YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – There were many Friday afternoons during the 1930s when John “Jack” Hynes and John Finnegan stared at each other across their desk, where a single phone line sat quiet all day. At that time, the business partners’ company, Hynes Steel Products, was in its 10th year, and the Great Depression was taking its toll.
Business was so tight that Hynes on at least one occasion expressed concern to Finnegan that if an order didn’t come in by the close of business, the company was finished, relates William J. Bresnahan, past president of what is today Hynes Industries.
“But the phone always rang,” Bresnahan says. “They got that sign from God that they should remain in business.”
Indeed, since the company was founded 100 years ago, Hynes’ story is the story of manufacturing in the Mahoning Valley. It’s all here: a fledgling company established during the boom year of 1925 perseveres through the Depression, adjusts to the demands of World War II, diversifies and expands after the war, survives the region’s industrial retrenchment, tackles recession after recession, and adapts to meet the needs of industries that didn’t exist a decade – let alone a century – ago.
The steel brokerage service had by the 1940s added steel service center capabilities and then followed with roll forming production. During the 1950s and 1960s, Hynes had expanded into flat wire processing and slotted angle products, and realized opportunities through new markets. Today, the company manufactures components for high-growth segments such as automated warehousing, while expanding business with new products for legacy customers in the truck and trailer and solar energy markets.
“Throughout its history, Hynes has evolved and changed,” says Rick Organ, president and CEO of Hynes. “That’s testament to all the leadership that’s preceded me, and we’re continuing to do what our predecessors did – evolve and recognize that customer demands and requirements have changed,” he says. “That’s enabled us to get to where we are today.”
At 100 and Beyond
Over the past five years, Organ says Hynes has invested more than $26 million in equipment and processes designed to open new markets and additional product lines. “With these investments, we’ve entered into new relationships with customers who we have not served previously,” he says. Moreover, the upgrades have enabled the company to produce new components for existing customers.
“Well over 60% of our revenue in 2025 will come from parts that we previously did not have the capability to produce,” Organ says.
Much of the new equipment was installed during the latter part of 2024. Among the upgrades is a roll-form line that has in-line welding capability. “It produces a closed shape,” the CEO says. “Previously, we could only produce open shapes.”
The process is vital to one of Hynes’ newest customers: the online retail giant Amazon. The new line manufactures roll-formed, welded center columns used in racking pods for Amazon warehouses. These posts are then transferred from the roll-form line to a newly installed automated welding system, which attaches a metal base to the column.
“We hosted Amazon at the plant about a year ago,” Organ says. “We took the time to understand their needs and shared with them the investments we were making that would enable us to produce the part. We were successful in winning that business.”
Each Amazon warehouse contains between 60,000 and 80,000 distribution pods, Organ says, underscoring the opportunities in this market. “Our first shipment was on Jan. 9 of this year,” he says. “By the end of that month, we would have shipped out 17,000 of these.”
Hynes has manufactured products for other clients in the automated warehouse industry, a segment that is commanding more of the company’s share of business. “That has grown to be a larger part of our overall business and that will certainly be the case in 2025 and beyond,” Organ says.
Hynes’ latest investments have also enabled it to expand product lines to its legacy business, Organ says. For example, its plant in Austintown today manufactures safety features – “bumper tubes,” to be exact – for truck trailers. These products are affixed to the rear of a trailer to prevent vehicles from sliding underneath the trailer in case of an accident. The company also began producing metal components for “last mile” vans, including rear-step for electric Rivian vehicles used by Amazon. “We entered that market in the latter part of 2024,” he says.
As it stands, the truck and trailer segment constitutes 27% of Hynes’ business today, followed by the automated warehouse market, which makes up 25%. Approximately one-third of the remaining business is with the solar industry, while the rest is devoted to serving the commercial and industrial sectors.
“We’re projecting in 2025 revenues of $125 million, a 20% increase from 2024,” Organ says, noting that year was slow for the solar industry. “Our compound annual growth rate is just under 15% per year.”
Foundations for Growth
Hynes and Finnegan began in business as young, aggressive salesmen in the steel industry, relates Bresnahan, who served as Hynes president from 1988 to 2010. “They did well, and had a following,” he says. Instead of working for other companies, though, the pair set out on their own in 1925 and established Hynes Steel Products – a steel brokerage business. “They had one phone line, one desk, and two chairs in a walk-up office in downtown Youngstown,” in the old Park Theater building, Bresnahan says.
As business grew, the company diversified and moved into a small plant at West and Rayen avenues, before constructing a new building in 1935 on Oakwood Avenue in Austintown. There, the company began warehousing and slitting operations, where it would purchase coils from steel manufacturers and slit and cut the material to customer specifications.
Although barely surviving the 1930s, Hynes had established solid relationships with its customers and suppliers.
“In the ’40s, the mill and banking relationships that they had developed stuck with them and allowed them to do the things they needed to do,” Bresnahan says. “They got material when other people might not have been able to get their hands on steel,” he says, given the high demand during wartime.
The company correctly foresaw a period of prolonged expansion in the years following World War II and hired young talent fresh from the service, according to Bresnahan. “They came on board and started with the service center, the strip steel division,” he says, before expanding into roll forming.
That business emerged because of one of Finnegan’s clients, General Electric in Erie, Pa., which manufactured refrigerators. “They were having some issues of welding the product,” Bresnahan says, especially the square-angled base.
Finnegan paid the plant a visit and suggested using a roll-forming process on the refrigerator component – a continuous manufacturing process that can take sheet metal and convert it into complex profiles. He then offered the company’s services, although Hynes had yet to commission a roll form line at its plant.
“As the story goes, Finnegan walked out of the GE facility, called Jack Hynes in Youngstown, and said basically, ‘Put a roll form line in. We’re now in the roll form business,’” Bresnahan says, laughing. “That got them into the business. GE remained a big account. It was our preeminent roll form account for decades.”
In 1946, Hynes and Finnegan organized both Hynes Steel Products and Roll Formed Products as sister companies. That same year, Hynes hired William W. Bresnahan, Bresnahan’s father, in the accounting department, according to a Youngstown Vindicator article from 1966.
During the postwar years, a sizeable portion of the business supplied the consumer appliance market, Bresnahan says. The company also gained a reputation for its quality strip steel that went into many other products.
In 1958, the company expanded its capabilities with the acquisition of Connecticut-based FlexAngle Corp., a manufacturer of slotted-angle steel products, and by the 1960s had its eyes on producing flat-wire products. In 1964, the company invested $300,000 to install a flat wire mill, which cold rolled wire into narrow, special shapes.
The elder Bresnahan was named president of the company in 1965. The following year, he and business partner James P. Hyland purchased Hynes and built the company further.
“Over the next 20 years or so, it was mostly organic growth,” Bresnahan says. “When dad and Jim had the business, we got into doing a lot more in-line processing,” he says. “We put holes and notches in profiles. We became the experts in not just producing a shape but producing a shape that had other characteristics,” he says. “That got us a lot of business.”
By the 1970s, Hynes had grown into three different plants in the Mahoning Valley, all on a campus at the corner of Oakwood and Four Mile Run Road in Austintown.
Bresnahan says he and his four brothers all worked at Hynes, and his father became sole owner of the company following Hyland’s death in 1979. “There were six Bresnahans there at one time,” he says. It was this type of family atmosphere that Bresnahan says helped to reduce turnover at the company.
“We rarely had people get up and leave,” he recalls.
Longtime Employees
Brian Shaner is a third-generation employee at Hynes. His grandfather was hired during the mid-1970s, while his father came on board during the late 1970s. Shaner himself has been with the company approximately 30 years.
“I had the luxury to work with my dad,” he says. “My dad worked on a 60-inch slitter, and I got to work as a helper there occasionally when I first started. It was nice.”
Jim Manche, a 36-year employee in material handling, says his experience is akin to working for three different companies in the time he’s been employed there. “There’ve been different changes over the years,” he says. “There were some lean times. Then there were other times where we can’t work enough to keep up.”
In 2000, Hynes expanded its footprint and occupied another plant along Industrial Road in Youngstown. By 2006, it had expanded its roll form division to Kokomo, Ind., and in 2015, acquired American Roll Form in Painesville.
In 2016, the company purchased the former Wean United building along Henricks Road in Austintown and consolidated its Mahoning Valley operations in that single facility.
The company also went through various ownership changes. In 2014, Resilience Capital Partners acquired majority ownership of Hynes. In 2019, the Hynes executive team bought the company back. In late 2023, Hynes was acquired by Dallas-based Crossplane Capital.
Jeremy Gurski, plant manager, says the new equipment has helped to land business that is keeping employees very busy. Given their current book of work, employees are putting in 68 hours a week, he says.
“The business is there,” Gurski says as he walks the plant floor in late January. “We’ve told everybody where we’re at,” noting the upcoming Saturday would be the first Saturday off in weeks.
President and CEO Organ, who has been with the company eight years, says that Hynes is changing with the shifting demands of the market, as it always has.
“It’s a very different company today than it was when I joined eight years ago,” he says. At that time, Hynes was active in three different business units – its roll-form capabilities, its legacy strip steel, and wire form business.
“We exited two of those three – the wire and the strip steel – since I’ve been here to focus our attention on the roll-form business,” he says. “It’s been a catalyst to growth during that time.”
Hynes’ Kokomo plant turns out products that primarily cover the truck/trailer and solar segment, Organ says, while Painesville focuses on the commercial and industrial sector. The Austintown plant cuts across all segments, but mostly focuses on truck/trailer, automated warehousing and solar. Hynes employs some 200 in all three plants – 135 in the Mahoning Valley.
The company plans to continue its investment into automation, Organ says. Currently, it takes approximately three minutes to inspect each metal column once it’s welded on a base. “We’re working with a firm to automate this process,” he says. “It will take what now takes three minutes down to five seconds.”
Organ understands that the changes underway at Hynes point to a business model that its founders and his predecessors would clearly understand.
“The vision and the recognition that for any organization to continue to thrive – it needs to change and adapt,” he says. “And they did that.”
Pictured at top: Rick Organ says Hynes has invested $26 million in new equipment since 2020.