When competitors in Main Line’s pipes, valves and fittings distribution market were cutting workers and shrinking, Main Line pursued new business and hired more workers.
“We saw our competitors pulling back,” said Tim Kroger, Main Line president. “And when they pull back, that opens doors.”
A knack for finding open doors helped Main Line stay in business for six decades. The industrial products wholesaler celebrates its 60th anniversary this year.
Main Line was started in 1955 in a basement on Ludlow Street before moving to a second home at 905 E. Third St.
On a Memorial Day weekend Friday about 15 years ago, the company closed at noon. Then all employees rolled up their sleeves and moved the entire business — every pipe, shelf and cylinder — to its current location, 300 N. Findlay St.
Main Line has called that location home since.
The closely held business is owned by the families of Mike O’Brien, its chief executive, and Kroger, who is the son of Fred Kroger, one of Main Line’s four founders.
And Main Line is moving into its third generation of family ownership. O’Brien’s sons Ryan and Andy, and Kroger’s son Chad, have been moving into their own positions of responsibility.
So when you ask O’Brien if Main Line is a family-owned business, the answer is a firm “Yes.” Photos of longtime employees adorn the wall in a meeting room, and O’Brien calls them all “family.”
“We’re only as good as our people, he said.
Linda Zierolf has been with the company since a week after she graduated from Julienne High School in 1963. O’Brien and Kroger point to her as an example of why Main Line has endured.
“I either like it or I have no ambition,” Zierolf quipped.
O’Brien decided in the mid-1990s that Dayton’s industrial base wasn’t growing. That wasn’t what he wanted to see.
“We felt that in order to survive, we had to grow,” he said.
He decided to broaden Main Line’s horizons, acquiring a competitor in Cincinnati and a warehouse in Lima. Main Line firmly covers the Interstate 75 corridor from Toledo to the Ohio River and beyond, he said.
Main Line has 48 full-time employees total, 26 in Dayton.
The core of the company’s business, about 30 percent, lies in six core accounts, customers that have stayed with Main Line for more than 40 years. As they have grown, so has Main Line, O’Brien said.
He declined to name his biggest customers — “My competitors are probably reading this article,” he said — but he said they are global and national Fortune 500 companies whose names readers would recognize. They are in the food equipment and process or chemical piping markets, many concerned with moving fluids from point A to point B.
“We are an industrial wholesaler calling on smokestacks, basically,” O’Brien said.
He declined to say what annual sales are, but he said in the past 15 years, sales have more than doubled. The business also offers sanitary, stainless steel products and offers a fabrication shop for the cutting, threading and shaping of pipes.
“We can cut it to size,” he said. “We’re a service-oriented business.”
Kroger said the company has also taken advantage of software to track waste and processes, helping Main Line guard inventory and the bottom line.
O’Brien said the next generation will take Main Line into the next 60 years.
“We’re looking for people who have a work ethic,” he said. “They don’t necessarily have to be an all-star in college, they don’t have to be an all-star athlete or whatever. But they have to have that ethic.”
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