Four Decades of Excellence: An Interview with Our President and Owner, William P. Gillespie

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania (December 10, 2015) - 

For the past 50 years, the Swagelok Pittsburgh | Tri-State Area has provided top quality service and Swagelok components. William (Bill) Gillespie has been a part of the operations for the vast majority of that time. For 40 years, he and his wife Sherry have worked hard to help the company succeed.

Bill spends his days overseeing the broad picture of Swagelok Pittsburgh | Tri-State Area. “My focus is on meeting with and consulting with the floor managers,” he says. “We meet individually on a weekly basis. We generally tend to discuss current events and some coaching issues I can deal with. And, of course, I have semi-regular contact with Swagelok on some bigger-picture initiative items.”

The topics of these meetings and the nature of these initiatives have changed quite a bit over the years, as the approach the company takes has evolved. “Our sales team was made up of highly-motivated individuals who worked more like private contractors. We’ve evolved to more of a process orientation in sales, utilizing multiple layers in our approach. It’s much more of a team approach than the ‘Lone Ranger’ approach of the past.”

Part of this evolution has been sparked by technological advancement. “Sometimes we just laugh. My first 10 to 20 years with Swagelok Pittsburgh, there were no computers, no fax machines, no cell phones,” Bill reminisces. “Everything was done by payphone and handwritten letters. From an efficiency and productivity standpoint, we’ve accelerated light years.”

The rest of this change has come from an unwavering commitment to excellent service. Swagelok Pittsburgh | Tri-State Area offers unparalleled service and training that add value for the customer. “We take our training on the road to our customers, or they actually come here to our facilities. This would be for technical training on installation techniques for our products,” Bill states. These trainings help promote safety, competence, and trust.

“We’re also involved in inventory management services, equipment rental services, and fabrication services. So there are a lot of things that are not product oriented, but service oriented, to help make our customers more competitive in their marketplaces. This has really grown over the last four or five years.”

The results of the company’s growth cannot be denied. “We have a reputation in our local marketplace for quality, integrity, and competence amongst all of our customer base. [Swagelok components] are certainly not the least expensive product on the market, and yet the majority of customers in the Western PA area [who use these components] come to us routinely because of our quality, the product availability, and the technical competence of our indoor and outdoor teams.”

Bill speaks very highly of his team and the work they do, and in recent years they’ve been repaying his praise in kind. “I’m very proud that for the last four years in a row we’ve achieved Best Places to Work Status,” Bill says. Swagelok Pittsburgh | Tri-State Area has been given this honor in the Pittsburgh Business Times by the team themselves. Associates have nominated the company through an anonymous survey on their own volition, and each year the scores they give the company improve.

These associates service a growing range of industries. According to Bill, the biggest customer base has come from the Marcellus Shale industry throughout PA and parts of OH, WV, and MD. “[We work with] mostly the mid-stream processors, the people who take the gas and make other products out of it and process it when it’s out of the ground.” Bill also states that about a third of their business comes from original equipment manufacturers. “We’re very proud of that, because people generally tend to select us to make their products more reliable.”

Some of the industries that helped get Swagelok Pittsburgh off the ground, such as steel, power generation, chemicals, research and development, and heavy manufacturing still play a role as well. But as Pittsburgh becomes more of a service-oriented market, Swagelok Pittsburgh has grown to meet that need.

Bill believe this growth will continue in the future. “We’ll continue to take advantage of process-oriented selling, a team approach. We’ll continue to evolve from [being] not just a component supplier and evolve as more of a service supplier. We’ll become more of a technological resource center, not just a warehouse of pieces and parts. And we’ll continue to take advantage of the growth in technology if it makes us a more productive entity and makes us more responsive to our customers.”