Rene Millard DeLano scores big with Southern Inspection
Her beginnings in Meade County may have been relatively modest, but her success in the business world has been anything but that. Armed with no firsthand experience but with desire and a good idea, Rene (Millard) DeLano created a company called Southern Inspection, a company with an expected annual growth of $2.5 million per year based in Clanton, Ala. Rene, a 1993 Meade County High School graduate, was a trained LPN when she got the idea to begin an engineering consulting firm and broached it to her husband Frankie, who was working as a welding department supervisor, in the line of business Rene was proposing. “Frankie had worked in and out of the business,” said Rene. “It seemed silly for him to work for someone else when we could work for ourselves.” “I told her she was crazy. It would never work and she wouldn’t get contracts,” said Frankie, a native of Breckinridge County. “But she got contract after contract.” In a nutshell, Southern Inspection works with companies who have hired contractors to build a new plant or retrofit an existing plant, specializing in geothermal power. Southern Inspection represents the customer, inspecting the welds and performing nondestructive testing. “The customer hires us to make sure the building is up to code standard,” said Frankie. These customers (companies) spend millions and sometimes billions on their plants and while inspection represents a small portion of that budget – usually around 5 percent – the customers consider inspection a valued service, because inspection ensures them they are getting the quality they paid for. Southern Inspection employs about a dozen people, including Frankie, engineers, a metallurgist, and several others. The company depends upon the expertise of certified welding inspectors (CWI) and certified welding educators (CWE). There are only about 35,000 CWIs and CWEs in the world, since the training and tests for these positions are fairly intense. “The hardest part is finding a CWI because it’s a very difficult test which covers the areas of welding, joint geometry, X-ray, ultrasound, and metallurgy,” said Frankie. Rene DeLano is now talking about spinning off and starting a scaffolding company for power plants. She’s also thinking about expanding into oil refinery work as well as guided ultrasonics, which she says is the way of the future. “Guided ultrasonics technology was developed in England and is trickling over here,” said Rene. “With only two or three companies currently doing it in the United States, we’d be on the cutting edge.” When asked how she made the jump from nursing to engineering, Rene stated she’d always had an inclination toward engineering. “I took a lot of math in school and was geared toward engineering,” said Rene. “But then my mother died and I went toward nursing.” Speaking of family, the DeLanos are also considering bringing the business to Meade County since their operations can be based just about anywhere. They haven’t decided this for sure, but relocation is a definite possibility. Whatever they decide, there’s little doubt that the future looks bright for Rene and Frankie DeLano. “It goes to show you that anything can be done,” said Frankie, who is obviously very proud of his wife. “It just takes somebody with enough guts to try.”
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By KAREN KENNEDY