The multi-award-winning H.H. Barnum Company has taken great pride in building a legacy that prioritizes customers and employees for more than 75 years. Offering value-added services and factory automation solutions since 1946, the company’s solutions help businesses get up and running, optimize their workflow, and maintain efficiency.
Headquartered in Brighton, Michigan, with offices in Cleveland, Grand Rapids, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Greenville, South Carolina, the company has also recently made a geographical expansion in order to serve even more customers.
“Prior to COVID hitting, several of our suppliers approached us and asked us if we would be interested in expanding further south,” says Spencer Sargeant, President. “Originally, it was just southern Ohio and southern Indiana and potentially Kentucky, and we jumped at the opportunity to do that.”
The onset of the pandemic, however, threw a wrench into those plans. “In our business there are a lot of face-to-face meetings and there’s a lot of onsite work,” says Sargeant. “But we hired some people who managed through that, and we also made some significant investments in inventory. Coming out of COVID, we were positioned to take some market share from some competitors who went the opposite way in basically decreasing their stocking levels and getting rid of as much product as they could as they figured this lull on business was going to stick around for a while.”
The company continues to invest in more people in those southern markets, he adds, as H.H. Barnum feels it’s a good market where the company can bring value to customers via stock, value-added product, and value-added services.
“We did buy a lot of inventory, and after COVID ended, it took us over a year to get our inventory down to where it normally would be,” says Ed Koza, Owner and CEO. “But it was worth the move.”
This ongoing commitment to quality service and growth has resulted in admirable recognition for the company, winning SMC distributor of the year in 2024 and previously in 2017—the only two years it was awarded. The company has also been named among the Top Workplaces USA for three years running. “We’re very proud of that. We have a great, great staff,” Koza says. “They’re the heart and soul of the business. We take recruiting extremely seriously and we have a reputation for taking very good care of our employees. That helps with our recruiting.”
Approximately 95 percent of H. H. Barnum’s recruiting is through word-of-mouth, he adds. When the company announces it’s expanding and is looking for certain job functions, it’s almost always somebody within the company who finds a qualified candidate, an impressive feat.
“We realized the employees are the lifeblood of our business, and we don’t just say it, we take it extremely seriously,” Koza says. “We do everything we can to provide value to our employees. We have a matching 401(k) and a very nice working environment. We pay above scale because we know we’ve got the best in the business, and we don’t want to lose them to somebody offering them more money.”
Respect is a vital component at H.H. Barnum Company, especially when it comes to the company’s 280 employees who may have family or health issues to deal with. “We throw the vacation policy out the window when somebody’s in trouble,” says Koza. “When people have to take six months off, we keep paying them, because we want them to go take care of their family and then come back to work when they’re ready.”
This compassionate mindset has predictably resulted in “almost no turnover,” Koza adds.
The company is also pet-friendly, complete with a dog park so employees can bring their dogs to work. “It started when I got a dog, because I’d never had a dog before,” he shares. “I thought, ‘why don’t we have this?’ I started bringing my dog to work and thought everybody should be able to bring their dog to work. So we probably have a half a dozen dogs in the building every day.”
“We have a wall of pets, too, on our back wall,” adds Sargeant. “There are probably 60 or 70 dog and cat portraits up there.”
Creating that kind of atmosphere and showing employees you care about them in all facets of their lives goes a long way to fostering loyalty within the company. “We also have a lot of smart people,” says Koza. “We have good systems and we’ve always been very conservative,” which has meant, for example, having the cash on hand to expand without the need to borrow. “We’ve been doing this for a long time, and we’ve always been smart with money. The owners don’t try to suck the money out of the company—we keep investing in it.”
H.H. Barnum also houses more inventory than its competitors and turns quotes around quickly, he adds.
“Our response time is the key,” Sargeant agrees. “Especially with the internet these days, and with younger generations who are looking for answers or looking to purchase something. They want to take care of it right away.”
As a company, this means being “very responsive” to customers and giving good answers that provide value. “There are a lot of people in our business who sell everything under the sun,” says Sargeant. “If you try to do everything, you end up not being good at anything. We try to limit our line card, and we try to focus on those products and pay attention to the suppliers who support us.”
H.H. Barnum’s suppliers appreciate that. “They know if they’re on our line card we’re going to pay attention to their product, and we’re going to try to grow it as best we can.”
Barnum’s exemplary company morale and excellent customer service are “cornerstones” of the business, says Koza. “I’m a really demanding shopper; from the beginning, I wanted to model Nordstrom’s. I just cannot stand subpar service, so we’ve always set the bar really high. Our customer service manager is an engineer. We sell technical products, and we want somebody who can help educate our customer service team.”
This is another nod to the company’s ongoing dedication to value-added service. Prior to Koza taking over the business from his father, H.H. Barnum was focused more on the process side, but has changed direction toward the automation space, which has been growing a great deal for many years.
“That’s primarily been our focus, the automation side of the business,” says Sargeant. “I think that’s been very helpful in terms of us finding new markets and in growing the company.”
Koza estimates that around 20 percent of sales is hands-on value-added work, going through the shop doing some kind of assembly or modification action to a standard product, which a lot of the company’s competitors don’t do. “We also have tech support staff of 30 people—a very high ratio for the total number of employees we have. We have a lot of customers that call and ask us to help them integrate our products and even our competitors’ products into their control platforms. So there’s a lot of value as far as a tech support side of the equation as well.”
“We can generally take care of most customer problems, and do it quicker—and a lot of times better—than they might see from the actual manufacturer,” Sargeant says.
The company has also increased its kitting over the past few years: taking a variety of different components, putting them together in a package, and giving it one part number so the customer can order and invoice one part number.
“It’s everything they need for maybe one specific machine they’re building,” he says. “It saves them a lot of time and money on the purchasing side as well as on the receiving side. They know when they get that box it’s going to go to a certain type of machine and it’s everything they need for that machine in one box.”
Although the end result is what has kept the company successful for so many years, H.H. Barnum’s employees and its people are what make the difference, agree both Koza and Sargeant. “We’re always trying to bring in somebody better than ourselves,” says Sargeant. “And it’s a real testament to the company itself that people don’t want to leave. They stay and they do the work, and they don’t want to leave.”
Being “great at the basics” is a point of pride for H.H. Barnum, adds Koza.
“We never want to lose anybody, so we try really hard,” he says. “If you were to ask us what’s the key to our success, I would say maybe 90 percent of it is the people. And when you have great people working together as a team, you can figure anything out.”
