Rigging Through the Ages: Mazzella’s 70-Year Journey as a Rigging Industry Leader

Intro

– [Tony Mazzella] My dad’s mentality of you got to be a lifelong learner. You got to stay with the times. You’re either getting better, you’re either moving forward or backward, there’s no such thing as standing still. That’s almost a mantra inside our company. And then the idea of humble, he was a very humble guy. He was hungry, he had a good work ethic, he was smart. And I mean that in his relationship with people. His, the people work for him, the vendors, the customers, that mentality of team. So all those things that we put on the wall today, in my mind, were directly from him. And that’s what we grew up around our whole life, and deviating from them, I don’t think we’re here today.

– [Announcer] For your own safety, you are reminded to stand behind the yellow line.

– [Ben Hengst] Welcome to Safety Factor. Today is a bit of a special episode. Mazzella is celebrating 70 years in business. So today we’re going to talk a little bit about rigging history and the history of the company. And I’m honored to be joined by CEO, Tony Mazzella, and brother and co-owner, Jim Mazzella. Gentlemen, thank you.

– [Tony] Oh, thank you.

– [Jim Mazzella] Great to be here.

The Early Days of Mazzella and the Rigging Industry

– [Hengst] All right, so let’s start a little bit with the history of Mazzella. Can you tell me about your father and founder and how the company started?

– [Tony] Sure. You know, obviously we weren’t around. It being 70 years ago, but the story really is, goes back to my dad’s dad, which is Antonio Mazzella. And he was an inventor and he invented a number of things, several rigging and making slings. And he had patents on a number of wire rope slings. He had patents on some boating things, outriggers, things like that. But he, while he was in southern Ohio, he worked in a steel mill and he would take the crane ropes off the old steel mill, off the crane cables and off the cranes. And he would, as he referred to, my dad, said “he’d play with ’em,” and he ended up playing with ’em and making several different multi-part slings, today, still the three part and the nine part are still used extensively throughout, throughout the world and the country. And, and he ended up selling his patents to WireCo. And my dad was only a sophomore in high school, but at that time, they moved the family from southern Ohio to New Haven, Connecticut, which was WireCo’s headquarters. And my dad and grandfather started WireCo’s first rigging shop there.

– [Hengst] Oh wow.

– [Tony And you know, fast forward, my dad goes into the service somewhere in there, he meets my mom, who was from West Virginia. After the service, my dad goes back to Connecticut, continues to work for WireCo short period of time, and then decides to move to my mom’s hometown in Charleston, West Virginia. And he started his first rigging shop, and as he put it, he starved for a year and he had to go find a job.

So through some connections, he ended up getting a job in Cleveland, Ohio as a foreman for a company called Frank Morrison & Sons, which was a rigging shop, but also a ships chandler on the Cuyahoga River there for a lot of the boats that came there. My dad worked there for five or six years, and then he decided to start his, try it again and that try it again was in 1954. And that try it again got us where we are today.

– [Hengst] Wow.

– [Jim] Yeah, he had a lot of persistence. He always wanted to have his own place. And he was interesting ’cause he was very confident in his ability to make the product. And I think what he learned the first time in, in Charleston was he needed to figure out how he was going to sell it. And I think the second time in 1954, he connected with some organizations. I remember Schaeffer Sales was big, Timken was one of his very first customers. And with the sales he was able to, to take off.

Pioneering Innovations in Rigging: The 7-Part™ Sling and More

– [Tony] Yeah, and the other cool thing, which we didn’t mention, I talked about my grandfather inventing some slings. But, and like you said, I think he had five patents on wire rope slings, but my dad invented the 7-Part. Somewhere in there, somewhere in that timeframe, he invented the 7-Part, which is actually probably the most complex one to figure out how to make. And you know, we make a hundred thousand of those a year still. And it’s a, it’s one of our really go-to slings that not all rigging shops have, in fact, most of them don’t have it.

– [Hengst] Was the 7-Part, one of the things that inspired him to start his own company?

– [Tony] I think it did, because he was making them for other rigging shops before kind of in the evenings while he was still working. And I think he was, and at some point in there, Timken really became his first account that was of any real, real significance. And Timken really converted a lot of their wire rope slings almost to a hundred percent 7-Parts. So that was the big kickoff. Just like almost any startup, you have one anchor customer that kind of gets you going, and Timken was that customer.

– [Jim] Yeah.

Humble Beginnings, Relentless Perseverance in the Rigging Industry

– [Hengst] So what are some of your core memories that you have of the milestones of the business before you were involved and before you joined?

– [Jim] Well, one thing I’d throw in on growing the business, you know, he got a little bit into it and it was obviously a lot to be doing himself, ’cause he was, he was selling it, he was making the product, he was delivering the product. We had a pickup truck that parked in our driveway every night, you know, at home.

– [Tony] One of the great memories was play on the pickup truck.

– [Jim] We used to play on it

– [Tony] That was actually in the street more than the driveway, but it was a fun thing for us, that was a great memory.

– [Jim] He did everything, so at some point, he brought in our uncle, Si Mazzella, and he brought in his cousin, Bill Mazzella, to be a part of the business. And they were actually partners in the business for a lot of years during that time. And that’s what allowed the business to really grow is that he had people around him. And Si worked primarily in the shop and I believe Bill worked primarily in sales.

– [Tony] Sales, yeah, at the time. And you asked about some of the milestones, well, I think it was in 1957, ’57 or ’59. But up to that point, all the slings they made were either multi-part slings and hand splice, or hand just straight hand splice eye and eye slings. No one was using Flemish eyes or swagers or anything. And he, I think they bought the number 31 swager that back then, it was ESCO was making the swager and he bought, they bought the 31st swager in the country and we started making Flemish eyes slings in, that was a big deal I remember, you know, from my dad and growing up, and–

– [Jim] That was a big innovation and a big investment at that time.

– [Tony] Yeah.

– [Hengst] And that’s the, you know, majority of slings nowadays.

– [Tony] Yeah, and then through the years now, I mean, there’s almost no hand splice and, certainly there’s still a lot of multipart, but the, almost all the standard slings are they’re Flemish.

The Rigging Industry in the Rust Belt Glory Days – Mazzella’s Growth

– [Hengst] So from what you can remember, what was the landscape like of in Cleveland when you were getting involved into the company, prime rust belt time? What was that like?

– [Jim] Yeah, so Tony was 1977, came into the business. I came in in 1981 full time. For each of us, yeah.

– [Tony] So when we, you know, we had the single location and a couple years, well probably five years before I was full time, they had added onto their building, so they went from five to 10,000 square feet. And they, the second building primarily was they got in the chain business and became a chain repair facility for Columbus McKinnon, which was a huge, it’s the biggest investment at that time, up to that time that the company ever made. Heat treating equipment, welders, proof tester, all that stuff. Clearly the biggest leap that the company made. And so that was kind of the next progression.

You know, they were sewing, they had one sewing machine. And so that part was, that part was a, you know, became, we became a big, big deal.

And then when I got in, just sort of had this, I was, I, my dad had a lot of pride and it was really clear that from who was the best in Cleveland, it was Mazzella. And it always bugged me just kind of being around, and we were the best, but we were also the third or fourth biggest in Cleveland.

How Mazzella Secured Major Steel Mill Accounts: A Pivotal Moment

[Tony] So in my head, first goal number one was to become number one in Cleveland. And how we ended up doing that was interesting because many of the people bought their wire ropes, especially the big users bought their wire rope from mill supply houses, the equivalent of what would’ve been a Grainger today. And they didn’t buy it from specialty rigging shops. So if you were, back then, it was Republic Steel, which became LTV and now is been several other things, and today’s Cleveland Cliffs. But that evolution, they were buying from mill supply houses and they were buying bulk reels of wire rope, there was a ton of waste and all that.

And we came up with an innovation around and built a steel mill program and we convinced Republic Steel that we could save them hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by going to our program, which included exact match lengths, it included doing a crane survey of everything they had, it included taking all this, I’ll call it obsolete rope they had, they had in the one department, they had over a quarter million dollars of obsolete rope because of the mismatches over years, someone would grab a piece. So we took all that back and found a home for it elsewhere in their company. Saved them a ton of money, and really that was the introduction of our steel mill program, which ended up going, you know, national eventually and became a great change in what we did. That was a big change in the steel industry. So we started capturing all the big user where they were buying ropes from mill supply houses, it all switched to the specialty rigging shops. And we took advantage of that.

– [Jim] Yeah, I remember that as well as being a major milestone. The day we got the first steel mill contract and Tony had worked so hard on this, you know, everybody in the company had worked hard on this and what this would look like to get that kind of business and then to take care of it. But what, it changed so much about the business because we had to develop all new processes. We had to develop systems of doing these things so that we could actually fulfill what we had promised. And we knew we were confident we could do it and we were able to do it. But it required a lot change.

– [Tony] While the company was always 24/7, you almost never got a call. Once we got the steel mill business, we got calls all kinds of time. At first it was to test us, and then, I mean we were getting calls at, we had calls at our Christmas party, we had calls on Christmas Eve, we got calls on New Year’s, and I swear half the time was just to test us to see if we would live up to our commitment.

The other thing we did is we took all, in that initial account, we took all the inventory they had in their plant, especially the ladle crane ropes. And where if they couldn’t change it in four hours, we guaranteed ’em, we delivered in four hours. So they eliminated all their inventory, which freed up a lot of space and money for them. So that was kind of the, one of the main things in day one that helped capture business.

– [Jim] Yeah, that was huge.

– [Tony] And even as big as Timken was and our number one customer since day one in 1977, we didn’t have any of their crane ropes. So eventually, took a lot of years even after that, but it took a while, we convinced them to go on our steel mill crane rope program, our ready sock system.

Expanding the Rigging Business: Mazzella’s Multifaceted Growth

[Tony] So, that catapulted the company in a big way. We then built a new building. We went from 10,000 square feet to almost 26,000 square feet, built a new building, and then eventually added onto that building a couple times before we moved into this location in 2000.

– [Jim] Yeah, I consider the building move was another huge milestone for a number of reasons. Number one, our dad was making a commitment and investing in the future and in our ability to continue to grow this. And, you know, thinking back about that time, we built the building in 1981, we moved in in the spring of 82. And the interest rate on the mortgage loan on the building was 18%. And the mezzanine loan we had that went along with that was 21%.

– [Hengst] Lot of faith.

– [Jim] Like you can’t even, that’s a lot of faith.

– [Tony] What everybody, why would you build a building with interest rates so high? Well, the truth was we started building the building when the interest rates were 7%. And by the time we had the lot close on the loan, the total ended up being a 21% interest rate. So that was scary. I mean, my dad, you know, had a crazy faith that we were going to pull this off, and I wasn’t, and probably we weren’t smart enough about the money to know how risky it was. We just knew we better do something good.

– [Jim] And I remember the month we moved in was, you know, it also 1982 when we moved in, we were in the middle of a recession and it was like our lowest month in sales in two years, the month after we moved into the new building.

– [Tony] Yeah.

– [Jim] Trying to cover all this. But I tell you, it, the other thing that I thought about as milestones were some of the key people that came into the company during that time period. While we were still in on Bellaire Road Bill Franz came into the business, you know, was here for his whole career. Tom Corall came into the business right after we moved into the new building to really, at Tony’s urging, to spur on sales.

– [Tony] Yeah. So we’ve never, so when… We had lost our sales person between our, my junior and senior year in college. And so, my dad, my dad replaced the guy and then said, Hey, you got to run inside sales ’cause we needed that. And he said, when my son graduates, then you can go outside sales. So when I got there, the way we worked it was, Now remember I was 13th employee, all right? The way we worked it was that he would go out selling three days a week and I would stay inside those days and I’d go out two, and the next week I’d go out three days and he’d go out two till we could afford to have a replace us. And that’s when we hired Bill Franz. Bill became the inside replacement for a guy, this guy named Mike, and I, at the time, and we got to be outside even more then.

The other person that made a huge impact on our company and our life was actually our supplier, which was Union Wire Rope salesman, Don Duffy. I was a very nervous, unconfident kid, scared out of my mind over sales. And Don was, to this day, the most professional salesperson the industry ever knew. And I had the great fortune of working with Don. And you know, when I wasn’t out trying to sell with him, I was on his couch trying to, you know, he’s trying to talk me off the ledge of, “Hey, this really isn’t, selling isn’t really that bad, you know?” So.

How Multisite Locations Have Changed The Rigging Industry

– [Hengst] So how has the rigging industry changed throughout your lifetime? How has, how have you seen it change?

– [Jim] One stat that always sticks in my head, I you know, I don’t remember what year this was. It would’ve been in the, the mid to late 80s. And there were something like 450 rigging shops in the United States with average sales of three and a half million. And that number always stuck in my head. So these were all shops like us started by somebody typically that had a skill, you know–

– [Tony] Family owned.

– [Jim] Family owned, and just of that size. And that’s what the industry was made up of at the time.

– [Tony] There were no big people, I can’t even think of one back then. There was nobody that was maybe if somebody had two or three locations, that was huge.

– [Jim] Yeah, I remember, you know, when we hit 7, 8 million, we were one of the bigger rigging shops around the country at that size. So it was just a very fragmented, different kind of industry.

– [Tony] Yeah and then in, was it 86 we opened?

– [Jim] Yeah, so 86.

– [Tony] Yeah, in 86, we decided to open our first branch and Jim moved down to Cincinnati and opened our first location. So that became, that was a big milestone too. Another big milestone for us was, you know, the idea of, hey, we’re going to have another branch. And we had had a couple anchor accounts, AK Steel, which was Armco at the time, and there was a Marion Steel, which was part of Armco. We, they had a tie with Union Wire Ropes. So we had some ins there, but we had a little bit of business there that allowed us to move down there. But we moved down there with almost no business at all. And–

– [Jim] Yeah, I think we did 80 some thousand in that first six months that we were down there and then, you know, then it was a half million and then it kind of grew up from there. But yeah, I went down there, we hired a guy from another rigging shop down in the Cincinnati area, and it was almost a flashback to how my dad started the business. So I was out selling, if I had to come in and help him make slings, I come in and help make slings. We had a part-time inside person that typed up the orders and answered the phones and, you know, it was just that kind of startup again.

The Pro Riggers and All Time Greats

Yeah, and the one thing just kind of the flashbacks we’re talking here is because my dad and because my uncle had such a presence and importance of making slings, the people they brought in, the Jimmy The Jet, the Rick Baldridge, they were the, they were the best around. I mean, they were good, they were super fast. And even when we, when the industry AWRF was formed and down the road a little bit, they had a contest to find the fastest rigger in the country. And we have the videos of it still, but Jimmy The Jet ended up being the fastest one in the country. And I think in the, it was, he had… the quickest person to make 30, I think it was half inch slings. Which is 60 eyes, Flemish eyes. And I think did it in 27 minutes. And the next fastest person in the country was like 36 minutes.

– [Hengst] Wow.

– [Tony] And I mean, and when you looked at the video, they showed it at AWRF ’cause that’s how you had to turn your contest. They showed it at AWRF and everybody thought someone turned the speed up. I mean, and then all of a sudden you see somebody walk by him at regular speed in the background and then they believe it.

– [Hengst] And it’s funny, at the end, whoever’s behind the camera goes, ah, I forgot to hit record.

– [Tony] That was Al, that was Al Evangelista, funny man went up.

– [Jim] Yeah, that’s great.

– [Tony] Yeah.

Building a Legacy: Core Values and Rigging Industry Culture

– [Hengst] So 70 years later, how do you still see your dad’s signature on the company today?

– [Tony] Well, I, you know, to me, so much of why we’re here is, you know, the core values. And back then, we didn’t talk about ’em, we didn’t put ’em on the wall. But, you know, I believe we’re here 70 years later because of those core values. And you know, what we have on a wall, you know, my dad’s mentality of you got to be a lifelong learner. You got to stay with the times. You’re either getting better, you’re either moving forward or backward, there’s no such thing as standing still. That’s almost a mantra inside our company. And then the idea of humble, he was a very humble guy. He was hungry, he had a good work ethic, he was smart. And I mean that in his relationship with people, his, the people work for him, the vendors, the customers, that mentality of team. So all those things that we put on the wall today, in my mind, were directly from him. And that’s what we grew up around our whole life. And in deviating from them, I don’t think we’re here today.

– [Jim] Yeah, right, I agree with that. It’s, you know, he just brought so much heart to what he did in the business. Like, he loved the business, he loved talking about it. You know what, even when he had backed away from the business, you know, the day-to-day work of the business, he was always here. He loved to walk the shop, talk to the riggers, help ’em out. And you know, I think he just had a great respect for people. And I think it showed up in the relationships he had with customers, with our suppliers and with all the people that worked here.

Passing the Torch: Next Generation Leadership at Mazzella

– [Hengst] So as Matt and Adam move forward slowly taking over the company, how do you see the future?

– [Tony] I think the future’s super bright. I think that they’ve come along at a great pace. I think they had exposure to my dad and when I talk to the company about how my dad thought, they heard it, they were part of it. And I think that really has stuck. And I mean, you know, they have a tremendous amount of passion for the company, the business, the people, very similar. You know, they have their own styles and in that, and, but without a doubt, they have the passion and I’ll say the, understand the core value piece very well.

– [Jim] Yeah, and I think with the core value piece in place, you know, the world’s going to continue to change. They’re going to have to keep evolving as to what this business is. It’s such a different kind of company than it was when it was much smaller just to operate something of this size and scope that it’s a different way of thinking, and yet, the core values still stand. And as long as those stand and they’re tied to those, you know, the X’s and O’s of figuring out the business and the best way to go, and the strategy, I think will come.

– [Tony] Yeah, so whether it’s the metal side or the lifting side, it really doesn’t matter. It’s, you know, that same, that same value piece I think is, is in all the locations and, and what we’re, now our job is how do we make sure it gets in all locations. You know, I mean, ’cause you buy companies, you try to match the culture, but ultimately, our goal is to instill the culture everywhere at the right level, at the right expectation. And, you know, all the things that we’re investing in now are tied to that.

And you know, and from my point of view, you know, those guys grew up with way more technology than I did. And so, you know, I’m, it’s really time for them to make that happen because the technology piece is so important going forward, and they have it, and I don’t, you know, so.

Family Is at the Core of Mazzella’s Legacy

– [Jim] Yeah, and I think about, you know, our mom and dad looking at this business today, and we didn’t mention this, but my mom learned how to make 7-Part slings and could make ’em in our basement, you know, while taking care of kids. And she also was involved in some of the early bookkeeping in the business. Then later on, she ended up running, you know being payroll, a payroll person for the business.

– [Tony] After all the kids were gone and that she became our, we processed our own payroll and she did that. And one of my favorite stories that my mom would tell is, you know, because she did, she’d get grease on her hands and that, and back then, it was ladies when they go out in the evening, they’d wear the white gloves and that was dressing up. My mom wore the white gloves to cover the grease on her fingernails. So, you know, that was just who she was. I mean, she was a great wife, great mom, and she had a lot of courage.

– [Jim] Yeah.

– [Tony] You know.

– [Jim] Yeah, she provided an incredible amount of support to him to allow him to do what he did with the business, to take the chances that he took. And I think, you know, I just think I’ve been away from the operation of the business for 20 years, but I think, you know, our mom and dad would come back and look at this business, they would be completely amazed. They wouldn’t believe it could become what it has become. And with all the heart that Tony has put into to continuing to grow the business and maintain the values that they established been really incredible. Yeah.

– [Tony] Yeah, and I think about the value piece. While, while it was certainly instilled, in 2012, we started following a guy named Patrick Lencioni, and we worked with their, their consulting, The Table Group. And I can remember we’re sitting in a conference room with the leadership team and these two consulters grilling the hell out of me. Like, what was it like, what did your dad, how’d your dad think? What would, what would he talk about? What was important to him? Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it was after two days of grilling, we came up with our values that we could put on the wall, because they all tied back to instilling confidence and comfort, into lifelong learning and to, you know, what were the sayings your dad had, all that stuff, all that grilling of me, what was it like around the dinner table? All those things came to where we were able to take what I sort of just knew because of being around them, my mom and dad. And they, I’ll say they extracted it from me to where we could actually put it on the wall and say, hey, this is who we are.

– [Hengst] Wow.

– [Tony] This is what we’re about.

Balancing Change and Tradition: Mazzella’s Formula for Success

– [Hengst] I’m wondering what is a piece of advice or a lesson. So we know that the, they’re on the wall, like you said, so, but what are some pieces of advice or lessons that your father taught you that have stayed with you to this day?

– [Jim] Well, the one that I, Tony and I have talked about this, so I know it’s on both of our minds is, and it has to do with being a lifelong learner. It’s an embodiment of that. Is that he would say, “Hey, you got to always be looking out ahead at what’s coming because you don’t know if these products are going to be used in the future. You know, this industry could go away. You have to always be looking ahead and thinking about what’s coming in”.

And you know, as you know, like Tony said, he didn’t come from a lot of education, but he was a very smart man and he was very visionary in being able to see what was coming. And I think that’s one thing that he instilled in us.

– [Tony] I mean, you know, everybody sees where we are today, but there were other businesses that we got into. We got into nanotechnology in, I forget what year we, in the 80s.

– [Jim] 21? Well, yeah, originally backing it in like 96, and then launched it as a business in 21.

– [Tony] So we did a lot–

– [Jim] I’m sorry, 2001, 2001.

– [Tony] What Jim just said, that’s why we had the even courage to buy Sheffield Metals, kind of go out of the, out of our normal course was that, “hey, you know, this business may not, people may not be using these products forever,” that kind of thing. He said, “hey, this business doesn’t have to be what it is today.” So he, there was no prescription. When you talk about get back to the values, it was more about, “hey, if you, if you do the right things, business will be in front of you. You just have to deal with what the market tells you.”

– [Jim] Yeah, the, I guess ability and willingness to take on some risk and try some things was a part of his makeup.

Overcoming Financial Crises in the Rigging Industry

– [Hengst] What were some of the highs and then the, the lows that you’ve seen throughout this company over the years?

– [Tony] I can give you a couple of ’em. One, better give more than a couple, but the one, my first really big one, might was, I think at the time LTV was our biggest customer and they had strung us out and, they were probably–

– [Jim] So it was 1986.

– [Tony] Yeah, we’re moving to Cincinnati, investment there. We, our biggest customer goes chapter 11. And I get a call from my dad, he was on the way to get a stress test for his heart. He get, he stopped the car, back then, you didn’t have cell phones, you stopped the car. He dialed me up and he said, I just heard on the radio, LTV went bankrupt, and they had owed us $264,000, which at the time was, you know, probably two thirds of our AR, accounts receivable.

Scared out of our mind. I mean, that was in, I remember calling the group of people together. And when I’m looking at ’em to tell them, I didn’t know what the hell was going to happen from then if we were going to have another day. And I called everybody in together. And when I looked at ’em, I saw all their families, that was frightening. And, sorry, probably the scariest moment.

– [Jim] Yeah, I remember Tony calling me, I was in Cincinnati when that happened and him telling me this, ’cause the news hadn’t made it down there. And just remember thinking, am I just packing this up and heading home? You know, not knowing whether we could survive that or not.

– [Tony] So one of the cool things of the bankruptcy law is that if, if they’re going to continue doing business with this, they had to pay us either CO day or no less than 10 days. So it allowed us to have the cash flow, but I didn’t know that day one. And so that was a big deal.

The other scariest moment for me was, you know, 9/11 hit, the economy went to crap in, it’s October/November, business is like terrible. And my dad died right around Thanksgiving that year. During that time, right at that same time, we had, in six weeks, remember, we’re much smaller, but the downturn was so severe that we lost about two thirds of our value of our equity in the company in those six to eight weeks, it was right before Christmas. And I knew we had to do something drastic, which obviously is layoff some people.

And I remember, I went to my mom, and this is kind of who my mom was. She was like the sweetest lady in the world. And we had made decision about who was going to be able to stay with the company and who wasn’t. And there were some people that had been here a while that my mom knew that we, you know, I was going to tell her, I was going to talk to her to tell her about this. And I probably was also going for a little bit of sympathy. You know, at the time. And when I told her what was going on, she just looked me in the face, she pointed her finger at me and she says, don’t you lose that company, sternly. And she turned and walked away. And I went, holy crap. And I didn’t say crap. And that was a no doubt biggest moment. The other was the scariest moment, but that was like talk about a foot in the butt. And my mom wasn’t a person that did that. But when she did it a couple times in my life when she did it, they’re still memorable today.

– [Jim] Yeah, you know, just from a leadership side, I mean, that was a call to, you know, make the, you got to make the hard decisions, you know, to get through this. And yeah, those were tough, tough decisions to make.

Memorable Highs: Mazzella’s Significant Achievements

– [Hengst] So what were some of the highs? Those were the lows.

– [Tony] Well, I think a lot of the highs really get back to the, you know, the customer stuff. You know, getting that next, I’ll say big customer, getting, early on it was the getting people to believe in our steel mill program and the ready stock program. Vendors, getting them to believe that we weren’t this little company anymore. And, but probably what had an impact on that more than anything was my dad’s relationship with ’em. It was, they cheered us on because they liked him and who he stood for so much, and that made that path easier was his relationships. And then the vision of how we wanted to grow was really a big deal.

– [Jim] Yeah, I think for me, I think just ’cause I was personally involved with it, so much was the getting Cincinnati up and going, you know, it was our first try to start something from scratch like that, and it was a grind for about three years until we got over the top. So I think knowing that we could do that, and once that got stable, we hired a, you know, a general manager to run that. And I moved back to Cleveland and I think it gave us confidence to go try some other things.

And that’s when we started the crane service business with Pete Ward and Bill Franz were very instrumental in getting that up and going. And shortly after that, we opened up in Canton. And so I think that just grinding through that–

– [Tony] And Jim coming back to Cleveland was a big, ’cause things, a lot was going on. And having him back here where the action really was happening was kind of the next catapult for us.

– [Jim] Yeah, ’cause it allowed me to come back and because I wasn’t in the flow up here to really work on projects, which had a lot to do with some of the startups, some of the like ERP system stuff, things that were going on at the time that could help lay a foundation for additional growth.

Building a Visionary Rigging Leadership Team for the Future

– [Tony] Yeah, you know, and I think that at the time, that was the good thing related to, you know, how I took things. Jim had the project management mentality, the tenacity to get things across the finish line. I was, at the time more, “Hey, what’s next?” You know, and that, that what’s next doesn’t always work if you haven’t got the others across the finish line, right?

So that was a big, big important piece where that, you know, when we got back in the same room all the time and, and that, and we always, you know, one of my sayings is you build the business after five o’clock, and Jim and I and the Bill Franz and the Tom Corall, you know, we had our day job and that was taking care of the customer, but we’d hang around and just whether it was a beer, without a beer, we’d hang around and talk about what was next, how do we make things better? How do we, what’s the next innovation? And that’s kind of where I came from, a build the business after five.

– [Jim] It makes me think, one of the other milestones that I remember that happened in the early 90s was the first time we formed, officially formed a leadership team. You know, other than prior to that, everything kind of came to either Tony or me. And we realized if we were going to keep growing this, we need to have a group of people together. And I’m trying to think of who was in the room. It was, it was you and I and Bill Franz, Tom Corall, Terry Pipik.

– [Tony] Yeah.

– [Jim] I’m not sure if there was another in the room or not. That might’ve been the original leadership team. And I remember the first time we said, we’re forming this, and we all sat in a room together and we kind of talked about each other. You know, we used a tool called Predictive Index to get a insight into how people thought and where their strengths were. And I remember that being a kickoff. It’s like, oh, this is a new phase of the company. We’re going to operate this a different way than we’ve operated this in the past.

– [Tony] Yeah, and it was fun, but it was kind of that, and I talk about you hit a wall, you got to figure it out. That was the next figuring it out that we couldn’t do it just us two or just, you know, the couple people we had, if we were going to go to the next level, we had to put in better systems, process, hire better people, delegate some things.

– [Jim] Yeah, push out the decision making to others.

– [Tony] Yeah.

Reflecting on 70 Years of Excellence in the Rigging and Lifting Industry

– [Hengst] So when you look at where the company started back in 1954, and you zoom all the way back out to today, what do you think? How do you feel?

– [Tony] I feel lucky. Yeah, you know, blessed, lucky. You know, I think hard work pays off. I think, you know, treating people right and attracting the right people pays off. I think that, you know, back to the values, you know, nobody’s perfect, but just trying to, trying to live those values and not… not settling and raise, you know, our, the idea of putting the bar up where if someone wanted to get you, Ben they had to put their bar up. And I always talk about, you know, we’ve got to be the target, you know, and be the bar.

And that means you got to do some extra things. You know, that little thing that the, it’s a bunch of little extra things that get it. There’s no there, there’s no one magic. You know, it’s all the accumulation of little things that you do that you don’t have to do. You know, the hungry piece. You look around the corner, what else can we do? What can we do to be a little bit better? And I think that really has always set the tone is we’re going to get better tomorrow.

– [Hengst] All right, thank you for joining. If you want to learn more about lifting and rigging, you can go to mazzellacompanies.com, check out our lifting and rigging center. We’ve got a ton of information in our learning center from articles, videos, downloads, podcasts, you name it. Thanks for listening, stay safe out there.