Don Lynn Move From L.A. Hasn’t Slowed Company, Thanks To ‘The Best Employees’

When Don Lynn decided to leave California four years ago, his primary motivation was the search for a better quality of life.

Lynn, who owns and presides over Lyn-Tron Inc., rates family concerns a notch above business concerns on his priority list.

“Even though we wanted to go to a place that was business-friendly and competitive,” Lynn explains, “our No. 1 thing was quality of life.

“We were bringing 30 families along with us, and I have five children of my own. And we wanted to go somewhere we could grow as a family.”

The quality-of-life stuff has worked out fine.

And imagine how pleased Lynn has been to discover that business considerations really haven’t suffered in the process. The company is currently involved in a major expansion of its facilities.

“Moving up here has allowed us to be so much more competitive in our industry,” Lynn says. “We haven’t, in too many cases, lowered our prices. But we haven’t had to increase them, either.

“So gradually, over the four years we’ve been here, we’ve become more and more competitive as our competition’s prices have gone up.”

At its facilities on the West Plains, Lyn-Tron manufactures fasteners and spacers that typically are used in circuit boards and panels. The parts are machined from various metals and plastics.

The task is more complex than it sounds.

To serve its market, Lyn-Tron must offer “an almost infinite variety of lengths, diameters, thread sizes, and materials,” Lynn says.

“When you extrapolate everything, our catalog contains probably 100,000 different items. We have about 40,000 different part numbers in our computer system and approximately 65 million pieces in stock.”

Lynn runs a company that his family founded in the Los Angeles area in 1956. He grew up working in the plant and left home for college to study architecture.

“I never wanted to be involved in the business,” Lynn recalls.

School was interrupted by the service, though, and when he got out of the Army in 1970, he decided to go back to work for Lyn-Tron “just to get my feet on the ground, and then go back to college.”

He figured six months, tops, but he’s been there ever since.

He took over the company in 1973.

By the 1990s, living in the Los Angeles area had taken its toll, and Lynn wanted out. So he began to look at other cities in the Western United States. Spokane wasn’t a consideration until he met representatives of the Spokane Area Economic Development Council at a trade show. In the final consideration, Spokane won out over Salt Lake City and Denver as the new home of Lyn-Tron.

Lynn brought 30 employees and their families with him when the company moved. He has hired 45 more people here since, most of them soon after the move.

And, he says, the quality of his employees combined with a good business atmosphere has allowed Lyn-Tron to prosper.

“When we took over the company in 1973, we were doing $400,000 a year in sales,” Lynn says. “In 1993, the year we moved up here, we were shipping $5.5 million worth of products. This year, we hope to hit $7.5 million.”

More impressive, though, is the company’s growth in profits.

Lynn says while his bookings will be up 15 percent this year and shipments will increase 10 percent, profits will be up 40 percent over a year ago.

“And a year ago,” he says, “they were up 30 percent from the previous year.”

All of that has been accomplished, he says, without significant growth in number of employees.

The company has increased its market share in a growing market, but the real key in growing profits has been achieving greater efficiencies.

“I really have the best employees that anyone could have,” Lynn says. “They’ve just come up with a lot of good ideas.”

Lyn-Tron has embarked on a major expansion to keep up with the growth in demand for its products.

In California, the company had a 24,000-square-foot plant. It built a 36,000-square-foot facility when it moved here and is now adding another 18,000 square feet. The expansion will cost about $1 million, and the company is also investing in $1 million worth of new equipment.

The expansion is being funded through industrial revenue bonds.

Lynn says the expansion will be a milestone for Lyn-Tron, but even more important could be the company’s involvement in a new product.

“It’s a fastener-type product,” says Lynn, who is reluctant to elaborate at this time. “It could represent a huge new market for us. That product could mean as much or more volume than we are doing right now.”

And if that happens, Lynn says, the company would “expand considerably” beyond the current building project and more than double its employee base over a five-to-10-year period.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo