Ramstad: Here’s how the Marvins keep the family business in remotest Minnesota

WARROAD, MINN. — Bill Marvin built the company now known simply as Marvin into one of the nation’s leading makers of windows and doors and became one of the legendary figures of 20th century business in Minnesota.

After returning home from World War II to this far northern Minnesota community, he bought equipment on the sly to transform his father George’s lumber mill into a year-round manufacturing operation.

He rebuilt after fire destroyed Marvin’s main Warroad factory in 1961.

He pioneered a mass customization process that gave customers and architects infinite choices — and positioned Marvin at the high end of the window and door industry, where it remains.

But he was simply “Grandpa Bill” to his grandchildren, including cousins Paul Marvin and Christine Marvin. They remember the snacks and pop he and his wife, Margaret, always had available for them, and the recitals and school activities their grandparents attended.

“He was known to us as grandkids as this conservative man who made really good business decisions, but I think we didn’t see, and you now piece together, he was taking really big risks,” said Paul Marvin, who has been chief executive of Marvin for eight years. “I only knew him as ‘Grandpa.’”

Before he died in 2009 at age 92, Bill Marvin asked his children and grandchildren to do four things with what was then known as Marvin Windows and Doors: Own the business. Run the business. Keep it based in Warroad. And do all of them in perpetuity.

And because Marvin helps one of the most remote regions of northern Minnesota prosper, I think the success of the Marvin family matters to everyone in the state.

“The thing that works for us is that we’re a business-first family business,” said Christine Marvin, who is the company’s chief customer officer and leads the Marvin Owners’ Council, the group of family members who work in the business.

“What we mean is that what unites us as a family is the business,” she added. “When we think about business and what’s best for the stakeholders and for the business long-term, it’s not about our self-interest.”

While that seems easy to say, the Marvins have made sure family members can never undermine Bill Marvin’s wish with a simple rule: No one in the family above age 33 has a stake in Marvin unless they are working at Marvin themselves.

In many family businesses, successive, ever-larger generations of founders’ descendants tend to take their inherited shares and sell them, diluting the family’s control.

Paul started and operated a school bus company in the Twin Cities before moving back to Warroad to join Marvin. Christine worked in California for a Marvin distributor, gaining a view of the company and its products from the vantage point of its customers.

To their generation, learning the business came easily — “We all grew up here,” Christine said — but the siblings and cousins later spread out.

“We’d learn about the business literally at the kitchen table, but also around the community,” Paul said. “What’s the kitchen table for the fifth generation? What keeps us united and grounded together? And that’s the Owners’ Council.”

Christine added, “There are pathways to share the stories about the business. Those stories communicate values and the culture of Marvin we want to pass forward. And they can learn about governance. It almost acts like a board where we have work plans, we have committees and it’s really intentional.”

Around this time every year, the Marvins hold an all-company meeting and announce profit-sharing totals. This year’s meeting happened Dec. 18 in the ice arena that is home to Warroad’s storied high school hockey teams.

Paul and Christine are children of two brothers who were part of six siblings in the third generation of Marvins. That third generation took the business to heights that amazed their father Bill. They also navigated a rocky period in the 1990s when the company lost money as it replaced for free tens of thousands of windows tainted by a wood preservative that didn’t work.

Christine remembered being in junior high at one of those year-end company meetings in the late 1990s when, “Grandpa stood up and said there were no profits.”

Employees walked up to the Marvin family members with yellow roses, the flower that has long served as the company’s symbol. “There was something very beautiful about how we stood by each other during those times,” she said.

Fourth-generation family members faced a big test in the COVID-19 pandemic. Forced to halt production in March 2020, they decided to stop company contributions to Marvin employees’ 401(k) accounts.

When things got back to normal by summertime, the family decided not only to restart the contributions but to restore the payments that were missed when production was shuttered.

Six members of the fourth generation, down from 11 a decade ago, work at the company. Four members of the fourth generation, including Paul and Christine, serve on the company’s board of directors, along with four independent directors.

It was only when they started working at Marvin, Paul and Christine said, that they started to piece together the risks their grandfather took and the hard decisions their parents made.