While many service centers today are striving to diversify their product lines and customer base with an emphasis on boosting value-added revenues, Ranger Steel is sticking steadfast to its mission as a pure distributor of nothing but carbon steel plate.

In fact, the Houston-based company prefers to call itself a “plate center” rather than a service center because of its strategic decision not to provide extensive processing services, which could put it in competition with customers.

“We don’t do anything to the product other than straight-line burn. We elected not to do any of the value-added,” explains Ron Whitley, Ranger Steel president. “We wanted to be distinctly different than a service center, and carve a unique niche in this market.”

Whitley’s father, Roy, founded Ranger Steel in 1958 as a traditional, full-line service center. In 1982, the father-son duo decided to differentiate the company by devoting its entire inventory to carbon steel plate products. Today, Ranger has 70,000 to 80,000 tons of steel plate on-hand at any given time. “I don’t think anyone does plate on the scale that we’ve done it,” Whitley says.

For most of its history, Ranger’s efforts went largely unnoticed. The company had a solid reputation in the Gulf Coast, but otherwise maintained a low profile. The steel shortage of 2004 changed all that. Customers far and wide who were being turned away or put on allocation by mills and service centers found that Ranger had the supply to meet their needs.

“We didn’t turn away a single customer,” Whitley recalls. “Everybody got help at Ranger. We had the inventory to support it.”

Maintaining an abundant inventory is at the core of Ranger’s simple, service-oriented business plan.

Whitley and the management team at his 26-person company decided to build on the bump it received from the tight 2004 market by advertising and marketing Ranger’s capabilities to a national audience.

Since then, the company’s growth has accelerated. In 2006, Ranger Steel shipped 320,000 tons of steel, and expects to increase shipments to 350,000 tons in 2007.

As the company attracted customers from a wider geographic area, it realized the need to expand facilities beyond its Houston headquarters and New Orleans location, which opened in 2002 to serve the shipbuilding and offshore oil rig industries. In June 2006, Ranger opened a satellite warehouse in Tulsa, Okla., complete with its own general manager and sales force. Later this year it plans to open another facility near Mobile, Ala., to better serve the southeastern market.

“We decided to go with satellite facilities, with the inventory at each facility designed for the clientele of that area,” Whitley says. Bringing the steel closer to the customers cuts down on transportation costs, he adds, noting that Ranger uses contract haulers to deliver material rather a truck fleet of its own.

Overall, Ranger sells into more than 30 states, while its subsidiary, Ranger Steel International, sells steel into Canada, Mexico, South America and the Caribbean. “It’s not nationwide, but it’s pretty widespread,” Whitley says.

The company’s customer-base is equally broad, serving the oil field, transportation (truck-trailer and rail car) heavy equipment and farm equipment markets. Service centers make up about 30 percent of its accounts, with original equipment manufacturers covering the rest. But even Ranger’s OEM base is varied, with no customer comprising more than 5 percent of the total business.

“If one industry goes down, we don’t sit here and wring our hands. We’re not crippled. We’ve worked really hard to reach a broad spectrum of industries,” Whitley says.

Ranger’s simple, tightly focused, low-value-added approach to plate sales has yielded strong financial results. Revenues exceeded $260 million last year and are forecast to top $300 million in 2007. Ultimately, Whitley expects Ranger Steel to be a $500 million to $600 million company. So far, it has been profitable in each of its 48 years.

“Losing money is not allowed here,” he adds with a smile.