ROCKINGHAM, North Carolina – Johnny Johnson found a good business niche as a pallet supplier, and he has stayed with it.
He also found a good size for his business, and he stayed with it.
Johnny owns Richmond Forest Products in Rockingham, North Carolina. Johnny started the company in 1986 with a partner. A fire destroyed the business in 1993. (The fire was started by lightning striking the company’s electrical panel boxes.) In the rebuilding process, his partner sold his interest to Johnny.
Johnny, 58, has worked in the pallet industry his entire life. He assembled pallets with a pneumatic nailer when he started in 1969. He worked at several North Carolina pallet companies – Carolina Wood Products, Rebel Pallet and Edwards Wood Products – and worked his way up to shop foreman.
Rockingham is located roughly between Charlotte and Fayetteville, which is adjacent to the I-95 corridor. Johnny grew up in Wadesboro, a mere 20 miles away.
The company is situated on 19 acres and has two buildings with 18,000 square feet under roof. The business employs 11 people, including Johnny and one truck driver. Production is in the range of 2,600 to 3,000 pallets per week with annual sales about $1.7-2 million.
Johnny runs the office, handles sales and buys lumber. His son, Clay, has been working with him about 12 years and assumes Johnny’s responsibilities when he is absent; Clay also is a substitute truck driver. Johnny also has two brothers who work in the business, Lonnie and Darrell; Darrell maintains all the company’s equipment.
Richmond Forest Products buys Southern Yellow Pine 2×4, 2×6, 4×4 and 4×6 and remanufactures the lumber into pallet parts. The company makes no hardwood pallets.
Johnny purchases lumber that has been heat-treated because most of the company’s pallets go to customers who use them for export shipments. He buys SYP in lengths from 4 feet to 14 feet from mills in Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia.
The cut-up operations are uncomplicated. The lumber is cut to length on one of two Whirlwind pop-up saws or an LM Equipment (U.S.) Verticut 2000 package cross-cut saw. The pieces are resawn into 1×4 and 1×6 deck boards by a Brewco two-head horizontal bandsaw. A Froedge de-duster follows the Brewco resaw to clean the pallet parts. Stringers are usually 2×4.
“That’s it,” said Johnny. I’ve always believed in keeping things sort of simple.”
The company also has a Rip-It notching machine to notch stringers. “It’s like a home-made, double-head automatic machine,” said Johnny. “It works really well for us.”
Richmond Forest Products has a Pallet Chief IV nailing machine that Johnny purchased new 10 years ago. The Pallet Chief IV, which uses DuroFast pneumatic nailing tools and collated fasteners, has two nailing stations, with three nailing tools at each station. The first nailing station assembles the bottom face of the pallet, and a flipper automatically turns the pallet over so the top deck boards can be put into place. The second nailing station finishes the assembly process, and the pallet exits automatically into a stacker.
With two men operating it, the Pallet Chief IV makes 500-800 pallets daily, said Johnny, depending on the footprint.
“That Pallet Chief is really the backbone of the company,” said Johnny. “We’ve been real pleased with it and real pleased with everybody at Pallet Chief. If you need parts, they get them right to you…They’ve really backed us.”
The Pallet Chief nailing machine is “real simple,” Johnny noted. It runs on 110-volt electrical service and compressed air.
The company also has two work tables for assembling pallets by hand with pneumatic nailing tools. Typically, two men work together at a table. These work stations are mainly used for building European block pallets. For building block pallets, the company cuts 4×4 and 4×6 material into blocks on a Whirlwind chop saw.
Richmond Forest Products manufactures about a dozen different pallets.
The most common footprints are 48×40 and 48×42 and 800×1200 mm for the block pallet.
The company’s customers include manufacturing businesses in the pharmaceutical industry and paper, packaging and building products industries.
“I don’t go out and look for a lot of business,” said Johnny. The company has picked up new accounts by word of mouth, and it has grown along with its existing customers. “That’s all I want to grow,” said Johnny. “If our existing customers grow 10 to 15 percent a year, I’m happy with that.”
If businesses call, asking for a price on a pallet, he quotes it, and the company gets the business or not. He does not aggressively compete against other pallet companies.
Richmond Forest Products has developed a good business niche in pallets made of Southern Yellow Pine, he acknowledged. “Whatever they need, 25 pallets or 25,000 pallets, we’ll do it.”
Supplying quality pallets and providing ‘just-in-time’ service keep the business humming along. “We keep a lot of inventory,” said Johnny, “more than other pallet suppliers this size.” Richmond Forest Products carries about $150,000 in finished inventory, he said. However, that investment enables the company to deliver within four hours to a customer from the time they call, he noted. “That means a lot to customers,” he said. Finished inventory is stored in a separate building to reduce the risk of fire.
“We get a lot of last-minute orders,” said Johnny, which is why he provides just-in-time service. “Customers call at 8 a.m. and want them by lunch…We’ve seen that a lot in the last six months.”
Stocking pallets for customers is definitely a selling point. “It cuts down on their inventory,” said Johnny. “They would rather have their pallets sit here, ready to move, instead of sitting at their place, being billed for them.”
Business has slowed in recent months; it is down about 15% in the past six months. However, Johnny said most of the decline can be attributed to customers who temporarily stopped or reduced production to do annual maintenance work or similar reasons. “We’ve been blessed,” he said.
“If it gets slow, we might call on some people” to get more business, he said. The company does a good volume of one-way pallets. “We push a lot of them,” said Johnny. “They keep us fairly busy.”
The company strives to reduce waste by reclaiming as much lumber as possible. For example, if end trimming operations leave it with a lot of 40-inch pieces, it will try to utilize that lumber for a customer that needs a 36-inch pallet. The company even reclaims the cross pieces that are used to package bundles of lumber.
The company also does a small volume of pallet recycling – mainly retrieving used pallets from some major customers, recycling them and selling them to other companies. About 5% of the company’s business is recycled pallets. Richmond Forest Products also picks up pallets from some customers, washes them with power washing equipment and returns them to the customers.
Sawdust from the bandsaws and cuttings from the notcher are collected by a blower system into plastic bags, and the material is sold. Trim ends and other scraps are sold to another business that grinds the wood and sells the grindings to poultry farmers.
Saw blades are serviced and supplied by Precision Saws, which also supplies the company with inserts for the notching machine.
The company has four trucks and makes all its own deliveries; it serves customers as far as 120 miles. All its customers are in North Carolina.
Johnny has upgraded the Pallet Chief IV machine regularly whenever Pallet Chief has made retrofit improvements to the model. Improvements over the years have included heavier gear boxes, hold-down clamps so the machine can assemble pallets made of reclaimed lumber, improved holders for the nailing tools, and more.
In his free time Johnny likes to freshwater and saltwater fish and also to preach. He is ordained and licensed and preaches as an evangelist at revivals and fills in at his home church, Bethany Freewill Baptist Church. Johnny also enjoys working in his yard, and he and his wife also dabble in the real estate market.
“The customer is the most important person,” said Johnny. Two other important aspects of doing business are pallet quality and service. “That’s what keeps us going,” he said. “The customer’s always right, and you work with them to keep your business coming in.”
Pallet Chief Nailing Machines Use Pneumatics, Collated Nails
Pallet Chief Manufacturing is an international supplier of pallet nailing and stacking equipment. The company is known for the design and production of cost effective, low maintenance, user friendly nailing machines.
Pallet Chief has been building pallet equipment for over 18 years. The company is based in Fayetteville, Alabama; all Pallet Chief machinery is designed, manufactured, sold and delivered from this location.
The company is owned by Barry Landers, who has designed and invented the entire line of Pallet Chief equipment. His sister, Gail Landers Ezekiel, is the office manager. Key employees include Mike Finch, production foreman, who has been with the company for 14 years, salesman Mike Fulmer, who has been with Pallet Chief for seven years, and Raushana Franklin, the newest member of the Pallet Chief sales team.
The Pallet Chief equipment line consists of the Pallet Chief Hand Nailing Station, the Pallet Chief I, the Pallet Chief II, the Pallet Chief III, the Pallet Chief IV, the Pallet Chief Skid Machine and the new Pallet Chief Deck-Mat Nailer system.
In addition, Pallet Chief is developing a block pallet assembly system and expects it to be available later this summer.
All Pallet Chief nailing machines use pneumatic nailing tools and collated fasteners. Some of the machines are semi-automated and some are fully automated. According to Pallet Chief, the Pallet Chief I can produce 200-plus pallets per day, the Pallet Chief II can produce 300-plus pallets per day, the Pallet Chief III can produce about 400 pallets per day, and the Pallet Chief IV can assemble about 800 pallets per day.
For more information, contact Pallet Chief at (800) 339-2925, e-mail sales@palletchief.com, or visit the Web site at www.palletchief.com.
Pallet Chief Develops Nailing Machine to Assemble Top Mat for Block Pallets
Pallet Chief Mfg. has developed a new machine to build the deck mat or top component of a block pallet. The company also announced it is at work developing a new block pallet assembly system.
The Pallet Chief Deck-Mat Nailer will nail the top deck boards and flat stringer boards together. The mats can then be nailed by hand to the bottom half of the block pallets.
A deck board feeder and deluxe stacking system, capable of stacking 50 pallets, will enable pallet manufacturers to build quality block pallets quickly and precisely. In addition, a new quick adjustment feature reduces change-over time by more than 50%.
The standard model Pallet Chief Deck-Mat Nailer will assemble mats up to 48×48 and is capable of performing staggered nail patterns. Custom sizes are available.
The Pallet Chief Deck-Mat Nailer uses new Wedge-grip nails, which require no clinching. The Wedge-grip nails also prevent damage to the pallet and improve strength of the connections. The new nails are stronger because of their innovative wedge design yet are about 25% less expensive than standard large coil 2-1/4-inch nails.
Like other Pallet Chief nailing machines, the Deck-Mat Nailer requires only 110 volt electrical service and compressed air. Maintenance costs are low, and the machine is easy to operate and user friendly.
The Pallet Chief Deck-Mat Nailer also has been designed so that it can be upgraded to a complete Pallet Chief block pallet assembly system when it becomes available in the next few weeks.
For more information, contact Pallet Chief at (800) 339-2925, e-mail sales@palletchief.com, or visit the Web site at www.palletchief.com.
