Tom Ferguson sent the email, went to lunch, and came back to an unexpectedly complicated retirement. He had spent a quarter of a century at Flowserve and its affiliates. He had run major divisions. He had made money for investors. His goodbye should have been a fairly straightforward exercise in professional satisfaction.
Instead, the replies surprised him. In his telling, more than a thousand people wrote back, many expressing pleasure at discovering he was a Christian. People who knew his work had known little about the belief behind it. He found that gap troubling. His retirement announcement had disclosed something he wished he had shared much earlier.
There was another assessment waiting at home. His wife, Maryanne, eventually offered a brisk review of his availability after years of business travel: “Honey, we've been married 25 years, but we've only been together 10.” Her prescription followed: “You need to go find a job.”
Few executive search firms can promise a recommendation quite that persuasive. Ferguson returned to industrial leadership. On November 4, 2013, he became president and chief executive of AZZ, the Fort Worth company whose work includes protecting steel against corrosion. This time, he wanted colleagues to understand more of the person arriving with the title.
A career measured in pumps, seals, and people
Ferguson's working life took shape in industries where the physical details matter. He graduated from Texas A&M in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in industrial distribution, a discipline concerned with getting industrial products and expertise to the people who use them. An advanced executive management certificate from the University of Southern California followed in 1990.
Before joining BW/IP International in 1987, he held management positions in manufacturing and oilfield services. At BW/IP, a predecessor of Flowserve, his assignments included engineering, operations, sales, and marketing. That sequence matters to understanding his later career: he had worked across the functions that must cooperate when an industrial company promises a customer something it actually has to deliver.
By 1997, he was vice president of marketing and technology for the Flow Solutions Division. He went on to lead its North American operation, then the division itself. From 2003 to 2009, he ran Flowserve's Pump Division. From 2010 to 2012, he led the Flow Solutions Group, a business with $3.3 billion in sales.
The titles describe a long apprenticeship in scale. Pumps and mechanical seals are unlikely dinner-party celebrities, yet entire industrial operations depend on their performance. Leading those businesses means living with the consequences of engineering, delivery, and service decisions. A persuasive presentation has a limited useful life when the equipment does not arrive.
Ferguson retired from Flowserve at the end of 2012. In 2013, he served as a consultant and interim chief executive at FlexSteel Pipeline Technologies before joining AZZ. His appointment put an experienced industrial operator into another business tied closely to infrastructure, with a different collection of decisions waiting on the desk.
The considerable business of a thin coating
To understand Ferguson's second act, consider what AZZ does to a piece of fabricated steel. The metal is inspected and cleaned. Alkali removes dirt and organic material; acid pickling removes rust and scale; fluxing prepares the surface. The steel then goes into molten zinc. The coating bonds with the steel and helps protect it against corrosion.
It is a business whose successful product may attract very little attention. People notice a building's shape or a bridge's span. The coating that helps the steel endure has a less theatrical role. Its value becomes easier to appreciate when you consider the inconvenience of replacing the thing beneath it.
AZZ's galvanizing history goes back to 1966, when it built its first plant in Crowley, Texas. The company itself began in Fort Worth in 1956 as Aztec Manufacturing, designing and distributing products for the oilfield industry. Ferguson inherited a business with a substantial past, including operations beyond metal coatings.
Coil coating addresses a different stage of manufacturing. Steel or aluminum arrives in a coil, is unwound, cleaned, treated, coated, cured, and rewound. The coating goes on before the metal is fabricated into a finished product. That makes the process relevant to buildings, appliances, and other goods whose surfaces must look right as well as last.
These two methods gave Ferguson a coherent industrial proposition: serve customers who need protected metal, whether they need it before fabrication or afterward. The connection is simple enough to explain without a corporate diagram containing seventeen arrows. Executing it would require a transaction large enough to change the company.
Different sequences. A shared concern with the surface that customers depend on.
The year he changed the contents of the company
In May 2022, AZZ completed its purchase of Precoat Metals from Sequa for approximately $1.28 billion. Precoat brought an established coil-coating business into the group. The acquisition expanded AZZ's reach along the metal-coating chain, adding protective and decorative treatments applied to steel and aluminum coil.
The size of the purchase made financing and debt reduction central to the undertaking. Growth acquired with borrowed money comes with a calendar attached: the interest bill keeps arriving while the integration proceeds. At announcement, AZZ presented cash generation and deleveraging as important parts of the transaction's rationale.
That September, another decision clarified the direction. AZZ contributed its Infrastructure Solutions segment to a joint venture and sold a 60 percent controlling interest to Fernweh Group. It retained 40 percent. The venture operated as Avail Infrastructure Solutions, while AZZ concentrated more closely on coatings.
In a later interview, Ferguson described a portfolio whose businesses needed different operating environments. He had an established relationship with Fernweh founder Nick Santhanam. The joint venture offered a way to release capital while maintaining an interest in the infrastructure operations. The decision acknowledged that keeping businesses together was itself a choice, with costs.
“It's not going to get better if we just sit here and hope.”Tom Ferguson, discussing AZZ's strategic change
There is something appealingly unceremonious about that sentence. Corporate strategy can become a language for postponing embarrassment. Ferguson's version allows less room for delay. The 2022 moves changed both what AZZ owned and where management would devote its attention. The result could be assessed in plants, cash generation, and debt, rather than the explanation.
The return is still a work in progress
By fiscal 2026, the year ended February 28, 2026, AZZ reported sales of about $1.65 billion, compared with $1.58 billion a year earlier. The combined company had a different shape from the one Ferguson joined. Its continuing operating segments were Metal Coatings and Precoat Metals.
Physical investment accompanied the financial changes. In 2025, Precoat opened a 250,000-square-foot aluminum coil-coating facility in Washington, Missouri. A factory opening gives a strategy an address. It also starts another phase of work: bringing production up, serving customers, and turning the investment into useful capacity.
In July 2026, AZZ acquired Seattle Galvanizing, establishing its first direct Metal Coatings presence in the Pacific Northwest. The deal added two Seattle-area locations and brought the galvanizing network to 43 sites across North America. One location featured a 45-foot kettle, a useful reminder that industrial expansion sometimes comes down to whether a customer's steel will fit.
On October 13, 2026, AZZ reported quarterly sales of $486.9 million, up 16.7 percent from a year earlier. Ferguson pointed to organic growth, the Missouri facility's continued ramp-up, and the Northwest acquisition. The company raised its fiscal 2027 guidance.
The details resist a perfectly smooth success story. Precoat's gains included higher prices and new-facility sales, while some customer markets, including appliances and transportation, had lower volumes. Company-wide GAAP net income declined against a prior-year period affected by a gain connected to Avail. Operating income rose. Those distinctions matter when assessing the business Ferguson and his colleagues now run.
What he wanted the replies to say
Ferguson's interests extend beyond the quarterly reporting cycle. He has served on advisory bodies at Texas A&M and on the board of Lionheart Children's Academy. The university's engineering college lists him among its 2013 Outstanding Alumni honorees. Haggai International, which trains Christian leaders, also lists him as a trustee.
His public account of joining AZZ includes a town hall, a statement about his Christian faith, and a boardroom Bible study. He says employees were told that being Christian was not a requirement for working there. He wanted his own beliefs to be visible and his conduct open to examination.
That is a personal ambition as well as a management question. A leader's stated principles can be compared with the way people experience him. Ferguson describes wanting managers to care about employees' development alongside their results. His account places that responsibility within his faith; shareholders can separately judge the operating record.
The retirement email remains an unusually revealing episode because it caught a senior executive discovering a difference between the career he thought he had communicated and the person his colleagues understood. Years later, he was willing to tell that story in public. For someone accustomed to explaining results, it was an admission that an important message had failed to arrive.
His next chapter has involved acquisitions, divestitures, and a great deal of coated metal. It has also involved trying to make his intentions more legible to the people doing the work. An inbox can deliver an awkward review. Ferguson gave himself another job after reading his.