After Thursday’s disclosure of the letter from the newly-departed president of American LaFrance, some people were wondering if the company is about to go out of business. The letter was sent out to the suppliers because most of them had stopped delivery on parts to the factory due to lack of payments for them.
But we have received some further information about the company and it appears that they should be able to pull through this ok. The cash flow problem largely stemmed from their forced move into the new plant after being sold by Daimler-Benz. D-B wanted to keep the existing plant to assemble SUV’s and gave ALF one year to get out. This gave cause to an accelerated, and costly, construction schedule for the new plant which had to be brought on line within months.
The new owners, Partriarch Partners, are a venture-capital company that really specializes in buying businesses that are shaky and turning them around to be sold later at a profit. Supposedly Patriarch has a $5.5 billion capital assets base and are fully able to weather this financial problem with ALF.
Of course, they may later choose to bail out. But right now it’s unlikely considering the large investment they just made for this new, modern factory. I expect they’ll do everything possible to get LaFrance back into full operation and start turning a profit again. Let’s all hope so because ALF is too important to our fire apparatus culture and history to go away.
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The topic for this past Thursday’s Lineup was the success that a VFD in Nebraska had in a recruiting program. In the commentary I had the names of the FD’s a little mixed up. The department that did the recruiting is the La Vista Fire Department. The weekend training session was held at the neighboring Bellvue FD’s training facility.
La Vista’s Fire Chief, Rich Uhl wrote in to get me on the right track there and he also answered the question that I posed about how they recruited the new applicants in the first place. Click on over to that article (HERE) and read his response in the Comments section to find out how they did it. I like to see that kind of innovative thinking and positive action going on. What kind of recruiting programs are you trying out?
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La Vista Rescue Pumper 632
All right, it’s time to get the equipment checked out. I’m ready for some coffee.
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