They also collect from their customers several types of recyclables and strive to be eco-friendly and eliminate waste.

Forty-five years ago, Jerry Brill was a truck driver who owned and operated his own rig. One of his customers was looking to get rid of some old pallets, while another was looking to buy some.

The answer seemed obvious. Jerry could fill the need for both parties by acting as a broker of sorts — buying, repairing and reselling used pallets. He asked his young son, James “Jim” Brill, to join him on the venture.

Jim was 17 and fresh out of high school at the time. It didn’t take long for the Brills to realize that opportunities for Performance Pallet were growing rapidly.

Jim Brill

Within the first few years, people began asking for new pallets, not just recycled ones. In response, Performance needed to develop their business model — to acquire lumber and begin pallet assembly.

“As I grew up, the business grew up, and (we) recognized that it was far more than just kind of a part-time thing,” Jim said. “So my dad graciously bowed out and said, ‘You’re young, you should take this business and run with it.'”

Jim said it was after about five years that he bought out his father’s shares. Jerry then became an employee, returning once again to a seat behind the wheel as a truck driver.

Building pallets from purchased lumber drove Performance to begin looking for their own mill in order to “control our quality, our cost in our service,” Jim explained.

Performance succeeded in taking a major step that was a boon for the company in January 2001, when they acquired the sawmill in Carney that had belonged to Gerry Guard of Guard Lumber.

One of Performance's trucks at the pallet site in Seymour, Wis. (Courtesy photo)

Guard had been a supplier to Performance for some time beforehand and was looking to exit the business, Jim reported. After the sale of the mill, Guard stayed on for a few years with Performance as the mill manager.

With logs coming in from about a 100 to 150-mile radius, the mill in Carney currently generates about 12 million board feet of hardwood materials annually. Three lines handle different sizes of logs.

“In Michigan, we’re buying a mixed hardwood, so little bit different than your grade sawmills that are producing lumber for the furniture-type industries,” Jim explained. Their primary products — pallets, skids, wooden boxes and crates — are made of lower-grade lumber than furniture but higher than pulp wood for paper mills.

“So we cut from the log, turn it into lumber and then ship it to Wisconsin, to our Seymour facility, where we do the final assembly — put it on automatic nailers and put the fasteners in the boards and into the stringers to make the finished product,” he said.

Performance actually has two premises in Seymour, Wis. One was acquired the same year as the Carney sawmill.

The business was already outgrowing space after space — after beginning in a 20-by-40-foot building, they built a 6,000-square-foot building, then upsized another a year later, and another two years after that, Jim recalled. They’ve sold the place they originally started in.

The building Performance bought in September 2001 is 105,000 square feet “and it’s been a blessing for us, because it allowed us to really out and grow to the point of where we are today,” Jim said.

The main Seymour location is for pallet assembly and recycling operations.

As a collection site for recyclables, Performance accepts mixed loads from their customers. From old cardboard to plastics, “all of the recyclables that we bring in are all sorted, cleaned, baled and then sold to the appropriate industry that takes it … back to a finished product,” Jim said.

Waste byproducts from lumber processing are put to use at Performance as well. The company produces and sells for various purposes mulch, livestock bedding and sawdust.

In a second nearby building in Seymour, Performance manufactures bundled hardwood — of the sort that’s sold at stores, including Menards. Performance makes heat-treated, shrink-wrapped firewood bundles and the “Bonfire Boss” Swedish torch log, meant to be lit from the inside.

“And then we have our Performance Transportation Group, which is our logistics arm of our company, taking care of all of our distribution and logistics of our of our finished products to our customers and picking up all of our raw materials,” Jim said.

Performance Pallet LLC is the parent company, but Performance Corp. is the term used to encompass all the various business arms.

Today, Performance has about 350 employees.

In 2024, a big change came to Performance. That May, Jim sold 100% of the business to private equity, making the company investor-owned, and then bought back in 40%. Jim’s still the CEO and the largest investor, but he’s laid a foundation that he said will protect employees, customers and suppliers when he is ready to exit the business.

All those people have been important to getting Performance where it is today. “We don’t take lightly the people — our customers as well as our employees and our suppliers,” Jim said.

He said that 80% of the top 10 customers have been with Performance for more than 10 years, and “our top two customers have been with us for going on 20 years.”

As for the staff, Jim said that Performance has people on the floor doing very physical work for 10, 15, 25 and 30 years, and choosing to stay.

“If you ask me what my secret is to being successful, I would tell you that it’s the culture that we have here within our organization,” Jim said. “We treat everyone — customers, employees and suppliers — all the same, and we treat them like family. And when you treat someone like family, you really give them no reason to leave you. They want to be part of your family. So our Performance family consists of our long-term customers.”

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R. R. Branstrom can be reached at 906-786-2021, ext. 140, or rbranstrom@dailypress.net.