Brown Industries, Inc.

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About Brown Industries

My name is Zach Davis. I’m the owner of Brown Industries. We’re a contract manufacturer here in the heart of Kansas City, Missouri. We specialize in precision machine components for OEMs and the construction of food industry. The example I like to give people is that the average diameter of a human hair is two-thousandths of an inch wide, 0.002 inches, and the tolerancing on the most precise parts that we make is plus or minus one-tenth of a human hair.

I bought this company, which was founded in 1965 by Larry Brown, I bought this company in August of 2020, so peak COVID. Liquidated by 401k, sold my truck, moved into the office for six months, and turned around what was then a dying business. We’ve made a lot of changes, made a lot of improvements since I bought the company, and we’re on a really great path with a really great team.

About the Facility

In total, we have about 25 spindles throughout the various shops. We have seven buildings and three-and-a-half acres in total on campus. We’ve done a lot of consolidating and a lot of efficiency improvement so we’ve actually reduced our footprint as we’ve grown the business just through efficiency improvements. Modernizing technology and processes and taking processes that used to expand four CNC machines and condensing them to a single machine with a robot tender where we’ve been able to continue to compete and add value for our customers.

For us in the contract manufacturing world, our efficiency is driven by how quickly we can set up and produce the next part number. Every minute that the machine’s not running, we’re not making money and we have to pass those costs on to our customers. When we get really effective at keeping the machines running and quickly setting up for the next thing, we’re able to provide a better price and a better product for our customer. A lot of the machinery that we’re using now that allows us to do that are millturns which have a lot of tooling inherently stored in the machine so you’re not constantly having to change out tooling between parts. You’re actually able to use the same tools between part numbers. Makes that setup and the changeover a lot faster.

Meet Zach

My original passion for machining started in high school. I was on the high school robotics team and my mentors were engineers from Honeywell and individuals in the Lee’s Summit community that own manufacturing companies. That really inspired me to develop a passion for machining and wanting to own my own machine shop one day. I went on to get a mechanical engineering degree from Texas A&M and went into the oil field after that. I worked in the oil field based out of New Orleans for almost five years. Moved back to Kansas City in 2019 to start looking for a business to buy.

Meet Paul

My name is Paul Sites and I’m the operations manager here at Brown Industries. My background is actually in software development. I have degrees in computer engineering and computer science from Missouri S&T. I came to be acquainted with Brown through Zach. Both of us have a big passion for education and we’re both very involved in the first robotics programs in the Lee’s Summit area. Despite graduating at similar times from the program, we really got acquainted once Zach moved back to try and shop for business.

My role here is a little unique in terms of a traditional operations manager position. Because of my technology background, I have a strong focus on finding ways to adopt and improve our technology use, both to make the business more efficient internally as well as pass along some of those savings to our customers.

What Makes Us Different?

Something I didn’t know before I bought the company but I’ve come to learn, especially about the industry as a whole, is there are not a lot of young energetic owners or people trying to grow businesses in this space. First and foremost, it’s just effort. We care deeply about our customers and the work that we do and we’re passionate about the work that we do. That shows in what we deliver to our customers.

I think that another big differentiator for us as a company and considering our competitors is just the way that we handle customer service. Machining is a very complicated task and there are often times un-forecasted complications that arise in the process as you’re producing something new, especially that you’ve never done before.

What that means is that often machine shops get absorbed in trying to solve those problems and completely forget to tell their customer that they’re going to be late on a delivery. For us, what we really prioritize giving advance notice. If something unexpected comes up and we’re not able to meet a delivery date, giving that advanced notice and working with the customer to make sure that our priorities are where they want them to be is really pivotal to our success.

Customer Success Story

Since I bought the company, we have tripled sales, and all that’s been by serving existing customers. One example of a recent customer success story is that they had an existing supplier for a part that went out of business and it really put their supply chain in a bind. We were able to reverse engineer that process, come up with even a better process than what they were using previously so that we could get that part turned around quickly and get their production line going again. It’s those projects that we really enjoy taking on and where we provide a lot of value for our customers.

Brown’s Growth & Development

A lot of the main changes that we’ve made here to our capabilities at Brown have been driven by the needs of our customers. We speak with our customers and they tell us, “Hey, these are really hard things for us to fulfill,” and we leverage our manufacturing experience to adopt that new technology. This includes the use of multi-spindle lathes, millturns, so we have two 9-axis millturns that we run now which have all been new since I purchased the company, as well as adding wire EDM. Anything to drive down cost and lead time for our customers is where we’re focusing our efforts.

How Is Brown Different?

We’re very different from a lot of our competitors because we’re always striving to figure out how we can improve our customer’s experience. A lot of that will come down to some of our internal work. Ultimately, our prices are determined based on the amount of time and effort, more or less, that it takes to get a job done. Anything we can do to improve some of that, we ultimately like to pass on to our customers.

As we have adopted some new technologies or found new ways to do things, we’ve been happy to tell some of our customers, hey, we’re going to drop prices on these things or whatever. We’re not trying to gouge our customers. We really see it as a two-way street with everyone we work with. We want to find a way to make everyone happy and ultimately be successful in whatever business they might be in.

The State of CNC Machining

CNC machining is a very interesting concept as a whole. A lot of people that walk through the shop or see our machines run look at a process and they think, “Wow, that’s so amazing. You’re not doing anything and it’s producing parts,” right? What they don’t see on the backend is how quickly things can go wrong and how much work and effort went in to proving out that process. I’ve been working hands on in the shop for four years now. I wasn’t a machinist before that but I do have a mechanical engineering degree. Every single day that I’m in this shop, I’m humbled by how difficult the things that we do are. It’s really impressive how much effort goes into these problems and how difficult the problems are that we’re solving.

Something that’s really cool if someone’s considering a career in CNC machining is that you experience a new challenge every single day. Just when you thought you’ve got something figured out, you’re proven wrong. There’s no limit to what you can learn in CNC machining. It goes a lot more deep than just pushing a button.

What Is Broaching?

Broaching is commonly or most commonly used for keyways and parts. Oftentimes if you have a shaft, a round shaft that needs to mate to another piece, then it’s common to install a keyway. That’s literally just a square bar that half of the square is in part 1 and half of the square is in part 2 and the square bar keeps them locked together.

Broaching can happen on all scales. You can do something like an eighth inch broach, which is pretty tiny, but some of our parts go all the way up to an inch and a half broaching. When you start to get to that size, the process to actually put that keyway into the part gets significantly more complex. One of the things that we spend a fair amount of time on is both developing ways in-house that we can more efficiently broach as well as purchasing equipment when needed to add capability so that we don’t have to outsource and use a third party for it.

What Is a Weldment?

A weldment is often a fabricated part that can be somewhat complex but often they need some precision features in them. This is just one way that we can help people in the fab world. If we receive something that’s already welded, we could add those features precisely to the weldments. Conversely, if we have a part that needs to be welded, then we have some fantastic welding expertise here at Brown that can do that assembly. Then likewise, if that then needs machine operations, we can do that all under one roof.

Quantity, Quality, & Cost

One of our big focuses to try and drive down cost for large production is the adoption of automation technologies. Traditionally, there might be a lot of operations that happen to parts after they’re outside the machine or even between machines. Some more complex parts in older manufacturing environment might jump between two to four different machines to be complete. We’re really trying to focus on a one and done approach. We really want to take a raw material and put it in the machine and have it come out part complete.

Some of the ways that we’re doing that is through the adoption of millturns. We have multiple 9-axis millturn machines. These are very capable to take that raw material and finish the part and put it out. We’ve also adopted robotic automation in some parts of the business, again, to help tend to the multi axis machines. This allows our machinists to really focus on some of the bigger picture items, making sure that we’re picking tooling that’s optimal for the part that’ll last a long time, preparing for the next part, etc.

The big focus is trying to make sure that the machine is running as much as possible. By doing that, it ultimately helps us drive our cost down so that we can then achieve both high volume as well as economical production for our customers.

Why Brown Industries?

We are not always the cheapest shop. However, we do think that we provide a lot of value, especially for local customers. One of the first, I guess, easy pickings from that is shipping costs. There are some parts that we make that are very large and when you start getting into parts that might be thousands of pounds or even hundreds of pounds apiece, it can be very beneficial to utilize a local supplier to save on shipping. One of the other values we provide is we really try to excel at our customer communication. We think that we do a good job at this, both for our local and remote customers. However, there’s definitely a lot of value when we can invite our customers into our shop for a tour and talk about their parts or their future needs and try to explain what we’re doing and how we’re improving and really just try to better understand each other and what each other needs.

Looking Ahead

In the future, we really want Brown to be a company that’s full of a lot of well-rounded individuals. We’re trying to move away from what could be seen as a traditional hierarchy inside of a machine shop and we really want our machinists to be able to do the whole gamut and hopefully a desire to do the whole gamut of operations. We are really looking for individuals that are interested in doing everything from setup to programming to tool selection as we try and grow the company. The value here is it really enables us to be a lot more flexible in how we approach work. Instead of having to have that one guy that does this operation, we can really leverage a lot of the different employees across the company to try and get the work done.

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