Robert Horton: A CEO who finds inventions a necessity

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Robert Horton is at heart an inventor.
“I like to fool with things,” says Horton, chairman and CEO of Ultrafab Inc., a Farmington, Ontario County-based weather-stripping and brush manufacturer.
The 77-year-old company leader recalls that, at age 30, an idea for a better way to make weather stripping propelled him into a new career. It also led him to found a successful manufacturing company.
Working as a traveling distributor of ultrasonic welding materials and equipment, Horton was struck by an inspiration for his own business while driving somewhere on the Massachusetts Turnpike.
“I got off and called my wife and said, ‘Honey, we’re going into the weather-stripping business.'”
Horton founded his company in 1970, working first out of his basement before moving into his garage and eventually into a friend’s woodworking shop.
“I built the first machine,” he says. “If it wasn’t for hot-melt glue, I’d have never made it.”
The rudimentary prototype’s first run produced 18 inches of weather stripping and Horton knew he had found a workable process.
He subsequently hired two retired machinists to build a larger version of the machine using whatever materials he could round up, including used fiber winders-which manage the spools of synthetic thread-that had been manufactured before the first World War.
“At first I was ecstatic that we would go 10 feet a minute, now we’re beyond 70 feet a minute,” Horton says.
From that humble beginning, the business has grown to fill a 100,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Farmington, Ontario County, and now employs approximately 250 full-time workers, up steadily from around 80 in 1993. He declined to comment on the firm’s revenues.
Although his five children now own 80 percent of the company, Horton says he forbade them to make a career of the family business. Consequently they have gone on to become electronics engineers, marketing managers and entrepreneurs in their own fields.
“There’s a lot of discord in families that had family businesses,” he says. “After school they had to find other jobs.”
Horton credits an account with Xerox Corp. in the early 1970s with helping to set the tone for his firm’s future business.
“I had to pay very close attention to the quality of the products,” he says. “They were just sticklers for quality.”
Ultrafab produces static eliminators and light seals for the copier company, but its core business remains making seals to keep the elements outdoors.
Weather stripping accounts for 85 percent to 90 percent of the company’s sales, with brushes, light and dust seals, and other items rounding out the balance.
Looking ahead, Horton hopes to expand Ultrafab’s reach in the brush market, most notably by developing a new method of producing paintbrushes.
“I believe that in five years we’ll be making a paintbrush in a totally different way (than other companies),” he says.
The market for such a product could be enormous for the company, Horton adds.
The company has grown steadily in recent years partly because of the company’s moves toward diversifying its offerings and developing more efficient ways of producing them. Horton declined to disclose the company’s growth rate.
“We don’t do anything the way anyone else does,” he says. “(We) don’t make it unless no one knows how to make it.”
Developing new processes has been his company’s key to success. Of the 13 patents the company holds, Horton is responsible for five. He holds eight other patents for ultrasonic-welding processes not used by Ultrafab.
Ultrasonic welding is a process that uses heat generated by a clamp vibrating 20,000 times per second to fuse synthetic fibers. After seeing that the process could be used to cut and sew a polyester and Teflon cloth, Horton realized that its applications could be much further reaching.
“This method of manufacturing allows for quick turnarounds,” he says.
It allows the firm often to ship orders the day after they are received, giving the company an edge over competitors whose processes generally require more time.
Horton acknowledges that often innovations come from both hard work and accidental discoveries.
An avid fisherman, Horton found he needed special paintbrushes for detailing lures. The multitude of colors he uses, however, required him to clean brushes constantly, consuming more time than he wanted to spend.
He found a way to push bristles through a common soda straw to make a brush which did not need cleaning. After waiting for the paint to harden, he simply pulled the bristles out a little further and clipped off the soiled ends, refreshing the tool without having to stop for cleaning.
The idea for the straw brushes was met with interest by a host of groups, from educators to archaeologists. So far Ultrafab has produced 50,000 and is developing a way to mass-produce the items.
Ideas for other products came when the company’s creative team saw ways to improve on existing products.
For example, after seeing a metal strip with steel wire fingers attached to roofs and windowsills to prevent birds from landing and leaving droppings on buildings, Horton devised a way to make a similar device from plastic using his ultrasonic-welding equipment.
The idea, he says, was to make a product that worked the same way, but that would not have sharp edges that could hurt a child who brushed against it.
Other products were born when Horton found new ways to combine byproducts from the manufacturing process.
By hot-gluing weather stripping to a roll of coffee stirrers, Horton developed a way to make thousands of brushes on a continuous roll, rather than individually. Realizing that the items could be produced by a continuous process and then cut into individual brushes, he developed an item that is used in a host of tasks, including cleaning camera lenses, computer keyboards and manufacturing equipment.
Nearly a year and a half ago, Horton realized he needed a more secluded spot to work on new ideas. He purchased a small building in Canandaigua to serve as his workshop.
He has since outfitted it with a simple machine shop where he and the company’s staff of four full-time developers can assemble new prototypes for manufacturing equipment.
“This is kind of my retirement office,” he says. “Through this facility we have the chance of doing development work for the manufacturing plant and developing new products.”
Edward Norton, Ultrafab’s director of research, says Horton has actually increased the amount of time he spends working since the research facility opened.
“I hope I have half his energy when I’m his age,” Norton says.
Horton’s greatest strength lies in his fertile mind, and developing new products is Horton’s true love, Norton explains. The senior executive has handed over day-to-day operations to Ultrafab president Fred Engelfried.
“He doesn’t confine your thinking,” Norton says. ” His employees can think outside the lines.”
Along with coming up with new products, Horton is helping to guide the company to retail markets as its product line expands.
“We’re just getting into the business of selling through stores,” he says. “We’ve always sold to other manufacturers through a (representative) network.”
The move to retail stems in large part from the company’s increasing presence as a brush maker.
“The brush market works a little differently,” Horton says. “Brushes are a high-quantity product, sort of non-high tech.”
Often brush makers find themselves working collectively rather than in direct competition, he says.
“One person can sell brushes from anybody,” he says, explaining that if a company does not make a particular style of brush it simply sells customers a product produced by a competitor.
When he is not at the helm of his company, Horton can be found outdoors.
Along with pursuing lake trout in Canandaigua Lake, he also makes trips to Canada to fish for bass and walleye.
Closer to home he likes to work on his golf game, though he admits the amount of time he spends at work has added a few strokes to his handicap in recent years.
He also pilots his own Cherokee airplane. His love of flying is a vestige of his service in the Army Air Corps during World War II.
He also credits his time in the military with helping to steer him away from following in his father’s footsteps and becoming an electrician.
“If it hadn’t been for the service that’s what I’d have done,” he says.
Taking advantage of the then-new G.I. Bill, after he was discharged in 1945, he went to college, eventually earning a degree in business administration at the University of Buffalo after taking time to travel the country.
Charles Maginness, the former chairman of Performance Technologies Inc., has known Horton for nearly a quarter century.
“He’s an unusual guy. Not many people are aware of the multifaceted Bob,” he says. “His mind is going all the time.”
Maginness credits Horton for his charity work, which he began almost as soon as he founded Ultrafab. Along with donating his resources to Hillside Children’s Center, he has given truckloads of food to summer camps, he says.
Horton also has been known to reach out to individuals in need, Maginness says.
After chatting with a waitress and learning about her struggles to earn college tuition, Maginness remembers Horton loaned her the money without ever having met her before.
He only requested that she contribute the money to pay back the debt to another person needing an education.
The life of a businessman has been rewarding, Horton says.
“When I knock off, I won’t feel the world owes me anything,” he says.
(Jason Conklin is a Rochester-area free-lance writer.)

10/05/01 (C) Rochester Business Journal