You Have $500K to Spend This Month…Where Are You Putting It?
In a special edition of The Job Shop Show podcast, host Jay Jacobs hit the floor at Paperless Parts’ annual user conference, POWER 2025, and asked attendees across a variety of roles, locations, and sizes three big questions:
- What is your outlook on 2025?
- If you had $500k to put towards any area of your business in the next month, where would you invest it?
- What has been your biggest takeaway from POWER?
We broke down attendees’ answers to question #1 in last week’s blog post – click here to check it out.
Here, we’re breaking down question #2:
“Where Would You Allocate $500K in Your Business?”
Machinery & Automation
Justin Quinn, President and Owner, Focused on Machining
“Automated 5-axis. Considering the skills gap/labor shortage, that machine can do so much work in a small envelope, with minimal human interaction. One highly skilled programmer could allow that machine to run 24/7.”
Matt Fritz, Estimating Engineer, GTR Manufacturing
“We would put it into capital investments. My personal choice would be 5-axis machining centers.”
Emily Anderson, Operations, Method Mfg
“We would probably put the money towards additional automation. We currently run a few automation cells and we have our eye on the larger cells.”
Peter Doyle, CEO, Hirsh Precision
“We would put it into capital equipment. We’d be looking at extending not just our automated machine capacity, but also adding new capabilities to grinding in-house.”
Jeff Kalinowski, Estimator, Electro-Metrics
“New machine tools. My choice would be a large vertical turning lathe. It can allow you to do much larger aerospace work.”
Joseph Long, Production & Operations Manager, Evans Manufacturing
“Our 4 kW laser is no longer top technology, so we’d add more wattage there. That tool is the center of our shop when it comes to our job shop capabilities. It’s where everything starts for us.”
Jim Fitch, VP Engineering, Nu-Way Industries
“$500,000 would be a nice downpayment for a tube laser. In today’s environment, lasers have become kind of a ‘gotta have it’ price of entry.”
Paul Becotte, VP Engineering, Alinabal
“Newer CNCs. We’ve had some aging equipment, so newer capital investments would certainly keep us more competitive. Specifically lathes that could open up different segments of the aerospace and defense market we serve.”
Software Integration
Ryan Hochstetler, Digital Director, General Stamping & Metalworks
“We’d probably put $500K into some of our machine integrations for real-time data collection improvements. We want additional information on our machine utilization and production capabilities to help feed back into the estimating side of things, making sure that changes in equipment are reflected in our quoting capabilities.”
Alex Enriquez, Estimator, Athena Manufacturing
“Given some conversations that I’ve had in the last two hours, I would like to see more money go into streamlining the quality inspection portion of our process. Something to make it easier for everybody to access that information in a more streamlined way.”
Ted Matherne, Manufacturing Specialist, Laitram Machine
“Certainly software technology—we want to see what more can be done with AI.”
Jonathon Friedl, Co-Owner, Black Mountain Manufacturing
“I would put it towards building more software. I would hire developers. A new press brake would be great, but the impact of that would be marginal compared to the impact we could make implementing better systems.”
People
Eric Henderson, Senior Estimator/Project Manager, Engage Industrial Solutions
“Training and cross-training…not just the estimating side of it, but also our laser plate processing, our sheet metal forming, and CNC machining.”
Joe VanBecelaere, Director of Sales & Estimating, RCO Engineering
“People; if the labor force was there, we would hire more. That’s not always something you can predict, but that would be my first choice.“
Hernan Ricaurte, President, Ricaurte Precision Inc.
“If there were a magic wand I could wave to hire some fantastic programmers, machinists, supply chain individuals, and experienced professionals, I would take that. Investing and training my people would be my first choice.”
Brandon Brooks, President, Wal-Tek Industries
“Our people. There’s some equipment and software on our wish list, but investing in our people is what’s going to make our company great; specifically our executive-level people to help drive this business forward. With CUI requirements and CMMC, I need to consider maybe a CTO to make sure our tech stack is integrated properly. I need to look at maybe a customer service manager as our sales team continues to grow. When I’m stuck working in the business instead of working on of the business, it hurts our ability to grow.”
Square Footage
Nathan High, Sales Manager, PBZ Manufacturing
“Space. We need more square footage. We’re busting at the seams. It’s a great problem to have.”
Subscribe to In the Shop to read part III coming soon, or tune in to the full episode of The Job Shop Show here!