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PRODUCTS FINISHING — PFonline.com 23 "Luckily, we had a manufacturing operation on the other side of the facility that kept us going, otherwise it would have been even more grim," he says. "But it was brutal, to say the least." Not only did Pozin have to deal with the fire and the loss of business, but he then had to quickly figure out how to get things back up and running and keep the customers he had. It didn't help that he was so far away when the destruction occurred, so he was delayed in calling customers to assure them their parts would still be finished in auxiliary lines in another building. Pozin said there was no time to grieve at the near loss of his company, or to feel sorry for himself. "I had 50 sets of eyes staring at me, wondering what my plan was going to be," he says. "There were lots of questions from my employees; they wondered if I was even going to keep the company, or whether we would be out so long that they needed to get another job. There were a lot of people with concerns, and at the same time I am trying to come up with a plan of what to do next." Novice Plater It wasn't the first time Pozin stood alone wondering what to do. Going back 30 years ago, Pozin also had a similar experience when he first purchased Sun Glo and had little knowledge of running a plating facility. After leaving the Navy, he was driving a truck for an air freight company along with his father when they decided to start their own trucking company. "My father and I were getting 60 percent of the fee for the freight company we were working for," Pozin says. "We decided to keep 100 percent of it and find our own businesses to deliver for." Most of his customers were platers, heat treaters and screw machine companies, which have a lot of weight that needed to be picked up and shipped throughout central Florida. He and his father expanded the business several times, but Pozin kept noticing all the nice cars the owners of the plating shops drove whenever he visited their facilities. "I was 25 and very impressionable," he says. "I started talking to the owner of Sun Glo, and he was telling me about how the new requirements for waste treatment were coming in for plating shops, and he really wanted no part of that. So we spoke a few times, and that's when I decided to buy it." Pozin says he struggled early getting to know the business model, and the former owner may have made the deal thinking that Pozin might default on his loan and he could take back the shop. "It never happened," he says. "I worked my tail off to get things going, and looking for ways to grow the business. Unlike up north where you can run barrel plating and make a killing, down here in Florida we had to be a jack-of-all-trades and really perform a lot of operations." In the Navy, Pozin was a nuclear machinist on one of the nuclear subs, and spent two years in training learning about heat transfers, pumps and other intricacies of the operation, plus he attended a vocational high school and spent three years studying industrial electricity. Sun Glo partnered with American Plating Power to design an area that kept rectifiers, control cabinets, heat exchangers and pumps in a separate room on the end of the facility, away from the plating area where corrosion might attack those important components of the operation. SUN GLO SURVIVES FIRE