ACE CEO Jean Pitzo with president Keith Stout.
If you’ve ever eaten processed food, you probably owe Jean Pitzo, CEO of ACE Metal Crafts, a big thank you. The company, tucked into an industrial park next to O’Hare Airport in Bensenville, Illinois, manufactures stainless steel component parts for food processing. ACE products play a role in making popcorn, chicken nuggets, yogurt, cheese, bacon and, perhaps most iconically, Oreo filling. For more than 30 years, Pitzo has shepherded the company from a small shop employing 30 people and pulling in $3 million a year in revenue to a 160-employee-operation set to take in $25 million in 2019, all thanks to one thing: trust between employees and management.
ACE was purchased by Pitzo’s father, Jack Lichter, in 1982, and she joined the sales division the next year when she was just 26. Her father passed the reins to her six years later, but despite her wealth of sales experience, she knew little about the manufacturing side of the operation she had inherited. Pitzo knew that if she was going to run the company she’d have to learn from the workers themselves. General manager Jack Stout took Pitzo under his wing, giving her a crash course in metal fabrication.
“He was an incredible man,” she says. “The foremen were all stainless steel experts. All outstanding, all older than me. I had to trust everyone working there.”
Pitzo was in the process of building that trust when she hit a hurdle. In an interview with an accounting trade magazine early in her tenure, Pitzo disclosed the company’s $5 million in sales. A company-wide game of telephone badly distorted the facts. “I heard a welder say, ‘Jean’s making $5 million a year,’ and that hit me,” Pitzo recalls. Rather than let rumors continue to spread, Pitzo decided to disclose ACE’s financials to the workers and turn it into an open book company. Her rationale was simple: People make better decisions when they have more information.
While the trust Pitzo placed in her employees eventually brought handsome returns, the next decade put ACE through the wringer. In 2000, the outbreak of mad cow disease in the U.K. caused demand for European beef to plummet, and as a result, demand for ACE’s meat processing equipment fell as well. By the time the recession of 2001 hit, the company had already been struggling for a year. The atmosphere was grim, and in early 2002, orders had fallen to a new low. Pitzo decided something had to change.
“One of my employees asked about a training workshop, and I decided, ‘We’re going to spend money.’ It’s going to sound crazy, but it changed the energy in the company from depression to possibility.” ACE began investing in worker training seminars and plant maintenance. When the economy turned around, Pitzo figured, they would be ready. At the same time, ACE began adopting the tenets of lean manufacturing, the industrial method famously employed by Toyota (nearly a decade later, ACE would bring in representatives from Toyota to help them fully implement the Toyota Production System). By the mid-2000s, the company had recovered and was growing steadily. A bit of good luck shielded ACE from the worst of the Great Recession—coffee drinkers were switching to single-use pods, and ACE produced the parts used in their manufacture.
Last November ACE expanded its operations, buying an additional plant in Bensenville. Things are looking bright, and Pitzo credits the culture of trust and openness she’s built with the workers at ACE. “Culture is everybody’s job,” she says. “If you have people solving problems and eliminating frustration in their work, your competitors can never catch up.”
