Linzie Venegas, president of Ideal Group in southwest Detroit, was literally born into the family business.
Her father, Frank Venegas Jr., started selling steel beams to homebuilders under the Ideal Steel banner in Livingston County in December 1979. Linzie was born a month later.
By the time she was 7 or 8 years old, she was doing filing and attaching bags of Jelly Belly candy to the homemade flyers her father sent to homebuilders in the tri-county area.
“I’ve literally been working at my dad’s company since I could say the alphabet. That’s when I started filing,” Venegas recalls. “When I was a kid, I’d play Barbies under my dad’s desk, listening to his conversations.”
As president, a role she’s had for 2.5 years, she oversees all of the Ideal Group of companies’ accounting, human resources, administration, and marketing activities. As a partial owner of Ideal Contracting, Ideal Steel, Ideal Shield, Ideal Surplus, Ideal Setech, and Ideal Setech Share the Space, she’s active in developing the strategic direction of each business.
Venegas says she and her brother, Jesse, 18 months her junior, have been preparing for their current positions their entire lives.
“Even though we’re a small business, I never really worked for my dad,” Venegas explains. “He always had me working for someone else in the office. One of those people, Sylvia Gucken, saw some potential in me and taught me how to use Excel and PowerPoint, and I was using them when I was 11 or 12. I was doing mail merges and handling the whole mail system at that time.”
After graduating from Brighton High School, Venegas attended Western Michigan University and Eastern Michigan University, all the while working for Ideal in one capacity or another — learning how to sell house beams, overseeing accounts receivable and accounts payable, handling customer service, and running the sales floor.
“I’ve done almost every job in the office,” she says. “My brother’s trajectory was a little different. He started as a floor sweeper, learned how to be a forklift driver and weld steel beams, and then became a union ironworker.”
Now, Jesse Venegas is president of Ideal Setech and handles the functional manufacturing side of the business.
“My dad’s dream has always been that the business would go to the next generation,” Venegas says. “So, every few years, he’d have us learn a different part of the business. When I was in my early 30s, he started giving me more management responsibility, stretching me. About 10 years ago, when I was in my mid-30s, he started teaching my brother and me how to be owners.”
Venegas says operating a family business can get complicated, with work spilling over into traditional family times.
“Sunday family dinner can sometimes get combined with work talk,” Venegas says. “On the flip side of that, we can be at work and Jesse will get a cute text picture of one of his kids, and we’ll start talking about that.”
Ideal Group currently operates on the site of the former Cadillac Clark Street headquarters, located just south of Michigan Avenue in southwest Detroit. The company moved there in 1996 and has since constructed a new building. Overall, it has 250,000 square feet of manufacturing space.
Venegas’ goals for the future of Ideal Group include expanding the overall business and enhancing community involvement.
“We want to continue to grow the Ideal Group, and find the right opportunities that make sense for the business and for our people,” she says. “We have really great people at Ideal and we want to keep growing and developing our talent and culture.
“I also want to continue to invest in the southwest Detroit community, which is very important to us.”
Venegas says a large percentage of Ideal Group’s philanthropic activity involves Holy Redeemer Church and its grade school, as well as Cristo Rey High School, both of which have been part of the Venegas family for years. She calls the Holy Redeemer campus Ideal’s Corner of Excellence.
Among the projects completed by Ideal Group were a renovation of all of the classrooms, along with adding a hospital classroom, in partnership with Henry Ford Health; a STEM room; and an entrepreneurship class.
Family continues to play a vital role at the Ideal Group, where Frank Venegas still holds the title of company chairman.
“I feel blessed to be able to see my dad every day,” Venegas says. “The whole family gets along really well. My dad has become my greatest mentor, and as I’ve gotten older and he has more trust in my abilities, he’s become even more of a mentor and less of a boss.”
In addition to her college degrees, Venegas graduated from the Harvard Executive Education Training Program and the Executive Training Program at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. She’s also an instructor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business Digital Excellence Program, where she teaches small business owners how to grow their businesses using the fundamentals of digital marketing.
Venegas is a board member of the Michigan Minority Supplier Development Council, Detroit Economic Growth Corp., and PBD Detroit. Additionally, she serves on the Cranbrook Board of Trustees and is a member of the board of governors at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Bloomfield Hills. Closer to home, she works with a variety of southwest Detroit organizations, including Latin Americans for Social and Economic Development Inc. (LA SED), the oldest Hispanic advocacy agency in southeast Michigan.
“The greatest thing about being in business is your employees,” Venegas says. “You have to really love people to be in business. It really is a family.”
