Shop Truths, Phrases, Tales; and Outright Lies

[Paul Jones]

TM51,

I wish you the best with finding a company where your talent can be fully utilized and appreciated. The third generation metallizing plant is unique because the odds for a company making it through successfully past the third family generation is not very high.

I know this personally from a good friend whose father started a very successful water pump company but died while he was in college studying mechanical engineering. He came home to help his mother and brother to keep the company running. The sons had work there for many summers but did not know all the details and had to learn fast. Nonetheless, they figured it out, he eventually got his ME degree and the brother a business degree, and turned the company into a tremendous success.

Now the brothers are my age (mid to late sixties) and their kids are taking over running the company. Their kids are all hands-on and worked their way up from sweeping the floors to working all aspects of the company from doing the machining, customer sales, and engineering. The company has a minimum of 18 month backlog on orders and all by word of mouth. I love during shop tours and have been there when testing 100,000+ gallons/minute pumps with 1000 HP+ electric motors and they build ones twice that size. They have a 10 acre lay-down area used to store castings and house the pump test tank (the tank looks like a large and deep swimming pool with lots of horizontal baffles to slow down the return stream of water from the pumps). They gave me a 12"swing gap bed geared head lathe from their maintenance shop because it was the too small for their current maintenance operations and thought I could use it for my hobby machining (I had to acquire all the QCTP and tooling but very appreciative of the lathe which was in great shape). All their pump designs are parametric and can be scale in any size to fit various CNC machining centers where the largest can swing 72" (and it has a couple of conveyor belts to remove the flood of chips). They even added risers to a big swing Mackintosh-Hemphill lathe to further increase its swing. It was one of the lathes used during WWII to re-machine the 16" gun barrels for the Iowa class battleships. However, I think their new large CNC slant bed lathe is taking over the work performed on the Mackintosh-Hemphill lathe. The kids all have ME and business MBA degrees and I they are already taking the company to the next level with world-wide sales. My friend who is in the middle generation knew about other third generation companies failing so they did things right to make sure the kids were involved early on and well prepared to run the company.

Have a great three day weekend,

Paul