National Door & Trim marks anniversary

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

It was 40 years ago, 1978, when local contractor Tom Turnwald Sr. began looking for a more efficient — and less costly — method of constructing doors for the houses he was building.

Instead of building and finishing doors at the house construction site, like other builders — a process that was slow and often held up other work, such as dry walling and painting — Turnwald got the idea to build prefinished doors and trim in a controlled indoor environment and then take them to a construction site and install them.

The idea of building prefinished doors and trims worked out well; in fact, it worked so well that Turnwald thought building doors might be a better business than building houses. So he and his brothers, Dick and Vic Turnwald, and a cousin, Gene, started a company to make pre-finished doors and trim for area builders.

That, says Tom Turnwald Jr., Tom Sr.’s son and the current owner of the business, was the start of National Door & Trim. Today, the local company is celebrating its fourth decade in business, although the company has changed and expanded somewhat from its original concept.

At first, the company had a little trouble getting established, since builders are a skeptical lot, on the whole, and not all that interested in trying new ideas.

Then the fledgling firm got its first break: A Toledo area home builder notorious for procrastinating on projects needed doors in two weeks for a house being built for a parade of homes. Turnwald’s dad told the builder said National Door & Trim could get the doors made and installed in a week, which it did, and, after that, contractors began coming to Turnwald for doors.

“Everybody else — the builders — knew the situation and the jam my dad got him out of, so they started calling my dad and business started snowballing,” the younger Turnwald said, noting that the incident pretty much fueled National Door & Trim’s initial growth.

The business expanded significantly over the next three decades, with even the tornado that tore through Vision Park on November 10, 2002, not a significant problem for National Door & Trim.

“We pretty much came out of the tornado the way we went in,” Turnwald noted.

That wasn’t the case with the home building recession that began in 2006, he added, when National Door & Trim lost roughly half of its workers and half of its orders because houses weren’t being built.

“That sounds like a lot, but we were gaining market share as others were going out of business, and we were lucky to just be down 50 percent,” Turnwald said.

To keep its workers busy, with housing starts down 75 percent between 2006 and 2009, National Door & Trim began making display cabinets for KAM Manufacturing.

“Once we got into display cabinets, we said well, we can do kitchen cabinets,” Turnwald said, with the company now providing a number of cabinet options for its customers. “Cabinet sales were probably one of the first things that started changing for us.”

Getting into the cabinet business also sparked the need for the company to build a showroom to provide a way for customers to see samples of National Door & Trim’s expanding product line.

Later, the company got the chance to get into the commercial door market when a developer was interested in a company that could provide him with both wood and metal doors for his various projects.

Turnwald said kitchen cabinets and commercial work have provided most of the growth for the company the past few years, with the company now making doors and cabinets for university student housing projects, assisted living centers and nursing homes, and other commercial products.

Although Turnwald began working for his dad and uncles out of school, taking over the company was a little unexpected.

“My dad had gone to Florida and, when he came back, suddenly announced he would be leaving in two or three months,” Turnwald said, noting that, while the transition went smoothly, it took some time to get used to being in control.

“My comfort level took a hit, knowing that, before, I didn’t have to make the final decision, and now it was all on me,” Turnwald said.

Today, the company is thriving, and Turnwald said that, while it’s kind of a cliché, the strength of National Door & Trim really is its employees.

“We have a really solid core group of people,” he noted, adding that the company has a number of employees with decades of service — and very little annual turnover.

National Door & Trim’s workforce has also changed a bit following the building recession. Although the company has about the workforce it did prior to the downturn — approximately 50 people — the make-up is different. Although the company started with mostly shop workers, more designers and project managers have been added the past few years.

To celebrate its history, and the future, Turnwald said the company has scheduled an open house for 3-7 p.m. Thursday, November 8, at its headquarters in Vision Park on Grill Road.