Elphick a cut-above mayor

The hint of victory in Enita Elphick's smile is easy to misinterpret. As the CEO and co-founder of a thriving $35 million-a-year lumber company, and a former advisor to the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Wheatland's small blonde mayor is entitled to boast some weighty accomp-lishments.

Not the least of these was her role in turning her adopted hometown's budget from deficit to reserves in only two years.

"Business is what she does, and a city is a lot like a business," says Wheatland City Councilmember Lisa McIntosh.

Elphick, 64, was re-elected as mayor in November. She has embarked on a long-term plan to expand Wheatland's geographic size in preparation for what she is sure will be exponential population growth.

She is confident, too, that her 20-year-old Yuba City-based enterprise will remain profitable, even through tough economic times.

Her optimism lacks the kind of swagger people generally associate with the highly ambitious.

To hear Elphick tell it, bluster and pomp — like complaints — are things she simply has never been able to afford.

Early exposure to poverty, illness and death taught her to be tough, frugal and resourceful, in both word and deed.

Most of her success, she says, has been born from a sense of necessity.

"The only way I can have a job," Elphick told herself before creating Unity Forest Products, "is to make one myself."

Perseverance

By the time she graduated high school in Mendocino County, the young valedictorian already had known hardship.

"I saw how hard mom and dad worked so late in their lives for just basics," she says. "... a roof over your head, and just some kind of food on the table."

Her dad, a rancher, fell ill when Elphick was still in grade school in the Sonoma Mountains. He lost his ranch and nearly everything else, including his ability to earn a living in his trade.

"We had an old paneled truck, and a hot plate," she remembers. Times were tough. "But never once did my parents complain."

Several years after her father was diagnosed with cancer, her mother suffered the same fate. As the youngest child and only daughter, Elphick was expected to stay home and care for both parents.

The budding scientist had been offered a full scholarship to Stanford University. She could not accept it.

Instead, she accepted a job as a filing clerk at a local sawmill and inadvertently launched a career.

During her challenging young adult years, she married and began her own family. Then, her parents died, one shortly after the other. They left her with unpaid medical bills, and Elphick spent five years working off the debt.

Meanwhile, she was taking on every challenge she could find within the confines of the mill. Recognized for her math and science smarts, the mill's owners set her to work developing techniques to make the plant more efficient and profitable.

Elphick received no credit for her innovations. Instead, she earned a promotion to office manager.

By the time she left, she had far exceeded the plant floor and management office presence of any female known to local sawmills, and raised more than a few eyebrows doing so.

"This industry," she says plainly now, "has not been kind to women."

Ruffling Feathers

Elphick's unemotional, unadorned style of speech had been born of necessity, but it continues to serve her well. In the physical, male-dominated world of sawdust and steel, any other communication from a woman would be like so much noise in an already complex din of machinery.

Amid the hyperbole and anxious political jockeying of a government meeting, however, Elphick's cool and deliberate manner stands apart.

"I'm sort of a clean-house-type person," she says with a soft smile. "A hatchet man, if you want to call it that."

McIntosh was on Wheatland's City Council when Elphick came on board in 2005. McIntire says she quickly adopted the savvy entrepreneur as her personal and professional mentor.

The two women are members of Yuba County's Local Agency Formation Commission, created by the state legislature in 1963, in part, to help prevent urban sprawl.

"She can be pretty blunt. At LAFCO meetings, they call her every name in the book," McIntosh says of the sometimes-resentful responses her pointedness can provoke.

"Enita says, 'thank you for your comments,' and moves right along. It doesn't faze her at all." McIntosh chuckles. "It's fun to watch."

In the 1990s, Elphick joined a team of community leaders working to fight the Base Realignment and Closure Commission's moves to shutter Beale Air Force Base.

No one in that group acknowledged Elphick for her role in protecting Beale during that round of base closures.

Elphick says she went through boxes of documents presenting a case for Beale's closure. Those centered largely on environmental concerns, including the presence of hundreds of vernal pools and wetland areas on the 23,000 acres of the base.

Up until then, the businesswoman's experience with the military consisted only of watching her oldest son's entry into the Marine Corps, and grieving his loss when he died in a training accident at age 21 at Camp Pendleton. That, Elphick says, had been one of the greatest losses in her life.

When she saw the U.S. Department of Defense documents, she figured her background in dealing with forestry issues could come in handy.

Paperwork for the studies appeared to be in order, Elphick says. But the summary upon which BRAC's arguments were being made to close the base was not.

The total number of environmentally sensitive sites on the base had been misinterpreted from the data, she says.

Elphick made a one-page report pointing out the discrepancy.

"That got us off the closure list," she says.

National champion

Ron Bartoli, Beale's most well-connected and outspoken advocate, remembers things differently.

"I don't recall that incident," he says of Elphick's discovery, or changes resulting from it.

"There were a number of people involved in the effort," he says, "We all campaigned and have gone to Washington (to save Beale), and the tremendous support of the community has always been influential on BRAC."

BRAC officials did take notice, as did others high up in the Department of Defense.

As a result of her work against them to protect Beale, Elphick says, she was asked in 1996 to serve on the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in Service, or DACOWIS, which she did from 1997 to 1999.

The work entailed visits to military bases in Bosnia, Turkey and in South Korea along the demilitarized zone, where she studied conditions for service women and for service members' families.

She also helped investigate the viability of posting women on nuclear submarines. It was a duty that required her to spend time on board a submerged vessel.

Elphick normally keeps her more feministic feelings to herself, but she cuts loose when talking about her experience as an honorary submariner.

"Women should be on those boomers," she says. "They should have been on them before they were ever put on aircraft carriers. It's the good old boys keeping women out of there."

She is equally forceful when criticizing rules in the wood mill industry.

Companies that sponsored golf tournaments — the ubiquitous symbol of business culture — did not invite or allow women into their competitions until Elphick pressed the issue. Her company now sponsors its own golf tournament.

Old school, new school

But in the 1980s, when Elphick was confronting glass ceilings as a female executive, a self-made woman in the sawmill industry was something brand new.

Back then, she was a single mom of four living outside Sacramento. One of her children had disabilities which required special medical attention. Elphick's life was full of responsibilities, and she was full of fight.

When finally offered a general manager's position — unprecedented for a woman without family connections — Elphick negotiated a 15 percent cut of the then-failing mill's future net profits.

It was, she said, the only way she could get more than a basic worker's paycheck. The salary offer she received was a pittance compared with what her male predecessors had earned.

In spite of her underlying conservative values, she had become a woman's rights pioneer.

"Women were supposed to be married and protected by a man," she says of the mindset she grew up with. "But I never saw it that way, and I never felt that way."

Her quick and high profile success in turning the mill's fortunes around brought unqualified respect from workers, and from executives throughout the industry.

When she finally struck out on her own, she had a devoted following of talented men who were ready to follow her lead.

Along with her primary business partner, Mike Smith, who now is also Elphick's son-in-law, she devised a strategy for a new enterprise. She and Smith sold their homes and went for broke, starting out in a tiny Roseville office, and negotiating to buy the Yuba City property.

Walking across part of the 26-acres of Unity Forest Products now, Elphick points out aspects that make her operation uniquely poised for growth, in spite of the currently bleak housing market.

"All this, we built ourselves," she says of the grounds' features. "All the engineering was done on my kitchen table."

Their factory makes products that are used primarily in custom built homes and remodel jobs. The boards and strips and panels are crafted to suit aesthetic tastes, rather than functional preferences.

While home builders have been struggling mightily, the custom home and remodel niche has weathered recent downturns in the industry.

"We have so many products and such a diverse customer base," Elphick says, "and that's one reason we're still in business."

Such flexibility requires extensive cross-training for employees and the ability to juggle and keep track of an enormous number of details, all at once.

Elphick's life training, she says, makes her uniquely suited to such work.

Remarried with ten grandchildren, and both a town and a company to look after, Elphick plays down any fuss about having broken gender barriers. She responds just as she did when facing criticism or prejudice resulting from her identity as a woman.

"I ignore it," she says. "I don't whine about it and I don't make excuses."

She also doesn't hesitate to take what may be a uniquely feminine approach in relating to her staff of nearly 100 workers — most of them men.

Elphick has a soft spot for the down and out who are genuinely eager to work. She says she gets involved with their families and does what she can to act as a mentor, and to connect them to social services they may need.

She lets her maternal instincts play a role in management.

Workers, like kids, she says, "have their own personalities, and you have to motivate each one in a different way."

But the rules, "don't waiver," she says. "They have to know what you expect from them, and what they can expect from us too."

She has put workers through drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, rehired workers after they served time in prison, and generally given them more than one chance to be successful in her company. A clinical therapist in town is paid for one pre-scheduled hour each week, just in case someone who works at UFP needs to talk.

Critical lessons she has learned from her own hardships, she says, inform her approach to running the company.

Chief among them: "Life is messy," she says. "Do what you can to help."

Contact Appeal-Democrat reporter Nancy Pasternack at 749-4712 or at npasternack@appealdemocrat.com