Page 42 - MetalForming April 2013

Sharing Knowledge, Shaping the Future
Self-Sufficient from the Start
Ten siblings—four brothers and six sisters—is enough to make anyone self-sufficient and competitive, and Bill Adler is no exception. He paid his own way to attend a private Catholic high school in Cleveland, OH, and Miami University (MU) in Oxford, OH, earn- ing in 1979 a Bachelor of Science Degree in Marketing. The second-oldest child in the family, Adler recalls that “in our family, we had to be self-sufficient. We learned the value of hard work as we all made our own way in life.”
Adler’s initiation into the world of metals and manufacturing came the summer following his sophomore year at MU, when he landed a job at Cleveland’s Jones & Laughlin Steel Co. When he returned to Miami he had an itch to learn more about manufacturing, and scratched the itch by enrolling in an industrial-education course. “I really enjoyed that class,” Adler recalls, “particularly the hands-on fabricating- machinery experience.”
As a newly minted college graduate, in 1979 Adler stayed near to his roots and went to work as an inside sales representative for a Cleveland-area aluminum service center located, coincidentally, on the very property to where he relocated Stripmatic in 2012. Cutting his teeth processing RFQs and estimating jobs for cus-
tomers, his goal all along was to learn the product and the
industry, then move into sales.
“I enjoy marketing, but I love sales,” Adler shares.
Before Adler found his way into technical
sales, he ran the metalworking shop at another Cleveland manufacturer, Mazzella Wire Rope &
Sling Co. (now Mazzella Lifting Technologies). “I
ran the shop for 21⁄2 years,” he says, “always with the understanding that I would eventually move into sales.” And in 1984 he did just that. “I sold wire-rope products for Mazzella for 6 years,” he adds. “In fact, one of my customers was the steel mill I worked for some 10 years earlier.”
In 1990 Adler got the entrepreneurial bug and went went looking to take the next step in his career: to own and operate his own company. His 2-yr. search ended in 1992 when he
acquired Stripmatic, a nearly 50-yr.-old metalforming company in Cleveland that manufactured washers, wrapped tubes and a variety of stamped parts. “We had 300 customers, with annual sales of $1 million,” he recalls.
“During those formative years at Mazzella, also a small family- owned manufacturing company, I learned a lot of great managing strategies that I have applied at Stripmatic, and continue to apply today,” Adler says. “My goal,
along with Liz (his wife and the company’s vice president and treasurer), has always been to build a family atmosphere
from the front office to the
plant floor. Day to day, we
find that this fosters an atti-
tude of collaboration at
Stripmatic. We’re building rela-
tionships amongst our employ-
ees that form a foundation for
productive problem solving with-
out finger-pointing. This allows us
to overcome the challenges pre-
sented by our customers on a daily basis.”
month to two or three per year.
In addition to the PMA Benchmark- ing Report, Adler explains the value gained from the knowledge shared by other PMA executives when networking at industry events, seminars and tradeshows. He mentions pressroom safety as one area where the knowl- edge gained from networking has made a difference in day-to-day operations at
Stripmatic.
“In the mid-’90s we decided we had
to address press-safety concerns,” he says, “and so with every opportunity to meet with our fellow PMA members we’d discuss the various techniques and products available for protecting our operators,” he recalls. “That has led us to continually invest in new bar- rier guards, light curtains and other safety products out on the floor.”
Executive Networking Group an Informal Board
Networking and exchanging ideas with peers amongst PMA’s company executives hits full stride when mem- bers enlist and participate in the asso- ciation’s handful of networking groups. Count Adler in. He became a charter member in a PMA executive-network- ing group 15 years ago, and says it’s been one of the most valuable benefits of membership. The value: sharing ideas and learning along with 20 or so other metalforming-company execu- tive from across the country, and from a variety of industries including sheet- metal fabricators, short-run stamping and automotive-parts manufacturing.
“The networking group serves almost like an informal board of direc- tors,” says Adler. “We use it as an early warning system to keep up with indus- try trends and gain advance notice of issues that might impact Stripmatic down the road. With that type of criti- cal knowledge we can plan ahead and adjust accordingly to what might be coming down the road, rather than reacting frantically when issues hit unexpectedly.”
What types of issues has Adler’s early-warning system detected? Adler, noting that most of the companies in
40 MetalForming/April 2013
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