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August 21, 2024

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Calling Shurn a copycat is a badge of honor

To say that Superior Maintenance Co. Inc. (SMC) owner and President Kevin Shurn is enamored with Toyota Motor Corp.’s “Toyota Way” would be a huge understatement.

In fact, with more than 30 years as a supply chain partner to Toyota Motor North America Inc., the Japanese automobile manufacturer’s Plano, Texas-based U.S. headquarters, he will tell you that his company is the embodiment of the Toyota Way.

Shurn founded SMC — a full-service facility management and production services provider in Elizabethtown, Kentucky — in 1988, the same year he received his first Toyota contract. The relationship has been steadfast. SMC has enjoyed the benefit of longstanding service contracts at key Toyota manufacturing plants in Georgetown, Kentucky; Princeton, Indiana; and San Antonio, Texas.  SMC also maintains the Toyota North American Headquarters in Plano, Texas.

Call him a copycat, but Shurn has an intense and unwavering focus on replicating the Toyota Way. The concept is defined as a set of principles of organizational culture based on two pillars known as kaizen — a process of Total Quality Management that demands continuous improvement and respect for people.

Imitating the Toyota Way has put SMC on a highly desirable perch within the Toyota supply chain. Over time, SMC’s Toyota supplier relationship has blossomed from primarily janitorial to facilities management; production support of subassemblies; sequencing and sorting; industrial machinery maintenance; and grounds maintenance.

Shurn said his approach as a Toyota supplier has been to get deep into the weeds of how Toyota operates its business and the philosophy behind it.

“Through all the years of working with the Toyota production system, we’ve developed the Superior Production System. As a result of us practicing the Toyota Way, we’ve developed the SMC Way,” he said. “Toyota is the foundation of our success.”

Accolades for SMC Way

The St. Louis, Missouri, native’s association with Toyota has been boundless and afforded SMC competitive advantages in the marketplace and supply chain. It is an association Toyota has clearly welcomed.

Going back to 2004, SMC won a Toyota Supplier award for outstanding quality. That followed with SMC’s receiving a National Supplier of the Year award from the National Minority Supplier Development Council Inc. (NMSDC) in 2005 and 2011 for its work with Toyota. The SMC Way earned Shurn the 2013 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award.  In 2014, Shurn was selected by Toyota to join them at a business event at the White House with President Barack Obama.

Most recently, in 2023, SMC received the Business First Family Business of the Year Award.  Toyota also is SMC’s sponsor in the NMSDC’s vaunted Corporate Plus program. This program signifies that members have a proven track record of successful performance of national contracts for a sponsoring corporation.  Currently only 139 of the more than 17,000 NMSDC-certified minority-owned business enterprises are members of the highly selective program.

 “We accomplished our most monumental SMC Way driven partnership when we formed a joint venture with one of Toyota’s group companies, Toyota Tsusho in 202. It’s been a great relationship,” Shurn said.

“The competitive advantage we have is that we know (Toyota’s business) as well as Toyota does because we were under their wing for over 30 years,” he said. “They have always been a nurturing company that believes in developing their suppliers. That’s the culture. We copy everything they do and that has led us to be successful all these years,” Shurn said.

Bonnie Clinton, vice president, chief procurement officer, indirect procurement shared services at Toyota Motor North America Inc. said there are also other factors she attributes to Shurn’s success.

“Kevin’s passion, energy and positive attitude are at the forefront of the business he created and the many ways he gives back to the community,” she said. “He has set the bar high for those who follow in his footsteps and those he mentors.”

Kaizen in action

With a residence in downtown Louisville, about an hour north of the company’s Elizabethtown headquarters in central Kentucky, Shurn said Toyota’s culture of respect for people touched him personally during a time of one of the most disconcerting events in Louisville’s history. 

The 2020 killing by the police of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman, that sparked many months of social justice protests that still resonates in the city today.

Shortly before Taylor’s killing, Shurn said SMC opened a facility in the city’s long-underserved West Louisville enclave for the assembly and repackaging of parts and components for shipping to Toyota warehouses, providing needed employment for dozens of workers and economic enrichment for families.

“My goal for years has been to create jobs and opportunities,” he said.

With persistent marching and angst arising from the incident and a subsequent protracted investigation, Taylor emerged a global symbol for injustice, like with the George Floyd case in Minneapolis. Shurn called it “scary times” in Louisville but backing him up was Toyota’s respect for people, he said.

“They [Toyota officials] called me to see how I was doing and wanted to know how they could help,” he said.

Winding down

As an entrepreneur responsible for delivering paychecks to 1,500 employees, Shurn probably will agree that he has been through a wringer of responsibility.

Turning 68 years old in October, he is looking ahead to the next generation of SMC, understanding that his running day-to-day operations of his company will be winding down.

“I’ll never get all the way out of the business,” he admitted.

But a key priority is succession planning. Shurn said his daughter, Sydney and son-in-law, Jamie Goldsmith, are heavily involved in operations as executives in the business, and his goal is to get them ready for greater responsibility within three years. Shurn’s brother Sid Shurn will be retiring as senior vice president by year’s end, and he hopes his grandson, Darrion, will move up the ladder.

“My goal is getting them developed where they can take over the company, and we can continue to grow. That’s the game plan for what’s going on right now,” he said.

The sky is the limit

During the run-up to retirement, Shurn, nevertheless, has some significant goals ahead for SMC. Topping the list is continuing to grow through cost reduction and focusing on increasing business in certain areas, he said, including “the challenge now to get more business outside of Toyota.”

He said another process he picked up from Toyota is the concept of Hoshin, a seven-step process that originated in Japan after World War II that involves communicating strategic goals throughout a company and acting on them.

Through the Hoshin process, Shurn sets the vision and mission of the company through an annual plan, delegating targets that teams are responsible for and relentlessly reviewing them and adjusting to stay on track.

He believes SMC has a compelling story to sell to large corporations needing to outsource staffing operations, manufacturing and production and dock operations among potential growth areas.

“The growth opportunities are better than they have ever been in our 30-plus years of business,” Shurn said. “The sky is the limit as to what we can grow.”

He highlights with pride where he has come from. Growing up in St. Louis, he served as a high school custodial aid, hawked sodas at Busch Stadium, home of the St. Louis Cardinals Baseball Club, and was employed as a grill man at McDonalds.

Shurn said his parents raised him to also be generous, honest and exhibit character and integrity.

So, he said he always seeks opportunities to help others succeed, such as with SMC’s “Mentor Monday” program where he mentors young African American men and women in business with the promise that “we can help each other.”

It is with such an approach that he received one of his highest personal compliments ever — from a famous neighbor in Louisville who was an entrepreneur and inventor and the father of a former Louisville mayor.

“He said, ‘How can we create more people like you,’” Shurn said.

“I get joy out of helping and developing others,” he said. “If I don’t do it, who is going to do it?”!

To learn more about Superior Maintenance, visit smc.cc.