James Knox isn’t an entertainer or a showman, but he knows how to make a grand entrance.
As president and owner of Kaylien, Inc., Knox, 74, manufactures thousands of doors and gates a year , everything from industrial doors to an elegant, custom-built entryway with a bronze and beveled glass finish.
That’s why the small company in Santee has earned itself an impressive roster of clients. Such celebrities as Dale Earnhardt, Eddie Murphy, Toni Tennille and Mike Tyson, as well as several hotels and casinos in Las Vegas all have Kaylien’s fiberglass doors in place.
Why fiberglass?
Fiberglass is cheap, fireproof, malleable and can be surfaced to look like more expensive materials. It’s also impervious to rust, rot, warping or termites.
That is why Kaylien gets so much business from Las Vegas. Hotel owners there typically have an idea what they want a door to look like , often sketching out a design on a cocktail napkin , and Kaylien can turn out a product matching the specifications in about a week, Knox said.
Gary Smith, tract division manager for Thousand Palms-based Guy Evans, Inc., is familiar with Kaylien’s product. The company, which supplies and installs doors for builders in Riverside County, finds one of the biggest selling points is the variety of doors Kaylien makes.
“They’re a unique company, because for a fiberglass door, they’re one of the only companies that will manufacture in different styles that can adapt to different houses. They’re a really good product to offer and sell,” he said.
That, and the durability of the product, makes Kaylien doors attractive to builders, Smith said.
Holds Up To Extremes
“They want something here in the desert that’s going to hold up so they don’t get customer service callbacks,” he said. “A wood door warps a lot between the heat and the cold weather, so you go with this Kaylien door, and you don’t have the warpage and the problems.”
Kaylien got its start when company founder Neil Livesay invented the process for making fiberglass doors in 1961. The following year, he founded the company in an 18,000-square-foot shop near Gillespie Field, where it stands to this day, Knox said.
Knox came aboard in 1976 when Livesay was looking to retire. The economy wasn’t doing very well at the time, and Kaylien was “hurting bad for business,” he said.
Knox, meanwhile, was looking for a business opportunity to invest in. At the time, he was working for the Wickes Corp., which wanted to send him back East to run some furniture stores in Pittsburgh. But Knox had other ideas.
“My wife and I said, ‘No, thank you,’ so we bought this business out of several opportunities we were looking at,” he said.
Knox took over Kaylien, running the company in the same way things had been done under Livesay. Part of the reason for the lack of change was that it took a few years for Knox to fully get his grounding in the business, and part of the reason was the company was struggling.
‘Guts And Soul’
“We haven’t grown because we weren’t capitalized to grow. I bought it on a ‘peanut basis’ , out of my guts and my soul, and a mortgage on my house. When you do that, you spend too much time paying the bills and not enough time building capital to develop it,” he said.
The result was that people were always coming up with new ideas on what to do, but not enough money to develop them, he said.
Knox’s one attempt to do something new and different was, by his own admission, a failure. When Balboa Park’s Casa del Balboa was being rebuilt after the original burnt down, Knox took on the challenge of redoing the ornamentation on the building in fiberglass.
The project cost him twice as much as he estimated, and he ended up losing about $1 million, he said.
Knox became much more cautious after that, and for that reason, he didn’t look to borrow money to expand the business and do more marketing.
Still, Kaylien managed to keep going due to the continued support from contractors and builders. Also, a product line that took off after the Balboa Park debacle helped turn things around.
The “Lustr Metl” doors, each with a distinctive bronze or pewter face, became very popular sellers, he said.
Over the years, the number of employees has remained fairly constant at about 25, and the amount of sales has remained fairly constant at $2.25 million , although those figures can almost double in the years the company gets a big order, such as a hotel, he said.
Next year, for example, Kaylien could be looking at as many as four Las Vegas projects. If all four come through, the company could make as much as $6 million in sales, Knox said.
This is helping the company to break out of its pattern of doing things the way they’ve always been done, he said.
For example, Knox admits in this high-tech age, his office is something of an anomaly because it relies largely on low-tech equipment. Although the company has a Web site (www.kayliendoors.com), Internet orders instead go to one of their suppliers, who faxes the orders to the non-wired staff in the main office.
But that will soon change.
Ralf Bauer, the assistant general manager of Kaylien hired five years ago, is credited with new ideas that may shake up the company. By the end of the year, Kaylien will install up-to-date computers and get Web savvy, so Internet orders can come to the company directly, Knox said.
Other possible changes include launching a new line of metallic-finished doors, expanding into Europe, and opening satellite plants to manufacture fiberglass doors for overseas sales, he said.
Still, the company hasn’t changed much in the past four decades, and that’s part of Kaylien’s charm, Knox said.
“We have the same kind of little country-store look, and we still make our doors much the same way. We try to hire the kind of people who work with their hands and have hand skills because you can’t always turn out a brand-new design or create a door with a fancy machine,” he said.
Knox was humble as he described his own company.
“We’re a little company in Santee. We know who we are; we don’t have any pretense about it. We still do doors the old-fashioned way. We still have dirt on the floor,” he said. “We’re going to keep making doors the way we learned how to make them, the old-fashioned way, with human talent.”
