Tennessee Flooring Machinery Maker to Move to Larg

Chattanooga, TN, May 24--Hasko Inc.'s scheduled June move is as much about form as function, according to company President Randy Brooks. The Chattanooga Times/Free Press reported that the company long known by the name of its founder, R.K. Haskew, is set to move from its longtime Red Bank building to a new, larger space in the Soddy-Daisy Industrial Park in which it's invested $1.6 million. Brooks, the late Haskew's grandson, said the new site will "reflect more of the image of a world-class company we want to project," and therefore prove more attractive to potential workers. "We've had a heck of a hard time finding people," he said. "We don't have laborers. We have technical people, and young people just aren't going into technical fields like they did 20 years ago. "I guess they want to do things they see on TV and think are exciting, and this is not glamorous," he said. Hasko makes equipment used by manufacturers of hardwood flooring. Ed Korczak, executive director of the St. Louis-based National Wood Flooring Association, said it would be difficult to overestimate Hasko's industry standing. "Over 200 companies make wood flooring, and Hasko's in the top five in this country supplying those companies," he said. "If we didn't have them, we wouldn't have wood floors," Korczak said. Brooks said Hasko's machines cost flooring companies between $200,000 and $500,000. Steve Pugh, the company's vice president, said production of those machines at Soddy-Daisy will be considerably more efficient than it's been in the Dayton Boulevard building, to which several additions have been made over the years. "We probably lose 12 man-hours a day constantly moving equipment we need into a space and moving what we don't need out," he said. "Our people are constantly working around something else to do their jobs." Brooks said the company specialized for some 60 years in buying and rebuilding old equipment. When carpet began replacing hardwood in the 1960s as the homeowner's flooring of choice, he said, the hardwood industry suffered and companies such as Hasko faded from the scene. "In the mid 1980s, hardwood started coming back, but nobody was making machinery" needed to make hardwood floors, he said. "Bruce (Hardwood Flooring) came to us for rebuilt equipment." Brooks said the company's direction changed shortly after he succeeded his father, Lewis Brooks, as its head. "We started manufacturing our own products in the early 1990s," Randy Brooks said, adding that he started his 32-year career at his family's company in the machine shop. The privately held company's annual sales were about $250,000 annually in the early 1970s, Brooks said. He declined comment on Hasko's current sales except to say that those sales have doubled in each of the past four years. "This company's growing at 25 percent to 30 percent annually," he said. "We've got 50 employees, (up from) a dozen or so 25 years ago." Even so, Brooks said, the company faces challenges, including increasing international competition. "Most of our competition is in Canada and Germany," he said, "and the Chinese are starting to come into this market with cheaper labor and without the restraints we have (in terms of) everything we have to do to satisfy the government. "We have one thing they don't have, though--an abundance of raw material. A lot of the wood from which the Chinese make their furniture comes from here," he said.