Ace Products and Consulting capitalizing off of strong 2018

RAVENNA, Ohio—After opening its newest expansion to customers only in March 2018, Ace Products and Consulting L.L.C. is leaping through its goals for adding on new capabilities and launching its iLearn Innovation Institute training program.

The company saw initial quick growth by taking advantage of the closing of DuPont's facility in Stow, Ohio, adding office and testing equipment, and most importantly employees used to working in an accredited environment, said Erick Sharp, president and CEO of Ace.

Now coming up on its first anniversary of opening the new addition to customers, Ace has continued growing at the same dizzying pace, investing about $3 million in the new initiatives.

"It's kind of how we got to where we were last year, just by listening to our customers," Sharp said. "As we built the place out and started laying out our expansion plan for what we wanted to do, we made a mistake in a joking way of letting people know what our plan was. Once customers got to know that, they would ask if we could do it now."

With customers requesting more testing capabilities, it made sense to push through the original multiple-year plans to offer the full package to customers, Sharp said. Ace wanted to show that the same growth processes that they had set up in the last year could be repeated across the board in other capabilities.

"We wanted to be able to work with both physical and analytical testing, some of the conditionings and different specialty tests," Sharp said. "That way, we can support all their needs so they don't have to split things up at different places for the same unit."

Though every company should have a second source, it makes sense to try to keep all of the aspects of a property at the same place, Sharp said.

"Once we got going with it, saying, 'We're going to go ahead and do this part because it'll allow us to round things out. We might as well go ahead and do this part.' Then, it was, 'Screw it, let's just finish it.' We completed the phases we had laid out for three years. Now we're looking at what's next, what are the other areas we need as we continue to grow those and strengthen it."

As Ace continues to grow, Sharp still is catching customers up on its new equipment and capabilities, he said. All in all, the company has added 14 pieces of equipment in the last six months of 2018. Those include inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (which covers California Proposition 65 testing), X-ray fluorescence, temperature retraction and scanning electron microscope, among others. It now has four different mixers (including two Banburys, a tilt body and a sigma mixer). While a lot of the recent expansion has been about analytical testing, Ace is working on bringing on some dynamic testing in the future as well.

"People are still learning what our capabilities are, we're finding, and learning what we have here," Sharp said.

Continued outreach

New equipment isn't the only measure by which Ace has grown, either. Compared to last year, the company's footprint expanded from 6,000 square feet of its current facility to about 20,000 square feet, including new offices and work spaces, as well as classrooms for its new iLearn modules. The entire facility covers 175,000 square feet, and some of that space could be used for some auxiliary incubation projects later on, Sharp said.

Early last year at its open house, Ace had six employees, including a few experts brought over from DuPont. Now it staffs 11, including several new techs who are picking up knowledge from more experienced members, Sharp said.

"That's helped us in grooming up our next generation here," Sharp said. "Bringing in these individuals who have the educational background and understanding chemistry and engineering, and them getting downloaded with all those years of practical experience. It's just a great combination to bring that together."

One experienced hire that Ace brought on was Christie Robinson, former training and development director for the ACS Rubber Division. A main goal of Sharp's in developing Ace is to reach the next generation and get them interested in rubber.

"When I got into rubber, I got lucky and started out with an exciting company," Sharp said. "Then I got to learn some of the other parts of rubber and saw why people think it's not so sexy."

Ace wants to change rubber's image, and is building partnerships with local schools to bring in students and showcasing what the industry has to offer, utilizing the company's working lab. Sharp brought the concepts to Robinson to discuss how Ace was differentiating its goals from what Rubber Division covers.

In talking with her, Sharp saw that she wanted to try some new approaches to reaching students for the rubber industry. Though she enjoyed her time at Rubber Division, Ace had a laboratory, a training center and a workshop.

"They don't have the capability to do some of the stuff that we were looking at getting into," Sharp said. "She's got the personality that she always likes to be doing more and reinventing, so when she saw what we were into, she was kind of interested. Obviously, she's very well-respected. She's developed curriculum, and she knows what to look for in development."

Working alongside local schools is a major goal for Ace, one that doesn't have any immediate benefit to the company but is an investment in future generations, Sharp said.

"There's no profit to be made. The company doesn't get bigger on that," he said.

"But it makes the rubber industry stronger and it helps bring people through. There are benefits down the road. If we touch some students now and they really love it and they enroll, maybe they work for us or for somebody else. But maybe they think, 'I first learned to love rubber because of Ace.' If we create those visions for people now, it could have long-term benefit."

Ace also is working toward accreditation and certification for Portage County and the State of Ohio to get set up as a training center for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, Sharp said. The goal is to bring job seekers in for a course in the basics of the rubber industry and connect them with local businesses looking for employees. The course will cover entry-level fundamentals of understanding rubber and processing it with hands-on work, and attendees will have additionally showed up on time and completed the steps of the program to cover some soft skills as well. Engagement within the class can also be tracked.

"The good thing is that, once we're set up, if they complete the weeklong course, they're basically guaranteed employment," Sharp said. "We've had so many people call us already to say once that's going, they want three or four people.

"It's crazy how many medium, small or even large companies are here in this 30-mile radius, and all of them seem to need people."

Back to school

Along with those training efforts, Ace has launched its iLearn Innovation Institute, a series of regular courses geared to new initiates to the rubber industry as well as more experienced employees, Sharp said.

The program covers some basic industry knowledge with hands-on training alongside insight into issues impacting the larger market. As experienced veterans retire out of the industry, there's a generational gap in knowledge.

"My generation got skipped," Sharp said. "We're doing a little better at the next generation coming in, but we're still not quite there. We're wanting to provide training both to professionals in the industry to help them get to the next level, but also for new people coming into the industry."

With a diminishing amount of technical knowledge in the field, it is important to be able to use hands-on training to bridge theoretical and practical application, Sharp said. The classes are developed to be shorter, to make it easier to stay fresh and attentive during instruction, and Ace will be updating curriculum as new information becomes available.

Part of that new curriculum includes courses that don't have as much to do with the day-to-day work of rubber as much as the wider industry. The kickoff schedule from December included courses on the global silicone market, California's Proposition 65 and the impact of trade wars and tariffs.

"There's a lot of current events happening that we wanted to be able to capture, too. There's relevant, real-time material that's actually going to help people where they're at," Sharp said. "And it might be a class we run once and don't do again because it was relevant for that time and it's been figured out. We're not worried about trying to develop a class that's going to last decades. We're worried about developing a class that's actually going to be useful for somebody."

Rubber industry training can have in-depth, technical training, but not everything about the wider industry is 100 percent technical, Sharp said.

"We're not trying to attract chemists and such, we're trying to attract purchasing people, business unit development directors—the whole variety of individuals who are affecting our industry," he said.

Ace is aiming for classes of about 30 people for most informational courses (which will run about 2-3 hours), and closer to 12-16 for more hands-on training, Sharp said.

The company is in the process of making some courses available for remote participation, and is on track to include satellite classes early in 2019 for some current events training, with plans being laid for international satellite courses by the end of the year. Satellite representation for hands-on training will take more time.

Starting as a smaller operation that has had the chance to listen and react to customers as they've grown has given Ace the ability to quickly respond, Sharp said.

"That's the nice thing about being able to act fast. Speed makes a difference, accuracy makes a difference," he said. "We want to be on the forefront of grasping at some of those new testing innovations, and speed is critical on that too. Obviously we do our due diligence, but we're just very efficient and quick in how we do things."