By Dominik Lobkowicz
Rudy Graf, a longtime owner of The Science Source who sold it in 2011, looks at a message recently scrawled on a piece of plywood on the wall of the company’s now-former paint shop: “Gone….. already forgotten…” (D. Lobkowicz photo) |
Less than three weeks after purchasing The Science Source in Waldoboro, the company’s new owner has moved the inventory and assets to Florida and those local workers offered a chance to stay employed will have to relocate to keep their jobs.
The Science Source was purchased on Aug. 4 by Science First, which is based in Yulee, Fla. Both are longtime manufacturers of science education equipment.
Some but not all of the company’s 25 employees were offered jobs in Florida with the new owner, according to now-former Science Source CEO Paul Rogers.
“I know of a couple of people who were talking about it, but I didn’t see anybody jumping up and down and buying their plane ticket,” Rogers said Aug. 26.
According to a press release from Science First, The Science Source was moved to Florida because “it would prove too difficult to operate in two such widely separated locations.”
“We offered the people in Maine jobs in Florida,” Science First President Nancy Bell said in the release. “The problem is, of course, that people in Maine tend to love where they are living. The team in Maine was truly remarkable in terms of skill and work ethic. Several are coming to train us and may consider moving permanently when they see the fine quality of life we enjoy in Nassau County. We are also extending consulting agreements to key Science Source people and hope to benefit from an ongoing relationship with them.”
Bell declined to answer questions about the sale earlier this month, and did not return a call for comment on Aug. 25.
Science Source employees were offered a chance to travel to Florida to train Science First personnel for a few weeks, according to Rogers.
“And they need people – they’re going to have to hire 15 people – so there was some tacit request for people to go to Florida and go to work for them,” Rogers said.
“We somehow failed to get the people from Science First to understand at the bottom of our license plate it says ‘Vacationland’ and millions of people make this a vacation destination,” Rogers said. “Why in the world would we want to move to humid, hot, rural Florida?”
Aside from an arrangement to provide knowledge to Science First about Science Source’s product lines, Rogers is in much the same boat as the rest of the employees.
“My plan is, just like the other 24 people, is to find a job,” Rogers said.
Rogers said he has been working to get the employees connected with the proper state agencies for support, and encouraging them to find a job that will support the work they have been doing at The Science Source – in some cases, for decades.
“I will say while we’re a good place to work, if you’re not a good worker you don’t get to stay here, so they were people who made a contribution. Every one of them,” he said.
The Science Source was sold to Science First by Anania & Associates, a Windham-based investment company who purchased it from longtime owner Rudy Graf in 2011.
According to Rogers, The Science Source employees were still employed by Anania & Associates until Aug. 22, and Anania & Associates paid two weeks severance or “roughly one week for each year they owned the company.”
Graf still owns the 18,000- to 19,000-square-foot building and roughly 20 acres of land where The Science Source was located, but he has not yet settled on a plan for its future.
Graf, who built up the company over 25 years after he purchased it as Bond Manufacturing in 1986, was less than pleased to find out the company was being taken out of state.
“I was very upset, obviously,” Graf said Aug. 26. “I spent 25 years building a business the way I had learned to build businesses; that is, to build good relationships with your employees, your suppliers, with your customers, and in this case with the science education community specifically.
“To find out one day it’s sold, and it’s sold to a company that I have very little respect for in my industry and in four weeks everything will be taken out of here, that’s a real blow. It’s a blow to the employees that will then have to find work, it’s a blow to what I would consider a legacy, in a way.
“I was building something here that I think was useful. Useful to the community, useful to the science education field. We were making products that made a contribution, and to see that just torn asunder is not a fun thing to look at.”
Graf had made an agreement with Anania in the sale that The Science Source would stay in Waldoboro and the roughly 30 positions at the time would be maintained, according to The Lincoln County News archives.
Graf said he was led to believe by Anania The Science Source would stay in Maine, but recognized there was nothing binding.
Peter Anania, chairman and founder of Anania & Associates, said in 2012 his company planned to grow The Science Source and then make it available for sale, hoping either its management team or another local company would purchase it.
“There [are] no guarantees in business,” Anania said at the time. “We’d like to see it stay in local control.”
“He was correct to say there’s no guarantee; you can’t put that into a legal agreement,” Graf said.
Attempts to reach Peter Anania for comment on the sale were unsuccessful.
The Science Source has not been without its own acquisitions over the years, including purchasing the assets of STACO Inc., a company that produced biological models, in 2001.
The company’s employees were offered jobs in Waldoboro, Rogers said, “but as I say, people don’t like to uproot.”
The models ended up being a boon for The Science Source, when a distributor for the models got an order from Iraq in 2005.
“We had a nice chunk of business, a few hundred thousand dollars worth of business” from the order, Rogers said.
“Two years later, it doubled. Two years after that, it doubled again. So in 2009 we had the best year The Science Source ever had, because of that little addition,” Rogers said.
Both Rogers and Graf showed a lot of appreciation for what The Science Source’s employees did over the years, and pride in the products they manufactured.
The company started out with drills and table saws, Rogers said, and grew to include CNC routers, a metal shop, a fiberglass shop, and a print studio. Virtually all the products were produced by Science Source employees from raw materials, he said.
“We bought wood, plastic, metal, cardboard, and turned it into finished goods. They might be sophisticated high-end physics apparatus, they could be elementary school triangles with sticks of wood,” Rogers said. “We bought glue, we didn’t make glue.”
“We had some really unique products here, particularly the Linx system that we developed ourselves,” Graf said.
The Linx system was what Graf called “design technology;” kits of wooden sticks, dowels, and wheels that could be accurately cut and drilled with manual tools by students using jigs, and eventually glued and assembled.
The kits were used to teach science, technology, math, and engineering, Graf said.
“This company that bought it, they won’t do anything with it. They don’t understand any of that,” Graf said. “Maybe we spent too much trying to understanding education, and they look at this stuff as just dollars and cents, not the end product, what it does, what it can do.”
“But at the same time for 25 years we made a profit, gave people livings, and were able to develop and invest in developing new products,” Rogers said. “We just didn’t do it at a pace an investment company would be looking for.”
Rogers said all The Science Source employees were invested in what they made, were conscious they were making a product that would be used, and added value to the products through their experience.
Rogers pointed to the employee who packed the Linx system in particular, a person he said knew not just the product but the customers.
“Lots of times if you’re a warehouse employee you’re just throwing stuff in a box that goes out the door. This person actually knew who was going to get the stuff at the other end. She knew if there was a problem, how they used things, and that just comes from years of experience,” Rogers said.
“The workforce that we had here, with some exceptions, I’d say was the best that I’ve had under my management,” said Graf, who has operated businesses in other parts of the country and spent years working for multinational corporations around the world. “The attitudes, their abilities to solve problems – it’s the Maine way.”
“In a small business you really begin to understand capitalism because you put your money at risk. You’re not getting a daily paycheck as most people do,” Graf said.
“These entrepreneurs that start businesses or build businesses, that’s what the essence of capitalism is to me. The ugly side of capitalism is the way this thing has unwound.”
Correction: An earlier edition of this story incorrectly stated The Science Source employees were not offered any severance or compensation. According to new information from Paul Rogers, the workers continued as employees of Anania & Associates until Aug. 22, and were paid two weeks severance or “roughly one week for each year they owned the company.”
