‘Man of Steel’ Helps Make a Difference

Business owner Frank Venegas Jr. is known as the “man of steel” in Southwest Detroit, but he’d rather leave a legacy as a man who did everything he could to improve his community and raise its next generation.

Venegas started Ideal Steel 45 years ago with a dark-blue pickup he made out of a school bus, and today, the business has grown into the Ideal Group, with 15 locations worldwide that employ 700 people and annual revenue of nearly $250 million.

Ideal Group is best known for making goalposts, guardrails, bollard guards and the cylindrical steel posts often seen in drivethrus and parking lots.

Venegas’ come-up story starts with a lucky raffle ticket in 1979 that won him a Cadillac Coupe DeVille. He kept the car for nine days before selling it to start his company. The late Hank Aguirre, an All-Star Tigers pitcher, convinced Venegas to move Ideal Steel to Southwest Detroit by giving him the nickname “Chicken S—”.

“He called me that because I was out in Livingston County, and I wasn’t in Detroit with my people,” Venegas said. “When Hank got bone cancer, that’s when it all changed for me.”

To carry on Aguirre’s vision, Venegas purchased an abandoned plant from General Motors Corp. to house the relocated company starting in 1996. The same year, he became a founding partner of Gang Retirement and Continuing Education and Employment, a program to shift youth from gang life to work life with the Detroit Hispanic Development Corp.

Venegas met with leaders of four gangs. “I asked, what do you want to create peace around here? They said they wanted jobs with opportunity and don’t leave,” he said. “We hired 20 from each gang, and once we got the gangs behind us, we started to get the community behind us.”

In 2008, Ideal Group began a sponsorship to host students from Detroit Cristo Rey High School as part of the company’s work-study program. Six years later, Venegas helped start a robotics team with Detroit Hispanic Development Corp. and a local high school to provide career opportunities for Southwest Detroit youth with engineer volunteers from the Detroit Three automakers.

“The nuns give me faith, the fathers give me faith, but the kids give me more faith than anything,” Venegas said.

Angie Reyes, executive director of the Detroit Hispanic Development Corp., said they refer to Venegas as the padrino — “godfather” in Spanish.

“He was one of the early ones to invest in the community and is one of the few that continues to give back, and it’s because he hasn’t forgotten where he came from.”

His assistant of 33 years, Sylvia Gucken, said she vividly remembered Venegas beaming with joy when he showed her Ideal’s new Southwest Detroit home, even as they passed boarded-up storefronts and burned-out streetlights.

“What people may not know is that Frank measures the metrics,” she said. “He questions how much one program helps and how does it add to the child’s benefit.”

Venegas said underprivileged children, as well as adults, benefit from this guidance: “I remind people about mentoring, and that doesn’t mean a nephew, a niece, someone’s friend or uncle … mentor someone you don’t know, and that makes the biggest difference.”