Home, sweet modular home - manufacturer Austin Guirlinger

Nation's Business, April, 1988 by Sharon Nelton

If Austin Guirlinger has his way, houses--like cars--will be mass-produced, using state-of-the-art technology and materials.

Just as tourists seek the Detroit site where Henry Ford first mass-produced his Model T or flock to Kitty Hawk, N.C., to see where the Wright brothers launched the first powered flight, so will they trek to Columbus, Ohio, 50 or 100 years from now to visit the scene of the trailblazing work of Austin Guirlinger.

At least that's what a number of Guirlinger's employees think.

"He comes to work to do something that no man has ever done before," says one associate. "And that something is to do for housing what has been done for the automobile."

Guirlinger is president and chief executive officer of Cardinal Industries, a privately held company that is the nation's leading manufacturer of modular homes.

His goal: to mass-produce shelter, driving the cost of housing down while maintaining quality. To achieve that aim, everything has to be standardized, and Guirlinger settled long ago on a 12-by-24-foot cube as his basic building block.

He knew he would also have to produce in volume large enough to permit manufacturing efficiencies. But to do that, he would have to attract a large number of customers, and they are still hard to come by in a world wedded to the conventional "stick-built" house.

To solve that problem, Guirlinger became his own best customer-creating, owning and operating more than 800 apartment communities; the Knights Inn motel chain, with 17,610 rooms; 17 Arborgate Inns; and 7 Cardinal Retirement Villages, as well as office complexes and, soon, student housing. Located primarily in 22 states east of the Mississippi, all properties are one-story, and all are composed of the basic 12-by24-foot modules.

Although manufacturing is the foundation, it is now a relatively small part of Cardinal, which is projecting $767 million in revenues this year.

"Austin's ability to have conceived not only a product but also a complete system by which that product would be brought into the marketplace and then control it once it's there is the real key to what he has done," says Vic Steinfels, Cardinal's vice president of operations.

"It's like Einstein. He was so far ahead of his time that he could no longer depend on the basic existing math systems to deal with some of the equations he had to solve. So he had to develop his own math."

Guirlinger doesn't look like someone out to make history. He is, at 61, an unpretentious man with receding hair who wears no-nonsense eyeglasses and short-sleeved shirts.

During a two-hour interview, he is polite and pleasant; he pours coffee for us, but he makes no attempt to charm or impress. He is relaxed, feet propped up on a chair in a conference room made of the Cardinal cube.

He seems so mild-mannered that we ask two senior executives over lunch how such an apparently uncharismatic person can provide the leadership needed to build a company to 11,500 employees.

"He's more than charismatic," says Jeff Thompson, vice president for corporate communications.

"The capacity to dream and to see so big, so far, so deep, to see where no man has ever seen before-that's part of the legacy of Austin Guirlinger," adds Larry Rosenthal, vice president of apartment products and a 17-year veteran of the company.

Not long ago, Thompson says, another writer was interviewing the boss. Guirlinger picked up a length of window frame and said it was made of structural plastic foam and was created, like spaghetti, by an extruding process. It reduced labor by 50 percent, and there was no waste. He handed the piece to the writer and said, "You're holding the future in your hands."

"I don't know how the reporter perceived it," Thompson says, "but I almost got goose bumps: all over me."

Part of Guirlinger's genius, Cardinal executives say, is that he is "unfettered by education."

One of nine children, he grew up in Detroit and after high school he went to Alaska, where he worked briefly on the salmon traps and in the logging industry. He enlisted in the Army just in time to serve with the occupation troops in Japan at the end of World War II.

Back in Detroit, he lasted half a semester in junior college. "It just wasn't meant for me," he says.

Jobs that followed shaped Guirlinger's future. Working in a General Motors plant gave him, he says, "the opportunity to observe the assembly of things in a logical manner." Sales jobs for two housing manufacturers introduced him to prefabricated housing.

The notion that homes, like automobiles, might be mass-produced began to get a grip on him.

One job took him to Columbus, and it was there in 1954, with $30,000 in backing from a partner, that he started Cardinal Industries in his basement. He was 27 years old,

He began producing a forerunner of his current module, marketing it to developers who were building in the Columbus suburbs. The city, watching tax dollars slip away, ruled that no utilities would be provided unless the land was annexed to Columbus,