SMU Profile: Ava Hascall keeps steel in the family

The company recently expanded to another 250,000-square-foot facility in Canton, featuring four slitters capable of processing 60,000-pound coils ranging from .015 to .400 x 72 inches, along with a Red Bud leveler capable of producing .300 x 72 x 240-inch sheets.

While many service centers have been heading down South, Hascall Steel is now focused on the Midwest.

“We’re sticking with what we know with automotive and now bulking up on heavy-gauge toll processing in the North,” Ava said. “There are enough manufacturers up here in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Indiana.”

Deep roots

Ava started in the lab at Hascall Steel when she was 15, so she knows the business from many angles.

“We test every coil that comes into the building,” Hascall said. “On the heavier-gauge samples, I got to use the shear, I got to mill it down.” She took material through the entire testing process.

And being on the floor gave her a real taste for the steel industry.

“I really liked the heavy machinery element, walking on the floor, guys using crowbars to get heavy-gauge coils in the uncoiler,” she said. “I always liked the vibe of steel.”

After a variety of other roles, she has been in sales since 2020, and now, since graduating from Babson College, she works as chief marketing officer in charge of brand strategy and market expansion.

An independent service center

With recent deals in the service center sector like Worthington Steel’s acquisition of Germany’s Kloeckner & Co. and Ryerson’s purchase of Olympic Steel, consolidation has definitely been having an effect on independent service centers like Hascall Steel.

“It’s definitely gotten more competitive,” Ava said.

She pointed out that the bigger players have economies of scale and are often able to procure steel at a lower price. This means that a lot of times, bigger jobs are being taken by these companies with certain revenue goals.

However, Hascall has another focus. “They have different goals than us,” Ava said.

“We’re a niche company, and we’ve been working with a lot of customers over 20 to 30 years, and our average order size is 5,000 pounds,” she added.

Hascall Steel offers a wide array of automotive-grade materials for highly specialized orders.  

“Those customers are going to consistently come to us because one of those larger firms will often throw away a 5,000-pound inquiry while we will cover every item,” she said.

At Hascall it’s more, “Hey, if you want to buy one 3,000-pound coil, that’s fine. Call me back in three months, and we’ll get you another, that kind of situation.”

Tight market

Hascall said her company has been seeing a steady increase in demand since December.

“That’s not just from our customers, our customers have been pretty steady, but we’ve gotten a lot of new customers in this seven-month stretch,” she said.

She noted that’s always a good indicator of how the market’s doing. When people start reaching out from further regions of the country, “it says that their supply chain failed, and now they’re going to reach out to us, because people know other guys don’t have it. OK, maybe Hascall does.”

In fact, Ava said, “We have a reputation in the spot industry, because we carry the largest unallocated inventory in the Midwest.”

She said in this heated state of demand, the “price level is increasing way faster than is sustainable.”

“That’s the state that we’re in right now that really tells us how tight the market is,” Hascall said.