Is a ‘Side Hustle’ on Your Horizon?

This article about Ideal Tool and Manufacturing reminded me of various machine shops I’ve profiled in Production Machining that have created side businesses for various reasons. Some were based on satisfying personal interests, as was the case for Ideal Tool and Manufacturing. Blake Price, shop vice president, and his father, Todd, noticed the need for an improved mount for their boat’s electronic fish finder, leading them to design a more effective, efficient device and create BeatDown Outdoors LLC to manufacture and market it and other related products.

Another great example in this vein is W.H. Bagshaw, led by Aaron Bagshaw (president) and his wife Adria (vice president), which created Walter Bat Co. (This story with video was the most popular article of 2023.) The 154-year-old manufacturer of precision, metal pins started a side business creating custom wooden baseball bats, which Aaron feels was a unique opportunity given bat production is in their turning wheelhouse. “But, it’s also what captures the heart of who we are as a family; our energy and identity,” he notes. In addition, Aaron says it gives his family the opportunity to create and shape a business from the ground up that perhaps his son and baseball player Kyan and/or their daughter, Maya, might have interest in down the line. The endeavor also helped create a stronger bond with the local community.

For Diversified Fittings, it was more about creating a complementary business. The shop, which specializes in machining complex hydraulic fittings and adapters of all types, created what it calls the Hose Shack. Some years ago, the Perry, Ohio, shop had a hydraulic hose on one of its machine tools burst. Someone at the shop had to drive 40 or so miles west to Cleveland to find a replacement $30 hose to get a $100,000 piece of production equipment back online and making money. The shop also noticed that surrounding businesses (for example, farms with expensive equipment such as combines) faced similar problems when they needed those consumables to make fast repairs. Therefore, Diversified Fittings opened its Hose Shack walk-in business, which primarily offers Gates industrial belts and hoses, as well as a warehoused inventory of more than 10,000 fittings and adapters.

Contact me if you’ve created a side business of your own.

In the case of Wolfram Manufacturing, it was about taking  advantage of its own process expertise to launch a new enterprise. This Austin, Texas contract shop serves customers in industries such as aerospace, medical firearms and oil and gas. Company President Nathan Byman says adaptive machining technology from Caron Engineering is vital for ensuring a reliable as well as optimized process that doesn’t require an operator to be stationed at a machine. In fact, his shop has come to be a “power user” of sorts to the extent that, since 2019, it is a distributor, integrator and trainer of Caron Engineering products for the western half of the United States and invites other shops to its facility to see how that technology is used in a real production environment.

Wolfram also is the creator of the software platform OnTakt, which is geared toward small and medium-sized shops looking to implement an easy-to-set-up, all-in-one solution for managing their manufacturing floor both on-site and remotely, while also enabling enterprises to collect, filter and route machine data to dashboards, factory apps and enterprise solutions. Byman says the shop built OnTakt because he didn’t feel there was a software available on the market to meet the needs of a shop like his collecting so much data.

I’m sure I’ll encounter more examples moving forward, but let me know if you have created your own side business. It’d be great to learn about the how’s and why’s of establishing it.