McElroy Manufacturing buys Broken Arrow Baker Hughes facility

BROKEN ARROW, Okla. — McElroy Manufacturing announced on Wednesday that it purchased the Baker Hughes facility in Broken Arrow to open the company’s fourth campus.

President and CEO Chip McElroy said the company will bring about 100 of its employees from Tulsa to the new facility mid-year in 2024 – which will coincide with the company’s 70th anniversary.

Those 100 Tulsa employees moving to the facility won’t immediately fill the roughly 150 or so jobs that were lost at the Baker Hughes facility in Broken Arrow, but McElroy said he expects growth across all of their campuses.

The Broken Arrow facility will house the sales, marketing, and training operations. It’s that training center, McElroy said, that will bring more customers and industry partners to Broken Arrow.

“Seventy-five percent of our business is domestic, 25% of it is export,” he said, “We host companies from all over the world, as well as the United States, Canada and Mexico for training, for industry events and we’re excited to have this facility be that front door for McElroy.”

That’s good news for Steve Ohman. He owns Stone Mill Barbeque and Steakhouse about a mile down the road.

He said he lost business when Baker Hughes closed most of its operations.

“It affected my business by about 5 percent,” Ohman said, “And you don’t ever know what’s going to happen after that. And I didn’t even know they were leaving.”

McElroy said he plans to hire about 100 new employees over the company’s four campuses within the next three to five years.

That could mean more business for Ohman.

“[That] could mean $45 to $50 a day to $75 [or] $100 a day,” he said, “But that all remains to be seen so I’ll be glad to have them.”

In the 20 years Ohman has owned his business, he said he has seen businesses come and go.

He said every little bit of new business helps.

McElroy said his company is a second generation family-owned business that, like Ohman’s, started as a small business. He said his parents started it in their garage in Tulsa.

The new site in Broken Arrow is part of the company’s strategy to keep all manufacturing operations in the northeast part of Oklahoma.

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