Everyone’s heard the old aphorism: You need to spend money to make money. But for Paul Nichols, owner of the Bland Co. in West Hartford, it rang especially true.
“If we still had our old machines, we wouldn’t be here talking today,” said Nichols.
He’s referring to the six “Swiss style” CNC milling machines he has bought over the last two years, an investment he directly credits with saving his 70-year-old, 17-employee company.
They weren’t anything spectacular, or even special. The machines were built in 2001, and Nichols bought them refurbished in 2005. But what they allowed Bland to do is work five times faster, and eliminate numerous steps in the manufacturing process.
The six machines cost about $150,000 a piece. In less than a year, Bland made it all back, as the company sales spiked from $1 million to $2 million. Nichols predicts sales will hit $2.5 million in a year.
Bland Co. is a niche within a niche, a manufacturer of threaded fasteners – specially cut bolts, pins and screws – that are used almost exclusively by the aerospace industry. Nichols sells the fasteners through distributors and directly to a number of area companies, including AAA Aircraft Supply in Enfield and Purdy Corp. in Manchester.
Before Bland bought the machines, Nichols would have to sell the fasteners in much larger quantities, and then subcontract out the manufacturing to another company. Usually that was Soldream Inc. in Tolland.
Nichols noticed how quickly and easily Soldream was able to spit out the orders. They were using newer machines. He decided to follow suit.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was an incredibly important decision,” Nichols said.
It allowed Bland to move from a small run manufacturer to one that could make more significant quantities of small parts. Nichols said he could book more, sell more and churn out fasteners more quickly.
John Flanagan, vice president of Bland, said the new machines are five times faster, and work at tolerance levels 10 times greater. They can carry out multiple steps that used to require at least two machines.
“It’s just so much better with these,” he said.
The end result: Once struggling, Bland has now outgrown its 7,500-square-foot warehouse and Nichols is actively searching for a new, bigger space – probably in Newington, which is just down the road from his building on Brook St.
And while he acknowledges demand has picked up because of the Iraq war, Nichols attributes Bland’s astronomical growth to that investment in new machinery.
“The old machines were just killing us,” he said.
