What keeps Kitchen Kompact on top?

Wood & Wood Products, March, 2008

People work hard and well when they work for themselves. Kitchen Kompact Inc. of Jeffersonville, IN, proves the principle of the free-enterprise system.

An incentive program Lets the company's hourly workers earn an excellent income--$7.60 an hour in one recent period ($5.35 an hour on top of an hourly rate of $2.25) in return for high productivity. Output at the plant is an average of 20 cabinets an hour per employee versus an industry average of five cabinets an hour, says W. Dwight Gahm, who bought a small, failing cabinet shop in 1955 and built it into the most successful in its field.

Part of the output comes from mechanized production operation that is a model of efficiency. But the company's managers agree that the opportunity to earn as much as $17,000 a year (including overtime) is a big factor in making Kitchen Kompact the Leading supplier of the field.

The incentive program is simple in operation. The number of cabinets turned out during a 13-week period is divided by the number of man hours it took to produce them. "This Lets each worker have a direct influence on the productivity of the plant," says Irwin Lacefield, production manager. "He can feel almost as if he has a business of his own and there's no real limit on what he can earn."