Last updated on March 2nd, 2023 at 08:40 pm
Building a successful sheet metal fabrication shop is a marathon—not a sprint. It takes time to get established, assemble a talented team, and foster relationships with customers.
Well, it's been two years since we opened our doors, and with great pride, we can say—Approved Sheet Metal keeps getting better. We've been in our new, expanded metal fabrication shop for over a year, and our team is continuously growing to meet increasing demand.
How are we making such impressive progress? It's simple. We wake up every day and commit to being the BEST.
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Our Core Values Inspire Us to Be the BEST
Our goal is to provide customers with superior-quality parts and services. We’re so committed to being the BEST precision metal fabricators around that we've made it the foundation of our core values:
- B: Better than yesterday. From the executive office to the shop floor, everyone in our company strives for progress and actively seeks opportunities to improve.
- E: Enjoy the journey. Meeting and exceeding our customers' expectations is one measure of success; another is how much we enjoy achieving that goal. Our team values the journey as much as the outcome. We arrive at work every day happy and eager to do our jobs well.
- S: Sense of urgency. Each of our team members embodies a sense of urgency. We are proactive, responsive, and thorough in everything we do.
- T: Treat others the way you want to be treated. The golden rule applies at all times—coworkers and customers alike are human beings worthy of respect and consideration. We value transparent communication and constructive feedback and aim to keep morale high every day.
Our core values aren't just pithy statements posted on signage in the shop—they’re directives that make up our fabrication company's DNA. Every step we take toward living and breathing our values translates into direct benefits for our team and our customers.
How We’ve Improved in the Last Two Years
We're particularly excited about three areas of our business that have seen massive growth and improvements over the past two years:
1. Team size
Since our inception, we've quadrupled in size!
Two years ago, Approved Sheet Metal was a team of nine; today, we have 38 dedicated experts who specialize in stainless steel tubular frames, engineering, laser operation, deburring, and administrative roles. We've doubled our metal fabrication capacity and now have a flourishing second shift.
And we’re not slowing down anytime soon. We’re actively hiring to meet the demands of our customers. It's safe to say that our team is better than yesterday based on size and skills alone!
2. Shop efficiency
We've embraced lean manufacturing principles in our shop and are laser-focused (pun intended) on efficiency. Instead of waiting for issues to bubble up to the leadership team, we employ a sense of urgency and source ideas from team members closest to the work.
We listen to feedback and leverage our team's knowledge to implement equipment, software, and strategies that can increase our capacity and output.
We're also proactively improving the shop to ensure our team members have an excellent quality of life at work, from upgrading the air conditioning to moving into a more open and airy space.
These benefits don't just translate to happier employees. We're getting quotes out faster than ever, and lead times are shrinking, thanks to the productivity and alignment among our team.
3. Customer collaboration
Perhaps the most exciting outcome of staying true to our core values and constantly improving is seeing more frequent and meaningful collaboration with our customers. We've been able to establish and build relationships, not just provide one-off manufacturing services, and for that, we're truly thankful.
How are we making it happen? It might sound a bit old-fashioned, but we're being proactive and picking up the phone instead of sending an email. A real-time, live conversation can often cover a broader range of topics than an email, and we can get to know customers on a deeper level.
Our customers enjoy the personal touch and appreciate that our engineers call them with questions instead of filling up their inboxes.
Happy customers make us happy and help us stay mission-aligned. Our co-founder, Steve Lynch, said it best:
"It helps me enjoy the journey when I see the shop getting better each day. The secret to that improvement is communicating and treating other people how you want to be treated. We're living our core values, which makes me really happy."
If our approach speaks to you, let's begin a journey together. Request a quote today.
