Not every offspring of a surface finishing company owner is destined to follow in their parent’s footsteps, work their way onto the shop floor, and eventually sit in an executive’s chair.
For Ross Henry of ChromeTech in Franklin, Wisconsin, following in those footsteps would have meant unlacing his ice skates and chucking his Bauer stick, but a potential hockey career staved that off for some time.
“I’ve been away from home playing on youth teams in other states since I was a teenager,” says Henry, Vice President of Operations at the company owned by his father and mother, Alan and Vickie Henry.
“I worked in the shop as a kid polishing parts and doing other things that needed to be done, but there seemed to be something else out there for me,” Ross says. “Eventually, I found my way back home.”
Dream of Professional Hockey
Alan Henry, left, and Ross Henry, at right, share a laugh while on the shop floor at ChromeTech of Wisconsin.A season with the Team Illinois 18 and Under when he was 15 saw him travel around the Midwest and Canada, playing against some of the top players in the world. That led to three seasons in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the United States Hockey League, a top junior ice hockey league consisting of 16 active teams in the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains for players between the ages of 16 and 21.
After being named to the USHL all-star team during the 2008-2009 season, his hockey prowess as a steady but hard-nosed defenseman earned him a Division I scholarship to play at Western Michigan University and a chance to take his career to the next level.
“I was lucky enough with hockey that I had some God-given talent,” Ross says. “But that only goes so far, maybe until you're 12 years old and everyone hits puberty, and people get bigger. But I was working hard every day at it.”
During his freshman year in 2009-10, he appeared in 33 games and led all freshmen in plus/minus with a +4 rating. His final season at WMU saw him appear in a career-high 40 games. He finished the season with career-highs in points with six and assists with five, helping the Broncos reach the League Championship for the first time in 25 years.
However, after earning a manufacturing engineering degree, Ross didn’t return to Franklin to join his parents and brother, Zach, at ChromeTech. Instead, he found a love of the foundry and casting industry during his college training and went to work in Milwaukee as a foundry engineer for several years.
Tragedy Strikes: A Loss of a Brother
The Henry family gathers for a family photo in 2021.The ChromeTech company is indeed a family affair; in addition to Alan, Vickie, and Zach working there, sister Adrianna also helped with marketing, writing, and photography throughout her high school and college years and even now.
Adrianna, Ross, and Zach used to clean the offices and bathrooms together on Sundays when they were teens, making a unique family get-together.
When he and his fiancé found out they were expecting in 2017, everything changed for Ross and other members of the Henry family. He was living with his brother, Zach, who told him he needed to return to ChromeTech and help him prepare for Alan and Vickie’s impending retirement.
Everything seemed to fall into place: Ross was hired as an engineering manager, Zach was working to take ChromeTech to the next level with a few innovative ideas and processes, and Alan and Vickie were trying to ease their way out of the business and allow their sons to take over.
“Brutal” was how Alan described those dark days three years ago. “There is no way to describe it in any other way but just brutal.”
But just as the stars were aligning for ChromeTech and the Henry family, tragedy struck in a way almost unimaginable to anyone. While riding one of his beloved motorcycles in August 2021, Zach was killed when he struck a vehicle that had pulled out in front of him, ending his life at just 33 years young.
Suddenly, Alan and Vickie were without their smiling and gregarious son, Ross was left without his beloved brother, and ChromeTech lost their driving force, who was to lead them into the next several decades.
“Brutal” was how Alan described those dark days three years ago. “There is no way to describe it in any other way but just brutal.”
The Beginnings: A Family Finishing Operation
Ross Henry watches parts come out of the tank at ChromeTech.To understand the impact of losing a son, one must first understand things started for ChromeTech, an ISO-certified industrial plating operation that Alan founded in 1984 after working at his father and uncle’s shop for several years. He tried to buy it from them, but they rebuffed his offers, so he started a company specializing in hard chrome, sulfamate nickel, electroless nickel, and nickel-chrome plating.
“I walked away not taking any of their customers because I wanted to try to keep it on good terms,” he says. “From that experience, I learned that knowing when to sell is important. But that’s how I got into the industry, and I thought you could make lots of money. I was all disillusioned.”
A decade ago, they added a 22,000-square-foot addition to their facility, bringing it to 44,000 square feet. They have about 28 employees and run three shifts, six manual lines, and one automated line for EN.
For their hard chrome process, ChromeTech has a large automated line with four cells that can run up to 17 million parts a year and has over 3,000 recipes. They also have manual hard chrome lines.
“We probably still do most sales in hard chrome,” Alan says. “ We have full polishing and centerless polishing, plus some sulfamate nickel. We have found quite a niche market for hard chrome over nickel, which is used occasionally for heavy deposits but mainly for nickel rather than chrome.”
“(Zach) waited until (Ross) was not happy with one of the foundries he worked at and went after him to recruit him to come here,” Alan says. “Ross had a lot of success in his career, but I think he quickly saw that running a business is also such hard work. And this wasn’t foundry work, so it was a steep learning curve for him.”
Alan started the business with a partner, and they were hands-on during the first several years, digging their 13-foot deep pit with a backhoe, pouring cement, running electrical, and installing electrifiers.
He admits that they started ChromeTech heavily underfunded and suffered because of what he says were mistakes and simple inexperience. But hard work — and long days in the shop during the early period — grew the company.
“It would have been way cheaper to go to an Ivy League school and get my MBA than making all those costly mistakes,” Alan says. “I had no idea how to start a business back in those days except to work harder.”
Planning to Transition Sons Into Running the Business
From 2019, at left is Alan Henry with his sons Zach and Ross and grandchild.At 69 years old, Alan says he started planning his retirement several years ago and having Ross join the business full-time several years ago gave him hope that his two sons would eventually take over operations.
He says he wanted Ross to come back and run the company with Zach, but when Ross earned his engineering degree, he didn’t want to force him into the finishing industry, which he knows from his own experience can be like riding a roller coaster at times.
Zach had been there full-time for the last 15 years, and Alan knew he wanted his brother Ross to come back and help him run the company.
“He waited until his brother was not happy with one of the foundries he worked at and went after him to recruit him to come here,” Alan says. “Ross had a lot of success in his career, but I think he quickly saw that running a business is also such hard work. And this wasn’t foundry work, so it was a steep learning curve for him.”
Like most children of the owners, both Zach and Ross knew their way around a plating starting when they were very young. But Alan and Vickie also homeschooled both of their sons, which Alan says took about three hours each day, and then the rest of the time, they were at the shop with their parents, helping with odd jobs and racking parts.
Alan admits he was often a very difficult boss to his employees and his sons. He says a lot of it had to do with the difficulties of running a small business these days.
“Zach used to always say, ‘You're never happy,’” Alan says. “And sometimes I'd step back and realize he was right. But I always felt we always had to push to be better. There is just a lot of things that need to be done besides just running parts.”
A Great Son, Brother, and Person
And and Zach at an industry trade show in 2016.Zach rose to become Vice President of Operations. Besides mastering many finishing processes, he also learned to handle people and manage the staff at ChromeTech.
Zach also drove various projects within ChromeTech, including the additional EN lines they were adding, and worked to bring newer customers to the company. With Ross by his side, learning from Zach and Alan, the company was on an upward trajectory, making Alan and Vickie think that their succession plans would work out just as they had planned.
The Henrys are all outdoor enthusiasts in the Wisconsin area. They like spending time riding dirt bikes, go-carts, and motorcycles whenever the opportunities allow it. It was especially refreshing to get away from the daily grind of owning and operating a finishing operation by taking their bikes out on a long ride in the countryside.
So, no one thought much of it when Zach was out for a ride on a warm, late summer weekend in 2021. It was his basic mode of transportation, but like all motorcycle riders, there is that inherent danger of sharing the road with much larger vehicles. On that particular day, Zach enjoyed what he loved most: cruising down the highway.
No Time to Grieve
Chrometech has about 28 employees and run three shifts, six manual lines, and one automated line for EN.For Alan, Vickie, and Ross, they received word on a Sunday night that Zach had tragically died in the accident. And yet, on Monday morning, they were all back at ChromeTech because that is what they had to do to run their company.
“We are a job shop, so our customers care about us, but they still need their parts,” Alan says.
Compounding the grief of losing their son, Alan was also in the midst of his medical crisis, having had open-heart surgery just a few weeks earlier and being told by his doctors that he needed to rest and take things easy. The issues continue, and Alan says in the three years since he lost Zach, he has been out for about nine months of those with health matters.
That left Vickie and Ross to pick up the slack after Zach’s passing and Alan’s medical rehabilitation. Alan realizes now how tough it had to be on Ross to lose a brother he was extremely close to and be asked to take over an operation that he was still learning.
“It was up to his brother, who was still fairly new within a couple of years, to keep it going,” Alan says. “And that was a tough job for him. We were busy like most people in the industry the last few years, but we kept moving. I still like this industry, but it's very tough.”
“When my brother passed, he championed things that some people didn't even understand,” Ross says. “A lot of people didn't understand because he championed it so well every day and all day, and for him, it was just second nature. It was like breathing to Zach.”
For Ross, it was a matter of keeping things running while he took over Zach’s position in the company and tried to make up for Alan’s medical absences. While he was picking things up gradually as he switched careers from the foundry industry to finishing, it was an asset to him to have his brother and father all working alongside him.
“The first year or two, I learned at a pretty rapid rate solely because I had two encyclopedias of plating,” Ross says. “From the foundry and casting industry to metal finishing and chrome plating, those are very niche industries. Foundries are a rare commodity, and no different than the hard chrome platers are a rare commodity.”
Losing a 'Champion of Change'
Ross and Alan forged ahead with picking up the management responsibilities after Zach passed away.Zach’s passing came at a time when he was trying to make subtle changes to ChromeTech to make it more competitive in the finishing industry, such as driving electroless nickel and working to get newer lines and processes installed.
The problem was that Zach kept much of that close to the vest and was the team lead pushing those initiatives with customers and inside ChromeTech. All that immediately fell on Ross to pick up and continue, even though he worked even more to absorb Zach’s other responsibilities.
“When my brother passed, he championed things that some people didn't even understand,” Ross says. “A lot of people didn't understand because he championed it so well every day and all day, and for him, it was just second nature. It was like breathing to Zach.”
That made things even tougher for Ross, who had to pick up the mantle from his brother and continue the movement and the push. He admits it was harder than he expected.
“I didn't have that expertise, and I didn't have that skill right away,” he says. “The first six months after that was a struggle for obvious reasons. We lost Zach, and he was such a key individual.”
With his sports background, Ross soon realized the parallels between getting back up after a hard fall and becoming a leader when everyone on the team was depending on him. He realized he didn’t need to do everything but needed to get things started again.
Picking Up the Ball and Running With It
Ross checks on a project on the shop floor.“The ball is just going to sit there until someone picks it up,” Ross says. “I had to get my head in a slightly different direction so I could see that no one was just going to come pick up the ball. I have to pick it up. And if I hand it off to someone, I need to make sure that when I hand it off to that person, they know where this needs to go, when it needs to be there, and how it needs to be handled.”
In the three years since losing Zach, the Henry family and ChromeTech have picked themselves up and moved on without forgetting the memory of their son and brother. Business has slowed somewhat in the past year as the economy has been sluggish, and customers have struggled with the impact of higher interest rates and inflation.
Ross says he is working on a project when, out of the blue, he recalls a conversation with his brother or even thinks to himself, "What would Zach do in this situation?"
“There are days that are tougher,” he says. “The last few months have been rough; the industry is generally soft.”
Ross also realizes that, at times, he is nothing like his brother. While he is more analytical due to his engineering background, he says his brother was great at running operations, sometimes based on gut instinct.
“My brother and I didn't see eye to eye all the time,” he says. “I am an engineer by degree, and I think like an engineer because I'm more cautious on some of the decisions. I like numbers and statistics. I like understanding what we're getting at before we hit the go button and start going.”
“I'd call Zach, and there were times where he didn't blow me off, but I could tell that he was forcing me to think critically and try to figure out what to do versus ‘Yeah, I'll come there and do it for you because you don’t know how.’ In a way, Zach is still guiding me even today.”
His years of watching Zach run the company’s lines gave him a better respect for how he operated in a production setting, who was usually not as cautious as Ross.
“That was not usually the case for my brother,” Ross says. “He was on it, which is also why he was extraordinarily good at running production and the job shop in the quantities we can run here. The volume we put through when we're busy is truthfully unbelievable.”
Becoming His Own Man by Becoming More Like His Brother
In August 2021, Zach was killed when he struck a vehicle that had pulled out in front of him, ending his life at just 33 years young.He says working alongside Zach—and his mother and father—and seeing how he managed people and processes has begun to rub off on him, and he finds himself channeling his brother more often than before.
“I’ve become pretty good at putting out fires at whatever level, whether it's production-related, maintenance-related, or process-related,” Ross says. “If we have to pump out tanks, or if I have to adjust something on the fly or test something on the fly, that's something that I couldn't have done five or six years ago. I didn't have to do it having my brother around.”
Ross also realizes that Zach was training him to become the operations manager he is today.
“There were days that we would have severe fires here that I realistically didn't know how to put out because I just didn't have that in my arsenal,” he recalls. “So I'd call him, and there were times where he didn't blow me off, but I could tell that he was forcing me to think critically and try to figure out what to do versus ‘Yeah, I'll come there and do it for you because you don’t know how.’ In a way, Zach is still guiding me even today.”
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