The Achieve Podcast - Rich Marker (All Metals Fabrication)
In this episode of the Achieve Podcast, host Jesse Warner interviews Rich Marker, the owner and CEO of All Metals Fabrication, a Utah‑based metal‑fabrication company. Rich recounts how the business began in the early‑1990s as a family‑run operation funded by an SBA loan, describing the gritty early days of hand‑crafted work, concrete pours in blizzards, and the first purchase order (PO0001). He explains the company’s evolution to a modern operation with 75‑100 employees, fully digital work orders, and automated equipment, now handling hundreds of thousands of purchase orders. Rich outlines his sales and marketing approach, emphasizing word‑of‑mouth, consistent authentic social‑media content, and a “tortoise” strategy of steady, ongoing effort rather than sprint‑style bursts. He details how AI is being leveraged for instant online quoting of simple parts and for gathering high‑quality data to improve internal processes. Looking ahead, he expresses excitement about continued improvement, customer focus, and the confidence that the business will sustain work. He shares leadership lessons, stressing that mistakes are inevitable but recovery and communication are critical, and offers advice to entrepreneurs: never give up, act despite fear, and don’t worry about originality—execution matters more than novelty. The episode closes with a plug for All Metals Fabrication’s website and the podcast’s sponsor.
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Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner. I'll be your host today. Today we're excited to have Rich Marker, owner and CEO of All Metals Fabrication, with us today. Rich, it's a pleasure to have you on the show.
Thanks for inviting me.
Great. So our audience can get to know you a little bit better, can you give us a quick backstory of your business? What do you do and how did it all get started?
Well, we started the business in the late '90s or mid-early '90s. Um, my dad always had a dream of owning his own business and he, um, was involved in another business that was joint— we were joint owners with another family and it just was kind of breaking down the relationships. So I was just graduating from college and he decided that'd be a good time to launch this new business. And I'd been working there at the, at the original business for a while too, just during my teenage years and stuff. And so we just, um, worked through the SBA to get a big SBA loan, which It takes a lot of courage. My dad didn't seem too daunted by it. I was more afraid of that than he was, but got some investors and we just, you know, had some experience in the business and we just basically put up a bingle, put up a building and hung a shingle. And we, I mean, that makes it sound easy, but we just went for it, you know? And luckily we had a lot of relationships and we had a lot of, industry experience, so we were able to just get through those first few years, which are always really hard. The first few years of a startup are always hard. And then, you know, the rest is sort of history. That's how we got started. And during that time, I was always, you know, wanting to be a business owner, I thought. So I was up for the experience. I was excited about it. To be honest. And, um, that's how we got started, you know, in the '90s. And those first few years, those first, you know, I'd say the first 5 years were really, really tough. You know, it was, it was, it was a hard journey at the beginning. Um, but, uh, you know, you just hang in there and make it happen, and it, it does. So that's how it all got started.
And what is it that your company does?
So we, we're involved in metal fabrication, which no one really knows what that means, but we, we do all the parts and pieces and things that you see every day, but you just don't realize that you're seeing them. We— one of our core niches is architectural metal, which is a little easier to explain, but that's the kind of metal that you see if you're, you know, walking down an airport, or if you go to a university or a museum, or there's metal all over those buildings. You see it everywhere, you just don't really know you're seeing it. And then we do a lot of OEM industrial work too, which is parts and pieces for, you know, basketball standards or roller coasters or things that you notice or participate in every day, just don't just don't know it. So it's just, that's what we do, you know, we make, we make metal turn into something that's functional.
You mentioned, uh, starting as a kind of a family business. Your dad started it. How has the company changed as it grow— as it's grown, and what does it look like now? How many employees? And talk to me about kind of where you started and what it looks like today.
Well, when we started, we, we, um, honestly, uh, I, I, some of the memories I have of that is we'd be, um, trying to sell stuff in the day And at night, you know, after we locked the door, we'd be painting walls, laying tile. And I remember we started with like 4 people. It was out in the shop. There was 3 of us in the office, and me and my dad and my mom and my sister part-time. And we had 4 or 5 people out in the shop just getting started on making stuff that we would— people would come in and order and One of the early memories I have is we had some equipment that had to show up at a certain time, and we're from Utah, so sometimes in the wintertime it can be— the weather can be dicey. And we were trying to pour concrete to set this— we had to pour these concrete footings to set these— to unload and offload these pieces of equipment. And because of the weather, we couldn't get the we couldn't get to pouring the concrete, but the trucks were coming regardless. So I just remember pouring concrete in the middle of a blizzard, and I remember the guy that was helping us saying, "This concrete's never going to work because of the weather." And he was right, it eventually failed, but we at least got it down, um, in time to get the equipment off. So those are the kind of things we were doing at the beginning, and now we have anywhere between, um, 75 and 100 employees. It varies a little bit based on season. And back then everything was hand done. In fact, I even remember generating the first PO, PO0001, and I remember giving that PO to the, the vendor that we were buying it from and him just laughing his head off, uh, just laughing like, you're kidding. I'm like, no. And now, I mean, our PO number I think is in the 100,000, 600,000, 700,000. And everything back then was by hand. Now everything's digital, like all of our work orders and all of our information is all, you know, at the touch of a finger. We, um, all of our equipment's fully automated. Um, you know, it's like, it's just, it's a whole different place than when we started, you know. It's just grown a lot in the years we've been doing it. So it's been fun.
Richard, congratulations on, on the growth. That's a fun story to go from your first order and everything that goes into that to having over 600,000 orders. It's, it's something to be proud of. When you look at sales, marketing, and outreach for your business, where are you seeing the most traction? What's working for you and maybe what's not?
That's a great question. I, uh, you know, I think everyone— I, I think for my kind of business, uh, everyone will tell you the best, the best sales tool is word of mouth, right? Where you— people know people know people know people, and they, they spread the word. So that's for sure vitally important. Today you can put that on steroids with, uh, you know, Google searches and AI and all that kind of stuff. So I think, I think word of mouth for small businesses is always going to be very, very important. Um, but I think you can really accelerate that by being smart about your social media presence, even, even unpaid, you know. And I'm not talking about paid stuff, but just creating social media so that— I mean, we use social media a lot, not just to attract customers but to attract employees. And, you know, we post fun things and we use, you know, we work hard on trying to create valuable content. And that's a thing we do to market ourselves. So we get, and my strategy personally is not the tortoise and hare approach. My way of doing it is the tortoise approach. Like I don't go in sprints. Like I just try to stay consistent. All the time. So I don't get on— and it's really hard, tempting to do, just do a whole bunch of stuff, do a whole bunch of stuff, and then let it go for 6 months or 12 months. I try to just be regular, constant, you know, not a ton, but just stay with it, stay with it, stay with it, stay with it. And I feel like that strategy— I, I mean, I hear a lot about what Google wants or what, what drives SEO and all that stuff, but just intuitively for me, the way I see it is just you You need to create something valuable and you need to be authentic. And that sounds sort of dumb, but you're just— if you be what you really are, maybe it's just one of those higher laws or whatever, but just try to, try to stick with something and create something that people would be interested in and value. And I just, for me, that's sales and marketing basically. And there's certainly levers to push or pull or however you want to say it, but those by and large is the way I approach marketing.
So there's a lot of buzz right now around AI, around automation tools like that. How are you finding ways to use AI in your business?
For us, I think about this a lot, if I'm being honest, because I— you hear so much about it. Oh, such and such corporation just laid off, you know, 30% of their workforce because of AI or whatever. And you're like, I'm missing the AI train. I better hop on that or I'm gonna get left in the dust. So I've thought about it a lot and investigated a lot and researched it a lot. And so what, what we are using a lot of is trying to automate some of our customer service interactions. And for us, that mostly means how we develop quotes and pricing for all the custom work that we do. Which is challenging because we don't, we don't make the same parts over and over and over. When you're a job shop, you make parts that are made to order, manufactured made to order. A customer comes to you with something specific in mind, and, and so everything's custom. So we're using AI to try to really speed up that process between a customer approaches us and then we get information back to them on cost, lead time, you know, things that, that are important, uh, about the job. And in fact, just here at about, um, 6 months ago, we've put up our first, um, instant quote where customers can literally hop on our website, download simple parts— these aren't complex parts— but they can download simple parts and the AI will automatically generate a quote without them having to talk to a human being. Without having to email somebody, without having to have a conversation. It's like, look, if you can generate a good model and you can download or upload that model into our system, we can get you a quote right now, instantly. So that's a— that's AI on, on the sales side. And on the operational side, um, we're using it quite a bit just to make our systems more robust. And I'm actually— that's a question that I'm pretty passionate about, is just improving processes. And the only way you can improve processes is by measuring. And in order to measure, you have to have good data. So it's this, um, a little bit of chicken and egg situation. So we're using AI a lot to help us obtain good data and then process the data for feedback. And I could go into, you know, a 25-minute story on my most recent project I've used with AI to help me automate something about information gathering, but I'll spare you that. But it's pretty, it's, it's pretty exciting. I mean, it's an exciting time to be a business owner, in my opinion.
As you look at the next stage of growth, what are you most excited about?
Um, you know, I guess just— I don't know how to answer that question exactly. I mean, what really excites me about the future is I feel like at least for our company. Um, there's— we have a ton of opportunity to get better, a ton of opportunity to evolve, a ton of opportunity to make ourselves more valuable for our customers. And I think every business has that sort of never-ending, but once you, once you kind of get onto that improvement train, it just takes a life of its own. And so it's just, for us, we've made so many strides in the last few years. I'm like, we're just, even though like we've come so long and all the years we've been in business, I feel like the last 5 years or 4 years, we've really just like hit a new gear in terms of taking care of our customers. And so I think that's what gets me excited is just seeing what that's going to do. Many years ago, I used to always worry like, "Oh, what if we run out of work?" I don't worry about that anymore. You know, I feel confident in my heart that we won't run out of work because we do good work. And I say that humbly. I mean, it's important to me, but we do good work and we really work hard to keep our customers thrilled. And I think if you put those two together, the work will show up. It'll show up and you don't need to worry about that anymore. And I've seen that happen enough that I I don't worry about that anymore.
Looking back at your own journey, some of the wins and the mistakes, what are some of the lessons that stand out to you?
Uh, good question. You know, I think, I think you're gonna— if you run a business or you own a business, you're gonna, you're your company and you both are going to make mistakes. There's— that's going to happen. It'll happen probably every day. And that, I think, the biggest lesson, one of the biggest lessons I've learned about that is it's not the mistake, because it's going to happen, it's how you recover from the mistake. Um, that's, that's especially true when you're interfacing with a customer. Like, maybe you mess something up, you're late, or a part gets messed up, or you don't you let them down in some way, shape, or form, if you can recover and they can see that you're passionate about recovering and you make that a priority and you communicate to them, most people, most customers will not only give you grace for that, but they'll actually applaud you for it, you know? And so I guess that's one of the main things I've learned is don't worry about making mistakes, just get better, you know, just improve. And if you keep that in mind, then, you know, mistakes will be something that you can overcome actually every day.
Last question for you, Rich. Any advice you'd give to other leaders or entrepreneurs who are on a similar journey to you?
Yeah, I think I've thought about that a lot. And I think the biggest piece of advice I would give to someone that's new to this or struggling or whatever is just, just don't, don't give up. Like, don't freeze. Don't— when things get hard or when you're, when you're facing a challenge or when something seems insurmountable, the worst thing you can do is just freeze, you know, just curl up in a ball basically and get in the fetal position, whether that means just hanging out in your office where no one can bug you, or not coming to work, or not facing a hard thing. Like, that's the worst thing you can do. And it— and the people that follow you will— they'll let go if you do that. They'll, they'll quit too, and they'll, they'll quit trying. And I think the thing I've learned is like, no matter what it is in front of you, just stay at it. Like, if you're facing a cash flow problem, then do all you can to figure out how to collect cash, how to solve that. If you're facing a sales problem, do all you can to go out and find work. You know, if there's an operational challenge and you're way off schedule or something's exploding, do all you can to fix that. And it'll do two things for you. Number one, it'll solve the problem. And number two, it'll take the anxiety away. Which is a curse, right? Oh, everyone hates that. So, so that's the biggest, maybe the biggest piece of advice. And then the second thing I would say is, um, you don't— no one— and you and I have talked about this before, but when I was younger, I used to always think every idea had to be original. If someone's thought of it, then it won't, you know, it won't work. But that's not true, you know. I mean, if, if you have an idea or if you want to do something and someone else has thought about it, it doesn't matter. There's plenty of place in the market for every idea, for every, you know, thing that you wanna try and accomplish. So just if you feel passionate about it and you think it's gonna work, then just go for it and don't worry about who's done it before you or who's doing it in conjunction with you or any of that kind of stuff. Just go, you know? And there's a fine line between ready aim, fire, and ready, fire, aim. And that balance is critical to— you can't be all of one of those or the other. You got to be somewhere in the middle where you sometimes you just got to leap and sometimes you got to, you know, sort of judge, but just act. Whatever you do, just act. That's probably my— that'd be my biggest piece of advice for people in this business.
Well, Rich, thank you for sharing your story and insights with us today. I really appreciate your time. For those interested and want to learn more about Rich and his company, All Metals Fabrication, you can visit allmetalsfab.com. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor, Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. If you enjoyed today's conversation, follow the show, share with another entrepreneur who'd also find value in it. And again, thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.
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