Executive Interview

Matt Forner Grote Grote lighting Grote Industries lighting repair shop repair shops technicians

Motor Age: Why do you think business has improved so far this year?

Forner: If economic times weren't as they were, we still have a good first three months, because that's a core time for our type of product (we're lighting and safety systems). It's cold, there are additional products (customers) buy during the winter that they don't buy during the summer and fall, there are some additional product lines being bought and there's typically more maintenance on lights during this time because of breakage.

Motor Age: Do you find that in the past year or so, people have moved to reactive maintenance rather than preventive maintenance?

Forner: No question about it. It's reactive maintenance right now and that started mid-year. It started in June. Preventive maintenance has gone down significantly. At some point we expect that to catch up in the third and fourth quarter. We expect to see a little spike due to people letting their equipment go to a point where they can't let it go any further and they have to get it fixed.

That's a temporary spike.If you take that away, we're projecting the market to be relatively flat; I think we're projecting a 2 percent increase this year without that spike. And next year we're projecting 1 to 2 percent. It's going to be a slow climb out of the economic situation we're in right now. That's in current and existing business.

One of the things we've done is opened up new markets, new niches. For example, specialty markets will allow us to grow our sales higher.

That's basically new, added business for us. We didn't compete in that market segment before. Our expectations as a company are not the 1 to 2 percent. They're higher than that because we're going after new business.

We've opened up a core white lighting, white LED market segment for utility lighting, work lighting, dome lighting, interior lighting, not only on trucks and trailers but small utility vehicles.

Motor Age: How involved are you in the specialty market?

Forner: We have very few application-specific products. You don't take a '99 Ford Taurus and say Grote has a part for it or a 2005 Lumina. Most of our products are just general trailer products, light products, general products that would fall on the maintenance side, farm lighting, agricultural.