Onex, Inc.
How an Employee-Owned Manufacturer Protected Its Culture Through New Leadership & Growth
Client Overview
Onex, Inc. is an industrial furnace and refractory company in Erie, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1966, Onex designs, manufactures, and services industrial furnaces, and roughly half of its work happens inside its customers’ facilities. In 2020, the company became 100% employee-owned through an ESOP, and today it employs about 110 people.
President Patrick Laskey joined Onex in 2020 and stepped into the top role in January 2023 as the founding owners transitioned out. In January 2026, he led Onex through its first acquisition. CultureWise helped Onex define its culture through a customized set of Fundamentals, the specific behaviors behind how the team works.
Why It Matters
When a company is 100% employee-owned, culture isn’t a soft benefit. It’s the operating system for a workforce that owns the outcome. As Onex grew across two Erie locations, took on constant work at customer sites, and prepared for its first acquisition, the culture that once held on its own began to stretch thin. Onex defined its Fundamentals to keep everyone aligned, no matter where they sit or which company they came from.
The Challenge
Onex wasn’t fixing a broken culture. It was protecting one through fast, structural change: new ownership, new leadership, a first acquisition, and a workforce that no longer sat under one roof. The mission and values on the wall weren’t something people could recite, and the recognition that came naturally in one building faded once the team spread across sites.
Leadership needed a consistent way to keep everyone aligned, bring a newly acquired company inside one standard, and give customers the same experience no matter which employee they worked with.
“Something had to bring us together. This was it.”
Onex, Inc.
Patrick Laskey
President
The Solution
Patrick first saw CultureWise when founder David Friedman spoke at his Vistage group. He chose to run the CultureWise system rather than build one himself, after watching a peer try the do-it-yourself version and stall. Onex customized its Fundamentals and rolled them out with CultureWise’s team.
The Fundamentals now run on a weekly rhythm: a Fundamental of the week opens meetings, and peer recognition through the new CultureWise platform reaches employees across every location, giving Onex back the recognition it lost when the team spread out. When Onex made its first acquisition, it rolled the Fundamentals into the new company, extending one shared standard into the integration itself.
The Results
Onex is early in the journey, but the Fundamentals are already doing the work. A workforce spread across two buildings and dozens of customer sites shares one language and one standard again. Customers get the same experience no matter which employee they deal with or where that person sits, and Patrick has a clear way to show new hires what’s expected of them from day one.
The recognition Onex lost when it spread out is back, too. The kudos that used to happen in a Friday huddle now travel across every location through the platform, so a job well done doesn’t go unseen just because the person who did it works off-site. And when Onex made its first acquisition, the Fundamentals gave both teams a shared starting point instead of two sets of unwritten rules.
For a 100% employee-owned company, the payoff runs deeper. When everyone owns a piece of the outcome, the Fundamentals give them a common way to act like it. That’s the culture Patrick’s building on as Onex grows, and it’s why he says you can walk up to anyone at the company and hear the same thing about the work.
Key Outcomes
- One shared language across two locations and job sites
- Fundamentals rolled into the 2026 acquisition from day one
- Peer recognition restored across a distributed team
- A consistent customer experience, whoever the customer reaches
- A hiring and onboarding tool tied to employee ownership
“Literally, just anybody in the organization you can walk up to and ask, hey, what’s been your experience with CultureWise? And you’re gonna hear nothing but fantastic things.”
— Patrick Laskey, PresidentThe Culture You Need
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