Mark Soucie – Ferroloy

Mark Soucie never set out to run an iron foundry. He set out to do what he had always done — find the gap, size up the risk, and figure out how to make it work. That instinct, sharpened over more than 13 years as a business unit CFO at Koch Industries, led him to a struggling Wichita manufacturer, Ferroloy, in 2017. What happened next was equal parts calculated bet and personal reinvention.

Mark Soucie | Ferroloy | President & Owner

Ferroloy, Inc. is an iron foundry located in Wichita, Kansas, specializing in ductile and gray iron castings. The company provides turnkey cast iron parts to original equipment manufacturers nationwide, offering raw castings and value-added solutions. Its client base spans agricultural machinery, infrastructure, transportation, and industrial equipment — industries that form the backbone of American manufacturing and represent the kind of durable, physical work that does not move offshore easily.

When Soucie first encountered Ferroloy, the company was nearly insolvent, struggling to make payroll with options narrowing fast. Soucie put up cash in the form of a convertible loan up to a 49 percent ownership stake, while planning to serve as a part-time CFO and help stabilize the business. A month later, the owner unexpectedly passed away, and Soucie bought the company outright from the estate. The part-time arrangement was over before it really began. He was now a full-time owner of an iron foundry, a role he had not anticipated but one he was, in many ways, built for.

Forging a path forward

In the early years, Soucie gave his operations team room to run. A seasoned COO with more than four decades in the foundry industry led day-to-day production, and Soucie was careful not to disrupt what was already working. Having seen firsthand at Koch how aggressive integration could alienate the people running a business, he was deliberate about restraint.

“I did not want to let my confidence turn into arrogance,” Soucie says. “The company had years and years of experience.”

He asked questions instead of issuing directives. He studied processes before changing them. When the COO gave his five-year notice upon the sale, Soucie used that window to learn the business from the inside. By the final year of the transition, he was deeply embedded in daily operations and steering the company toward a more structured management approach. That structure now includes weekly quality meetings where leadership reviews process controls and scrap by part number, weekly maintenance sessions to set equipment priorities, biweekly safety reviews, and biweekly high-level leadership gatherings — a disciplined cadence that keeps core metrics from slipping out of view.

Reducing waste, raising margins

One of Soucie’s most persistent focus areas is scrap reduction. In a foundry, scrap reflects variation in the production process. When parameters drift outside acceptable ranges, the risk of producing an off-spec casting increases, and that casting must be remelted — costing time and energy even when the raw material itself is recovered.

Soucie frames scrap in two categories: waste driven by process variation that is too wide, and inefficiencies tied to specific parts, whether in tooling design or in the production steps used for them. Attacking both requires different tools, but the goal is the same. Less waste means higher margins — and as foundries continue to disappear from the American landscape, those margins matter more than ever. Ferroloy already recycles the steel it starts with, sourcing material from salvage yards, melting it down, adding alloys, and pouring molds. It also recycles the sand used to make those molds. But Soucie is clear-eyed about the limits of that recovery: even when material is reused, the cost of failure is real.

A Foundry 4.0 initiative, built around the Ignition SCADA system and integrated with the company’s ERP platform, has helped turn fragmented production data into real-time intelligence. Energy consumption is now actively tracked and managed, allowing the company to avoid costly peak-hour charges while maintaining capacity. The initiative has already pointed toward unlocking significant latent output without adding new equipment.

A commitment to safety

Among Soucie’s most ambitious goals is achieving SHARP certification — a rigorous health and safety designation administered at the state level. No other foundry in the country currently holds it. The program places a company under daily state oversight rather than reactive OSHA inspection, and reaching that standard requires embedding a culture of safety throughout every layer of the organization.

For Soucie, safety and quality reinforce each other in practical terms. A safer environment produces more consistent results. Consistent results reduce scrap. Reduced scrap improves margins. The chain of cause and effect runs through every meeting, every metric, and every hiring decision.

Building the right team

Soucie is candid about the growing pains that came with expansion. Early on, hiring was too loose. If a candidate cleared a basic bar, they were brought on. Quality suffered. Safety suffered. COVID compounded the disruption. Coming out of that period, Soucie overhauled the process entirely. Every new hire now goes through a phone screening, followed by on-site interviews with four members of the leadership team, before a recommendation reaches the hiring manager.

“I really like where we are at right now from a depth perspective, capability, and leadership,” he says. “We’re on solid ground to grow the business.”

The results are concrete. A recent Indeed posting to restart a night shift drew roughly 120 applicants; Ferroloy interviewed close to 20 and hired six. The company covers 70 percent of employee health insurance premiums, 70 percent for dependents, and 50 percent for spouses. Pay has been pushed up in response to the market, and Soucie views that investment as a competitive advantage — one that keeps skilled workers in place and enables sustained improvement in safety and quality.

His larger goal is to double revenue over the next five years. Wichita is a blue-collar city with a deep labor pool, and Soucie believes the talent is there if the company is willing to pay for it and offer a workplace worth staying in.

“I firmly believe that we can double our revenue in the next five years,” he says. “We are in Wichita; we are a blue-collar town. We have a good pool to hire from if we’re willing to pay for that talent.”

He came to Ferroloy planning to be a part-time financial adviser. He ended up as the owner of an iron foundry, accountable for every job on the floor. The responsibility to his employees, he admits, is heavier than he expected.

After earning a degree in accounting from Kansas State University, working through a series of financial roles, and eventually serving as a business unit CFO at Koch Industries, Soucie arrived at Ferroloy with the exact preparation the company needed — even if neither he nor the foundry quite knew it yet.

An old company in an old industry, Ferroloy is now in the hands of someone determined to keep it around for a long time by doing things differently than anyone else is willing to try.