Some things come with a label stamped right on the box: handle with care. Nobody has to explain what that means. You slow down. You pay attention. You don’t toss it around like it’s replaceable, because it isn’t.
Troy Fischer never asked anyone to put that label on Liberty Casting. Neither did his co-owners. For decades, they poured everything they had into building Liberty into one of North America’s foremost gray and ductile iron foundries. When it came time to sell, he put into words the emotions they all felt.
“It’s not just an acquisition. It’s our life’s work.”
That’s true for any owner selling a business. The only question is whether the buyer on the other side of the table understands it.
The group agreed to something important early on: no private equity, no investment group. “We want somebody that’s going to run the business the way it’s being run,” Troy said.
And then, as if by chance, one of the owners received an email. A man named Pierre Huot, at a company called Canerector, reached out describing an industrial acquiror that seemed to tick all the boxes. They checked out the website and liked what they saw.
Pierre visited not long after, walking the plant floor with Troy the way you’d expect any buyer to. What Troy didn’t expect was how easy it was. “Some people you just click with,” Troy said. “He did a really good job explaining the company.” Pierre wasn’t selling a pitch. He was describing a philosophy: multiple companies, run independently, with the people who already know the business left in charge of running it. Not an investment group looking to flip an asset. Not a private equity firm counting the months until an exit.
“You could tell the message on the website was true,” Troy said. “Everything since has only confirmed it.”
Finding the right match was the easy part. Ask anyone who’s experienced an acquisition and they’ll tell you: it’s a lot of work.
Handing over reams of information to people who didn’t run the place was a different kind of exposure than Troy was used to. He didn’t love it. But even he was surprised by what came out of it. “I learned things about the business I didn’t know,” he says, things that had happened over the years, things he’d never been directly involved in. It was the hardest he’s ever worked, but worth it.
Because on the other side of that process was a man Troy himself had spent years grooming for exactly this moment: Josh Gary.
Josh joined Liberty as a mechanic in 2014, with no foundry experience and no plan to make a career of it. What he had was a habit of taking things apart to understand how they worked, a habit that started as a kid and never really left him. Within a few months, he was leading other people on the maintenance team. Troy noticed. “We’ve got big plans for you,” he told Josh early on.
Over the next decade, Josh moved through nearly every role at Liberty: maintenance manager, process engineer, plant manager, director of operations. One stretch had him running two jobs at once when a plant manager position opened unexpectedly. It wasn’t fun, but it was the moment he figured out what kind of leader he wanted to be, and what kind he’d seen enough of.
In a previous life, Josh had worked under a culture of “it is what it is,” where micromanagement left little room for people to think for themselves. So, when this job became his, he made a different call: give people ownership and trust them to run with it. It paid off. Turnover at Liberty has stayed very low for five years running.
By 2025, Josh was VP of operations, and successor for Troy. The two had a relationship built over a decade of hard conversations and straight answers. “It’s a relationship I’ve never had anywhere else,” Josh says of Troy.
That trust is really the throughline of Josh’s whole story. When the town hall came announcing Liberty’s acquisition and that Josh was stepping up as GM, the room didn’t have much to react to there. Plant managers were already reporting to him. The people on the floor already trusted him. “We didn’t lose a single person over the transition,” Josh says with pride.
They trusted Josh. Canerector, they’d have to take on faith, especially for anyone who’d already been through an acquisition that hadn’t gone well.
Employees like Demetri Manus had seen firsthand what an acquisition could do to a company. Over his 27 years in the industry, he’d watched cultures he loved erode with each change in ownership. By the time he found his way to Liberty in August 2025, he was burned out and ready for some stability.
Four months later, Troy called him in and told him Liberty had been sold.
“The very first thing that came to mind was, here we go again,” Demetri says. He knew this story. Reassuring words upfront, then the slow erosion of everything that made a place worth working at. Troy told him this would be different, and Demetri trusted him enough to remain optimistic.
What actually convinced him wasn’t a conversation. It was watching. “I’m in sales. I read people,” he says. He watched Josh and Troy through the weeks that followed, and their confidence looked real, not performed.
Nothing changed. Months later, Demetri is still there, still doing the same work, with the same people, and now with the added benefit of Liberty’s expanded network through Canerector’s Foundrion Group. His wife noticed something, too. “You’re still coming home happy,” she told him. ” This isn’t like the last time.”
Three people, three very different vantage points on the same acquisition. An owner who couldn’t imagine handing to just anyone. A successor who inherited more than a title, he inherited a decade of trust. A new hire who’d been burned before and had every reason to brace for it again.
That’s not luck. Amanda Hawkins, Canerector’s CEO and person on the other side of this acquisition, is the third generation of her family to run the company. She didn’t step into a balance sheet. She stepped into a legacy her grandfather built, the same way Troy built his, the same way Josh spent a decade earning his place in it.
“We don’t buy businesses to change them,” Amanda says. “We buy them because someone already figured out how to build something worth protecting. Our job is to make sure that keeps happening, not to get in the way of it.”
That’s the label stamped on every business Canerector buys, even when nobody says it out loud. Handle with care. Slow down. Pay attention. Don’t treat it like it’s replaceable, because to the people who built it, it never was.
A year from now, ask anyone at Liberty Casting what’s changed. The honest answer will still be not much. That’s not the exception to how Canerector does business. It’s the whole point.