09/18/2026
Homegrown Fabricator Supports Regional and National Biopharma Partners
Consider Johnston County’s most important life sciences companies, and names like Novo Nordisk, BD and Grifols come to mind. True, the three are global biotech titans that employ thousands of workers here. But less conspicuous industry names are also thriving. Now expanding in Smithfield, for example, is Ace Fabrication, a business that has operated at its U.S. 70 Business W. location since 1962.
Michael Prince, President of Ace Fabrication, says his company’s presence in Johnston County pre-dates that of Novo Nordisk, the Danish bio-manufacturer that arrived in Clayton in 1993. “We’ve been here longer than just about anybody,” says Prince, a veteran of the Research Triangle Region’s pharmaceutical sector. Since acquiring the company ten years ago, Prince has grown Ace Fabrication’s workforce from 10 to 30 employees – with more hiring likely as the company triples its real estate footprint and adopts the latest laser- and robotics-rich production technologies.
Ace Fabrication is an end-to-end design, engineering, fabrication and installation company providing custom stainless-steel equipment, architectural products and facility solutions for new construction, expansions and ongoing production needs in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries around the country. “We’ve been working with life sciences companies since our inception,” Prince explains. “About 99 percent of our business is in life sciences. We support all the major manufacturers.”
While the company delivers stainless steel products across the country, its work on behalf of arriving and expanding biotech names in the Triangle has intensified in recent years. “So much of everything that’s going on involves all the new pharma facilities in the RTP area,” says Prince, whose career managing capital projects spans positions at Burroughs-Wellcome & Company (now Thermo Fisher Scientific), Wyeth (now Pfizer) and Biogen.
“This is exactly what a cluster is,” says Ted Abernathy, Founder and Managing Partner of Economic Leadership LLC, a national consulting company based in Raleigh. As a term-of-art in economic development circles, “clusters” refer to both the horizontal and vertical concentration of firms in an industry across a region. Operating in the Triangle, for example, are more than 600 life sciences companies ranging from early-stage university spin-offs to multi-billion-dollar biomanufacturers, collectively employing 42,000 workers, according to the N.C. Biotech Center. “Clusters are about supply-chain concentration,” says Abernathy, who helped guide regional economic development for the Research Triangle Regional Partnership (RTRP) prior to launching Economic Leadership LLC.
In the late 1990s, Harvard Business Professor Michael Porter advanced the cluster-based framework to benchmark regional economic competitiveness. Today, it’s more than an academic abstraction. “There’s never been a time when it’s more important,” Abernathy says. “We’re seeing a trend now that data analytics can provide expanding companies the means to judge places faster and with greater anonymity. And one of the things they judge is supply-chain clusters.”
Along with supply-chains, talent pipelines are another essential ingredient for clusters. Johnston County, for example, super-charged its life sciences cluster in 2004 with the opening of Johnston Community College’s (JCC) JCC Biotech Workforce Development Center in Clayton, customizing a bio-manufacturing training program around the talent needs of Grifols and Novo Nordisk. More recently, JCC’s Advanced Manufacturing Training Facility in Four Oaks is growing a talent pipeline to support defense-oriented manufacturers and other 21st century industries. “Supply chains and training are the keys to competitiveness,” says Abernathy. “It’s like blocking and tackling in football. You’ve got to do it.”
Ace Fabrication offers an up-close-and-personal view of how the Triangle Region’s biotech cluster operates. Ace works directly with big pharma names to deliver stainless steel components, furniture, carts, cabinets and process equipment. But it also works through a network of clean-room integrators who contract with biopharma producers. The Triangle is home to several leading integrators, and Ace maintains ongoing business relationships with them too. A third channel are the engineering firms retained to design, build and renovate life sciences facilities, and the Triangle also has a few. “Our proximity to our customers is important,” says Prince.
As a fabrication shop, Ace sets itself apart from competitors because it uses only stainless steel to avoid the risk of contamination from mixed materials common with other suppliers. “Hardly anyone else has the volume to be exclusively stainless steel,” Prince says. “That’s a key advantage for us.”
As to the importance of talent, Prince says “workforce is number one.” Ace maintains informal relationships with colleges and universities in the region to hire workers with the right skills. “NC State produces a lot of our engineers,” says Prince, who holds a mechanical engineering degree from NC State and an MBA from UNC-Chapel Hill. The company taps JCC’s welding program for some of its staff and has even found Wayne Community College a fertile source of engineering and technical talent.
Ace Fabrication is working with Goldsboro-based Jackson Builders Inc. on its new 33,000-sq.-ft. facility. Prince estimates the company will invest a total of $6.5 million in the site, including the installation of new systems like robotics-driven laser welding equipment. He and his team have not yet decided what to do with its existing 10,000-sq.-ft. facility. Options include leasing some or all of it as renovated office or storage space. “The support we get from the County and the Town is important,” says Prince, who commends Johnston County and the Town of Smithfield for smoothly executing the permitting and approvals necessary for his company’s expansion.
“Every small business is important to us, but Ace Fabrication is a great example of a homegrown local company extending regional and national supply-chain connections in a lucrative global market,” says Chris Johnson, Director of the Johnston County Economic Development Office. “Companies like Ace are important because they support the competitive posture of several of our largest private employers while also anchoring our small business community.” Moreover, the company’s significance in the region’s economic development picture sparks indirect benefits. “As Ace Fabrication supports the growth of the Triangle’s overall life sciences economy, those new jobs and investment dollars can find their way to Johnston County as well.” Johnson says.
Ace’s Prince expects his company’s new facility to be complete by the end of this year, at which point he can turn his attention to additional hiring needs. “When we get into the new facility, we’ll have more room and can start adding to our workforce,” he says. The past decade has been a fruitful one for the company. “We’ve grown revenue by a factor of five over the last 10 years,” Prince says. Making the company’s success even more astounding is the fact that Ace Fabrication operates without a sales or marketing team, relying completely on word of mouth for new clients. “We’re a relationship business,” Prince says. “When we work with a new partner, we rarely ever lose that business – ever.”
The Johnston County Economic Development Office (JCEDO) facilitates value-added interaction between government, education, and the private sector in encouraging and promoting job creation and economic investment in Johnston County. A unit of county government, JCEDO collaborates with local, regional, and statewide partners and allies in providing confidential location assistance to businesses and technical support to the county’s 11 municipalities. Its menu of services includes customized digital mapping, labor and wage analysis, site readiness assistance and incentive packaging.
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