Q&A: Norm Schneeberger, GS Precision

Vermont Business Magazine, Jan 01, 2005

Norman Schneeberger, 37, is the owner and CEO of GS Precision, a company located in a 60,000-square-foot Brattleboro facility. The company provides high-precision, machined components and subassemblies for the aircraft engine, missile guidance, and fuel control system segments of the global aerospace industry and in the automotive, medical and optics fields. Founded by Schneeberger' father in 1958, the company recently initiated operations in a 17,000-square-foot manufacturing space locate Roca Fuerte Industrial Park in Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico. Schneeb, recently started a new firm, GSP Coatings, also located in Brattleboro. One Industrial Park. Schneeberger attended the University of Vermont and been with GS Precision since 1992. He lives in Brattleboro, and has two, children. Robert Smith interviewed Schneeberger at his office in Brattleboro.

VBM: I'm interested in your background, and in GS Precision, what the history of the company is, and what it does. Are you from the Brattleboro area?

Schneeberger: Yes. This is a family business. My dad started it in 1958, so that's 46 years. I grew up in the business, and worked summers in the shop.

VBM: Did it start as a machine shop?

Schneeberger: Yes. I went to the University of Vermont, then got a job in Connecticut for about three years, with a machine tool company. Not really what we do here, but sort of related. I came back after three years to raise a family here.

VBM: You've been with the business how long?

Schneeberger: About 12 years.

VBM: Is your dad retired?

Schneeberger: Yes. He still comes in quite often. He's out of the day-to-day stuff, but he still stays involved in special projects.

VBM: Is the company seeing growth?

Schneeberger: Before 9/11, we were doing real well. We had a year-to-year growth over a seven year period, from about $10 million to $25 million. Then 9/11 totally wiped the growth out. We're very reliant on the commercial airline industry, that's one of our biggest customers. Everyone knows what happened to the economy, and especially the airline industry after 9/11. It knocked us down to about $17 million after that. This past year we went back up to $20 million, and at this date, we're above that for this year.

VBM: How many employees do you have?

Schneeberger: We have about 250 at this plant, who actually work for GS Precision. We started another business, GSP Coatings, that does anodizing, and we have about 15 employees there.

VBM: What exactly does GS Precision produce?

Schneeberger. What we sell is time and expertise. We do not design our own products. We build products that other people have designed. Everything we do is custom made, mostly from metal. One of the things that we're known for is the ability to make extremely tight tolerance parts out of extremely difficult metals. We do it in a production environment, not in a laboratory environment, so we're able to do it in significant volume.

VBM: You've recently opened a shop in Mexico. Could you talk about that?

Schneeberger: We did that a little over a year ago. We're competing with China and Singapore and a lot of these Far Eastern countries, and we needed a way to be able to lower our costs, so we opened a facility in Mexico. We have 50 employees down there. They're doing a lot of the same things that we're doing here, except less sophisticated and on a smaller scale. That has probably had more of a positive impact on our business here than any other move we've made. It's drawn the attention of a lot of major companies, people that we don't do business with, and they're interested in doing business with us because we have this plant, and it will ultimately reduce their costs. It's been a lot of work, and the jury is out on how much we're actually going to save until the thing is really fine tuned. One of our biggest concerns in Vermont is finding skilled people. I hear all these quotes about unemployment rates and everything, but we have virtually no unemployment down here. It's extremely difficult to find skilled people here.

VBM: You must be one of the larger employees here in the Brattleboro area?

Schneeberger: I think so. I don't really follow those numbers.

VBM: How did the company get started?

Schneeberger: It's my dad's brain-child. He saw a need on the market. He was involved in selling and servicing machine tools. He thought he could better service customers if he was actually producing the parts that they were attempting do produce on their own. He was down in Manhattan, and had some friends in Vermont he used to come up and visit. He thought this would be a decent place to set up shop.

VBM: When did you build this facility in the industrial park?

Schneeberger: I believe it was 1984. We were in Wilmington, and we had a plant on Old Ferry Road, which is a part of C&S Wholesale Grocers now. They bought it from us and built around it. We built this place, and shut down the plant in Wilmington about 10 years ago. It was really difficult having two plants that far away from each other. We've expanded this year into another building here in the park, with about 50,000 square feet. So we're back to two buildings again, but they're very dose together and we've set up the work flow so that basically things are only going in one direction.