DeWITT –– Atlas Fence, Inc., a local fence construction company founded in 1979, has been acquired, and the new owner plans to make capital improvements and expand the business. 

The company’s new owner, 46-year-old Chris Polimino, says he had his eye on Atlas Fence for a while, and was fortunate enough to make a deal with John Czebiniak, 59, founder and ex-owner of Atlas Fence. Czebiniak continues to work for the company following the sale.

“I purchased the company because I knew it’s a longstanding, well-run, high-quality company,” says Polimino. “There’s absolutely potential for growth.”

The transaction closed on Feb. 15. Financial terms weren’t disclosed.

Atlas Fence, located at 6852 Manlius Center Road in the town of DeWitt, has been providing residential, commercial, and industrial fence products and services since 1979.

The business offers residential products including wood, chain link, ornamental iron and PVC fencing, lawn furniture, swing sets, tree-house play sets, and basketball hoops. It also sells commercial products such as guard rails, electric gates, gate operators, and cages.

After receiving the raw materials from its suppliers, Atlas Fence customizes the products based on the customers’ needs by using its own computerized router. The company also sells products it purchases from a wide variety of suppliers including Ameristar Fence Products, Master Halco, Backyard Adventures, Bison, and Douglas.

Atlas Fence now has customers all over New York State, and some in Pennsylvania as well. The company carries $5 million in personal and product liability insurance, according to Polimino.

New owner

Before buying Atlas Fence, Polimino worked at Tracey Road Equipment, Inc., a construction-equipment dealership, as the company’s CFO and COO for three years. Prior to that, he was the president and CEO of OP-TECH Environmental Services, Inc., a provider of environmental, industrial, and mechanical construction services, for 10 years.

Polimino and Czebiniak met about a year ago through Grenell Consulting Group, a Liverpool–based company that helps business owners with succession planning, training, and improving the performance of their key contributors. Grenell was advising Czebiniak, and connected him with Polimino, who says he decided to buy Atlas Fence from Czebiniak after their first meeting.

“I’ve known Atlas Fence for a long time … and they have a great reputation in the residential and commercial municipal markets,” says Polimino. “It was a good opportunity and it matched my background of being in the construction-related industries for pretty much my whole career since college.”

He says he finished his due diligence, and was able to obtain financing from Alliance Bank, N.A., prior to the closing of the asset purchase. The acquisition includes the name of the company, the customer list, 20 employees, 30 service vehicles, and other business equipment. 

The sale did not include the property. Polimino signed a five-year lease with Czebiniak, owner of the 7,000-square-foot building that Atlas Fence occupies. Polimino will have an option to buy the building when the current lease ends, says Czebiniak.

Czebiniak will remain on staff with Atlas Fence for a minimum of three years, serving as the vice president of sales and marketing. He says that at this point he does not have any plans for what he will do after that.

Polimino’s plans

Last year, Atlas Fence’s revenue increased by 11 percent from 2010. However, Polimino says that was not the main factor in his decision to acquire the company.

“Certainly it helps –– it’s better to buy a company that’s growing rather than shrinking –– but that wasn’t the main reason,” he says. “That didn’t have as much an impact on my decision to purchase as the reputation of the company and the way the company was being run.”

Polimino says he will follow the company’s existing game plan, which includes providing a high level of customer service, quality materials, and quality installation for its clients, as well as providing a safe and productive work environment for its employees.

“A lot of our employees have been either with the company or in the fencing industry for more than 20 years,” he says.

Polimino believes that the depth of experience of the company’s personnel makes it stand out from its competitors. To keep the solid foundation of Atlas Fence intact, he is keeping all 20 full-time employees, including three in the company’s accounting department, three in administration, four in sales and customer service, and 10 project superintendents.

He says he expects the Atlas Fence work force to swell to 45 employees when it has its full installation crew back as the peak construction season starts in early April.

Atlas Fence is looking for individuals with sales experience and a contracting background as it expands its sales force this year, says Polimino. 

He says the company will also add more service vehicles to its existing fleet of trucks and trailers, and continue to upgrade its construction equipment.

“We’ll probably spend about $150,000 in capital improvements over the next 12 months,” Polimino says. “Our expectation for this year is to continue to grow our revenue about the same that we did last year.”

Challenges 

When asked about challenges, Polimino identifies rising gas prices as the biggest concern for Atlas Fence.

“Certainly fuel prices are going to have a big effect on our business because we do have 30 vehicles in our fleet that we run on a daily basis,” he says. “So I see the fuel as being a challenge, and that’s probably going to be the biggest challenge … ”

Polimino also notes that the residential side of the business depends on improvement in the housing market, which the company is seeing. Since the life of a fence is typically long, people generally do not need new ones unless they are buying new houses, he explains.

“When the housing market is strong, we have a lot more demand for fences … ” he says, “We’ve seen some improved activity this year which has been encouraging.”

Last year, about 35 percent of Atlas Fence’s revenue came from its residential business.

Atlas Fence is now working on a number of residential projects, as well as projects for commercial customers including a major retailer, a trucking company, and an engineering firm. It is also taking part in the Onondaga Lake cleanup project.

Polimino says Atlas Fence is expecting more projects to come as April approaches, including in the health and education sectors.

“We are seeing quite a few opportunities on school-related projects right now, and we are seeing a lot of opportunities in the health-care-related industry,” he says. “Hospitals are making improvements and spending money, so we see opportunities there.”   

CLAY — O’Brien & Gere may be best known locally as an engineering firm, but the company’s manufacturing operations account for 10 percent of its revenue and sales in that business are growing.

O’Brien & Gere produces industrial furnaces and other heat-treating systems used in industries like aerospace, defense, automotive, energy, and health care. The firm relocated its manufacturing unit from a site in Fayetteville to a 160,000-square-foot location in the town of Clay late last year.

The new space is actually slightly smaller than the old building, but the floor plan is wide open and flexible. O’Brien & Gere also added overhead cranes, a paint booth, and other upgrades that will allow it to handle the growth it sees ahead in manufacturing, says Stephen Palin, senior vice president for O’Brien & Gere’s Denton TSI brand of furnace and heat treating-systems.

Manufacturing sales rose 40 percent in 2011 and are projected to jump 50 percent this year, Palin says. O’Brien & Gere spent about $3 million of its own money on upgrading the new manufacturing space, he adds, and received no government incentives or other aid for the project.

The Clay site is a better location for much of the facility’s work force, Palin says. Many of the employees in the manufacturing unit come from the North Country, so it’s an easier drive than Fayetteville. About 80 people work at the Clay plant, which is located on Morgan Road and formerly was the home of Rollway Bearing. 

O’Brien & Gere employs another 320 people at its headquarters in downtown Syracuse. The firm, which generated 

$200 million in revenue in 2011, has 850 employees at 30 offices nationwide.

“We see this as one of the fastest growing parts of our business,” O’Brien & Gere CEO James Fox says of manufacturing. “It’s a differentiator for us.”

That’s because O’Brien & Gere provides the electronics that control its furnaces and material-handling technologies that load
them as well. The company gives its customers a complete system, rather than just pieces, Fox notes.

Much of the work involves crafting highly customized equipment to deal with specific metals at high temperatures, he adds.

The firm’s customers use its equipment to manufacture items like bearings, wind- turbine blades, and even replacement hips. The manufacturing unit also produces air quality products and the new facility includes a lab for testing wastewater treatment technologies.

Manufacturing projects range in size from $300,000 to $10 million, Palin says.

O’Brien & Gere’s manufacturing business has traditionally been focused on the Northeast, but that’s changed with the addition of a national sales manager, Palin says. O’Brien & Gere is now pushing its products into Texas, the Pacific Northwest, and California.

And the industries the company serves are here for the long haul, Fox adds. High-value work in sectors like aerospace seems to be returning to the U.S., he says.

Customers for the manufacturing unit include firms like GE and Pratt & Whitney.

O’Brien & Gere’s manufacturing business began in 1994 when it acquired Denton Refractory. 

The company relocated its headquarters to downtown Syracuse from suburban DeWitt in 2010. It occupies three floors of the six-story Washington Station building at 333 W. Washington St.

SYRACUSE — Mohawk Global Logistics is expanding its Buffalo sales office into a full-service branch.

The shipping-logistics firm has added four new employees to the location with the expansion. Previously, Mohawk Global had two salespeople in that office.

The site will now offer local import and export businesses a complete set of logistics services, including customs brokerage, international and domestic transportation, warehousing and distribution, and trade consulting. Mohawk Global, based in Syracuse, has additional offices in the Rochester, Albany, and Chicago areas.

The company employs more than 85 people, including 55 in Syracuse.

Demand from clients drove the expansion to a full Buffalo branch, says Sherie Cuddy, the regional manager for Mohawk Global who is overseeing that location. The company sees strong growth potential in the Buffalo market and expects to add more people to the office in the future, she adds.

In addition to the sales office, the company has been offering free global trade seminars in Buffalo for the past three years to help educate the business community on issues related to import and export compliance.

Mohawk Global opened its Buffalo sales office in 2008. It already had a customer base in the market, even before opening there.

The market was a good one for the firm since it is close to Toronto, a major gateway for international shipping, according to the company.

Buffalo was the final piece to Mohawk Global’s upstate New York footprint. The firm began expanding outside New York last year with the opening of a Chicago office.

The company already had clients outside the region, but Chicago was its first physical location outside the state. The city is a strategic gateway to the Midwest, according to Mohawk Global.

Major rail connections run through Chicago and it’s a hub for air freight as well. The location will allow Mohawk Global to reach further into cities like Milwaukee and Minneapolis as well, according to the company.

Mohawk Global relocated to a new headquarters at 123 Air Cargo Road earlier this year. The firm is now located in the former US Air reservation center on the Syracuse Hancock International Airport property.

The company had been based in 10,000 square feet of space at 152 Air Cargo Road. Mohawk Global currently occupies about 60 percent of the new building’s 26,000 square feet of space.

The city of Syracuse acquired the building after US Airways shut down its reservation center in Syracuse after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The center was one of several the airline closed nationwide after the attacks. 

Mohawk Global announced a lease-to-own agreement with the city on the building in January 2011.

SYRACUSE  —  Brian Bluff told a room full of military veterans that they’d better be ready for challenges if they want to start their own business. 

“Check your gut,” said Bluff, who was the keynote speaker at the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) 2012 Veterans Business Conference at Onondaga Community College (OCC) on March 13. “If you don’t like to work weekends, if you don’t like to work nights, then this is not the right thing for you.”

Bluff is a veteran of the U.S. Navy. He is also the president and co-founder of Site-Seeker, Inc., an Internet-marketing firm based in New Hartford that has 22 employees in New York, Connecticut, North Carolina, and Virginia. He started Site-Seeker in 2003 and had previously started another Internet-marketing firm, TCO Inc., in 2000.

“If you like a challenge, if you want to bury yourself in your work and do something important, something you feel good about, then [starting a business] is really cool,” he told the veterans. “It’s a good time.”

This is the fifth year the SBA’s Syracuse district office has organized its business conference for veterans, which is titled “Operation: Start Up & Grow.” This year’s conference drew 120 military veterans and about 60 exhibitors, representing more than 30 organizations.

Veterans who attended chose between workshops on social media, financing, and government contracting. Other workshops addressed marketing plans and selling to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Bluff drew from his experiences in the Navy in his keynote speech. He recounted being on the USS Conyngham when a fire broke out at the front of the ship.

That fire killed one man and damaged the ship so badly that it had to be decommissioned. Bluff said he was a damage-control assistant on the vessel when the fire happened, and that he suffered injuries and burns.

“Our mission was to fight the ship,” he said. “As you prepare to begin your business, you’ve got to understand that your mission is profitability.”

Bluff advised veterans to plan for the worst and look as far into the future as possible when starting their businesses. And he recommended keeping as much cash on hand as possible.

He also said business owners should be prepared to take action quickly if their business encounters trouble.

“You need to take evasive action early,” he said. “Lay it out and then make a decision.”

Veterans should be willing to enlist organizations like the SBA, Syracuse SCORE, and the Small Business Development Center at OCC when starting their business, according to Bluff.

“There is no award for figuring it out yourself,” he said. “Take all the help you can get.”

Helping veterans find assistance as they think about starting their own business is one of the reasons the Syracuse SBA holds a business conference for veterans, according to Cathy Pokines, the director of marketing and communications at the SBA’s Syracuse district office. Attending the conference gives veterans access to a wide range of organizations, rather than having to choose from telephone numbers on a list, she says.

The conference typically attracts between 100 and 140 veterans, Pokines says. She estimated that more than 600 different veterans have attended since the Syracuse SBA first held the conference in 2008.

Veterans are good candidates to start a small business because of their military training, Pokines adds. They have discipline, courage under fire, and the ability to take calculated risks, she says.

“The hallmark characteristic of small-business owners is taking risks,” she says. “Because they’re risking their savings, they’re risking their employees’ financial wherewithal, and they’re putting their ego on the line.”

Veterans could qualify for various forms of SBA assistance, including the Patriot Express loan program, according to the SBA. That program is for members of the military community who want to start or expand a small business. The Syracuse district has processed 119 loans under the program since 2007.