About Twin Angel Welding – Interview with Ownership
This is an in-depth exploration of how and why Twin Angel Welding does the type of work that they do. Twin Angel Welding is not a typical welding shop that specializes in a single type of welding – they seek to build relationships with the community through offering real-world services. Honest work for honest pay. Not just what they get the best return on investment or profit percentage on. Count on Twin Angel Welding to outperform peers, and provide quality work for Iowans – and beyond.
We Believe in Quality
A Highly rated Welding Services Provider Serving Iowa area businesses and individuals

More than 25 years in the business of Welding
An interview with the Owner
This is a transcribed version of an audio interview between the interviewer “B” and Twin Angel Welding’s Representative “JS”. It is likely to ‘read’ as a conversation, and may include colloquialisms and informal structure. We’ve made every effort to stay true to the original conversation, even if it makes the written version a bit harder to read or more inconsistent sounding.
This format is done on purpose; it’s meant to help you get to know the business, the business owner and the types of things they do on a day to day basis. Twin Angel Welding is a metal fabrication and welding shop located in Pella, Iowa, that has been routinely recognized as one of the best small welding businesses in Iowa. Twin Angel Welding is a Cast iron Welding Specialist, and offers full service welding to Iowa area businesses. For certain jobs we may be able to provide crew or welding in other states – depending on the need and contract agreement. Please contact us if you want us to work on a project.
As the company continues to grow, they look forward to continuing to offer premium customer service and value for your dollar if you engage with the company for welding, consulting, fabrication or other metal work. The company is also pioneering a line of ready made products that cater to Iowans and beyond in the safety and risk management sector including products that work to improve fall suppression. Additionally, Twin Angel Welding offers prefab Accessory Dwelling Units, and farm outbuildings, hunting stands, and other “bombproof” tornado shelters, safe rooms, barns, and other products that can be installed modularly and built to improve your ability to use properties of all types, while still maintaining mobility, and the ability to change your configuration.
Below is the First interview with The ownership of Twin Angel Welding, and the following will be available with audio as well in the future, if you prefer to listen to it instead.
B: “You know what I’d like to do is kind of just give me a little background about yourself and talk about kind of the way you approach business and the things that you’re doing the things that you kind of came up through in the welding arts and construction in general because I think sometimes a lot of people look at business owners as people that are really disconnected from the business or as single service operators – people who are like: ‘I’m the only one in this business doing this, and I do it to make a living’, and you know I think there’s no in-between in most people’s minds. Give us a little bit about your background and kind of tell us about how you came to be kind of an all around, you know, broad-depth and breadth type of welder.”
JS: “My background is about as blue collar as it gets. I have been working either construction or welding or a combination of the two since I was fourteen years old, and I’m pushing forty two now. I’d been working just about every kind of construction from roofing, to welding to concrete to framing, and about 15 years ago now, I took a fall off of a 20 foot ladder and that about ended my construction days so I picked up and stuck a little more steady with the welding side of it. To keep both my feet on the ground.”
B: “Were you doing a lot of welding at the time when you were in construction – what? Like metal studs, or?”
Twin Angel Welding: “I wasn’t doing as much welding then, but I had enough practice that I knew what I was doing. And, so I picked up the welder at that point and started working for some local companies and I started to pick it up from guys that had been doing it prior to me you know, guys that had been doing it for twenty, thirty years, and I just soaked up as much knowledge and as much of that information as I possibly could. I just worked my tail off to be the best that I could possibly be.”
“Welding in general, and pretty much any of the trade it’s hard, back-breaking work and you either do it because you love it or do it because you know you have to. Myself: I love what I do, and I do what I love.”
B: “So, tell me a little bit about, because I kind of get this… I think when people look at Iowa as you know, a culture or a people, they do see a hard working set of folks who are really down to earth and I know that about you, that you’re a hardworking guy and that you’re really down to earth.
And it’s really easy to kinda you know, understand the motivations you have – that sorta thing – but take me a little bit through the idea because I think Iowa has a real – because they’re so ag-heavy; agriculturally heavy as far as industry goes. There tends to be a lot of that 4H and R.O.P. kind of mentality where people are going through trade schools generally, and I don’t mean all the trade schools like ITT-Tech, I mean real trade schools like where you would go and you would, you know, learn to weld or where you would go and you would learn to do diesel mechanic work, or where you would go and you’d be raising, you know, hogs, right?
Like, there are some real programs where there is legitimate state funding and otherwise; county funding that sort of thing. How did that factor into your early career or or at least when you got heavily into welding – did any of that stuff kind of come around and help you out as far as you know, initiating the next phase of your welding career when you first got started?
And I want to be clear for everybody that that might be listening or viewing the transcript or however we disseminate this – you’ve been in the business for a while – it’s not like you’re a three or four year old welder right? You’ve got significant experience – you’ve been doing this (Welding in Iowa) for twenty plus, almost thirty plus years at this point.”
Twin Angel Welding: “Yeah, I have. Now, I don’t have any issue or anything against any of the trade programs or schools or anything like that – myself though – that just wasn’t the path that I took. I was always – I was always myself, a hands on learner – So, I thought my best way of learning was it was just to jump straight in and learn as I was doing it, and I was lucky enough – I was one of the few that was able to find a opportunities out there where you know, I had some on the on the job training.
I think that way, I think that is so much more – from my perspective, anyways – I think that is so much more effective. Instead of going and sitting in a classroom for six to eight hours a day…”
B: “Right… theory is great, but if you can’t make a joint welded together that holds together, you’re not gonna be a welder, right? Professional welding actually requires implementation, you know?”
Twin Angel Welding: “Yeah, and shoot, you go to sit in a classroom for six or eight hours and five days a week and they’re still not gonna teach you everything that you’re possibly, you know that you have the possibility of running into in the field. It doesn’t matter if you’re working on an assembly line making the same product and you’re doing it 180 times a day, not all those 180 things you make are going to be the same. You’re gonna run into problems and you have to know how to address those problems on the fly.”
B: “I don’t wanna keep this too long, but I think it’s important for people to understand the genesis of what you do because you service a broad range of people and you do a broad range of services that a lot of welding shops aren’t doing. But when it comes to specialized professional services and you’re talking about real true craftspeople or tradespeople that really have the experience they usually find a sweet spot and they say: “This is all I’m doing from here on out.” Because it’s more profitable.
I think it’s important for those that are trying to understand who you and Twin Angel Welding are, and who you are as a business owner and as a proprietor of that business, that that you’ve chosen a pathway that is it’s not necessarily as profitable as just going and saying: “I’m going to do one thing and really well.” You’re doing a lot of things really well, and you have a broad depth of knowledge as far as across the different fields of the segments or facets of welding, so I kind of want to get into that little bit from the origin story perspective like when you were when you knew you were going to be a welder.
You know, you’ve taken a fall off of a you know twenty foot roof or ladder, or whatever it is right: ‘I’m probably not gonna be doing roofing anymore.’ Did you go down and pick up you know, an old Lincoln or Miller arc welder, all beat to crap, and just start making butt-welds or what – like what were you doing at that point? Was it something that you felt like you needed to train on a bunch of different machines because you have this in-field experience – tell me a little bit about what that was like?”
Twin Angel Welding: “What that origin kind of looks like – I mean is as simple as I can put it: when I took a 20 foot fall off of a ladder; I shattered my left heel and my construction days were over pretty much immediately. But I still had a family to support so I had to find another way to do so.
I had a background in welding – I knew that welding paid well, so I hit the pavement looking for pretty much any welding jobs that I could find. Anyone that had jobs that I could get. But at the same time it was like, this isn’t bringing quite as much money in, as I was before.
So I invested in a small welder and started putting out ads for the service and started doing it in my garage as well.”
B: “And what types of jobs were you generally taking early on, was it like repairing hitches on truck frames or was it like you know, repairing the claws on the bucket of a backhoe – that type of thing, or?”
Twin Angel Welding: “Yeah that is pretty much exactly what it was – a lot of was repairing a lot of things; you know out here we get quite a bit of snow in the wintertime, so I was fixing a lot of people’s broken snow plows, snow blowers lawn mowers, truck frames; pretty much anything that people were needing fixed, and needing it fixed now.”
This Interview will continue as pieces are uploaded here. Future Audio and Transciptions will be posted separately as blog Posts in the About Twin Angel Welding Category of the Blog.