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Friday, November 13, 2009 11:00 AM

Area businesses fight to stay alive

By LINDA BROWN, Herald Staff

More than 300 people depend on Ransom Memorial Hospital for their livelihood.

And that’s something chief executive officer Larry Felix takes seriously.

“Things needed to change when Larry came here 10 years ago,” Brenda Pfizenmaier, public relations director, said. “He’s done a fabulous job and because he has, we’ve been planning for the recession for a long time.”

That leadership and planning has meant no layoffs for hospital personnel, she said.

“We’re doing very well,” Pfizenmaier said. “In fact, under his leadership, we just keep getting better and stronger.

The hospital is just one of the county’s top employers that has been dealt additional challenges this year with a sour economy.

‘Slight dip’



The economy has presented some employment challenges for Ottawa Retirement Village, 1100 W. 15th St., but not enough to force any layoffs among the 180 employees, Dee Shaffer, marketing director, said.

“We saw a slight dip in our short-term therapy census over the summer months,” she said.

Short-term physical therapy residents often come to ORV after having hip or knee replacement surgery.

“We suspect they were waiting to have elective surgeries done until the economy got a little better,” Shaffer said. “That had a slight bearing on our full-time employee status, but it was very temporary and that census has started to climb again.”

‘Quick turnaround’



Midwest Cabinet Co., 1674 N. Industrial Ave., has experienced an anticipated decline in orders from one of its biggest customer bases — restaurants.

“Restaurants are some of the first to take a hit,” Joe Rogers, operations manager, said. “If they can’t remodel or build another store, our orders don’t come in.”

That decline forced some layoffs and some creative cost management to keep the remaining 80 employees on the payroll, he said.  The company employed 150 people in 2007 and 125 in 2008 and early 2009.

“We’re participating in the Kansas Work Share program,” he said. “Basically, we work four days or three days, 24 or 32 hours a week and Kansas Unemployment pays the difference up to 40 hours. Pretty much the whole company is on that plan.”

Rogers said based on orders, they plan week-to-week how they’ll handle the work load.

“We’re still running the night shift, but we only have five people on it,” Rogers said. “We get quick turnaround orders out on that shift.”

Rogers said their chain store customers are anticipating some growth over 2009 for 2010.

“They’re budgeting now which stores will be remodeled and where new ones will be put up next year,” he said. “That’s one of the indicators we use to determine what we’ll be doing over the next year as well.

“Our plan is to call employees back to work when we start ramping up again.”

‘Strong backlog’



After laying off 24 employees in May, Schuff Steel, 2001 Davis Road, managed to hang on without any staff layoffs until recently.

“We had a strong backlog going into 2009,” Dennis Randall, executive vice president and general manager, said. “We were able to keep everybody on until about two weeks ago when we had to lay off about 10 people. We had the normal attrition that helped protect jobs as well.”

Randall said the company, which now employs 95 people, has a reasonable backlog to take it into 2010.

“The goal is to maintain through the first quarter, although we’re going to be pretty thin,” he said.

“By the second quarter, we should be very comfortable with the work force we have now, and we may need to add a few employees. Our general thinking is that we’ll start to ramp up during the second quarter, and by the third and fourth quarters we’ll really start to improve.”

The Ottawa plant is one of 10 in the country owned by Schuff Steel. Randall said that fact has helped the local plant as well.

“We’ve been able to share work with the other plants,” he said. “That has helped keep things level.”

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