I recently talked with Lenny Sylk and Dick Rotto, two of the most consequential figures in component manufacturing. They are men whose legacies are worth knowing, even a half century distant from their industry-founding work. Both were consummate entrepreneurs, with the guts to start businesses with no prior industry experience, in well-supplied markets. However, they came from opposite ends of the country, and from opposite disciplines.
Lenny studied at the prestigious Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, just as Donald Trump was beginning there. Lenny’s father owned a chain of Philadelphia-area drug stores, and Lenny grew up in his father’s magnificent Philadelphia mansion where Lenny resides today. Lenny and his partner from Wharton searched for business opportunities after graduation, including the premises of local lumberyards building trusses. He recognized the booming housing market 30 miles away in southern New Jersey, where the third Levittown was in the middle of a 12,000-unit build-out. So that’s where Lenny went in the truss business.
Dick started more humbly, having transferred from the University of Oregan to Southern Methodist University to follow his swim coach. Dick studied industrial engineering and interned at Texas Instruments’ plant in Dallas that was engaged in the mass production of electrical devices. That experience acquainted Dick with the advantage of repetition in product assembly. Perhaps because of his upbringing in the heart of the U.S. timber industry, he sought to build something from wood. When he visited the Barns Lumber’s truss plant near Love Field and saw Charlie Barns’ crews cranking out hundreds of trusses per day, Dick discovered what would become his life’s work. And, ingeniously, he talked Charlie Barns into backing his Houston startup.
Both Lenny and Dick first began by expanding locally and then nationally. Lenny was attracted by the U.S. government’s rapid expansion in the DC–Baltimore market, and he partnered with Dwight Hikel to locate a plant 50 miles north of Baltimore in 1976. When that plant’s deliveries to DC’s Virginia suburbs were too often delayed by traffic congestion, he set up a third location in Fredericksburg, VA, 100 miles south of his Maryland plant.
Dick Rotto expanded his market area northward of Houston with the help of his partner’s Dallas location. When both locations couldn’t keep up with the Texas housing boom, Dick built a plant midway between them in Georgetown, just north of Austin, in 1980. But neither Dick nor Lenny was done expanding.
In the early 1980s, Lenny moved his business westward from his commanding presence in the mid-Atlantic states into several promising markets. Initially, he purchased Mississippi Valley Components in the St. Louis market, later launching startups in both Houston and Denver. He recruited top talent to manage those markets, hiring Dick Marriott, sales manager at Hydro-Air Engineering (MiTek’s predecessor), to run the Denver and St. Louis operations, and moving Ted Watkins and Jack Dermer to run the Houston operation. In each of his new locations, Lenny installed his proven operating systems and achieved early success.
However, in the housing industry, what goes up eventually comes down, as both operators discovered when Texas housing construction collapsed in the late 1980s. Lenny closed his Houston plant and Dick closed his Georgetown plant. Dick sustained his Dallas and Houston operations by dispatching his sales force across the country while innovating methods to ship trusses across long distances. By the early 1990s, Dick was shipping enough product to both Florida and northern Virginia that he was able to set up plants in leased buildings in Orlando, FL and Fredericksburg, VA.
Lenny continued pursuing acquisition opportunities across the country, leading to his purchase of Truss-Com’s three plants in northern California in 1989. While he relocated several experienced individuals from his other operations to Truss-Com’s Sacramento headquarters, they struggled mightily to implement the Shelter plant management and engineering systems in a market unlike any Lenny had encountered. Having supplied trusses in southern California, I can attest to the significant engineering and delivery challenges in that market that discourage changes in the status quo, thus favoring incumbents.
By the mid-1990s, both owners began the process of retiring and leaving businesses in which their strong leadership sustained them through thick and thin. Lenny later described the challenges of traveling across the country to keep his disparate operations following his proven management systems. Fortunately, he had strong partners in his Denver and Maryland plants that were able to acquire and sustain his most successful operations. Dick’s denouement began in 1995, when he had to enlist outside investors to facilitate the purchase of Charlie Barns’ ownership stake, to which Dick sold his interests and left the business in 2000.
Today, the lasting influence of both individuals is evident in the successors to the companies they founded. Shelter Systems Limited of Maryland, formed by Lenny and Dwight Hikel 50 years ago, was purchased by the Hikel family in 1993 and continues today as a preeminent supplier in the Northeast. Trussway’s four Rotto-established locations continue to thrive, supplemented by the creation of a Fountain, CO location in 2006, though under the ownership of Builders FirstSource since 2022.
Today, these former industry giants continue to be amazed at the changes in our industry, as they peruse the pages of my book, Transforming Construction Through Technology and Willpower, with continuing interest, even as they both approach their ninth decade. Their stories continue to provide us with lessons on building and sustaining a successful business in this challenging industry.