Modernizing California's Industrial Base with Jules Brenner, Founder of Industrial Succession

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Modernizing California's Industrial Base with Jules Brenner, Founder of Industrial Succession

California has 6,000 metal fabrication shops and very few successors to run them. Jules Brenner is on a mission to fix that.

William Fry

Jul 16, 2025

Transcript

Listen now on Spotify or YouTube.

California has 6,000 metal fabrication shops and very few successors to run them. Jules Brenner is on a mission to fix that. Through Industrial Succession, he’s buying and operating metal fabrication shops that serve time-sensitive and highly engineered use cases — from data centers to critical infrastructure.

In this episode, Jules shares what makes the succession problem particularly challenging in California, how they staff and operate metal fabricators, the latest trends in automation and the kinds of sellers he looks to partner with.

Some takeaways:

Most fabs are small owner-operated businesses. Over 6,000 of the 30,000 metal fabricators in the U.S. are based in California. But the vast majority are small shops with the owner still actively operating machinery. Only around 200 of the 6K earn $20M of revenue or more.
RE market impacts succession planning. Over the past few decades, many owners bought the real estate their fab was using. As the e-commerce and media business boomed, their real estate shot up in value. This often means they’re holding an 8-fig piece of land but only a low 7-fig business. In practice, many don’t care to struggle through the succession process and instead elect to close up shop and monetize the real estate.
Want to compete against China? Do the hard thing. Brenner’s shops focus on certified welding, patented products, short lead times, and complex quality requirements. These are areas where U.S. operators can outcompete — even with California labor costs.
Production leads are the hardest roles to hire. The sweet spot is a person who can weld or machine parts while also tracking throughput in spreadsheets and email. Most candidates lean heavily technical or administrative. Few can do both.
Standardized quality certifications make M&A easier. Brenner targets fabs who already comply with AS9100 or ISO standards. These standards create not only cleaner operations, but also make post-close integration smoother. If you buy a fab without them, you risk seeing a lot of headcount churn during the qualification process. Many employees lack the desire or skill to comply with more intense QA requirements.
Customer concentration is the biggest trap for new buyers. Many metal fab businesses serve just a few large customers. Buyers have to perform serious diligence to understand the exact work product being delivered to customers, the lifetime of the customer, and the risk that they go elsewhere for their welding, cutting or fabrication needs.