Brothers Billy Smith and Sam Smith Jr. come from a family of industrial tank builders.
They were supervisors by the time they were 19, Billy Smith says, and both came to lead tank divisions at their respective employers.
“I was doing all of the tank work there, and Sam was at another company doing the same thing,” Smith recalls. “Do millions of dollars worth of work for them, do all the estimating, hire all the men, talk to the customers, get the entire job done, and you don’t even get a gift certificate at the end of the year.”
In 1997, they set out on their own. Their first jobs involved repairing water towers, which paid the bills, but wasn’t exactly the ideal line of work on which to build a career.
“That was very, very, very dangerous work,” Smith says. “You’re 200 feet up in the air, hanging on the side of an old water tower, when the only reason you were there to go look at it was that parts were falling off of it.”
Until about four years ago, no sales division existed; every job came via word-of-mouth.
Fortunately, Smith Tank & Steel works mostly for petroleum and pipeline companies these days. It employs about 525 people and did more than $152 million in revenue last year. But in the early days, they were just working to pay the bills.
And for the first several years, the company was basically three people, with sister Karen Smith running back-office operations. She’s the vice president for corporate operations these days, while Billy is president.
Many companies in the Capital Region complain about their struggles to find good employees. Smith Tank & Steel is not one of them.
“Every morning, the office is full of people applying for a job,” Billy Smith says. “People want to work for us.”
They’re hiring, but there are no signs advertising that fact. The company has taken out newspaper ads twice in its history, but all that accomplished was attracting more people who weren’t qualified.
Apparently, the word is out that Smith Tank & Steel is growing rapidly, stays busy and doesn’t mind paying overtime. Unlike many industrial service companies that hire mostly temporary workers who are cut loose once a job is finished, Smith doesn’t do layoffs; people that have left have done so voluntarily or were let go because they didn’t work out, company leaders say.
Billy Smith says the company tries to treat its employees the way he wishes he had been treated early in his career. That means fair pay with bonuses for extra effort, opportunities for advancement, and appreciation for each individual’s contributions.
“There are no empty promises,” Karen Smith says. “We’ve never said anything we haven’t done.”
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