Keith Busse, Mark Millett and Richard Teets — Steel Dynamics

incorporated August 1993

Steel Dynamics was founded by three men who had already built one famous mill: Keith E. Busse, Mark D. Millett and Richard P. Teets Jr. were Nucor executives who had put up the Crawfordsville thin-slab minimill — the world's first — and in August 1993 they incorporated their own steel company in Indiana, headquartered in Fort Wayne. About $370 million was raised by September 1993 to build it — some accounts give $400 million, and the Business record carries both — of which $110,000 was the founders' own money. The Butler minimill began commercial operation in January 1996, the company went public the same year, and in October 2007 it bought Fort Wayne's own OmniSource for about $1.1 billion.

Busse was the hometown founder of the three: born and raised in Fort Wayne in a family of modest means, he was accepted into Purdue's engineering school and could not pay for it, so he pumped gas and unloaded tires at a Montgomery Ward service station while earning an accounting degree at International Business College, finished in 1963. A bachelor's degree from St. Francis College followed in 1973 and an MBA from Indiana University's Fort Wayne campus in 1978. He had joined Nucor in 1972 and rose over twenty-one years to vice president and general manager at Crawfordsville, heading the thin-slab project — the SMS agreement signed in 1987, the first cast in the summer of 1989. At Steel Dynamics he was president from 1993 to 2007 and chairman and chief executive from 2007, retiring as chief executive in December 2011 and remaining chairman. He was named Steelmaker of the Year in 2005, and the University of Saint Francis named its business school for him in 2004. He is living, and this entry keeps to the public record.

Millett, British-born and soft-spoken in the trade accounts, took his metallurgy degree at the University of Surrey in England, joined Nucor in 1981 as chief metallurgist at Darlington, South Carolina, and then oversaw the design, construction, staffing and operation of the Crawfordsville melting and casting facility. He succeeded Busse as Steel Dynamics' chief executive on 1 January 2012 and is also its chairman. Teets took a mechanical-engineering degree at Lafayette College in 1977, spent eleven years at J&L Steel and LTV, and joined Nucor in 1987 as engineering manager at Crawfordsville, hired by Busse; he was president of the Association for Iron and Steel Technology in 2006 and retired in 2016 as Steel Dynamics' executive vice president and president and chief operating officer of steel operations. He lives in Butler, Indiana, and his 2014 oral history is held by the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. The company's course is the Business section's.

Sources:

1. Businesses — "Steel Dynamics, Inc." (the August 1993 incorporation, the Crawfordsville background, the financing figures with their $370/$400 million difference, the Butler start and the OmniSource purchase).
2. Purdue University, honorary-degree citation for Keith E. Busse (2006) — the Fort Wayne upbringing, the service-station years and the degrees; the Journal Gazette via the Indianapolis Business Journal (April 2018) — Busse's age and standing.
3. The Association for Iron and Steel Technology and the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley — Teets's 2006 presidency and his 2014 oral history.