Company: Total Manufacturing
Owner: Carl Reed
Employees: 40
Type of business: manufacturer
Location: Cumberland
Year founded: 1997
Annual revenues: $3.5 million
READY WHEN YOU ARE: Carl Reed is president of Total Manufacturing which is prepared to do virtually anything required in manufacturing.
Rhode Island's Market Has Changed. Developers, Builders, Investors and Sellers Must Change With It.
By Emilio DiSpirito IV License Partner | Engel & Völkers Oceanside Leader | The DiSpirito…
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The name says it all: Total Manufacturing.
The growing Cumberland company designs, fabricates and assembles products for other manufacturers to sell under their brand names. Total Manufacturing will even ship the products to the end customer if necessary.
“They don’t even have to load it into a box,” said Total Manufacturing President Carl Reed.
Reed founded Total Manufacturing in 1997 on the notion that the growing practice of outsourcing need not apply only to specific business functions such as accounting or marketing. Total Manufacturing offers companies the opportunity to outsource the entire manufacturing process, from design and engineering to production and assembly.
Despite some initial resistance to the concept, it seems the idea is beginning to catch on.
Total Manufacturing’s revenue jumped from $30,000 or so in 1997 to $3.5 million last year. And the company’s original workforce of 12 employees has swollen to 40 and counting today.
Reed said his company often can manufacturer products for customers cheaper and with less hassle than they could do it themselves. But the true key to Total Manufacturing’s success is versatility.
Total Manufacturing’s niche isn’t high-volume contract manufacturing. Instead it makes 50 of these and 100 of those and, in some cases, the company makes just one unit for a customer. A machinist might be turning out precision components for rifles in the morning and parts for a nail gun after lunch.
In the company’s machine shop, industrial box staplers that look like exercise equipment are lined up neatly for assembly. In the next room, though, workers are wiring a self-leveling table that the customer wants to be capable of leveling itself to within half the thickness of a human hair. And a dangerous-looking industrial laser is under construction in an office nearby.
Reed, himself a mechanical engineer, enjoys all the variety.
“That’s what makes it so fun,” he said. “We do have a lot of people that are very versatile.”
Building a laser is certainly a challenge, but the true difficulty for Total Manufacturing comes when it makes a sales pitch to a potential customer. First, there’s the issue of how the company should describe what it does.
Reed doesn’t like the term “outsourcing” because he thinks most people associate the word with contracting out a single function and because others see it as a dirty word that often proceeds other dirty words such as job cuts and layoffs.
“People aren’t thinking of outsourcing complete products yet,” said Reed, who figures his company and others like it have just reached the beginning of long growth cycle.
And then there’s the challenge of directing the sales pitch to the right person.
The manager who gets paid to oversee manufacturing operations at a company might not be so receptive to the idea of moving some of those operations out of house, Reed acknowledges.
“It takes a certain sales expertise and an enlightened customer,” Reed said.
But Reed doesn’t see himself as being in competition with a company’s own manufacturing resources for work. Rather, if a company’s management wants to try out a new product without spending too much time building it, Total Manufacturing is happy to do the job. Or if management wants to continue selling a core product even while using its internal resources to work on new products, that’s right down Reed’s alley too.
Total Manufacturing was named to Dun & Bradstreet/Entrepreneur Magazine’s 1999 Hot 100 list of the fastest-growing new small businesses in June.
Reed said the company’s growth stabilized and turned profitable this year after last year’s break-neck revenue gains. Looking to the future, he hopes to continue Total Manufacturing’s growth in 2000 by attracting additional customers and winning more business from the accounts it already has.
A customer that taps the company to make a particular mechanical or electronic component might be convinced to turn the whole manufacturing process over to Total Manufacturing after the company proves itself to be a capable and reliable partner, Reed said.
For now, Total Manufacturing will greet the turn of the millennium from a new plant in Smithfield that Reed said will allow the company to do more electronic assembly. The precision work requires a “clean” environment, and Total Manufacturing has been using its office space for such projects in the Cumberland plant.
Reed expects to move into the Smithfield facility some time in December.
If past experience is any guide, the new year in the new plant looks to be a bright one for Reed and Total Manufacturing.
