🔒From dirty radiator shop to 78K-sq.-ft. newly acquired industrial space, Joining Industries rose from humble beginnings

Michael Francoeur launched his high-tech industrial welding business in 1985 with $5,000 in savings and a refurbished electron beam welding machine rescued from a scrap pile.

Long before Francoeur launched Joining Industries, he started Dynamic Electron Beam in a two-bay former radiator shop tucked behind a duplex on South Main Street in Waterbury. The once-prosperous city was in decline and Francoeur could find cheap rent on an apartment and his shop.

The property owner offered Francoeur, then 25, six months of free rent if he would clean out the filthy building.

“I was scraping and brushing and removing years of materials that were stripped away from radiators, then slapped on coats of paint,” Francoeur recalled. “That was the humble beginning.”

Last year, Joining Industries — the parent of three separate companies — bought two buildings with more than 78,000 square feet of combined space to house a growing workforce of 110 employees.

Joining Industries paid $3 million in April for a 45,110-square-foot East Granby property that has hosted the bulk of its operations since 1998. Purchasing its former leased space gave the company elbow room and options for growth.

Joining Industries followed up in December with a $1.6-million purchase of a 33,364-square-foot Windsor building that previously served as lab space for The Travelers Cos.

Joining Technologies — the legacy arm of the business — performs a series of laser manufacturing processes for a wide range of industries, including defense, cosmetics, medical, aerospace, automotive and more. It uses lasers for scribing, cutting, drilling, ablation, stripping, forming and cleaning.

“We have drilled holes in concrete for the military,” Francoeur said.

Greg Miller, president of Joining Technologies, said his arm of the business employs about 80 people. That includes staff from American Cladding Technologies, a branch that is being reabsorbed into Joining Technologies at its East Granby address, just west of Bradley International Airport.

The fastest-growing arm of Francoeur’s company is JT Automation, spun off in 2016. The company designs and builds automated laser manufacturing machines tailored to specific clients’ needs, with prices ranging from $500,000 to $2.3 million.

It took two years to design and produce one multimillion-dollar machine that uses lasers to trim false eyelashes. It was built for a cosmetics company in Vietnam, Francoeur said.

In 2019, JT Automation had 10 employees. Today, it has 30.

JT Automation President Ryan Lombardini said he expects to hire another eight to 10 people by the close of the second quarter. The company is offering salaries between $80,000 to $150,000 for skilled tradespersons, including mechanical, manufacturing, controls and electrical engineers.

“Word is getting out,” Lombardini said of rising demand. “We are really getting our name out there. We are becoming a lot better known in the industry. We are trusted by a lot of larger organizations. That’s what’s led to our growth.”

External factors have helped.

“I think it is a combination of a young company hitting its stride, laser technology becoming more ubiquitous in manufacturing and the effects of the last two to three years in the labor market driving more automation initiatives,” said Joining Industries CEO David Hudson.

Pent-up demand

JT Automation will exit East Granby for the Windsor building this spring, following $250,000 in renovations. The move will free up about 10,000 square feet in East Granby, allowing Joining Technologies to add equipment and expand capabilities there. The additions will include a modern electron beam machine being imported from Germany.

“I have machines on order that I have no place to put until (JT Automation) moves out,” said Miller, the Joining Technologies president.

Miller said manufacturers are reshoring more work due to instability in overseas labor and supply chains. Another factor in current growth is pent-up demand following a slowdown at the outset of the pandemic, Miller said.

The company performs welds on sensors used in the manufacture of semiconductors, which have seen a boom in domestic production lately.

Francoeur said last year’s real estate purchases are part of a long-term strategy of “scaling up,” that he is pursuing with Hudson’s corporate know-how.

“Dave and I have vastly different backgrounds,” Francoeur said. “I am entrepreneurial with knowledge of metals and fusion welding. Dave has operated large corporations where he scaled up their capital equipment. … What you see now is the result of us scaling up and our combined unique skills allowed us to do that.”

Don’t I know you?

Francoeur and Hudson seem almost fated to work together.

After graduating from Agawam High School in 1976, Francoeur went right to work locally as a setup assistant in Massachusetts-based manufacturer EBTEC’s welding department. That’s where he met Hudson, who had the same job.

Francoeur said he had a knack for the trade and was quickly invited to become a welding trainee.

“I had an aptitude for metals and for fusing metals,” Francoeur said. “It came very quickly and naturally.”

Looking for work a few years later, Francoeur answered a Penny Saver ad for a sound engineer job with a local band. He was surprised when his old acquaintance, Hudson, picked up the phone.

That’s how Francoeur became the sound engineer and harmonica player for a ZZ Top tribute band called “Fandango.” Hudson played bass guitar.

“We were together for a year and a half,” Hudson recalled. “Mike went his own way and became entrepreneurial. I became a corporate guy.”

Hudson spent 20 years with Enfield-based paper-industry machinery maker Jagenberg Inc., becoming its director of procurement. Hudson said he left that business for opportunities that didn’t pan out and eventually took a job as a salesman for a small machine shop.

In November 2004, he called Joining Technologies trying to sell the company welding services. He eventually spoke to Francoeur.

“The next thing you know it dawned on us we actually knew each other,” Hudson recalled. “So, I went in to see Michael and in a very short time we decided to see if we could do something together and grow this really nice little company that Michael had started.”

Hudson was hired as vice president of sales and marketing in 2005. At the time, the company employed 24 people. Six months later, Hudson was named president, freeing Francoeur to deal with a personal challenge.

The duo’s business partnership and friendship quickly deepened. Last year, Hudson bought 50% of Joining Industries.

“Every dollar we make we tear in half,” Francoeur joked. “The accounting is easy.”

Bumps in the road

Building the business hasn’t been an uninterrupted string of successes, Francoeur stressed. There have been setbacks and soured relationships along the way.

Shortly after launching Dynamic Electron Beam, Francoeur partnered with two investors who, after about a year of struggle, decided to cash out.

Francoeur said he knelt at the base of the roughly 50-foot tall illuminated cross at Holy Land — a shuttered religious theme park atop a hill in Waterbury — and prayed hard.

A week later, Francoeur was sitting in his tiny office, thinking about how to find work as he listened to his investor-partners talk about dismantling the business. One of them picked through a stack of mail — mostly bills that Francoeur said he was too dejected to even contemplate.

“He opens this mail and it was a purchase order for $30,000, which at that time was enormous, and it was from Bristol Babcock,” Francoeur said.

That saved the business. But Francoeur and his partners parted ways in 1989.

Three years later, Francoeur launched a new company — Energy Beam Labs Inc. — in a leased industrial condo off Route 10 in Cheshire. That business would ultimately grow into Joining Industries. Francoeur said he planned a far more regimented, innovative and professional atmosphere.

“I wanted to be a laboratory,” Francoeur said. “I wanted to be where people came with their problematic issues, where I would solve the problem and create the process at a very high level.”

Francoeur said he believes the company he founded is likely to double in size in five years.

“With all of this reshoring, there are very few people that do what we do,” Francoeur said. “We do subcontracting manufacturing and we automate factories. It’s huge.”