When Carla Trotman took over the reins of Electro Soft, a family-owned contract electronics manufacturing company, she had already worked there long enough to change the style of clothing in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania from “lifestyle.” , I knew some things had to change. Transform your business into a growth engine.
The three most important things she came up with to take advantage of today's reshoring phenomenon and scale her company are: Revolutionize the sales process by leveraging the Internet and e-commerce. and promote the benefits of manufacturing employment, particularly at Electrosoft.
“We changed the entire structure of the company and are now growing 20% year over year,” Trotman said. Chief executive. “The main thing is that we changed our culture. We had to restate our core values, our mission, and our business goals.”
Electro Soft manufactures circuit boards and wiring harnesses for military contractors, automated guided vehicle manufacturers, and many other types of manufacturers at its facility, which employs approximately 30 people. The company's “culture” was started in 1986 by Trotman's father and mother, Jim and Sheila Wallace. Jim Wallace leveraged his expertise as a manufacturing executive at SmithKline Beckman to found Electro Soft.
His daughter joined the company in the factory as a teenager, cutting wire for 25 cents an hour using a ruler and wire cutters. Then, 15 years ago, he left his corporate career behind and returned to Electrosoft with the idea that he would ultimately succeed. her father.
As Trotman rose through the ranks, he watched closely and was ready to put his ideas into action after Wallace retired and took over as CEO in 2020. This is to pursue growth, which is our first and most important goal for Electro Soft.
“It was a lifestyle business,” she says. “We never really had plans to grow. It was just a business that paid the bills and just carried on. But the need for manufacturing in the U.S. has increased so much these days that we definitely have the potential to grow.” It is located in
Trotman, who is also the author of a new book, has been at the helm of Electrosoft since he started as CEO. Dark, Dirty and Dangerous: A Vibrant Future for Manufacturing—We are focusing on three areas to help the company maximize growth opportunities:
• Restructuring of leadership. “We overhauled our organizational chart, fired a few people, and brought in an organizational psychologist to create a cohesive management team,” Trotman says. “We were a little divided.”
• Emphasize manufacturing jobs. “Manufacturing needs to be better marketed,” Trotman said. “We need a sexy makeover. Back in the day, no one wanted to be a computer programmer, but now coding is a popular job. Manufacturing is no different. Look at how the media portrayed it. Please: Smoke, sparks, dark and dirty environments.
“But manufacturing really just turns raw materials into finished products. That means bakeries, clothing companies, car manufacturers. We need to take the time to explain that and open the doors. Three-quarters of U.S. manufacturing companies have fewer than 20 employees.
So Trotman launched ElectroSoft's own campaign to highlight manufacturing jobs, including its recent participation in Manufacturing Day, an annual event promoted by industry groups and recognized by the federal government. Ta. Among other things, the company is working with nearby Drexel University to create a manufacturing “career accelerator.”
“People go through a six-week boot camp to get them primed and ready for manufacturing,” Trotman says. “Drexel asked us who we wanted to target, and we said women, people of color, and immigrants. When we think about educating people about what manufacturing jobs are, we started casting a wider net.”
• Utilization of e-commerce. Contract manufacturing may be one of the last industries to embrace the marketing and sales capabilities of the Internet, but Trotman has been using the lessons he learned while working for large corporations to I started participating from the beginning.
“Door-to-door salespeople were once widespread in industrial markets,” she says. “Back then, most industrial companies had websites, but they were in small print or long. war and peace. “It wasn't optimized. For us, that meant flattening our sales.”
Under her direction, Electro Soft became online savvy, communicating not only with design engineers but also with buyers through “marketing talk.” This was completely new to us. We were manufacturers. We had to think through what we were offering and accurately portray who we were. ”
Electro Soft's online marketing efforts include a blog, which is a significant investment for a small business, but by flagging the company in Google searches by potential customers, “Google algorithms reward fresh content. “I realized that,” Trotman said. Search engine optimization has helped Electro Soft “understand who is buying from us and who we want to be.”
