Smallest Baldrige Award Winner Imparts Some Big Lessons - Texas Nameplate Co - Brief Article

Nation's Business, March, 1999

No company that has won the prestigious Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award has been smaller than Texas Nameplate Co., a family-owned Dallas firm with 66 employees. With annual revenues of $4 million, Texas Nameplate is "the petty-cash account" of the much larger companies that have dominated the list of Baldrige winners since the first awards were made in 1988, jokes the company's president, Dale Crownover.

Texas Nameplate makes metal nameplates for products ranging from oil-drilling equipment to computers. It has been filling that niche successfully since 1946.

The Baldrige trophy--named in honor of Malcolm Baldrige, who was secretary of commerce when he was killed in a rodeo accident in 1987--is awarded to a handful of applicants each year by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a federal agency within the Commerce Department. Applicants undergo a rigorous examination process that encompasses most aspects of the company's life, from strategic planning to human resources to business results.

What can Texas Nameplate's peers--the thousands of small businesses with only a few dozen employees--learn from its success? Among the lessons Crownover cites:

You get what you pay for. For the past three years, all of the company's jobs have paid better than minimum wage, Crownover says. Instead of paying two people minimum wage, he notes, the company pays one person considerably more than the minimum--and gets the same amount of work as it would from the two lower-paid people.

Layoffs are highly destructive. "Morale suffers; customer satisfaction suffers," Crownover says. "We had a layoff in the early '80s, and it was probably the worst thing we've ever done." If a company has a layoff, he says, "it's an indicator that it does not have good strategic plans in place."

Stay ahead of regulation. Crownover says that as environmental regulation tightened in the '70s and '80s, Texas Nameplate didn't take it seriously enough at first, but it learned better. "We felt that the best thing to do would be not just to meet the requirements, but to exceed them," he says. The company, which etches most of its nameplates with chemicals, generates 10,000 gallons of waste water a day but is on the verge of cutting to zero the amount of its waste dispersed into the environment. "We're going to he recycling our acids," Crownover says, "which will give us a competitive advantage."