Manufacturing Executives of the Year
Small Company (tie)
Diane and Cole Waldo, FSX Equipment, Granite Falls
General manager Cole Waldo and president Diane Waldo of FSX Equipment, photographed by Hayley Young
Diesel particulate filters are roughly equivalent to catalytic converters on cars, except they’re fitted to the exhaust stacks of heavy-duty trucks and construction equipment. Formed in 2007, FSX makes the equipment for cleaning those filters.
It’s a green business. Not only do the filters remove soot and ash, but cleaned filters allow a truck to use less fuel. It’s a growth business, too, spurred by regulations mandating installation of filters and increased demand for equipment to clean the filters effectively.
Operated by Diane and Cole Waldo, FSX doubled employment and sales from 2009 to 2010, investing in capital equipment as well as research and development to improve its filter-cleaning machines. The firm landed major truck manufacturers as customers. Paccar Parts announced last year it was offering FSX machines at Kenworth and Peterbilt dealers, noting that the company’s technology got filters 9 percent cleaner than the next-best model. Navistar added FSX machines to its dealer network, too. Transit, school and government agencies are ordering FSX’s equipment for their fleets.
Growth prompted FSX to split its filter remanufacturing business into a separate entity, FSX Reconditioning. Truck makers can send in plugged filters and order like-new filters as replacement parts.
Small Company (tie)
Paul Akers, FastCap, Bellingham
Bellingham entrepreneur Paul Akers describes his approach to teaching lean principles of productivity improvement this way: “All I do is ask everybody to make a two-second improvement a day for the rest of their life.” An accumulation of two-second improvements and a relentless emphasis on lean methods have helped build FastCap from a single product—a peel-and-stick cover for cabinetry holes—into a $10-million-a-year business with dozens of tools and products, and with a goal of introducing at least one product a month.
The company starts every day with an employees’ meeting to discuss problems and solutions, and to reinforce lean concepts as part of the corporate culture. Lean also helped FastCap avoid the ravages of the recession, even though its customer base is concentrated in the construction business. FastCap avoided layoffs, he says, and because it was able to add people, equipment and technology, it will be well positioned when the recovery arrives.
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