ALLISON WALSH | CONTRIBUTOR
Over the course of its nearly 100-year history, G.F. League Company Inc. has built a reputation for quality so solid that it relies almost solely on word of mouth to continue to grow its business. Barbara League started as an employee after marrying into the family in the early 1960s, and today she is overseeing the company’s two divisions – League Manufacturing and Quick-Crate – as chairman and CEO.
UBJ sat down with League to talk about the path she followed to the helm of G.F. League Company, and her take on the state of women in manufacturing today.
What was your role in the company prior to taking on a leadership role?
When I had our first two sons I didn’t want to leave them and go back to work, so I started a secretarial service out of our home – this was 1965. I found myself doing more and more work for G.F. League Company. As our children got older I would come and work here half days while they were in school, and then when they stayed all day I stayed at work all day. So I just weaned into the business from that perspective.
I had no training, because in the ’50s you didn’t have manufacturing engineering technology degrees from colleges for women. I had a business degree from Winthrop. Fortunately Greenville Technical College came online in 1962 and I went and took everything I could take relevant to manufacturing.
How did you evolve into your current role as chairman and CEO?
We had some really bad years when the economy was up and down. In the mid-’80s we had the choice of laying off the production team or laying off the management team, so that was a no-brainer. My husband and I ran the entire operation until the economy recovered, and that catapulted me into a higher role than I had had previously. I just stayed there as we brought employees back on line.
When [my husband] retired in 2007 he gave me all of his stock in the company, which made me majority stockholder, and that enabled us to apply for and receive our WBENC [Women’s Business Enterprise National Council] certification. That has opened a lot of doors for government contracts, particularly in the aerospace industry.
It’s probably safe to say a lot of the women you went to college with didn’t intend to become career women.
A lot of them went for their MRS degree. That’s what you did. At 12 years old I had a paying job. Our school was right across the street from this real estate agent’s office. After school I would answer his phone while he went out to show properties. Monday through Friday,and he would pay me 50 cents an hour. I have never, ever not worked. I love being a mom, I loved staying home with my children, but I needed more. I had to work. Fourteen-hour days don’t bother me at all.
The company appears to have a long history of adapting to what’s going on around it.
We like to eat. If we don’t adapt, we don’t stay in business. We started as a lumber brokerage business in 1917. In 1936, my husband’s grandfather died, and his son – my husband’s father – had just graduated from Furman. He and his mother – my husband’s grandmother – decided to take the wood and manufacture component parts for the textile industry, because back then Greenville was the textile center of the world, and we had all these textile mills that needed parts for their machines. I thought that was so innovative that he had that knowledge and that drive. That’s when it became League Manufacturing.
And we have the most incredible team of employees. We hire people who are smarter than we are and we leave them alone and let them do their jobs. And that works. If a customer calls and says he’s got a machine down and he’s in real trouble, and we’ve got production scheduled out for five weeks, we shut it down and we run that customer’s part right through to get him out of trouble, and our employees adapt to that.
Women make up nearly half of the U.S. labor force, but are still vastly under-represented in manufacturing. To what do you attribute this, and what can be done about it?
There still exists a stigma about manufacturing that it’s dirty, it’s long hours, it’s heavy labor. Nothing could be further from the truth. It’s creative, it’s innovative, it’s immediately tangible. When you design a part and you take it to the plant and pick out the material and put it on a machine, it goes from the paper to the end product like that. How rewarding is that? A lot of women who are artists are understanding this connection now, and I think we’re going to start seeing a lot more women in manufacturing.
Women in manufacturing need to do their part, too. We had a group of Girl Scouts we brought in to take a tour of the plant two or three months ago. They were just fascinated. Little things like that can plant a seed that can grow and take them in a different direction. If they were bored it did not show.
Does your company make hiring women a priority?
We have had CNC females in the past, but the pickings are just not there. When we need somebody for one of those machines they have to be skilled. This is getting ready to change, because the Center for Manufacturing Innovation at Greenville Tech is coming online in 2016 and that’s going to take Greenville Tech’s ability to provide us with CNC operators to a whole new level. And we’re going to start seeing more women in manufacturing.
I am so proud of that project because that’s Clemson partnering with Greenville Technical College to close the skills gap and create a pipeline of skilled workers for all the manufacturers in this community.
