At the end of his first year in business, Tom Duffey, manufacturing sales rep-turned-entrepreneur, sat in the office and listened to crickets chirp in his plant. It was not a good feeling.

Like many entrepreneurs, Duffey began in 1989 with a clear vision of what he wanted his company to look like — and had no idea how to make it a reality.

He finally figured it out about six years ago, and today his company, Plastic Components Inc. (PCI), is at the forefront of injection-molded plastic parts manufacturing. Its performance scorecard proves it.

The globally competitive, Germantown company is a world-class producer of low-cost, critical, injection-molded plastic parts, selling to 29 customers across the country. PCI makes, on average, 33,043,590 parts per month and has a 98.95 percent on-time delivery record. Sales figures, too, are soaring. At $14 million, 2010 sales were up 37 percent from 2009, and the first quarter of 2011 was 24 percent ahead of 2010. Management estimates the company will close 2011 with sales of $17+ million.

In its main 40,500-square-foot facility, PCI runs 42 molding presses with 49 employees — far ahead of the industry average.
“The average molder in our industry has five employees per press,” Duffey explains. “So a comparable company our size with 42 molding presses would have 210 employees.”

The initial vision he had for the company has finally come to fruition.

“When I started the business in 1989, I had a good idea of what I wanted to accomplish. I knew the last thing the industry wanted was one more mediocre molder. There are thousands of mediocre molders out there. The angle I hit upon was to run a fully automated facility using computers, robots and automated handling systems,” he says.

That’s exactly what he’s done, but only after the company fire smoldered slowly for 16 years. In 2005, Duffey struck a few strategic matches and lit a conflagration under its feet.

Finding its Niche
Before 2005, Duffey didn’t even have an office at PCI. After starting the company, he had remained working as a manufacturer’s rep in Engineered Products, an Elm Grove company he started with his dad in 1980. His first step was to sell that company to his brother and move to PCI full time. Next, he sank about $1 million into new equipment and technologies. Finally, he invited two professional acquaintances to join him and made an all-out commitment to marketing — which he believes is the cornerstone of his success.

“I brought Theresa Schell out as a marketing manager, and then I brought out another good friend, Rick Riesterer, as a manager of business development,” Duffey says. “I really felt that marketing was going to be a key to our long-term success and growth.

Together, the three explored the company’s strengths and identified its core competencies. Schell began branding the company. She developed a Web site where prospective customers can learn about the company and how it produces low-cost, high-quality parts. Visitors to the site can find out about the latest company developments and complete an online quote request. An aggressive e-mail strategy helps drive customers and prospects to the site, and target marketing has helped PCI find customers that comfortably fit its niche.

“We identified that what we do best as a molder is to produce high volume, critically type-tolerant small plastic parts. The biggest part we make is about the size of a football,” he says. “We started to look for markets where we thought they needed high-volume production of small parts, critical tolerances and globally competitive prices.”

The team then looked at PCI’s Wisconsin-based customer list and realized they were losing many of them — to other states and other countries. They could no longer rely on a local or regional customer base to support the company’s growth.
So they broadened their scope, creating a new, national marketing strategy designed to find customers in markets where they felt they could be competitive. In the process, they discovered new niches they’d never considered before, like the appliance and plumbing industries.

“The growth we’ve had is largely the result of the marketing and business development efforts we made five years ago to create new opportunities and put new business in the pipeline with customers all over North America, in markets we had never, ever pursued before,” Duffey says.

He estimates 60 to 70 percent of PCI’s current business comes from customers they had no relationship with five years ago.
Learning From Mistakes
Duffey admits that PCI’s early years were hard, especially that first year. He and two other investors, including his father, started the business with three molding presses and a 10,000 square-feet facility at the current Germantown location. Between September 1989 when they closed on the building and February 1990, the company didn’t run or ship a single part.

Fueled only by stubbornness, the company grew slowly and expanded several times, to the point where space at the original facility was maxed out by 2011. So at the beginning of May, Duffey purchased another 15,000-square-foot building, just a block and a half away from the first one.

Building Bigger Plans
He has even bigger plans for the new facility, and they have him “very, very, very excited,” he says. “I’ve sent my team — the operations team, including my son Ryan, who’s our vice president and is going to head up this operation, along with our operations guy — and I’ve said, ‘OK, here’s a piece of paper and here’s a new building. Knowing what we’ve learned over 22 years and all of the things we know we would do differently if we had it to do over again — go do it. Make it the world-class showcase we want it to be.”

The overarching goal is to have a fully automatic operation — run without any employees. “My dream is to have the facility running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with literally no humans in the building … a totally human-free, lights-out operation with nothing but computers and robots, and video cameras watching everything that goes on in the building,” he says.

While he doesn’t think this is achievable, he’s going to try it anyway. And he just might succeed. He’s done it before after being told he couldn’t.

In an entrepreneurship course at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where Duffey earned a graduate degree in 1988, a final assignment was given to write a business plan.

“I wanted to write a business plan to start a plastics company, and PCI was the business I had in mind. But the professor wouldn’t let me do it. He told me, ‘No one comes to Northwestern to go back into manufacturing,’ and he literally would not let me write the business plan I wanted to write,” Duffey recalls.

The rest, of course, is history. And, when he reflects upon it, Duffey says there’s only one thing he would change.
 “Somewhere around five years ago, the caliber of my decision making became a lot better. I’m 53 now, so I like to say maybe I crossed a bridge where I got a little bit smarter somewhere around age 48. If I had it to do over again, I’d like to cross that bridge sooner. I think it would have made life a little bit easier.”

Now that he’s crossed that bridge, he occasionally has time to relax. But when he does step away from business, you won’t find him on the golf course with other CEOs who kick back there. You’ll probably find him — with wife Molly, “the smartest person I know” —  on a warm, sandy beach in North Carolina or Key West, shades on, box of good cigars by his side and Jimmy Buffett playing on his iPod.

“Whenever I get too wound up and start taking myself too seriously, I need to turn on Margaritaville and get back to the center,” he laughs

That sounds a bit more enjoyable than listening to crickets chirp in an empty plant. 

Marcia Tillett-Zinzow is a freelance writer who lives in the Lauderdale Lakes area north of Elkhorn.

Best Practices in a Down Economy
Tom Duffey, CEO of Plastic Components Inc., shares his best practices for weathering troubled economic times.

1. Continue Marketing. Marketing, says Tom, is the sum and substance of his company’s success. The business that’s coming in today is not because of anything he’s doing right now. It’s the result of his commitment to intensive marketing efforts five years ago. He suggests companies continue marketing when things are slow, even though pulling back or slashing it from the budget might be the first thought. If you do that, he says, you’re turning off the pipeline.
“You’re almost guaranteeing that six, 12, 18 months down the road, the customers you might have developed to keep you going are not going to be there,” he says. “Cutting back on marketing almost guarantees that you will fail.”

2. Keep Your Focus. While the first instinct in a down economy might be to grab whatever business comes your way, Duffey says that can be a bad idea. When companies break from their niches and core competencies, they end up diluting their strengths, becoming jack-of-all-trades and master of none. “You’re no longer really good at one thing, you’re mediocre at a lot of things,” he warns. Staying focused on what your company does best will ensure the business you really want, the work that fits your capabilities, will continue to come your way.

3. Fire Up Your Passions. The thing that separates companies that “get it” from companies that don’t, Duffey says, is an obsessive-compulsive passion, not just lip service to buzzwords in the books. He’s not a fan of such jargon as “lean initiatives” or “continuous improvement.” The way to get better, he says, is to develop a natural orientation to looking beyond the status quo.

“What I want is an organization that is absolutely as compelled as I am to doing things better tomorrow than they did them yesterday — and that’s what I have now.”

Photos by Shanna Wolf

By Marcia Tillett-Zinzow

Marcia Tillett-Zinzow is a freelance writer who lives in the Lauderdale Lakes area north of Elkhorn.

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