Have you ever looked at a roller coaster and wondered how it worked? At Webb-Stiles Company, they know because their products move materials and products around buildings, just like a roller coaster!  When you are trying to make people as efficient as possible, keeping them at their work station and not moving things from one place to another helps increase the amount of work they can do. Webb-Stiles will come into a manufacturing plant, warehouse, or other building and develop a solution that is unique to that space. Some conveyors take things over your head while others are built into the floor on the building. And others are at a height to make it easy for people to work on the products moving by them. If you have ever put groceries on the belt at the checkout, stood on a people-mover at an airport, or gotten a car wash at an automatic car wash, you are familiar with the ways things have to move from one place to another!

At the time that Joe Webb and Don Stiles came together, they were both selling standard conveyor systems to companies. That was great for most companies, but there were some companies that had unique needs that weren’t being met by the standard products on the market. They wanted to offer custom solutions that fit the customer’s needs, exactly. When you are trying to increase efficiency, every little bit helps!

Economic changes really impact our business. When there is a presidential election we know we will see a slow down in new orders for about six months before November. It generally doesn’t matter which party wins – people just get nervous. We also are in need of skilled workers. We need people to come in with welding or machining skills which means they know how to connect metal together or make it into parts we need. It is harder to find people with those skills. And then we need people who will take responsibility for their work and enjoy doing a good job. 

We have customers all over the world! Our largest markets outside the US are Chile, Brazil, China, Mexico, and Canada. We work hard to buy all our steel locally – made in Cleveland. We want to work as local as possible!

Steel , cardboard, and paper are the easiest to recycle and we do as much as we can. We receive money for our steel scraps and we take those funds and put them back into the company to make improvements. 

We have a number of government entities as clients so we need to understand their buying process, the fact that they have to get multiple quotes on a project, and that some or all of the process is open to the public. We also supply data to a variety of agencies on manufacturing to help the government inform programs. 

We post our openings on our website and we work with temporary agencies to do temp-to-hire. That means the person comes in to work for us, but is paid by a temporary agency for a period of time. If we like them and they like us, they get hired by Webb-Stiles and are an employee of ours, then. It works well for everyone because they get a chance to try things out without as big a commitment. And if they don’t like it here, the temp agency can find them another job. But of course, we want them to like it here!

Why do you like working here?

For us, we really want to be seen as a family. We care about our employees and know for them, their family comes first. We will make things work if they need to be somewhere for a child, parent, or spouse. Our employees also love how creative they get to be. We never know what problem we will need to solve next. And they feel like they are all part of the process and solving the problem for the customer.