Taking a no-nonsense approach

Listen to this article

A jock and a poet, Steven Abramson is a bright collection of unlikely contrasts.
As a business owner since 1985, Abramson, 56, is known both as a hard-nosed competitor and as a kind-hearted boss.
In his office at Pace Window and Door Corp. he is refreshingly unfiltered and instantly likeable.
“I can’t stand it when people come in and they shake when they’re around me because I’m the owner of the business. Come in, do your job. Tell me the facts; I don’t need fluff. Let’s get through it,” Abramson says.
He jogs three to four miles nearly every day. His passion for running and athletics was one of the reasons he named his company Pace. The result is a trim, fit company under the management of a no-nonsense coach.
Given the shrinking economy, Abramson is applying his fluff-free mentality to the company’s product offerings.
“What we’re trying to do is a stripped-down version of doing business. That’s what it’s coming down to, and we need consumers to recognize the importance of using local manufacturing, fabricating companies like we are,” Abramson says.
To squeeze into customers’ tightening budgets, Pace is developing a lower-priced window, with high-quality materials but without the high-cost technology. The new offering, he explains, is for customers who say they cannot afford $650 for Pace’s best window.
“The new product will still offer good performance, but it won’t have all of the different patents we put on our other products,” Abramson says.
The company manufactures doors and vinyl windows at its 23,000-square-foot headquarters and showroom in Victor, and it has three other locations in Buffalo, Albany and Syracuse. During its peak season from March to December, Pace has 60 employees.
The firm had $7.1 million in 2008 and hopes to grow that further this year.
In addition to the new product line, the company’s three-pronged growth strategy includes a foray into sunroom sales and installation and home energy evaluation services.

Eye on service

Underlying Pace’s growth strategy for 2009 is a refinement of its customer service practices. The firm works consistently to fine-tune how employees interact with customers, and it intensified that effort five months ago when it hired a service coordinator. Hart Goldsmith has two service technicians working with him to add finesse to the employee-customer interface.
“With commercial service work, there may not be the best customer-service people, so I’m trying to develop more of their bedside manner, if you will,” Goldsmith explains. “They are the ones who see the customers most, and they are the impression the customers get.”
The improvement effort addresses “how the service guys act, how they talk to the customer, how they conduct themselves at a residence, how they clean up and leave afterwards,” he adds. “I like to think that we leave a zero footprint. We should be like ghosts.”
Abramson first spotted Goldsmith when he was out to dinner one night. He was impressed by Goldsmith’s ease with customers.
“I was waiting tables,” Goldsmith says. “I was a customer service implementation specialist. I got downsized a year prior to meeting Steve, and I had just been waiting tables, trying to make ends meet while I was waiting for another job. Then I found this. I’m absolutely ecstatic about it.”
What drew him to Pace was the balanced advocacy there is for the client and the company.
“This is probably the most ideal situation for me. One of the problems I’ve had before (at other companies) is when management cares more about the bottom line than the customer. In those cases, I tended to go toward the customer and against the company to compensate,” Goldsmith says. “At this company, I’m never in that position.”
Employees say that when something is wrong, Abramson does not hesitate to say so. The man does not tiptoe, they say; probably the mere idea would make him laugh.
“I try to limit politics here where I can,” he says. “Politics is a waste of time, energy and money. It’s such a drain on our country. Look at the drain of our system of politics; it’s disgusting. Here we’re really fighting to hold together a wonderful little company whose whole premise is to do right by the customer.”
Abramson has strict standards for his company and for others, but they are no stricter than those he sets for himself.

A competitor

Abramson, a former lacrosse athlete, plays close to a dozen senior softball tournaments across the country every year. His team is a group of 19 men, ages 54 to 62, from around the Rochester region, and practice runs from January to November, three to four times a week.
When he joined the team, his coach says, Abramson thought his skills were rusty. So in addition to attending practice, he went to the coach’s house every afternoon.
Coach Dennis Warren recalls, “At 4 we would go over to the school by my house, and he would take 100 swings, and then he would make me hit him 100 fly balls. Needless to say, my hands were a little raw after it, but I enjoyed doing it.”
When Abramson makes a mistake on the field, he takes it hard, Warren says.
“It’s terrible how hard he is on himself. He calls himself a few names: ‘Stupid!’ He doesn’t make a scene or anything-he sort of beats himself up. It’s interesting,” Warren says.
Abramson says playing sports is an opportunity to experience adversity on a minute-by-minute basis. For that reason, he says, it is an excellent place to improve oneself-even better than school, at least for him.
At SUNY College at Cortland, Abramson was more interested in sports and enjoying the experience of college than in the classes. As a business owner, he says, the lessons he learned on the playing field ended up being much more useful. And athletics provided an outlet for his competitive streak.
“I get sick of people saying, ‘It’s OK to win or lose,'” Abramson says.
“My goal is to win, or why would I want to play? If it’s recreation, sure that’s fine. But if you’re in a tournament or you’re doing a job, let’s go! What’s the sense in just doing your job if you’re not going to do it as well as you can?”
Some of that mentality came from Abramson’s ninth-grade lacrosse coach on Long Island. Abramson says his coach helped him combine and employ the tools he had-the training, the mentality and the skill. Sports and teamwork provided the environment Abramson says he needed to develop his management style.
Respect, he says, is the bottom line, with employees and customers.
“We’re above board, and we expect that in return,” he says.
“The majority of our customers are great. But there a few of them who are just out of control, and then they complain. Their goal in life is to get a better price,” Abramson says.
“But I’m certainly incredibly positive: Our business is going to change to be even more customer-oriented with great quality product. But we don’t want people to think we’re going to be the cheapest, because we’re not going to be the cheapest.
“We want to give you the best quality, the best information, and the best product and installation that we can, and we want to meet challenges when there are challenges,” he says. “We have to afford to service. For all that, you can’t sell windows for $200 a window.”

Local focus

The company buys its materials from local suppliers whenever possible. Abramson says he would like to see more companies and individuals do that. He commissioned a group of local artists to create a mural communicating that message on the facade of Pace headquarters.
The community needs to work together to pull itself out of the struggling economy, because government is not going to, Abramson says.
“I sleep nights sweating because I have to take money out of my home to put it into the business because it’s a tough time. That’s no problem. But why is the government bailing out all of these corporate bastards and putting them back in place?” he asks.
Certainly, corporate and government corruption have not helped to elevate consumer or investor morale, he says.
Abramson’s wife, Dana, is president of Achieve Results Corp., a Rochester training company for speech recognition software.
Her own attitude was affected by the lower national morale, she says; negative news day after day was bringing her down. But she has changed her attitude to see the strategic opportunities in the current down market.
“I would let it get to me. Then I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. We save people money by reducing costs; if people have to downsize, we can make them more productive. So I’m going to love listening to the news, because we’re going to thrive.'”

Drive to succeed

The Abramsons have three sons-Brad, 26; Corbin, 19; and Gavin, 17- and have cultivated a will to succeed.
“It’s a very competitive environment in our home,” Dana says. “Everyone is very tenacious. It’s a house full of very strong personalities.”
The couple met when Steve was buying the first computer for Pace. Dana sold it to him.
“This is how ‘no fluff’ he is,” she says. “A couple days later, he called the computer store, and he said, ‘My name is Steve Abramson. I bought a computer from you the other day, and I thought you were kind of cute. Would you like to go out with me? We can drive separately; in case we don’t like each other, we can go home.'”
To this day, she says, he insists it was a practical suggestion. Even thoughtful, he says.
“Why would you want to stay on a date with someone you don’t like?” he asks innocently.
He has a sensitive side, though, and he has no shame about it. When he is inspired, Abramson writes poetry.
Sometimes suffering inspires the writing. The death of his mother-in-law was one example. He read his poem at her funeral.
Part of Abramson’s approach to the world is a ready and easy recognition of his faults and shortcomings and a strangely contrasting inability to recognize them in others.
Abramson believes in people readily but almost naively, he admits. And his general manager agrees.
Brian Ludwig, 35, is being primed to lead Pace after Abramson retires. It is a succession plan the two started mapping two years ago.
The men complement each other and share a thorough understanding of themselves. Ludwig says that helps them react to the environment-to customers, vendors and employees-in a state of keen awareness.
But when it comes to hiring, Abramson is perhaps a little too enthusiastic.
“I believe everyone fundamentally is great,” Abramson says.
When he likes someone, he believes that person will be a good employee, Ludwig says. But even Abramson admits that is not always the case: “I’m a horrible judge of people.”
Still, good employees always separate themselves from the rest, producing a strong team. They are the ones who recognize the usefulness and durability of Pace’s methods, Ludwig says.
Abramson says Ludwig was the first person to share his commitment to the business in equal measure.
Ludwig says he is making more of the leadership decisions in 2009 as Abramson tries to pull away from the business a little more-although retirement plans are on hold for now under the cloud of the economic climate.
In the meantime, Abramson says, the focus at Pace is on differentiation, as it always has been.
“In leading a business, the only thing that’s going to make it succeed is by differentiation, with our patents, with our marketing, with our sales presentations, with our installation, with our service.”
[email protected] / 585-546-8303

Steven Abramson
Position: President, Pace Window and Door Corp.
Age: 56
Family: Wife Dana; sons Brad, 26; Corbin, 19; and Gavin, 17
Education: B.S. in education, SUNY College at Cortland, 1974
Residence: Victor
Activities and interests: Jogging, light weight training, playing on competitive sports teams, spending time with family and friends
Quote: “If you’re the typical, ethical person, how do you run your business, how do you go forward? Luckily, where there’s adversity there are advancement opportunities. So I live off the advancement opportunities where I can.”

01/16/2009 (C) Rochester Business Journal