The Soul of an Entrepreneur by David Sax

Author:David Sax [Sax, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

NCC AUTOMATED SYSTEMS OCCUPIES FIFTY thousand feet of low-lying, industrial space on a country road, bordered by farm fields, slaughterhouses, and a turkey bacon processing plant. The building is split between a narrow warren of offices and a huge warehouse and shop floor, filled with worktables, giant water cutting machines, welding stations, buckets of small components, sheets of steel and aluminum, and several American flags hanging from the rafters.

“What we do here is simple,” Kevin Mauger said, as we walked around the facility in hard hats. “We’re taking raw metal and plastic, cutting it, bending it, and building conveyor systems out of it.” As Mauger corrected me several times during our tour, a conveyor system is more than a conveyor belt. The conveyor system is the entire apparatus that moves products from one end of an assembly line to the other, often in wild, looping configurations that bend over and under, up and down, and round and round to fit into a facility, like gigantic Rube Goldberg machines. A conveyor belt is just one piece of that; the rubber or metal tread that some goods move along.

If you need something moved across a factory or warehouse in an automated fashion—frozen dinners, ramen noodles, pregnancy tests, prescription lenses—NCC will build you the system to move it. “That includes everything from the conveyor itself, to small machines to do a specific task, like turn a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in its package around,” Mauger said. Food manufacturing and optical assembly made up the bulk of the company’s work.

Mauger was not NCC’s founder. That was Bob Ryan, who started the company in 1986 after working as a salesman for a conveyor belt company. Mauger grew up nearby and met Ryan by knocking on his door when he was still in college. The twenty-year-old mechanical engineering student had recently found out his girlfriend was pregnant and had started a handyman business to earn cash. “I went from living in a frat house in my junior year of college with forty guys to living off campus with a baby in senior year,” Mauger told me, as we sat in his office, which featured several photos of his wife, Danielle, and their three adult children, Philadelphia Eagles paraphernalia, and the usual inspirational office posters (“Rule #1: If We Don’t Take Care of the Customer, Someone Else Will…”), industry awards, and pictures of Tasty Cakes moving along NCC-built conveyors.

After doing work around his house all summer, Ryan told Mauger to give him a call if he wanted a job after college. “I graduated Friday and came in to work here on a Monday,” Mauger said. It was 1994 and he never left. Back then NCC was a smaller company, with fifteen employees and $3 million in annual sales. Mauger described Ryan as a visionary founder, with the charisma of a born salesman, and the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later management style of one, too. According to Mauger, Ryan’s core value was “There’s always a way.” He refused to tell a customer no, resulting in frequent all-nighters by NCC’s staff to realize Ryan’s lofty promises.

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