Not Your Father's Machine Shop
Central Valley Machine is clean, light, and run entirely by computers
03/3/02 — Mike Ingraham
One day Jerry Wursten arrived home from work in a feisty frame of mind. “I think I’m going to start my own machine shop,” he said.
His wife Audre didn’t even look up. “Yeah, right,” she said.
She was correct to be skeptical. True, 26 years ago this month the Wurstens with $33,000 did start a business worth millions called Central Valley Machine. But this is not what you’d think is a machine shop, at least not your father’s machine shop.
Ask machinist Kevin Clark what he enjoys and he answers “reading.” What kind of answer is that from a machinist?
“You mention machinist and people think ‘auto mechanic,’” Jerry says. They still work with their hands and count on that good old common sense, but modern machinists are also mathematicians and computer programmers. “I’m a tech freak,” says Clark as he punches in numbers. The joke now is that Jerry couldn’t get a job here if he weren’t the boss. Visitors are struck by the technology, but Jerry says CVM’s real assets are the technologists.
“They think a machinist is in a blacksmith-like environment, but it’s not that anymore,” Audre says.
Gleaming floors, glass, shining metal, soft lights, quiet, computers, clean pressed coats ... 1886 North 100 East seems not so much shop as laboratory. The loudest sound is the splash of a waterfall cutting through stainless steel.
In a way, this is a lab, building through trial and error. Central Valley literally builds, and scarcely ever says no to a customer. It can build you a drive line for your car. Or it can build parts to get that rusting rocket or roller coaster up and going. Planning a nocturnal aerial assault? Central Valley can help — its fortune was practically made on flares.
Jerry picks up a discarded bracket that will never make it on a Polaris missile.
“The hole in here is too big by half the width of a hair on your head,” he explains. The bracket’s botched; the shop would have to try again. The trial and error can get expensive but Jerry’s attitude about losses is that they are gains. “People spend $50,000 for a college education, and I’ve just had an education.”
Actually, if education comes from hard knocks, Jerry is not that well educated. He can’t recall any setbacks in building a business from a storage shed to a 60,000-square-foot palace plus outlying buildings.
However, if education comes from hard work, then the Wurstens are wise indeed. When Audre is asked about working with Jerry all day every day, she replies “I love him and I hate it when I’m not around him.”
If you are around Jerry, then you are around work. Okay, so Audre took a few weeks off following open heart surgery. But doing all the finances and all the bookkeeping and taking the calls and saying no to Jerry when he wants to buy another $600,000 machine, it’s safe to say that she’s in her sunny corner office pretty much all the time.
A farm lad, Jerry is at it by 6:30 a.m. and still going at 6 p.m. It’s a long day, but on the other hand, this is the only job he has now. Many of his 56 years have been spent avoiding sleep — four hours and he’s done — in favor of second and third jobs.
“We’re a real mom and pop shop,” Audre says, and in fact she’s called “Mom” by the 65 employees, and not just those named Bret, Brian and Brad Wursten. The machinists visit her office to cage candies and make end runs around Jerry.
“They struggle with him,” Audre says. “They tell me what the problem is, and I go around the back door and tell Jerry to soften up.”
What, Jerry won’t listen to them?
“He’s just a man,” Audre says with a smile. “They come and talk to me and I get it straightened out.”
Not everyone talks to Audre, incidentally. Men call asking to speak with the owner. When Audre says “I’m the owner,” they hang up.
“They maybe don’t trust me,” she says. “They maybe think I’m lying. They don’t want to think that a woman owns a machine shop.”
But check it out — Audre indeed owns 51 percent of Central Valley Machine, which conveniently qualifies the shop for government contracts to minority and female owners. Being in the defense and space business, government has been good to Central Valley. So why does Jerry shudder?
“Paperwork. We’ll have almost as much in paperwork costs as in manufacturing the part. You have to supply certification of materials, the processing, the heat treating, the plating ... everything involved.”
This is really not what he had in mind back at Utah State University when he was studying with a “tremendous teacher” named Lorin Palmer. Jerry had talent — “a lot of others asked me to help with their projects” — but direction? He studied welding, automotive technology, engineering and lots more with “no idea what I wanted to do.”
That didn’t apply to Audre. He knew he wanted to marry her, and they wed in 1967. Fortunately he did not have to lay siege to her like he did to Zion’s Bank, bugging them for six months for a loan to start Cache Valley’s fourth machine shop.
The bank brandished studies showing the rates of business failure, but its naysayers were no match for Jerry. “I must have shown them I had the persistence to compete,” he recalls. He took the $33,000 loan in March of 1976 and hightailed it to a storage shed at 3100 North Main Street — the central valley — where he set up with one lathe, one saw, one mill, one wood stove, one wife, and a million mice and snakes.
“Terrible,” says Audre.
“When we were young, we probably didn’t realize what the real chances of success and failure were,” Jerry says. But he must have realized a little since for three years he kept his night gig as a machinist at Moore’s Business Forms.
“It was hard,” Audre recalls. She was then a young mother. “Jerry wasn’t there at night, we were alone. You think ‘I don’t know if I could do that again.’ Three years was a long time.”
Daytimes he knocked on doors at Del Monte and Presto Products for small jobs at $10 an hour. When youngest son Brad was born — and paid for by Moore’s insurance — he left the Moore’s payroll.
Today he compares leaving that job to investing a million in a machine. Steps don’t get much bigger.
“I just had a hankering to create my own destiny. Some people have to have a guarantee. I’m not that way. I’m the kind of person willing to take a chance.”
The machine shop had no typewriter. Audre wrote in longhand beneath a letterhead printed at Moore’s. It was a personal touch, but even the biggest baby of a businessman does not need the personal touch as much as a mother’s three boys.
“I tried to be at home during the day when they were little. When the older one, Bret, came home, I left them in his care. Those times were hard. You feel like you’ve failed because you left your kids.” She pauses. “But these were things that had to be taken care of if we were going to succeed.”
That lesson of sacrifice seems to have been passed on. Asked if the sons might take over one day, the Wurstens say they are wondering that themselves.
“They’ve probably seen how much commitment it takes for us to be here,” Jerry says, “and I’m not sure they have that commitment themselves. It goes a lot beyond an 8-hour day.”
From the shop, Jerry and Audre would go home and work some more. “Every single night,” Audre says. But every single night, too, she’d make sure there was a sit-down dinner. “And there still is,” she says.
The pace only picked up, and space shrunk. When Thiokol’s usual 5,000 parts order was replaced by one for 80,000 parts, the aluminum took up the whole parking lot.
“That was big,” Audre says. A breakthrough, really, signifying the sort of customer confidence that led to a 1994 Small Business Administration Subcontractor of the Year Award.
Big orders lead to big buildings, evidently. Central Valley added a shed every five years until moving into the present facility which appears vast enough to have been built to manufacture airplanes. In fact, at one time in every McDonald Douglas plane that rolled out of Salt Lake City — one or two a week — Central Valley had 300 parts.
Aerospace and amusement rides — CVM has a connection with S&S Sports Power of North Logan — have been the bread and butter. But talk about space shrinking — since Sept. 11 aerospace has shrunk sending CVM’s four project managers out hunting contracts in other fields like energy and medicine.
“The big challenge is to be successful through changing times,” Jerry says. “You have to be diverse. We’re very lucky to be able to maintain right now.”
“It’s better than it was a few months ago,” Audre says.
Jerry smiles. He became a machinist because he likes to use his hands, “to make something to see at the end of the day.” As they say in the space game, mission accomplished.