3 Ways To Turn Contract Manufacturing Into A Growth Engine

When Karla Trotman took over running Electro Soft, a family-owned contract electronics-manufacturing business, she had already worked there long enough to realize she was going to have to change some things to change the outfit in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania, from a “lifestyle business” into a growth engine.

The three most important things she came up with to expand the company by taking advantage of today’s reshoring phenomenon: shake up management; leverage the internet and ecommerce to revolutionize the sales process; and tout the benefits of manufacturing employment, particularly at Electro Soft.

“We’ve changed the entire structure of our company, and now we’ve grown 20% year over year,” Trotman tells Chief Executive. “Mostly it was changing our culture. We had to restate core values, our mission, the goal of the business.”

Electro Soft manufactures circuit boards and wire harnesses for military contractors, makers of automated guided vehicles, and many other types of manufacturers in its facility that employs about 30 workers. The “culture” of the company was started in 1986 by Trotman’s father and mother, Jim and Sheila Wallace. Jim Wallace leveraged his expertise from being a manufacturing executive for SmithKline Beckman and founded Electro Soft.

His daughter started with the company as a teenager on the shop floor, cutting wires for 25 cents an hour with a ruler and wire cutters, and then 15 years ago left her own corporate career to come back to Electro Soft with the idea of eventually succeeding her father.

While working her way up the ranks, Trotman observed carefully and was ready to hit the ground running with her ideas after Wallace retired and she became CEO in 2020. Covid slowed her down, but after it lifted a couple of years ago, Trotman was able to pursue her initial and most important goal for Electro Soft: growth.

“It was a lifestyle business,” she says. “There was no plan to really grow. It was a business to pay the bills and just keep going. But because there is such a need for stateside manufacturing these days, we do see the ability to grow.”

Since she began steering Electro Soft from her CEO seat, Trotman—also author of a new book, Dark, Dirty Dangerous: The Vibrant Future of Manufacturing—has focused on three areas so the company can best take advantage of growth opportunities:

• Recasting leadership. “We looked at our org chart and let go of a couple of people, and brought in an organizational psychologist wo help create a cohesive management team,” Trotman says. “We were a little bit fragmented.”

• Highlighting manufacturing jobs. “Manufacturing needs to be marketed better,” Trotman says. “It needs a sexy makeover. Back in the day, no one wanted to be a computer programmer, but now coding is the hot job. Manufacturing is similar. Look how the media have portrayed it: smokes stacks, sparks flying, a dark and dirty environment.

“But manufacturing is really just turning raw material into finished goods. That means bakers, clothes companies, auto manufacturers. We need to take the time to do that and explain that and open our doors. Three-quarters of U.S. manufacturers have fewer than 20 people.”

So, Trotman launched Electro Soft’s own campaign to highlight manufacturing jobs including participating in the recent Manufacturing Day, an annual event promoted by trade groups and recognized by the federal government. Among other things, the company also is participating with nearby Drexel University to create a “career accelerator” for manufacturing.

“People can go through a six-week boot camp and get primed and ready for manufacturing,” Trotman says. “Drexel asked us who we wanted to target, and we said women, people of color and immigrants. We started casting a wider net when we think about educating people about what manufacturing jobs are.”

• Harnessing e-commerce. Contract manufacturing may have been one of the last industries to pick up on the marketing and sales capabilities of the internet, but Trotman began plunging in years ago, applying lessons she had learned during stints at larger companies.

“The door-to-door salesman used to be prevalent in the industrial marketplace,” she says. “Then most industrial companies had a web site, but it was either in small writing, or it was as long as War and Peace. “It wasn’t optimized. For us, that meant our sales were flat.”

Under her command, Electro Soft has become online-savvy, communicating not just with design engineers but also with buyers via “marketing speak. This was brand new to us. We were manufacturers. We had to be thoughtful about what we were offering and carve out an accurate picture of who we were.”

Electro Soft’s online marketing efforts have included blogging—a significant investment for a small company, Trotman says, “but we realized the Google algorithm would reward fresh content” by flagging the company in google searches by potential customers. Search engine optimization helped Electro Soft “figure out who was buying from us and who we wanted to be.”