LITTLE ROCK — Custom Aircraft Cabinets Inc. of North Little Rock said Friday that it will hire 150 workers and invest $5.9 million in an expansion at a former retail store in Sherwood.
The announcement comes 23 years after the company began operations in the garage of the parents of Mike Gueringer, co-owner of the company with Paul Reesnes.
The company, which makes high-quality cabinets and upholstery for private aircraft, has 140 employees and plans to hire the 150 workers over the next two years, paying each between $31,000 and $41,600 a year. In addition, an affiliated company of Custom Aircraft Cabinet — Reliable Fire Protection — will hire another 20 employees at $41,600 each a year.
Custom Aircraft Cabinets received almost $634,500 in state funding from the governor’s quick-action closing fund to go toward renovating the 146,000-square-foot former National Home Centers building on Landers Road in Sherwood, adjacent to Sam’s Club.
The state also will provide the cabinet firm with an income tax credit of 1 percent of payroll for the next five years and will provide sales-tax refunds on eligible building materials and machinery associated with the expansion.
The company’s expansion is “breaking the trend” in the industry, Gov. Mike Beebe said at Friday’s announcement. Some companies in the industry are reducing their work forces.
Hawker Beechcraft, which does finishing work on private jets in Little Rock, said a month ago that it would lay off 170 of its approximately 450 employees at the plant. A Chinese firm has offered to pay $1.8 billion to acquire Hawker Beechcraft, a Wichita, Kan., firm that is in bankruptcy. Another jet-maker, Dassault Falcon Jet, laid off about 150 workers in Little Rock three years ago.
Hawker Beechcraft and Dassault Falcon Jet are customers of Custom Aircraft Cabinets, as well as Midcoast Aviation, Gueringer said. Midcoast Aviation is now known as Jet Aviation of St. Louis, which does aircraft maintenance and modification.
Also in early August, LM Windpower said it would lay off more than 230 employees at its turbine blade plant at the Little Rock Port, including all of its 140 temporary workers.
On the other side of the coin, Caterpillar Inc., which has a 700,000-square-foot plant in North Little Rock, said in March that it would hire 125 workers to start a third shift.
Reesnes said Custom Aircraft Cabinets has been contacted by some of its customers recently, seeking more products.
“They’ve been watching us over the 23 years and know our reputation,” Reesnes said. “They are getting busy and are needing help.”
Gueringer said the company gets numerous calls from businesses that say they are unhappy with their current suppliers.
“We just don’t have complaints about the quality of our work,” Gueringer said.
The business aviation industry has been in an “incremental recovery” for the past couple of years, said Dan Hubbard, senior vice president for the National Business Aviation Association in Washington, D.C.
“What we’re seeing at this point in the economy is a mixed picture in the aviation industry,” Hubbard said. “By any metric you would use — flight hours, aircraft sales, size of the preowned aircraft fleet and employment — there was a downward turn in late 2008 and 2009. It was not until sometime in 2010 before you started seeing things stop getting worse.”
There are a lot of small and midsize companies across the country in the business aviation industry that have recently started showing improvement in business, Hubbard said.
Reesnes said companies that make and work on small private jets, but not larger private jets, have been hurting.
“Everything has taken a hit in this economy and everything has slowed down, but now we’re seeing signs that everything is starting to pick back up again,” Reesnes said.
Before beginning Custom Aircraft Cabinets in 1989, Reesnes and Gueringer worked for several firms, including Dassault and a jet-finishing company that has since gone out of business.
The two said they had a dream to start their own business, so they first prayed about it.
“And God told us that was a good thing to do, and He would be with us,” Reesnes said.
In August 1989, they quit their jobs and opened shop in Gueringer’s parent’s garage. Gueringer was 36 at the time.
It was difficult at first to get contracts because the two were unknown to manufacturers of private jets.
“It was just cold calling, begging for an opportunity to show them what we could do,” Gueringer said.
They repeatedly talked to officials at what was then Midcoast Aviation’s headquarters in St. Louis. Eventually, Midcoast invited the two to St. Louis to show what they could do, Gueringer said.
One of the first jobs they worked on was building cabinets for Walt Disney’s first corporate airplane, a Gulfstream turboprop, the two said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 09/01/2012