Last fall, four business partners spotted a window of opportunity and climbed on through.

By doing so, they completed the transformation of a small private renovations outfit they bought 22 years ago into Canada's largest window and door company: The Gienow Window & Door Income Fund.

President Dave Munro, his associate Dennis Zentner and two minority partners retained 35-per-cent ownership when the former Gienow Building Products Ltd. of Calgary raised $251 million via an initial public offering in October. The IPO coincided with Gienow's purchase of Farley Windows Inc. of Alexandria, Ont., and Munro is already projecting combined sales in the $165- million range for 2005.

"Last June, as a private company, we were looking at the acquisition of Farley," recalled Munro, an accountant by training who grew up next door to Alberta Premier Ralph Klein in Calgary's Tuxedo district.

Shannon Oatway, Business Edge
President Dave Munro shows off showroom samples at Gienow, which has no inventory.

"We spent five or six months in due diligence, making sure it was a functional fit for us," he continued. "But we soon realized there was much more synergy in going to a public income trust (TSX:GIF.UN) and using that as a stepping stone to (buy Farley and) more acquisitions down the road."

Though Munro says the fund has no plans for further moves until the dust has settled from the Farley takeover, he and his management team know what they're after.

They're on the prowl for well-run, privately owned competitors that haven't the size to go public, are controlled by proprietors who may be thinking about retirement and that may not have kept pace with evolving manufacturing philosophies.

By transplanting Gienow's high-tech manufacturing attack, Munro is convinced he and his team can sharply improve the profitability of such targets. Based on the Gienow track record, there's no reason to doubt his word.

According to its own estimates, the innovative wholesaler/retailer has already cornered 40 per cent of the market share in its Calgary backyard. But Munro's a realist. He readily concedes that a downturn in the thriving Alberta market is inevitable.

So, with several busy sales offices in Langley, Kelowna and Prince George, B.C. and an eye on lucrative markets in both Ontario and Quebec, the Gienow Window & Door Income Fund is primed to build fresh sales steam on a number of virgin fronts.

"B.C. is a growth market for us," Munro confirmed. "We're still a neophyte in B.C., but we're convinced we've got big growth potential there."

But that's not the half of it. The company's already selling product in 11 countries and that includes an increasingly healthy sales base (22 per cent overall) in the U.S.

Founded by the Gienow family during the late 1940s, the company was shuffling along as a fairly old-fashioned "craft" operation by the time it found its way into the hands of Redpath Industries, which owned it when Munro, Zentner and partners made their offer to purchase in 1983. At the time, the company employed a staff of only 35 and occupied a modest building in northeast Calgary.

"We never dreamed it would grow the way it has," said Munro. "In the early days, everyone knew Gienow as a renovation company. But we took it to a different structure and now Gienow's strictly a new construction company."

Today, Gienow-Farley boasts a combined staff of 1,250, 500 of whom work in Gienow's five-year-old primary production plant in southeast Calgary that occupies 360,000 sq. ft. and utilizes the latest, leanest production methods. That includes an Internet-based monitoring system that has won IT awards, dazzled industry watchers and helped reduce a production cycle that once took up to four weeks to process an order. Today, Gienow's turnaround time is less than 24 hours.

It's called just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing, a fully integrated approach first developed in Japan. Experts from both the National Research Council and the Alberta Research Council were asked to assist, and have been integral to the long-term success of the makeover, Munro confirmed.

Through the years, Gienow's 14 full-time computer programmers have created and updated exclusive software while developing a series of key databases that enable them to continually reassess production efficiencies.

"As we analyse these databases, we figure out how to do things better, how to load our plants better and improve our all-around efficiency. We don't have one bit of inventory," Munro's machine-gun staccato broke off as he dashed to his next appointment.

But the picture seems clear. Gienow's window on the world is about to get larger.

(Tom Keyser can be reached at tomk@businessedge.ca)