All Articles

What Is Your Philosophy of Quality?

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, September/October 2019

What are your thoughts about quality? At one level this would seem to be a simple question to answer, but I speculate that if we asked that question of a large group of individuals, we would get a multitude of different answers. To most individuals, quality is subjective and may look very different at one moment than it does at another. Take, for example, the scenario of dining out. If the food is delivered to your table with a sloppy presentation, you may consider it to be of lesser quality than a dish that was presented well, even though the flavors and taste are still excellent. In this case, the quality decision is being made more on appearance than performance.

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Six Things I Learned Building a House

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, September/October 2018

In 2005, my bride of several years and I entered into an adventure and decided that rather than buying an existing home, we would build our first new home together. For many, entering into such a project is likely to test the mettle of their relationship, but my love for building projects made this an easy decision, and thus, I was not intimidated to act as my own General Contractor. So, we hunkered down, began working with an architect friend, and soon had a plan ready to go. Next came the arduous process of finding and hiring subcontractors.

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Workplace Development: It’s Too Important Not to Get This Right

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, November/December 2019

In recent years, the universal chorus of manufacturers across the country seems to be how they are going to recruit new members to their team to keep up with new openings and backfill the exodus of an older workforce that is quickly retiring. To their chagrin, they have learned that even if they have a good solution to this first challenge, other, often more imposing challenges quickly follow suit. Once they have new team members aboard, they find themselves challenged to bridge an ever-widening skills gap. As a result, workplace development in the form of education and training has become increasingly more important.

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Advice From Millennials

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, November/December 2018

In 2015, the Millennial Generation, those with birthdates that fall between 1977 and 1995, surpassed all other generations in the United States workforce. In fact, they make up a generational cohort of 85 million individuals, which is about five million greater than the Baby Boomers. With respect to the workplace, by 2020 the Millennials will constitute over 50 percent of the U.S. workforce, while Baby Boomers, currently the next largest cohort in the workforce, will be less than 25 percent.

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Recruiting and Retention

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, May/June 2019

I just left an Industrial Fasteners Institute meeting where, once again, one of the most prominent themes of discussion revolved around recruiting and retaining new employees into our industry. This is not a new discussion. In fact, I have been working on projects related to this topic for the last seven years. I recall a report, “A New Wave—Recruiting the Next Generation,” where it spoke about various programs by which “companies are ensuring the future of the industry.” The key part of this thread is those quoted six words, “ensuring the future of the industry.” I have been working on this for the last seven years, and others much longer, signaling the realization that very little of the dialog is new. So why has so little seemingly been accomplished in all this time? Although this article is not intended to seek the answers to that question, it is an important question to consider, especially in the context of the subject of this article, i.e. recruiting and retaining individuals into the fastener industry. I hope that exploring such questions will lead you to ask yourself: Why, if the very survival of your company—or more globally, an industry—is dependent on ushering the new leaders, associates, and members onto your team, has so little been proactively accomplished in the last 10 years? And to what extent has your company invested in ensuring its future?

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Strategic Planning: Something Every Progressive Fastener Company Should Be Doing

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, January/February 2019

Authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote in their book Extreme Trust: “When your headlights aren’t on, the best rearview mirror isn’t likely to improve your driving.” Although this quote was likely intended to address the idea that past experience isn’t a guarantee for future success, it also speaks to the idea of operating a business without a strategy. If you don’t have a vision and strategy of where you wish the business to go, it is sort of like driving at night without your headlights on.

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What Building a Home Can Teach About Customer Service

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, July/August 2019

About 12 years ago, my wife and I built the house we currently live in. I acted as the General Contractor. Although for many, this choice turns out to be a disaster, it went reasonably well for me, and in fact, I enjoyed doing it. So it is no surprise that I should find myself once again playing General Contractor in a major construction project.

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Attracting the Next Generation of Workers

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Reprint from American Fastener Journal, July/August 2018

One day when he went to the mall, Nick Swinmurn, the founder of Zappos.com, couldn’t find a pair of shoes. He turned this inconvenience into an opportunity, founding Zappos.com in 1999. If you are unaware of Zappos, it is an online seller of shoes and clothing. By 2008 it had surpassed one billion dollars in sales and was acquired the following year by Amazon for $1.2 billion. Today it produces revenues in excess of $2 billion.

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Why Do Fastener Suppliers Usually Focus Their Attention on a Single Market Segment?

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Reprint from LINK, Winter 2021

Have you ever considered why most fastener suppliers, whether a distributor or manufacturer, tend to predominantly supply customers in a single market segment? In other words, consider for a moment, aerospace and automotive customers, it is extremely rare for a fastener supplier to support both industries. Although rare, it is not unheard of for a company to supply different market segments. In fact, I can cite several examples of manufacturers that have operations focused on different market segments, including several companies which have construction and automotive focused operations and one that has both aerospace and automotive focus. However, without exception, these operations are supported separately from different sites or as completely separate and independent operating divisions.

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Is There Value in Application Engineering?

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Reprint from LINK, Summer 2021

I began my career in the fastener industry over thirty years ago as an Application Engineer. This was a great place to start, and, perhaps, the most cherished time of all my years in the industry. I suppose that Application Engineering can mean different things to different people, but within the fastener realm this role is pretty universally understood as an interface which works with the customer to provide the best fastening solution. This not only means choosing the correct fastener but also the related joint design, fastener heat treatment, finish, packaging, and any number of other design or process related decisions.

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