Two Stream-Flo employees share four decades together
It’s July 3, 1984, and Rick Holowach and Rakesh Chand are both starting their first day at Stream-Flo.
A few months earlier the Edmonton Oilers beat the New York Islanders four games to one to claim their first Stanley Cup and Prince’s “When Doves Cry” is top of the charts.
Fast forward 40 years and Holowach and Chand are side by side in Holowach’s office, recounting how the past four decades at Stream-Flo have gone.
“It’s been an incredible journey,” reflects Holowach. “To see the growth and having worked with so many incredible people and being mentored by a lot of people, it’s been a very truly rewarding experience for me and one that I will treasure for a long, long time.”
For Holowach, his journey began in the warehouse fresh out of NAIT. After a couple of months there he shifted over to Quality Control and then to operating the CNC machines for a few years. His love of numbers got him into the CNC programming side of things and led him to scheduling the CNC department and ultimately assuming the role of CNC Supervisor. Holowach ran that team for a few years before shifting to the Manufacturing Manager role and, after another advancement, he is now the Operations Manager – Manufacturing.
“There’s been a few different steps along the way,” says Holowach modestly. “The heart of it, for me and Rakesh, we worked in the CNC department back in the day for many years together, side by side, and still to this day we’re still involved in the manufacturing world.”
Chand, who had just turned 18-years-old when his Stream-Flo journey began, started off in the sucker rod shop as a part timer before getting hired on full-time with our ATP department.
“Back in the ’80s the company offered, if you wanted to do anything work related, they would pay for the CNC courses introduced at NAIT in I think ’85 and I did mine in ’87,” remembered Chand.
Rakesh Chand, left, and Rick Holowach have been working together at Stream-Flo for 40 years following their anniversary in July, 2024.
A solid CNC career path
The Stream-Flo CNC department, where Chand landed after his schooling at NAIT and remains to this day as a CNC set up operator, which includes daily involvement with CNC programming, fixturing, and tooling, was designed back then to be a place where employees could grow.
“Having held a Lead Hand role for a few years, it has been a desirable destination with a solid career path intentionally laid out for me,” said Chand.
“We would look for employees who had potential to become CNC operators”, explained Holowach. “We encouraged the employees to take the courses at NAIT, upgrade themselves, and at that point we would transfer them over to the CNC department, and we were very successful in doing that.”
A large part of the success both have seen in their 40 years centres around the growth they have experienced along the way, both personally and professionally.
The evolution of Stream-Flo from a smaller company to what it is now, with plant expansions and product lines added along the way, ranks high on the list of achievements for both men, who remember the busy, busy times that created the special bond they share.
Expansions, like this one to the Edmonton plant in 1991, and the growth they brought with them, represent some of the defining achievements for both Holowach and Chand over their four decades with the company.
“We worked together in the trenches, we’ve always worked together and see each other every day, sometimes you’d see each other more than you see your wives,” joked Holowach. “Back in the day we would work long hours Monday to Friday and this included working Saturdays. There were quite a few years there that a lot of us were here more than we were home. By the time you got home you just ate and went to bed because you had to get up the next morning to come in. There were deep commitments back then and maybe that brought a lot of us closer.”
Chand thinks so, nodding his head and saying “oh yeah” as Holowach recounts the hectic days of when everything was manufactured in-house, and all the pressure was on the plant to execute.
“It was always challenging but, in a way, we always made it through,” said Chand.
Some recent challenges the pair have tackled side by side include the few years of COVID, implementing a new ERP system, and, of course, any of those cyclical bust periods our industry is famously known for.
A bedrock built from dedication
Throughout all of them, Holowach says the deep commitment on both sides, from company and employees, has been the bedrock for the four decades of service he and Chand have given to the organization, and which has shone through in its success.
“I think with Stream-Flo we’ve tried to retain everybody as we’ve gone through those ups and downs and tried to focus on the next upturn,” said Holowach. “A lot of those downturns were opportunities for us to reorganize, purchase equipment at discounted prices, do plant expansions, and prepare for the busy times again. We utilized them as opportunities for improvement.”
As Rick and Rakesh weathered the bad and basked in the good, growing all the time, their lives did too.
“When we all worked together on the shop floor, a lot of us were all single, we got married, we had kids, and now all our kids are getting married and gone to school and done whatever,” said Holowach. “We’ve all walked in those same shoes all the way along. The support that we have here in the plant, a lot of that is, both office and shop floor people, it is just a lot of us have been here a long time and it makes things so much more connected in a lot of ways.”
The passage of time, punctuated by Chand and his humor.
“The newer guys that get hired now, if they hear what year we started, they say we weren’t even born that time,” he laughs.
“It’s been a good company to work for and they take care of you, I’ve spent 40 years here so that must say something good,” Chand continued.
While life now, with its smartphones, social media, streaming, and AI moves at a faster pace than it did when the two started, one thing has remained the same since July 3, 1984.
Rick and Rakesh, showing up to the main Stream-Flo plant, working side by side, or, in the case of this story, sitting so.
Though everything, eventually, comes to an end, and while Chand has “a couple of years more” and Holowach is “on the last lap”, it’s been one heck of a ride.
“Life gets better every day from when I started,” says Chand, as he and Holowach share another laugh of the many they’ve enjoyed together.