YOUNG BUSINESSPERSON OF THE YEAR Mark Ashworth
TITLE: President/CEO
COMPANY: Oxford Alloys
AGE: 36
ACCOMPLISHMENTS:
• Helped Oxford Alloys grow from a regional supplier into a distributor with its own label of high-quality, corrosion-resistant welding alloys.
• Increased sales more than 600% since 2003 through new domestic and international markets.
• Received the President’s “E” Award for Excellence in Exports in 2006.
• Helped company land a spot on Inc. magazine’s 2008 list of the nation’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies.
In 2000, Mark Ashworth was living in Atlanta, working for the company that would later become Accenture and preparing for the MBA program at Vanderbilt University.
Fascinated by how the right processes could help companies outmaneuver the competition, he saw himself landing a high-profile job with a Fortune 500 firm after his graduate studies.
But 12 hours before movers were scheduled to load his and his wife’s belongings and head for Nashville, Ashworth made a rash decision.
“Something in my gut just told me that even though graduate school sounded good, it wasn’t the right decision,” he says. “I called my wife Kelly, and I said, ‘Stop the movers. We’re going to Baton Rouge.'”
It was surprising news for Kelly, a Connecticut native who Mark had met at Providence College in Rhode Island. But the couple returned to Mark’s hometown to take over, and ultimately transform, Oxford Alloys, the successful welding supply business his father, Owen Ashworth, had founded in 1970.
“My dad is a true example of someone who knows how to get it done. He started this business with $5,000 and determination and was incredibly successful,” says Ashworth. “The perspective I gained while at Andersen Consulting was that my dad was right all along: It takes getting down to brass tacks to accomplish something.”
Ashworth’s vision for the family business included a radical alteration of its path in order to make it competitive on a global scale.
Rather than continue as a vendor of other manufacturers’ welding products, Ashworth wanted to develop a private label that would be so respected it could gobble up market share in established domestic markets and in emerging markets overseas.
“Without your own brand, it’s purely a commodity business, a transactional business,” he says. “I didn’t want that. I wanted to sell value and to build something.”
But in a mature sector like welding alloys—noncorrosive materials used in petrochemical plants and in oil and gas exploration—the prevailing perspective was there was no room for new players.
“Early on, it was really hard,” Ashworth says. “Buyers wanted the lines they were familiar with, which, at the time, weren’t ours.”
He was dogged. Working long hours with help at times from Kelly and one other staff member, Ashworth focused on the two key ends of the business: finding the right manufacturers to produce Oxford Alloys’ private label products and finding distributors to trust their quality and begin promoting them to end-of-line customers.
For production, Ashworth settled on mills in Taiwan and Europe, where he found good prices on nickel, which is a key ingredient. But he knew that to build a solid reputation among buyers and suppliers, Oxford Alloys would have to go one step further to ensure product quality. The company invested significantly in quality assurance technology that determines if products meet specific requirements.
Oxford Alloys products arrive into the Port of New Orleans, where samples pass through quality control devices that read their composition. They must meet the standards specified by the American Welding Society as well as additional specs required by the company.
The quality control system was integrated into a broader technology system created by Kelly Ashworth, an expert in the field and the company’s CFO. Oxford’s aggressive technology plan enables it to better track its distribution centers in Houston and Chicago and communicate with staff members at those sites and also in South Carolina.
By 2006, Mark Ashworth says, Oxford Alloys had achieved brand penetration and had significantly expanded its warehouse capacity so that customers almost always had quick access to the right piece of equipment. Today, the company sells to 60 countries.
Having created an approved product by ExxonMobil worldwide and by the Canadian Welding Bureau, the company achieved another major accomplishment in 2010 when it obtained product approval by Petrobas, the Rio de Janeiro-based company that now ranks third on the PFC Energy 50.
“That was huge for us,” Ashworth says. “There is substantial growth in Brazil.”
It’s not long into a conversation with Ashworth before he starts to share his management tenets—”it’s not what you say, but what you do”—and his view that the 15 people who work for him are more “family than employees.”
“What motivates people is what they see, and I want them to be excited about coming to work and going the extra mile,” says Ashworth, adding that the company discusses potential hires at length to ensure it’s getting the right fit. “This is a very demanding work environment, and it’s not for everyone. I couldn’t be more proud of the team that’s here and what they’ve been capable of.”
The next country on Oxford Alloys’ horizon is Singapore, where Ashworth plans to open another sales and distribution center that can cover the needs of the eastern hemisphere. The Singapore operation should come online in 2012.
“I want 24-hour commerce,” he says. “We are wasting 12 hours a day sleeping and doing nothing when we could be serving other customers.”
Ashworth says he doesn’t buy into “flowery mission statements that don’t mean anything,” but he has crafted a statement of purpose that spells out the company’s mantra, a generic statement he intends to copyright. It’s full of platitudes like “work harder than the competition,” “improve something—every day” and “put service to the customer above all else”— the rudiments of customer service.
Backing that talk, Ashworth says, is what matters most.
“When you have that headache at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday morning and don’t feel like doing anything, the question is, Are you going to push forward?” he says. “Around here we do. That’s the difference.”
Click here to return to the 2011 Business Awards and Hall of Fame.
