A Year After the Iowa Venture Award: A New Plant and a New Product
Looking back at our growth, Metal Wholesale LLC was honored with the prestigious Iowa Venture Award, nominated by our partners at Southern Iowa Electric Cooperative
A year ago, the Iowa Area Development Group and its rural electric cooperative partners presented Metal Wholesale with a 2025 Iowa Venture Award at the Southern Iowa Electric Cooperative annual meeting. It is an award for entrepreneurial vision and community impact — the kind that comes with a nice photo and a paragraph in the local paper.
So it is worth asking the honest question twelve months later: what actually changed?
Two things you can point at. A new plant in Wyoming. And a product that takes us somewhere we have not been before.
The Plant
In July 2026, we held the grand opening of our Cheyenne, Wyoming facility.
At the time of the award, Cheyenne was a construction site and a line in a press release — "an additional facility currently under construction." That is the least interesting version of a fact. The interesting version is that it is now producing, staffed, and shipping.
Cheyenne is our seventh manufacturing location and takes us into a fifth state, alongside Bloomfield and Charles City in Iowa, Hutchinson in Kansas, Linton in Indiana, and Owen and Monroe in Wisconsin.
The logic behind it is the same logic behind every plant we have opened: manufacture closer to the customer. Freight is the quiet tax on this industry. Every mile a panel travels is cost that ends up in a dealer's price and time that ends up in a contractor's schedule. Cheyenne cuts both for the high plains and the mountain west.
The Product
The second thing is LUXR.
LUXR is our metal shingle line, and it is a real departure for us. For eleven years we have made panels — ag panel, post-frame, the products that go on machine sheds and barns and commercial buildings, sold through lumberyards to people who buy roofing the way you buy any other input.
A metal shingle is a different animal. It goes on houses. The person choosing it is a homeowner who is going to look at that roof every day for forty years, who is weighing it against asphalt, and who cares how it sits against their siding and their trim.
That means a different standard. Panels have to be accurate and consistent. LUXR has to be accurate, consistent, and good-looking from the curb — in a way that holds up over decades of UV and thermal cycling without the curling and granule loss that ends an asphalt roof around year seventeen.
We did not get into shingles because the category is trendy. We got into it because after a decade of rollforming, we think we can make one more efficiently and more consistently than the market currently offers. Which is the same reason we do anything.
What a Decade of Compounding Actually Looks Like
Metal Wholesale started in Bloomfield in 2015. Two brothers, a metal roofing operation, and a service area that reached about as far as the surrounding counties.
Eleven years later it is seven manufacturing locations across five states, a dealer network of lumberyards serving 15 states, a logistics arm in Metal Express, and a supply chain division in Coil Spot — all under the Metal Capital umbrella.
None of that was a single leap. It was a decade of decisions that each looked small at the time.
The partnership with Southern Iowa Electric Cooperative, which began the same year the company did, is the clearest example. When the co-op used the USDA Rural Economic Development Loan program to help finance new equipment and two new product lines, it was not a headline event. It was a loan that let a rural manufacturer buy machinery it otherwise would have waited years for.
That equipment came from Australia and Germany — sourced globally, then run in a town of about 2,600 people in southern Iowa. High-volume, and built to be safe for the people operating it. Neither requirement is cheap, and neither was negotiable. Access to patient rural capital is what made it possible to insist on both.
Cheyenne and LUXR are what a loan like that looks like a few years downstream.
The Part That is Harder to Measure
The phrase that came up in the award video was "why not here, why not us."
It sounds like a slogan. In practice it is a hiring position. Every job created in Bloomfield is a job someone did not have to leave the county to take. At the time of the award, 45 people worked at the Bloomfield headquarters, part of a total workforce of 107.
Rural communities lose people the way things usually go wrong: slowly, then all at once. A plant closes, then the school consolidates, then the last grocery store goes. The counter is unglamorous — businesses that decide to grow where they already are instead of relocating to where growth is easier.
We are a Christian-founded company, and the values that show up in how we operate are the ordinary ones. Stewardship: treating equipment, capital, and people as things you are responsible for rather than things you use up. Hard work. Doing what you said you would do. None of that is a differentiator on a marketing page. It is just how you keep dealers for eleven years.
What The Award Actually Changed
Three things, honestly.
It Made Conversations Easier.
Third-party recognition does work that self-description cannot. A lumberyard evaluating a new supplier — or a homeowner evaluating an unfamiliar shingle brand — now has an outside data point.
It Clarified The Standard.
Being nominated by the co-op that has backed you since year one raises the cost of coasting. Greg Proctor and Southern Iowa Electric Cooperative put their name on our behalf. That is a debt of performance.
It Reframed the Growth Question.
The award was for entrepreneurial vision, which sounds like it rewards expansion. It does not, really. It rewards building something durable in a place that needed it.
The mission we stated on camera that night has not moved. We want to be the most efficient metal manufacturing company in the United States. Not the biggest. Not the loudest. The most efficient.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. Chasing size means opening locations and hoping volume follows. Chasing efficiency means asking, at every facility, whether a dealer's order goes out faster and more accurately than it did last quarter. One of those is answerable on a Tuesday morning. The other is a press release.
A new plant in Wyoming and a new product line are the visible version of that.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is the LUXR metal shingle line?
LUXR is a metal shingle product line designed specifically for residential roofing, offering a durable, high-performance alternative to traditional asphalt shingles.
Where is the newest manufacturing plant located?
The seventh manufacturing location opened in Cheyenne, Wyoming to serve customers across the high plains and mountain west regions.
How did Southern Iowa Electric Cooperative support the company's growth?
The cooperative nominated Metal Wholesale for the 2025 Iowa Venture Award and utilized the USDA Rural Economic Development Loan program to help finance new equipment and product lines.
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