Richmond Times Dispatch - June 25, 2006

Extruding success / Two aluminum presses are the mainstays of a fast-growing company

BY JOHN REID BLACKWELL

At Service Center Metals, everyone’s happy when Elvis and The Boss are singing. The two big aluminum rock ‘n’ roll stars by the company’s owners, dominate the factory floor at Service Center Metals in Prince George County.

Operating round the clock, the machines produce tons of aluminum extrusions – rods and bars and other shaped pieces of metal – which are stacked around the plant floor awaiting shipment to customers.

When Elvis and The Boss are humming along, that means business is good. It’s also a sign that the economy is doing well, company president Scott Kelley said.

“Our products are used in so many different markets and thousands of different end users, “Kelley said, “It’s a good indication of market strength.”

Aluminum extrusions are used in construction and many other products, including machinery, equipment, electronics, vehicle components, even bicycles and baseball bats.

When [Scott Kelley] and his business partners, Chip Dollins and Randy Weis, opened the plant in 2003, Elvis was the first machine they installed to produce aluminum extrusions. "Elvis paid the bills" during the company's first few years, Kelley said.

The latest addition to the plant is The Boss, a 5,000-ton machine named for Bruce Springsteen, Kelley’s favorite rock star.

The Boss is part of a recent expansion that has doubled the factory’s size to 140,00 square feet and tripled its output. The company has invested about $35 million in Prince George’s SouthPoint Business Park, and Kelley said it is planning another expansion.

Just four years ago, there was not factory at all.

Kelley, Dollins and Weis took a major gamble when they founded Service Center Metals. For more than a year, they took no salaries as they worked to get the company off the ground.

“It’s been a wild ride, and a blast,“ said Dollins, the company’s vice president of operations. “It’s been a lot of hard work too. There have been some tough times.”

Now, the gamble is paying off. The company’s revenue is pushing $95 million this year. It has more than doubled compared with 2005, and Kelley expects it reach $135 million to $150 million in 2007.

“The market is very strong right now,” he said. “Our timing was very good.”

Service Center Metals stared with just the three founders and added about 30 employees once production got going. It now has about 100 employees after hiring workers to run a their shift on the new press.

The company’s fast growth landed it in Entrepreneur magazine recently. Service Center Metals was ranked 10th on the magazine’s list of the top 100 fastest-growing new companies in the U.S.

Two other Richmond-area firms made the list: Compass Energy Service Inc., an energy sales and services company, and Gain Inc., a direct marketing firm.

The market for aluminum extrusions is about 4.5 billion pounds a year.

But Service Center Metals competes in one segment of the total market that serves a network of about 50 service centers across the country that sell aluminum extrusions to manufactures.

The company’s largest market is for machinery and equipment makers, followed by transportation and electronics.

The Boss is larger than Elvis and make bigger aluminum extrusions. It can product 550-pound aluminum rods, which are so heavy that the company installed an installed robot to move the pieces.

The named the robot Hal, after the villainous computer in the science-fiction movie “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“ Unlike the Hollywood Hal, our Hal does only what we tell him to,“ Dollins said.