Stan Pauls - the CEO & co-owner of Decor Cabinets - says he is living his dream.
And he credits his wife, partner and company co-owner Connie for supporting him all the way.
“I married the smartest girl in the class,” Pauls says with a chuckle.
“We went to school together and she was the valedictorian and I said I’ve got to marry her. And that has worked out great. We work together and I really do feel like I am living the dream.”
Pauls grew up in a small hamlet of a couple hundred people, in Glenbush, Saskatchewan, about an hour north of North Battleford. His dad was a pastor in a small church. That was one day a week and the other six days he was a carpenter, he built houses in summer and cabinets in winter and that’s where Pauls developed his love for woodworking.
“I went to the school of hard knocks, helping him, but I always loved building things so when I was about 14 or 15, I bought my first table saw. I had saved up enough money then and I started building things. Anything from toy sheds for people to a grain elevator or lawn ornament,” he says.
“And I think I was around 14 years old when I sold my first piece. So quite a few years before I could even drive.”
He also built a little playhouse for his sister, and when his uncle saw it he asked him to build one for him as well.
“It’s funny,” Pauls says, “I was just talking to my cousins recently and they still remember getting that and they still have it.
“That’s kind of where it started. I went to school for 12 years, but I never graduated, I didn’t have enough credits, so then I went to Saskatoon because I wanted to work and build things and I started working for a cabinet guy. He also did a little bit of construction work.
Pauls says they were building the cabinets in the houses, “but then I convinced him to set up a shop. I helped him with that and within six months I was the shop foreman. We had six employees and I was just 18 years old.”
Pauls says he worked for him for another year – and I married my wife Connie, we were both 19 at the time - and then “I had this dream of going out on my own.
“So I bought a quarter of land (about 160 acres) from my father-in-law and built a little house on it, about 22 x 24, and a little shop, about 30 x 36, and I built cabinets in there.”
But he wanted to do it better, he was building face frame cabinets at the time. Like he had learned on the job. But he has always been curious and learned by observing other people.
Then one day he heard that the place he left in Saskatoon had hired someone from Germany and felt he had to talk to that guy because back then there was no internet and Pauls was always looking to learn something new, so talking to people was the best way of doing that.
“So, I met him and convinced him to let me work for him for the winter, for three months, to learn how to build European-style cabinets, because he was the European master from Rosenheim,” he says.
“But then after about a week, he decided to pay me and said ‘this is good, we’ll work together. ‘”
“So we did and that’s where I learned to build European cabinets. At the same time, I wanted to be a journeyman carpenter, but when I applied they said I had to go the trade school, but I said I didn’t have time for that, and if I know my stuff why do I have to do that? So I did the exam and I got it. Now I was able to build houses in summer and cabinets in the winter.”
Later, Pauls and his partner opened a small shop in North Battleford, but eventually decided to focus all their energy on the Saskatoon facility.
It was mostly residential work, but they also “built stuff for schools and the university.”
“We used a lot of European hinges and door slides and that was fairly new at the time and sourcing those parts wasn’t easy,” Pauls says.
That’s when they decided to travel to Europe and filled up a container with hardware and brought it back.
“But it was way more than what we needed - we were a 10-man shop at the time - so we opened up another business, European Hardware Distributors in Saskatoon. And we hired my brother, who didn’t know anything about hardware to sell it for us, because we were busy building cabinets.”
Pauls says initially, whenever a customer had questions about hinges, his brother would call them and “we would tell him what to say, because the customers didn’t buy from us, they bought from European Hardware Distributors.
“We ran that company for about six years, we had two stores, in Saskatoon and Regina, but then I sold my shares to buy into Decor Cabinets. My brother owned it for quite a few more years afterwards and later sold it to Richelieu. Richelieu owns it now.The reason Pauls bought into Decor Cabinets, was that after his wife had supported him for all these years, “and my dream to buy a quarter of land and be a hippie and all that stuff, she had gone back to university and got her degree as a CA. That meant she had to work for three years before she could write her final and she got a job in a small town in Manitoba, in Winkler.”
He says they did some research and since it seemed like a great place to raise a family, they decided to make the move.
“You know, she had always followed me in my dreams,” Pauls said. “So, it was time for me to follow her dreams and we decided to move to here. I sold my shares in the Saskatoon Company and because of my industry contacts I knew Decor had a good name and reputation so I asked them if I could work with them.
“That was Oct. 23, 1989. I remember it well, that was my first day at Decor. And after about a year and a half, they approached me because one of their three partners wanted to retire and they offered me shares in the company. That’s when I sold my shares in European Hardware Distributors and I sold my land and then I had some cash and we bought into Decor.
When I joined Decor there were about 50 employees and we had about 32,000 sq. ft.
The company continued to grow, and then six years ago Stan and his wife Connie, bought the company from the last remaining original partner.
Today, Decor employs some 540 and operates from a 200,000 sq. ft. facility.
Continued growth
Most recently, Decor added 40,000 sq. ft., for an automated HOMAG line that’s about 800 feet long. And because it ends in the old plant, they had to “move a bunch of equipment from the old plant into the new one, into the centre of the U-shaped line, in order to make it all work.
“We also put in a new dust collection system and that to me is stellar. That has just changed everything,” Pauls says.
“That’s amazing and it’s so important for employee health and quality products, especially for finishing.”
Part of the new, fully automated line is a huge sorting system. As sheets are cut, “let’s say for four or five kitchens, we put them into a batch and parts of the kitchen might come from the first sheet and other parts could come from the 10th or 15th sheet, because it is cutting it from different sheets for better optimization of the material. And then it gets edgebanded and into the sorter.
“So when the doors are ready and we call out kitchen number two and cabinet number one, it brings out those parts and it brings them out in the order that we are going to assemble them. It will bring out the sides, the tops and the bottoms and the shelves, all in the order we assemble them.”
Pauls said the intent for that system is to double their production with the same number of staff.
“We know that as we get more technology, we need more office and differently-trained people. So not only do we want to keep our employees, but this also means we can offer them more opportunities.
“In fact we have already sent numerous employees to Europe for training and when the new equipment was delivered, our people were part of the assembly because they were already trained and they know how to run it. We already have eight people trained on the new equipment and we are working with the local Red River College for additional training. We want to give more of our people an opportunity.”
In fact, Pauls has for years focused on giving his staff opportunities and ways to dream bigger and better, everything from taking them to LIGNA and other industry events, “so they can see for themselves what is possible, to providing opportunities to grow themselves or their role in the company.
“I think it is important to provide people with opportunities and to let them dream of bigger and better things.
“How else can they see what we can do if they haven’t seen something better and bigger and different. And to show there is opportunity for them at Decor.
Making it all work
One of the challenges that came with adding the new, fully automated line, was the fact that it is feeding into “old” plant. And while Pauls says they are able to handle the additional production, it took some tweaking and fine-tuning and small changes in final assembly to make it all work.
“Eventually, we will also update our final assembly,” he says, “but we have to get this working perfectly before we want to start on another project and we are confident we can handle it with out current configuration.”
Of course implementing and coordinating everything wasn’t easy.
“It was a challenge to get to where we are now, because throughout it all we had to keep up with our production,” Pauls says.
“So when we had to move a drill because a new one was coming in, we had to do it on weekends and evenings. It’s taken several months to do all this and it meant we put a lot of pressure on our people, but we’ve managed. So now we’re going to slow down and let things settle and get the feel for how everything is working. We had to move equipment around for the new line and now we want to make sure everything is working and tweaking as needed. There is no bottleneck, no urgency, but it is important to take the time to have things settle.” 
Finding and keeping employees
Perhaps surprisingly, despite having some 540 employees and being located in a small town that has more than its share of other large companies, Decor Cabinets is doing quite well when it comes to finding and keeping employees.
“Right now we don’t have a real problem,” Pauls said. “What we did many years ago, was we recruited in Europe, in Germany and Ireland, and about seven years ago went to the Philippines.
“We went there ourselves, with our team and some Manitoba government officials to assist us, to interview people right there. So we have just over 100 people from the Philippines, who moved here for two years and then their families could join them. It’s also a path to citizenship. After two years they can get their landed immigrant status, then they can bring their families and eventually apply for their citizenship.”
Decor’s business is done through a dealer network.
“They receive the order and we manufacture it and then deliver the product to our customers,” Pauls says.
Decor has its own trucks for the delivery to the dealers, they have about 17 owner operators and also use some dedicated carriers to fill any gaps.
Most of the work is residential and product split is about 50/50, Canada and the U.S.
“We go to Ottawa in the east and Alberta in the West, with some going to Vancouver as well, but that is minimal,” he says.
“And in the U.S., it’s the Seattle/Portland area in the West and then Colorado, and in the Midwest it’s Minneapolis and Chicago and we also have a couple of trailers going to Florida. We’re also in Maryland and Kentucky.
