KENNETH A. Lewis Sr., the best machine-shop student in Southern High School's class of 1958, is painfully aware of the tech crash, the capital investment slump and the recession.
Sales at his Baltimore manufacturing company, Kenlee Precision Corp., are down 30 percent. Computer- and telecom-related orders are dead, he says, and he owns perhaps a third more metal-forming machines and other production capacity than he can use.
And he could not seem happier about business.
"I'm psyched," he says. "I really am. I've got the best crew I've ever had in my life. I don't have to tell you defense is coming back," and, he adds: "We've got 25 new customers on our horizon that we didn't have two years ago."
On an economic optimism scale of 10, Ken, where are you?
"I'm a 10."
He's probably always like this. You don't go from humble beginnings with no college education to own a key parts supplier for Hewlett-Packard and Baxter Healthcare by dwelling on risks or looking for excuses.
Instead of complaining about taxes and regulators, Lewis is drumming up customers. Instead of fretting over Maryland's shrinking manufacturing base, Lewis has become something of a one-man economic spinoff effect: He helped his brother and a son-in-law start metal-machining businesses and helped another son-in-law start an industrial painting company.
Instead of sitting in seminars listening to motivation consultants talk about "opportunity in crisis," Lewis is seeking new business and making his shop sharper.
Muscular, round-faced, bald and pony-tailed, Lewis, 63, walks through his Morrell Park plant like a teen-ager showing off a Camaro. The first machine, the size of a small car, is made by Nakamura-Tome of Japan, costs $365,000 and is turning hunks of metal into silvery, intricate works of industrial art in less than three minutes.
The finished product is a gleaming little disk with a drilled-through shaft protruding from each side. It looks like a child's top, only smaller. Destined for a high-tech measurement device, the part comes from a single piece of steel and once would have required four or five separate operations.
Kenlee's machines not only do such work quickly, they do it accurately - within millionths of a meter of required specifications - and Lewis has more than a dozen of them furnishing a three-level warren in the middle of a residential neighborhood. About 140 people work there.
Capital investment, capital investment, capital investment are three secrets of Kenlee's survival. Lewis once bought a $600,000 machine to do a $300,000 order, figuring correctly that the stepped-up capability would eventually pay for itself.
Only the best machine tools can craft parts to the tolerances required by the medical hardware firms, semiconductor manufacturers and defense-electronics companies Kenlee supplies. And only the best machines can do it quickly enough for Kenlee to make money.
But Lewis, who sports more gold than a Zale store, doesn't seem to have mired himself in debt, and he avoided other mistakes of the 1990s bubble.
He wasn't completely seduced by the telecom and computer booms, for example. His telecom and semiconductor customers wanted him to dump other clients and focus on them alone. If Kenlee had acquiesced, its sales might be off 80 percent today, not 30 percent.
Maryland manufacturing held its own for most of the 1990s, but it has lost 11,000 jobs in the past two years, 6 percent of the total. The slump, a Republican governor-elect and what was perceived as favoritism by Gov. Parris N. Glendening for biotech and telecom companies has summoned renewed calls for government assistance to traditional factories.
"People have misinformation about manufacturing, and when you have new leaders express a desire to move in that direction, it helps all people take manufacturing more seriously," says Michael Galiazzo, executive director of the Regional Manufacturing Institute.
"If we look at Maryland manufacturing in the same context that we look at the football stadium and the baseball stadium, then we could see benefits far beyond what we see right now."
It's true that manufacturing fires up a regional economy like almost nothing else. But it's also true that Maryland manufacturers have gotten two tax cuts in the past five years that probably add up to the kind of money Galiazzo is talking about.
Gov.-elect Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. should take a hard look at helping Maryland manufacturers, but there's only so much government can do. You're in the private sector, folks. And Ken Lewis, whose company, granted, has benefited from government job-training programs, says he's psyched.