Allison Lee’s initial goal as an owner of a powder coating facility was to get through the first five years of operation.
Allison Lee“I was always told if you could get past the 5-year mark, then you’ll be okay,” says Lee, owner of Coatings Plus in Boise, ID.
Unfortunately, the first two years were when Lee was a stay-home mom, and other family members ran the operation. Things weren’t going so well, and that’s when Lee and her Father in law stepped in to take control and keep the business afloat with the clock running.
“That left me just three years to turn things around,” she says. “But my team and I went to work, and we paid off our debts and righted things. We’re profitable now, and that is a huge victory for us.”
Rewarding Staff for their Hard Work
So how is Lee celebrating her small but definite financial success: by rewarding her staff of 11 with health insurance and other benefits that she can now afford for the first time.
“We’re not the highest-paying company, and we don’t have a lot of benefits, but I do care about my employees; they have stuck with me for a long time,” Lee says. “My team believed in me, and I want them to know I believe in them, too.”
Coatings Plus offers thermoplastic and powder coatings to a variety of steady customers in batch ovens and also offers sandblasting and burn-off stripping services.
The facility began in 1980 as Lynn Industrial Coatings. In 2003, it was purchased by a group of investors which had a manufacturing operation and renamed Coatings Plus. Almost a decade later, an investor approached Lee and her family with the opportunity to purchase the powder coating entity from the manufacturer with his involvement as well.
Lee had an extensive background in jewelry and retail sales and enjoyed quite a bit of success in the industry before they purchased Coatings Plus. Her customer service skills and management prowess lent herself perfectly to take over running the shop full-time in 2014 when the business began having financial issues.
Finding Resources to Run a Coating Shop Profitably
But when she stepped into the powder coating world full-time, she found a significant issue with finding resources to help her run a coating shop profitably, let alone learn the fine art of powder coating.
“The problem is there is no real system in the powder coating world,” Lee says. “No one could really give me that information. I just had to go back to business basics: what are we measuring? What is our P&L? Why are we buying coffee when we can’t afford it? Why are we spending money on uniforms?”
Lee began taking a microscope to all facets of the shop’s operations and soon learned what her costs were, as well as her overhead breakdowns. From there, she set a path to stop hemorrhaging money and make Coatings Plus a viable operation.
One of the biggest issues Lee faced as a novice in the industry was understanding how to properly coat parts, especially when they were doing batch work and the parts were new to them.
But over time, Lee and her team came to see enough odd shapes and parts enough to know what it takes to get a part cleaned and coated properly.
“You have to know a lot about a lot,” she says. “You have to be skilled at batching by the gauge of metal and skilled at color runs. Control what you can control when batching by color, and that is very important.”
Choosing Parts They Want to Work With
Lee said when she joined Coatings Plus full time, they were still producing a lot of “onesies and twosies,” but now they have grown enough to where they run similar parts.
“When we started this turnaround, you essentially take what you can get,” Lee says. “But now I can choose the parts we want to work with and be a little pickier and choosey on what we work with, but that is because I was taking those ones and twos, which we weren’t making a lot of money on.”
Coatings Plus is now doing more than 1,000 parts per day, but the challenge is still there because Lee emphasizes they are not doing the same 1,000 parts each day, which is where the expertise and experience come in.
Lee says there is still a lot of trial and error in the batch work that Coatings Plus performs, but she also has a strong policy of under promising and over delivering on some projects that come in the shop.
“There are a lot of times where I don’t know where these parts have been, how they have been processed, or how they have been treated,” she says. “There are just a lot of bad things that can happen, but we just try to control those variables as much as we can to deliver the best-coated parts that we can.”
When issues do arise with a coating problem, Lee says she and her team go back to Coating 101 to find the solution, which she says the matter often lies. Trying to get complicated with solving issues is usually a waste of time and sends her team on a wild goose chase.
“Most of the time, when there is a problem, it really is a simple issue,” she says. “Do we have clean hooks? Are we getting a proper ground? It’s usually a situation where if we go back to 101, we find the problem and say ‘Oh, duh,’ and we move on. It truly is getting back to the basics.”
Team Steps Up When Tragedy Strikes
Lee and her team put together a mixture of hard work and working smarter to get business at Coatings Plus straightened out and turned around. Things began to run smoother, and Lee began to get more confident that she could run a business that only a few years earlier she had no clue about running.
But all of that changed in 2018 when things literally hit the floor: Lee went for an exercise run around her building with an employee, and when they came back to the office, Lee collapsed to the ground in cardiac arrest. The EMTs who quickly arrived were in and out of reviving her — she says she coded about 10 times while they were treating her — and got her to the hospital, where doctors couldn’t detect a definitive cause of her heart ailment but eventually did implant a defibrillator to stabilize the rhythm and pattern of her heart.
“They told others I had less than 8 percent chance of living when they took me to the hospital, and/or may not be the same,” Lee says. She was in a coma for roughly 10 days while the medical team worked to solve the issue, but the doctors told her it was a “freak occurrence” based on no previous past health issues.
While Lee recuperated at the hospital and at home for nearly two months, her employees went to work keeping the shop open and running without their leader. In fact, it turned out to be their most successful month since Lee took over running the company. Lee says that staff members Anthony, Art, Bob, Julia, Kassie, Dutch, and Rick who were — and all still part ofthe team — that continue to step up and make the company a success.
“I guess when tragedy strikes, you really understand who and what you have around you,” she says. “You have to figure it out some way, and somehow, and I have such a great crew that just said to each other, ‘We have got to make this happen,’ and they did. They all really wanted to make me proud.”
Providing Second Chances to Those Who Need It
Lee and her family purchased the coating shop originally to help with a ministry program, which in part worked to help place those coming out of prisons back into society with jobs. It helped them with a steady flow of employees, and they committed themselves to help those workers establish a career path, albeit some were only short stays at Coatings Plus before moving on to other jobs.
“Our whole business model is giving people a second chance who may need another chance at life,” Lee says. “I tell all of them that if they want to get better as a person, then this is a good place to work. I play by the rules, and they can stay here if they play by the rules, too.”
Her goal moving forward is to continue growing Coatings Plus and to have her and the team get better at what they do every day in coating parts. She has been actively involved with the Powder Coating Institute and the Chemical Coaters Association International over the last several years, even speaking at their annual conference as well as being a part of their peer-to-peer review group that helps small groups of shops learn from each other by visiting and auditing their facilities.
“We want to get better at everything we do,” Lee says. “It’s not just how we coat, but in how we run the entire facility. I want to be successful in everything that we do, and if I don’t know how to do it, then I want to find the right way. I used to be obsessed with perfection, and now I am a little more go-with-the-flow, but I also want to tighten it up, too.”
