One of the things that has always fascinated me about the used machinery business is the daily assessment of risk and reward in the deals we go into. Every deal for my company Graff-Pinkert is inherently a gamble on the future value of a discarded machine tool. It also is a judgment call on the risk assessment of our competitors who may or may not know about a machine we have interest in. My son Noah calls it a daily treasure hunt. It sounds better than “going to the gambling tables.” I think I understand the risks after being around…
Author: Lloyd Graff
How do you change a loser into a winner? This is a question that has intrigued me for decades as a sports fan and a business owner. I think the question can be refined today to, “how do you change a non-winner into a winner?” or, “how do you transform mediocrity into superior performance?” Winning doesn’t mean a championship, and success in business can be defined as longevity and happiness with performance, even if the owners do not get mega rich. But there is a mindset in sports or business or academia that consistently moves the needle toward success vis…
After reading Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance, I understand why many folks are proclaiming that Elon Musk is one of the greatest visionaries of our lifetime. Much like Steve Jobs did, he envisions products which most of us would think impossible and then finds ways to actually build them. But his ambition is not to invent a clever product or service simply for profit, he wants to create products with the purpose of changing the world. He wants to stop our dependance on fossil fuels. He wants to put a colony…
The machining world is a conservative one, where change comes slowly. In the screw machine arena change often takes a decade to filter through the industry. Today we are seeing a shift that is catching on in conservation of metal, particularly brass. Hot forges produce near net shapes, which are then machined by multiple station rotary transfer machines. This is a method that has come into vogue for fittings manufacturers. The volumes must be high to justify the initial capital investments, but the paybacks are significant from the reduction in scrap turnings from the traditional way of doing things. With…
In May I had the wonderful opportunity to go on vacation in a small paradise in northern Spain called San Sebastián (Dononstia in Basque). When I asked folks from San Sebastián how they felt about their home city they simply beamed. They boasted that the city is the gastronomic capital of the world, it has the most beautiful scenery in the world, has a solid economy, and that its Basque language has no other languages it can trace itself back to, making it the oldest language in all Europe. I’m happy to say the bragging of the San Sebastiáns didn’t…
Old McDonald’s is under siege these days. Demonstrators at the Oakbrook headquarters for $15 per hour minimum wage. Flagging sales. Franchisees are unhappy with the company. The stock is sinking. Burger King, of all competitors, is gaining share with fried chicken french fries advertised by talking roosters. The world doesn’t like McDonald’s at the moment so they fired the last CEO, who had just gotten his feet wet in the job. Do they deserve a break today? I doubt it. I visited a McDonald’s today to buy a biscuit and coffee, something I very rarely do, but I was in…
For a century public education was the channel for students to access knowledge that would enhance their lives in many ways. It was the path to middle class lives for tens of millions, the Americanizer for immigrants, the building block of successful democracy. But today the conventional model of top down primary and high school education is rightfully doubted by many in America. The doubt cuts across race, educational background and economic status. Public education with calcified Boards of Education, unionized teachers, politicized curriculums are doubted. With the doubt comes a determined counterattack from those who currently control most of…
It was refreshing to read about U.S. home prices rising 7.4% over the prices of one year earlier. Of metro areas, 22% showed double digit increases. The median family home price was $205,000 versus $191,000 one year earlier. Homes are selling at an annual rate of 5,000,000. But not where I live. I get to watch the best and worst of times as I observe the moribund market for the large beautiful homes in my village of Olympia Fields, Illinois, and compare it to my daughter’s neighborhood of small 60-year-old homes in Palo Alto, California, the center of Silicon Valley…
Mitch Liss of Edsal Manufacturing, who I interviewed at length for TMW five years ago, is moving his shelving manufacturing company out of Chicago to beautiful Gary, Indiana. I was shocked when I saw the announcement because Liss is a lifelong Chicagoan, whose employees came largely from the city. But Gary provided incentives. Chicago taxes were brutal, and Liss needed room for expansion, which Chicago made prohibitively expensive. If you hit business people in the nose long enough they will eventually walk out of the ring. ****** I spent a lot of time at the recent Columbus PMTS Show talking…
The economic numbers these days indicate a relatively weak first quarter of business in the U.S. The indicators I see in the machine tool business verify this, except automotive still seems strong. The strength of the American dollar and the weakness in oil and gas account for much of the slack in manufacturing. At the recent Precision Machining Technology Show (PMTS) in Columbus, Ohio, I talked with several European machining firms who are searching for business here. Their reasoning is that the shift in the dollar over the last several months gives them the opening they have been waiting for…