“For me, reliability is extremely important. My personality is geared towards resolving chaos, yet I live in it every day: things are going to break,” said Aaron Voreis, owner of Weigh and Test Solutions. “I work in a niche business. If it weren’t for customers having problems, we would not have jobs. What I do is fix somebody’s problem.”
After running the industrial scale company for two years, in 2013 Voreis purchased the business from his father Bob who had started the business in 1986. It is the south Texas and northern Mexico distributor for Mettler Toledo, the largest manufacturer of industrial scales. WTS sells, installs and repairs specialized scales at citrus and vegetable packing sheds, at truck inspection stations and scrap metal yards and at refineries and logistics companies.
“Everything we consume has been weighed an average of seven times. Weights and measures are so integral that we don’t even notice,” Voreis explained. Weighing starts with the collection of raw materials and their delivery to the manufacturer who weighs them multiple times and continues through distribution to the final sale. Even machines that meter items such as petroleum are checked against a scale. Vegetables, pharmaceuticals, juices, recyclables and packages all get weighed on WTS equipment.
Voreis was a diesel mechanic in the military and then worked on heavy equipment and with cranes in construction before returning to work with his father. He described himself as methodical. “I like to recreate what the engineer originally intended and improve on it.” He recalled his teenaged friends fixing up hot rods. He, in contrast, concentrated on putting everything back together in order. “Nothing is more fulfilling than finishing something.”
Voreis said as a child he was influenced by Ronald Reagan’s comment about not being the smartest man in the world, but knowing someone who is. “That’s what I operate off of. I don’t want to be the smartest,” but to know how to reach the smartest, the best, person, in any situation.
Voreis is insistent on doing it right the first time. “Nothing is more irritating than going back. No one likes to work with me, because I just can’t leave unless I know no one will have complaints when they come in in the morning.” For a new installed scale, Voreis spent two weeks tracking down a glitch, which turned out to be a factory-installed programming error. “I don’t care how it got broke: let’s fix it. Humans are going to make mistakes. The preventable ones bother me the most.”
“My goal is make a good living doing what we do,” said Voreis, but he turned down a half-million dollar project, because “it would have been a bad application for the customer. I thought about it for a week and had to recommend something else for them. My mindset is so aligned with solving the problem, finding the best solution. When I write quotes, it’s basically a map.”
Voreis creates order from the chaos arriving at his Los Fresnos desk, where antique brass postal weights are probably the only frivolity. WTS projects have included truck scales for TxDOT at the Pharr-Reynosa Bridge inspection station. That six-month project had weigh-in- motion scales with the sensors set in the road to weigh truck traveling at 30 mph. WTS installed the scales at Maverick Terminals at the Port of Brownsville, and they completed the only rail-in-motion scale in deep south Texas. That scale is twelve–and-a-half-feet long and capable of weighing any commodity coming out of the port.
“We’ve got this down to such a science. We have the highest up time of any scale system in the world,” Voreis said. The robust Mettler Toledo truck scales with digital load cells are self-diagnosing and have predictive maintenance, along with a 10-year guarantee on parts and labor. “I’ve never changed a single sensor in over seven years. That’s zero failures with 40 truck scales. We can prove our uptime is higher than anybody else, beyond a shadow of a doubt. Ask any customer that owns one. Other than dirt that gets under scale. I make maintenance calls but no service calls with down time.”
For more information, see wtsscales.com This story by Eileen Mattei appears in the April 2016 edition of Valley Business Report. or call 350-4588.
This story by Eileen Mattei appears in the April 2016 edition of Valley Business Report.