Why Starting a Machine Shop Felt Less Risky Than Another Corporate Job, Ep #529
About this episode
Brian Balthasar discusses his decision to start a machine shop after experiencing corporate layoffs and the challenges he faced in the process.
Getting laid off twice early in your career could make you crave stability. It did the opposite for Brian Balthasar. After two rounds of corporate layoffs, he decided that starting his own machine shop was the safer bet. This is another one of our Gen CNC conversations. Brian founded Balthasar Industries in 2022, and he just bought his first building in North Tonawanda, New York. We walk through the leap: buying a mill and a lathe before he had customers, learning that the sales cycle can run a year or more, and finding out how fast the costs that have nothing to do with machines pile up. Some of the most useful parts are about money. The SBA 7(a) loan that got him started, the tooling and support gear that blew past every budget, and why his original business plan turned out to be 10 to 20 percent right. We add the rule every shop owner learns eventually: plan on it costing twice as much and taking twice as long, then pressure test that plan against the worst case. We also get into growing past a one person shop, standardizing on DN Solutions, and building a tech stack in the right order, with connectivity first. Brian shares the CAM path that let him run a shop knowing only…
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- Stop Complaining About the Skills Gap and Do This Instead, Ep #527
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