Forging Ahead: How Five Generations of Small-Town Values Collided with Big Ambitions to Spark One of America’s Fastest-Growing Companies
Matthew Nix, age twenty, yearns to grow Nix Welding, even though his grandfather, father, and aunt are content with the way things are. Small. Status quo. Good enough.
In 1902 in tiny Poseyville, Indiana, Matthew’s grea-great-grandfather opened the blacksmith shop that became Nix Welding. He thwacked a cross peen hammer onto white-hot iron to shape it into submission on an anvil. Nearly 100 years later, despite family pushback, Matthew looks beyond the cornfields that his family thinks confine Nix Welding. He works his own kind of forge, to bend, mold, and expand the business, often finding himself in his own self-stoked fire as a trial-by-error entrepreneur.
Forging Ahead reveals how Matthew, now CEO, and the team he methodically curated leaned on small-town values and faith to transform humble Nix Welding into Nix Industrial, a revered custom manufacturing and industrial repair powerhouse. Today Nix Industrial is one of the fastest growing companies in America.
Author Angie Klink paints a vivid portrait of a business saga from America’s heartland. Forging Ahead is a family tale, a coming-of-age story, a business handbook, and a letter to future generations.
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Angie Klink writes compelling stories of Americana and the hero’s journey. An author of twelve creative nonfiction books set in the heartland, Klink is a historian, biographer, essayist, scriptwriter, and copywriter with sixty-one American Advertising Federation ADDY Awards. She has written for Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History magazine, MS. Magazine, and the American Writers Museum. She was the scriptwriter for two documentaries narrated by actor Peter Coyote: the public education film Rise Above the Mark and Eternal Flame about Tom Kelly, a member of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. In 2024, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution honored Klink for her distinguished contribution to historic preservation, particularly the publishing of books. A six-time attendee of the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop at the University of Dayton, Klink received an Honorable Mention in the Bombeck Writing Competition. She holds a BA in communication from Purdue University.
