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Trade-Mark Industrial on the move to much larger home
Oct 22, 2014 | Brent Davis | The Record | LINK

CAMBRIDGE — When the Straus family was looking to further expand Trade-Mark Industrial Inc.about a year ago, they were faced with a key decision.

Should they purchase another property in Kitchener to complement the six buildings they had amassed over the years in the Union Street area?

Or should they look elsewhere for a single property with the goal of bringing everybody together under one roof?

They chose the latter, and now the big move for the multi-trade contractor is underway.

By mid-November, the company should be settling into its new home, the former Automated Tooling Systems plant on Royal Oak Road in Cambridge.

The sprawling plant offers more than 365,000 square feet of space, significantly more than the collective 150,000 square feet at its Kitchener properties.

"Efficiency is the key," said Thomas Straus, vice-president of millwrighting and rigging and one of the five Straus siblings — with Dan, David, Ken and Connie — who work alongside parents Russ and Linda in the tightly knit family business.

Add to that the fact that virtually every area of the firm needs more space and the decision to move to the larger building makes a lot of sense.

"It allows us to add more services as well," said president Russ Straus, who founded Trade-Mark in 1998.

The company purchased the Cambridge plant and owns the existing real estate in Kitchener. It is in the process of finding tenants for those buildings.

The Cambridge site will allow the firm to store all of its equipment inside, and the company also will be able to provide short-term equipment storage for customers — something it wasn't really able to do in Kitchener.

The expansion will likely allow Trade-Mark to ultimately add 100 or so new employees to a roster that currently totals about 480.

That includes offshoot TM3 Inc., which specializes in street lights and traffic signals, and United Electric, a small Guelph-based electrical firm it owns that will move to the Cambridge site.

Trade-Mark also has an American branch based in Kentucky. With the manufacturing sector in the recovery mode in the United States, there could be an opportunity for the company to expand its operations there as well, said Dan Straus, vice-president of finance.

Trade-Mark specializes in millwrighting and rigging, electrical, piping, fabrication, structural, sheet metal and HVAC installations and repairs for the industrial, commercial and institutional sectors.

"We get involved after the shell (of a building) is in place," explained Thomas.

The company's work can involve installing new equipment, systems and machines, or moving, replacing, repairing or modifying what's already there.

The majority of its jobs involve more than one area of a company, explained David Straus, vice-president of automotive.

"We're a one-stop shop," added Thomas.

Trade-Mark's clients include the Toyota plants in Cambridge and Woodstock, the Sifto salt mine in Goderich, Dofasco in Hamilton and universities in Waterloo, Guelph and Hamilton.

Sales are expected to reach about $120 million this year, representing more than a 30 per cent increase over last year.

"That internal growth also prompted us to bring everybody under one roof and have enough room for future growth for a while," Russ said.

To support its work, Trade-Mark has a number of specialized in-house facilities, including sheet metal, pipe and miscellaneous metals fabrication shops, an equipment assembly shop, a custom machine shop, an electric motor rewind shop and vehicle repair.

It also owns and rents a wide variety of equipment, such as cranes and forklifts, and operates a fleet of tractor-trailers, to haul whatever's required for the job at hand.

"We do anywhere from $500 jobs to our biggest job to date, $23 million. That gives you an idea of our capabilities," Russ said.

"I didn't visualize at all that the company would ever grow to where it is," he admitted.

Family members attribute much of the firm's success to its all-in-the-family approach, where each Straus sibling or parent is a senior manager or owner.

"There certainly is a lot of trust," Russ said. "It's all we know," added Dan.

Prior to founding Trade-Mark, Russ ran a similar, but smaller, business in St. Agatha.

"We never want to lose sight of our roots," he said. "We never want to lose that base where we started from."