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Aluminum processing for the Hole family: over the past quarter century, Marvin Hole's company, Aluminum Blanking, has grown from a small start-up to a specialist in the toll processing of surface-sensitive materials.

Article Excerpt
MARVIN HOLE was a coil-handling equipment salesman in the 1970s when he saw a market opening.

Steel producers had already started to divest themselves of finishing operations, and he anticipated that aluminum companies would do the same.

"We had access to a lot of used equipment, and he contacted several mills to see if they had interest in cut-to-length aluminum coil, which they did," says Eric "Rick" Hole, Marvin's son and the current vice president and chief operating officer of Aluminum Blanking, Pontiac, Mich., the company his father founded in 1979.

Since then, Aluminum Blanking has grown into a toll processor with 105 employees working two shifts. The company processed 120 million pounds of aluminum last year and expects to handle 140 million pounds in 2006.

Aluminum Blanking operates seven blanking lines in three buildings totaling 180,000 square feet on the Pontiac site.

"We've had steady growth, with a couple of big jumps over the years. It's a very capital-intensive business. When a building was busting at the seams, we'd plan an expansion with another building and new equipment," Rick Hole says.

The company has little room left to repeat the process, since its three buildings occupy most of the available land....