Make Employees Your Partners In Growing the Business

Beginnings

Internships are wonderful things; they provide work opportunities to young people and sometimes they find their life’s work through that experience. Mike Uhrick, for example, interned at Okon Iron & Metal while in college, and in 1986 he bought a recycling company, renamed it, and Venture Metals was born.

Uhrick’s background in chemistry proves useful as the company collects waste metal including steel, alloys, copper, stainless steel, and aluminum among other things, and breaks them down to be reused. Thanks to Uhrick’s experience with internships, Venture has now implemented its own internship program and as a result has successfully hired several full-time employees.

The small shop was challenged in their original property as it was small, and collecting and sorting all of the metal scrap while selling at the same time was not easy. However, over time they were able to relocate to a much larger facility to accommodate growth.

Taking Care of Business

Mark Chazanow, whom Mike worked with at Okon Iron & Metal, joined the company in 2011, and together with their industry relationships, contacts, and experience, they have expanded the business greatly. The company is now global, servicing construction, manufacturing, demolition, HVAC, fabrication, machining, energy, aerospace, utility and many more industries.

Mark Chazanow, Vice-Chairman, described the Venture Metals mission like this: “We capture scrap at the source, collect it, process it, and send it to a place that melts it down to make it into a new product to complete the loop. It’s a circular economy; we are an end-to-end solution provider.”

Kelly Fairchild, Vice President of Business Development, explained that they purchase industrial-generated scrap metal waste and post-consumer scrap including rebar, plate and beam, structural copper and copper alloys, high temperature alloys, aluminum alloys, precious metals and more from large industrial manufacturing companies and metal service centers. They sell it to mills and foundries so they can make new products. 

Achievements

The company has received numerous awards for outstanding supplier and customer service. They achieved the ISO 9001 in 2015, and they take pride in their first-in-class safety program. Venture Metals is expanding, developing corporate accounts all over the world, no doubt in part because of their emphasis on care. 

A sign of growth: The company that started with five employees now has over four hundred.

We’re All in this Together

These days everyone wants to know how to attract — and keep — quality employees. Venture Metals has definite views on this. They believe in making employees part of the company’s plans so they can become a partner in a growing culture. That means giving employees access to the principals and others who can teach them the business and assist them in becoming an important part of the team. It also means showing employees that you are willing to make a substantial investment in their training to help them be successful.

“The culture is very relationship-based,” Chazanow said, “with great support and communication both internally and externally.”

Of course, this type of company culture is highly attractive to many would-be employees. It’s also difficult to maintain during periods of great growth. The company grew steadily for many years; now it grows at a pace that is almost inconceivable, Chazanow indicated.

Where is Venture Metals Going?

Some advice that the company could have used five to ten years ago is to bring in and develop more talent to prepare for all this growth.

The rapid growth is likely a sign of the industry’s future. Chazanow believes that the industry will continue to be very important as we strive for a sustainable future and make more and more components from recycled materials. 

Not only does Chazanow expect the industry to grow, he also sees great expansion for Venture Metals — in every direction across the map. RF