Top Workplaces: Inpro offers employees doggie daycare, birthday bonus

Walk through hospitals, sports stadiums, even One World Trade Center in New York, and you may bump into one of Inpro Corp.'s products.

The company that employs about 600 in Muskego manufactures hand railings, wall guards, corner guards, kick plates and many more products used in some of the biggest and busiest public buildings.

Even in the bathroom — it makes the partitions between stalls.

One World Trade Center, the massive skyscraper built to replace the twin towers destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has Inpro fire-resistant expansion joints in the flooring — important since without them fire roared through the space where the floor expansion joints were in the twin towers and hastened the collapse.

In 2018, the company's F140 Fire Barrier Expansion Joint System was included in Architectural Record magazine's "best architectural products" edition.

Inpro, a $160 million company founded in 1979, has experienced 25 consecutive years of sales growth, said CEO Phil Ziegler. His brother, Steve Ziegler, acquired the company in 1993 when it had $10 million in annual sales.

"Even in 2009, when many companies were down significantly, our bottom line grew," Ziegler said.

Yankee Stadium, Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Marriott hotels, hospitals, airports and schools across the U.S. are just some of the places where you’ll find Inpro products.

"And we are proud of the fact that we manufacture almost all of the products we sell. We are a success story for U.S. manufacturing," Ziegler said.

As a place to work, the company has some unique offerings such as subsidized doggie daycare, a $100 bonus on employees' birthdays and an annual bonus based on the company's performance.

Inpro has two employee fitness centers, a fitness trainer and onsite child daycare.

Many of the office employees are allowed to work from home a couple of days a week, and there's generous "universal time off" in addition to college tuition reimbursement.

"We do our best to provide a good work-life balance," Ziegler said.

The company says it has about a 10 percent employee turnover a year, about half of the rate for many manufacturers.

"We are under the belief that technology trumps cheap labor," Ziegler said.

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Every year the company writes a tactical plan with six or seven key goals and 30 or so action points necessary to achieve them.

"That involves almost all of our employees. We put together everybody's ideas on what we need to do to maintain our growth," he added.

"This has been the genesis of our growth, every year having a solid plan and then acting on it. The problem with most companies is they do a plan, and they feel good about it, but then they put it on a shelf where it collects dust. We actually work on every single item identified."

Ziegler says the family-owned business has been a beacon for people weary of being whipsawed by publicly traded companies where jobs are eliminated on a regular basis.

He says Inpro also is a place where people have a lot of say in their jobs.

"Our belief is that every employee here is the president of what they do. They know what changes have to be made, how to become more efficient and do things better."

"This is not a command-control environment."

The starting hourly wage for entry-level positions is $14.50.

"When we are looking for machine mechanics and for people in high demand positions, we are paying quite a bit higher than that," Ziegler said.

In 2018 the company helped build the Inpro Athletic Field at Muskego High School. It helped provide camera technology for the police department's K-9 unit and was a main sponsor for Make-A-Wish Wisconsin, Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, the Waukesha County Fair and Racers Fuel the Cure.

"We are pretty well known for what we do in the community," Ziegler said.

About half of Inpro's new hires come from current-employee referrals, and this was the 10th consecutive year the company won a Top Workplace award.

"Our employees are the ones who make this a best place to work. It's not senior management, it's not me. Everybody is making this a good place for all of their co-workers," Ziegler said.