Business Profile: Career path wasn’t by design

Jan Mellinger and her husband were raising three young children when she was downsized from a job at Nike in Beaverton, Ore., just before Christmas.

A little stunned by the unexpected setback, Mellinger initially thought she would get through the busyness of the holidays before beginning her search for a new job.

But based largely on the strength of a recommendation from her former supervisor at Nike, she was approached within days by Gus Kollom, the founder of Northwest Fourslide.

“He shows me a new location and a brand new building and hires me on the spot as a bookkeeper,” said Mellinger, who is now the majority owner of Northwest Fourslide.

It was the first of many times in Mellinger’s almost 40 years at the metal parts manufacturer that she would rise to meet needs within the company. Her reliability, hard work and talent prompted Kollom to promote her into management, Mellinger said.

The company changed hands following Kollom’s death, with a relative taking over. When the heir was ready to retire, Mellinger said she and her husband, Kevin Mellinger, purchased Northwest Fourslide in a deal intended to secure its future.

“I don’t think I ever thought of myself as a leader in the industry,” Mellinger said. “I just did what had to be done.”

Especially in her early years with the company, she was one of the few women in her industry. But being a woman, Mellinger said, doesn’t usually matter in the day-to-day operations of Northwest Fourslide.

One of the biggest impacts is that being a woman-owned company provides a certain advantage to some of their customers who have government contracts, she said.

Northwest Fourslide is now poised to relocate to Idaho in June, where it is constructing a $10.8 million, 43,000-square-foot plant in North Lewiston.

The company employs 40 people at a facility it leases in Tualatin, Ore., near Portland. About half of them are making the move to the region and another 20 staff members will be hired in the area.

The project has the support of the Port of Lewiston and the Nez Perce County Commission.

The port sold Northwest Fourslide its site. The commission has backed giving the company a partial property tax exemption for five years using a mechanism in state code and county ordinance. It has previously helped Clearwater Paper and Vista Outdoor upgrade their Lewiston operations.

Northwest Fourslide’s parts go into products of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories, the region’s largest private employer; consoles for lights above airline passenger seats; and missile systems, among others.

Each of the hundreds of parts manufactured by Northwest Fourslide is assigned a number. Some are hard to see with the unaided human eye. Others are almost a foot long.

Mellinger knows each part’s function from memory as well as the client that purchases it from Northwest Fourslide, the metal required to make it and where the metal is procured.

Every order begins with a drawing submitted by a client that’s turned into a custom die or mold that’s used to make the part. Typically Northwest Fourslide can have components in production as soon as eight weeks after receiving a drawing depending on workload and material availability.

Opening in Lewiston is part of a succession plan to shift the operations of Northwest Fourslide to the next generation of the Mellinger family.

What led the Mellingers to Lewiston began in the 1980s.

She worked days at Northwest Fourslide. Her husband, Kevin Mellinger, also an owner of Northwest Fourslide, pulled swing shifts as a forklift operator at a corrugated cardboard company. The arrangement allowed them to keep their kids out of day care.

Her work ethic is part of what impressed the owner, Mellinger said.

“When you’re dealing with the company financials, and every little penny that goes in and out, I think that I just gained his trust,” she said.

Her involvement at Northwest Fourslide grew and she became a vice president of the board about 20 years after she started working there.

It was in that capacity that she helped the company navigate through one of its biggest challenges in 2000. The economy was slipping and Hewlett Packard, one of the world’s largest manufacturers of computer printers, moved production of the parts Northwest Fourslide did for them overseas.

“They were 60% of our business,” she said. “We lost that in one year. … We were debt free. We had to cut back a lot of people and just weathered the storm.”

Part of the solution was obtaining an aerospace certification, something not all of its competitors held, and expanding into the medical industry.

Once the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves a part, it’s hard to move it elsewhere, she said.

The new approach also involved filling smaller orders for thousands or tens of thousands of parts, instead of orders for millions of components, Mellinger said.

“Most of the sweet spot is that smaller amount because it’s harder for them to take those overseas and find suppliers that will make smaller quantities,” she said.

More than a decade later, Mellinger stepped in when Northwest Fourslide faced a different type of crisis. The founder’s nephew, Tom Mololepsy, was ready to retire and no one in his family was interested in running it.

Mellinger inquired about the possibility of her husband and her buying it. With Mololepsy’s cooperation and help, they negotiated an agreement to buy it, cashing out their retirement plans as part of the deal.

“It was terrifying when we bought the company because we didn’t know what was going to happen,” she said. “Everything we ever owned was on the line.”

They moved operations to a more affordable, smaller facility. They also strengthened processes in a variety of ways such as adding more inspections that improved the already high quality of their products. The value of Northwest Fourslide has roughly doubled under their ownership, she said.

Now the Mellingers are setting the stage for the next phase of the company. Their two sons, the boys who had just started elementary school when she lost her job at Nike, are now adults with key roles at Northwest Fourslide.

Their oldest son, Brad Mellinger, is production manager, and their younger son, Matt Mellinger, is the director of new part development and tooling manager.

Their daughter, Mandy Conrad, has an ownership stake in Northwest Fourslide, but isn’t involved in its day-to-day operations.

Their sons plan to grow Northwest Fourslide in Lewiston where they expect it will pass to a third generation of Mellingers.

“It’s not like it’s a given,” she said. “Most people don’t understand that. We have to teach them the American dream, which is hard for that third generation, because it is all they have ever known.”

Williams may be contacted at ewilliam@lmtribune.com or (208) 848-2261.