Final Thoughts

“For the record:

• I didn’t lay off one person in the entire company
• I sent everyone 65 or over home and paid them
• We didn’t apply for ANY assistance at all!
• I let everyone who wanted to work from home do so and continue to
• We clean and sterilize facilities daily and extra on weekends
• I set up a fund for anyone who needed assistance
• I handed out $1,000 bonuses in late March in the middle of all this [totaled $3 million].”

For the rest of the community, Mr. Zekelman also did the following:

• I bought iPads for local hospitals so people could communicate with loved ones
• I donated tubing for hospital beds
• I personally have funded a cancer research project to the tune of $8.5 million and many millions of dollars elsewhere.

“We did everything and beyond to make sure our teammates and communities were safe, but now we must go forward,” he said.

I agree, it is time to move forward. It was my pleasure to have Barry Zekelman as a guest speaker this past week, and I hope that we will be able to do it again either live or in an online setting.

This Wednesday (June 3) we will have trade attorney Lewis Leibowitz as our guest speaker, and I have promised one of the Zekelman employees that I will ask Mr. Leibowitz some tough questions. That I will do. The SMU Community Chat Webinar is at 11 a.m. ET, and you can register by clicking on this link.

I did get an email from one of our readers who sympathized with the crazy week I was having. My response was, “if you only knew….”

I am on the board of trustees for Hamline University, my alma mater located in St. Paul, Minn. More precisely, it is in the Hamline-Midway portion of the city. The area where on Thursday evening and early Friday morning vandals hiding amongst peaceful protestors looted and burned buildings, one being a pharmacy that had stood one block from the university for 102 years.

The university, which still has students on campus, is safe and secure. The university is one dedicated to educating first-generation students from the culturally diverse communities around the state of Minnesota and the Upper Midwest.

Of course, the university, and me as a member of the board, still must deal with the challenges being created by the pandemic. The ability of students, and their parents, to pay for a private liberal arts education is being squeezed as jobs are disrupted. Students are debating whether it is worth going to college if the education is going to be online. Some are considering taking a “gap” year. Universities around the country are dealing with budget issues as it is difficult to know how many students will show up come the fall.

Hamline, and many colleges around the country, will be making decisions over the next one to two weeks about what a college education will look like as we try to define the “new normal” that will keep students safe, and moving forward.

Then there is our decision to take this year’s SMU Steel Summit Conference to a “virtual” event. An event that is familiar yet foreign at the same time. We have 12 weeks to build a conference experience that is unique, challenging, interactive, beneficial, and entertaining for our virtual attendees, sponsors and exhibitors.

This will be accomplished by putting together a program that keeps your attention, allows for you to interact with the speakers and attendees, and covers a wide variety of topics. Many of the subjects and speakers we will cover will not be found in other webinars being conducted by SMU, CRU or others in the industry.

We are putting together a virtual networking experience that allows virtual attendees to interact with known and unknown attendees and speakers. This will occur within the SMU Virtual Steel Summit Conference hall. When you enter the virtual hall, you will have various options: help desk, auditorium where the presentations will take place, networking lounge, exhibition area and chat rooms. I will be discussing each of these areas in more detail in the coming days and weeks prior to the conference.

We intend to open the hall prior to the beginning of the event where registered attendees will be able to find the names, company names and titles of those who will be in attendance once the conference begins. You will be able to introduce yourself, suggest meetings and meeting times, which can be done as either a “chat” or live Zoom/WebX one-on-one video meeting.

If you would like to learn more, and register for the 2020 SMU Virtual Steel Summit Conference please click here.

It has been exactly two years since I sold Steel Market Update to the CRU Group. For those interested, I have agreed on a new contract with CRU, and will remain with Steel Market Update. I am looking forward to continuing to grow the SMU newsletters, proprietary products, events, workshops and more.

As always, your business is truly appreciated by all of us here at Steel Market Update.

John Packard, President & CEO