We chat with Dan Brockman, the founder of the Dayton, Ohio, shop Techmetals.
Brockman was recently featured on FinishingAndCoating.com as a Legend of the industry. He started Techmetals with John Stickel, who, while in college, founded Miami Precision Chrome in 1968.
After Stickel’s departure in the mid-1970s, Brockman was joined by longtime friend Mike Franz. With increasing demand for metal plating, a larger facility was necessary, and soon after, they would introduce an electroless nickel division, Electroless Nickel of Dayton Company.
In 1982, they merged all the metal finishing operations under a single name, Techmetals. The company has grown from 10 employees and 80,000 square feet to the current 200,000_ square foot facility with around 250+ employees.
Brockman was a college student in the late 1960s when he took a part-time job at a manufacturer who also happened to be looking for a hard chrome plated. One of the tasks Brockman was given was to find a suitable plating operation for his employer to use, and he discovered there were not many platers to choose from.
“I went back to my college class and wrote a 70-page business plan with a few other students on how to run a hard chrome plating business,” says Brockman, who eventually used the plan to open what is now Techmetals in Dayton, one of the premier finishing operations in North America.
“I was 20 years old and thought I knew it all,” he says. “I started the business and never even went back and finished college. My first plating tank was a Rubbermaid trash bin, and we used a car battery charger as a power source. I thought I could easily fix this problem.
In its second year of operations, Brockman and Stickel earned over $1 million in sales, a remarkable accomplishment for the young engineer. They eventually opened up several other finishing and machining businesses, too.
“I also like to invest in stocks, and one of the major rules is to be diversified,” Brockman says. “One of the first things in all my business plans was I wanted to be in at least five sectors.
Today, Brockman is mostly retired but still frequently visits Techmetals' offices, where his son, Phillip, is now president and CEO.
“Phillip has continued a lot of the things that we started, which was continued training for employees and showing appreciation to the staff,” Brockman says. “You are only as good as your employees.”
Visit www.techmetals.com
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