The Beginnings of Torchmate - Part 4, Conclusion
This has drawn out longer than I originally intended. As the title to the thread states, “The Beginnings of Torchmate” - not a tedious blow by blow history. As the business progressed from this point forward, it starts to get into the grey area of proprietary information, trade secrets, etc. So, I’m going to condense things somewhat in this final installment – kind of the way some movies end, with a sentence or two showing what happened to everyone.
My daughter, who had graduated from college with a math degree, would eventually come to work for us and start handling the search engine result analysis. She was located in West Virginia, which was fine, given her focus on our Internet presence.
We continued to introduce new products: The Torchmate 3 table had one side lower than the other to facilitate loading material with a forklift; a Small Shop Machine had a 4’ x 4’ table, meant to appeal to hobbyists with limited space. A variety of accessories were introduced, including a tube cutting attachment, a plate marker, and a number of other items.
More and more CNC tables were being manufactured in-house rather than being pulled together from components manufactured elsewhere. I won’t elaborate on additional machines, as some are still being produced.
Sales were now at a level that justified in-house manufacturing. We acquired two industrial welding robots to help us with the fabrication.
I purchased a 65 watt Synrad laser to test the inherent accuracy of our machine. This was not nearly powerful enough to cut steel, but worked well on gasket material, leather, ceramic tile, paper, etc. Some of the items I cut with it were quite surprising to me, given my experience with plasma arc. A few examples are pictured below. We never offered a laser option for the machine, due to the cooling requirements for anything much more powerful than my unit.
We moved three more times: to an 11,000 square foot building in Reno, then to a 30,000 square foot facility across town, and finally, to its present location under Lincoln Electric (see pictures).
As our sales numbers increased, so did our number of employees, reaching 66 by the time the business sold. By 2006 sales, technical support, shipping & receiving, and most administrative functions were performed in Reno. I continued to remain involved in product design and marketing, and my daughter in Internet related activities.
My goal all along was to eventually turn the entire operation over to my son, and retire again. However, competitors and copycats were appearing in droves on the Internet. While we believed that the market was far from saturated, it looked as though our market share might be difficult to maintain going forward. After careful consideration and much soul searching, we decided to sell the business. By this time we had machines in something like 85 foreign countries and every State in the U.S.
The business sold in early 2011, my son and daughter remaining with the company through the transition period.
My son eventually bought a cross-country ski lodge in Montana. My daughter is now director of marketing for a start-up business. I live on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
It has been a fascinating and rewarding journey, which I experienced later in life than most. I am now 81 years old, and continue to play around with various fabrication projects. I have finally shaken the impulse to make money.
No one can authoritatively tell someone else how to run a business. The only information they can convey is what worked for them during a certain period of time. I hope I have done that here.
Photos 1-5 Some typical Torchmate installations prior to 2011
This has drawn out longer than I originally intended. As the title to the thread states, “The Beginnings of Torchmate” - not a tedious blow by blow history. As the business progressed from this point forward, it starts to get into the grey area of proprietary information, trade secrets, etc. So, I’m going to condense things somewhat in this final installment – kind of the way some movies end, with a sentence or two showing what happened to everyone.
My daughter, who had graduated from college with a math degree, would eventually come to work for us and start handling the search engine result analysis. She was located in West Virginia, which was fine, given her focus on our Internet presence.
We continued to introduce new products: The Torchmate 3 table had one side lower than the other to facilitate loading material with a forklift; a Small Shop Machine had a 4’ x 4’ table, meant to appeal to hobbyists with limited space. A variety of accessories were introduced, including a tube cutting attachment, a plate marker, and a number of other items.
More and more CNC tables were being manufactured in-house rather than being pulled together from components manufactured elsewhere. I won’t elaborate on additional machines, as some are still being produced.
Sales were now at a level that justified in-house manufacturing. We acquired two industrial welding robots to help us with the fabrication.
I purchased a 65 watt Synrad laser to test the inherent accuracy of our machine. This was not nearly powerful enough to cut steel, but worked well on gasket material, leather, ceramic tile, paper, etc. Some of the items I cut with it were quite surprising to me, given my experience with plasma arc. A few examples are pictured below. We never offered a laser option for the machine, due to the cooling requirements for anything much more powerful than my unit.
We moved three more times: to an 11,000 square foot building in Reno, then to a 30,000 square foot facility across town, and finally, to its present location under Lincoln Electric (see pictures).
As our sales numbers increased, so did our number of employees, reaching 66 by the time the business sold. By 2006 sales, technical support, shipping & receiving, and most administrative functions were performed in Reno. I continued to remain involved in product design and marketing, and my daughter in Internet related activities.
My goal all along was to eventually turn the entire operation over to my son, and retire again. However, competitors and copycats were appearing in droves on the Internet. While we believed that the market was far from saturated, it looked as though our market share might be difficult to maintain going forward. After careful consideration and much soul searching, we decided to sell the business. By this time we had machines in something like 85 foreign countries and every State in the U.S.
The business sold in early 2011, my son and daughter remaining with the company through the transition period.
My son eventually bought a cross-country ski lodge in Montana. My daughter is now director of marketing for a start-up business. I live on the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.
It has been a fascinating and rewarding journey, which I experienced later in life than most. I am now 81 years old, and continue to play around with various fabrication projects. I have finally shaken the impulse to make money.
No one can authoritatively tell someone else how to run a business. The only information they can convey is what worked for them during a certain period of time. I hope I have done that here.
Photos 1-5 Some typical Torchmate installations prior to 2011