Focus on Entrepreneurship 

Getting creative

Ingenuity drives growth of  C. Falls manufacturing firm

By NANCY KIMBALL Flathead Business Journal

Gary Byers has been in the creative-thinking business since Ronald Reagan replaced Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office.
That’s long enough to have a pretty good idea of what works in the entrepreneurial world, and what needs to be set aside.
“You’ve just got to make sure you want to do it,” the owner of Creative Sales Company said.
“You’ve got to get good people around you,” Byers said, “because you’re not going to do it on eight hours a day or five days a week.”
From his metal industrial building along U.S. 2 just south of Columbia Falls, Byers and his 18 employees produce sharpeners for everything from ice augers to kitchen knives, sturdy rubber straps to organize garages and keep RV showers tidy, air freshener, plastic snaps for securing tarps, a novelty cooler he calls the Big Bobber, and the Professional Ladder Utility System, a paint-tray tote that he says is the first update since paint trays came out in the horse-and-buggy days.
The good people Byers has collected around him include Tracy Pagel, who’s been doing his marketing and graphics for seven years; Angie Dennison, his office manager the past four years; and plant manager Phil McCully, who’s “been here since he didn’t even know how to start up an injection molding machine,” Byers said.
The electronically controlled machines are the heart of Creative Sales, heating plastics until they can be shaped into the various products.

BYERS GOT into the business of inventing things to make people’s work and play easier back in 1980 when he and his father, John Byers, founded Creative Sales.
They started their original plant 13 miles north of Whitefish by Olney, working the business themselves for the first two or three years before Byers’ brother Tim joined the company.
John Byers had devised a long-lasting carbide insert for a plastic hand-held knife sharpener that the two developed. So “we bought a few acres and built a shop and started making it,” Byers said.
Working in a crew of six or seven, including the three Byers men, they bought some equipment and worked out arrangements for getting their injection molding done in Idaho. They outsourced parts production, then assembled and packaged everything in-house. Within two or three years they bought their own injection molder and added a second one a year later.
Byers headed to market, started calling sporting-goods manufacturers and set up booths at trade shows in an effort to get the knife sharpener out to the world.
They increased sales by 10 or 15 percent in the first three years, and developed a scissors sharpener after the third year.
“We just basically ran the machines we had, then built more multi-cavity tools in one mold,” around the fourth year, he said. The “cavity” is the area in the injection molder that forms the plastic part being manufactured.
It’s what drove growth in the early going.
“The more tools we had, the bigger capacity we had to get,” Byers said. “We had an excellent product because we were the first ones out with a carbide sharpener.”


The three grew their business to nine or 10 employees, in addition to themselves, before Byers eventually took over the business from his dad and brother.
As growth continued, he made the call to relocate and started looking for a spot in 1998. Initially, he said he wasn’t keen on Columbia Falls, but landed there “because this is a lot better for a central location, for drawing people to work. It’s too far to drive to Olney.”
He worked with the city of Columbia Falls to land a Community Development Block Grant, targeted at business growth that would create new well-paying jobs in the community.
It allowed him to add another two injection molding machines in his new 28,500-square-foot plant, doubling capacity.

WITH THE increased production Creative Sales repaid that grant in a year, far ahead of schedule. He since has won a second block grant to tool up for the Big Bobber.
It’s an idea that some friends, Jim and Marty Adams and Howie Johnson, asked Byers if he could manufacture. The large fishing bobber-shaped cooler is marketed for novelty gifts and promotional packages.
Creative Sales redesigned the cooler and its assembly, paring down the initial 20-minute assembly time — “there’s not enough hours in the day,” Byers said — to a fraction of that. And he used the shrinking process as plastic cools to create an airtight seal, making the entire assembly highly efficient.
“Efficiency is a thinking mindset. It just comes naturally when you’ve been in the business this long,” he said.
“I’ve been in this manufacturing business a long time. If you turn around and go back over your footsteps [during production], you’re doing something wrong.”
Today, Creative Sales markets 32 products globally — he said he has business cards in six or eight languages — and continues to extend its reach with each new generation of innovation.

Reporter Nancy Kimball may be reached a 758-4483, or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com