Win a Machine, Grow Your Team: One Shop Owner's Playbook for Smart Growth, Ep #531
About this episode
Tim Drinkwater shares insights on smart growth strategies for shop owners, including the importance of cash management and the risks of equipment purchases.
Most shop owners have stood in front of a shiny new machine and felt the pull. Buy it, and the work will come. Tim Drinkwater of Accurate Machine Products has lived both sides of that bet, the one that nearly buried him and the one that showed up as a free machining center. This conversation sits right where two of our current series meet: Gen CNC, where we talk to founders who started young, and our workforce development series. Tim started his shop in a garage in 2007, and he's blunt about how a young founder should spend those first dollars. Cash is worth more than tools you don't need. Customers come before capability. And sometimes buying an existing shop beats building one from scratch. We also get into the mistake that can quietly kill a shop. Tim bought a brand new lathe for a firearms customer who never signed a contract and then walked away. Mike shares the flip side he keeps running into, walking through shops with gorgeous, idle equipment bought on a customer's promise that never turned into a purchase order. One of those build-outs is the reason a whole company ended up for sale. Then there's the fun part. Tim won a DN Solutions SVM 4100 in the DN and Kennametal…
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