The Industrial CapitalistThe country is building again. Somebody should keep the record.
American industry is in its second surge: plants coming home, pipelines and power being built, shops and fleets and crews growing behind them. The Industrial Capitalist is the record of that rebuilding and of the people doing it, written by people who have signed personally for iron, made payroll in lean years, and sent crews out before dawn.
Why this exists.
Something is happening in this country that the business press has been slow to see. Industry is coming back: manufacturing returning to American soil, energy and power being built at a pace not seen in a generation, and behind all of it a new class of owners, operators, and financiers doing the building. They are chronicled by outsiders, when they are chronicled at all. Analysts write about them from a distance, trade publications write about them for advertisers, and the people who actually build the businesses rarely see themselves in either.
The Industrial Capitalist was started to fix that: a publication that treats the owner of a service company, a rental fleet, or a fabrication shop as the most interesting person in American business, because in this moment they are. We call it the second industrial age, and we intend to keep its record.
It is published from inside a working energy services company. The team behind it runs HydroTech Testing Services and NitroTech Rentals, which put crews and equipment on pipelines and facilities across the United States for hydrostatic testing, nitrogen services, and pigging. That is not a credential we lead with. It is the reason we know what to ask.
We begin with energy, the industry that powers all the others. Manufacturing, infrastructure, defense, and power will follow as new desks open.
Why I started this.
I have spent my working life on pipelines and pads, running crews and equipment for the companies that keep this country supplied. In the last few years I have watched something change. Plants are coming home. Pipe is going in the ground. Shops are hiring. The people making it happen are owners like the ones I work beside every day, and nobody is telling their story the way it deserves to be told, from the inside, with the numbers left in.
So we are going to keep the record ourselves. That is all The Industrial Capitalist is: an honest account of the second industrial age, kept by people who are living it.
Henry Froats Jr.
Founder, and host of The Record
What we publish, and who.
Henry Froats Jr., Director of HydroTech Testing Services and NitroTech Rentals. The voice of The Record.
Reporting, the Journal, and the Assembly are run from the editorial desk, which is independent of partnership conversations and reachable through the contact page.
Reporting, profiles, and perspectives from the pad, filed under four desks: From the Pad, People & Profiles, Land & Capital, and Beyond the Field.
Long-form conversations with the operators and financiers of American energy. Every episode asks the same three questions: the first machine, the number, and truck three.
Quarterly invitation-only salon dinners, an annual off-the-record Summit, and the Energy Fifty, our unranked roll of the year’s most consequential builders.
One email a week: what moved on the pad, who we spoke to, and the number that mattered. No advertising.
How we work.
Five rules, kept in public so that readers can hold us to them.
Principals only
We interview owners, operators, and the capital behind them. Not consultants, vendors, or spokespeople.
No pay to play
No one pays to appear on The Record, at a dinner, or on the Energy Fifty. Each property carries one named partner who underwrites it and has no say in it. Nothing else is for sale.
Off the record is honored
What is said off the record stays there. What is said on the record is edited with care and never distorted.
Numbers are checked
Where a figure matters, we ask to see it. If we cannot verify it, we say so.
Corrections are printed
When we get something wrong, we correct it in the story and note the change. Write to the desk.
Our own interests, disclosed
The publisher operates energy services companies. Where a story touches that business, we say so plainly.
Write to the desk.
Story tips, corrections, guest proposals, and press enquiries all reach the editorial desk through the contact page. Guest proposals for the podcast have their own form, and membership requests go through membership.
The Industrial Capitalist · Established MMXXVI · Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania · industrialcapitalist.com