Jaime Maliszewski likes to impart new technology in his two plating shops in Milwaukee whenever he can, but he also sees the benefits of bringing in an old friend.
Jaime MaliszewskiMaliszewski has overseen extensive renovations at Reliable Plating Works and Elite Finishing in the past two years. An ongoing project involves refurbishing lines, replacing motors and hoists, and sprucing up the company, which will soon celebrate its 100th anniversary.
More importantly, the president of both facilities is just as excited after convincing a long-time acquaintance, Dan Rank, to join his team as sales director after retiring from a staffing firm he helped run.
“He's been a supplier of ours for years,” Maliszewski says. “We also worked together for years in the St. Joseph Academy charity golf outing for over 20 years, and when he became available, we decided to get him on our team.”
Add Value to the Customer Base and Attracting New Ones
In 2023, RPW rebuilt half the tanks in one of their biggest nickel lines, replacing 13 tanks and reconnecting all equipment.Rank says he was ready to settle back and enjoy retirement when Maliszewski called him to join their team to fill a recently opened role. He knew a lot about manufacturing companies from his decades of supplying Reliable Plating Works and Elite Finishing with staff when they needed it, and he says he is excited to work in the industry.
“Jaime reached out, and it's been a lot of fun,” he says. “It's going to be 20 to 30 hours a week, and hopefully, I can add value to his customer base and get some new ones.”
Reliable Plating Works and Elite Finishing are primed to add capacity after Maliszewski spent considerable time and money sprucing up the shops by replacing aging equipment and introducing newer technologies to run the lines.
Reliable Plating Works specializes in decorative nickel/chrome plating, electroless nickel, copper, polishing and buffing, and vibratory finishes.
In December 2023, they rebuilt half the tanks in one of their biggest nickel lines, replacing 13 tanks and reconnecting all the bus work, filters, rectification, and related equipment and plumbing.
“It was all hands on deck, which was crazy because we did it in three weeks, over Christmas and New Year's,” Maliszewski says. “It was even crazier because we missed a couple of days with holidays, but mostly because we had to keep producing for our customers that need us to keep their lines running, and a longer downtime was not an option.”
Massive Overhaul of Lines and Systems in 2022 and 2023
A year earlier, in December 2022, Reliable Plating Works undertook a massive project rebuilding the superstructure of one of its largest plating lines, including hoists, motors, and the PLCs running the system. It was also done over the holidays and was expedited because of the additional Christmas and New Year days off.
“We wanted to make the lines run better, healthier, and faster,” Maliszewski says. “We wanted less maintenance and to make it run faster, more user friendly, and less chances for any kind of mishaps or misruns.”
The massive improvements allow both shops to have more throughput, serve existing customers faster and better, and improve the performance of their operations.
Of course, once Maliszewski and his brother, Jeff, who runs the company with him, finalized all the improvements, they set their sights on another important matter: growing their customer base.
Like many finishing operations in the U.S., Reliable Plating Works and Elite Finishing have seen customer orders go up and down throughout the past few years. Jaime Maliszewski says it has been “such a goofy year with sales,” with some customers way up and others very down. Now that operations have been dealt with the upgraded equipment, sales were the next focus.
“They had 18 SKUs, and they told them, ‘This guy in Wisconsin is going to be able to turn these parts for you right away, and you're going to have a product to us way quicker than if you go anywhere else.’”
“We're trying to help customers move more parts,” Maliszewski says. “We want to keep things on the production side going because we don't want production failures to hold up orders; we want the sales guys to look good because they can always turn product. And the more we can turn product — and with better quality — that's what the customers want.”
Pushing Turnaround Time as a Benefit of Finishing Parts
Reliable Plating Works specializes in decorative nickel/chrome plating, electroless nickel, copper, polishing and buffing, and vibratory finishes.Reliable Plating Works and Elite Finishing have always emphasized turnaround time to current and prospective customers, especially those who may be off-shoring the parts as far away as China. Maliszewski says some customers report a six—to eight-month turnaround time overseas, while his shops can usually do it in one week or two and sometimes on the same day.
Reliable Plating Works had one of its biggest customers send them a job from a supplier company in California that needed to get parts finished quickly. When they were told to use Reliable Plating Works in Wisconsin, Maliszewski says the new customer questioned whether to send the parts to the Midwest, even though its final destination was the East Coast.
“They told him, ‘The parts make a stop in Wisconsin and come to us; it doesn't have to come back to you,’” he says. “They had 18 SKUs, and they told them, ‘This guy in Wisconsin is going to be able to turn these parts for you right away, and you're going to have a product to us way quicker than if you go anywhere else.’”
That’s the message Maliszewski wants Rank to convey to prospective customers: quality parts, knowledgeable staff, and fast turnaround by a professional team.
“I told Jaime that I would work 20-25 hours in the office each week and spend 10 hours just walking my dog,” Rank said. “It was a good sign of things to come.”
Rank had worked with both shops for several decades regarding their staffing levels, especially when he had placements at either shop and would show up to help get the employee acclimated to the facility.
Maliszewski says that when he started to fill the open sales position, he asked his wife who she would recommend for him to hire. Without knowing that Maliszewski and Rank were already discussing the job, she said, “Dan Rank.”
“That’s when I knew I wanted him to join us,” Maliszewski says.
Walk the Dog and Picking Up New Business
Dan RankRank got off to an ominous start even before working a day at the shops. After his first discussion about the job, he was walking his dog and stopped to have a conversation with one of his neighbors. When Rank told him he was considering a new position with an electroplating company, the neighbor offered to send him some finishing work from the company where he worked.
On the same night as Rank was walking back home with his dog, he ran into another neighbor and had a similar conversation; before he got home from the dog walk, he already had two prospective clients lined up.
“I told Jaime that I would work 20-25 hours in the office each week and spend 10 hours just walking my dog,” Rank said. “It was a good sign of things to come.”
Maliszewski says that even though Rank has a peripheral view of Reliable Plating Works and Elite Finishing's business operations, he wasn’t looking to hire an expert in electroplating.
“When Dan and I were first talking about the job, he told me, “I don't know [crap] about what you do,’” he says. “I told Dan that's not why I'm hiring him. I'm hiring a guy with the personality that can go out and talk to people because people like to buy from people they like; that's the first thing.”
Jeff Maliszewski and TinaMaliszewski Maliszewski says he is confident Rank will be able to tell the story of Reliable Plating Works and Elite Finishing and how, for almost 100 years, they have been one of the most counted-on finishers in the Midwest.
“We'll feed him whatever information he needs, and we're giving him a little crash course on what plating is all about,” says Maliszewski, who runs plating courses every Friday in April for his customers to send their engineers, buyers, customer service, sales, and new hires to so they can learn and understand the role of finishing and to see how the shops handle their parts.
He thinks Rank will catch on quickly and is confident he can help them increase sales, especially by bringing in new customers who are a good fit to be long-term partners with the shops. Jeff’s wife, Tina Maliszewski, also works to get new business for the shops by lead prospecting and managing their social media presence.
“I've been doing this for 40-some years, and some of the stuff it seems obvious, like if I was laying sod and I know it's the green side up,” Maliszewski says. “We’ll do some training, but more importantly, Dan already sits in with our people down in the plant; he's already had conversations with plant managers, polishing and plating supervisors, and different people just to get a hang for what kind of business we need.”
Upgraded Equipment and System Will Improve Efficiencies
Maliszewski is banking on the upgraded equipment and system, which, paired with Rank’s efforts to bring in more work, should bode well for Reliable Plating Works and Elite Finishing over the next several years.
“The whole nickel-chrome side is where our money's made,” he says. “Nickel-chrome is what we do, and it's like beer at the bar: it's our biggest seller. We wanted to make improvements, and we'll still tweak it every day. Even though we are over 95 years old, we keep learning.”
Two years ago, Maliszewski made a key hire with a new maintenance supervisor, Scott Blank, who had been instrumental in working to get the lines refurbished and improving the building’s infrastructure.
“Scott is an electrician, and he's been amazing,” he says. “He is the only reason we could turn that last project around in three weeks, and it was because of him and the way he organized it, preset it up, and had everything ready at the right time and place. It was very well organized.”
“That's always a big problem when you have all that negative air in the plating area for all the ventilation on your tanks, and then you have negative air for all your polishing equipment. Your building becomes just a big old suck hole.”
Reliable Plating Works is moving its polishing line out of the facility and into a facility next door, which will free up more space at their location for some of the new work they are getting in. Not only will those improvements make the facility even more efficient, but they will also keep it cleaner with the polishers out of the building.
“It gets the dust and the dirt out of the building here and puts it in the building next door where all the dust collection can be segregated,” Maliszewski says. “That's always a big problem when you have all that negative air in the plating area for all the ventilation on your tanks, and then you have negative air for all your polishing equipment. Your building becomes just a big old suck hole.”
Crunching Numbers to Get a Great ROI
Reliable Plating Works is moving its polishing line out of the facility and into a facility next door, which will free up more space at their location for some of the new work they are getting in.Maliszewski says they are ready for another 95 years of operation with all the new equipment and features on the finishing lines. He is astute at crunching numbers and knowing what will be a good investment and what will make his customers happy in the long run.
For example, at the end of 2022, the renovated line cost them $700,000 to add new hoists, motors, and software to the line first installed in the early 1980s and upgraded three times before this upgrade. But Maliszewski had already done the math before the first bolt was turned and knew the updated line would give them 20% more throughput and pay for itself in a year.
“We want it to have more advanced systems to increase efficiency and speed up the line a little bit, too,” Maliszewski says. “The breakdowns happened more often, and we made many hand moves for new customers and processes. We had to adjust since the automation couldn’t handle it.”
More importantly, Maliszewski says the line went from processing 10 bars to 12 bars an hour, a 20% increase in throughput.
“There’s a lot of things that were no-brainers for us,” he says. “It paid for itself in less than a year.”
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