March 2014
| Business World Magazine | 153
I
t’s a decades-old company with generations of family street
cred, but don’t for a moment think that Summers Rubber
Company is a dinosaur existing solely on nostalgia. Few
things, in fact, could be further from the truth.
The Cleveland-born company – long a leading source of in-
dustrial hose products combined with market-leading customer
service – turns a spry and lively 65 in 2014 while retaining the
same ability to react to changing conditions and adapt opera-
tions it possessed as a precocious teenager.
The latter is evidenced by recent investments catering to the
energy industry, which has become an important factor in Sum-
mers’ Ohio and Western Pennsylvania home base with the in-
crease of oil and gas exploration activities in the Utica and Mar-
cellus shale formations.
“We spent a tremendous amount of time, starting in 2011,
trying to understand what we needed to look like to sell this par-
ticular segment – the energy segment,” says Frank Tiernay, Sum-
