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All That Glitters
How Providence and design guided three generations of the Ulbrich family's Wallingford steel business through Depression, world war and sweeping industrial changes
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Business New Haven
1/22/2001
By: Mitchell Young
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Seventy-six years ago a giant wave of entrepreneurism surged through flush with victory and vigor following the Great War. The 1920s were indeed roaring, and for one entrepreneur the possibilities seemed limitless.
An energetic Frederick Christian Ulbrich started a scrap-metal and used auto parts business on Dudley Street in Wallingford. Born in 1901 at the dawn of the 20th century, Ulbrich was the son of German immigrants that had themselves arrived in America only a decade earlier.
Today - after invention, depression, war, international expansion and family succession - there remains Ulbrich Stainless Steel & Special Metals Inc. with corporate headquarters in North Haven, Connecticut.
Over time, his family, his employees and the Wallingford community would learn that Ulbrich's energy and vision were guided by deeply held views about achievement. His were the success “secrets” we often hear about with regard to successful entrepreneurs, especially those of an earlier era: innovation, quality, work ethic, straight dealing, enthusiasm, citizenship.
Fred Ulbrich, however, found an additional tool to assure that his legacy would grow: He brought his family into the business and imprinted his strongly held values on them, too.
The Success (ors)
Fred Ulbrich Jr., the eldest son, hardly viewed his father's small company as his future when he went off to Brown University. But following college and a stint in the army, Fred Jr. looked again, and for the first time saw real opportunity in joining his father formally. After all, he had been working at the company since he was a young boy.
It was 1956, and Ulbrich was still a small (if profitable and promising) family business with annual sales of just over $1 million. The company had only one full-time manufacturing employee, but Fred Sr. had cultivated a loyal and experienced group of part-timers, while his sister, May Warzocha, headed a small group of young office workers.
Four years later brother Dick was brought into the business, followed by Dan Ulbrich in 1964.
Today Fred Jr.'s son, Chris, is the company's president and chief operating officer. Dick's daughter, Mary Ulbrich Merlini, is vice president of corporate communications and training.
As the family team developed, the firm has prospered even beyond what the optimistic Fred Sr. might have imagined was possible. Ulbrich Stainless Steel & Special Metals' sales are approaching a quarter of a billion dollars annually and it employs more than 600 people.
The company still has its principal manufacturing operations in Wallingford, but they are supplemented by stainless steel and specialty metal manufacturing service centers in South Windsor, California, Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, Mexico, Canada and England. International operations have grown to include sales to thousands of accounts in more than 60 countries.
The company's materials have gone into thousands of manufactured products - from pacemakers to dental appliances, aircraft engines to flight recorders, ball point pens to…well, look around: You'll see stainless steel virtually everywhere.
According to Chris Ulbrich, that trend will continue as “In the future, more and more products will use stainless steel, especially as our concern for the environment continues. In Japan, many roofs are made of stainless because they don't need to be replaced every ten years.”
It is for this special achievement and distinctive company history that Business New Haven gives its 2001 Founders Award to the Ulbrich family. Recognition for a company with deep roots here highlights Ulbrich's recent national recognition as MassMutual's “1999 Family Business of the Year” in the large-business category.
Frederick C. Ulbrich Sr.
By the time Fred Ulbrich Sr. left Connecticut to seek his fortune, he had worked at the Judd Manufacturing Plant in Wallingford in a department run by his father, and learned the cutlery trade at Wallace Silversmiths. Ulbrich couldn't stray far from the metal trades and he landed a job as a scrap-metal inspector at the United States Steel Co. in Denora, Pa.
Just 23 years old, Ulbrich's new experience helped him to see an opportunity at home. Shortly thereafter he returned to Wallingford to establish his own scrap business.
Ulbrich understood what steel mills were looking for in scrap. He also understood that the high cost of automobiles made the resale of used auto parts a potentially lucrative business.
Ulbrich wasn't alone in seizing these opportunities. Another New Haven-area scrap firm, the Schiavone Co., was also gaining a toehold in the market at that time. Ulbrich worked with Schiavone but worried that the local scrap market might not be big enough for both of them. He had his eye out for what we might call today a “value proposition.”
What that proposition might be began to emerge in 1929 when stainless steel became commercially available in the U.S., and the Wallingford Steel Co. (now Allegheny Ludlum) began to roll stainless steel manufactured by the Ludlum Corp. of Pittsburgh into coils.
Ulbrich had the Wallingford Steel scrap account, and he soon found himself in the newly emerging “high-tech” stainless steel business. He began taking night courses in metallurgy at Yale. So by both Providence and design he became an early pioneer in the industry.
As Wallingford rolled its steel, much of the “scrap” was simply narrow cut-off coils as larger coils were trimmed to meet a customer's size requirements. Ulbrich had trouble selling much of this scrap - not for a lack of a stainless scrap market; he just didn't see it as scrap, but a potentially valuable asset.
He began to stockpile the small coils of stainless which he would eventually sell to machine shops that needed small quantities or narrow strips of rolled stainless. While Wallingford Steel was serving customers that required tons, Ulbrich would sell as little as a couple of pounds at a time.
He began to see his niche being built on the philosophy “Be willing to do what other companies can't, or won't.”
Soon enough, however, he may have felt like some of today's Internet executives. While stainless had a sterling future, the world around him had collapsed following the stock-market crash of October 29, 1929. Ulbrich made use of the times, however. He and his wife befriended and employed some of the depression's displaced workers (people some called hobos), and the workers helped the Ulbrichs build an expanded plant.
In 1936, at the height of the depression, the Ludlum Co. merged with Allegheny Steel and Ulbrich lost the scrap account. It was time for another “value proposition.”
Depression or no, automobiles were rolling across America. Travelers had to eat, and that meant thousands of diners. Ulbrich saw an opportunity inside those stainless steel diners. The Wallingford-Meriden area was a leading cutlery manufacturing center, so Ulbrich put his skill and scrap stainless to work. He began manufacturing a line of stainless-steel cutlery for the lunch-car market. A few years later, World War II erupted and plants across the region and nation were humming. Ulbrich was awarded the army mess-kit knife contract.
The demand for stainless steel soared, but other products and companies had a higher war priority than Ulbrich's contract. Unable to acquire sufficient stainless in the thickness and widths he needed, he purchased a used rolling mill and slitter and retooled them. Now he could take more available stainless sizes and “roll” it to his own specifications.
Productivity and quality soared and Ulbrich soon earned more orders. By Providence and design, Ulbrich was now a fledgling specialty re-rolling mill.
Ulbrich's interests extended beyond his business, and the lifelong Wallingford resident was elected mayor, serving from 1942 to 1948. His political career was cut short by a heart attack and a doctor who suggested he could afford only one full-time occupation. He chose stainless, but soon enough would again become fully engaged in the “citizen” game.
As the war ended with his business growing, Ulbrich was asked by some of his part-time employees to help bring some of their relatives to the U.S. In war-ravaged Europe, thousands of “displaced persons” (DPs) languished in refugee camps. Passage to America required a sponsor and an employment guarantee. Buoyed by a strong post-war economy Fred Ulbrich took up the call, eventually helping more than 150 people come to these shores. Today, a core part of the Ulbrich workforce are relatives or descendants of some of those original “DPs.”
The Z Mill
New ideas, processes, inventions are nothing without sales and as every inventor knows customers come in three flavors: innovators, adapters and laggards. Tadeusz Sendzimir, the Polish inventor who created the Z-Mill at his Waterbury company, discovered which type of customer the Ulbrichs were.
The Z-Mill was at its birth and remains today a revolutionary machine for milling very hard metals such as stainless steel. With a Z-Mill, an operator can apply thousands of pounds of pressure through a cluster of rolls bearing down on two small steel rolls. The rolls “squeeze” the stainless steel as it passes through them, reducing its thickness to five to ten thousands of an inch - with tolerances in the millionths of an inch.
Ulbrich borrowed $10,000 to invest in the company that would buy the first Z-Mill and in the 1950s would purchase the third one ever made. Sendzimir and Ulbrich became friends, and Sendzimir developed his machine by testing improvements with Ulbrich employees at the Wallingford facility. The benefits flowed both ways: a better product for Sendzmir, and a competitive advantage to Ulbrich. Again both Providence and design guided the company.
Time To Get Busy
With the capabilities of the Z-Mill and additional equipment the Ulbrichs bought, it was time for Fred Jr. to get busy. He started a credit and then an advertising department at Ulbrich.
By 1960, his younger brother Dick joined the business, followed by Dan four years later. Meanwhile Fred polished up the Ulbrich charm and organized a national sales force. His sales plan still adhered to his father's original vision. “We would sell to subcontractors, small, mostly family owned [machine shops], in small quantities,” he explains.
“Today our customer base is very much the same,” says Fred Jr., now chairman emeritus. “We have many small machine shops, but now we also sell to very large companies like General Electric and we've added [clients] internationally.”
The brothers soon began to shape the business into a modern manufacturing company. Dick Ulbrich, today the company's chairman and CEO, assumed responsibility for production. Like his brother, he also hadn't planned on a career in the company - and certainly not in production - when he decided to attend Georgetown University.
Dick Ulbrich acquired his experience the family way. “When we first got into the business, my father wasn't sure where we should be placed. He said, 'Seek your own level.'”
While Dick acknowledges that as closely aged siblings he and Fred Jr. were naturally competitive, he explains: “Our personalities were quite different. Fred is a sales-type personality, and I have an engineer's personality. My father recognized the importance of us getting exposed to different parts of the business. So first I was selling steel, then I was able to spend time in the shop and running equipment. That opportunity is one of the benefits of a family business that you don't often hear much about.”
He adds, “After we found our own levels, our father fixed our responsibilities.”
Soon the family decided that they had to grow the business to accommodate the needs of the three brothers and their aunt May.
“We wanted the business to expand - not necessarily because of more money, but so we wouldn't plow over each other and have disagreements,” says Fred Ulbrich.
To generate that growth, Fred Ulbrich explains: “We focused what we were doing. In those days there were 17 different re-rolling companies. They produced aluminum, copper, and we really specialized in stainless and worked to be as good as we could in stainless. We also decided to focus on the metals that could withstand high temperatures.”
These high-performance metals were being used in aircraft engines and other airplane parts by companies like Pratt & Whitney and Boeing. Thus Ulbrich became a beneficiary of the Cold War aerospace boom.
Again, the boys hewed closely to their father's original plan. Fred Ulbrich explains: “All I did was expand on the concept. Most of our competitors were targeting large quantities. We said, 'There's a huge market out there if we could get people to know about us.'”
And there was. But the company's high-quality, high-service philosophy came with a special cost- or what became a special opportunity. Ulbrich discovered it needed to be physically close to its customers. So in 1968 it opened its first satellite manufacturing service center in the Chicago area to serve the giant Midwestern manufacturing market.
The plant was an immediate success and wrote the blueprint for future expansions across the country and around the world. Once again the company was driven forward by a marriage of Providence and design.
By 1969 the firm was selling $10 million annually and running three shifts with 60 full-time employees.
As the company grew, the boys sought opportunities for further expansion. That meant bank borrowing on a previously unknown scale. The elder Ulbrich decided it was time to let the boys take over the business completely.
In 1975, the Ulbrich family faced the combined challenge of a national recession and the death of Fred Ulbrich Sr.
“They were terrible times,” Fred Jr. recalls. “We learned how a business should operate. The bank was very uneasy. They had always dealt with my dad, now they were dealing with me and they weren't too comfortable there. [In their view] we had bad economic times and new people.” However, “We eventually made it, and exited the '70s doing about $30 million [in annual sales].”
What helped the Ulbrichs weather the recession was a restructuring of the company - and a goal to reach $100 million in sales by 1990. They attained $75 million in 1986 in spite of what was seen as a Japanese price attack on the American steel market in the early '80s. By 1990 the company was doing in excess of $100 million and had a new ten-year target of $200 million.
“We were constantly striving to define ourselves and to differentiate from the warehouses and the major steel mills,” says Dick Ulbrich.
In 1977 the family team got a little bigger as Chris Ulbrich joined the company full-time at age 22 after graduating from the University of Connecticut. Unfortunately the family soon suffered the untimely loss of Dan Ulbrich (who had been running the sales operation) when he died at age 40 in 1979.
As president and COO the 46-year-old Chris Ulbrich will be taking over the company when Dick and Fred finally retire for good. His vision of the future of the company seems as clear and simple as Fred Ulbrich Sr.'s.
“We're still about servicing our customers,” he says, “now on a worldwide basis, with quick delivery, quality special metals. We have our manufacturing service centers to follow our customers. My grandfather's favorite saying was, 'I aim to be the best in everything I do.' That philosophy is still at the core of our strategic plan.”
The legacy that Dick's daughter, Mary Ulbrich Merlini, wants to maintain at the company is the notion of possibilities: “To my grandfather, anything was possible. If there were obstacles, you could find a way it would be possible to achieve your goal.”
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