Kelley Shreve on a Century of Built-to-Last Trust
Kelley Shreve is General Manager of Lindberg/MPH, the industrial heat treat furnace manufacturer founded in 1912. Located in Riverside, Michigan, since 2014. A mechanical engineer by training, Kelley built ruggedized computer servers for Virginia-class Navy submarines and refurbished continuous casters for steel mills before joining Lindberg as an applications engineer. Three years ago, when the company’s president retired, the CEO asked Kelley to step into the general manager role.
In this “Beyond the Brief” Conversation, Kelley explains why a furnace built in 1913 is still running today, how a tight-knit industry rewards showing up rather than selling, and why the next chapter of Lindberg/MPH’s is going to create a very “cool” atmosphere in the shop.
From submarines to steel mills to furnaces
Q: You have an unusual path into this business. Walk us through it.
Kelley: I became a mechanical engineer in 2000 and started in commercial refrigeration, then moved into custom fabrication, taking other people’s designs and reverse-engineering them for manufacturing. That’s where I learned the true value of communicating with production and sales. Later I built ruggedized computer servers for a government subcontractor. They went on Virginia-class submarines and had to withstand 30 G’s of shock, equivalent to an underwater mine going off next to the sub, and keep running. After that, I refurbished continuous casters for steel mills at Siemens Metals Technologies. I’d always wanted to learn the front side of the business, sales and quoting, and Lindberg had an opening for an applications engineer three miles from my house. I took it, moved into larger heat treat equipment, then sales leadership, and three years ago our CEO asked me to step into the GM role when our president retired.
A business almost nobody thinks about
Q: Most people have never considered industrial heat treating. How do you explain what Lindberg does?
Kelley: Heat treat is a science that’s been around for millennia; the ancient Chinese and Japanese samurai did it, just in a more rudimentary way. It touches everyone every day. If you zip up a jacket or use a ballpoint pen, you owe it to heat treating. We build the furnaces, the controls to run them, quench tanks, gas generators, conveyors, afterburners for emissions, whatever the process requires. One of our more memorable projects was for the Icelandic Lava Show, a tourist attraction where the owner remelts collected lava rock and pours it into a bed of sand in front of an audience. We’ve also built furnaces for private space flight companies. It’s not glamorous, but it’s everywhere.
The furnace that wouldn’t quit
Q: You mentioned equipment older than a century still running. What does that teach you about how Lindberg builds?
Kelley: Shortly after I started, a customer called our parts department with a serial number we couldn’t find in any record. The team dug through the archives and discovered the furnace was built in 1913; the company was a year old then. The Parts Sales team asked if he would like the OEM team to quote him a new furnace. His response: If you can make this furnace run, why would I ever replace it? Furnaces are designed to ramp up and stay hot, not cycle hot and cold, so once one is running and understood, it tends to be low maintenance unless something catastrophic happens, usually human error. Customers who spend upwards of a million dollars on a piece of capital equipment tend to protect that investment.
Getting out in front, one trade show at a time
Q: You’ve expanded your trade show circuit rather than cut it, at a time a lot of B2B marketers are pulling back. Why?
Kelley: The heat treat industry is large but incredibly tight-knit. I’ve gotten very involved with the Metal Treating Institute, sponsoring their spring and fall meetings, and even our competitors will personally thank us for being so involved because there’s enough work out there for everybody. We’ve identified fifteen or twenty more shows to walk, not necessarily furnace shows, because anyone building CNC machines needs parts heat-treated too. A lot of the real business happens booth to booth, and at the dinners and social hours when show traffic is slow, someone mentions their heat treater closed down, and suddenly you’re quoting a furnace.
Q: Any big news coming up for Lindberg you can share?
Kelley: We’re introducing a new technology to the industry. Right now, a lot of heat treaters look at certain process data as black magic, and we want to bring hard, factual data that makes it tangible. I can’t say too much, but we have a piece of equipment on order, and it’s about to get very, very cold in our shop. It’s the polar opposite of what we’re used to, and I think it’s going to turn the industry upside down.
Kelley Shreve is General Manager of Lindberg/MPH, the industrial heat treat and non-ferrous melting furnace manufacturer headquartered in Riverside, Michigan, with more than 75,000 installations worldwide since 1912. Kelley has also served as a reserve police officer, currently in Coloma, Michigan, since 2012. He is, by his own family’s account, not allowed to sing at church, and with good reason. Connect with him on LinkedIn to learn more about how a century of tribal knowledge and a lot of trade show handshakes keep an industry running that most people never even know exists.