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ARCOLA, ILLINOIS, population 3,000. Grain elevators along the rail line stand as the town’s tallest structures and as a testament to its agricultural heritage. Diners, antique merchants, and storefronts featuring Amish goods line brick-paved Main Street. If not for the electronic clock blinking in front of the insurance building, one might feel desperately misplaced in history.
Despite its quaint facade, Arcola is a place of contrasts and contradictions. The birthplace of Raggedy Ann and Andy, it is home to the sculpture “America’s One and Only Hippie Memorial.” And once the largest U.S. producers of broomcorn–an earless corn harvested for its fiber–Arcolans haven’t farmed the crop for decades, yet boast the nation’s largest broom and brush museum.
Located at the corners of Oak and Jefferson Streets is another anomaly of sorts, the Thomas Monahan Company, Thomas “Tim” Monahan, ’63, and Patrick Monahan, ’64, proprietors. A generic huddle of manufacturing plants and warehouses, the company is one of the few businesses in town that bridge the gap between Arcola’s indulgence in the past and its need to be an economically viable community.
The company was founded in 1922 by the Monahans’s grandfather, who brokered broomcorn, buying from local farmers and selling to broom manufacturers nationwide. His customers required a variety of fibers, colors, and lengths of broomcorn for their products, and the elder Monahan –as well as his son, Thomas Monahan Jr., who joined the company in 1936–relied on a hand-picked random sampling method to match a harvest to a manufacturer’s needs.
The company used this sampling method until 1963, when Tim Monahan, now chairman and president, joined the family business–a move he had always intended–and introduced a semiautomated method of processing broomcorn that removed the guesswork and improved operations. It was the first of many changes introduced by the third-generation Monahans that would keep the company alive and propel it into the 21st century.
Despite Tim’s innovation, the Monahan company faced a turning point in the early 1970s, when the costs associated with the crop, which is harvested manually, escalated beyond profitability. As broomcorn growers moved southwest to attract cheaper labor, finally settling in Mexico–now North America’s chief broomcorn producer–the Monahans reduced their broomcorn business in favor of more lucrative avenues. Today, broomcorn accounts for only 10 percent of the company’s business, supplying about 30 broom manufacturers, down from nearly 500 companies 20 years ago.
“By talking to people in the industry and looking at trends down the road, we were fortunate enough to move into other areas of opportunity,” Pat said. The Monahans realized that the rise of warehouse-type merchandisers Wal-Mart, Target, and K-Mart–a burgeoning force in household goods categories–meant a demand for greater breadth of product lines and larger quantities of product, and expanded their business into those areas.
“Our customers are the ones selling to Wal-Mart, and we’ve expanded our product line to supplement what the manufacturers cannot do themselves,” Pat explained. The company’s services now include providing metal mop parts and cloth and twist mops for companies like O-Cedar, Rubbermaid, and Quickie.
Although the Monahan product line has changed over the years, the firm retains a top spot in producing and supplying broom manufacturers with one part of the broom–the handle. The company’s biggest area of expansion has been in the manufacture of metal and wood handles, used in everything from yard implements to curtain rods. The trade now represents 75 percent of the family business, and the production of 200,000 metal handles daily makes the Thomas Monahan Company the largest handle manufacturer in the world.
The company’s growth and subsequent success also makes them a top employer in rural Arcola and the surrounding region, with 180 employees.
Still, maintaining success requires vigilance. The Monahans’s biggest challenge is remaining afloat in an increasingly competitive environment, Pat said. They must continually provide clients with more value-added services, which inevitably means keeping up with technology. Thanks to Pat’s background, they have.
After graduating from Chicago in 1964, Pat worked for pioneering computer companies Sandia Corporation and IBM, realizing early on the potential for computers in business. When he joined the Thomas Monahan Company after his father’s death in 1979, he used his experience to automate the business and has continued to do so ever since. His most recent accomplishment is the introduction of a Web site (www.thomasmonahan.com), which includes an online product catalog.
“We’ve also invested a lot of money in state-of-the-art equipment to automate many of the manual operations. But since we’re always picking up new manual jobs that we’re trying to automate, it’s an ongoing process,” he said.
Helping with that process may be a fourth generation of Monahans, of which there is no lack–Pat and Tim each have nine children. In emulation of their own experiences, Pat and Tim encourage their offspring to work outside the family business for a while or go to graduate school–as has Tim’s son Jon, who received his I.M.B.A. from Chicago in 1998 and now works for a firm in Texas. Should their children decide to join the Monahan company, “they need to bring something to the table,” said Tim. “Business changes all the time, so whoever comes in has to be pretty talented and pretty fast on their feet.”–John Spizzeri
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