It would be difficult for most of Byrne’s hundreds of employees to even imagine it, but both Norm and Rosemary grew up without indoor plumbing, attended one-room schoolhouses, and hunted and harvested most their own food.
From those hardscrabble origins, Norm and Rosemary transformed Byrne from a basement experiment in Ada into a global force.
The primary moving force has been Norm, a 79-year-old paradox. Norm’s management style is the stuff of legend, hardly what you’d find in today’s MBA manuals. “Ya gotta get ’em movin’,” he says with a chuckle — thus the moniker, “Stormin’ Norman”
Norm was born on New Year’s Eve 1940, the lone boy among seven sisters on the family farm. He graduated from Lowell High School he ran track, though his prep years were marked by tragedy when his dad died suddenly from a stroke in 1957. His school days were made even more difficult by dyslexia, a disorder he would transform into a business asset, going on to become both an inventor and holder of multiple patents.
It was in Grand Rapids during the summer of 1962 that Rosemary met Norm. “He asked me for my phone number, and I was going to write it on a $10 bill he had, but then I told him ‘You’ll spend that before you ever call me’ so I found a piece of paper. He called me the following Wednesday, and we spent the day at Lake Michigan.”
They married in 1963 and started Byrne in a 12-by-12-foot room in the basement of their Ada home in 1970. During the installation of their first piece of heavy equipment – a wire cutter that weighed upwards of 500 pounds – it destroyed the bottom steps leading to the basement floor. They fixed the damage and never looked back.
Both worked other jobs while their fledgling business grew – Rosemary as a nurse, and Norm at a variety of manufacturing positions.
As Byrne grew, so did the family, with Kelly, Kathy, Dan and Molly arriving in that order. In the beginning, the couple leaned on high-interest loans from sharks in Chicago because local banks wouldn’t provide them funds for operating capital. Norm never took a salary for the first five years, and every supposed impasse only made him more relentless in his quest to succeed.
Norm bristles at the prospect of giving up or giving in: “The ones who survive are the ones who stick with it,” he says. “Don’t ever quit.”
Today, Byrne Electrical boasts well over $100 million in annual sales, relying on a workforce who churn out power and data distribution products for the home, healthcare and furniture industries not only from Rockford and nearby Lakeview, but in Mexico and China.
To read the full press release, about Byrne’s humble beginnings and future 50th anniversary celebrations, please visit https://www.byrne.com/News/cords-of-wood-quarts-of-jam.
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Contact: Lisa Zabavski
616.240.3589
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SOURCE Byrne Electrical Specialists
