Three growing local companies under the flag Nine Ships will soon build a new manufacturing facility on what was once Hammermill Paper Company property, enabling them to double their workforce.
The three co-owners of the company Ryan Martorella, Shaun Seifert, and Fred Teitman walked Erie News Now through their facilities to illustrate their growing problem. Business is too good. They already have close to 100 employees for their growing product lines and services and they need to expand.
“We’ve grown every year since we’ve bought the company and we have no choice but to take this next step, and we’ve very excited for it,” Ryan Martorella said.
Fred Teitman added, “Every year we’ve acquired great customers – consistent customers – we grow with them and they grow with us.”
The Erie County Redevelopment Authority had just the right space for their expansion. It’s a slice of former Hammermill Paper Company property that stretches from East Lake Road to Lake Erie. And the ECRDA provided the grant support for the company to build a new $14-million facility.
“So, I don’t think we would have been able to do this without Tina and her group,” Shaun Seifert said. “For everything that they’re doing on the federal to the state level bringing us, helping us with grant money, this project would probably never exist if it wasn’t for their team.”
Modular Engineering, the first business they purchased in 2017 builds pre-fabricated industrial enclosures to be used as crane cabs, e-houses, and water filtration systems and they’re in demand. At first they were building 10 a year, now production is up to 100 annually. “There is a big demand right now, the data center industry and the power industry is really driving a lot of growth, of a lot of sectors that all play into that main market,” Martorella said. Some are “stick builds,” from the ground up, others are made by modifying new or used shipping containers.
Corporate Glass and ME Construction are suppliers and contractors for commercial construction. That’s good news for those in the construction trades. “We love grabbing the carpenters, electricians, the welders, laborers -pretty much anything in between,” Seifert said.
The combined companies as Nine Ships will be looking for engineers, estimators, and project managers as they expand their pipeline across all three businesses at the historic Hammermill Property which once employed thousands. “And we now get to build on those roots and that foundation that was really important and critical to Erie, and we’ll get to put our roots down on top of this soil and I think it’s going to be a cool story and a lot more to come,” Teitman said.
As for the name Nine Ships, “that was the number of ships in Perry’s fleet when he defeated the British on Lake Erie, so we always joke that we have three companies so we have six more to go,” he added.