Meet DiamondBack Covers: Mission-driven culture fuels major growth for local company born from ENGR 407
9:00 am – 3:00 pm, September 20, 2024
Lobby of the Engineering, Design & Innovation Building
Learn about product design and manufacturers from DiamondBack engineers and hear how this success story grew from a class project in ENGR 407. The company will also be sharing information about internship opportunities for current students.
The Penn State Engineering Entrepreneurship class-project-turned Pennsylvania’s 2019 Small Business of the Year, DiamondBack Covers is a success story for entrepreneurship and ingenuity. Ethan Wendle, the company’s co-founder and current executive chairman of the board, credits DiamondBack’s growth and staying power a true belief in its mission.
“We decided on a mission for DiamondBack years ago,” he says. “We wanted to be a place where customers loved to buy, and employees loved to work.”
For a company that’s built to last, lead with a mission
“When we started out, our mission was to build the best truck cover, but who cares about that?” he asks. “If customers love to buy from our company, then obviously they love our product. And if employees love to work for us, then we are building a company that’s built to last.”
He says that setting that mission—and really living by it—has forced DiamondBack to ask hard questions. “Years ago, we had three-year warranties on our covers. Then, seven or ten years later, [customers would] have a little problem with [a cover], and need a small piece replaced. We’d charge them for the parts, and it was part of our revenue stream. But when we were asking ourselves how to make our customers love us, it made us wonder why we were charging for this stuff. Did we really need to make $30? Our mission changed how we looked at the customer experience,” says Wendle.
Why customers love to buy
Led by their mission, the team changed their three-year warranty into a retroactive lifetime warranty. Today, if something happens to your heavy-duty, load-bearing truck cover, not only will it be fixed for free, but you’ll get a handwritten card from the company with a $5 bill inside: Sorry about the trouble. Have a coffee on us.
The company also now sells directly to customers, a change it made early on in its 17-year history. It gives DiamondBack the chance to “really manage the customer experience,” Wendle says. “If I could give entrepreneurs specific advice, it would be to treat your customer service as marketing, and not minimize it. A lot of times, companies are thinking ‘how can I keep this low?’ But once you see customer service as marketing, as a way of valuing your customers in a deep way — making them thrilled — it becomes a much bigger priority.”
This philosophy has led to an explosion of growth for the company, and a legion of what Wendle calls ‘raving fans.’ “We don’t really do a lot of sales,” he says. “It’s mostly word of mouth. Our customers are our biggest salespeople. And it’s helped us to grow massively.”
Where employees love to work
DiamondBack has approached the second part of its mission, to create a workplace where employees love to work, with the same intention and innovation. “You actually have to love people,” Wendle says. “If you genuinely care, people will thrive. It’s more than just coming up with five core values, putting them on a poster and taping it on the wall. You actually have to live by your mission and people will attach to that.”
During the pandemic, that meant that the DiamondBack leadership team worked hard to make sure that employees did not miss a single paycheck during shutdown. “We paid them until unemployment kicked in and offered them more than what they were making with us.”
And, as production started up again and sales exploded, pushing the usual one-week lead time into an eight-week wait list, DiamondBack was faced with a puzzle of how to increase productivity without sacrificing livability for workers.
“We needed to add about 30 employees, but did not have the space for them to work,” Wendle says. “We knew we needed to go to multiple shifts, but we weren’t happy with the hours of the second shift. Afternoons and evenings is when you have dinner as a family, go to your kids’ ballet or sports practice. We needed to create a second shift and still have employees who were genuinely happy to work at DiamondBack, not just incentified to simply stick around.”
The team decided to create a schedule where every worker would put in 35 hours and be paid for 40. Each employee works 6.25 hours for four days and 10 hours on the fifth day. The first shift works from 5:00 a.m through 11:15 a.m., with the second shift coming in from 11:15 a.m. through 5:30 p.m. “Everyone is home for dinner,” Wendle says.
And since employees are working reduced, concentrated hours, they’re not as tired, and productivity has increased by more than 10%. “We made the call to pay more to get people who want to work here for the long term. By being adventurous and creative, we’ve been able to pick up some really good employees who didn’t want to disrupt their lives by working second or third shift.”
Adventurous and creative since 2003
“Adventurous and creative” could describe the better part of the last two decades for DiamondBack. The company was born from an assignment in an Engineering Entrepreneurship class at Penn State in 2003. Matt Chverchko, now the company’s chief engineer, had some equipment stolen from the back of his truck and, when he went looking for a secure truck cover, he couldn’t find one that he liked. With that, an idea was born. Chverchko and Wendle worked on a prototype for a load-bearing, durable truck cover that could securely stow goods in the truck bed and still carry heavy loads, like a stack of firewood or an ATV, on top.
Their professor saw the potential in their product and urged them to take it into the market. “Bob Beaury really invested in us, and mentored us,” Wendle says. “Really, he’s still mentoring us. He’s on our board. Penn State’s biggest contribution to DiamondBack was Bob. Having him there from the beginning … his willingness to pour into us. It’s been phenomonal.”
The company moved into a 3,000-square-foot incubator-type space in Moshannon Valley Enterprise Center with just a single employee, Wendle, who had dropped out of Penn State to fully pursue the business.
By 2017, the company had 75 employees and was in a brand new 38,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in the Moshannon Valley Regional Business Park.
Wendle says they initially chose their location because of its affordability, but now they have no intention of moving. “The Happy Valley ecosystem provides really cool things,” he says. “There’s access to major highways, and we’re close to so much. And this area provides employees with a really strong work ethic that I’m not sure we would find in other places.”
Meet the DiamondBack team in person on September 20, 2024, from 9 am -3 pm in the lobby of the Engineering, Design & Innovation Building. Hear more about their story, learn about product design and engineering directly from their engineers, and find out about internship opportunities for current students.
