From Harleys to Hammers
Two former Harley Davidson Engineers Join a High
School Friend to Build a Trenchless Equipment Empire

Appeared in Trenchless Technology Magazine, September 2005

The story of HammerHead does not start with piercing tools, pipe bursting systems or HDD boring bits. Instead, it begins with the unmistakable growl of a Harley Davidson engine. Co-founders Rob Crane, vice president of factory service, and Steve Wentworth, vice president of engineering and advanced product concepts, originally worked for Harley Davidson. (Crane was an experimental mechanic; Wentworth was a product design engineer.) During the last six years of their employment with the company, both of them also raced bikes on amateur and professional racing circuits.

It may sound like the perfect job, but the friends wanted more. "We had really nice positions at Harley that most people would be envious of having," says Crane. "However, there was nowhere else for us to go at Harley at the time."

The solution would come in the form of a trenchless tool. In 1988, Crane's friend (and soon-to-be fellow co-founder) Jon Haas contacted him with an interesting proposal: applying his engineering skill not to a motorcycle but to a trenchless tool. Crane discussed the idea with Wentworth, and the three met to take a look at the piercing tool that Haas was using at the time. Upon discovering that the tool could not even be taken apart, Wentworth, Haas and Crane decided that they could apply their skills to building tools that were easier to use and maintain than the ones that were on the market at the time. Thus in 1989, HammerHead was founded in Oconomowoc, WI, where it is still based today.

It was a surprisingly easy transition for the two engineers. "Both Steve and I worked on fasteners at Harley Davidson, keeping things tight and keeping them together for quite a long time," says Crane. "We changed a lot of Harley fasteners."

"Virtually our entire careers were spent making things durable," says Wentworth. "Not just durable in the sense that they would wear for a long time, but durable so they wouldn't break. That skill transferred easily, 100 percent over to construction equipment. It was amazingly similar."

The trio may have had quality products, but that would do them no good unless they could sell them. Haas, however, had a plan. He was familiar with Vermeer Mfg. and was sure that his company's product would be a good match for it. But it would take some convincing. "When the guys first came down in 1990, Vermeer had never handled a piercing tool before," explains Payce Reynolds, director of HDD with HammerHead. "I would say the team - John, Rob and Steve - understood that Vermeer could not have any problems with this product. The key to gaining market share was to have the Vermeer organization have a product they could count on."

Fortunately, HammerHead could ensure a quality product, and Vermeer could also count on the start-up to be a troubleshooter and problem solver as well. "If there were any problems, HammerHead developed a reputation early on of taking care of it above and beyond what would be considered standard for the industry. It made it very easy for Vermeer and for their salespeople to sell the product with confidence, knowing that if there was ever an issue, even two or three years down the road, that HammerHead would stand by it if it was a known issue and somehow work together to make it right for the customers." Impressed with both the company's products and policies, Vermeer signed a long-term agreement with HammerHead in October 1989.

It wasn't long before the partnership started seeing results. "In 1990, Allied was number one in the United States in piercing tools," says Reynolds. "At the time, they were probably running 60 to 65 percent of the market share.That was our best estimate at the time. The overall market was probably running around 3,000 tools a year. Piercing tool technology had been around for quite some time. The design had originated in Europe and had been used in some form or another for many years without much advancement in innovation."

"The moment we got started taking a look at that product and making it lower cost, easier to maintain, with a longer productive life and everything else, it took the major players by surprise. We immediately gobbled up market share from 1990 to 1995. Our volume literally doubled every year during that time frame. I think it forced everybody else to immediately jump-start their product, pour more money into research and development and keep up with the pace that we set."

Building a Brand

Building a brand name while starting and maintaining a fledgling business takes a great amount of dedication, planning, organization and personal strength, but sometimes it also takes a little something extra. Something like T-shirts. Lots and lots of T-shirts.

"Literally 100,000 T-shirts," says Reynolds. "One year alone we gave away 70,000 T-shirts with the Vermeer and HammerHead name on them. That was our whole marketing scheme; we did virtually no advertising."

"We took a page right out of Harley Davidson's branding strategy, make a cool shirt and have your customers advertise for you," says Crane.

"Our literature was very sparse," he continues. "But every customer knew the HammerHead name because they wore the T-shirts. It was very unique," states Reynolds. Not only unique, but fitting. Innovative concepts and a dedication to quality have been at the heart of the company since the beginning, and it is these tenets that brought HammerHead its unparalleled success.

As with any endeavor, success for HammerHead did not come effortlessly. Both founders and employees alike know that to keep their top spot, the company must continue to uphold its reputation for both superior products and quality service. "The company is really engineering driven," says Reynolds. "At any given point, we've run anywhere between three and five times the industry average as far as sales dollars dedicated to research and development. For many years, we were pushing 30 percent of our sales dollars toward it, and even now we're pushing 15 to 16 percent. The industry average is only 3 to 5 percent. The result of that is that you have a 15-year-old company with 50 patents and well in excess of 70 different products, including an innovative self deploying winch design, Active head piercing tools, HDD rock tooling and accessories, and many different models of pipe bursting and ramming equipment.

"Vermeer's reputation for customer service and support allows HammerHead to have an absolute dedication upfront to be innovative," says Crane.

"That truly is one aspect that drew us away from motorcycles and into trenchless was the opportunity for innovation was so phenomenal. It still is," says Wentworth. "There wasn't as much opportunity in motorcycles. You pretty much had a tight set of specifications you had to go with, whereas with trenchless, the only specification is to get the job done with quality, cost-effectiveness and reliability."

Prototypes of new products are put through a series of rigors before hitting the shelves. Crane and Wentworth's background in testing and analysis led the latter to build a fixture known as "The Coffin."

"We have an accelerated durability fixture that we run the tool, monitor the individual components, and make design changes before we ever put the tool in the ground," says Wentworth. "Before we ever put the tool into the ground, it goes through 100 hours of testing of accelerated durability."

"That's our standard," adds Crane. "One hundred hours in The Coffin is roughly equivalent to 1,000 hours in the field."

After in-house testing, HammerHead moves on to field-testing. Through relationships with companies throughout the United States , HammerHead sends prototype equipment to various regions and asks customers to provide them with feedback. Company engineers then incorporate this feedback into the design. In time, the product emerges from testing and is ready for mass production.

"Only after all that, the direct response and direct feedback from the customer, you finally settle in on a production design and go forward," says Jeff Wage, HammerHead vice president of sales and marketing.

"You've got lots of time and testing on it, you've got lots of feedback, and you now have confidence in your design," says Crane.

A sturdy, user-friendly design is only one part of the equation. HammerHead 's owners also know that to keep their business thriving, they must keep their customers happy. And in the end, the best way to keep customers happy is by keeping employees happy, too.

"When we set this whole thing up early in the 1990s, we really wanted it to be a place where people wanted to work," says Reynolds. "It was important to maintain a family oriented culture. Much like Vermeer treats our company like an internal division, we treat our employees like part of the family."

"The neat thing we've been able to continue is that there are no set hours here for anybody except the personnel that cover the phones," Reynolds explains. "If you're working in the shop, you can come in at 6 or you can come in at 10, just as long as you get your job done and your 40 hours are in at the end of the week. The result of that is that we have a crew that, at any given time, will do whatever it takes to get the job done."

And Reynolds isn't kidding. "We had a container going to Europe with a bunch of critical bursting equipment on it. It was a Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m.; they were loading the last piece of equipment on, it was going through quality inspection, and they found that the pump was defective on the unit. I said, 'Well, I guess we can hold the container over or we can ship it without this unit.'" Even though the unit was critical - Wage "absolutely needed it" - Reynolds didn't want anyone to lose any sleep over it.

Upon his return the next morning at 6 a.m., however, he found that some employees had done so gladly. "I said, 'What in the world did you guys do?'" Reynolds recalls. "They said, 'Oh, we just stayed here all night long.' This was just a couple of employees who on their own stayed all night long and replaced the pump so the thing could be loaded on first thing in the morning and shipped. Nobody asked them to; they just did it."

"That's pretty normal, too," says Wage. "That sort of event happens more than once a month. I'd say it's a two-time a month kind of event. You just walk out on the shop floor and say, 'Can anyone do this?' and there's usually one or two guys who literally get in a truck and leave - no clothes, no toothbrush - they'll get in the truck and take off with that equipment. You don't have to ask them or push them, and they don't ask anything for it. That's really neat about our company culture."

Moving On Down The Road

When asked about the future of the company and the industry it supports, the HammerHead officials are optimistic. "We think the world is finally seeing what trenchless offers. It's not a niche product; it should be a method that's used as a standard," says Wentworth. "As time progresses, that's going to demand that the product continue to change, that the methods continue to change. Ultimately, that's where we want to be. We want trenchless to be the standard method and open-cut to be the exception. The world is seeing that that's the right way to go."

There are several markets within the industry that look promising for HammerHead, including pipe bursting and various methods used for water, gas and fiber-optic infrastructures, but Wentworth emphasizes that the company will not be limited to any one area. Instead, it will always look to push forward with new and better opportunities for trenchless products.

"The final opportunity we feel we always have is for us to find innovative ways to do something in a trenchless manner that's currently done open-cut that creates a new market," he says. "I like to compare the technology of our industry to that or arthroscopic surgery. Prior to the advent of arthroscopic surgical techniques, the only alternative was to open cut. The process was invasive and risky, the healing was slow and it left the surface scarred," said Wentworth. "This is similar to the effect of open cutting to install, repair, or replace infrastructure, the predominant method used today. I want us to design products that are simple and cost effective and that install, repair or replace infrastructure safely, unobtrusively and environmentally friendly."

"One way of doing this," says Wentworth," is for us to continue the refinement of our smart hammer technology. Smart hammers, tools that provide impact force on demand, can be pulled through ground by any machine or device capable of producing tension on a rod string, chain or wire rope. The result are bursting systems that do the majority of the work with static pullback force but have the capability of superimposing impact energy over top of the static forces during difficult parts of the burst. Smaller versions could even be pulled through the ground by something as simple as a manual winch, making the replacement of sewer lateral very cost effective. Those are harder and longer term processes to benefit from, but we believe that it keeps us ahead of the curve, and it keeps us looking at trenchless in a new way."

Crane sums it up like this, "Smaller holes, less trench."

Katherine Fulton
Assistant Editor, Trenchless Technology Magazine