill Weaver discovered his zest for working with wood early in life. When he was 9, growing up in New Jersey, his family hired “an old Italian carpenter” to fix up their house.

Weaver never tired of watching the craftsman working his magic with wood, surrounded by rising piles of chips, shavings and sawdust. He never forgot that feeling.

Years later, after a tour of duty with the U.S. Navy, he remembered that youthful experience and discovered he still wanted to “build things and work with wood,” he said. The next few years found him apprenticing in a cabinet shop in Idaho, then following his trade from job to job around the Northwest, even spending a couple of years selling cabinets to retailers and a stint with Tiz’s Doors in Everett.

At one point, he landed in Mount Vernon and stayed long enough to enroll in middle-management business courses at Skagit Valley College, one of the “smartest things I ever did,” Weaver said, grinning.

A love of wood, years of experience working with cabinetry, learning sales techniques and soaking up management and business skills paid off for Weaver when he joined the 14-year-old Cascade Cabinet Co. in 1995, after it was purchased by Beltecno Industries of Nagoya, Japan.

“We changed our product line to custom and semi-custom products in the middle to higher-end price ranges and began growing, helped by the fact that we were doing the right things just as the economy was picking up,” Weaver said, adding that the name was also changed to Canyon Creek Cabinet Co.

Once the company’s Sales and Marketing Vice President, Weaver later became Executive Vice President in 1999 and then moved up to CEO, 18 months ago.

For Weaver, one of the most rewarding experiences is “seeing the development process” as a company grows and “watching people grow, too,” he said.

“I love the accomplishments — we took a $14 million company and 140 employees and grew it into a $50 million company last year with 410 people — but it’s the dynamics of watching the people grow that really inspires me,” he said.

Sometimes watching that growth — for a business as well as its employees — is painful, he added.

“It’s not always warm and fuzzy. The first three years were tough. We were growing like crazy and our facilities were totally inadequate ... then a fire took out a third of our plant. We were operating out of three buildings and trying to build another one,” he said.

That new, 196,000-square-foot headquarters in Monroe consolidated all of the firm’s shops and offices and streamlined operating, launching Canyon Creek on a new course to profitability. Already the company is approaching the $60 million-a-year sales volume the plant was designed to handle at maximum capacity.

Currently, however, the slowing economy has temporarily reduced sales, forcing revised projections of about 7 percent less in revenue than a year ago, Weaver said, but “we’re still awfully busy ... if this market is supposed to be ‘bad,’ then I’ll take more of ‘bad,’ ” he said.

Because the company is learning how to maximize the benefits of its large facility, along with applying energy conservation and recycling procedures to lower costs, profits have only slipped slightly, he said.

Serving customers well has also kept sales up in a sluggish economy, despite the demise of the $500,000 to $1 million-plus home market that helped fuel the company’s growth during the boom years of high-tech, dot-com companies.

“We always try to deliver on time, even if we have to make (costly) changes internally to avoid putting our production delays on the backs of our customers. You always pay one way or another, either to make deliveries on time or when alienated customers go to another supplier,” Weaver said.

Canyon Creek Cabinet’s high-end home and office furnishing products are primarily marketed through a network of distributors and homebuilders, as well as being showcased on the company’s Web site.

But the Monroe plant also welcomes 25 to 30 visitors a day for a tour of one of the Northwest’s most expansive displays of kitchen decors in a variety of colors, styles and woods. Designs revolve around Canyon Creek’s Cornerstone collection of traditional framed cabinetry and its European-style decor in its Millennia line.

Over the years, the company’s designers and wood workers have created one of the most extensive lines of custom cabinetry in the world, offering more than 4,500 different combinations of door styles, shapes, sizes and finishes, including oak and cherry wood.

Since families often visit the showroom, the company has built a child’s-scale kitchen display that provides entertainment for youngsters while their parents talk with sales staff about the full-scale models.

Because Canyon Creek also designs and builds furniture for home offices, family rooms, libraries and media rooms, the company even encourages visitors to tour its executive offices to see varieties of its furniture products in use.

As for expansion markets, the company is well along in negotiations with a large East Coast distributor whose orders could bring the Monroe plant to capacity production over the next three years, Weaver said.

“This company’s customers are already genuinely enthused about our high-end products for their mid-range market,” he said, adding that the company is experiencing a busy, vibrant and exciting time presently as new markets are developed, ISO 9000 certification is under way and a new computer system is being installed.

The success of the company has made Canyon Creek the largest corporate employer in Monroe and fourth in a public-private list that includes the Monroe State Reformatory, Monroe School District and Valley General Hospital. Even in today’s weaker economy, the plant has an “applications wanted” sign on its building, always seeking skilled workers.

From cutting wood parts and assembling complicated furniture products to maintaining its own sales force, marketing department and a fleet of delivery trucks, the company is a one-stop service center, a business encompassing several businesses, he said.

“We surprised the city of Monroe with how much retail sales taxes we generate for them, too,” Weaver said. “Forty percent of our sales are to builders, and they’re taxable. We try hard to be a good community asset. In many ways, we’re the cornerstone of industry they didn’t have. We help with food drives, support local athletics and things like the senior center and participation in the city’s community response program for earthquakes or other disasters.”

Weaver himself has been involved in the Monroe Chamber of Commerce leadership, Boy Scouts of America, as a parks commissioner, a member of a nonprofit group formed to fund a community swimming pool, a task force on traffic-problem solutions on Fryelands Boulevard and in numerous church organizations.

As for his management style, Weaver believes in “participation and consultation” among employees and the management staff, but never forgets “in the end, I’m the ultimate person with responsibility.”

Weaver also has varied responsibilities at home. He and his wife, Lainie, have six children — Matthew, Andrew, Jared, Pat, Brian and Celina.

For more information, call the company at 800-228-1830 or visit its Web site, www.canyoncreek.com.

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