Owner does it all at vent maker Raz-Air

As Patti Schubert painstakingly riveted together several thousand of the foundation vents marketed by her company, it slowly dawned on her that there had to be a better way.

There was.

A machine shop devised a spring clip to replace the rivets.

She was able to speed production and cut costs.

But for Schubert, the lesson was this: Unless you do it yourself for a while, you'll never really understand a start-up company.

Not yet six months old, Schubert's Reno-based company Raz-Air building Products already is profitable.

Its niche? An improvement on the foundation vents that are a crucial and usually ignored piece of every home that's built.

The vents prevent the buildup of moisture and gases such as radon under a home.

Unlike traditional metal foundation vents, Raz-Air products are injection-molded polymers that don't rust, are easy to paint and are simple to open and close.

Schubert knows the product as well as any entrepreneur could.

When she bought the rights to the Raz-Air line at the start of this year, fullscale manufacturing had yet to begin.

These days, a plastics manufacturer works under contract to make the injection- molded pieces, and five part-time employees provide some assistance to Schubert.

But mostly she assembles the units herself.

She packs them herself.

She taught herself to drive a forklift and warehouses the inventory herself.

She makes the sales calls herself and ships the orders herself.

"I'm it," she said last week.

"I love to get dirty, and it's a hard day's work.

I feel good about myself when I go home."

Even over the short term, however, the strategy of Raz-Air doesn't depend on Schubert working her fingers to the bone.

She's squeezing costs as tight as she can to free some margin to bring distributors on line.

Once the distributors are rolling out the product nationwide, Schubert counts on volumes rising rapidly enough to keep her margins growing.

The company already has seen a sharp increase in volume among the 14 contractors supply houses in northern Nevada that sell its products.

"I've been shipping pallets," Schubert said.

"It used to be just boxes."

Schubert has targeted California and Texas as her company's next markets, largely because their warm weather allows construction to continue year-round.

And that means a year-round market for foundation vents.

The challenge, she said, is convincing contractors to try something new.

"People get in the habit of using the same products," Schubert said.

Although Schubert spent the last few years managing a golf course in rural North Dakota yes, the golf season is pretty darned short in rural North Dakota she's no neophyte at manufacturing.

Among her earlier business ventures was a Los Angeles manufacturer of sheepskin boots she launched in the family garage.