I love to watch the Shark Tank reruns on CNBC. The stories of committed entrepreneurs putting it all on the line in orchestrated mini-dramas in front of the “Sharks” is really quite absorbing. But the one thing I never see on the program is the entrepreneurial manufacturer looking for the backing to buy a Haas Mini Mill or Okuma lathe to start his business. In our machinery business we virtually never see a young man or woman buying a used machine to make fittings for Parker Hannifin or John Deere. I asked Bryan Harvey of Thompson Auctioneers if he sees…
Author: Lloyd Graff
The stats from the PMPA (Precision Machined Parts Association) for August confirmed what I’ve been feeling for the past year. Business is really strong for machined parts manufacturers. It goes pretty much across the board. Automotive, aerospace, medical, even oil and gas and appliance are doing nicely. So is my machinery business that sells to the folks in this section of the manufacturing arena. This presents a new challenge for me. For almost the last 15 years I have been pushing uphill with only a few respites mixed in. The business trend has been mostly negative for American metalworking companies.…
My day inches by. I was busy but a little scatterbrained. I know I had a dozen conversations, but by the end of the day it’s hard to remember who they were with. It is a dot on the calendar of life. Did I waste it? I feel a certain degree of desperation about frittering a day away. I am very aware of the finiteness of my being, but I have found a way to experience my day in a generally positive way. Write about it. I have a chunky black sketch book with creamy blank smooth pages. My pen…
Lloyd and Noah Graff are traveling for a family funeral today, so we’ve scoured the archives for some favorite pieces to re-visit. The Illusion of Security May 2011 Volume 07 Issue 04 What is your “net worth?” I remember my father used to calculate his net worth often and would meticulously record the amount his assets exceeded his liabilities on sheets of paper he kept in an accordion file in his desk at home. When I worked with my Dad we would periodically discuss his net worth. He talked about it with reverence, sometimes in hushed tones, like the figures…
Foxconn’s choice of southern Wisconsin for their first major American manufacturing plant is fascinating to me as someone who has seen the Midwest absolutely battered by Chinese competition for the last 25 years. The days are gone since Foxconn in China slung nets under the windows of the dormitories where its young employees resided to catch the suicidal workers, so depressed after a brutal day of assembling iPhones. Now Foxconn is confident enough of its manufacturing prowess and managerial acumen to stick a giant factory in a Wisconsin cow pasture and recruit its workers from the broken down, bankrupt towns…
About a month ago I stumbled upon a book which continues to change my life every day, The 5 Second Rule: Transform your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage by Mel Robbins. I’ve listened to several self-help books over the years that I found thought provoking and sensible, but none ever changed my life. They sometimes even made me feel down on myself. I felt so overwhelmed by all the advice that I could not get myself to do much of anything they prescribed. Then I found The 5 Second Rule, which did change my life. What is “The 5 Second Rule”?…
I am not a racist. I am not a Racist! I am not a RACIST! I wanted to hire a person to call people in the machining business to prospect for surplus machinery for sale and find potential customers. I decided to place an ad on a local Internet classifieds page mostly used by people looking for a plumber or exchanging muffin recipes. This approach had worked beautifully two months ago in locating a new factory employee whose wife saw our wanted ad an hour after we had placed it. She called, set up an appointment for her husband, and…
Where are your eclipse sunglasses? It isn’t a dumb question because the flimsy, one use only, $2 shades are the stuff of a provocative metaphor for how we live our lives. This issue came up after reading Seth Godin’s pithy short blog this past Tuesday, “The Market for Used Eclipse Sunglasses,” which I will reprise now. “It doesn’t matter how many you have. It doesn’t matter how much you paid for them. It doesn’t matter how long the line was yesterday. The market is gone. It’s a sunk cost. Falling in love with what we have and reminding yourself of…
On Monday, August 14, my wife, Risa, received a Facebook message from a woman named Diana. In 1995 they were both on a commuter train to downtown Chicago when Diana’s 3-week-old daughter Keisha stopped breathing. Even worse, blood was coming out of the baby’s mouth. Risa had recently taken a CPR class at her Tae-Kwan-Doe school. Everybody else on the train seemed paralyzed, but Risa raced to the baby and administered mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. There was no time to think. She had the courage and the knowledge to step up. The train ultimately stopped and the mother and child were helicoptered…
It is rare to read a long article in The Washington Post that delves into the life of a guy who pushes the button on a punch press thousands of times a day. But Chico Harlan did it brilliantly in his feature piece last Saturday. The two-thousand-word article was about more than just Bobby Campbell who works at Tenere Corporation in Dresser, Wisconsin. It was probably the best depiction of the struggle to find capable and reliable factory staff in America 2017 that I have read. I wish I had written it. I talked to The Post’s Chico Harlan on…