The Family Behind Pedoc Power Solutions
Pedoc Power Solutions is a family-owned, USA-based manufacturer of stainless steel outdoor power pedestals. We’re headquartered in Mount Prospect, Illinois, and we’ve been in the metal fabrication business for nearly 50 years. But the story of how we got here is less about manufacturing strategy and more about a father, his daughters, and a culture he built that outlasted him.
He Came Here with a Trade and a Work Ethic
Our father, Ulrich “Uli” Marks, immigrated from Germany in the late 1950s. He was a coppersmith by trade and loved the craft. When he arrived in the United States, he found work in metal fabrication — and eventually, quietly and without much fanfare, started his own company out of his home. He wasn’t chasing a grand entrepreneurial vision. He simply saw a customer who couldn’t get the parts he needed and decided to help.
Marcres Metalwerks was officially founded in 1978. The customer he’d gone out of his way to serve in those early days, Scaled-tronics, is still one of our largest customers more than 45 years later. That tells you everything you need to know about how our father ran his business.
He never had a sales team. He never needed one. Word traveled because the work was good and the people behind it were trustworthy. When you called Marcres, someone was going to take care of you.
Growing Up in the Shop
Our father was an advocate for women in manufacturing long before that was a common stance. He didn’t just allow his daughters to be involved — he insisted on it. All four of his daughters worked in the business at one time or another, and for Melinda and Marlene, the shop was simply part of growing up.
As Melinda recalls, “I used to ask him, can you bring some parts home? My friends and I want to work.” He’d bring home parts that needed adhesive pulled off them. They’d spend their summers on it, earning a few cents per piece. It was the kind of childhood that makes the concept of a family business feel completely literal.
When Marlene came into the business after college — she’d studied to be a child psychologist, not a metalworker — our father put her on the machines from day one. His reasoning was straightforward: you can’t quote a job, manage production, or serve a customer well if you don’t understand the work at its core. So Marlene learned. She eventually earned a degree from trade school and became a certified sheet metal modelmaker. She ran equipment, learned tolerances, understood materials. The knowledge she built in those years became the foundation for everything that followed.
When the Business Had to Go On
Our father was sick for several years before he passed in 2005. By the time he died, Marlene had been in the business since 1989 — nearly 16 years working alongside him. The handoff wasn’t sudden or unprepared. He had been teaching her, deliberately and consistently, for a long time.
Still, taking over a company while grieving the person who built it is its own kind of hard. Marlene became president and assumed responsibility for quoting, production management, employees, human resources, and quality systems. Her husband Mike came into the business alongside her, taking on much of the production floor. Together, they kept it going.
The employees already knew Marlene. The customers already knew the family. That continuity mattered. One of the early Marcres employees, Hector, has been with the company for over 40 years. He was 19 years old when he started. That kind of tenure doesn’t happen in a place where people feel like numbers.
Family-Owned Power Pedestal Manufacturer: What Carries Forward
The things that defined Marcres under our father’s leadership are the same things that define Pedoc today: meticulous production standards, a clean and well-organized shop floor, customer service that doesn’t quit, and a genuine investment in the people who do the work. You can see it in the equipment — state-of-the-art laser cutting, CNC punch presses, robotic laser welding — and you can see it in the people who operate that equipment, many of whom have been doing it for decades.
As Marlene puts it: “Customer service is paramount for us. That was what my dad believed in, and to this day, everyone in our company knows this is utmost important — that we satisfy our customers, that good products go out the door. We stand by them. We’re good to people.”
That’s the legacy. It shows up in the product, and it shows up every time someone from our team picks up the phone.
If you’re working on a project that requires reliable outdoor power, we’d welcome the chance to help. Request a quote today and someone from our team will be in touch.