For global industrial equipment manufacturer and supplier Rite-Hite Holding Corp., innovation and development has been core to the company’s operations from the start.
The family-owned business, founded in 1965, initially gained traction as a manufacturer of loading dock equipment, including levelers and vehicle restraint systems. Over the years, through acquisitions and developing new products internally, Rite-Hite has evolved to become a holding company for several subsidiaries that produce a large family of products and employ nearly 2,500 people worldwide.
This year, it unveiled plans for the next stage in its evolution: developing a new headquarters facility in Milwaukee’s Reed Street Yards business park to house more than 300 employees. For its plans to bring hundreds of jobs and grow in the city of Milwaukee, Rite-Hite is BizTimes Milwaukee’s Best in Business 2020 Family Business of the Year.
To continue to innovate and grow as a company, Rite-Hite leaders see its planned move from its Brown Deer headquarters to the Walker’s Point neighborhood as a strategic decision.
One of the main goals of the new campus – envisioned as a four-story, 158,300-square-foot office building and 103,000-square-foot, two-story research and development building – is to consolidate employees into one location and foster more collaboration, said Rite-Hite chairman Michael White.
“The Reed Street Yards location was one of the few remaining, multi-acreage sites in the downtown area where this could be accomplished,” he said. “Our company culture is focused on innovation, collaboration and relationships, and being together in an appealing location with connected buildings that can foster these things is important to our future growth.”
The new headquarters building will house Rite-Hite’s office employees and a customer experience center, while the other building will be devoted to research and development, a technical training center, a live loading dock and warehouse demonstration space, and the Milwaukee office of Rite-Hite subsidiary Arbon Equipment Corp.
With the company facing looming retirements and a competitive labor market, leaders expect that planting a headquarters near downtown Milwaukee will help attract a new generation of workers, White said.
“We expect our businesses to grow over the next decade at a pace exceeding inflation. That will necessitate adding people,” he said. “We also expect that acquisitions will add to our stable of products, bringing more employees into Rite-Hite. Our Reed Street Yards plans anticipate that growth. At the same time, automation and technology should make the business more efficient.”
Rite-Hite had been considering relocating its offices since 2017, when the village of Brown Deer initiated an eminent domain action to seize six acres of land near the company’s headquarters for a new public works facility. The company and village settled the dispute and the village eventually acquired the land from the company.
The company has not yet announced a groundbreaking date for the Reed Street Yards project, though city infrastructure work is ongoing.
As the company has its eyes on the future, the current e-commerce surge amid COVID-19 has driven more demand for Rite-Hite’s products and services. The company’s manufacturing facilities – deemed “essential” under Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers’ “Safer at Home” order in the spring – continued running throughout the pandemic, while employees who were able transitioned to working from home.
“Our products and services play a major role in keeping supply chains operational. We have all seen how COVID has accelerated consumers’ use of e-commerce, and that has resulted in ongoing demand for our products and services, since many of our customers are making investments in that area,” White said.
White, the son of Rite-Hite’s late founder, Arthur White, said being a family-owned company has been an advantage for the business throughout the years, offering greater flexibility to navigate industry headwinds and challenges.
“We don’t have a quarter-by-quarter mindset,” he said. “We can live with softer profits in lean times and we can share more, by way of benefits, because we don’t have thousands of shareholders to satisfy.”
