More than luck

The Ideal Group was founded on the sale of a car won in a raffle, but it’s grown on a combination of heads-up attitude and hard work.

Spend some time with Frank Venegas Jr., chairman of The Ideal Group based in Detroit, Michigan, and you get the impression that he believes he is a very lucky man.

Spend even more time with him, and you’ll find that luck has little to do with his company’s success, which includes several divisions that take commercial construction projects from concept to completion.

Venegas began working for a building supply company pushing brooms and learned about business by filling orders, managing inventories and satisfying customers.

His responsibilities grew and his ability to help customers solve problems sharpened. Hard work and his heads-up attitude fueled his ambition to get ahead in life.

Then luck entered the picture. In the summer of 1979, Venegas bought a ticket as part of a charity raffle and social function being sponsored by a local building association. He walked away from the event with a brand new, fully loaded 1979 Cadillac.

Venegas drove the car for about a week, then decided to sell his good fortune for the opportunity to start his own business. With the money from the sale of the Cadillac and other savings, he founded a small distributorship for construction tools and supplies.

As interest rates and fuel costs skyrocketed in the early ’80s, Venegas had to diversify to survive. He took on several lines of wood stoves, which were as fashionable in 1981 as hot tubs are today. “Homeowners lined up to purchase a wood stove. We would do entire neighborhoods. It was good business,” he recalls.

Because his firm catered to the home-builders’ market, growth was stymied in the late ’70s and early ’80s by double-digit interest rates. Diversification was not the key to growth, but to survival.

“Commercial building came out of the recession first, and in 1983, I focused on steel fabrication. Ideal Steel was born, providing structural steel and finished steel products for commercial buildings,” he says. The division has grown over time, and Ideal Steel is now the largest miscellaneous steel supplier and the second largest structural steel supplier in Michigan. To this point, Venegas didn’t consider his company to be a contractor; instead he looked at ways to provide his contractor customers with the right products they needed at a competitive price. He looked to technology to achieve those goals. Most notably, he developed a plasma cutting system that allows Ideal Steel to fabricate barriers and hand rails that are more resilient and less costly to maintain than conventionally fabricated styles.

“We figured out how to use AC current to power a plasma cutter and a separate DC current-driven controller to control it. This allows us to make perfect circle-cuts on the side of a pipe or tube. The technology lowered our costs, increased our productivity and provides our customer with a better product,” he says.

As his steel business grew, opportunities in the erection business began to pop up. He formed Whitmore Steel, which is signatory with Ironworkers Local 25, completing a variety of steel erection projects.

Good work by the firm captured the attention of the Ford Motor Company, and it asked Venegas to work through the Michigan Minority Business Council to become a Certified Minority Business Enterprise.

“We started out doing small jobs, and as they were completed and they liked our work, we got more work from them,” he says.

Today, Whitmore Steel installs the railing, beams and steel structures that Ideal Steel designs and builds. Recent projects include hand railing at the Detroit Tigers’ new Comerica Park, the Detroit Lions’ new Ford Field, steel work for Southwest Airlines’ Terminal A at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport and various jobs within Big Three automotive plants.

The new guard
In the process of developing innovative and proprietary methods to produce hand and guard rails, Venegas and others on his staff developed a guard rail system that’s sturdy, low-cost, easy to maintain and reasonably priced. The Ideal Shield product line is made with Schedule 40 or 80 steel pipe that’s painted or sleeved with a high-density polyethylene thermoplastic that eliminates the need for painting. The barriers are 11 times stronger than conventional systems and withstand hits that crease or destroy other guard rails.

The product line also includes plastic sleeves that slip over conventional guard posts, eliminating the need to paint them. The sleeves can be customized with company logos and  warning signs and come in a variety of colors. Ideal has several patents on these products and the processes used to manufacture them.

Technology continues to play a major role in the company’s growth. Recently, Ideal Steel expanded its fabrication capacity by acquiring a new plant that accommodates the latest in CNC machinery and steel-handling equipment. The expansive plant improved fabrication time by 300 percent and allows work crews to assemble even larger fabricated pieces with less assembly onsite.

Today’s jobs are fed to the fabrication area right from CAD/CAM software engineers that use to design building components.

“Jobs that took 10 to 12 minutes before are now completed in 20 seconds. It used to take us on average two hours to fabricate a beam; now we have it down to 20 minutes. CNC-controlled plasma cutters can cut a 13/15" hole through 5" plate and it looks like the hole was drilled,” he says.

The plant recently completed building an 92'-long bridge that was transported to Hutzel Hospital in downtown Detroit on an early Sunday morning. Within three hours, Whitmore Steel crews picked the bridge and had it in place, lifting it over the seven-story section of the hospital. “The size of our fabrication plant lets us handle these types of jobs. We have a 35-ton capacity crane in that facility. Without that capability, the bridge would have taken much longer to put in place and would have greatly affected hospital operations,” Venegas says.

The company continues to grow through a partnership with Barton Malow, an area general contractor. Through this arrangement, Ideal Contracting offers general contracting capabilities and self-performs metal stud and drywall installation, concrete work, demolition and clean-up and rigging. Working with Jenkins Construction Company, the divisions of the Ideal Group will install the structural steel for Cass Technical High School in Detroit, which involves 3,500 tons of steel and 60 tons of bolts.

Ideal’s ability to produce shop drawings electronically and its ability to fabricate components from that electronic information has saved the project three months of engineering time, Venegas says. “The fast-track project started in July and will be finished in November. The ability to work on engineering electronically allows us to transmit information to steel detailers all over the world. It is the key to greater productivity and business,” he says.

Involvement with the Big Three automotive business has pushed the Ideal Group into facets of technology where contractors usually don’t go.

The company uses Everest, a software package that integrates all business functions into a single system and Covisint, a global independent e-procurement exchange for the automotive industry. “That technical ability helps us get more jobs from these types of customers,” he says.

This article was published in the September/October 2002 issue of Contractor Tools and Supplies magazine.

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