In 2009, jobs were scarce. Nathaniel Elder lived in Cobourg, Ontario, and a position had opened up nearby. "It wasn't anything special, I'm afraid," he says now, almost apologetically. "There were not a lot of jobs in 2009, and I happened to live in Cobourg. So the job, it all just kind of lined up."
Seventeen years later, that unremarkable beginning has turned into something else entirely. It's a career that traces the whole arc of a company, from a small, tight-knit handful of people to a brand that's now part of Soluroc's network across the Americas.
When Nathaniel joined, the team was small enough that nobody had just one job. "I played a hand in pretty much every side of it," he says. "Production planning, operations, producing the product, designing it, quoting it, selling it." Today he focuses on technical sales, solutions and custom designs, but the years he spent touching every part of the operation are exactly what let him sell it with authority now.
He remembers the early culture in plain, unromantic terms: a small customer base, a small team, and a habit of figuring things out as they went. "It was very entrepreneurial in the early days," he says. "Do you think we can do this? Yeah, we can do that. Let's just try it and figure out how to make it work." What stuck, he says, wasn't the size of the team, since it's grown a lot since then, but the commitment behind it: "Everybody is very committed to turning out a good product and high customer satisfaction." That mentality, he confirms, came through the Soluroc acquisition fully intact, and it's really the thread that runs through everything else he has to say.
Ask Nathaniel what separates Abreco from the competition, and he doesn't offer up a slogan. He points to a habit instead: designing around the problem actually in front of him, rather than reaching for whatever's already on the shelf.
"We had a strong focus on developing new solutions for customers, as opposed to trying to sell them an existing product," he explains. "That's a big piece of what separated us from the competition, being willing to work with the customer and come up with custom products and one-off applications, instead of force-selling them something off the shelf."
Two projects came up when he thought about what he's proudest of. The first is a long-standing account that's grown into the company's number one custom-design partnership. "What we developed for them required a lot of redesign, a lot of back and forth," he says, the kind of persistence that only pays off when the goal is actually solving the customer's problem, not just closing a sale. The payoff was a product three to four times more reliable, keeping their operations running longer with less downtime.
The second started as an emergency. A newly built mine's equipment was wearing out far faster than expected, a common problem when new builds go in with project budget friendly material, and the team got the call while the customer was in a real bind. They put together a fully custom package and had it shipped within five or six weeks. That kind of speed turned a one-time rescue into a relationship that's still going strong twelve years later.
When Soluroc acquired the company, the natural question was whether that same customer-first instinct, the thing behind both stories above, would survive the transition. Nathaniel's confidence says it has.
If anything, he sees the team as better equipped to deliver on it today. Under Soluroc, a direct sales force now works alongside Abreco's established distribution network, adding more technical depth behind every one of Soluroc's brand lines, while distributors continue to play their part where customers want local stock or representation on the ground. "One of the biggest benefits of the direct sales force is it's a better-trained team," Nathaniel says. "They're able to be more technical with the customer, better represent our product lines." He'd already been watching more customers ask for that kind of direct, technical relationship long before the acquisition, wanting to deal straight with the original manufacturer rather than through a middleman. Under Soluroc, Abreco can now offer either path, whichever actually serves the customer best.
Seventeen years, one acquisition, and a full career's worth of roles later, does he still feel connected to the brand itself? "Yeah, I would say yes," he says. "There's definitely added satisfaction when you see the brand do well, and you create a solution for somebody that's novel for them, and it solves their problem. There's definitely some attachment to that."
Asked what he'd tell someone deciding whether to work with Abreco over another supplier, he didn't lead with a spec sheet. "We have a great team environment that wants to produce successful results," he said. "That would be the biggest pitch." He still works out of the Cobourg office three days a week, close to the plant that started it all, a site that just expanded by more than 16,000 square feet. It's a small, telling detail for someone who's spent seventeen years building this brand from the inside out.
In the end, that's what seventeen years at Abreco really comes down to. Not one big turning point, but the same habit, carried forward by the same people: solve the actual problem in front of you. Now they just have more reach and more support behind them while they do it.