#Kubes furniture how to

#Kubes furniture how to

“I realized there was a large engineering component to the business, but I didn’t even know how to read a blueprint,” Kubes recalls. And as his business took off – it was incorporated as Kubes Steel Limited in 1974 – he looked to Mohawk to furnish him with the necessary skill sets. It was the beginning of a lifelong learning process – one that would see his education at the College continue over the next 20 years as Kubes pushed to get the type of manufacturing contracts he really wanted. He started attending evening classes at Mohawk College, where he completed his high school equivalency. He bought a small shop and set to work, but it didn’t take long for Kubes to realize that his options were limited without a high school diploma. As Kubes would soon learn, it wasn’t the only time things would not unfold according to plan. Those plans never materialized – his Dad stayed on at the plant until he retired at age 58. Kubes envisioned his father retiring from Dofasco some five years down the road and coming to work with him as a business partner. Kubes made plans to grow the home-based venture – known in the early days as K&K Ornamental Iron - into a full-scale company large enough to support both himself and his father on a full-time basis. But his son saw the glint of opportunity, and set his sights on taking the business much further. Dad was a talented artisan who created fireplace screens and fences as a hobby. It was not long before he dropped out of high school, taking a job at Burlington Steel while helping his father to operate a small-scale ornamental iron business from the family garage. He preferred mechanical pursuits and longed to dabble in the business world. His proud parents – a Dofasco millwright and a homemaker – nurtured their son’s obvious academic talents, sending him to Saltfleet High School, where a curriculum of sciences and humanities would groom him for a career in Law or Medicine.īut bored and uninspired, Kubes took little interest in his newfound trajectory. Despite the barriers of language and culture, he completed public school at the top of his class. Born in Bosnia, he immigrated to Stoney Creek at the tender age of eight. Joe Kubes, President of Kubes Steel Ltd., didn’t plan on being a manufacturing maverick at least not at first.