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Manufacturing has shrunk as a driving force in the American economy, but the companies that remain—especially here—are tough, resourceful, inventive and looking at a sunny future.
Dan Smith
Manufacturing covers a lot of ground in the Roanoke Valley. It includes everything from building big metal things to brewing beer, from publishing magazines and newspapers to making clothes and cosmetics, from constructing homes and businesses to myriad other undertakings.
The Roanoke Valley’s manufacturing community has, generally, toiled mostly under the radar, with companies wildly different in every way creating goods, jobs and wealth for our community, the state, nation and world.
Following is a look at a few good ones: solid companies that grow annually and contribute to the quality of life in the Roanoke Valley.
Clark Brothers Welding
David Clark calls himself “a natural entrepreneur” for good reason. Clark learned the basics of welding, which would become his vocation, while working on his family’s farm in Iron Gate. After high school in 1998, he opened a one-man welding shop in a 900-square-foot building and he was off.
He moved into a larger building in Covington in 2008 and bought the assets of Roanoke Welding in 2013—hiring its workers and growing from 4 to 11 employees. His working space grew to 46,000 square feet. He’s at 17 full-time employees at Clark Brothers Welding in the Norwich section of Roanoke now and is looking at steady—if unspectacular—growth over the years.
“I’d love to do 50 to 80 percent growth a year,” he says, “but that’s unrealistic and unsustainable. We’ve had an average of about 25-32 percent a year and even that can be daunting.”
His business has evolved from small welding jobs to big contracts with electrical companies, transformer manufacturers and the like, repairing and making heavy equipment. His company even designs parts upon occasion and it still accommodates small jobs.
Success is a matter, he says, of going out and rustling up business. “When I go out,” he says, “I come back with something. It may not be a big or long contract, but it is basic. I’m convinced there’s opportunities for manufacturing out there.”
While this was going on, Clark took note of his lack of formal education and enrolled at Dabney Lancaster Community College in Alleghany County, then with the move to Roanoke, shifted to Virginia Western. He earned his associate’s degree in five years and transferred to Virginia Tech, where he won his bachelor’s in business administration in 2005.
In 2010, he hired Laurel, his wife of 17 years away from her natural profession (dietitian at hospitals) as his bookkeeper and his younger brother, Chad, who was driving a truck, as his purchasing manager. The 39-year-old is the father of a boy and a girl, 12 and 4.
SynCom Electronics Corporation
The building on Campbell Avenue in the heart of downtown Roanoke is big, rambling and almost totally anonymous. It became the first factory downtown in many years when new owners Scott Rice and Chris Gray asked for a rezoning after buying it in 1998 in order to put their four-year-old company in a better place to succeed. The city’s center had been factory-free since the middle of the 20th century.
There are 16,000 square feet on five floors in the building and it is apparent that an interior designer was not among the workers hired to get it up to speed. There’s a sign outside, but it’s low-profile, and the front and back doors stay closed and locked. That’s not so much for secrecy as it is for privacy. There’s work going on inside; technical, careful work; essential work. SynCom makes wiring harnesses for industry, the military, aerospace and commercial purposes. The high-tech wiring—some of it goes into fighter planes and Navy ships, for example—is put together by hand by SynCom trained technicians, which is distinctly low-tech. The work is so specific that there’s no training for it outside, so employees (22 of them now) are handpicked and taught.
Rice, 49, and Gray, 60, worked together doing pretty much the same things in North Carolina until they determined they could do the job better, more efficiently and more profitably. They started their own company and found a level of success almost immediately. In recent years, says Rice, a native Roanoker, growth has been a steady 30 percent a year.
Gray, a Canadian, says the company doesn’t have a sales force (it had one once, but the sales people kept getting orders wrong), so there is a reliance on face-to-face interaction with potential clients. “The work is highly technical and complex,” says Scott, “and sales people don’t understand it.” When “we interface with customers, they are very receptive. Rarely do we pitch and not sell.”
Like so many small manufacturers, SynCom is laser-focused with its products. In the past, it has even helped a company develop a product that was to be produced in China.
“We made the first million,” says Rice, “before manufacturing went overseas.” The idea, he insists, is to do what the client wants. “We’re here to support them.”
Some of the assemblies “take two or three days to build and we might do 65, rather than the thousands that would be made” in a high-volume shop. Obviously, the unit cost can be quite high.
SynCom takes considerable satisfaction in being clean and environmentally friendly, recycling all of its industrial waste (some of it gold and copper).
The co-owners are both married and each has two children.
Butler Parachute Systems Group
Manley Butler places the age of his business precisely at “37 years and two wives” making him 27 when it began manufacturing.
Butler began parachuting in 1973 “while chasing a girl” to the New River Airport in Dublin, the region’s only drop zone. He joined the Navy in the early ‘70s, and became a combat air crewman. He earned a BS (1980) in aeronautical engineering from the University of Texas through the Naval Enlisted Scientific Education Program.
While in Austin, he started Butler Parachute Systems as a part-time venture. While living in California, he went full-time with the business in 1988, before moving the company to Roanoke in 1995. Through most of his years away from Roanoke, his father, Caldwell Butler, served as a 6th District Congressman (and was a star in the Watergate hearings).
Butler operates in an old blue industrial building in Northwest Roanoke, a building that began as a bowling alley in 1964. He bought the building and spent six months renovating it before moving in. It is a huge, rambling 24,000 square-foot facility now, one that accommodates cutting and sewing the parachutes, as well as machine and wood workshops. Some of the specialized equipment in the building was built by Butler employees, most of whom have been trained on the job.
Butler has 31 employees in Roanoke now and, he says, sales have been rolling at a near record level recently. In fact, 2015 was a high-water mark and 2016 was solid. The business doesn’t always run at those levels, though. “It’s a roller-coaster sometimes,” Butler says.
His customers range from individuals who might own a P-38 fighter plane from World War II (“rich guys who fly $3 million planes and who have the money to buy and fly an expensive toy”), to individuals “with $30,000 airplanes on the low end,” to the military in a range of countries. Their parachute needs vary from those costing $240 (a 12-footer used to land goods) to about $30,000. Butler does not sell sport parachutes, concentrating on equipment for emergencies, private planes, unmanned vehicles and specialized test flight airplanes.
Butler has no official sales team, but several employees have primary jobs and also do sales and technical support. The training for very specialized positions and equipment is one of the difficult challenges of the business, says Butler. Butler Parachutes sell worldwide and the company, one of the very few doing what it does, is quite well known in places like the famous Paris Air Show.
Mechanical Development Company Inc.
In 1950, level-headed Paul Powell and “eccentric genius” Roy Spain had that classic combination of circumstances that lead entrepreneurs into business: an idea and an open basement. They shared the idea and Spain had the basement. Pretty soon the basement gave way to a 600-square-foot building, then multiple expansions in the 1960s and ultimately to the 45,000-square foot space that MCDI occupies in Salem today.
The idea was to start a custom machine shop that led to a spin-off—Medeco Locks, which was sold in the 1980s. More recently, MDCI spun off a small sister shop next door, which has one customer. The company is now run by a second generation of Powells with a third generation (John Powell and JP Jr.) waiting in the wings. The eccentric genius (JP Jr.’s description) sold out long ago.
Today, MDCI is a buzzing factory with millions of dollars worth of machinery-making machinery inside and 25 highly-skilled employees running them (some as many as three machines). That number is significantly down from the 120 workers of the 1970s, but not for the reasons you might expect: automation has cost employee numbers, but promoted intense efficiency. Mechanical Development sells its expertise to a wide range of customers, most of whom do not have machine shops because it would not be cost effective to do that in-house.
Some of the operators, says John Jr., are in their 60s in a profession that has been called “dying” for years. John Jr. notes the recent retirement of legendary machinist Bob Cole at 80. MDCI trains its operators because the work is specialized, but occasionally a local trade school (Danville Tech, for example) will send a dandy over, as it did recently. He still had to be trained specifically, but his foundation was solid, says the junior Powell.
MDCI has “35 to 50 regular customers,” says Powell Jr., few of them with a lot of work to do, but there is enough work consistently for the company to have seen considerable growth in recent years, says Powell Sr.
The younger Powell was asked a few years ago to join the company (he’d “grown up in the back shop,” when his uncle Walter Daniel was in the management mix, but had earned a law degree and had just started practice). He replaced Walter’s son, Lin, who died at 47. Powell Sr., 61, took over the company in 2007, having worked there since 1982. The law degree, says John Jr., who is 36, “helps any business. It requires a strong basis in critical thinking.”
MDCI has had to evolve over the years and John Sr. notes a time when “there was an auction about every week of a machine shop going down the tubes.” But the company found a niche, bought machines, produced with great efficiency and thrived. John Sr. says the intention is and always has been “to remain a small, family business,” and yes, both Powells can run the machines.
The challenge is still finding good employees when they are needed. John Sr. insists “we pay better than the average lawyer” earns, but students tend to avoid trade schools because of the image. “Until recently, training in this area [of Virginia] was not good.” That seems to be changing and that’s good for MDCI.
Optical Cable Corporation
OCC has been such a pillar of strength and corporate virtue in this region for the past 15 years, so it is easy to forget what a hot mess it was in 2001 when the board finally had enough and fired founder and CEO Bob Kopstein, an eccentric genius if ever there was one.
The company came through that near-fatal stock problem pretty severely bruised, but with enough good sense to hire Neil Wilkin as its knight in shining armor. Wilkin produced spectacularly and rapidly and today OCC has become one of the most respected manufacturing companies in the region, easily moving from production of fiber optic cables to its international position engineering and making a comprehensive line of high-end cable and connection products that involve more than just fiber optics.
Kopstein, one of 25 brilliant engineers let go by ITT in Roanoke in the early 1980s when it closed its fiber optics business (a great story of initiative for these engineers), founded the company in 1983 and produced sturdy, light, tough fiber optic cable that was transmitting huge amounts of data—for that time—especially for the military. That cable helped in the evolution of the industry. After Kopstein’s misadventures, OCC had to hustle to re-take its industry position and hustle Wilkin and his teammates did.
By 2009, they added plants in Asheville, North Carolina and Plano, Texas, and their employment grew from 200 to 350 (210 of those in Roanoke). Wilkin talks about OCC as a “small company with a big footprint.” He stresses OCC “is in the top four fiber optics companies in North America” and “some say that should be the top two.”
OCC, which is publicly traded via NASDAQ, doesn’t “generally sell to the [big data] carriers,” says Wilkin, concentrating on mining, oil and gas industries, broadcast, harsh environment and “specialty markets” in more than 70 countries. Innovation “is part of a continuum,” says Wilkin, made necessary by an ever-changing industry.
OCC, says Wilkin, is in the advantageous position of not “seeing a lot of foreign competition” and in concentrating much of its marketing here.
This is also a company that takes its corporate responsibility personally and is deeply involved in everything from scouting to the arts to the Roanoke/Blacksburg Technology Council.
Wilkin likes to note that you can find OCC cable in such diverse places as NASCAR infields, Tech football games, military deployments and missile programs and a wide range of other uses. In general, if you see a cable that looks like an OCC product, it probably is one.