Some businesses have a founding story. HFW Industries has an 80-year one, and it starts in a World War II foundry.
I sat down with Jack Watson, the fourth generation to work in his family's business in Buffalo. HFW does turnkey thermal spray and hard facing, the coating work that keeps power plants, turbines, and other critical infrastructure running. But the throughline of our whole conversation was the journey: how a company gets from a spray gun bought out of the back of a salesman's car to a 70,000 square foot shop still serving customers it first won three generations ago.
Jack's great-grandfather Harold spotted thermal spray as a brand-new technology during the war, and when his boss wouldn't buy in, he bought the equipment himself and sold the service out of his car. His grandfather took over at 26 with the business four weeks from closing. His dad rebuilt half the company when the print cylinder business went to zero. Every generation faced a crisis that could have ended the whole thing, and every generation found the next opportunity.
What carried through all of it is a focus on people. Jack half-jokes that you need a psychology degree to run a shop, and he tells a story about a simple thank you that brought one of his guys to tears. Management by walking around, treating people well, training patiently for years: that's the culture his grandfather built and Jack is protecting as he brings in the next generation.
We also get into why they carry almost no debt, how Jack balances his own hunger to grow against everything the generations before him learned the hard way, and where thermal spray and precision machining are headed with gas turbines and AI driving demand. If you care about building a shop that lasts, this one's worth your time.
