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52 www.CNC-West.com CNC WEST December 2017 /January 2018 CAD/CAM/CNC Perspective By: Tim Paul Customer Success Manager Fusion360 CAM Tim.Paul@Autodesk.com Instagram: OneEarTim What does it take to grow a machine shop? shop, and his employees. Business Hygiene: When I use the term “business hygiene” I think of how well a company handles the fundamentals of their business. Fundamentals such as customer interactions, business partnerships and their understanding and management of their overall business. Kelly checks all those boxes, and checks them well. When I asked Kelly if there were any single keys to his business growth he replied, “I treat each custom- er like they are my only customer.” It was clear that Kelly saw this point as one of the most important as- pects of his continued growth. As basic and easy as that mantra sounds I think it is easily forgotten and lost as a business grows and traffic increases. When talking to Kelly about many aspects of his business I picked up on a trend. He doesn’t look at his business as a vendor to his customer, but rather a partner to their success. He gave me examples of contacting his customers to discuss DFM (Design For Manufacturability) details that would save them a lot of money and other examples where he would just push forward. He understands the balance of a design change’s overall value vs just making it easier for him to make parts. Kelly also gave me examples of reworking parts that were customer engineering errors, but explaining that sometimes being a good business partner is what is more important. Technical: In my August/September CNC West arti- cle, I compared critical, analytical, and lateral think- ing while also giving a couple examples of how they could fit into a machine shop. Managing the growth of a new machine shop is a great way to flex your thinking skills, and Kelly does a great job of thinking through challenges. One great example of Kelly’s ability to analytically think through challenges is how he has adapted and O ver the many years in my career, I’ve had many opportunities to meet quite a few business owners. From my crumb-snatcher years of watching my Dad and uncle run their fab shop to being a slave to my own lawn mowing business, The Lawn Barber, during my Jr. High years, I’ve always wanted to learn all the little details of what it takes to start and grow a business. I recently caught up with my friend and Autodesk customer, Kelly Johnson, Owner of Precision Manufacturing Company. I met Kelly a few years ago as he was starting a new shop in Rancho Cordova, California. Kelly started his business a few years ago as a one man show in a small shop with one new Haas VF2SS and a new seat of HSM CAM software. Kelly has since grown into a much larger shop with four Haas machines, six employees, and two shifts. With such impressive growth, I couldn’t resist investigating what Kelly has done to grow his shop. I was thinking about interviewing Kelly for this article. Instead I decided it would be best if we just had a discussion like we would have any other day. My hope was to dig deeper into what magic tricks Kel- ly had that lead to his strong growth in what many would consider a very competitive market. I must admit that after a couple hours of talking to Kelly about his business, his customers, his ma- chines, the processes he has in place, and his career history I was a bit disappointed that I had not found the magic bullet for growing a new machine shop. It really comes down to what I probably mislabel as “good business hygiene”, smart tools and processes, and lots and lots of hard work. With that minor disap- pointment, I was happy to find some trends, well-es- tablished principles, and a solid company mantra. In reflecting on my chat with Kelly I broke our conver- sation into three groups that I wanted to talk about here. Business Hygiene, the technical side of his P otos: Precision Manufacturing Company