A business model that’s based on coming together

HANDS ON: Division manager Jack Blade, foreground, and inside sales representative Jason Normandin are part of the E.J. Prescott team. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY
HANDS ON: Division manager Jack Blade, foreground, and inside sales representative Jason Normandin are part of the E.J. Prescott team. / PBN PHOTO/RUPERT WHITELEY

A variety of materials, chemistry, parts and human expertise must be precisely aligned to make the brass water pipes and valves produced at Red Hed Manufacturing in Lincoln. The pipes are used to carry drinking water from public water mains to faucets around the United States and beyond.

That precision is a result of the intense collaboration among the five sister companies of E.J. Prescott – one of them being Red Hed – and the many suppliers, vendors, distribution professionals, regulators and trade groups that make up the water-works industry.

“Red Hed valves are installed in every public drinking-water system in Rhode Island and Massachusetts,” the company wrote in an award application to Providence Business News.

“What we do affects people more than they understand,” said Jason P. Normandin, marketing representative for the 95-year-old company.

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Public awareness of drinking-water safety may be higher lately because of news from Flint, Mich., about the harmful presence of lead from old pipes in the city’s water supply. Red Hed, in fact, retooled its processes to remove lead from its pipe-making alloy in 2005, Normandin said, nearly a decade ahead of federal mandates.

“Legislation [to remove lead from pipes] was coming on the horizon at that point, and we got out ahead of the curve,” Normandin said.

The ability to revise its metal alloy and remove the lead – a historic and useful element in the pipe-making process because it acts as a lubricant and extends tool life – was itself a product of collaboration between Red Hed and Babs Foundry of Norton, Mass., which makes the brass fittings and valves for Red Hed, using Red Hed’s proprietary molds. “Babs was a big part of the lead-free switch-over,” said Normandin.

The family-owned E.J. Prescott Inc. has 28 offices in nine states, Normandin said. Most create products related to the waterworks industry. One of the five, PEP Transportation, owns and operates a fleet of 18-wheelers for transporting goods.

Prescott purchased Red Hed in 2001. Prescott and Red Hed share use of a building in Lincoln, but Red Hed actually employs only three people. Red Hed relies on Babs Foundry to make the pipes and valves; Commo Sealing of North Providence to create rubber gaskets; Teknicote Inc. of East Providence to apply a Teflon coating; Cumberland Foundry in Cumberland to build a flange; and a Sandusky, Ohio, company to make a special, double-ended screw.

Red Hed’s Lincoln employees machine the parts to specifications, and assemble and test them. The Lincoln staff conducts inspections and machine calibration, and handles hundreds of custom fabrication projects every year.

Normandin said the company’s outreach throughout the waterworks industry in the United States is due partly to its active participation in a wholesale distributor network, which increases its national visibility, and to several trade associations. Those include New England Water Works Association, American Water Works Association and the International Erosion Control Association.

Beyond that, Red Hed offers continuing education classes to anyone in the waterworks industry, “a key component for increasing exports,” the company told PBN. “As far as we are aware, this program is the only federally recognized apprenticeship program in the waterworks industry,” Normandin said. 

The company is now in its ninth year, he said, of offering its Know How classes in all nine states where E.J. Prescott has offices. Sessions cover technical topics of special interest to the waterworks industry, even allowing people to qualify for continuing education credits.

The Know How series also has moved into a secondary specialty: soil-erosion management, of particular interest to the construction industry. Students in these classes include engineers, soil scientists, landscape architects and members of boards of land-use agencies, Normandin said.

He said that the Prescott company, with just three owners, may make it easier for the company to collaborate quickly and smoothly, internally and externally. “I can pick up the phone and get one of the owners on the line at almost any time,” Normandin said. “That’s not as possible in a large company.” •

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