Hitzer Stoves has been hand-building wood and coal stoves in Berne since 1975, along with windmill and pitcher water pumps. That kind of longevity is not common in manufacturing. Companies that make a physical product in a small town have to be right about a lot of things at once: the design, the price, the timing, the people on the floor, and the money it takes to keep all of it moving.
The mid-1970s were a period when plenty of households were rethinking how they heated their homes, and a company that could build a stove well had a real market in front of it. Having a market in front of you and having the capital to reach it are two different problems, though, and the second one is the one that closes doors. Starting a business is one thing. Staying in business through fifty winters, several economies, and handoffs to the next generation is another.
Today the company is in the middle of a handoff to the next generation of the Lehman family. Clez, Dean, and Jason Lehman each came into the business at a different point in that story, which means they each know a different version of it. What they seem to agree on is where the pressure came from, and who was on the other end of the phone when it did.
Here's Clez, Dean, and Jason Lehman of Hitzer Stoves, in their own words:
The beginning of the story is the part most business owners will recognize fastest. A new company in 1975 had no track record, no history of profits to point at, and no easy way to prove to a lender that the idea would hold. The family's memory of that moment is not sentimental about it.
"If it hadn't been for the bank, we'd have been out of business. It's that simple."
That is a plain sentence about a hard year, and it explains a lot about why this relationship has lasted five decades. A bank that says yes to a new manufacturer in a town of a few thousand people is not running a formula. It is making a judgment about people it can actually go look at, in a place it actually knows. That judgment gets made differently when the person deciding lives twenty minutes from the shop.
A Sounding Board Before It Was a Loan Request
The part of the relationship the Lehmans return to most is not the closing table. It is the conversations that happened before anything was signed. Ideas would come up, the way they do in a family business, at odd hours and in no particular order. Some of them were worth pursuing and some of them were not, and figuring out which was which took someone outside the family who understood the numbers and had seen other businesses try similar things.
"It was nice to have First Bank of Berne guys there to kind of be a sounding board to bounce some of that stuff off of once in a while."
If you run a small business, you know how rare that is. Most of the advice available to you is either free and uninformed or expensive and generic. A banker who has watched your operation through good years and thin ones can ask the second question, the one about timing or working capital, without you having to explain the business from scratch every time.
Over the years that groundwork changed what the family felt free to consider. When you have a lender who already understands your seasonality, your inventory, and how your money moves, a bigger idea stops being a hypothetical. The Lehmans describe it as knowing they could take on a larger project or buy a property and that the bank would stand behind them and work with them on whatever they needed. That confidence is not something a rate sheet provides. It comes from having been through several cycles together, so both sides know what the other does under pressure.
There is also a preference at work here that runs deeper than convenience. "As long as we can keep everything local, that just benefits the whole community," one of them says in the video. In a place like Berne, a manufacturer's payroll, a community bank's lending decisions, and the health of the businesses on Main Street are not separate systems. Money that stays in the area tends to come back around.
Handing It to the Next Generation
The most interesting part of a fifty-year business story is usually the transition, because that is where most family companies come apart. Hitzer is in the middle of one now, with Jason stepping further into the business and the older generation watching how he handles it.
Part of what they are watching is how he uses the tools available to him. The technology side of banking has changed more in the last fifteen years than in the previous fifty, and the family sees Jason building his own version of the relationship, one that runs on different rails than a phone call and a drive across town. There is no resistance to that in how they talk about it. "If we can let him develop that relationship with First Bank of Berne and the younger generation, go for it, man."
That is an older generation talking about a younger one, and also a fairly clear statement of what a long banking relationship is supposed to do. It is not meant to stay frozen. It is meant to be handed off intact, so the next person running the company inherits not just the equipment and the customer list but the trust that took decades to build.
Ask the Lehmans why they never shopped the relationship and the answer is short. "First Bank of Berne is stable. It's been there. It's treated us right. There's just no reason to go anywhere else."
Fifty years on, Hitzer is still building stoves in Berne, still family run, and still working with the same community bank that took a chance on a new company in 1975. If your business is thinking about a bigger project, a building, or a handoff to the next generation, the business bankers at First Bank of Berne are a good place to start the conversation.