April 20, 2019
It Was 20 Years Ago This Week…
It was 20 years ago this week, that Greg Lane started Advantage Adhesives, Inc. He set out to build a company built around products of uncompromising quality and excellent service; to build an organization that was focused on dealing with customers, suppliers and employees with honesty and integrity; to find solutions rather than pushing off the shelf products on our customers problems; by being innovative and thinking outside of the box.
It is fun to think about the early days, to look back on pictures when we were all a little bit younger and our equipment was shiny and new. Its inspiring to walk out into our manufacturing facility and think back on the days where we occupied a small corner in the back of someone else’s warehouse. Greg often tells a story from the early days about issuing a PO for cores for our very first customer. It was a big deal for Greg to sign that first PO. It wasn’t a lot, but at the time, it was. He held onto it for 3 days, pulling it out and looking at it and then putting it back into his desk, until he got up the courage to take that leap. There are many small milestones that were exciting, like getting a brand-new coating line, or slitter. When we started we didn’t even have the capability to coat. One of the biggest moments for us was coating our first master roll of tape. We only ran it at 50 feet per minute, but it was special. It was the start of in house coating capabilities that would be tweaked and improved to get us to where we are today. Today we run 3 coating lines, 6 slitters, and 2 spooling lines.
It is not about machines or buildings though, but rather about the people who have made us who we are today. It is the relationships we have built with our many great suppliers who decided to sell the small new guy a few boxes of adhesive, or the liner supplier who agreed to make a few hundred feet of the liner when the big guys wouldn’t even take the phone call. It is about the customers who have leaned on us for our expertise, and our commitment to service. It is our customers who have counted on us to deliver a quality product, that is on time and priced right. Most importantly though, it is about our employees who have put in the hard work and long hours to work through problems and working late to make sure that equipment got fixed or that an urgent order got out to our customer in need. Greg likes to talk about having good employees in this way, “You can put me in a Ferrari, and Mario Andretti in a Yugo, and Mario Andretti will beat me every time.” Mario doesn’t win because Greg is a bad driver. Mario wins because he is an excellent driver. Our employees are the best around and it is due to their care and constant attention to detail that we can provide the best tape on the market today.
Our 1st production roll of PSA tape made in house.
We have been busy in the past year working on growing our customer base and the products we can provide them. To do this we added a new inside sales position. We also took it upon ourselves to become ISO9001:2015 registered, which was not an easy process. We didn’t undertake this because we were told to do it by a customer, we did it because we wanted to be better.
Over the course of these last 20 years, we have experienced tremendous growth. Our expectations for Advantage Adhesives for the next 20 years is to continue to make Advantage a better place to work for our employees, increase our capabilities, develop new ways to be able to enhance our customers ability to interact with us, and continue to make it easy for our customers to work with us. We owe our highest thanks to our customers, suppliers and employees as we continue our growth during the next 20 years.
If you are an existing customer call us to talk about your new requirements. If you are not yet one of our customers, please give us a call and we will show you what we can do for you.
Welcome to the next 20 years!