Caged Growth

Caged Growth

Danielle Huff has dealt with a broad range of challenges in running a Gulf Coast-based baseball-dependent metals company, all the way up to union struggles. But she's close to finding her sweet spot.

SPORTS BUSINESS by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

In late 2003, Danielle Huff pleaded with her business partner Rob Huff, a man who doubles as her husband: Let's lower our prices just this once, Danielle Huff said, so we can outbid our competition for a potentially lucrative job.

At stake was a six-figure contract building backstops, batting cages and other baseball stadium necessities for a new construction project in Surprise, Ariz. The spring training baseball complex being built was to be the future home of the Kansas City Royals and Texas Rangers - a perfect fit for the Huffs' company, Bradenton-based C & H Baseball, which at that time had done similar work hundreds of major and minor league baseball stadiums.

Rob Huff held fast, however, to what he and his wife talked about a few years earlier, when they first got into running their own business together. He reminded her that one of their never-break rules, a concept they learned from previous corporate jobs, was to avoid slashing prices just to get one project. That's because once you cut, it becomes near impossible to build prices back up.

The Huffs didn't lower their bid for the Surprise job and, no surprise, they didn't get it. But the ultimate vindication came two years ago when the stadium managers hired C & H to replace much of the work the other company did, as that work proved to be shoddy and incomplete. C & H did more repair work there last year, too.

The lesson learned sticks with Danielle Huff, 38, five years later. And it's a lesson many small business owners and entrepreneurs could use nowadays, especially as the economic hard times could make any project seem like a home run.

"We don't want to get into discount wars just to get a job," Huff says. "We are not the lowest guys, nor do we want to be."

That kind of stubborn approach as served the Huffs well. The couple, which bought the 40-year-old business in 2000 from Rob Huff's biological father, has taken the company from under $1 million in annual revenues to more than $3 million. The 11-employee company has grown at least 10% a year every year the Huffs have owned it, even in 2008 when revenue growth for a myriad of Gulf Coast businesses evaporated.

Meanwhile, C & H has become a top player in the niche industry of providing and building batting cages, netting and related equipment for baseball stadium construction, one of three business lines it's in. The company also manufactures its own steel and aluminum baseball cage equipment out of its Bradenton facility, which it sells to other dealers.

Despite the growth, or in some ways because of it, challenges and potential hurdles linger for C & H - all the more so because the Huffs have some ambitious expansion plans. Those include doing more business in the Dominican Republic and a youth baseball haven and in Arizona, the new hot spot for spring training. On the latter, the company recently set up a corporate entity in Arizona and has plans to open a full-time office there.

Union struggles

One issue that looms like a 100 mph fastball over the company is financing. Indeed because it couldn't get a secondary source of credit, C & H lost out on a job building cages and backstops for Citi Field in New York City, the future home of the New York Mets expected to open in April.

The company's main credit line was tied up in a job 15 miles north of the Mets project, working on the cages and outfield wall padding for the new Yankee Stadium going up in the Bronx. Not only that, C & H's main business bank was Bradenton-based Freedom Bank, which banking regulators shut down Oct. 31 due to credit and capitalization issues.

So the Huffs were left in a lurch, one that ultimately cost them the Mets job. The Yankee Stadium project, the largest one the company has ever taken on, is worth about $500,000, Danielle Huff says. The Mets job would have been worth at least that much.

The company has since received a credit line with Sarasota-based Landmark Bank. But while Huff says it's enough to get the business through at least the first six months of 2009, she worries about what other jobs she could miss out on due to financing constraints. "When you are a service company, which is really what we are, not an asset company, it's hard to get credit," says Huff. "That's been a difficult ride."

No less difficult and challenging, however, has been the Yankee Stadium job, a $1 billion project that will replace one of the most hallowed stadiums in professional sports. Huff sums up the problems with that job, which C & H has been working on since last summer, in a word: unions.

"We had to learn how to play with those guys," says Huff. "We had to adjust our expectations to their work ethic."

For example, Huff says C & H had to hire six people from the local ironworkers union for some of the metal work and another three employees from a pipefitters union for work on the outfield walls. The end result is that Huff says the job has taken longer and cost more, as much as four times more, than other projects.

The union headaches connected to the job have dented the company's pride in being part of building such a famous stadium. Says Huff: "It's bittersweet."

New cages

Dealing with New York City unions is a new test for Huff, a soft-spoken Mississippi native who still retains pieces of her southern twang. But working in what have traditionally been man-dominated fields is nothing new. Her manufacturing experience dates back to when she was 13 years old, when she answered phones at her uncle's steel fabrication company. That job grew into doing other tasks on the factory floor.

Huff thought her experience would be a good fit when an opportunity came up for her and Rob Huff to buy C & H nine years ago. That, and she thought her eight years in advertising, where McDonald's was one of her corporate accounts, as an asset.

Huff has maintained the company's finances and inside operations, while her husband has handled bidding and contract work. The company's payroll now includes three welders and a fabricator, as well as a full time project engineer.

The company itself has also gone through several changes, even in the years before the Huffs bought it. It was founded in 1968 as a small welding shop called C & H Welding & Metals.

A few years later a coach from the Pittsburgh Pirates, which ran its spring training practices next door to C & H, asked the welders to come up with a portable batting cage that was equipped with netting. The coach wanted to run several practices simultaneously, without balls flying all over the place.

The company made those cages and over the next two decades it fine-tuned its metal work with baseball equipment, to the point where the sport became its core focus. It has since worked on projects in more than 300 stadiums nationwide.

Huff hopes to win several more projects in 2009, capitalizing on the connections and relationships she and Rob Huff have developed with the architects behind the most recent projects. She also is keeping a close watch on the new stadium sagas playing out in Tampa Bay for the Rays and in Miami for the Marlins.

But C & H is also looking to grow in other areas, says Huff, in an effort to be as diversified as possible in case the economy sinks even lower. In addition to expanding its international client base, Huff says the company is working on a new line of products for high school and youth leagues. It's a market C & H has stayed away form in the past, as the margins in selling to cost-conscious schools tend to be thin.

Another possible growth avenue could come to C & H eventually in the irony of having to replace some of its past work going back to the 1970s and 1980s. Not that Huff wants her company's work to fail, but she says C & H's potential client pool is small because its craftsmanship has always been stellar.

"Our products are the Cadillac of the industry," Huff says. "But sometimes, to our detriment, our products last too long."

REVIEW SUMMARY

Businesses. C & H Baseball, Bradenton

Industry. Manufacturing, baseball

Key. Company seeks to continue its growth track by going out of Florida and overseas and by sticking to core business principles.

All in the timing

Many bankers up and down the Gulf Coast responded to the real-estate fueled credit crisis of 2008 by taking an obvious step: Seriously curtailing all real estate loans.

That placated dozens of bank executives and board members. But it presented a new set of problems for Danielle and Rob Huff, who were in the early stages of a $2 million dollar expansion project for their Bradenton-based metals business, C & H Baseball, which provides equipment and installation for baseball stadium construction.

In early 2007, the company had already received government permits and site approvals to build a new facility and baseball training center in east Manatee County, in Lakewood Ranch. The plan was to build a new 16,000-square-foot headquarters for C & H while also providing cages and practice space for the region's youth baseball teams and players.

And since the economic slide had not yet fully manifested itself, Huff says bankers were calling her everyday, ready to finance the project. By the end of 2007, however, when the Huffs were ready to move ahead with the project, those bankers' offers were history. Huff's efforts to get financing for the project last year were also futile.

Despite what she says has been a disheartening experience, Huff is hopeful 2009 will provide a happy ending to the expansion story.

"It would be a real heartbreaker to have to walk away from this project," Huff says. "We are ready for construction. We just need a bank to partner with."

-Mark Gordon