FACILITY TOUR INFORMATION.
On Friday September 22, 2006 I met with Glen Stevens of Assembled Products, Inc. Rogersville, Alabama. Our meeting was a 2 hour informal question and answer, followed by a 30 minute facility tour. I covered a wide variety of topics to make it less formal and find out business philosophy.
After setting our meeting Glen had called Mr. Willey to make sure it was ok to discuss the company. He was told to "show me everything and answer any questions completely." I found Glen to be very open and friendly and encouraged the visit. A refreshing response. He even offered to pick me up at the airport.
I have set this up in a Q & A format.
Q: Tell me what you do here?
Glen: We are a small, family run assembly production house.
Q: What does that mean? I'm a novice explain please.
Glen: We help ideas grow with custom electronic design, R&D, Prototypes, all the way through a production run. If a run gets to be real large we job it out and do quality control at this facility.
Q: Whats small?
Glen: We can assemble 20,000 units a month in house. When we get above that it makes financial sense to have it done in China. If that happens, we can handle quality control on about 100,000 units a month.
Q: That seems like a lot. Can you add employees fast enough?
Glen: This area has a huge unemployment problem. Most are well trained on machinery from the textile industry. We can get them up to speed pretty quickly. A rumor went around a few months ago and I had 20-25 folks show up at my door Monday morning looking for a job. Unfortunately and fortunately getting good employees is not a problem.
Q: How much of this facility does ATWT own.
Glen: There seems to be a misconception that ATWT owns the assembly facility. They do not. That is a good thing. No overhead or debt to carry with a major manufacturing facility.
Q: How long have you done business with Mr. Willey?
Glenn: Gosh, I guess we have been doing business 8 or 9 years now.
Q: What kind of person is he?
Glenn: What do you mean?
Q: Does he pay his bills.
Glenn: A, (pause) you know he went through a rough period 3 or 4 years ago that well. He had some financial problems and was not paying bills promptly. But he kept his word. He paid us every dime and I respect him more today because I know what he went through and he paid us every dime. Because of that we allow him to pay on terms.
Q: Terms?
Glenn: Yea you know 30, 60, days after shipped.
Q: Wow?
Glenn: He keeps his word, we know he will make good.
Q: So you trust him?
Glenn: I do.
Q: How did you meet Mr. Willey?
Glenn: I use to live and work in Memphis, but he really came to my dad in the begining. Dad's helped inventors for years.
Q: How many shares of Atwec do you own?
Glenn: We have a company policy of not holding any stock of companies we are working with.
Q: Why
Glenn: They pay us a fee, it just keeps things cleaner.
Q: So they don't own any of this facility?
Glenn: No, but from your perspective that's a good thing. They have no overhead of equipment or building. Pay us to assemble and we just recently set up a computer network to direct ship once the product is sold. ATWT will not have to handle the product from China to us to distributor. We suggested it and they liked it so over the last 2 months we have been implementing it.
Q: China, So you don't make it here?
Glenn: We make the circuit boards here, all other parts are imported from China and assembled on site.
Q: How big is this place.
Glenn: We have 33,000 square feet.
Q: You must see great inventions all the time.
Glenn: I do.
Q: How big is this product going to be? You must have an instinct.
Glenn: Never know, we see a really big one once every year or two. They seem to have it going on. Initial numbers look pretty good.
Q: How good?
Glenn: We are running another 3000 next week. You want to see them?
Me: Sure!
I will try to get photo's of plant up in next day.
I found the facility work areas well maintained clean and in general efficient.
Beauty of this is how streamlined they have the process now.
They use only a fraction of the facility for ATWT.
More later,
Scooter1
Make decisions based on the advantage of long term information. Do your own DD before buying or selling anything.
