by Lisa Eno, The Tuscaloosa Business Ink

Robert Smith, VP of operations, and Tim Smith, VP for sales and engineering, inside Smith’s Machine’s production shop. PHOTO CREDIT: Laura Shill

What’s the distance from Cottondale, Alabama, to Stuttgart, Germany? For Smith’s Machine, it’s 25-plus years of positive thinking, hard work, and keeping it all in the family.
In the early 1970s, Woody Smith was in maintenance at B.F. Goodrich. He had always dreamed of operating his own machine shop. “I really didn’t know how I was going to make it happen,” said Smith. “I was an OCS graduate in the Alabama Army National Guard, so I was trained to be a leader and to have a positive attitude. With this training, I thought I could do whatever I set my mind to. I began to purchase small pieces of equipment and set up a small shop in the back of my parents’ home.” In 1974, Smith and his father purchased a one-man machine shop license and began taking in work from local farmers and mining companies. But a few years later, the business was still growing too slowly for Woody Smith, so he purchased a building and began looking for more equipment with which to expand his shop’s capabilities. Smith soon picked up his first big client, a Bessemer foundry. “From this contact we were given an opportunity to do production drilling and tapping of ductile iron castings,” said Smith, who worked the night shift at Goodrich while growing his business. He continued working at Goodrich until 1993.
These days the company, which now employs 28, does production machining, contract machining, jigs and fixtures, automotive assembly tooling, light fabrication, and Waterjet cutting, serving clients in the Southeast, Texas, and Michigan. Since 2000, the company has also been part of a joint venture with two German toolmakers, Eberspaecher Formenbau and Hummel Formen, both located in the Stuttgart area. That joint venture, Alabama Precision Mold, LLC, does plastic injection molding for the automotive industry. “We offer the ability to build molds up to 1m square and service tools with repairs and engineering changes up to 20 tons in weight. This type of service is in high demand in Alabama, as most tools have to leave the state for service and repairs. Also, with the automotive market growing in Alabama the need for plastic parts is growing annually,” said Tim Smith, VP for sales and engineering.
“We’ve been building the automotive manufacturing side of our business,” said Tim Smith. “The obvious reason, of course, is because the automotive market is the hottest market in Alabama. We are excited about the industry that is here and coming to our state. The automotive market presents our company many challenges to overcome and allows us to set our goals to grow with.”
Smith’s Machine continues to be a family business. Tim and Robert, two of Woody’s three sons, are VPs in the company, and Smith’s wife, Judy, is the company’s president. “Working with family is very difficult, and it creates many challenges that would not be present when working with nonrelated colleagues,” said Tim Smith. “The good part is the level of trust we have in each other — trust is very important in a small business. And it is a benefit to our clients that the owners are always involved. When building relationships with clients, the client at some level gets the same point of contact for years to come.”