Zach Berry, left, works with his father, Pat, at Farmington-based Ruff Manufacturing. “Our plan is to let him learn as much about the business as he can over the next five years,” said Pat Berry, who owns the company.
When Pat Berry says it’s hard to find people willing to work in the manufacturing trades, he’s speaking from experience. One recent hire walked out after just 15 minutes on the job.
“Believe it or not, yes,” said Berry, who owns Farmington-based Ruff Manufacturing. “I stepped away to do something, came back a few minutes later, and he was gone.”
Ruff Manufacturing is a heavy-steel fabricator and flame-cutting specialist, one of more than 700,000 manufacturing businesses in the U.S. fighting for a shrinking talent pool. According to a 2021 study by Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, the U.S. is on track to have 2.1 million unfilled manufacturing jobs by 2030 as retirements, combined with new job growth, outpace efforts to attract and train new workers.
Unlike a lot of businesses recruiting for trades jobs, Berry has an inside track on emerging talent: his 20-year-old son, Zach. Zach joined Ruff Manufacturing two years ago and has been splitting his time between learning the business and taking college classes. “Our plan is to let him learn as much about the business as he can over the next five years, from running the machinery to the administrative part of it,” Berry said.
At the end of that time, Zach can decide if he wants to become a second-generation business owner. Already, he has recruited two of his friends into the business. “They’ve turned out really good,” Berry said. “They’re both mechanically inclined kids, and they’re working part time, probably 12 to 14 hours a week. We’re trying to develop them so, within a year or two, when they’re done with school, they can come on full time.”
30-plus years of ups and downs
Zach and his friends have joined a company with a rich history. Ruff Manufacturing’s roots date to 1985 when Pat Berry was working at a large fabricating company in Bloomington that closed. He and a coworker bought some of the equipment and struck out on their own, focusing on flame cutting and steel fabrication.
As the business grew, Ruff Manufacturing developed a reputation for delivering high-quality work on short timelines. It competes with much larger steel businesses by being strategic about keeping materials on hand and offering quick turnarounds. Today, it has eight employees and serves customers primarily in the seven-county Twin Cities area.
“Pat’s company just always comes out on top,” said Lisa Franxman, Market President for MidCountry Bank in Hastings, who has worked with Berry since 2002. “They are consistent and stable. Things can kind of put him down, but he just gets right back up. There have been a number of things thrown at this company, but to go through all of those and still have long-term employees, it says a lot about his leadership style.”
Ruff Manufacturing’s core team of employees has been with the company for close to 30 years, a tenure Berry attributes to a combination of good salaries, benefits and a level of flexibility that many companies only recently started to embrace.
That degree of employee commitment has helped the business weather tough times. When the recession hit in 2009, for example, the company cut work schedules back to 32 hours per week without losing key personnel.
“I had to refinance my house and my business to come up with cash to keep things going,” Berry said. “We worked through it. It took a year and a half or two to get back up to where we were.”
By 2019, Ruff Manufacturing was on track for record sales. Then, the pandemic hit. “All of a sudden, everything just got shut down,” Berry said. “Our sales were cut in half, basically, immediately.”
Ruff Manufacturing wasn’t alone. The pandemic caused the second quarter of 2020 to have the largest decline in U.S. manufacturing output since World War II, with fabricated metal products among those hardest hit, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While some sectors, such as motor vehicles and parts, rebounded quickly, fabricated metals were still slightly below fourth-quarter 2019 levels by mid-2022.
Kyle Perkins works at Ruff Manufacturing, whose core team of employees has been with the company nearly 30 years.
Berry worked with MidCountry Bank to apply for the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program early in the pandemic. It received two PPP loans. The money meant the company could keep its entire team on payroll.
“That was the whole goal of the program, to keep people employed,” Franxman said. “It worked extremely well. After the first round of PPP loans, we were able to do the second round much more efficiently, and it saved a lot of companies.”
Plans for growth
Like many small business owners, Berry wears many hats. Owner and founder may sound glamorous, but many days that means driving a truck to make deliveries, serving as a machine operator and cleaning parts, while also being responsible for sales, marketing and administration. “When you’re running the company, you’re not just running a machine,” he said. “You’ve got a million things going on through your head. You’re trying to navigate through everything and plan ahead for six other guys to make sure they have work to do and keep things moving smoothly.”
Having strong relationships with professional partners, such as the one with MidCountry Bank, has been particularly helpful, Berry said. In addition to the PPP loan process, he worked with MidCountry to finance the buyout of his business partner, who was ready to retire. Today, Ruff Manufacturing is on pace to close 2022 with $1.8 million in revenue.
As Ruff Manufacturing heads into 2023, Berry sees more growth on the horizon. The business has been taking on more machining work and expanding its Blanchard grinding department, which creates a flat surface on steel plates.
Most of the company’s sales come from word of mouth. “We treat everybody the same way,” Berry said. “If a small company calls and wants something done in a day, we do it, and if a big corporation wants 100 pieces done in a couple of weeks, we’ll do that, too.”
Obtaining enough material from a tight supply chain – and, of course, more employees – are the only constraints, Berry said. “For me, our growth potential is unlimited.”
Source: Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal and Lauren Lawley Head – Contributor