Dom Medina is Retired – Sort Of

Strolling through the bread, cracker, or snack aisle at a supermarket, it’s hard to find a product that was not baked beneath a blue flame emanating from a Flynn Burner. Bimbo, Sara Lee, Hostess, Flowers, and Mondelez are just a few of the food service brands that consider burners engineered and manufactured by Flynn Burner the standard of the commercial banking industry. Applying a metaphor to quantify Flynn’s influence in the industry, former CEO Dom Medina offered, “All roads lead to Rome.  We’re a niche type business where all roads lead to Flynn.”

Now retired, Medina worked at Flynn for thirty-seven of the seventy-nine years of its existence. “I joined the company in 1987 right out of college. My first, and really, only job. I graduated with an electrical engineering degree,” remembers Medina. Although the position called for an individual with a combustion engineering background, he was hired and worked in the engineering department as a service technician, traveling to Asia, South America, Central America, Canada, and all over Europe. “A lot of our equipment such as flame-treating systems needed servicing or repair. That’s how I started,” says Medina.

Medina is still actively involved in Flynn’s sales, often fielding calls from Flynn customers who are in crisis mode. “I speak Spanish fluently. So, many of those customers still call me when things are needed or emergencies come up. They still like to hear the old voice that they dealt with for all those years. I’m still in touch daily with the office and the current CEO Travis Eddy,” says Medina.

Aside from dealing with certain Flynn customers, Medina serves as trustee of its ESOP. In the 1970s Harold Flynn, the company’s founder passed, and his son Edward took the helm. As Edward Flynn aged, he realized his daughter was not interested in running the business. To preserve his father’s vision of longevity, collaboration, and shared success, Edward Flynn created the ESOP in 1993.

Often viewed with skepticism by employees who consider ESOPs thinly veiled attempts by executives to cash out and leave employees in the lurch, Flynn’s ESOP was thoughtfully introduced and a sincere attempt to secure Flynn’s longevity and future success, says Medina. “The program proved to be an excellent concept. From the employees’ point of view the better the company performs the better it is for an individual. As the company gains value, the shares that are allocated to employees yearly obviously gain value,” says Medina.

Flynn orchestrated the second phase of its ESOP in 2007. “It ensured the company’s sustained success. Thanks to this structure and the dedication of its employees, many of whom are now retired, shares of the company have been continually distributed since 1993. Over that time, their value has increased by approximately 2,500 percent, providing substantial long-term benefits to Flynn’s employee-owners,” says Medina.

Since its founding in 1946, Flynn Burner has refused to rest on its laurels. “We started out as a small company making a few burners a week. Then we went on to complete systems,” says Medina. In 2015 Flynn moved approximately thirty of its fifty employees and entire operation from New Rochelle, NY, to Mooresville, NC. “We were looking to expand, and we were landlocked in New Rochelle,” says Medina. Flynn moved into a 52,000-square-foot building. In 2018 it added 10,000 square feet to manufacture control panels, develop software, and manufacture safety modules. “We’ve become experts and mastered the baking parameters for every type of product you can imagine, from a roll to a cookie to a croissant to a pita,”says Medina.

Under Travis Eddy’s leadership, Flynn moved to the next logical step in its evolution when it began installing entire oven mechanical upgrades, not just the burners and control panels. “We started to get more into the control of the entire process. We’re probably upgrading in some respect an oven or two a month,” says Medina.

Medina calls Flynn a culture-driven organization that is deeply embedded in its clients’ operations and focused on innovation and reliability. This culture and business philosophy enabled Flynn to evolve from a company that manufactured a few simple burners a week in the 1940s, to a company that installs a variety of burners and associated accessories in existing ovens, designs and manufactures control panels, and builds specialty equipment such as branders, infrared dryers etc… all of which are integral to the baking process. “It was a natural progression. The culture part has been kind of steadfast in making a legacy. We added supervision and installation crews to provide complete, turnkey solutions for oven upgrades, installs and relocations. This expansion ensures a seamless experience for customers seeking full-service installation and modernization support. We have customers saying to us, ‘We want Flynn to handle all of it as a turnkey project. We don’t want any finger-pointing and Flynn can deliver,” says Medina.