Testing, consulting firm Ace Products adds space at Ohio facility

RAVENNA, Ohio—Erick Sharp is planning on offering testing capabilities bridging the rubber and silicone markets, as well as providing industry education, with investment and expansion at his Ace Products and Consulting business.

Sharp, president and CEO of Ace, is leading the company through its second expansion stage, which opened to customers as of March 1, he said. The expansion includes an additional 3,500 square feet to be added to the company's current 7,000 square feet at its Ravenna facility, and will cap off with an open house April 12.

Ace is housed in a 172,000-sq.-ft. industrial park facility on 72 acres with rail access, giving the company more room to expand in later planned phases and bring in other rubber-related business, Sharp said.

Before Ace, Sharp worked with Portage Precision Polymers Inc. for four years. When Portage was acquired by Hexpol A.B. in December 2014, Sharp decided to get away from the corporate environment.

"I've been through this before, going big to the corporate side. It's just not a match for me," he said. "I'd rather go completely to the other side and start grassroots."

Sharp started Ace on his own at the beginning of 2015, and expanded into a 2,000-sq.-ft. lab in Akron with some mixing and basic test equipment to do research and development work.

"That was going well for us, and there was a lot of feedback from customers pushing us to go into independent testing and expand the scope of what we were doing," he said.

Sharp took a look at the market for pain points in the rubber industry, and put together plans for the next stage of independent testing and a broader scope for R&D testing as well, he said.

"I could maintain the business at the size it was, and be a happy, small company, or seize the opportunity to bring in investors and go for it," he said. "I'm not very good at being happy and content. I like to go for it."

He brought in three other investors as part of the team, began lining up equipment and looked into the requirements to be an accredited lab. The Ravenna location brought the space Ace needed, and was strategically placed for nearby customers, Sharp said.

"There's the concept of an industrial park moving in here that we can try to push toward polymer," he said.

Assembling a team

Ace is working toward ISO 17025 accreditation to be able to cover independent testing requested by customers, Sharp said. That effort is backed up by employees who already have experience working in an accredited lab through DuPont.

Sharp said he came in contact with former DuPont employees when the company's facility in Stow, Ohio, closed. One of his connections in the used equipment industry told him about DuPont's acceptance of silent bids for equipment. As a fledgling company, Ace needed the equipment, and Sharp found a Banbury internal mixer, a guillotine cutter and press, and rebound and resilience testers at a fraction of the cost he had anticipated.

When Sharp went back to the facility to do further analysis on the equipment before picking it up, he had a chance to meet the team, and was impressed by their professionalism, he said.

"It stuck out to me that they were going through a shutdown and people were losing their jobs, but yet they were extremely helpful," he said. "All the equipment, they had cleaned it, and had all the spare parts sitting with it.

"I thought, there's really a good culture here, and that's key to what we're putting in here. We have the unique opportunity to build something from the ground up, so we want to be able to choose the equipment, choose the people, choose the culture and choose the way we do things, because we know how special that opportunity is. You get one shot at doing that."

DuPont already was an A2LA-accredited lab, and the employees had an understanding of the routines and priorities involved, so he started handing out business cards, Sharp said.

"So we went from trying to figure out how we were going to source all of the equipment and recruit employees to here," he said. "It accelerated our timeline and expanded our capabilities from what we initially thought we were going to do, having experienced people to bring in right out of the gate to help push that forward."

Those DuPont employees include Doug Foster, who came from DuPont's Performance Materials Technical Service and Development Laboratory. In his new role at Ace, he works as laboratory manager, watching daily operations and assisting in implementation of the ISO 17025 accreditation. John Leonhard, quality coordinator at Ace, also comes from DuPont, where he managed and maintained DuPont's quality systems.

Wendy Naugle, Ace's administrative manager, also comes from Sharp's past, joining the company from an administrative position at Portage Precision. Ace currently has six employees.

Experienced investors

Sharp also is relying on the experience of his three other investors, who all have backgrounds in business, to help him build Ace from the ground up. Those three include two silent partners, as well as Doug Hartley, who currently serves the company as vice president of sales and marketing. Hartley also had history with Sharp, as they worked together at Portage Precision. He and Sharp collaborated on ideas after Sharp had gotten Ace started, and he's looking forward to spending more time in guidance.

"I'm concentrating on the things I like doing best, the sales and marketing part," Hartley said. "Myself and the other investors, we have all had experiences starting businesses and running them before. I think being able to come here and offer what mistakes we made, we don't want to make those mistakes again. So if Erick can learn from our mistakes and the things that cost us money, that'll be huge."

One example is the installation of a laboratory information management system, which will help keep track of samples and tests. Some sources would say to wait a year or so down the road, but it's important to have it in place now, Hartley said.

"I know how costly that'll be, not having it now but then having to convert it later," he said. "If we can come out of the gate with that in place, that just gives us cost-savings for ourselves but also a better quality of product right away for our customers. That's important."

Sharp is a believer in surrounding himself with the right team, which is important when building a testing facility that incorporates some manufacturing elements, he said.

"The whole concept that we're birthing here is based around service," he said. "We want faster turnaround, we want traceability all the way through the process. We're taking management technologies and applying them to a lab environment.

"In the interviews with those from DuPont and others, we reviewed those philosophies, and they resonated well. So everybody's bought into what we're trying to accomplish here, which is key."

Broadening capabilities

Initially, the company will be focused on physical and mechanical testing, Sharp said, along with providing evaluations on raw materials. Another option will be the capability to do silicone testing.

"We're doing that carefully, because we don't want people to immediately label us a silicone lab," he said. "We're a rubber and silicone lab. A rubber lab that does silicone and has that capability, whereas other rubber labs don't."

Being able to offer some silicone testing gives the lab reach into another entire market, as silicone becomes more widely used in some applications, he said.

"It's valuable doing it in a lab setting, because in a lot of these places where silicone is taking over is automotive and heat applications, in construction and weatherability applications. Being able to side-by-side compare those within the same lab is worthwhile," Sharp said.

He also wants to use Ace as a way to provide education to the wider industry, establishing quarterly free training courses, he said.

"We want to put some practical knowledge out there," Sharp said.

With the lab's capabilities and process equipment, Ace is in a position to be able to both talk about and demonstrate the details of rubber processing and testing in real-time situations, he said. The goal is to make the rubber industry seem less complicated and more practical, partially in a bid to help bridge the transitional age gap in the industry.

Sharp hopes to be able to partner with colleges and high schools to lay the foundations of an interest and understanding of the rubber industry with potential new industry recruits, he said. The training won't just be focused on lab testing, but bring in elements of extrusion, molding and fabrication, for example.

"We want to modernize and simplify the concept of rubber to the industry," he said. "We want to help be that interpreter and find a way that it resonates with the learning style of what's coming up, so we can get people into the industry, and maybe make it look cool in the process."

In the scale-up after the company opened the new site to the market in March, Sharp already has his eyes on the potential for growth, with expected hires of four or five more employees by the end of the year, he said. If volume continues as he's planned, he expects to be at about 20 employees within the next three years.