Episode Details

Contact Roger Sustar:

www.thinkmfg.com.

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce our guest today, Roger Sustar. Roger is CEO of Fredon Corporation, which offers complete manufacturing solutions for precision machining needs. They've been in business since 1969 and always go one step beyond to provide their customers with the highest level of quality through planning employee involvement, training technology, and a highly effective quality control system.

Roger is a firm believer in giving back to the community. He started a group called AWT - the Alliance for Working Together - to serve as a forum for manufacturers in Lake county to discuss common business issues. Welcome to the show, Roger.

Roger Sustar: wow, Thank you, Lisa, very much.

Lisa Ryan: Roger, please share a bit of your background and what ultimately led you to Fredon.

Roger Sustar: I came back from the United States Army back in 1964, got married, and before I got married. My dad had me worked for his little company for about two days or three days, and I quit my father's company called Masco Machine. He had a very nice company in Highland Heights, Ohio.

Because it was just too harsh, he had three partners. My wife wanted me to go to school, so I tried to get into Fenn college, which is the pre-Cleveland state. I had failed. I passed the essay test because I wrote the essay, and my wife typed it. That was when papers were around that before the computer, a long time ago. I got an a-minus or something like that. She did an excellent job. I used to pass an English grammar exam, and grammar is, you know, diagramming. Right after the fifth try, I said, screw this. I couldn't take it.

I learned a lot about manufacturing, especially fabrication, because his company was called nonferrous metals fabricating. I learned a whole bunch he bought a plastic company called Cleveland plastic fabricators, and at one point, he said to me, said how about if I give you 49% of my business, and you run it for me. I said, wow, that's pretty good, but I have to go home and talk to my wife. He got upset, called my father said, oh boy, what kind of wimpy you have for a son that he can't do things independently. I was a good husband because I had my wife involved with everything. We started our own company a couple of years later. It was crazy, but that's what happened.

Lisa Ryan: In all of these years of business, you have a real focus on introducing young people into manufacturing, even starting as little as young as fifth and sixth grade. Tell us a bit of the Alliance for Working Together - why you created it, and some of the results that you're seeing because you're doing it.

Roger Sustar: Okay, well, we started it early 2000s when business became tough for a small company to survive. Back then, we were primarily concerned what helping each other with healthcare with insurance costs, where to purchase steel, where to get aluminum - anything like that. It wasn't easy at that time.

We finally kept meeting and hearing these things, and then it ended up the most crucial thing that everybody was concerned with was the future workforce. We started this whole thing based on a robot program that I saw in Arizona. We watched it inside a cage, and then we decided that we needed a wow factor, so we would take those robots and build those. We teed it off with NRL - National robotics league. Ours is a little bit different. Ours is called the WT robots. We went to the high schools, and we got high schools involved. The high schools are excited about it because it's free for them. It's getting companies like us and others to participate and help the kids. I'll get into Bowman high school - a parochial girls' Catholic school that I had