News

Vocational Solutions fighting to come back

Robert Dehond packages medical gloves at Vocational Solutions.

By Bill Moss, Published: May 7, 2013

When one of your tasks is something called "defacing Wal-Mart returns" for after-market resale, you know you've got a real backshop operation.

Allen Combs is glad to have the work.
Allen Combs, at Vocational Solutions.The director of Vocational Solutions since September, Combs inherited an operation with a 46-year history of serving handicapped adults and local industry, a Board of Directors with dozens of years of management experience and a big mess.
The previous director had been convicted for embezzlement and though insurance and restitution covered most of the loss, Combs said auditors are still discovering problems like the sale of a truck with no sign of the proceeds and a Labor Department investigation that resulted in back pay for some employees.
"It's been a long process," said Combs, an athletic-looking homebuilder, former School Board member and current West Henderson High School tennis coach. As a Vocational Solutions board member, "I didn't know anything about the program. I'd come in, get my free lunch, listen to how bad things were and go back to work."
Now, when he goes back to work after a board meeting, he stays in the building. It's his to fix, with the help of a board that is committed to the turnaround. As workplaces go, Vocational Solutions has happy moments around every corner.
Hardly anyone is grumpy. Smiles, laughter and hugs are common. Combs drops in on a chair exercise class. Besides fulltime work for handicapped adults, the center provides work skills training, independent living skills, reading and writing, math, social skills, computer training and art. Combs knows everyone by name and everyone knows him.
He has signed up with the Marketing Association for Rehabilitation Centers, which is run by Noel Watts, a former executive director of Vocational Solutions.
"Now we're on the list," Combs says. "There's 15 MARC members. They market what vocational centers do to the nation and world."
Combs is working, too, to get the clean room certified, so the center can compete to make and package materials used by hospitals.

And last month, the board approved his effort to restart the printing operation, a once-profitable part of the operation that had been sold off.

Marketing Solutions
Like other non-profits, Vocational Solutions needs donations to supplement revenue from day-to-day operations.
"I don't have that $100,000 matching donor that the Playhouse has," Combs said, referring to large gifts that helped bail out the theater last year. "We need to get ourselves out of the hole and we need to improve business."
A model he looks to is Haywood County's vocational rehab center, where 536 employees — 40 percent of them disabled —work three shifts making medical draperies and other medical supplies.
"They send two truckloads a week to Texas and one shipping container to Europe once a week," Combs says.
With a certified clean room, the Hendersonville center has a shot at getting the overflow work from Waynesville.
Combs said he's lucky to have "a fantastic volunteer grant writer," Dorsa McGuire. Vocational Solutions was offered a $15,000 Perry Rudnick Foundation grant, "if we could come up with $135,000" to match it. Combs is shooting for a grant from the James H. Cummings Foundation, which would fund job creation. What the center needs more than anything else is steady contracts that turn a profit to pay down a burdensome debt of $362,000.
"It's hard to find a grant that you can spend on debt relief," he says. "Basically all we can do right now is pay interest. We're working with Macon Bank. They've been very good to us."

Recession hurts growth
The protracted recession exacerbated the bad luck that hit Vocational Solutions. Founded in 1967 as the Henderson County Sheltered Workshop, the center has employed handicapped adults and performed work from local factories for more than four decades. Combs didn't know until he took the job that the first director, Millie Flanagan, was his wife Pam's grandmother.
"We have always been the outsourcing resource," he says. "With this economy, industry has been trying not to outsource. I think industry since 2008 has been nervous about spending on outsourcing. They try to do it in-house."
The job of taking Wal-Mart labels off returned merchandise is a contract with Jacob's Trading. The problem is the stuff has filled a good percentage of Combs's floor space. "It's limiting what we can do," he says. He's trying to negotiate with Jacob's to move it out quicker. The center also does work for G.E., Shorewood Packaging, Selee, Coats North America, Borg Warner and Medical Action but it needs more. Combs plans to reopen the print shop next month, and has lined up some work already.
"We need to make around $50,000 (a month) in industrial contracts to be self-sustaining," he says. Now Vocational Solutions is making half that. It's not a new story, here or anywhere else. Whether it's the Symphony, the Playhouse or a legal aid office, non-profits face tough times.
"People just need to understand that non-profits need to be profitable and we have not been for the last six years," Combs says. "We're broke and getting broker. I don't know a nice way to say that."
In the warehouse space, workers at large tables package medical gloves. They don't know the trouble Combs has, and he forgets for a moment the pressure of debt, grant applications and cluttered floor space. They smile and he does too.