OmniDuct is a commercial HVAC ductwork manufacturer, with four facilities on the west coast. From these locations in Arizona, Southern California, Northern California and Seattle, the company services western USA. OmniDuct builds commercial ductwork and sells it to mechanical contractors, whom Jon Collins, Vice President of Operations at OmniDuct calls the company’s “primary customer base.” While this may be its primary market, the company also serves a wide range of customers that install ductwork. What makes this company differ from its competitors, however, is its unique ability to design custom products with exact specifications for each individual project. As Collins explains, the company is capable of building bespoke products as and when they are necessary. “We are pretty much a full-custom commercial HVAC duct manufacturer, so something we build today we might not ever build again, or we might build tomorrow.” With a product range that varies from custom homes to anything commercial and light industrial, the skill involved in this company cannot be overstated. Collins explains, “We can build products anywhere from three or four inches large up to 20 or 30 feet in size.” What makes this service even more impressive is the speed at which the company can support its clients. OmniDuct operates a 24-hour turnaround time from when customers purchase the order to when the team deliver it on their site.
With such a broad base and a dynamic range of products, it would be easy to believe that OmniDuct could run into challenges. Keeping so many plates spinning must be difficult. Unsurprisingly however, the company is versatile and flexible enough to adjust scale and size on an hour-by-hour basis. It is not uncommon for OmniDuct to have both large and small products being built the same day.
Collins explains that OmniDuct has the ability to switch “at the drop of a hat” in order to service customers. “OmniDuct’s number one goal is to make sure customers are successful.”
Established in 1982, OmniDuct celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2022. It’s a multi-generational company, which has always been important to Kyle Brumleu, CEO of OmniDuct. With a rich and varied history, the company has built a reputation on experience and reliability. Given that Kyle’s grandfather Ed Brumleu set up OmniDuct forty years ago as a way of maintaining support for customers of a previous venture that had gone bankrupt, it is easy to see how this reputation has been earned.
Brumleu’s father then joined the company in 1982, becoming President in 1991. Brumleu explains that this marked a period of sustained success for the company. “Through his leadership, we expanded from Southern California to Sacramento, Northern California,” servicing those markets until 2008 when OmniDuct further expanded to service Washington and Arizona.
“With a rich and varied history, the company has built a reputation on experience and reliability.”
With a history dating back three generations, OmniDuct has surely encountered some memorable projects. Given the nature of world events in recent times, it is unsurprising to learn that two of these have been completed recently. The Gila Resorts and Casino in San Tan Mountain, Chandler, which Collins describes as “an interesting project” for the company, is a prime example of the ability that OmniDuct has to draw upon its resources to ensure the client is satisfied. With the project being shut down for a month, fears were mounting that costs and deadlines would surely be missed. When the project reopened, the expectation of completion date had not changed. This meant that OmniDuct had to “ramp up” production speed to enable the customer to meet the deadline. Collins explains, “The General Contractor’s expectations seemed somewhat unrealistic, but through coordination with the customer and our team’s desire to ensure the customer was successful, the project was completed on time.”
Gila Resorts and Casino
Another unique project for the team was the Tule River Tribe Casino & Hotel in Porterville, CA. Collins explains that, in the normal running of projects, a large job site will facilitate the storing of materials. This one, however, did not. This meant that OmniDuct had to come up with a “unique solution.” In an example of the innovative thinking that takes place at OmniDuct, the company delivered products on 53ft trucks. For this project, one trailer would be left on site with the materials needed that week, staggered within the truck in the order it was needed. OmniDuct picked up an empty one on the way back after each delivery. Collins explains, “it was a challenge, but also something that we figured out and it really helped our customer tremendously in being efficient on that job and also sticking to the deadlines that they needed.”
With the exception of the facility in Sacramento, the company has been able to reduce the square footage of the other three facilities, reducing the number of shifts from three to one to produce more duct work each day and more pounds every year. Collins explains the rationale for these changes. “We’ve really figured out how to be much more efficient with our space and with our time. This has helped the company to continue to grow with less space and resources,” adding that for him, this has been “probably our biggest milestone we’ve achieved over the last few years.”
Innovation notwithstanding, the key to OmniDuct’s success runs deeper than clever fixes. Brumleu explains that in his opinion, longevity has been achieved through the company culture. He explains that the company is “driven by our core values – integrity, caring and stewardship” adding that OmniDuct has a “continuous improvement mindset.” This has never been more evident than in the recent past which has seen the company experience a period of sustained growth. “Over the last ten years, our continued drive to become a lead manufacturing company and also really embrace the continuous improvement mindset has led to the team reaching some important milestones.”
OmniDuct’s culture is, according to Brumleu, something the team thinks is “really important to [their] success.” The company has many employees with a “really long tenure.” As Brumleu explains, longevity is synonymous with the company. “Around 25 to 30 per cent of the staff here have worked with us for over ten years.” He goes on to explain that the company is “very family-feeling and oriented.”
This culture is something of huge importance to those at OmniDuct. Brumleu explains that one of the company’s core values is caring, which he feels the company puts a lot of effort into when it comes to employees and team members. He says, “With any decision we make, we ask ourselves ‘is it of the highest integrity?’ and ‘are we doing this with a caring heart and being a good steward of all the resources that flow through our door?’”
For both Collins and Brumleu, the future may be bright, but this is down to one core facet of the company; the employees. In fact, for Collins, it is the staff that make OmniDuct a successful company. “The success of this company is not from any kind of CEO, or Vice President of Operations, or any kind of a high-level executive. I think every single person in this company really adds to the value of it. Without a group effort by all, it doesn’t really matter who we have at the top. It’s everyone and their collective efforts that really makes the company successful.”
