The Hutterite religious community traces its roots in North America all the way back to the 1500s. Much like the Amish and Mennonite communities of the region, the Hutterites have established themselves over centuries in rural colonies that are largely active in self-sustaining work and lifestyles such as farming and agriculture. Generally, these colonies do not interact with the outside world in typical ways such as through technology or modern communication. However, the company WB Components counts itself as one that has a strong Hutterite core, proving that exceptions can sometimes lead to something exceptional.
WB Components began operations around 1984, when members of the Willowbank Hutterite Colony in Edgeley, North Dakota were approached by a man selling a truss table taken from a defunct plant. The colony purchased the table and began producing trusses from there under the leadership of Dan Wipf, originally a truss plant manager and now in Inside Sales & Design. WB eventually teamed up with supplier Alpine ITW (Illinois Tool Works), which provided engineering software and plates for the trusses, two necessary steps to expand the company’s operations. Today, WB services projects and clients across America, with a roster of remote staff members to oversee and facilitate national operations.
The North Dakota head of Truss Design & Sales, Jeff Haider, explains that the business is steadily growing and improving its processes while also reinvesting back into the Hutterite colony. Many of WB’s operations are performed in-house: the company manufactures, engineers, and designs its own stackers for trusses; loads and unloads products from two different rail spurs via its own fleet of Peterbilt semi-trucks and a half-dozen pickup trucks; and builds its own columns in-house. 2024 also saw the addition of an in-house automated truck washing station to help keep the fleet running clean.
Furthermore, the company’s operations include a degree of automation in its layouts, table setups, and saws, which allows it to label each piece of wood processed to designate its future purpose and destination. WB even repurposes its wood scraps into turkey bedding that it then re-sells, a practice that many other truss plants simply don’t think to do. Haider says that, when it comes to sustainability and smart solutions like this, “we were green before green was a thing.”
This decade has been a busy one for the company. In 2020, WB built a 56,000-square-foot lumber storage building from the ground up, one that boasts a modern interior with temperature control, the latter being important for both wood quality and morale for employees during the notoriously subzero North Dakota winters. This warehouse has improved overall wood quality as it allows WB not to have to store its main resource outside.
WB sports a quarter mile of storage for its trusses; whereas a lot of other plants can be very tight in space, WB has the capacity to build up to 115-foot clear span trusses in wood. “We have never come close to running out of space,” Haider says. The space is also filled with multiple pallet handlers and forklifts that allow for quick loading and unloading of trusses, which pairs well with its transport fleet that is ready to haul to any state.
Haider says that 2024 turned out to be a great year for WB, with sales on par with the equally successful 2023. The company would not have had such success, Haider says, without being open to traveling across the country to find interesting work, such as big building jobs in the Kansas area. “It’s knowing our market and knowing what to do to get those sales,” he tells us.
Amid this mounting success, there are still some challenges to overcome. Haider says that a challenge in working with Hutterites is that they are not concerned about advertising the business, insisting only on word-of-mouth. This is why partnerships with organizations like NDAB (North Dakota Association of Builders) and NDRLA (North Dakota Retail Lumberman’s Association) are incredibly important, as both have afforded the company access to networking and personal training within the industry, as well as a demonstrable uptick in sales in the North Dakota area. Haider says that the growth of WB wouldn’t be possible without partner organizations like these, and the company is very grateful for them.
Another aspect of being a Hutterite business is that WB lacks options for bringing in new talent, as the colony does not generally hire workers from outside its own collective or others nearby. A challenge going forward will be in producing more volume during the year’s busy times with the same amount of people. This will also mean an increased focus on and improvement of communication amongst the company’s remote employees across the country. In the past, WB opened its doors to other truss plants eager to research its warehousing and storage, plants that WB now often partners with and that have similarly opened their own doors.
WB Components has also had to continue adapting to changes in the lumber industry. In recent years, certain commodity prices have been better than others and projects in the home area of North Dakota were a bit sporadic. Haider says that not every area was great for business in 2024 with the economy struggling—especially in areas like housing—but WB was able to find its niche to operate in and ended up having a good year despite it all.
A crucial factor for the company is the presidential change from Joe Biden to Donald Trump and the potential for lumber tariffs to be imposed by the new administration. The lumber market has fluctuated because of this uncertainty, but with WB’s large storage facility, it can order multiple rail cars of wood and store it indoors safely for a long time. Historically, North Dakota has not had much trouble during national situations like the 2008 housing crisis thanks to its robust local industries (i.e. oil and the Air Force), and WB has not faced a big crunch itself. The Sentinel Missile Project also has a strong presence in the state and is promising to bring infrastructure and more than 500 new families to the area.
Haider says that business is generally slow for WB at the start of the year until about April, when business picks up considerably until roughly November. To keep its business growing, WB will look to find more work in the slow winter times so as not to be in a deficit by the time April comes around. The company is confident that President Trump will do a good job for the lumber industry in lifting American bans on logging in certain areas, which will give companies like WB timberland for wood that is close by and allow it to not depend on Canadian lumber; however, WB does enjoy working with the superior Canadian lumber product and Haider hopes the tariff situation can be resolved.
Automation will also play a big role in WB’s future. Automated tables that need less manpower to work and other options could be gamechangers, but there have been hiccups with the adoption of automation in the truss industry so far this decade. With the hope that these problems will be fixed and more options will be available, automation will likely represent the company’s next big investment.
Haider says that 2025 is expected to be an incredible year for WB Components. While Haider himself says that he didn’t understand a lot about the Hutterite community before starting work with the company, he says that they have made him feel like he is part of a family thanks to a strong sense of closeness. This attitude is what the company will be bringing forward as it looks to take steps into the automation space while maintaining the same high quality of service that America has expected from it since the 1980s.
