T. Bruce Sales: An 80-Year Lesson in Diversification

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WEST MIDDLESEX, Pa. – Founded in 1946 by Bruce Campbell, T. Bruce Campbell Construction and later T. Bruce Sales Inc. have both evolved through the years. 

The founder, Bruce Campbell, was an iron worker by trade, according to Jeffrey Hogue, now president of T. Bruce Sales, Inc. 

Campbell was making a living traveling around the country, erecting and sheeting buildings. But eventually, Campbell grew weary of traveling constantly and decided to put down roots in West Middlesex, Pa. 

He first founded the T. Bruce Campbell Construction company. T. Bruce Sales came a little later, in 1963. Hogue said Campbell had a customer that needed some work done, but that customer’s contractor on the project would not work the weekend.

“So Bruce (Campbell) took it upon himself, put a crew of guys together,” Hogue says. “They worked the weekend out in the middle of the parking lot, got the customer what he needed and decided that he was going to start T. Bruce Sales.”

It began as a construction company, T. Bruce Campbell Construction, and later expanded into T. Bruce Sales.

Currently, Bruce Campbell’s son Scotty Campbell oversees both T. Bruce Sales and T. Bruce Campbell Construction. And his son Robert Campbell runs the construction side of the business. 

Hogue runs the day-to-day operations at T. Bruce Sales.

“We answer to Mr. Campbell on a daily basis,” Hogue says of Scotty Campbell. “He’s very much involved in the daily operations.”

Hogue has his own anniversary this year, starting with T. Bruce Sales in 1976 as a laborer and working his way up through the ranks. Hogue says there have been a lot of changes in the industry. Soon after he started his career, Hogue adds the steel mills in the area began closing.

Historically known as Black Monday, Sept. 19, 1977, marked the beginning of the industry’s demise, when Youngstown Sheet and Tube closed its Campbell Works and left 5,000 employees looking for work. That closure led to others and a domino effect of job loss throughout the region over the next five years.

“We’ve seen a lot of companies, big companies, come and go,” Hogue says. “And so we had to diversify.”

T. Bruce Sales started as a fabricated foundry flask, making molding products. But the Campbells saw the need to diversify and began branching out from fabrication into machining.

“If we had not made those diversity changes, we wouldn’t be here today,” Hogue says. “I firmly believe that and the Campbell family have put their life and their investment into this facility to make sure that everyone has what we have today. So, it’s safe to say that if we didn’t evolve, we would be left behind.”

That diversification has meant staying abreast of the needs of area businesses and investing in additional equipment, including a $2 million investment 12 years ago of a Farley Laser Lathe. This plasma cutter with a high speed drill spindle has made it possible to do more work quicker.

In the 1990s, Hogue says they had no machine shop equipment and Scotty Campbell believed they needed it to be competitive. First they started with small, manual machines, but when the time came to get into automated CNC machines, Campbell was thinking big.

“My thought was, let’s start with the small stuff so we learn a little bit,” Hogue says. “And he said ‘No, you’re looking at it absolutely wrong. We’re going to go with the big stuff. We’re going to learn on the big stuff.”

Hogue says the reasoning was everyone had the small equipment and to stand out, T. Bruce Sales stepped into the larger equipment.

“Today we have machines that can machine something 12 feet high, up to 28 feet long at one time,” Hogue says. “We have all our CNC machines, have 3,000 RPM drill spindles with reach out to about five foot on a particular part.”

Scotty Campbell also installed a truck scale, which Hogue says was a huge investment, but also paid for itself in three months when they learned an unscrupulous hauler was overcharging for what he was sending them.

The Fire

In the early morning hours of Oct. 16, 2021, fire whistles drew the attention of local fire departments to T. Bruce Sales. One of the buildings, including the office area, was engulfed in flames.

Hogue says the fire was caused by a faulty lithium ion battery in a new Segway, a device used to get supervisors from one part of the facility to the other.

In the end, 100% of the office capacity was lost along with about 140 feet of a machining shop. 

Such a loss could be devastating to a business. But Scotty Campbell was again thinking big.

The new 16,000-square-foot building was constructed on the site of the fire, opening three years after the fire. It was longer and higher, built specifically for large fabrication with enough to accommodate even larger equipment than before.

“He wanted heavier capacity,” Hogue says of Campbell, adding the high ceilings and heavy duty crane allow T. Bruce Sales more than 90 tons of lifting capacity as high as 30 feet. “It’s made a huge difference in what we can attempt to build and manufacture.”

Jeff O’Hara, senior project manager/engineering manager, said the new building is state of the art with pipes bringing products in from the bottom, like gas piped directly into the welders, allowing them to work consistently without changing tanks. The new building also is all on one level, as opposed to the old building’s different levels that made moving products and equipment difficult.

While the new building was constructed, Hogue says they were able to continue on without fail, thanks to the “infinite wisdom” of Campbell and the dedication of the employees. 

Over the years, Campbell had added onto the facilities, often letting employees add square-feet to the end of a building during slower times, giving them work instead of layoffs. Hogue says as more and more buildings were added, Campbell had made sure there were different electric and gas supplies to each one.

So when the fire happened, while everything in that building was lost, it was possible to move the 10 employees who worked in that building right into other buildings.

“We couldn’t do anything in this building,” Hogue says. “At the same time, the other buildings were up and running and we were able to keep moving. We didn’t miss any deadlines. The guys did what they needed to do.”

Hogue admits it put them back, but deadlines were met.

Celebrating 80 years since it was founded, T. Bruce Sales remains a family-owned business despite its growth and diversification through the years. 

With more than 110,000-square feet of fabrication space, precision machining capacity, finishing areas and in-house testing capabilities, the company continues to support customers in a wide-range of industries.  T. Bruce Sales offers heavy plate and structural fabrication, balancing a mix of job-shop projects, long-term and short-term, big and small.

T. Bruce Construction continues to do major building projects, supplying iron workers to job sites, providing mobile cranes and rigging and doing maintenance repairs.

“We work as two separate entities and it seems to work well,” Hogue says.

Pictured at top: Jeff O’Hara, project manager at T. Bruce Sales, stands inside the shop that was built after a fire destroyed the company’s previous facility.