Omaha Firm’s Growth Creates Need to Expand

By Chet Mullin, Omaha World-Herald, Neb.

May 7–There’s no instruction manual to follow toward starting your own business, especially if you’re a woman entering a man’s world of steel fabrication and components.

Penny Rosso, who created Pen Steel Inc., said that, over the years, she has earned the respect and trust of her customers. “Because of my gender, that was not easy to do,” she said. “They had to trust me so much.”

Pen Steel, which is housed at 89th and J Streets, is making plans to start construction on a new building in the fall at Nebraska Highway 370 and Interstate 80, going from about 10,000 square feet of space in three buildings to 19,000 square feet in one building to handle the firm’s growing business.

The 46-year-old grew up on a farm in Anthon, Iowa — about 30 miles southeast of Sioux City, where she was the second oldest of three girls, with three younger brothers.

“My father didn’t wait for boys to come along,” she said. “He put us girls to work immediately, pitching manure, milking cows by hand, walking beans in 90 degree temperatures and high humidity — I have a good work ethic, in other words.”

After graduating from a business school in Sioux Falls, S.D., with a degree in fashion merchandising and retail sales, she began working for a jeweler in Sioux City but, “I wasn’t too thrilled about the hours for retail sales, the long days, nights, weekends, holidays of working.”

She moved to a job selling advertising for a weekly paper in Sioux City and one day called on the Sioux City Foundry.

“After I made my sales pitch for the newspaper ad, they turned it around and asked if I would be interested in working for them.”

She took them up on the offer and became a sales agent and later went to work for a customer, D.V. Industries in Pender, Neb., as a purchasing agent.

“I already had the sales background and knowledge,” she said, “and in five years at D.V. Industries, I was introduced to steel distributors, mills and acquired more knowledge about buying plastics, hardware and fastener equipment and robotic welding.”

She started Pen Steel in Lincoln in 1998 and moved to Omaha in 1999, acting as a manufacturer’s representative working with companies. Eventually the work evolved.

“I became more of a broker, a middleman,” she said. “I decided to buy items, made per my customer’s engineered drawings, from shops that would process parts for me.”

She is quick to spread the success of her company to her seven employees. “It’s our company,” she said. “Pen Steel isn’t just about me; I didn’t make the company entirely on my own. I have great people working for me.”

Over the years, Pen Steel has “developed and changed multiple times according to the demands of the market place and rising costs of steel,” Rosso said.

In the past year, she said, steel prices and the cost of fuel to transport it have driven prices of products up 10 percent to 12 percent. Still, business has been good.

“We did $2.2 million in sales last year,” Rosso said, “and expect to do $2.4 million this year, but we could hit $2.5 million and we’re in a recession, supposedly.”

At the end of 2004, she had a chance to move into larger space.

“I had invested approximately $200,000 in robotic-welded components with one of my subcontractors,” she said. “The subcontractor was always late . . . that made us look bad. If I didn’t want to risk my customer taking work from us, I had to do something, I had to change.”

Pen Steel bought robotic welding equipment and began to do the work, helping the firm grow even more. Ross said she plans to acquire an even larger robotic welding system when the company moves.

“We hired more welders, purchased more welding and fabrication equipment,” she said.

The firm has no product line per se, but works for other companies, producing steel and stainless steel components based on the client’s specifications and drawings.

“One of our major customers is a global crane manufacturer in Pennsylvania, and that particular company has pretty much doubled sales with us over the last five years,” Rosso says. “They could purchase parts from overseas, from China, India, Mexico, but they don’t.

“We ship on time, they trust our quality and because we have such little overhead expense, that global company has found us to be extremely competitive,” Rosso said.

She points to her logo, a stylized penny, “for me and my philosophy.” It has “In God We Trust, Liberty, in terms of entrepreneurship and, of course, Lincoln, who has stood for the American way.

“We do not import or export,” she says, “I know it’s a global economy, but I’m a farm girl, and I like to see the American way prosper . . . with manufacturing done right here in the United States.”

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