An Interview With Douglas Parker, Circle-Prosco

Douglas Parker is the owner and president of Circle-Prosco (Bloomington, Ind.), a family-owned pretreatment and coating operation celebrating its 50^th year anniversary. Formed by Parker’s father-in-law, Conrad Kuzma, Circle-Prosco started out in the automotive heat exchange industry during a time when the industry was shifting to use a lot of aluminum — which prompted the company’s subsequent growth into stationary HVAC areas. Over the course of its 50 years, Circle-Prosco has become involved in finishing very specific components and also develops and applies coatings for industrial manufacturers. Parker recently took some time to talk with Products Finishing about the company’s approach and its latest endeavors.

Tell us about your core business.

Circle-Prosco got its start providing high-performance pretreatments to automotive heat exchanger manufacturers; we have run hundreds of millions of automotive cooling components through our coating processes. We’ve since expanded to be both a pretreatment supplier and a finisher.

My understanding is that Circle-Prosco offers application services as an extension of its core pretreatments, lubricants and cleaner business. Can you talk a bit about what all you’ve been doing?

We brought in in-house coating for some very specialized areas in 2003 and have grown that extensively, changing our manufacturing footprint quite a bit. We rolled out some of our aluminum pre-treatments and developed them for steel applications and have been growing that pretty aggressively for the last few years.

So, in the steel area, we’re looking at AAMA (in both steel and aluminum for architectural applications, we can meet all five of the AAMA specifications). We have a product that we call Steelcote, which is a zirconium-based, phosphate-free pretreatment with excellent performance characteristics and robustness. This is not typical of some of the zirconium products out there. Most still contain phosphates and don’t quite solve the algae bloom environmental problem. We can get zinc phosphate type performance with a process that has the complexity of an iron phosphate pretreatment.

A larger part of your business centers around automotive, correct? What made you want to move into the construction/agricultural area?

We started looking around for other areas to push our capabilities, which we had developed at that point for 25 years. We had the ability to really run high-volume pretreatment processes, repeatedly, robustly at low cost with high performance. We focus a lot of chemical analytical capability to prove that and we continue to develop it. Basically, we have this technical focus and wanted to allow other people to benefit from it. We saw some other areas that needed some improvement and worked with those processes to show we can do it — and we’re just kind of rolling that out one customer at a time.

What’s been the key to Circle-Prosco’s success these past 50 years?

Our core value is that we succeed when our customers succeed. If we go out and help other people succeed in their goals, our success will follow. That was always my father-in-law Conrad’s guiding philosophy for the business. For example, I’ll send my technical people to help our customers with problems that don’t relate to our products — that’s part of maintaining that relationship.

We continuously reinvent ourselves. Another thing that Conrad always said was, “If we’re doing the same thing five years from now that we're doing now, then we're failing to grow and survive.” We believe in continuous improvement and continuous product development.

How did Circle-Prosco weather the COVID pandemic?

We were able to organize ourselves to stay functional in a safe fashion. When our volumes were off last year — in the second and third quarter — we used that time to advance several engineering projects with some of our customers.

What’s on the horizon for the company?

One of the trends I’m paying attention to is that of alternative fuel vehicles roiling the automotive market. On the automotive cooling side, we have a number of chemical solutions for problems that alternative fuel vehicles present. Basically, there are some process-related issues with engine coolant and manufacturing characteristics that applying pretreatment to the inside of automotive cooling elements solve, and we have some outstanding ways to do that with our process chemistry and also we are applying those coatings ourselves.

And as previously mentioned, environmental improvement with our phosphate-free products is obviously a big initiative for us, especially as the phosphate regulation environmental issue becomes more broadly recognized.