Episode Details

Contact Rick Winter:

Email: rwinter@SNCMfg.com

Website: SNCMFG.com

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers Network Podcast. My guest today is Rick Winter. Rick is VP of sales and marketing at SNC manufacturing. 

Rick began his manufacturing career at a very early age. During summers after high school, Rick worked in a paper mill to pay for college, and after graduating college with a BBA in marketing, Rick worked for polaroid. Then, he moved on to a company that specialized in custom extruded aluminum components for the telecom industry. He now works for SNC manufacturing, a leading custom transformer manufacturer of single-phase and three-phase industrial control transformers, with manufacturing facilities in Oshkosh, Mexico, and China. Rick, welcome to the show.

Rick Winter: Thanks, Lisa.

Lisa Ryan: Share with us a bit of your background. What attracted you to manufacturing, and what's kept you here.

Rick Winter: I grew up in a blue-collar area, mainly the paper industry. My father worked in the paper mill his whole life, and I worked in that paper mill in the summertime to pay for my school, so I was exposed to it early on. It was the lifeblood of my upbringing. That's what pretty much everybody did in the area.

As I moved through my career, I worked for companies that manufactured products. So I started in the different side of it, and then, as I moved into, I've always enjoyed being in the factory and seeing the production being done.

It's always had a hands-on feel, so it's enabled me to be better at the front-end of the business and better understand what goes on behind the scenes in the plant.

Lisa Ryan: I know that you like being in the plant. What are some things you've done with your workplace culture in connecting with your employees and engaging them? What helps you keep them?

Rick Winter: That was a challenge. I've been at SNC for five years now. One of the things that I took on pretty early on was changing the culture at SNC. This is our 75th year of being in business. We have many long-term employees, and with that comes a lot of the traditional, historical, cultural things that may be outdated in many ways. So we are trying to get the culture to be more interactive and break down that barrier of the front office versus the factory—that and getting everybody to understand that we're more of a team.

One of the first things I did was to set up quarterly all-hands meetings. During these sessions, we talk to the employees, just like everybody else. We tell them how things are going, how we're doing against our revenue goals, our bottom-line goals, and then the other initiatives we're doing.

We're getting them to feel a little more ownership and understanding of their stake and making them understand that they're an important cog in this whole system. Without them, we can't deliver on our end. So that was one of the things we started doing was getting more employee events. Recently, we took the entire factory to a local minor league baseball game. We do that once a summer, and they bring their families. We do stuff like that throughout the year. We have events on-site and host dinners or barbecues where the staff grills out for the employees.

We try to get our employees to realize that we appreciate what they do by doing small things with more interaction.

Lisa Ryan: So you say it's an all-hands meeting that you're having - the office staff, along with the leadership team and the people in the plant?

Rick Winter: Correct. It's everybody from the owner of the company on down. The management team will do the presentation. We have a template that we use. We do it during the lunch hour, and we'll usually bring in lun