Safety is a product

When Charlie Brown and Stan Norton had their chance to experience the corporate world, they didn't stay long.

Mergers propelled their family rubber hose and safety equipment business into a multinational firm. In 2005, after eight years, the brothers-in-law went back into business for themselves, bringing many of their old employees along.

"We had employees and this place, but very few customers. We didn't leave and take a whole set of business with us," Mr. Norton said. "We had to go out and crawl and fight and prove ourselves again."

"We had a healthy payroll and not one order coming in," Mr. Brown recalled. "There wasn't a thing in this building, not even pallets ... That's incentive."

They had experience in starting over. In 1986, a fire destroyed the facility, forcing them to rebuild. According to reports, it was among the largest fires in Richmond County and prevented some planes from landing at the nearby Augusta Regional Airport.

The men rebuilt on Mike Padgett Highway, and now run two businesses: Automatic Fire Systems of Augusta and Industrial Rubber and Supply.

If it's 8 a.m., it is quiet in the 25,000-square-foot building. Most of the teams have already been sent out to call on customers. All 22 employees gather at 5 p.m., however, for the daily debriefing and safety meeting.

Employee safety is important.

Safety is also a product.

"We've always been a big safety house," Mr. Norton said.

The company has shelves of gloves, rubber boots and respiratory masks. It was a natural progression, he explained, since they sold the hoses that handled the chemicals at industrial plants, they also knew what it took to protect the employees from exposure to those chemicals.

The main products for Industrial Rubber and Supply are industrial hoses, rubber and metal, and the gaskets that seal them. The company also makes some niche products, such as the rubber pads that protect glass while it's being shipped.

They've got a machine that presses out gaskets. It is the same kind of machine that shoemakers use to press out soles.

"Some of our customers have unique designs, and we keep those templates," Mr. Norton said.

It is common to get in a large order of gaskets; some of them require time-intensive hand cutting that requires the whole crew to be involved.

They call it a gasket party.

"Hey, guys, guess what we're doing tonight?" Mr. Brown said with a smile. "We've got so few employees that when we get something that requires a lot of work, we're all out here."

That means the owners, too.

Representatives from Industrial Rubber go to their clients' plants to prepare for their summer maintenance shutdown, taking measurements of all the parts.

"When they say go, we start fabricating," Mr. Brown said. "So when the contractor is ready to install it, they aren't waiting on us, it is there."

"These big companies, even though they've got very adequate maintenance programs, once you get down into gasketing and O-rings, they're looking for expertise. That's what we do," Mr. Norton added.

If there is an emergency repair needed somewhere, "we'll go around the clock with them. Stagger the work force to be there," Mr. Norton said. "The stuff we do gets noticed. They calculate downtime by money."

The air-conditioned room on the Automatic Fire Systems side of the business is a popular spot during the heat of the day, but it is also the messiest room.

The company services fire extinguishers, which means they are disassembled and the fire retardant recycled.

"It is along the lines of baking soda," Mr. Norton said. "It is just dusty."

A large air handler keeps the room breathable.

Depending on the model, a fire extinguisher needs to be refitted every five to six years.

"This is a heavily regulated industry -- people have to have credentials, the company has to be licensed," Mr. Norton said. "The DOT is kind of like our auditors. We keep it by the book, no deviations."

The company also inspects and installs pre-made fire suppression systems that restaurants use.

Back to business

"Since we left the big company, we are very hands on, both of us are with the customer," Mr. Norton said. "The corporate world wasn't our bag. We're just hometown, real service-oriented. We can move pretty fast. When a customer needs something and a decision made, we can make it quick.

"When you get tied up in red tape with a big company, that decision is made a long ways away."

The "big company" was Hagemeyer North America, which is Dutch owned and still has an Augusta operation.

"A lot of customers were asking us to get back to do what we used to do. That's what we did," Mr. Norton said.

Mr. Brown's father, also named Charlie, started the company -- then called Industrial Rubber & Safety -- in Chattanooga, Tenn., in 1969. The Augusta branch opened in 1978.

The elder Mr. Brown retired in 1997, right after selling the business to a regional company called Vallen, which was later acquired by Hagemeyer.

"We found ourselves as an under $10 million branch to part of a $350 million company with Vallen, and then overnight $8 billion worldwide (with Hagemeyer)," Mr. Brown said.

Jimmy Royal has been working for the brothers-in-law for the last 19 years. He followed them into the merger and then back out. He started in the warehouse and now handles customer accounts.

The brothers-in-law came together in 1985, when Mr. Brown's father sold off his Chattanooga branch to a partner and moved to Augusta, bringing Mr. Norton with him.

His bosses complement one another, Mr. Royal said. Mr. Norton is the inside guy who keeps the office running. Mr. Brown is the outside guy, the salesman.

"Charlie can sell ice to an Eskimo," Mr. Royal said.

"I didn't see a salesman that could hold a light to him," Mr. Norton said of his brother-in-law. "He gets to know them. He wants to know them. It is genuine, not just business-related. Customers like that. They like to know they're dealing with friends, not just a salesman."

"A friend never lets a friend down," Mr. Brown explained.

Mr. Brown is equally appreciative of Mr. Norton's gifts.

"I don't know what I'd do without him," Mr. Brown said. "He's the brains. It didn't take long for Vallen to figure out the connection. We actually got the nickname 'Fluff and Stuff.' I was the fluff."

Getting started

With the name Charlie Brown, it has been common over the years to be teased about the well-loved Peanuts comic strip character. These days he feigns ignorance of the cartoon to tease back.

He has a Snoopy drawing hanging on his office wall, though the rest is dominated by his love of Georgia football.

Mr. Brown was born in 1954 in Columbia. His father was in the Army and scheduled to go to Korea but was reassigned to an office upon his son's birth.

When he left the Army, the family moved to the Georgia side of the Chattanooga metro area. The elder Mr. Brown went to work for a company that made asbestos gloves until joining a business partner in buying an industrial rubber company.

The younger Mr. Brown went to work for his father after a brief stint at the University of Georgia. He started out pursuing a degree in pre-med, switched to business, but then left school when he married Delaine, whom he met at college.

"We were in Chattanooga for six months and dad asked if I was interested in transferring to Augusta. It was a chance for us to do something on our own," he said.

The Augusta branch of the company opened in 1978, with a staff of three.

"(Delaine) drove the truck, kept the books, and I sold and pulled orders. I'd get lost chasing smokestacks," Mr. Brown said.

Meanwhile, Mr. Norton was on his way to the University of Tennessee to get a business management degree. The Chattanooga native graduated in 1981.

He married Denise Brown, his high school sweetheart and Mr. Brown's sister. His father-in-law asked him to join the business.

"Charlie was already down here, those were the Vogtle days and SRS had thousands of people working there. This was the growing area," Mr. Norton said. "Chattanooga had been a saturated market and he saw growth down here."

In 1985, Charlie Brown Sr. sold off his interest in the Chattanooga business and moved to Augusta.

The fire

"It is a sight that will be in my mind for the rest of my life," Mr. Brown said of Sept. 13, 1986.

Mr. Brown was at a Georgia football post-game party in Athens when he got the call from his sister that he needed to come back to Augusta because the business was on fire.

A nearby business had caught fire and it skipped over to Industrial Rubber.

Mr. Brown said he knew it was bad when the radio station began reporting on it when he was halfway home. He sped up and received a speeding ticket on the way.

"We had 5,000 pairs of rubber boots that we were stocking for Vogtle and Savannah River Site," Mr. Norton said. "A gas line pipe fell and was a blowtorch into those rubber boots and took us out. What didn't melt was so covered with soot that it was no good."

Mr. Norton said the company had just installed computers to run the books. They were fortunate to have a backup system.

The loss was $1 million.

"Our next day in business, we had a truck. UPS came. We took the boxes and put them in the back of the truck; that was the new warehouse," Mr. Norton said.

Customers came to help clean and move damaged merchandise, he said. The general manager at Olin provided a Winnebago that became Industrial Rubber's office.

Clients also helped by determining their orders for the next six months and paid in advance for them.

That's friends in business, Mr. Norton said. "They helped us back."

Weeks after the fire, they set up in an empty building on Gordon Highway. Charlie Brown Sr. went to work designing the company's current location on Mike Padgett Highway.

"It is perfect for what we do," Mr. Norton said, referring to the configuration of docks and office space.

It would take years to get it. They moved into it in 1991.

Six years later, the elder Mr. Brown retired and sold the business -- but not the building.

"We went to work for the new company," Mr. Norton said. "We kind of thought bigger was better. We thought it was going to open up new avenues."

Fire systems was a business unit that Mr. Norton managed. In 2002, the owner didn't want to be in that line of work any longer, and the brothers-in-law bought it.

"Since we got it and we worked for them, it worked out good," Mr. Norton said.

Three years later, they left Hagemeyer, which vacated the building when the lease ran out, and Mr. Norton and Mr. Brown were able to restart their industrial rubber and supply company.

Flowers and music

Mr. Brown will tell you that his main hobby is Georgia football. He's got a signed photo of University of Georgia football coach Mark Richt.

The other hobby is growing flowers, specifically the day lily.

"That shakes everybody up. I get no respect," he said.

He's even won an award for some of his day lilies, an award which spawned its share of office hazing.

Mr. Brown got into day lilies by helping his neighbor, who is a master grower.

"He had so many flowers that he suggested putting some in my yard," he said.

Mr. Brown might be more widely recognized, though, for his work with the Children's Medical Center at the Medical College of Georgia. The Brown family has been involved in its fundraising telethon since 1988. He is a former organizing chairman.

He organized volunteers for the phones and "shook hands and said thank you" at the event.

Mr. Brown was in the Jaycees club for 15 years, a past president, until he got too old to belong to the young professionals network.

He has always been involved in the American Society of Safety Engineers, which meets every Tuesday.

Mr. Norton is also heavily involved with the society, and is its program chairman.

Mr. Norton's other talent is music.

He has been playing the guitar at churches for 15 years, beginning at his own church, Warren Baptist. For the last few years, he has been playing guitar in services at First Baptist Church in North Augusta because they had a need.

"But he can play the bass, the piano, the mandolin, the banjo -- he's very gifted," Mr. Brown said.

Mr. Norton said his parents put him in lessons as a child.

"My parents wanted me to play and then I put it down, picked it back up when I wanted to do it," he explained.

He had ambitions of a career in music, playing in a country band while living in Chattanooga.

"I had a degree under my belt and they didn't. They were willing to take the risk, but I didn't," he said. "I chased the business route."

With financing their business and children in college, both men joke about their retirement getting further down the line.

"He can't retire from me; we walk out of this door together," Mr. Norton said.

Reach Tim Rausch at (706) 823-3352 or timothy.rausch@augustachronicle.com.