The Schaefer Group

about two miles from our facility. Unfortunately, it wiped out a few of our local suppliers. We had 15 tornados touch down within a 60-mile radius of our building. That’s very unusual for Ohio.” Another savvy move from The Schaefer Group was the recent purchase of assets and equipment from Avchem Corporation. As White explains, “Avchem was machining ceramic board parts for the low pressure die-cast industry, the extruders, the billet manufacturers, and the forging industry. We had already been buying some of these components from them to sell to our customers, and when they decided to get out of that business, we made a decision to purchase it from them. And that’s going to be huge in the near future. We were doing a substantial amount of business with them, already, and adding to that is the business they were doing with other customers, so it made a win-win situation for us to take it over. We’re in the process, now, of moving all the CNC machining equipment for these ceramic boards up here. Every billet manufacturer, every extruder, every low- pressure die-cast machine uses these pieces that we manufacture now. There are very few in the U.S. doing that, in fact, the one company that is our competitor buys them from overseas. So, we feel we have a high advantage in the industry at this point.” Next on tap for The Schaefer Group is selling their own line of fluxes. “We’ve signed an agreement with Amcor to have them take their existing fluxes and put our part number on them,” says White. “So, we can sell them with every new furnace we make. The fluxes are what clean the aluminum and lower the amount of waste by-products from the aluminum melting process. We do a lot of training sessions on how to clean a furnace, so it just made sense that we recommend a flux to people. Those are three things we’ve done in the last year that have, and will continue to increase value, market share, and revenues for our company.” The Group’s biggest customers are in the automotive sector. In fact, almost every major player in the industry has aluminum parts poured