Kundel Industries Goes To Hollywood

Copyright 2009 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.
By Dan O'Brien
YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio

Robert Kundel Jr. understands that playing phone tag is a fact of everyday business. It’s just not every day that phone tag is played with comedian Jay Leno.

“He told me, ‘You’re a hard guy to get a hold of. It’s a good thing you don’t owe me money,’ ” Kundel laughs, recalling his recent conversation with the former host of The Tonight Show and star of NBC’s new program this fall, “The Jay Leno Show.”

Kundel, operations manager for Kundel Industries Inc.’s custom crane division, says he and Leno traded phone calls for days until they finally made contact several weeks ago. Leno, known almost as much for his collection of classic cars as his comedy, was on the line because he had recently installed a small custom overhead crane in his garage in California where he restores classic cars. And he wanted Kundel, who made the crane in Austintown, to know how much he liked it.

“I thought it was pretty funny that he was trying to track me down,” Kundel says. Leno gave Kundel the OK to use his image and promotional testimonies on the company’s Web site for advertising and at trade shows. “He seemed like a real down-to-earth guy,” Kundel says.

Leno is just one of many Kundel Industries customers who owns a SnapTrac crane, a product designed, manufactured and sold by the enterprise in Austintown. Other customers include the U.S. military, NASA and “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” The cranes were donated to Leno and Extreme Makeover, Kundel says, but such freebies are well worth their return in marketing benefits. “We’ve recently picked up new dealers such as Summit Racing, Fastenal and Granger,” he reports.

Kundel Industries designs and fabricates three different overhead cranes capable of lifting as much as a half-ton, three tons and 10 tons, Kundel says. The SnapTrac – the smaller, half-ton crane -- is a product designed for workstations at any company or industry that requires heavy lifting. “There’s a very wide variety of uses,” he says. Although the product is often associated with auto enthusiasts such as Leno, the vast majority of customers are in other types of small businesses.

“There’s a big market for this,” Kundel says. “One was recently shipped to Afghanistan” for use at a military base. General Motors Co., Ford Motor Co. and Honda Motor Co. are also customers that have purchased a SnapTrac.

“There are a lot of places where it can be used,” says Shawn Malinky, an account representative for Knight Industries, Auburn Hills, Mich., which distributes the SnapTrac and other cranes made at Kundel. “It’s very simple. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t require a team to put it together.”

The small crane is becoming more popular within a variety of businesses such as transmission shops, boating companies, small manufacturers and average homeowners. “Our relationship with the company is less than a year old,” Malinky says, “and we’ve had great success in selling their products.”

Other opportunities that look promising are with businesses tied to the agriculture. “The food and grocery industry is doing well because people are staying home,” Kundel says. “We’re trying to figure out how we can relate them to our industry.”

The company started to market its SnapTrac product about four years ago, and business at Kundel’s crane division soared 80% between 2007 and 2008, Kundel relates. Today the manufacturing market is flat and business was slow in June. “Since then, we’ve started to pick up,” he reports.

The crane business is especially important in this market because its other division -- manufacturing large shoring and shields used in heavy construction projects -- is suffering. Kundel employs 35 in Austintown, but before the recession had as many as 60 working.

Kundel is one of only four companies in the country that manufactures this type of workstation crane and the only one that uses a sophisticated steel-cast trolley and internal electric harness system. The trolley and electric system was developed and engineered at Kundel. The steel-molded trolley body is unique.

A schematic was designed in-house through software, and the specifications were sent to the Trumbull County Career and Technical Center. There, the specs were fed into a three-dimensional imaging machine that produced a 3-D model of the component. The company refined some of the initial flaws in the part and then had it manufactured at an Ohio foundry. “These new trolleys are four times stronger and lighter” than the traditional types, he reports.

The company fabricates and paints all the support beams for its cranes within its plant on Henricks Road. Other components are machined and assembled off-site and shipped to Kundel, where they are tested, packaged and sent to customers in a complete kit. In the case of the SnapTrac, the crane is shipped in parts to the customer who is expected to assemble it on-site.

Kundel says the SnapTrac can be bolted to the shop floor and put together within a day. The SnapTrac retails at roughly $2,800, but the company’s larger cranes can run as much as $150,000. “A lot of companies want to buy, but they’re still waiting,” he says. “Once things start to break loose, I think we’ll be really busy.”