Almost every shop owner I talk to wants to grow. Far fewer build something that can survive a real downturn. That's the thread running through my whole conversation with Chris Welch of Swissomation, and it's why I wanted him on after we met at Machining on the Summit. Chris runs a high-mix Swiss machining operation, two locations and around 120 spindles, and just about everything he does comes back to one idea: build a business durable enough to ride out whatever the market does next.
We get into the moves that kept him standing when other shops folded. The 2001 telecom crash nearly took him out, and he came out of it refusing to let any single customer pass 20% of sales. He advertises hardest when he's slammed, which is why he was up 35% in 2009 while friends were calling him looking for work. He buys used machines with cash, adds his own live tooling and indexing, and stays out of debt so he never has to lay anyone off. In 29 years, he hasn't.
Chris is a systems guy too. We talk through his sales-based bonus program and why he steers clear of profit-sharing, the twice-daily blueprint checks that make quality everyone's job, the quarantine-and-lot-ticket process running on an ERP he wrote himself, and how a fleet that size lets him slip short-run tech jobs in between the longer ones. He doesn't dodge the hard parts either: the Google AdWords money pit, the rough jump from owner to CEO, the training program he admits he's behind on.
If one line sums up the episode, it's how Chris describes the shops that don't make it: everybody wants to milk the cow, nobody wants to feed it. Watch your debt, save your money, invest in your people, find your niche. Coming from someone who's lived all four, it's worth the hour.
