In 2022, Elevated Industrial Solutions, a then-60-year-old supplier, decided to undergo a rebranding following a run of organic growth and acquisitions. Fresh off the purchase of Finish Systems (2017, Wisconsin), Compressed Air Technologies (CAT; 2019, Ohio), Palmetto Compressors (2020, South Carolina) and Air Center Inc. (2022, Michigan), the firm united under the Elevated brand — and it’s been growing ever since.
Last summer, Elevated announced that Romy O’Daniel had joined its team as chief executive officer. O’Daniel brings with him 30 years of sales, operational, strategy, integration and distribution experience — most recently as the SVP of sales for Crescent Electric. Elevated cited O’Daniel’s “proven track record of developing high-performing teams and cultures” in order to “drive sustainable growth.”
ID recently spoke with O’Daniel about the company’s near-term plans as he takes the helm for Elevated’s next wave of success.
ID: Let’s talk a little bit about the change in leadership. What should we expect for Elevated as the company moves forward with you at the helm?
Romy O’Daniel: Elevated is a diverse company. We’ve done a lot of things. We’re in a lot of industries. It’s great to be in a lot of industries, because you’re diversified.
But you have to still have one singular strategy going forward. You have to have a strategy for everybody to rally behind; something that everybody believes and something that everybody says, ‘That’s our goal, that’s our True North.’ And that’s my focus — to bring us all under one strategy that brings us to success in the future.
I believe in a process called listen, learn and lead, and have been listening to the team. What are our issues? What do we do well? What don’t we do well? Learning from that … learning from the entire team and, in the end, coming up with a strategic plan that allows us to lead the team forward into the future.
ID: Obviously, there’s been a lot of coalescing around one brand – those individual pieces from multiple acquisitions – and about trying to create a multifaceted distributor with which to go to market. How has that been going?
RO: I think Elevated is still pretty divergent when it comes to that, coming up with what you’re thinking of as one, unified go-to-market strategy. We are well on our way, though, because we have finished the rebranding, which was a big part of it. So rebranding started two years ago and we just finished last month with our Michigan team. We are now one Elevated. That is a big deal, even if it’s more of a mindset than anything else. Having a bunch of divergent entities operating, all of us underneath one brand, is the first step. We’re there.
ID: Let’s talk about Air Center, specifically, and how it’s been more integrated into the overall focus. Can you tell me a little bit more about what Air Center brings to the table and how you characterize this as being fully on board with the company brand?
RO: Air Center is an absolute operating machine. If anything, we’ll be taking Air Center’s best practices and using them at Elevated, not necessarily the other way around. That is a very well-run business and always has been. They do a couple of things especially well. They do compressor sales well but, more importantly, they do service well. Their name is well-known in the market. They have good customer retention because of the respect that they’ve gained in the market. And they also have a significant portion of the precision tool market in Michigan, specifically Ford, where we do very, very well. My job at Elevated is to help the whole company with a strategic platform to execute against moving forward.
How do we grow? How do we make more acquisitions? Sell more things? In my mind, our strategy is going to change from being a company that sells [just] products to a service company that happens to sell certain products; our base is going to be to come in to service the customer, take care of their equipment, regardless of what equipment [it is].
ID: Do you feel like the market perceives you now as a service company?
RO: We are trusted as a service company, yes. We have the best technicians in the business, the most knowledgeable. Compressors are a complicated mechanism, and if we can service compressors, we could service anything.
ID: Have you found your customers have a greater need for service as the labor force has created more of a challenge for them to staff those positions internally?
RO: Yeah, it’s totally logical when you think about it. As the U.S. workforce gets older, there are just fewer people going into the service industry, and that level of expertise out there right now is hard to find. A lot of folks don’t want to do this type of work. And everything needs service or else it breaks and costs these companies downtime.
The thing about services is it’s something that a lot of companies forget about. They forget about it until their line goes down for two days and they remember it, right? Our job is to remind them that, ‘Hey, if you want to avoid this downtime, you need to service your equipment.’
ID: In late ‘22, when I last spoke with Elevated, lead times and inventory were some of the biggest issues the company was facing. Is this still the case? And if not, what is the biggest issue that’s facing your company?
RO: I don’t believe lead times and inventory are much of an issue. I’ve been in this industry for over 25 years. We’ve always had lead times and inventory issues. It’s no worse now than it was then, depending on the product. So no, I don’t think that’s an issue anymore. At least in our industry, we’re on time.
The biggest issue I would think going forward is just businesses are tight [with their spending] right now. That’s been good and bad … because they actually want to do more service. Even though businesses are tight, they’re saying, ‘How can I get two, three, four more years out of that compressor?’ So it actually is beneficial to us from that perspective.
Something we’re going to have to figure out strategically is what else do we want to service and what else do we want to sell? Our largest issue as a company is going to be finding more people to do service. It is hard to get the less experienced to come into this business, to want to be a compressor technician. Not [just] the average person can service a compressor. You have to be trained. Our issue is finding people to service whatever that happens to be.
ID: Is there anything else that you want to add to this discussion about what you are excited about at Elevated?
RO: We have great people. I think that everything starts with the people. What kept me awake at night [before taking on the role] was, what was going to be the talent of the people? Because I knew when I took over as the CEO that if I assessed that and we had a cultural issue or we had a people competence issue, we were going to have a tough hill to climb. It’s hard to implement strategy if the people don’t like where they work, they don’t like what they do, or the culture is fractured. It’s not, so I was super happy because that’s the hardest part. If that’s done and the people are motivated and there’s a strong culture, strategy is easy.
I’m also really excited about taking our industrial supplies and placing them online for our customers. By mid-March, customers will be able to go to a website and order – or re-order – industrial supplies quickly and easily. It was something that customers asked for. When going out into the field with Elevated salespeople, customers would tell me they loved doing business with us but wanted the ability to order and re-order faster and easier. Our customers should expect information about this in February.
