Elevator-remodeling company rides a patent to success

Ever wonder what cabinets and cows have to do with elevators? Or heard of rewarding an employee who fouls up with a free trip to Hawaii?

Then you've never heard Glenn Bostock recount his evolution from attention-deficient, dyslexic student with zero interest in classroom work to imaginative president of a small elevator-remodeling company in Bucks County that has been on a phenomenal ride up with a unique patent.

Phenomenal, as in 30 percent annual growth for 10 years - until the recession seriously cut into the discretionary spending of commercial-building owners.

Not that it was necessarily a bad thing for SnapCab by Bostock, the 32-employee company's namesake insists. The years of profound growth had made the business "cash poor," he said. The slowdown allowed cash to accumulate and credit lines to be paid off.

Now, "work feels like a lot more fun instead of feeling desperate, wondering how we were going to make payroll," Bostock said last week from his office at SnapCab's only plant, in Warrington.

But that's getting way ahead in the story.

It begins in Bryn Athyn, Montgomery County, where Bostock grew up and still lives. And where he and still-close friend Greg Glebe, both sons of woodworkers, developed their own creative skills.

There was the metal candy rack they rescued from a trash bin, to which they affixed wheels so they could coast on streets and sidewalks. And the raft they made with plywood and inner tubes to travel on local creeks. And the hang glider, fashioned from bamboo and clear tarp.

"Fortunately for us, it didn't actually fly, so we didn't kill ourselves," Bostock said.

Bostock, now 50, apprenticed in high school with a cabinetmaker at his church, the stunning Bryn Athyn Cathedral. He would go on to study fine woodworking at Bucks County Community College and apprentice for cabinetmaker Dirk Ohdner in Easton, Pa.

In 1983, Bostock started a business finishing and repairing furniture that evolved into cabinetmaking. Work was steady until 1989, when a recession virtually killed home-improvement projects.

A career change - elevator remodeling - was suggested by his father, Peter, a partner in an elevator-maintenance company in North Jersey.

Peter Bostock told his son the work would be a far less-costly alternative to elevator replacement - $8,000 to $35,000 vs. $100,000, in today's pricing - and something that would appeal to property owners, especially in trying economic times.

Glenn Bostock's reaction: "It seemed like an awful idea." He was thinking of the fire, weight, and ventilation codes that apply to elevators.

Then he thought of his responsibility to family (the first of his three children had just been born), so he gave it a try. His first job: Renovating an elevator to match a reception desk he also had been hired to build.

Slowly, the jobs came: one every few months, then one a month, then one a week.

Along the way, Bostock found the process of elevator remodeling needlessly time-consuming and set out to make it simpler and faster.

In 1998, that yielded the patent that makes SnapCab by Bostock unique: interlocking joints on horizontal panels, which make for easier installation and less costly repairs.

A common maintenance problem in elevators is damage to interior panels done by small delivery carts, usually to the area under the handrail. If panels are installed vertically, that typically means the damage, and thus replacement, involves at least two panels. With SnapCab's system, the most frequently dinged area of a cab is confined to one horizontal panel.

The company now sells 20 cab-remodeling kits a week and provides online videos to help with installation. (It also performs local installations.)

Neal Krouse, president of United Elevator Co., said he has been doing business with SnapCab for more than 20 years, averaging 15 cab remodels a year. Acknowledging "a lot of competitors," he said SnapCab's appeal has "always been the quality," along with the ease of assembly.

"It takes less time," Krouse said. "Time is money."

In the city, SnapCab's work adorns elevator interiors at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Thomas Jefferson University Hospitals, the Franklin Institute, and Mellon Independence Center.

Its glitziest job was for a Bethlehem restaurant: an elevator fashioned with blue-mirrored glass and fiber optics to look like a starry night.

Now, about those cows.

Caleb Morrison, SnapCab's vice president of operations, was in sales when the request came in from a Texan who wanted to use leather for a cab interior - "the leather from his cows in his field."

Morrison got to thinking about the messy business of slaughter and, well, "We said it wouldn't be fire-rated. That was the easiest way out of that."

Otherwise, it's all about satisfying the customer at SnapCab. That's why employees who let customers down are rewarded.

Huh?

Bostock said it's his way of encouraging problem solving.

"We want people to say, 'I screwed this up' instead of trying to hide it," he said. "The money to be made is in identifying problems."

The employee who got to go to Hawaii had sent the wrong kind of elevator ceiling to a customer there. He made up for it by devising a system the company now uses to avoid such mistakes.

At $6.2 million in 2010, SnapCab's sales were down from nearly $7.5 million in 2008. Sales this year are trending well up over early last year, and the company - where most employees earn $15 to $25 an hour, plus benefits - is hiring again.

With an estimated one million elevator cabs in the United States, Bostock foresees his company one day reaching $50 million in annual sales and possibly adding a second factory out West.