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24 JUNE 2017 — PFonline.com Growing Customer Base All of that gave him a good base knowledge of what needed to be done in a plating operation, and—with a work ethic second to none—Pozin grew Sun Glo and its customer base. "Between high school and everything they threw at me in the Navy, I was pretty much taught everything I needed to know about running a plating shop," he says. "They had a nickel chrome and galvanizing line, plus some zinc when I took it over. We had two guys here and me. That was my starting point." Pozin has grown the company steadily, and at one point had over 100 employees working for him. He added Nadcap certifica- tions to almost all of his plating lines, and partnered with several aerospace firms to perform its coating operations, including General Electric, Lockheed Martin and others. A few years ago, Pozin made a strategic move with a Fortune 300 manufacturing customer they were servicing and opened a metalworking shop next door to machine and stamp their parts before finishing them, and then warehoused the parts and shipped them to their customer as part of a fulfillment agreement. "It was basically a vendor-maintained inventory partnership," he says. "We made their parts, finished them and then shipped their parts; we were in charge of the entire supply chain for them." Things were going well for Pozin and Sun Glo—they even received a $5,000 prize in Fifth Third Bank's Curious Customer contest that honored achievements by small businesses—until the morning of Sept. 18, 2015, when the fire struck. For 45 days, the insurance company wouldn't even let them enter the shop to start rebuilding, causing further annoyance. Self-Contained Electrical Area "I've always prided myself on the maintenance of my shop, so when we had to design a new plant, I knew I didn't want our guys to have to stand on their heads when they were working on a pump or something," he says. The first thing he did was powder coat everything—every electrical conduit, every junction box, every breaker box. The goal was to protect metal from rusting in what could be a very caustic environment of a plating shop. The Sun Glo crew did most of the rebuild themselves, including removing the debris from the fire and then building walls, adding insulation and installing lights. "If guys weren't running the plating lines we had left to help generate revenue to keep us going, then they were swinging hammers or had a welder in their hand rebuilding," he says. One of the most interesting aspects of his shop's rebuild was to partner with American Plating Power in nearby Fort Meyers to design an area that kept rectifiers, control cabinets, heat exchangers and pumps in a separate room on the end of the facility, and away from the plating area where corrosion might attack those important components of the operation. In an environment of change, it's comforting to know you can always count on Coral Chemical Company to bring stability to your metal finishing business. For over 60 years, we have weathered many marketplace shifts, yet we continue to provide a strong foundation of process knowledge and chemical expertise to our loyal customers. Count on the solid building blocks of Coral for your successful finishing operations. 847.246.6666 800.228.4646 sales@coral.com www.coral.com PLATING