Metal fabricators merge to form Caldera Manufacturing Group

A welder finishes a corner joint. Images: Caldera Manufacturing Group

Mark Jurman, CEO of Caldera Manufacturing Group, has a story behind the company name. Formed in 2023, the organization, backed by Lorraine Capital, brings four companies together under one brand.

“We were at the peak of the mountain,” Jurman said, “and we blew the top off the place and created something new. Think of a caldera like Crater Lake. We’re going from being just a good fabricator to being something much more.”

In some ways, the metaphor applies to the industry at large. Sheet, plate, and tube fabricators have been built on mountains of success, yet two trends have spurred significant change. First is increased demand, thanks to reshoring and OEMs everywhere taking a fresh look at their supply chains. Second is the generational shift, with successful company founders and leaders reaching retirement age and investors looking for opportunity.

When mergers and acquisitions go well, these trends can work in a virtuous cycle: An OEM needs a certain capability, level of capacity, or geographic footprint; investors acquire companies that offer them; and—with several previously independent fabricators merged under one entity—sales relationships get wider (more diversified) and deeper (doing more for each customer). As Jurman explained during a recent conversation with The Fabricator, that’s the idea behind Caldera Manufacturing Group.

Origin Story

Gary Romig led Reading, Pa.-based Summit Steel & Manufacturing for several decades, and during that time he and his leadership team made several strategic moves. About 10 years ago, the company launched products in the storage carousel space. Today, Summit Storage (a separate company with operations inside the Summit Steel facility) offers various racks, vertical and horizontal storage carousels, mobile carts, returnables, compact sheet storage racks, and other heavy-duty storage products.

Romig also purchased Fairlawn Tool, a fabricator and stamper in Westminster, Md. Fairlawn and Summit offer complementary technologies. Summit has laser cutting, both flat sheet and tube, as well as powder coating; Fairlawn has punching. Both have welding, from manual to robotic, machining, and CNC press brakes, but Fairlawn also offers stamping. Together, the two can process gauge material up to thick plate, as well as structural shapes and tubes. Summit Steel also has powder coating.

That process portfolio led to the Summit organization building broad technical expertise and a similarly broad customer base. This, among many other factors, made Summit an attractive buy for Lorraine Capital in late 2022.

The organization was missing one piece of the puzzle, though: a large geographic footprint. It could ship far and wide, but if customers wanted a plant geographically closer to, say, an assembly plant in the Midwest, it just couldn’t provide it.

That’s how the idea for Caldera began to take shape. In January 2023, Lorraine-backed Summit Steel acquired Laser Specialties Inc. (LSI) in Tulsa, Okla. LSI has a variety of capabilities, including automated material handling, laser cutting and punching for sheet metal, wet paint, and—as of this month—ultrahigh-power laser cutting with the capability to handle 1-in. plate or even thicker.

From all this came the formation of a new 170-employee entity in October 2023: Caldera Manufacturing Group. “We thought about all the changes in the world, all the geopolitical and supply chain issues,” Jurman said. “So many companies are looking to bring supply chains closer. So, instead of having separate companies, we decided to bring all four of them together to help better service the supply chains. And in a lot of ways, it provided a great deal of excess capacity.”

Among many other processes, the new organization has press brake forming, tube and structural shape laser cutting, as well as (most recently) ultrahigh-powered laser cutting. The cutting system is slated to be operational this month.

Scaling up smooths out demand variability that most custom fab shops are all too familiar with. The problem can be dramatic if an organization has highly concentrated revenue: Everyone scrambles to meet demands of just a few large customers at the expense of a “long tail” of small accounts.

But even larger operations with diverse revenue streams have some variability. With all operations under one umbrella, “We can now move jobs from plant to plant,” Jurman said. “If our Oklahoma plant is over capacity, we can move jobs for East Coast customers to our other plants,” Jurman said, adding that with scale also comes greater opportunity for customer partnerships. “Our overall vision is to be involved earlier in the design process. What can we do to reduce cost, shorten lead times, and improve [our customers’] manufacturing performance?”

To make this happen, Caldera is expanding its salesforce. “We’re fortunate,” Jurman said. “We’ve got a deep base of knowledge in our sales and engineering group. They have 35-year relationships with key accounts in multiple markets. That, of course, will remain in place. But we’re also recruiting more people to support key industries. We’ve identified sectors where we want to grow and drill down, everything from high-tech to entertainment to heavy industrial products.”

Jurman explained that he’s looking to develop an expanded sales structure, with industry experts supported by manufacturing process experts who know Caldera’s key capabilities, be it cutting, bending, or welding.

Plans also are to ramp up sales of the company’s storage products, tackling new retail and industrial markets. For instance, Jurman said some of the company’s storage systems can work in certain retail environments needing to secure product from theft.

Eventually, the sales team will help Jurman and others on the management team target new acquisition opportunities, to expand both its geographic footprint and process offerings. In the future, this might be outside machining or sheet metal, plate, and tube fabrication. “We won’t add capacity for capacity’s sake,” Jurman said. “We want to add capacity because there’s a genuine customer need.”

The idea, he said, is to serve existing and new customers in new and specific ways. The last thing Jurman and other managers want is for the new organization to be pigeonholed as a specific kind of supplier: precision sheet metal, plate fabricator, stamper, tube fabricator, or anything else. Instead, customer needs will shape how Caldera considers its mix of manufacturing processes and potential acquisitions.

Due Diligence

Mergers don’t always go well, of course. Shop cultures might differ; perhaps the overall investment strategy falls short; short-term trumps long-term thinking.

But Jurman isn’t one for short-term thinking. He has plans to work with technical schools to build talent bases near Caldera locations. He also is a big believer in pushing authority down the org chart. “We have supervisors, leads, and technicians who should be making decisions,” he said. “That’s the direction we’re going. For us to double or triple in size and offer our customers the service they need, we need to have the right people. It can’t be all at the top. It has to be all through the organization.”

That’s where scaling up comes into play, and a few elements need to be in place to make that happen. The first, Jurman said, involves good use of data, including systems that can merge with a larger whole. “This will be part of our due diligence. Does [a potential acquisition] have a system we can convert easily to the system we already have?”

Caldera Manufacturing Group formed in 2023. CEO Mark Jurman said the name is a metaphor. “Think of Crater Lake … we’re blowing the top off and starting something new.” Bartfett/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Data gives the road map. After all, if a fabricator doesn’t know where it truly is—real machine uptime information, changeover times, time for material handling, and so on—how does it know where it’s headed?

This dovetails into the human piece of the puzzle. Technical talent is a must, but just as important is engagement. Is everyone helping and happy to be working together?

“I’ve been in a lot of factories,” Jurman said. “In some cases, if you’re a customer visiting a shop, people move away from you and don’t want to talk to you. When I walked through the plants at Caldera, employees came up to me and said hello.

“They told me what they were doing, and I could tell they were proud of the work they were doing. That really matters. I always want to feel the pulse of the factory and make sure people are engaged and empowered to make good decisions.”

That involves training, of course, but it again entails pushing authority down the org chart. The farther decision-making authority is from the front lines, the more powerless people feel.

A New Beginning

Jurman’s summit-to-caldera metaphor could extend to the industry at large. Fabricators continue adding capacity with better cutting, bending, and welding technology. A garage shop grows into a major regional player, but then what? Maybe the top needs to be blown off, revealing a new landscape—a new beginning.

Caldera’s answer is to knit closer ties with customers, helping them through multiple processes within metal fabrication and, eventually, beyond.

Metal fabrication giant MEC, the Mayville, Wis., company that’s been No. 1 on The Fabricator’s FAB 40 list for more than a decade, reported a similar strategy last year. MEC customers are looking for lightweighting solutions, so more aluminum fabrication is in the company’s future—but plastics and composites might be too as well.

Jurman described a similar path for growth. They’re starting with technical knowledge and engagement: working together, having pride in one’s work, being given the authority to make a difference. Sprinkle in a good data and measurement system (software) that’s easy to work with, connect to, and grow. All that builds the foundation for scaling up, both in terms of capability as well as geography. Caldera, and perhaps the industry at large, is just getting started.