On Air: The Art of Industrial Real Estate — Episode 28
Host: All right, all right — welcome, listeners, to episode 28 of On Air with Team Jensen, the art of industrial real estate. Today we’re excited — we’ve got a peer of ours on, Jack with Laminate Works. They’re out of the Armourdale area in Kansas City, Kansas. Jack, thanks for coming on.
Jack: Yeah, thanks — excited to dive in. We were sitting down earlier and you mentioned these are the type of tables you guys make.
Host: If you want to share a bit about your role at Laminate Works, the history of the company, and how it got started — I know it’s a family business too, so curious to hear a bit on that.
Jack: Yeah — I’m president at Laminate Works right now, been in that role for a few years. Family business — my dad started it in 1999 in Wichita, then we moved to Kansas City around 2001 and have been there ever since. I started working in the plant when I was eight years old, partly out of necessity to keep my mom sane during the summers. I fell in love with it immediately — loved making things, loved being around the old plant guys who taught me a lot of words as an eight-year-old. Some gruff guys, but they became like a second family to me. By the time I was 10, 11, or 12, I was finally starting to work on machines instead of just sweeping floors, and I knew this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Now we’ve got a cool dynamic — I run Laminate Works, and my dad took a sabbatical a few years back, decided what he wanted to do with his future, and started a sister company of ours, a metal manufacturing business called Metal Works. So he’s doing that, and I’m doing Laminate Works, and it’s great.
Host: Are there folks who’ve been there since you were a kid that you still get to work with?
Jack: Yeah, it’s really cool — one of the guys on our management team, Shawn, has been with us 16 or 17 years as of last week. He’s kind of the wise sage of our management group who’s seen it all. We’ve got a handful of guys on the plant floor who’ve been there just as long — I’ve kind of grown up with some of them.
Host: We were talking on our last episode about culture and how important that is to quality of work-life — if you don’t enjoy the people you work with every day, it’s not going to be enjoyable for anyone there. I’d imagine that family dynamic instills a lot of that culture from the inception.
Jack: Yeah, that’s the hope.
Host: [Martin City “crack it open” segment — Fairway Session Ale]
Host: I know you were at the Masters this year — that must have been a pretty cool experience.
Jack: Yeah, I was a special guest of a friend this year. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — awesome. I was having coffee with a well-connected friend in Kansas City, mentioned my 30th birthday landed on Masters Sunday this year, and he casually asked if I had access to the Masters. I said no, but I was working on it — a week later he texted me four badges for Sunday. My wife and my best friend Mark and his wife came along — we’ve got kids the same age and do a lot together, so it was a great group.
Host: You grew up your first several years in Wichita, then moved with the family business to Kansas City. Has Kansas City been a great home for Laminate Works over the years?
Jack: Definitely. We had a plant in Dallas, Texas that we sold a couple years before COVID, and we used to have a Houston plant too, but we sold those as a strategic divestiture to build up more of a world headquarters here in Kansas City. That’s been our hub ever since — we’ve got customers up in Canada, down in Mexico, pretty much all over the U.S., and it’s a good central location. We don’t have offices in Texas anymore, though I do have a salesman based in Dallas who travels that region.
Host: Want to share a bit about the products you make and who you sell to?
Jack: We’re a manufacturer, and we only sell to other manufacturers — that’s a distinction that sets us apart. We get the occasional hobbyist or DIY caller, but we only sell business-to-business. A company that calls us might be an office furniture manufacturer, like the table we’re sitting at — some manufacturers build everything themselves, others buy components out, like table legs from one company and tops from another, then assemble and sell. We serve industries from office furniture to school furniture, restaurant furniture, hospitality, even elevators — really anything with a decorative laminate sheet on wood, cut into shape and edge-banded, mainly for OEMs.
Host: I’d imagine there are benefits to volume in your process.
Jack: There can be — we like to call ourselves “batch size one,” meaning we try to optimize manufacturing so any shape or size can flow through without creating constraints. It’s nice when we can run 800 identical work surfaces in a row, but sometimes it’s one, or five, or twelve. There’s no minimum order threshold required.
Host: When you went to school, did you know you wanted to join the family business? Did you get a degree tailored to it?
Jack: I knew I wanted to work in the family business. My dad, being an entrepreneur, always said the one thing he really learned the hard way was finance — because as an entrepreneur you just have an idea and figure out how to run a business along the way. So I got degrees in finance and business management. For a minute I considered doing something totally different with it, but it ended up being a good foundation — understanding what the textbook says about some of these things, rather than just life experience.
Host: I think that’s part of what’s fun about entrepreneurship — more control over your own destiny, which can also make it more stressful.
Jack: Right — you’re really relying on yourself and the team you’ve built. It sounds cliché, but it really is never the same thing two days in a row — never the same problem, never the same opportunity. It’s a lot of fun in that aspect, but also there’s no true clocking out — no PTO where you leave your work phone in the office. One of our office guys just had his third baby, and there’s a running joke about paternity leave — I run 100% commission-based, so if I’m not working, I’m not making money. You can take off as much time as you want, but you know the cost of it.
Host: What’s your headcount these days?
Jack: About 65 at Laminate Works, and four or five over at the metal business.
Host: [Martin City “crack it open” segment] What’s your favorite memory working with your dad at Laminate Works or Metal Works?
Jack: I’ve got different tiers of memories. Growing up working for him as a really young kid, it was the excitement of getting up early, knowing I was up before all my friends, getting paid $2.50 an hour to sweep floors — there was an excitement to that responsibility. I miss those early morning summer drives to work with him. We used to get lunch together a lot too — don’t as much anymore since he’s mostly at our metal plant in Belton now. There were also trips together, trade shows and things like that.
It’s also really cool hearing other people talk about my dad — I admire him a lot, since he’s the entrepreneur who built the business and has been really generous giving me the opportunity to grow it now. In a weird way, I’m proud of him and impressed by him, which is funny since he’s my dad — but that’s probably the coolest thing, knowing I get to do what I do because of what he did.
Host: [reflects on generational business handoffs, drawing a parallel to his own family business and a local church pastor passing the torch]
Host: Are you at a point where you can go around town and notice your product out in the wild?
Jack: Sometimes it hides — it’s meant not to stand out. Sometimes you know exactly what it is. The more fun thing is seeing something that’s clearly not ours and thinking, “That looks terrible — I need to call on those guys, whatever they’re using, there’s a lead.”
Host: You’ve got two little girls at home?
Jack: Two girls, four and two, with a third girl on the way in September. Me and my French Bulldog, Gus, are the only guys in the house.
Host: Any hope of getting the girls into the family business?
Jack: The hope is to let them do whatever they want. I always felt like I wanted to be in the family business, but I never felt pressured to be — I have siblings, one of whom is involved, two aren’t. For my daughters, it’s about fanning whatever flame they’ve got.
Host: Tell us about your sibling who works with you.
Jack: My older sister’s been around a bit too — she didn’t start as young as I did, but helped with admin and office stuff over the years. She just had her first kid in January, so she’s in a part-time, as-needed role right now doing some marketing.
Host: [Host reflects on his own sibling dynamic with his brother Kurt, drawing parallels]
Jack: My dad always jokes — kind of backhandedly — that I was the last of his four kids he thought would go into the business. It’s been fun finding the synergy anyway. He and my older sister are probably the most alike, hard-headed types; I take more after my mom, so I end up being kind of the mediator.
Host: [reflects on the responsibility and reward of working in a family business, and the value of complementary skill sets on a team]
Host: Are the majority of your customers here in Kansas City, or mostly outside the region?
Jack: We have a few local customers, but the majority is outside Kansas City. Trade shows have helped over the years — early on, a local laminate distributor named Randy helped us establish relationships with customers who needed manufacturing capabilities they didn’t have themselves, which built out a regional base into Missouri. We also had a unique lane along the I-35 corridor up to Duluth, thanks to a salesman based in Minneapolis who was with us about 15 years — there’s a lot of woodworking activity in that area. Beyond that, our larger OEM customers are spread out everywhere, often in smaller towns where they’re the main local employer.
Our internal slogan is something like: when sourcing laminate parts and panels is easy, manufacturers can focus on what they do best. If you’re selling office furniture, you don’t necessarily want to deal with sourcing laminate parts yourself — if you can’t make it efficiently or don’t have capacity, buying it out can be a hassle. Our value proposition has always been service, making customers feel genuinely taken care of — that’s gone a bit out of style everywhere else, and we’ve doubled down on it as a differentiator.
Host: [conversation touches on the shift toward lowest-price, DIY options versus the value of a dedicated expert partner, drawing comparisons to other locally owned businesses]
Host: [Martin City “crack it open” segment] What’s something you learned about your dad you didn’t know, working together all these years?
Jack: It’s funny running into people who mention “Bert” — my dad — sometimes fondly, sometimes because some old bridge got burned 20 years ago and a company doesn’t want to deal with us because of it. Sometimes two businesses just aren’t meant to work together, and somebody takes it the wrong way.
Host: Even though he’s shifted focus to the metal side, I’d imagine you two still talk about where Laminate Works goes next.
Jack: Absolutely.
Host: Are you actively hiring for any roles right now?
Jack: Our strategy’s always been to find the right people and figure out the role later — if someone embodies our core values, we know it’ll work out long term, whether we’re actively hiring for something specific or not.
Host: Website?
Jack: LaminateWorks.com — though again, only reach out if you’re a manufacturer, not a hobbyist.
Host: Have you helped any newer manufacturers get off the ground?
Jack: A few — there was a cool company in Phoenix a few years back trying to capture the home-office boom, making some neat desks with our product; not sure they’re still around. There’s also a great Kansas City company, Simply Tables, doing a lot of cool stone-and-wood work, though most of what they do isn’t laminate. I always enjoy opening people’s eyes to what’s possible with the material — it’s not the perfect fit for everything, but it’s fun helping someone imagine the possibilities.
I was calling on a mom-and-pop office furniture manufacturer last week — a husband and wife who started the business in 2010 refurbishing old cubicles, reupholstering fabric and reselling them, and it grew from there into making their own furniture too. The husband mentioned sometimes being at the plant around the clock if he doesn’t have someone to run the machines that day. We actually met them for dinner before touring their facility, and it turned out to be their first date night out in months — felt a little bad they spent it with me and my sales guy instead of doing something more fun. But once we toured their plant, the conversation shifted from “I had no idea that was even possible” to genuinely exploring how we could help them get some of their life back by taking on more of that manufacturing. Those conversations are always the most rewarding — genuinely trying to help people, not just sell them something.
Host: That’s a really cool example. Appreciate you coming on with us — excited to see Laminate Works and Metal Works keep growing. Best of luck moving forward.
Jack: Yeah, that was fun — likewise to you guys.
Host: That’s a wrap.
