I met Tim Betts a few weeks ago when he was shopping for a Willemin turn-mill we had for sale. One conversation in and I knew he had to come on Swarfcast.
Tim told me he’s in the drugs business, the guns business, and horse racing, and that actually makes him one of the most heavily regulated businessmen in America. Seriously, he’s a compounding pharmacist, he machines precision rifle parts, and he manufactures race bikes for harness racing around the world. And he’s all in on every one of them.
Interview Highlights
Guns
Tim co-owns Procision Arms with his partner Jason, who runs the shop while Tim runs the office. They spotted a real gap in the market. Small and mid-sized gun builders were getting squeezed by venture capital firms buying up precision rifle component manufacturers, jacking up prices and cutting margins. Tim and Jason built their processes from the ground up to fill that void. Today they’re a full OEM shop producing parts to aerospace tolerances for bolt action hunting rifles. Five-axis machining, horizontal mills, EDM, serious work.
Drugs
Tim has a doctorate in pharmacy and works for a compounding pharmacy in southeastern Pennsylvania. Compounding means making custom medications that either don’t exist commercially or have been abandoned by drug companies as unprofitable. The work is intensely creative. If a a child or animal won’t take a pill, you find another way. Tim’s team once made antibiotics for a rhino who happened to love Rice Krispie treats, so they baked the dose into a full 9×9 pan. They’ve also embedded pills into fish to medicate penguins. It’s a business tightly regulated by the FDA and more manufacturing than most people realize.
Horses
Tim and his brothers grew up in harness racing. Both of their grandfathers trained horses and his brother is a full-time trainer today. Tim also owns a company that manufactures the sulkies, the two-wheeled race bikes the horses pull. They ship them to the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and South America. It’s a genuinely global manufacturing business inside a niche sport most people have never thought about.
When Worlds Collide, Good Things Happen
At first glance, these three worlds have nothing to do with each other. But the overlaps keep showing up. Veterinarians, some of Tim’s core pharmacy customers, turn out to be disproportionately into hunting and shooting, so pharmacy relationships open firearms doors. He met a major firearms customer through the horse world. And the problem-solving mindset carries across all three. As Tim puts it, the trial and error in pharmacy looks a lot like dialing in a new tool path in the shop. “This carrier didn’t really work at the pH it has to be at, so we have to try a different carrier. It’s a lot of the same type of things from a production standpoint.”
His wife says she never knows when he takes a phone call at seven in the evening whether it’s going to be about horses, guns, machining, or pharmacy. Tim just shrugs. “Never a dull moment.”
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