The Sheahans started Platinum Precision Machining in Aurora in 2007 and in August watched as orders picked up after a slow first half of the year. Now, business is even brighter, and the economic storm of 2009 is subsiding.
Business the past three months has been very good for us. We’ve managed to find work, and though we haven’t grown as much as we originally projected for this year, we have picked up some very promising new customers and will still show an increase in sales for 2009.
As in previous months, incoming orders remain unpredictable, so we are still operating in feast-or-famine mode. We have recorded both our worst as well as our best month in the last half of this year.
We’ve had to remain flexible and think outside of the box in order to find work. We’ve continued to concentrate our sales-and-marketing efforts in the green-technology industries, and we’ve done some complex medical-prototype work.
We began this year with one full- and one part-time employee but downsized to just the one part-timer in May. Then, early fall, we utilized several part-time, temporary machinists when the workload demanded it.
It wasn’t hard to find machinists looking for extra work. In fact, we placed an ad in early September and are still receiving occasional inquiries. We were able to hire a permanent full-time machinist and are once again back to two permanent employees.
We have considerably more customers than we did one year ago, but sales per customer remain lower than what we are accustomed to. Most people we talk to tell us the same thing, that they are able to find steady work, but the volume is still lower than normal.
We believe the economy is recovering. The doubt people have about the economy most certainly remains.
Our perspective is somewhat unique since we really have no idea what it is like to operate a business in a favorable environment for our industry. We spent the first two years in business building our shop, and then, in our third year, the recession hit.
The lessons have been simultaneously the hardest and most valuable.
