Steel workers at the ArcelorMittal Dofasco steel plant in Hamilton, Ont. Photo by Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press files

My father, Harry Zekelman, suddenly passed away at the age of 68. He left my two brothers, Alan, 23, and Clayton, 17, and me at the age of 19 a few struggling real estate assets and a nearly bankrupt little tube-making operation in the small farming town of Harrow, Ont. We were not prepared to be business owners, but we dug in, took it one day at a time and figured out how to make steel tubing.

Several months thereafter, I was invited to visit our supplier, Dofasco Steel, in Hamilton. We were a tiny customer, maybe buying 200 to 300 tons per month. The tour started at the soaking pits, a huge box structure from which a crane would extract a red-hot glowing block of

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