Copper at the Core: How Jim Wargo and Electric Materials Supply the Building Blocks of Modern Technology | Manufacturing Series

Anthony Codispoti : Welcome to another edition of the Inspired Stories podcast where leaders share their experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired by how they’ve overcome adversity. My name is Anthony Codispoti and today’s guest is Jim Wargo. Jim is a sales representative at the Electric Materials Company. Founded in 1915, they are a leading manufacturer of copper forging, castings, and high-quality electrical components for industries like transportation, oil and gas, defense, and power generation. They operate out of a massive 420,000 square foot facility offering custom engineered products and a fast 24-7 repair service.

Their mission reflects the motto, write the first time, on time, every time. Now, Jim has been a part of Electric Materials Sales Team helping connect clients with reliable solutions. He also has prior experience as the GM at the Lawrence Park Diner in Lawrence Park, Pennsylvania, and was the head winemaker for a local winery. Throughout his career, Jim has shown strong dedication to top quality service, whether it’s supplying industrial components or running a restaurant. Now, before we get into all that good stuff, today’s episode is brought to you by my company, Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and unique employee benefits that are both great for your team and fiscally optimized for your bottom line. One recent client was able to add over $900 per employee per year in extra cash flow by implementing one of our innovative programs. Results vary for each company and some organizations may not be eligible.

To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at addbackbenefits.com. All right, back to our guest today, the Inside Sales Rep at the Electric Materials Company, Jim Wargo. I appreciate you making the time to share your story today.

Jim Wargo: I appreciate the time with you, Anthony, and thank you for reaching out. Hopefully, we can answer some questions here and inspire people and just tell them what we’re about.

Anthony Codispoti : All right, let’s roll up our sleeves and do all that. So, before we get into talking about your role at the Electric Materials Company, you can tell us a little bit about your time at the diner. What made this place special and what was your role there?

Jim Wargo: Well, growing up, I grew up in a town called Northeast, which is where Electric Materials is. The Lawrence Park diner always had this aura around it. It was built for the GE facility that was in Erie, Pennsylvania. It’s still there. It’s now Wobtech, but it was built for GE. They were running three shifts, seven days a week. It was huge. And they’re celebrating 75 years last year.

They’re under 76. So, this little diner was brought in, and it’s on the National Historical Registry. And it was always, as a child, you remember the food there. You know, I remember the Greek sauce.

The Greek sauce was amazing as a kid. So, it worked out that my best friend, she bought the diner. And I was kind of in between another job as a winemaker. And she asked me to help out one or two days.

So, I did. All of a sudden, that turned into six days a week. So, I left the winery and started working with her full time.

So, between the two of us, we just nailed it. She is an amazing woman, Don Van Scoder, amazing owner, amazing woman. She has turned that into a top 10% in the world on TripAdvisor. We had visitors from Germany, Jamaica, all over the world. They come just for that place. It’s worldwide known. It really is world-known for the Greek sauce, the food. Everything is done right in front of you. There’s no back kitchen cooking. That’s where all the prep work was, that I was in charge of the prep work, kind of managing that. But you have a chef on a 36 square inch grill, cooking everything for 200-some patrons a day. Wow.

Yeah, it is absolutely phenomenal. And what’s funny is the diner at Lawrence Park, it’s spelled with an O-R, not an E-R like everywhere else. But it’s kind of like a Northern Pennsylvania thing. And the diner in Lawrence Park was the very first one to spell it with an O because it was a spelling error. They were opening, they were opening up 76 years ago. And they ran an ad in the paper and said, come experience the Lawrence Park diner and they put it with an O. So people were kind of joking around, oh, let’s go see that big mistake that they had.

Let’s go see the mistake. Well, the food spoke for itself. So over the years, the food is still speaking for itself.

People recognize the O and it just flourished from there. And as it is right now, they’re open eight to two, Monday. Mondays are closed. So Tuesday through Sunday, eight to two. And sometimes there is like a half hour wait just to get in there.

Wow. But everybody wants to come see the O. Everything wants to see the O.

Absolutely. And what’s cool about it is she has kept everything the same. So the seats you’re sitting on, the tile, everything is 76 years old. So it is actually, it is a national monument right there, right here in Lawrence Park.

Anthony Codispoti : And what’s so special about the Greek sauce?

Jim Wargo: The Greek sauce is very special. It’s almost like a Coney Island sauce. But we had a lot of Greeks in the Lawrence Park area. And they gave a couple recipes and all that. So I think it was about four owners ago, he came up and developed a Greek sauce with those people and it has just flourished from then. There’s a bunch of Greek sauces in Erie. I’m not a favoritism here on this one, but I will say the Lawrence Park diner has the best in Erie.

Anthony Codispoti : Okay. So how is it that you came to be the head wine maker at a local winery? Is this something you’d had previous experience or training in?

Jim Wargo: Well, I always dabbled it in at home. It was one of those hobbies where, you know, I had a car boy off to the side making homemade wine. And it’s a story maybe we can get into later about a life change and all that. But I became friends with the family of a winery here called Arrowhead Winery. They actually were the biggest in Pennsylvania three years ago. They did just about half a million gallons of wine and juice out the door. So a very big facility supplying 60-some other wineries with product. But I got to know the family making my own wine. I worked with them a little bit behind the scenes in the grapes, you know, because what we have around here, it’s the second largest grape growing region in America outside of Napa Valley.

If you start in Geneva, Ohio, and you go up to the Finger Lakes, the grape region along I-90 corridor is the second largest in America. And I was very fortunate to work with the Movilia family at Arrowhead. And I worked in the vineyards a little bit just, you know, spare time, this, that with the family. And they moved me inside and said, hey, if you’re interested, we know you have a little bit of a background in winemaking. So I worked with a head winemaker.

He eventually moved on. I rolled into that position for about two years. I became the head winemaker out there. And I went from a simple five-gallon carboy to walking into tanks that had 3,000 gallons capacity.

Anthony Codispoti : So what did you have to change about your process going from smaller scale to bigger scale?

Jim Wargo: Timing. The best part about wine is like homemaking, beer, other spirits. The math stays the same. So what you do in five gallons, the math is the same for 10,000 gallons.

That equation doesn’t change, just the zero is added. Change. So all you had to do was realize, okay, five gallons is only going to take two weeks, the ferment, where 3,000, 5,000 gallons is going to take a little bit longer. So you had to time everything just right so you would not run out of product. At that time, I believe we had like 35 different wines going in the winery. So at that process, we had everything going and we were bottling for other companies. Other companies would bring us their product. We had the own bottling line in there. We had a deep freeze cooler that went to negative 20 degrees that we could cold press and everything there. All the grapes were pressed on site.

There was no juice bought. So when it came harvest time, late August, early September, for 90 days straight, we were there working with grapes. So it was an interesting process. It really was.

Anthony Codispoti : When you said it’s the second largest grape growing region in the country, that really surprised me because I think I’ve been to Napa and Sonoma, beautiful, but it’s a particular type of climate. And where you are on the shores of Lake Erie, very different climate there. What is it that makes it such a great, great growing region?

Jim Wargo: Easy to say. No, it’s a good region because it’s almost like a microclimate. What’s nice about it is that if anybody who knows the area, I-90 runs right along the whole lakeshore from Geneva to the Finger Lakes. You get five miles south of I-90, there’s no grapes. But what’s nice about Lake Erie, it is a very shallow.

It’s the shallowest lake of all the great lakes. So all the wind coming off during late fall during harvest is still that warm climate. While the temperature is getting cold, we’re still getting that warmer air off the lake.

So that helps feed it so we’re not getting any type of frost or freeze. Same thing as in the summertime. I mean, sorry, springtime. Down south, Pittsburgh, West Virginia, they’re starting to get that thaw. Buds are coming out. Some of those fruit trees, the sherry trees are starting to see the buds. Also, you get a deep freeze.

Those buds are killed, you lose fruit. Up here, the lake is frozen. So as those warm temperatures come, we might have a 50-degree day, but those cold winds off the lake are keeping us at 30 degrees, 40 degrees, so nothing is budding.

So if we do get that late freeze, none of the buds are ruined. So it’s actually a perfect microclimate area to grow grapes, and the soil is phenomenal. Back in the day, his name was Mr. Phillips, he had thousands of acres of Concord grapes. He was the grape grower in America, and that was right here in northeast. And that is why Welches, everybody knows the name Welches, they have one of their largest facilities here in our town, and they work with all the farmers. So come the middle of September, this whole town smells like grapes. The smell is phenomenal around here.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s pretty interesting. Okay, let’s shift gears into what you’re doing now. How did the opportunity at Electric Materials Company come about?

Jim Wargo: Well, it started, it was one of those nice stories where I started on the floor. We’re very virtually vertically integrated here, so we have our own shipping department, mill, casting, everything. I started in the shipping department here, so I got to see the product at the very end where I would receive it, I’d make the box, put it in the box, but to shipping labels on and get them out of here. I then was asked to go to our other side, our salary side, and kind of get worked into what’s called an order editing position. And what that is, is where we take the customer’s verbiage and we switch it into our verbiage, which we are custom to and we can build orders to. So I was able to read the orders, see what the customer needed, put it into our terms for production. So I went from the very end from putting the product in the box to now writing the order before it’s even started. I did that for about a year, year and a half, and then I was asked if I was interested in sales. I’ve always loved talking to customers, to people, and I made the switch to sales and I saw the very true beginning of it, where I’m working those customers’ relationships, where I’m calling them, they’re calling me, I’m doing visits. So I’m grabbing that order, working with the customer, then going to the order editors who are there now, taking it all the way through the process.

So I did start basically at the very end and now I’m at the very beginning. And it’s been a great experience, you know, knowing the facility, the way I do over 10 years here, I really enjoy what I do, working with the customers, and I feel for the customer. You know, I’m here for it. And I think all my life experiences, you know, a Renaissance man, as some people have said, it

Anthony Codispoti : takes a good for those, for those who are wondering during the pre interview, that’s what I said. Just so Jim isn’t, isn’t being too boastful there, that was a term I threw out.

Jim Wargo: Sorry, go ahead, Anthony labeled me on that one. But it gives me depreciation to know that, you know, the customers matter the most. And that’s what I love about electric materials, is we care about the customers. We can do whatever we want, but we want the customers happy. And that’s why our motto is, you know, write the first time on time, every time we want to make your experience here the best possible. And for me, that’s caring.

I that’s just my nature. I want to be involved. And I want to be hands on and I want to give the best possible time, the best product, and just make everybody happy.

Anthony Codispoti : So I think it’s pretty cool that as you put it, you sort of you started your work there at the end of the process, moved your way into the middle. And now you’re involved at the front end, you’ve got, you know, like a really holistic view of kind of what goes on there.

And I have to assume that that’s helpful in supporting the customer. Help us better understand in layman’s terms, what is it that you guys do there? What are you making? Who are you servicing? Well, it’s, it’s very complex.

Jim Wargo: A lot of people’s industries is like, okay, we make bread, we make eggs, we make copper products. That could be anything from a copper hammer. We still make those. If you look at some of the gas trucks that go around with the tankers, the tanker trucks, those valves, when they open and close, they have to be hammered closed. Well, you don’t want to have a spark. So copper does not spark. So they use our hammers to close those valves and open the valves, just like they do in mines, you know, they’re pounding away, they can’t have a spark.

So we’re still involved with copper hammers. Our company actually started on this right here. And if you ever go online to like YouTube, you research us, whatever, it’ll say it all started with a trolley wheel.

And that’s what this is right here. And to be honest, we still make them. 1915, Mr. Herschel started this company making trolley wheels, because that was the future. That’s what everybody was traveling by. You know, they run on the rails, wire goes through there, everything goes on, it creates power.

That’s how everything’s going to go. So we started with the trolley wheel. From there, we developed into hammers, we developed into other products. So when you say, what do we do, we do a little bit of everything. We’re in data centers, we make copper components for data centers, that could be anything from computers, the cell phones, anything technology we’re involved in.

We are involved in people movers. We make things called commutators. Commutators are a rotary switch used in DC motors. It reverses the direction of current flow. And it causes rotational spin.

So if you have like a vacuum or something, this is a very small commutator. If you think about it, it spins. It has magnets on the armature, it will start spinning, and it creates power. That could be used in airplanes, submarines, elevators, anything that has a motor that needs that motion turning, it creates that power.

So we’re involved in that. The best part about what we do is copper is 100% conductivity, which means you’re not going to lose anything across the board. So if you’ve got to transfer power from one side to another and not lose any amperage or anything, you’ve got to use copper.

Anthony Codispoti : Sorry, it sounds kind of like an interesting point there. Are there other materials that people sometimes use and they create this loss of power that you’re talking about?

Jim Wargo: And you will see it. Some people can use aluminum. Aluminum is conductive itself, but it’s not 100%. Brass, which we also make here because brass is just a subcomponent of copper. It’s just a different element involved in it. Brass will drop you down sometimes to like 80% conductivity. So it all depends what you want. You can use brass, you can use aluminum.

Anthony Codispoti : Why would you choose to use something other than copper, considering that copper has 100% conductivity?

Jim Wargo: It could be, you think about a breaker switch where you have 100% coming in, but that breaker is there to make sure nothing more than 70% gets passed on. You could overload. You think about your power strip. The power strip comes in. You don’t want 100% of that to blast it out to everything because it would get overloaded. So some people will want that 100% coming in, but maybe filter out 70% to compact it so nothing gets overloaded in the system.

Anthony Codispoti : Got it. And then I interrupted you. You were talking about some of the other stuff that you guys do. Please continue, Jim. Yes.

Jim Wargo: And we do make rotor bars. I can’t really see the screen behind me. I’ll give a little bit, but you can see we make different size rotor bars that go into commutators. Some facilities in the United States and across the world, we supply worldwide, they’ll make their own commutators. So what they do is they’ll buy the rings, they’ll buy the rotor bars from us, and they’ll assemble it there, or they’ll have us assemble it. We have our own forge. You think about compacting coming down. You think about any industry where there is power, we’re involved in.

Anthony Codispoti : And so as you think about, obviously every company has competitors, somebody who’s doing similar things. What sets you guys apart?

Jim Wargo: I think what sets us apart is our quality. It speaks for itself. We have always been known as the Cadillac Copper of America, and that’s what we do. You could pour copper into a hole in the ground and make a ring.

That doesn’t give you top quality. What we do here is after 110 years of being in business, we are all one spot, one stop. We are vertically integrated. So what we do is we pour our own copper, we make them into billets.

You got to think of billets as a round tube, and then we extrude our own product. Everything we do is in-house. We do not take any product and ship it out, waiting for somebody else or bringing a product in. So we are responsible for our own quality control and our own time.

We’re not waiting on somebody else. We’re some of our competitors kind of outsource some of their product. They start here, but they can’t make their own copper, so they bring copper in, they can’t extrude it. We do it all here. One of our biggest attributes is we can plate in-house. We have America’s largest silver plating line. We can plate up to 20 feet wide, long, I mean. We also do 10.

We do nickel. So we do all that in-house. We’re not outsourcing it to another place. It’s all here in our facility. So basically, like I had talked about, I started here in shipping, now I’m in sales, I’m starting to finish. We do all the product here, start to finish.

Your product, when a customer orders from us, it does not leave our building until it’s on the way to their facility. So we’re responsible for everything. The only thing we do not have here is our own trucking company. We have our own shipping department, quality control. Everything here is handled by us. And I think that sets us apart.

Anthony Codispoti : You mentioned this a couple of times, and I want to draw more attention to it because this strikes me as particularly unusual. 110 years the company has been around. And it started with a copper trolley wheel, which you still make today.

But I’m going to give a very short summary. Over that course of 110 years, obviously the company has acknowledged that there are many other uses for copper and the other types of metal products that you guys produce. But to have that kind of longevity and success, not just squeaking by, not just making it, but thriving. 200, or what was it, a 400,000 square foot facility that you guys operate.

That’s enormous. I know that you obviously haven’t been there for even most of the lifespan of the company, but now having been a part of it for several years, can you put your finger on why you think that the company has survived so many up turns, downturns in the economy. 110 years is impressive. What is it about the company that’s allowed it to remain successful for so long?

Jim Wargo: I think the key word would be adaptation. We did start with the trolley wheel because that’s what everything was. And through our years here, we have adapted to what our customers are looking for, what the world is looking for. Cell phones were, I didn’t have a cell phone until I started college. I didn’t have one in high school.

They weren’t around. We’ve developed and adapted to what the need for people currently is. So we’ve gone from a trolley wheel to working with car manufacturers for connections on batteries. So we do battery terminals.

We do sub feeds. We do connectors. We have transformed that into power grids. Power industry distribution is one of our big areas where we help build with transformers. We make components of that. We have our own casting here. So our foundry makes castings that go into transformers, which creates power.

As we developed cell phones and everything else, we became part of that in the data center because you need copper in to make that connection and connectivity. Moving on even more in the data center, you’re looking at all these grand AIs. So the latest is AI. We’re working with some companies that have these huge mainframes, huge ideas, and we’re working with them in a medical field. As times have changed, we are working with medical fields because copper is, it doesn’t hold any type of bacteria.

You walk into buildings and you think about you grab a brass rail. Why do they use brass? Because it cannot transmit any type of bacteria. It’s bacteria free. So a lot of hospitals and medical equipment will use that because basically it’s a cleanser.

It does not have any bacterial formations on it. So it becomes very critical. So through the year starting with the trolley wheel, we’ve developed, yeah, we still make hammers, soldering coppers. But we have moved on to bus bars for different industries, which are now hitting some industries have dropped and others have picked up and that’s where we have adapted ourselves to pick up on, okay, where’s where’s the strong bit?

Where’s the small bit? A few years ago, our forge was super busy. We used to make an old balls, you know, they mix paint, everything that went away. Our forge was kind of hurting. So we took those guys put them in another aspect of our company, which was flourishing. Now all of a sudden forging are coming back. And we’re rocking and rolling on that three shifts, six days a week. So again, we are adapting to what the needs are for our customers. Like I said, we started with trolley wheel. Now we’re in data centers.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, it’s striking me what in interesting and unusual material copper is. Yeah, I mean, here’s here’s what I’ve picked up on. No spark, right? So it’s good for hammers in, you know, in an environment where you can’t have any risk of that happening. A no bacteria environment, which sounds almost unbelievable. And then 100% conductivity, it like somebody should write a book about this is I’m sure that they have. But are there any other sort of like miracle properties to copper that I’m not in tune with yet?

Jim Wargo: Well, there’s a lot of benefits. It all depends what you read into a few years ago. I don’t know if you remember the copper bracelets were huge. Yeah, people would wear the copper bracelets, their skin would turn green.

They’re like, Oh, but it would heal. It helps with basically, you know, the blood flow, everything because again, it’s helping register copper balances everybody. Believe it or not, copper is somewhat used in winemaking.

If there’s a bad flavor or something, you can use copper sulfate, an aspect of copper to regulate some of that high acidity. And all that some wineries getting back to my wine business, wineries will actually use a copper channel to go through there. You have people make whiskey, what do they make it in?

They make it in a copper pot. That way, guess what? It’s heating up, you’re not losing any energy.

Everything. It’s not exothermic. It’s endothermic. It stays within itself. So it is a very unique element. And I think it’s something we’re going to see more of here, especially because with the latest, with the presidential election happening, and I know President Trump is interested in copper and making everything here in America, bringing it back in from overseas, I think you’re going to see a huge push for copper products, not only just for the remainder of this year, but for the next five, 10 years, you’re going to see a big push for copper products here in America. So it’s just going to get bigger and bigger.

Anthony Codispoti : Jim, what is EM Express?

Jim Wargo: EM Express, that is an offer that we do for our customers in case there’s an emergency breakdown. Say there’s a motor, they’re going out all of a sudden, and they get a power surge, it breaks down. They’re down losing money by the hour. They need us and our EM Express to get the job back in here fixed and back to them as soon as possible. We will try to do it, depending on the severity. We can try to do it within seven days, 14 days, whatever we can do to get it done. We’ve had customers from overseas, domestically come to us, hey, we’re losing millions of dollars a week.

How soon can we get it? And that’s where we come in and help them out. What’s nice about us being in the business for 110 years, we’ve pretty much seen everything.

The rings, the commutators, you tell us the frame, we have a great core of engineers here. We have a dynamic group, we really do. It is a fantastic team. I love working here. They know their product. We’ve had a lot of experience here.

Some of the guys have been here 35, 40 years. They’ve seen it all. And so when a customer has a breakdown, all they have to do is give us a couple of small things. We know exactly what they need. We make it here, we get it to them, and they’re back up and running.

Anthony Codispoti : Can you think of a specific example where that rapid turnaround made a critical difference to one of your clients?

Jim Wargo: Sorry, speaker’s going off there. It’s going to go up for one more time.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s all right. This is what it’s like. This is the work environment.

Jim Wargo: Absolutely. Well, you got to think about it. Say you’re at, I’ll just make a point, Hoover Dam. One of the doors is not working because they need a commutator. The commutator’s creating power, water coming through. That breaks down. That’s a major issue. They’re losing power. So they’ll call us, and I’m not saying they did. We’re not working with Hoover Dam, but they’ll call us and be, hey, can you identify this commutator?

Boom. We’ll send it to our engineers, our order editors. They’ll ID it and be like, yeah, that’s what it goes on.

It goes on this armature. We’ll get a replacement to them as fast as possible. So all they have to do is shut down for a couple hours, take the old one off, put our new one on, and they’re back up and running because it could be a major catastrophe. And we see it a lot, especially with some of the natural disasters that we have, especially in our country, between the hurricanes, the tornadoes, you see power grids down. We want to get power back up and running. So a lot of our customers in the power grid, they’re decimated.

You think about all the powers, they’re a week out. People need oxygen, machines, they need electricity for heat, power just to bring up. With all that system down, our parts that go into those transformers are very crucial. So we’ll get the call, hey, electric materials, we need this product as soon as possible. How can you help us out? We’ll be there on our EM Express, get on the product they need as soon as possible so everybody can get back to living their lives and hopefully getting better.

Anthony Codispoti : So you guys started in 1915. You’ve expanded, you’ve got this massive 400 plus thousand square foot facility. You guys have seen tremendous and sustained growth over the years. From a sales perspective, what growth strategy has been the most successful for the business?

Jim Wargo: I think for us is the flexibility of helping our customers out. Copper shoots up, I think copper right now is over five dollars a pound. It was three dollars a pound.

about a year ago, about $4, $3. So you’re really seeing copper go up. We don’t go in and just, you know, gouge, we want to work with our customers because it’s just like going to the grocery store with egg prices or everything else is rising and rising. Unfortunately, we cannot take those costs and take a hitting for so long, but we try to hold on as long as possible before pushing that onto our customers. And I think that’s really helped us out with our relationships where the customer is like, hey, we understand there’s an increase. How can you help us out? And we work with them to make a better relationship because it is a give and go. You know, we work with them, they work with us, and it just helps out everybody in the long run where we’re a lot, we’re really flexible. We’ll get people in.

I just had an order last week that they don’t, they did not want it until the end of October. They called me and say, Jim, you know, we kind of made a mistake. We needed, okay, well, let’s get you in there. And we adapt to what they need. And it goes back to that word adaptation. You know, we adapt to what is needed by our customer base or by society. And that’s how we help them out.

Anthony Codispoti : Right. The first time on time, every time. It’s the guiding principle there. Is that something that’s just sort of like put up on a placard and I don’t know, people like to talk about it, but it doesn’t really get implemented or used or sort of integrated into the day to day operations.

Jim Wargo: Well, yes and no, yes, it’s on a placard. But no, we do go by that every day. We have our own quality department here in house. Again, in house, we have everything. So our quality department with the pharaoh arm, we have metallurgists on scene. We have many inspectors out on the floor. So at every process of the bill, be it a simple bar to a commutator, we have inspectors along the way that are checking lengths. They’re checking diameters.

They’re checking every aspect of it. So when it gets to the customer, the customer knows, hey, this is the right bar I needed, the right ring I needed, we delivered on time. The order was right. So we were right the first time, on time, and we try to, we do it every single time. And that’s one of the processes that we’re very proud of. And our quality department here is fantastic.

The person in lead of that has been here over 40 years. He has trained, we are ISO approved. So every year we work with ISO to get approved. So we can work with projects, we follow all standards, we have our own insight tolerancing, which is actually tighter than some of our customers tolerances. So we make it tough on ourself. So when the customer gets it, they’ll be pleased with the product knowing that we had no problem hitting their qualifications because we hit our more harder internal requirements.

Anthony Codispoti : What do you think future growth looks like?

Jim Wargo: I think future wise, it’s just going to keep expanding. Right now, knock on wood, we are seeing a huge growth in business. What we have done in the last six months almost encompasses what we did all of last year. Wow.

Yeah, it is a big push right now. That’s phenomenal. Oh, it is. And our sales team, everybody here from sales to shipping, everybody here, they are just knocking it out of the park. It is a team effort.

And that just shows how we work as a team that everything is coming together and we are showing such a better year already. And we’re basically halfway in. We’re six months into our calendar year. And our calendar year runs September through August.

So that’s why I say that. And just the growth is phenomenal. Talking with some of our customers like in the power grid, they are booked out until next September already. So we’re starting to see some of our attributes and business ventures, they’re being booked all the way out.

So that means we’re going to get booked going. And again, I think the push to buy America is going to be very beneficial to us because we are one of the few companies that melts their own copper in-house making a true Made in America product. And we can push that onto our customers that need to buy American. But also we’re seeing a push at the same time, a push out of the European nation for our product because they know our quality as right the first time on time every time we can deliver that product. So I just see everything right now growing and growing. And hopefully this bubble doesn’t burst for a while.

Anthony Codispoti : So it’s interesting because Europeans ordering your product, there’s a lot of freight involved. Some of these parts are big, they’re heavy, they’re bulky. And so to be ordering from the States, having it trucked to the border, put on an ocean freighter, over to the coast of Europe, unloaded, put on another truck, that’s a lot of extra expense. I mean, what you guys are delivering to them must be something that they can’t find in terms of the quality level, they’re closer to home.

Jim Wargo: Absolutely. And there are a lot of opportunities over in Europe for them to purchase material over there. But they come to us again, because they know they’re going to get that quality product.

They don’t have to search 10, 15,000 different websites, they come to ours and they realize, hey, you can offer everything at one shop. And I think when you come down to the freight, that is the key. They don’t have to come to us for the copper, have us ship it to somebody else to put it together, go to another place to plate, and then finally go to them. They’re coming to us for a part that is drawn, extruded, it is cut to size, it is plated, it is boxed, and it’s on the way to them.

They’re getting it at one stop. Because you think about some of the product coming in from overseas with us, you know, to America, you’re paying a lot of freight charges. You know, those freight charges do add up. So if we can keep everything in one spot for them, it’s only one freight charge over to them, and they’re still knowing they’re getting that quality product.

Anthony Codispoti : You make a really good point that I hadn’t really wrapped my head around there, Jim, is that a lot of other places that folks may buy from, there’s extra freight costs baked in because right, they had to get this part from here, or, you know, get the metal melted over here and forged, and you guys are able to do that under one roof. So you bring in the raw materials, and you’re moving it from one part of your plant to another, rather than from one part of the country to another.

And so there’s a lot of cost efficiencies in that. As you guys are, you know, you’re experiencing this huge growth, and you’re talking about, you know, the push to buy more American, you think is going to continue to fuel this. But do you think that’s the reason why you’ve seen such incredible growth already in the past six months?

Or is there something else that’s fueling that? You mentioned that your clients that are the power producers, the power companies, that, you know, they’ve got these huge orders. Like what’s going on in that sector that they’ve got such a backlog?

Jim Wargo: Well, I think some of it has to do with the buy American, but a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure. You know, as places are expanding, you think of Las Vegas, it’s in the middle of a desert. All of a sudden it expands, expands. Well, as people are expanding into other areas, the power grids need upgraded, the power grids need advanced. So everything that we’ve done in the past 20, 30 years, you now are getting to that cycle where everything has to be redone. You know, you want to upgrade here, upgrade here, you know, you think of cell phones, you know, that’s great.

If you have an iPhone 2, it might still work, but everybody wants that 16. So you always want to do the upgrades. It’s going to get a little bit better.

And I think that’s where the push was initially in the last five, six months, was for those power upgrades. It was a good time. Economy is good. Okay, let’s redo the infrastructure. So you’re starting to see a lot of those power grids getting those upgrades to everybody. A lot of it has to do with, you think about your cable service, the internet, a lot of it is going, it’s changing from the old dial up to, you know, streaming and everything.

So all those data centers have to get caught up. The newest push is AI. AI is a huge push everywhere in the business.

AI encompasses the glow. And so you’re starting to see a lot of new places and plants come into fruit tissue and using the copper product that we supply. So you’re just seeing an upgrade across the board on every avenue. And like I said, I don’t think it’s going to stop at any time. Because as soon as you slow down over here, this one realizes, oh, we got to pull our product up now to get up with our competitor. So here they are going battling each other, constantly upgrading, keeping luckily us in the middle busy.

Anthony Codispoti : I want to shift gears. I mean, Jim, in my experience, growth oftentimes comes from facing our biggest challenges. I’d be curious to hear about a serious challenge that you’ve overcome. What was it? How’d you work through it? And what did you learn coming out the other side?

Jim Wargo: Well, I think the biggest challenge in my life, and, you know, everybody’s gone through it, not everybody, a lot of people have gone through it, is, you know, I was working here at Alichon Materials, and then I ended up going through a divorce. I had a young son at the time.

He was, I believe, five at the time. It was very tough. So I started getting pulled different ways. And that’s kind of where I became a winemaker. You know, I had already been making wine at home, and I was here at Alichon Materials, but, you know, with everything going on, I just, my head wasn’t into it. And so my friends called me and they’re just like, Hey, listen, maybe a change of, you know, just scenery would do a little bit different.

So I ended up leaving here. And that’s when I went to the winery, and it opened up a lot of doors for me. You know, I made the product, but yet I was still selling the wine, you know, we would go to shows, we’d have our showroom wine tasting, I was still doing that sales, which I love. And then at that time, because of working at the winery, I met my friend and her husband walked in one day and I started a conversation. And also we became instant friends. And because of that instant friendship, I got to know the Lawrence Park Diner. And I started working there with her.

And at the same point, I was helping manage that place with her. I’m in the back prepping, I’m meeting with customers, I’m still selling product, I was selling the diner, the food, you know, everything about it, the history, talking with people. And while I was there, it just kind of connected that even though I left the Lich material sales, I was still selling. I wasn’t selling copper, I was selling wine, I was selling food, I was selling a product, but I was still selling. And I reflected that that was my passion is to sell this product.

So the opportunity came, got a call from Lich materials, Jim, are you still arrested? I’m like, yeah, you know, so we talked it out and came back. And it’s like joining a family reunion, it really was. I came back and it was like nothing ever changed. A lot of the people I worked with were still here because I hadn’t been gone that long.

So I came back in and it’s been fantastic. The sales manager, the president, CFO, everybody here is just phenomenal. And I think that’s how our whole facility feels like it is a family. We do a lot of group activities together. We have picnics as a group.

Yeah, we’re 426,000 square feet. But pretty much everybody knows everyone. And that’s what makes it nice. A lot of them live in the area.

So it’s a community wide area. And you know, the old saying is you can never go home again. I did, I came back, I’m home again here.

And I just love it. But I think that was the toughest challenge was going through the divorce, not knowing what’s gonna happen. And I find myself right back here happier.

My son is 17, junior in high school, about to go to college here in a little bit. So time is going by, getting a couple more gray hairs. But it’s just fantastic. And I think it’s just a story to show never give up. And you might not know what your true passion is in life until you’re kind of confronted to be, well, this is common, this is common, this is common. You found your passion. And I did find my passion here at Electric Materials. I really did.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s a really cool story. I appreciate you sharing that. And it’s interesting how such a stressful and emotionally painful time like a divorce, you can look back on and see that sort of the seeds of the future were being planted shortly after that. And I like the message of resilience here, right? Because it’s when you go through something really tough like that, like a natural human reaction can be to just sort of withdraw, right?

Sort of pull yourself out of society to just hunker down. And it feels normal and natural and helpful. But the best thing for you during those times is to get up, to get busy, to get back out there, to try different things, try on different hats, you know, you got to try on a bunch of hats that don’t fit to find the one that does. And I think that that’s what your story highlights. And you were able to come home again into a role that suits you even better than, you know, some of the other positive experiences that you’d had there at Electric Materials. So that’s pretty cool.

Jim Wargo: Thank you. And it is, you know, the old saying is you get knocked down nine times, you get up nine times, you know, you’re going to get knocked down in life no matter what. It’s how you react to it. And I think that’s the key is the world is never going to be a Utopian facility. You know, it’s not going to be a perfect idea. There are going to be knock downs in life, but it’s how you come back. And that’s one thing I try to do is to stay positive no matter what. I’m a very happy person. I enjoy life.

I enjoy this job. And I try to teach that to my son is no matter what, you know, you’re 17 years old, I tell him, you’re going to have heart, you know, heartbreak, you’re going to have hardships, but you got to keep moving on. Stay resilient.

You’re going to find out what life has to offer. And there we go. You know, we’re working. And as many as many times as you get knocked down, come back stronger.

Because every time you get knocked down, you get tougher, you get tougher. And I’m just happy to say that it worked out for me. And hopefully it works out for many other people. There’s no reason to give up. You know, today could be a hard day, but tomorrow could be the best day ever. And that’s what you always got to look forward to is the next day.

Anthony Codispoti : I love that. Jim, is there a particular resource that you might recommend for other folks that’s been helpful for you, whether it’s a book or a podcast or some kind of a course that you took?

Jim Wargo: One of the best things, I went to Gannon University here in Erie, and one of the best courses I took was on networking. How to network with people. We meet people every day. And it just happens to be you meet somebody, okay, they know somebody, they know somebody. It’s all about networking and knowing your worth. I think that is a key phrase that I use myself is know your worth. Don’t let anybody tell you that you’re not good enough.

You’re not smart enough. You make them realize that you are. And that course, again, and taught me that that networking and promoting yourself, it makes you more confident, not cocky or arrogant, but more confident in yourself, not only in an aspect of a business, but in the aspect of personal.

So if you personally feel yourself as confident, that’s going to promote yourself off and cast yourself off in not only your personal life, but your business life as you’re confident, and you can move on. I would read any book on networking. I know there’s books out there across. I’m bad on authors and I apologize on that. I would love to give a shout out to a book, but I don’t have one off the top.

But just anything where you can concentrate on the art of networking and communication. That’s the key because a lot of times, I’m on a school board and I’ll walk in and I’ll reach my hand out to talk to a certain young person, male, female, and they look with their eyes down. Make that eye contact.

Make it personal. Make the eye contact. Stand up when somebody offers a hand. Stand up. Shake that hand. Look them in the eye.

And those are the ones that I see, especially with this newer generation growing up, going through school, is a lot of them are lacking that confidence. So network, talk. Get with people, a small group, whatever. Work on those communications. Work on those ideologies and just become confident in yourself.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, I like that because so many of my friends that I’ve known over the years, they’re looking for a new career opportunity and they’ll do the job boards and they’ll scour LinkedIn, whatnot. And it feels like more times than not, the best opportunities that come about are from people they already know. People that are in your network, people who already, they know the face, they know the name, they know the personality. They’ve had some interaction with you. So yeah, the more people that you get a chance to interact with, and I also think it’s important, and I think you probably agree with this, Jim, it’s not just about what can I take from that person. What can I offer to that person? That’s how you really enhance the relationship and kind of get the ball rolling. Absolutely.

Jim Wargo: Yeah, you get into some of the relationships where you always have that one upper. They always got to up you. You’re like, oh, I got a story, I’m going to do one better. No, you always want to take in what they have and take that information. But if you can help them, help them out. It’s a give and take. If it’s a give, give, give, that doesn’t work. You have to be able to help them out. And just relying on people is the key. It got me through tough times in my life with the divorce. I leaned on people, I leaned on friends. I leaned on strangers that became friends. And I think that is the key is they took from me, I took from them, and we gave each other something. And I think that is the key, not only business, but just in life in general.

Anthony Codispoti : Yeah, I like that. Any daily habits or rituals, practices that you go through that help keep you centered and on track?

Jim Wargo: I like to get up early. It kills my son sometimes that I’m up at like, you know, 334 o’clock in the morning. I like to just spend about an hour, hour and a half and just kind of sit, reflect on everything to be like, okay, this is what I want to do today. And I kind of pre-playing my day beforehand. Before I just, you know, the alarm clock goes off. Next thing I know, I’m in the shower, I’m doing this and it’s just too fast. I want that hour, hour and a half just to reflect on the day. Think about, okay, this is what’s going on.

Yeah, yesterday might have been bad. I was stressed out about this, but you know what, I’m going to do this, this, this different. And it just takes time for me, where I think a lot of people that work Monday through Friday, they might take it just for their weekends to be like, okay, Saturday, I’m not doing anything. Well, then you just sit around all day Saturday, then you feel bad on Sundays, you didn’t do anything on Saturday. This way, with me taking that hour and hour and a half a day of just basically reflection, I’m relaxed, ready to go into the day. I come in, I’m awake, let’s go. Some of my coworkers might tell you I’m a little too energetic first thing in the morning. You know, I’ve already had those two, three cups of coffee.

Anthony Codispoti : You got up hours before they did. Now you’re fueled with the caffeine. You’re on a roll. Exactly.

Jim Wargo: I’m ready to conquer the day. But I think that just takes a little bit of, you know, ritual where every day you just sit, sit time apart. It’s like making your bed in the morning every day. Some people do, some don’t. I do because it gives me something that I accomplished and finished already. You know, I got out of bed, I made the bed, hey, I accomplished the feet already. That’s one thing I can say positive about the day. You have to look at positivity in your life. If you’re always negative on yourself, you’re negative in your atmosphere, your negativity is going to affect you tremendously, but you’re also going to affect everybody around you.

You know, you think of that piece of fruit that has a little bit of fuzz on, it touches another piece, that fuzz starts connecting and connecting all the way down. So if I can spend that hour and a half and get my positivity going, not only for myself, but for my son when I take him to school or I come here to work, that positivity and just build, I just think it just makes a greater work environment and also a better me where I’m not burned out, where I got to sit down all day Saturday or Sunday, not do anything because I had no time. I’m making time daily to just decompress, de-stress and find my focus again. I like that.

Anthony Codispoti : Jim, if we were to talk, say a year from now, and you were celebrating something, what would that be? What would you hope it would be?

Jim Wargo: Not a marriage, no, I’m just joking. Not a divorce, I know that. I think it would just maybe be a record sales year. I would love, I don’t do anything just for me. I’m not a self-accolade guy. I would love for us, my manager Allison, President Lucian, to call in all of us, all of the employees to say, we had a record year.

After one year, we just had record amount, a product, complaints, returns, smallest ever. Just have that record year where it shows our hard work, our dedication has paid off. That would reward me. It really would. Yeah.

Anthony Codispoti : It sounds like you guys are well on your way to that. I mean, you’re saying the first six months, you’ve already beaten what you did all of last year.

Jim Wargo: That’s impressive. It is getting there. Like I said, it’s nothing like I don’t want to hold up a trophy, say, oh, look what I got. I’m not that type of guy. My reward is the people around me, the business I work for is succeeding. I think one of the best things around here is we’re currently hiring. We need workers. I think that is a great mode as a company because some business some businesses, excuse me, are currently downsizing. They’re letting employees go. We are currently hiring.

We’ve hired, I believe, over 40 in the last four or five months, and we’re still looking to head on. I just say that is a growth. It means a lot to me and it rewards me that I, as a salesman and the whole sales team, we are doing our jobs to get work in here so we can bring people in and give them jobs. I’m not putting us on the pedestal because we’re not. It is a whole team effort.

We cannot do it ourselves. It is across the board, the entire people here. We are all working hard, working together to create job opportunities for other people to bring them in here and enjoy our family atmosphere.

Anthony Codispoti : And maybe you touched on the answer to my question here, which is, when people do come to work there, why are they coming? What is it that draws them in and what keeps them there?

Jim Wargo: I think what it is, it is a feel of family. It really is. The pay is great. Good benefits. We partake in different activities. Our human resources, they do great jobs. We have little picnics. We have outings. It is just a great place to work. Is it stressful and fast-paced sometimes?

Yeah, absolutely. Every place is. You sell newspapers at a stand and sometimes you’re not busy.

Next day you have 20 people deep. That’s every industry. But around here we all work together.

You come in tomorrow, Anthony. We’re not going to set you up for failure because we’re all invested in the company. Our retirees with their pension and all that, they’re looking at us to help them out.

We currently working for them, but we’re also working for us to create our retirement fund. And being a small town northeast, we’re just a little speck on the New York border there, but we’re very goal-oriented. We’re very tight. People call us the Norman Rockwell community. Because basically we’re like a Hallmark movie, our town. And I think that atmosphere with everybody’s attitude here of working together, being a team, it’s just fantastic. And one of the aspects that I think is nice is we have generationals. Legacies here. We have people that their grandfather worked here. Their dad worked here. They work here.

Their son works here. So we see a lot of that here. And I think that shows a lot of pride in what our company does. That a certain family or should say families have a legacy here that, hey, my name has been in this building for almost 100 years. And I think it’s fantastic where we open the doors for a tour for like 100 years. We had a tour in here. We had people come in like, oh my gosh, my grandfather worked on this machine. My dad worked on this machine. This is where, you know, and you just see that and it brings pride to a lot of people. And I think that’s what we have a lot of here at Electric Materials is pride.

Anthony Codispoti : That’s so cool. I mean, I feel like that’s something out of an old movie. You don’t hear that very much anymore where you got one, two, three generations of people working at the company. Jim, I’ve just got one more question for you. But before I ask it, I want to do two things. First of all, I’m going to invite all of our listeners to hit the follow button on their favorite podcast app. So you can continue to get more great interviews like we’ve had today with Jim.

Jim, I also want to let people know the best way to either continue to follow your story, that of the companies, or to get in touch with you directly. What would that be?

Jim Wargo: You can follow us online at electmat.com. That’s E-L-E-C-M-A-T .com. We have a nice webpage. We’re you can follow us online there. Easiest way to call us is our 800 number. It’s 800-356-2211.

That gives you the direct line. You can get a hold of the operator to get us in sales. Or if you are in the industry and you’re going to shows, ESA is one of the biggest shows in the country. We always have a booth there.

Please stop by the booth at ESA. This year it’s in Nashville. We will be going overseas for a show. We are cast expo. We are always around. But probably the best way would be our website at electmat.com or the 800-356-2211 for a direct call in. Great.

Anthony Codispoti : And we’ll make sure we put all that in the show notes as well. So last question for you, Jim. As you look to the future, what exciting changes do you see coming to your industry?

Jim Wargo: It’s almost endless. I think the biggest thing is going to be the whole data center and where that goes. As we’re getting more computer savvy, more AI, it’s going to be interesting to see how the industry changes towards that. The car industry. You’ve gone to battery cars instead of gas cars. There’s now a push for hydrogen cars. You’re seeing that over in Europe where they’re actually using hydrogen cars. You’re seeing that development from gas to electric to hydrogen and also cell phones to AI to other products.

I’m excited to see exactly what’s going to happen next. I saw a great meme online just yesterday where a guy had a telephone, a boombox, a telephone book in front of him. It’s like all that is now in the palm of your hand.

You think about it, all that is right there. What does the future hold? What are we going to have in our hands, in our ears, five years down the road? It’s just mind-blowing of what we can do. I’m excited to see how we are going to adapt to that. It’s going to be a fun ride. It really is.

Anthony Codispoti : It’s interesting because when I ask this question of most of my guests, they respond with ways that they’re starting to use AI in their jobs or their businesses. Your response is still very much related to AI, but it’s a little bit different because it’s in the demand for your products because AI is booming so much.

Jim Wargo: Yes. That goes back to the use of the boards. You got the computer boards, everything involved, and that’s where our product comes in. Again, we’re going to have to adapt to what that need is. Again, we have all these parallel paths. Now we’re going to start another one and have another branch come off that family tree here.

Anthony Codispoti : Jim Morgo, I want to be the first to thank you for sharing both your time and your story with us today. I really appreciate it.

Jim Wargo: I appreciate the time, Anthony, and I appreciate you reaching out. I’m glad we could do this together.

Anthony Codispoti : It was a lot of fun. Folks, that’s a wrap on another episode of Inspired Stories Podcast. Thanks for learning with us today.