An Inside Look at One of Our Portfolio Companies - RemainSafe

Earlier this week, Team RemainSafe , a BlackSmith Ventures company, announced that it had been awarded a major commercial contract in the commercial and community storm shelter industry. This award marks a major turning point in the business and reflects the team's hard work in transitioning the business to a nationwide player in the residential, commercial, and community sectors.

As we enter the Thanksgiving holiday (at least at the time I'm writing this), I think its important to reflect on the journey, the gratitude, and the teamwork that goes into early stage acquisitions and startups.

In January 2021, BlackSmith Ventures completed the acquisition of a company called SteelSafe Shelters - a FEMA compliant decade old storm shelter manufacturer based in north Alabama - which we quickly rebranded RemainSafe. The company was primarily focused on the residential homebuilder market with some commercial and residential jobs over the history of the company. Fun Fact 1: Don't take rebranding a brand that has been in existence for 17 years too lightly. It's freaking hard and takes time, effort, and most important - people who knows what they are doing.

Hurdle number 2 came in May 2021, very soon after the acquisition, and totally unexpected (to us)... Steel prices rose by 215% and availability of raw materials shrunk drastically! This all happened after we came off the companies best sales quarter ever. See, we thought we had the manufacturing part of the business whipped, so we focused all our efforts on growing top line revenue, expanding regionally, and on product innovation. Fun Fact 2: You can't predict the unpredictable. Maybe said another way is we make plans and God laughs. What do you do when you have record sales, but your cost price now exceeds your sales price? We had to get really creative. We had to change the way we thought about manufacturing. We had to rethink the supply chain side of the business. We had to become excellent communicators with our customers, suppliers, and partners.

The third major milestone was bringing manufacturing in-house and hiring the Operational Ninjas that we needed. The business that we acquired had always outsourced manufacturing. This is a very prudent strategy, but we realized that in order to control costs, increase quality, and meet demand, we needed to bring manufacturing of standard products in house. This required a significant investment, but gave us the ability to do our own in house R&D. Fun Fact 3: All this sounds really sexy, but its so hard and I give all the credit to our team for locating a facility, hiring the best in the industry, and putting the foundational bricks to facilitate the growth we project.

As we sit here on November 23, 2022, we feel like we are just getting started. Our goal remains the same as it was day 1 - establish a nationwide brand around making this world a safer, more secure, and more confident #newtomorrow... This week, we got one step closer.

Just know fellow entrepreneur, founder, and inventor that the journey is complex, ever-changing, and certainly uncertain, but if you stay the course and persevere through the hardships, you will prevail.