Torbjorn Bergstrom. Everyone calls me Toby.

About thirty years in and around CNC machining, from the shop floor to executive operations. Seventeen of those years I spent at Worcester Polytechnic Institute running the manufacturing labs and teaching manufacturing and robotics engineering, where I built what I still think was the best CNC training program in the world. One program took long-term displaced workers, trained them in eight weeks, and put them into local shops as operators, programmers, and setup techs. More than four hundred of them, and most were still in the trade years later.

In 2016 I bought a small precision machine shop from friends of mine. I moved it to a building two miles from my house and put a pull-out sofa in the office, and for years I slept there as often as not. I set an alarm to check the machines overnight and never needed it once. I woke up when the spindle stopped, every time. Then I went home, showered, had breakfast with my family, and went to my day job. Quoting, programming, setups, payroll, chasing receivables, hiring machinists, keeping two customers happy while trying to find a third. If you own a shop, you know the list.

I ran it for five years. Everything I understand about buying machine shops I learned from running one.

Since then we have looked seriously at more than fifty shops and bought very few of them, which is the part most sellers find reassuring rather than discouraging. We are not trying to buy a shop this quarter. We are trying to buy the right one.

I also hold a PhD in manufacturing engineering. It comes up almost never in this work, and I mention it here only because you would find it anyway and wonder why I left it out.