Waxing entreprenurial

SELF PORTRAIT Date and place of birth: April 10, 1963, in Fayetteville Family: son Jake, daughter Brooke Occupation: Owner and founder of Hanna’s Candle Co. and Greenland Composites Inc.

If I make it to 100, I’ll celebrate by going to the lake!

My advice for first-time water skiers is the more you practice, the better you’ll get.

The candle scent I like best is Apple and Berries Triple Scented Mainstays. I have one burning at my desk right now.

The book that influenced me the most was Candle Crafting, From an Art to a Science by William Nussle.

When I’m in my car, I like to listen to rock and country.

My goal for the next year is to make a profi t.

For the next 10 years, it’s be debt free.

People would be surprised to learn we set the world record for pouring a concrete slab at the candle plant. We poured 1,000 concrete trucks (full) in one weekend.

When I need advice, I talk to a lot of different people. I have a great group of people I can call on that all have different skill sets.

My fantasy dinner party would include my dad, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and of course, Ronald Reagan.

The thing I like most about making candles is that we are limited only to our imagination as to what can be done with wax and fragrance.

What I like least about making candles is that sometimes wax can be very unpredictable.

What fascinates me most about Hanna’s Candle Co. is what our people can accomplish when we put our mind to it. They make me proud.

The No. 1 key to success is just getting started, and then not quitting.

My favorite quote is “50 percent of success is just showing up.” A word to sum me up: gratefulFAYETTEVILLE - If all goes according to plan, Burt Hanna’s not even halfway done.

Hanna just turned 50, and he’s crammed plenty of living into those years.

Construction projects, raised-bed gardening, kids, personal and professional successes and setbacks - more of the former than the latter - creating one of the nation’s largest candle companies, making a go of it as a professional water skier … there was a lot that happened between 1963 and 2013.

And yet, Hanna’s far from content. When asked how he feels about hitting the half-century mark, he laughs and insists he’s got at least another 50 years left in him.

“I’m thinking I can make it another 60,” says the founder of Hanna’s Candle Co. and Greenland Composites Inc. “You’ve got to set your goals high!

You’ve got to think positive. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do.”

The odds are pretty stacked against Hanna, or any of us for that matter, making it to 110, but don’t rule it out. Somewhere out there, someone may have written a how-to book for people interested in becoming a super-centenarian, and if Hanna can get his hands on such a book, he’ll follow its instructions to the letter.

That strategy worked out pretty well for Hanna in his first 50 years. He learned how to water ski from a book he checked out of the Fayetteville Public Library. Other books taught him how to make potpourri and candles, and transform extruded composite materials into popular products.

Hanna’s a man of ideas, someone who has a flash of inspiration and then determines how to make it happen. Small obstacles, like never having made a candle in his life, don’t get in his way, because he’s also a man of follow-through. He’ll work tirelessly until he acquires the knowledge to reach his goal, and then completes it.

“He’s got this tenacity,” explains Mike Barnett of Fayetteville, the longtime engineering manager for Hanna’s companies. “He sees everything as, ‘We’re going to make it,’ and he never gives up. He gets in and works harder and makes it work.”

When Hanna turned 40, he was an unqualified success. He had built Hanna’s Candle Co. into one of the largest candle manufacturers in the United States, with annual sales in excess of $60 million in the early 2000s.

The last decade was sobering. Candle wax is a byproduct of petroleum, and when the price of petroleum surged, it was like getting hit by a speeding train. The economic recession didn’t help matters,as consumers turned away from discretionary purchases like candles, and sales dropped below $10 million.

At the same time, Hanna was embroiled in a bitter divorce and custody battle - a fight as brutal as the one the company recently waged with Bank of America.

None of these obstacles were enough to snuff out Hanna’s flame. The struggles may not be over yet, but each month they fade more in Hanna’s rear-view mirror.

“Burt’s been through a lot, but every time you talk to Burt he’s the same way,” says longtime friend Mike Wahl of Rogers. “Whether he’s up against a lawsuit or going on vacation, Burt’s down the middle of the road.” A CURIOUS BOY

Hanna wasn’t much of an athlete as a kid.

In fact, he admits he still isn’t much of a jock. Hanna lives on a farm south of Fayetteville, which he shares with his older brother, Thad. Those who watch Hanna water ski on the lake at the farm might be tempted to think he’s got a real gift for it.

The truth is, though, Burt Hanna made himself into a good water skier through practice and the determination that he would excel at it.

“He is the most persistent guy I ever met,” says Thad Hanna, the chief financial officer of Hanna’s companies and his real-estate division. “People see him water ski and think he is natural talent, but he doesn’t have great handeye coordination. He just works so hard to learn stuff.”

Burt Hanna’s determination was evident at a young age. So was his curiosity.

Hanna was born and raised in Fayetteville, the fourth of Fred and Anne Hanna’s five children. Burt wasn’t much into sports or other extracurricular activities, but he liked knowing how things worked.

As a kid, he’d take apart his bicycle and then put it back together. As a teenager, it was motorcycles.

Thad Hanna says Burt was born with an innate curiosity, making him the kind of kid who “read trade magazines on machinery” instead of Sports Illustrated.

“All his life, you couldn’t just tie both his feet down; you had to nail them down, because he’s so high-energy,” says business mentor John Maguire, who has known Hanna since he was young.

Hanna went through Fayetteville public schools, and stayed in town after he graduated high school in 1981, enrolling at the University of Arkansas. By then, he had already been working for four years, having taken his first job at age 14.

He was a mail boy for McIlroy Bank, pumped gas down at the boat dock, and tried to start a few small businesses, none of them particularly successful.

Thad Hanna says his brother’s industriousness is simply part of Burt’s nature. Their father owned a boat store when they were growing up, and later was mayor of Fayetteville for close to a decade.

“It’s in [Burt’s] DNA to work hard,” Thad says.

DREAMING OF SKIING

And so it was that Hanna willed himself to be a professional water skier.

“When I first said I wanted to be a professional water skier, I didn’t know you could really make a living doing that,” Hanna says.

The truth is, he adds, he really couldn’t make a living as a professional water skier, but he sure had a blast trying. He had skied as a kid on Beaver Lake, but that was just straight stuff on wooden skis. Burt wanted to know how to do tricks.

He checked a book out of the library, and practiced to the point of exhaustion. By age 19, Hanna had landed a summer job at a ski show at Lake of the Ozarks, Mo., where he made $200 a week, enough money to fund his education.

“Water skiing was the first thing I was good at,” Hanna says. “It came from hours and hours of practice. Nothing comes easy to me.”

Hanna wound up skiing professionally in California, Germany and Florida, taking time off from college to pursue his dream. This was why, in 1987, he was still enrolled at the University of Arkansas.

He was close to a bachelor’s degree in accounting at that point, and recently married. He read about the success of Heber Springs-based Aromatique and thought there was a great opportunity in potpourri.

So after reading a how-to book, Hanna and his wife acquired some red dye and fragrance oil, and piled the bed of a pickup truck with wood chips, then dried the mixture in a clothes dryer. The next thing Burt knew, they hadsold $125,000 worth of potpourri in nine months, mostly to independent gift shops and at craft shows.

Looking back, Hanna says his motivation to go into potpourri was as much about money as it was his desire to remain in Northwest Arkansas.

“Everybody back then got a job and had to head to Dallas or Kansas City or Tulsa,” says Hanna, who left UA nine hours short of graduation. “None of that appealed to me. I’ve been to a lot of places around the world, and this is a great place to live.” COURSE CHANGE

When Hanna went into candles, he never looked back.

Hanna’s Potpourri Specialties was thriving, with $800,000 worth of sales in 1988, and $2 million the year after that. (It also nearly went under when Burt, looking to save money by incinerating his trash, accidentally burned his building - and all his supplies - to the ground in 1988.)

Customers kept telling him that the real opportunity was in candles. The market was underserved at the time, Hanna says; it was basically Yankee Candle and little else.

Hanna decided to take their advice. After - what else? - obtaining a how-to book, Hanna went to the store and bought $10 worth of wax. He traded some potpourri to get a used stove, told Thad to run the business for a few months, and set about making candles.

At first, Burt would drill a hole in the bottom of a crock pot, stick a wick inside it and pull it through. It was a slow, frustrating process, much tougher than making potpourri, but in a few months, Burt had enough candles for his brother to take to a 1993 gift show in Dallas.

“The first day, I sold out of candles,” Thad Hanna recalls. “I called and told him, ‘You’d better learn to make them, because I can sell them,’ and from that the candle business took off.”

By the mid-’90s, sales were in excess of $6 million, and the company’s name had been changed to Hanna’s Candle Co., as it phased out of the potpourri business. That seemed huge, but they were about to explode - after a close call.

BOUNCING BACK

In May 1997, Hanna reached an agreement with Wal-Mart to deliver 189,000 pieces by September.

These were 6-by-6 candles - 6 inches tall and 6 inches in diameter, a mountain of wax with four wicks at the top. Hanna was elated, and bought 1,000 candle molds. He figured he could pour wax in them, turn them over every four hours, and have 6,000 ready-to-go candles by the end of the day.

He figured wrong.

“I couldn’t make those candles to save my life,” Hanna says. “With a thousand molds, I was lucky to get 400 [total] in 24 hours. I was going to go broke.”

With time running out, Hanna took a few people to Germany to visit companies that produced candle-making equipment. Most told him a 6-by-6 candle couldn’t be done, and the most optimistic said they could have a machine ready to go in 18 months.

Undaunted, Hanna started drawing press designs on the airplane ride home, and arranged a 30-day delay withWal-Mart as soon as he unpacked. The first candle press was assembled by Sept. 1, and the order was completed by the new deadline.

Hanna owns several patents, which cover different aspects of his businesses.

“He’s wild about doing new things,” says Barnett, who headed the group that built the 6-by-6 press. “He loves to manufacture something, but actually doing the building is not Burt’s forte; he’s a great idea person. We built virtually all the equipment in the plant.”

Bolstered by the 6-by-6 candle, sales skyrocketed, before surging oil prices and a sinking economy nearly crashed the company. Hanna was forced to significantly reduce staff, and wound up selling several assets, like the sparsely rented office building in Bentonville that is now the headquarters for Sam’sClub.

At the same time, Burt’s 19-year marriage ended in a divorce, and Burt got full custody of the couple’s two children.

Burt admits that these personal problems took a serious toll on him.

“The divorce was hard on the kids, and I think that’s another reason the business struggled [beyond the economy], because I was a full-time dad,” he says. “It took a lot out of me. But the Bible says, ‘For what will it profit a man if he shall forfeit his own soul?’ That’s the way I feel about my kids.”

As if this wasn’t enough, Bank of America claimed that the company had defaulted on loans and moved to foreclose. Hanna fought back and won his case in court, which significantly bolstered business with customers who worried he was going under.(The bank has appealed the verdict.)

Yet even while all this was going on, Hanna’s ingenuity was still hard at work. On a trip to Sam’s Club, his son saw a raised garden box for more than $800, and said he wanted it.

Hanna said he wasn’t going to pay that much, but he would build one. He did it that afternoon, and in an astonishing coincidence, two days later a representative from Sam’s Club called and suggested Greenland Composites start making raised garden boxes.

It took years to get the formula right, but in 2010 the company started producing boxes made from recycled wood and polymer (plastic). That year, it was voted the Sustainable Product of the Year at Sam’s Club.

It is the best-selling raised garden kit in the United States, he says.

“None of us knew anything about extrusion,” Barnett says, of the method used in making the boxes. “It’s like the candle business; there were not a lot of people out there who knew a lot about it, so we came up with our own processes.”

Which brings us to today: Burt Hanna at 50. Not back on top, but off the mat, working down his company’s debt, dreaming of new ideas, and making sure there’s still time to water ski.

Who knows what the next 50 years - and beyond - will bring?

“I will feel like I’ve done a good job if in 150 years there’s still a Hanna’s Candle Co. in Fayetteville, Arkansas, making candles,” he says. “That means I did a good job raising my kids, and passing this on to someone to keep it going. That’s important to me.”