Hi Tec Fabrication – welding dreams, seam by seam

Rich Palzewic

Staff

March 24, 2025

STURGEON BAY – Dan Rankin said wanting to run his own business, be independent and get himself out of the corporate world were big parts of his decision to take over Hi Tec Fabrication in Sturgeon Bay last June.

“I had thoughts of owning Hi Tec back in 2022, but it wasn’t quite for sale at the time,” he said. “I kept in touch with the owner, and then around Christmas time 2023, he called me, and we started talking again.”

From there, Rankin said negotiations began in January 2024.

“It took six months to close,” he said. “I went through the SBA (Small Business Association) for funding – I had never been through any of this before. It was a good experience for me to learn the process and say I did it. I’m 39 years old, had worked for a shipyard (at Fincantieri Bay Shipbuilding) and then was buying a rather large company – it was quite the feat for me. One of my biggest accomplishments (in life) was navigating my way through this pretty big purchase.”

More on the business

Rankin and his wife, Ashley, took over ownership of Hi Tec Fabrication – a full-service metal fabricator offering custom and production fabrication – June 28 of last year.

“We’re a light-to-medium fabrication shop,” he said. “I would say 80% of our current business is carbon steel, but we have a lot of capacity in stainless and aluminum as well. In industry terms, we’d be described as a low-volume, high-mixture shop.”

Rankin said Hi Tec specializes in smaller production runs of 20-100 parts.

“We don’t specialize in the 5,000 to 10,000 (part runs) like (other local companies do),” he said. “We’re more of a custom production run shop, but we do have about a half of dozen bigger, primary customers – Cummins, Marine Travelift, My-Jack, McMaster-Carr, Venturetech in Texas, etc. Those are our primary, core customers.”

Aside from those bigger customers, Rankin said Hi Tec does work for “hundreds of others.”

“We do a lot of off-the-street custom jobs,” he said. “We also have a little bit of a retail side, so wood stoves, fire rings – that type of stuff. In my opinion, I think we’re a pretty unique shop.”

Rankin said on the custom/retail side of things, he feels Hi Tec is very reasonable with its prices.

“When we took over last year, in comparing that to now, we are doing maybe four times the amount of over-the-counter sales,” he said. “I’m trying to grow that because in Sturgeon Bay, there’s not a Menard’s. We’ll sell our scrap steel to the public if someone needs a chunk for a project. I think the quality of the product you get here is great compared to what you might get off the internet. It’s all typically welded construction.”

Rankin said he is a mechanical engineer by trade, so he likes helping with that part of the business, too.

“In the last six months, I’ve gone and done several site visits,” he said. “I really like the custom stuff we do – there’s definitely a niche market for it.”

Rankin said Hi Tec recently took on a custom project for an area woman.

“There was a lady with a big flower garden that entered into the woods,” he said. “We built this moon ring for it – an eight-foot tall, big circle you can walk through to get into their garden. We like the artsy stuff, too. It’s fun – every day is a little different and gives us some variety.”

Rankin said his employees appreciate the variety as well.

“Again, because we’re a relatively low-volume company, nothing is monotonous,” he said. “Our workforce is really good and very skilled, and everyone I’ve talked to here likes that. They’re not stuck doing the same job every day.”

Rankin said currently, Hi Tec has 19 employees.

“It’s going to be a slow, steady growth,” he said. “When I took over in June, we had 14 employees, so we went up by five. I think a good number for our facility would be potentially adding another five employees over the next year or 18 months. To do that, I need to grow the work. Right now, we’re keeping up and ahead of schedule with our current crew, but I need to keep ‘feeding’ them.”

Hi Tec has about 67,000 square feet of production space – which Rankin said “provides a lot of opportunity to streamline our process.”

“My short-term goal – whether it’s a year or 18 months – is to buy a bigger and better laser,” he said.

Rankin said Hi Tec’s production space is laid out in four primary areas.

“We’ve got a steel warehouse, our production floor where the fabrication guys are with our current machinery, a glass and paint area and then we’ve got our shipping department,” he said. “The goal would be to move the laser and make the steel warehouse our cutting center. That would open up a lot of production area to the floor. The goal is to maximize and optimize our footprint first.”

Though Rankin said the company is off to a good start since he took over, he wants to make sure things are sustainable before moving too far forward.

“I pride myself on knowing every one of my employees,” he said. “If they need something, they can call me. I like the family aspect of (Hi Tec). It’s honestly my favorite part of owning it. Everybody is working for a common goal.”

A bit of history

Rankin said the history of the business dates back several decades to the Wulf brothers.

“Wulf Brothers is an HVAC company that goes back a long time to Sturgeon Bay,” he said. “They actually were a hardware store. I believe – I don’t know the exact dates… I want to say in the mid-1990s – this started in the back garage of Wulf Brothers. They were doing their sheet metal stuff, and then it spun up from there. The company has done work for a lot of big customers over the years.”

Youth apprenticeships

To develop new talent, Rankin said he is beginning to dabble a little in youth apprenticeships.

“I’ve got two (students) starting this summer,” he said. “If you want local people to stay around, you have to build them up, right? There aren’t 100 people pounding on the door with 20 years of experience. We’ve got to make those people and start somewhere.”

Rankin said he is a good example of what can happen when you put the time in.

“That’s how I ended up at Hi Tec,” he said. “I have a degree in engineering, but I started at the (ship)yard at the bottom and worked my way up through the ranks. It’s all what you want to make of it. When I started at the shipyard, I was lucky because I got to work with a group of guys who started in the 1970s and had 30 or 40 years of experience. They were willing to teach me what I needed to know. When those guys started retiring 15 years ago, now it’s the next generation of workers who need to do the same with the younger people.”

To learn more about Hi Tec Fabrication, visit htfab.com.