Family Ties

Joining forces with his brother, this CEO left law practice behind to focus on new business

Steve Barram
CEO of Integrated Services, Inc.

Steve Barram’s very first job was washing and moving cars at a nearby dealership. But it wasn’t much more than a paycheck for him. “It was merely a job,” Barram said. “I never saw myself in the lube or car wash industry.”

Fast-forward to today and Barram is CEO of Integrated Services, Inc. (ISI), a leading provider of point-of-sale computer software for the fast lube industry.

His path to ISI wasn’t exactly a direct route. In fact, it had more to do with family than anything else.

Since his sophomore year of high school, Barram knew he wanted to be a lawyer. “Law fascinated me,” he said. In Barram’s opinion, lawyers were curious by nature, a trait he had been raised to value and develop. His mother raised her five sons to have inquisitive minds, just as she had. “Mom taught us that asking questions, as long as they were asked with the right attitude, was a very valuable skill to learn,” Barram said. “She lived her entire life that way — up to the day she died, she was asking questions, always learning, stretching her mind.”

After following his passion and obtaining his law degree from Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College, Barram helped his brother Peter (described as the entrepreneurial spirit of the family) incorporate ISI in March 1988. But Barram didn’t stay with the company. “After incorporating him, I put my head back down and focused on my law practice,” Barram said.

A few months later, Peter called again — this time with a request for Barram to fly to Houston to help with a major negotiation. “I went,” Barram said. “That’s how we got our first major national license with an oil company.”

That was the beginning of Barram’s growing involvement with ISI. Before long, he realized he was spending just as much time helping build ISI as he was on his law practice. “I kept volunteering to do whatever Peter needed me to do — write this, do that,” Barram said. “I was spending copious amounts of time to build this business.”

So he left his practice, joined forces with his brother full time, and has been ISI’s CEO ever since.

Part of the draw for Barram was the opportunity to work with his brother. “Peter’s much more entrepreneurial, and he knew the industry,” Barram said.

You’d do well to be well-versed in a few areas if you were in a room with all of the Barram brothers. Together, they cover quite the spectrum: law, politics, religion, education and technology.

Barram’s oldest brother, Dave, served as deputy secretary and chief operating officer of the Commerce Department for the Clinton administration, later being appointed administrator of the General Services Administration by President Clinton. Dan, the second eldest brother, followed in their father’s footsteps. Their father was a pastor, and Dan has been involved in campus ministry for 41 years. Barram’s other brother, Dirk, is the dean of the school of business at George Fox University in Newburg, Ore.

Barram’s parents were always his inspiration. “My dad was a man of few words. But when he spoke, it was well worth listening to,” Barram said. He said his parents lived a life of integrity, which he and his brother, Peter, wanted to make sure was an integral part of the culture at ISI. “Our culture is built on integrity, accessibility and transparency,” said Barram. “We don’t stand on a hierarchy — we either succeed as a team at ISI or we don’t succeed.”

Brewing a Better Business

CEO Trent Walters is a long way from his college internship

Trent Walters had a college internship that would leave many students jealous. As a senior chemical engineering major at The Ohio State University, he worked with the brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch.

“I was fortunate to get an internship doing some water-saving projects and as a brewing intern,” Walters said. “The whole process of seeing how beer is made is fascinating. It’s a huge-scale operation.”

And while he would have loved to start a career working with Anheuser-Busch, family sent him on a different path.

Walters’ father was in the final treatments for lymphoma, so Walters looked to stay closer to home and took a job with Scott’s Miracle Grow as a formulation engineer.

After four years, he moved to Florida to work for Tropicana, but it didn’t take long for him to decide he wanted to strike out on his own. Two years after moving to Florida, he left a well-paying job at Tropicana to get back into the family business.

“I had that itch,” he said. “It’s a feeling inside you. You want to be an entrepreneur, and you want to see your sweat equity in a different light.”

It’s no surprise that Walters wanted to chart his own path. In fact, it’s because his father decided to sell National Pride Equipment (NPE) that he made the jump. “I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get back closer to family and kind of keep this in the family,” Walters said. “I was 5 when my dad bought his first wash. I was brought up in this industry and spent summers working at the washes doing preventative maintenance.”

What he didn’t know at the time was that he was making an entrepreneurial leap just in time to take the company through the great recession.

Observe. Understand. Improve. That’s the simple process Walters set in motion when he purchased NPE in 2007. But, he didn’t get to work through it at a slow pace. “I’m a firm believer in a very simple process when you go into something new,” he said. “But with the economic challenges, we moved very quickly into improve mode.”

Long known as a catalog company, NPE had to change its focus quickly. The company localized its marketing efforts to help cut expenses while working to grow sales and focusing on providing great service.

“We have become more known as a local, good service provider with techs on the road, being available weekends and after hours,” Walters said. “We sort of lost touch with the catalog side and circled the wagons and focused locally.”

Losing touch with its catalog business wasn’t such a bad thing. The company had been losing market share and customers outside of Ohio. By focusing on the local market, NPE began adding equipment offerings and saw sales growth from new product categories. In fact, the last four years have seen double-digit growth in sales.

Now, NPE has purchased Car Wash Super Store and is beginning to grow the catalog business again while maintaining focus on the local. “I had a conversation at The Car Wash Show in 2012 with the general manager Carrie Soule about what synergies there might be,” Walters said. “We didn’t talk again until after the SouthEast Show in 2013, and seven days later we owned Car Wash Super Store.”

Even with all the success Walters has seen with NPE, one would think there must be at least part of him that wants to be a brewmaster. But, he says, he hasn’t bothered to even dabble in home brewing. “I know I can’t make what they can,” Walters said.