I remember years ago when I got hired on, my manager at the time, he said, do you want to have a sales territory and sell perforated metal?

I'm like, what's perforated metal?

Well, I always say we work somewhere where we put holes in metal.

So Hendrick Manufacturing is a perforated metal manufacturer.

Perforated metal is used in a lot of different applications in various industries.

We do products for medical customers, mining and aggregate, quarries, coal sorting.

We do architectural products.

But when you think about perforated metal, it's everywhere.

Your vacuum cleaners, your microwave, your washer, your dryer, they're all made of perforated metal.

We have hundreds of customers and they can order anything from one sheet of perforated metal all the way up to thousands of different sheets.

And then we take that and we figure out the manufacturability of it.

So we'll take their idea and say, OK, if we change this a little bit, we can make this more efficiently and give them a better product.

So we take specifications from our customer and we perforate to their order.

We do all different types of materials, thicknesses, perforation patterns, and the products that we make end up in our customers' final products.

We have approximately 600 customers.

We do about a thousand orders every month.

In an average month, we'll ship anywhere from typically one to two million pounds of sheeted material out of the facility to our customers.

So what sets us apart from other fabricators is our high-speed presses.

That was really the innovation that Eli Hendrick sort of piloted back in the early 1900s was the high-speed press concept.

These presses utilize perforation tooling that can create thousands of holes every minute through metal sheets.

Where someone else may use a type of equipment that may punch one or two or three holes at a time, we can put thousands of holes into a sheet very quickly.

We're vertically integrated in the sense that we build our own tools.

We make our own punches.

So if a new customer came to us and we didn't have the tool today for our lacrosse machines, we could build that tool within a couple of months.

So these machines that we're looking at here, they were built in the early 1900s and put into service around 1910 right here in Carbondale.

They still run today.

Northeast Pennsylvania has historically been a good area for manufacturing.

This facility was built in this region 150 years ago because of the coal industry.

Coal and oil refining is what really started Hendrick Manufacturing.

The story itself of the gentleman who started this company is really fascinating, Eli Hendrick.

There was a few different oils he worked with and kept developing the filtration of that oil.

And the filtration of the oil was originally done with wire cloth.

And wire cloth with canvas in between it.

So he developed the idea of perforating or putting holes in metal to do the same thing.

So he developed the first multiple punch tooling to perforate multiple holes at the same time.

And he developed the machinery to do it also, which is how Hendrick Manufacturing was created.

The original buildings are still here.

This is the town, Carbondale is where the town, where this company started.

A lot of the business that we do is here on the eastern part of the country.

So I think we are in a good location as far as servicing our customers, getting product to them on time.

We do have customers in California, in the west, midwest, all over the country.

We find new markets for our product every day.

This is our 150th year that we're celebrating in 2026 right now.

So it's only been three families over the past 150 years who have owned this company.

With the acquisition since Aetnire, growth is something that they're very focused on.

We're the largest family-owned perforator in North America.

The Aetnires have always made us feel that we were important as employees.

I would say the biggest key to our lasting 150 years involves our members, our people here on the shop floor.

So it's a remarkable achievement to be here in the same town, doing the same thing after all these years.

Metal has pretty much been the same for the last 150 years, but it's the people that have been changing, improving and keeping the business going for us.

Thank you.