March 2014
| Business World Magazine | 93
a near $100 million entity with a staff that
swelled to as many as 800 employees.
Luber, by then in his 70s, sold the business
to the management team in the early 2000s.
That transaction, however, triggered a series
of failed leveraged buyouts, which brought
with them numerous incoming and outgo-
ing presidents and prompted a gradual ero-
sion of a company that became saddled with
debt and a lack of confidence as the national
economy worsened.
It was put into Chapter 128 receivership
– Wisconsin’s version of a formal bankrupt-
cy proceeding – in early 2010, which drew
Luber, at age 85, back into the mix when he
and a son, Paul, repurchased the business and
brought Smith in to oversee daily operations
as president and chief executive officer.
Smith had known Paul Luber for several
years and was himself a veteran of 25 years
in contract manufacturing, including three
similar stints in which a full company reboot
was needed.
“It wasn’t anything foreign to me – A:
contract manufacturing; and B: a turn-
around situation,” he says. “Having the high-
est respect for the Luber family, I embraced
the opportunity.”
Super Steel has reduced both its cost
structure and its footprint since the most re-
cent transition, and Smith says the imminent
$100 million target will be reached with the
company housed in one facility rather than
the three in which it previously operated.
Cost structures are now in line with com-
petitors, he says, and market share is incre-
mentally being regained as well. The compa-
ny’s staffing level dipped as low as 175 earlier
in the decade before the transfer of power
back to the Lubers, but it’s since grown back
to more than 400.
A recent series of job fairs, in fact, will re-
sult in the hiring of 30 to 40 more welders in
the next fewmonths and Smith’s expectation
is that staffing will ultimately reach a peak
