Flowline Alaska of Fairbanks.

• Author: Deisher, Philip
• Position: Company profile

Flowline Alaska of Fairbanks This Interior insulating firm has captured a share of the North Slope's pipe coating trade.

WRAP A LITTLE FIBER-glass and some heat tape around your water pipes, and you call that insulating. Imagine an automated system that insulates pipe from 2 to 60 inches in diameter and 20 to 80 feet in length. Such wraps are the specialty of Flowline Alaska, a Fairbanks-based company serving the petroleum industry.

Pipe is heated, cleaned, insulated with urethane and wrapped in galvanized steel in an operation that is ingenious, efficient and profitable. Rick Schok, the firm's founder, formerly served as vice president of North American operations for H.C. Price. Price was the largest pipe coating firm in the world with operations in the United States and abroad when it was purchased by a Dutch firm and renamed Bredero-Price. (Since then, it's changed hands again and operates as Energy Coatings, a division of Lukens Steel.)

Schok came to Alaska in the 1970s to open Price's pipe coating plant on the North Slope. Seeing no future with Price, he left the company, located an investor in Tulsa, Okla., and set up a pipe coating plant of his own in Fairbanks in 1982.

He acquired a urethane plant formerly occupied by Upjohn and expanded it into an automated pipe coating plant. Schok says his physical plant is worth about $2 million, but adds, "It isn't worth a nickel if no one wants to buy it!"

Also chairman of the board of Denali State Bank, Flowline's owner says running his business takes up most of his time and requires a great deal of attention, keeping him from involvement in other community activities. His business dealings frequently find him more in contact with companies in Los Angeles, Tulsa and Dallas than with those in Fairbanks.

Says Schok, "I think Chamber of Commerce-type organizations try to help the economic development of their community. Hopefully that is one of the things Flowline is doing."

Because his business is construction-related and work often is sporadic, his employee base varies. In December, between 30 and 35 workers were on the payroll. Schok says the company has never operated more than nine months out of the year. "Our employees like that, because we operate mostly in the winter, and they can get summers off or find seasonal construction-related jobs."

Schok believes Flowline enjoys competitive advantages as an Alaskan firm, "not from political considerations, but because we live here and probably...