BULLISH ON PEOPLE CINDA CORP. PRESIDENT SAYS TAKING CHANCE ON WORKERS IS GOOD BUSINESS
Detroit Free Press (MI)
By CECILIA DECK Free Press Business Writer
Date: March 26, 1990; Page: 3E
Edition: METRO FINAL; Section: BIZ
Illustration: Photo JOHN A. STANO
When Virgil Cobb first laid eyes on Mark Moore five years ago, he saw a young man with no skills, no job and no socks.
Today, Moore is Cobb's right-hand man at Cinda Corp., a Detroit-based distributor and contractor of insulation and fiberglass products, whose biggest projects include the Cobo Hall expansion and Chrysler Corp.'s Auburn Hills technical center.
"It was wintertime and there he was wearing tennis shoes with no socks," Cobb recalls. "I gave him my work boots, and I swear he wore them a year before he gave them back."
Cobb, 47, a former teacher, former publicist for the Catholic diocese of Toledo and former fiberglass salesman, is a man who believes in giving people chances.
Over the years, he has hired ex-convicts. He has also hired people with mental and physical handicaps. It's not just because he's civic-minded. Cobb says it makes good business sense.
My objective is to find the manpower most appreciative of an opportunity," he says. "The most important quality an employee can have is loyalty. You can't buy it, and in a small company, upward mobility is limited."
And, Cobb says he has been burned. "The convicts didn't work well," he says. "I hired three and all three ended up back incarcerated."
Other employees stole checks and materials.
"He's given people two or three chances," says Moore, the man who walked in with no socks five years ago. Moore is now the Cinda's installation supervisor, and Cobb considers him one of the best in Michigan.
Selena Heard, Cinda's marketing director who has scoliosis, said Cobb took a chance on her when he hired her three years ago.
A student in public relations at Michigan State University, Heard was referred by Michigan Rehabilitation Services for a job as office manager at Cinda. "I had no knowledge of construction, drywall, nothing," she says.
First, Cobb entrusted Heard with furnishing the new office building/warehouse he had bought on West State Fair near John R. Then, he sent her away on training programs to learn about drywall and the construction industry. By her second year with Cinda, Cobb was sending Heard out to meet clients and potential clients and to attend City of Detroit functions.
"I remember him saying, 'You really do well when you're out there,' and I remember how good I felt," Heard says.
"There was a time when I was down and out and no one would have known I'm a professional and I can do a job. A lot of people wouldn't have seen beyond the surface. He did."
Cobb says Detroit has lots of resources to offer, but businesses have to pay the price. "The price is a lot of patience and good will," he says.
Cinda uses drug testing to weed out applicants, Cobb says. And he says he devotes time to teaching new hires professional etiquette.
"Some people find it very confusing to be on time," Cobb says. "If you spend your life watching TV, saying 'I'll be right there' sometimes means 'I'll be there before noon.' I insist my employees are punctual."
For a first offense, Cobb says, he suspends the employee. The next offense means termination. Theft gets an automatic firing with no due process.
Cobb says he has paid another price for doing business in Detroit, as one of few ongoing businesses in a run-down neighborhood near the state fairgrounds. The area is geographically perfect for the market he wants to reach in Detroit and suburbs, but there have been frequent break-ins.
"My family goes bonkers when they think about me being here at night in the winter," says Cobb, who lives in Troy. "One Saturday, people came in and told neighbors they were making a delivery and they just cleaned out my warehouse."
His dog, Sam, a boxer that looks like a pit-bull and has the run of the place, is a deterrent, he says.
The main advantage of locating in Detroit is the labor pool, Cobb says. Because most city residents do not have cars, Cobb has a station wagon that goes around picking workers up.
Cobb won't give financial information about Cinda, but says: "We've been very successful, very profitable."
As a black-owned company with eight of its nine permanent employees black, Cinda is able to bid for City of Detroit projects under the city's sheltered market program. But it wasn't always so, Cobb says.
He founded the company in 1984 after working in sales for 15 years for Owens-Corning Fiberglas Corp. of Toledo, the last five as district manager in Detroit.
Born in Chicago, he moved with his mother, a day worker, to Toledo and won a scholarship to Findlay College in Findlay, Ohio. "I knew there was a better side and education was my way out," Cobb says. "I was not a great student, but I knew I had to hit the books. I knew I didn't want to go back to where I was from."
After graduating with a bachelor's degree in education, Cobb taught school for three years in Toledo, earned a master's degree from the University of Toledo and worked for the Diocese of Toledo as communications director before joining Owens- Corning.
When he left the company to start his own business, Cobb had $17,500 and no employees. No banks would give him lines of credit, which meant he could not bid on government projects that have a delay between the time the work is completed and the time the contractor is paid.
Cobb worked a year by himself before hiring Moore.
By 1987, Cobb had established his company well enough to bid and win a contract to insulate the Cobo Hall expansion. "That was a springboard into large commercial business," he says. Bob Hallick of Turner-Brooks Inc., a Madison Heights contractor, says he has been doing business with Cinda for five years.
Hallick says he has had to tell Cobb on occasion that while he respects what Cobb is doing, "In the construction business, if you don't have the materials on time, no one wants to hear excuses. They want results."
But Hallick says he has gone back to Cobb's firm many times because Cobb is trustworthy in a world where many contractors go back on their word.
VIRGIL COBB
JOB: President, Cinda Corp., Detroit.
PERSONAL: Age 47; married to registered nurse Faye Cobb; lives in Troy; two children, Stephanie, 21, and Alexander, 18.
LAST BOOK READ: "The Art of the Deal" by Donald Trump. "A terrible book," Cobb says.
HOBBIES: Basketball "fanatic," weekend golfer.
Caption:
"My objective is to find the manpower most appreciative of an
opportunity," says Cinda Corp. President Virgil Cobb.
PROFILE
BIOGRAPHY
VIRGIL COBB
CINDA CORP |
