Meet Jim Vinoski, the Manufacturing Advocate Proving America Still Makes Things
Manufacturing Leader Blog Series
Jim Vinoski wrote his new book, American Manufacturing, to prove something simple: the United States hasn’t stopped making things. The book's 22 tales of integrity, ingenuity, and the modest heroes who built a nation make the case that today’s perceptions of the industry do a disservice to the people working within it, and to a country that still relies on a healthy manufacturing sector. That sense of purpose is what drew me to Jim, and it’s the thread running through each section of his book, each one aimed at helping marketers tell manufacturing’s story more accurately and more powerfully.
When I sat down with Jim Vinoski, independent writer, longtime manufacturing leader, former Forbes contributor, visiting fellow for the National Center for Energy Analytics and host of the Manufacturing Talks, I found myself most interested in how a bike-obsessed kid from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula became a voice for America’s most consequential industry.
The bicycle that started it all
Jim traces everything back to a magazine rack in Ironwood, Michigan, when he was about 13. He’d picked up cycling early, when he was “pretty much old enough to walk,” but it wasn’t until he found an issue of Bicycling magazine that he discovered a whole world he didn’t know existed. There, he found high-end racing bikes, training rollers, and an entire mechanical universe waiting to be taken apart and understood.
He did exactly that. He tore down his own bikes, rebuilt them, eventually built his own from scratch, and worked in a shop. By the end of high school, he was down to two real options for college: mechanical engineering or English. He loved to write as much as he loved machines. He tested well in both. Engineering won out, but as his career would eventually prove, he never really gave up the other path. He just deferred it.
The real experts were running the machines
Jim doesn’t dress up how his career began. “I don’t like to admit it, but it’s the truth,” he told me. He came out of college as a “super-duper-smart, know-it-all” who would “show these people a thing or two.” It didn’t take long to learn otherwise. His degree brought certain benefits, but it did not make him an expert at anything. “The real experts were the people running the machines, maintaining the machines, building and installing new equipment,” he explained, along with the people providing the power and water the plant ran on. What he took from this lesson was to go directly to the people running things to understand how they really worked.
He has a theory for what makes manufacturing different from so many other kinds of work. “Manufacturing is the crucible of the business world because you can’t hide. You’re making real stuff, you’re delivering real stuff, you’re getting paid for real stuff,” Jim explains, because your customers value what you made more than the money they paid for it. If they don’t “you're going out of business.”
That’s why he’s blunt about leaders who drift away from the factory floor, and he includes himself. “I’ve experienced it myself,” he told me, as the demands of the job draw you toward the office. But he’s clear about what it costs an operation. “If you’re running a business focused on manufacturing and you’re not staying constantly in tune with what’s happening out there and what’s really eating your people’s lunch and costing you money, you’re not doing your job.”
And when corporate does visit, it’s often “a dog and pony show.” Jim has been at several companies where a visit meant days cleaning up the plant and making sure that things ran perfectly while management was there. His verdict: “talk about counterproductive,” because “the people calling the shots need to know the facts and you’re purposely obscuring the facts from them.”
While Jim was talking about manufacturing leaders and their proximity to the work happening under their purview, I couldn’t help but think those of us who tell the company’s story are in the same position.
Put away the chairs
If Jim’s interest and passion for engineering started with bicycling, the values he practiced as an engineer can be traced back to his parents and a common experience that repeated itself through his upbringing.
Growing up in a large family, involved in constant community and church events, he remembers that when everything wrapped up, his family didn’t leave. His parents stayed to help put away the chairs. So the kids stayed too. It became a value he carries today: be useful to other people, even after you’ve gotten what you came for.
I see that same value (to be useful) in how Jim found his way back to writing. Even after he built a career in engineering and plant management, writing remained a hobby. When a chance to write about manufacturing for Forbes came along in 2018, he took it. He told his editor that he wanted to write about what Americans actually make, because so many people are convinced that we don’t make anything in America anymore. It isn’t true, and he’s spent years proving it.
What Americans still make
To answer that question, Jim told the stories of 22 different manufacturing companies. He decided early that each one would be a company that is still operating today.
Hellwig Products, a family-owned spring and torsion-bar maker in Visalia, California, makes the point as well as any. Right after World War II, the grandfather of the company’s current CEO noticed cars sagging, came up with the idea of a helper spring, and started making them, moving to California for the opportunity there. They later added torsion bars. The products are “totally old school, totally mechanical,” with “no flashing lights,” Jim told me. It’s all about shaping metal and making it do the things you want it to do.”
What has kept the company growing is finding new uses for what it already makes, from keeping a family’s station wagon from sagging to muscle cars, to transportation and military applications. “You’re not innovating new products,” Jim said, “you’re innovating new ways of using those products.”
Jim is honest that a modern audience might not see the appeal at first, but “for an old school geek like me,” he said, it’s “very cool,” and he sees that cool factor in “still bashing metal out in California.” I asked him if the lesson for marketers is that a company that looks unexciting can have a great story. He said, “I think that’s a piece of it.” The other piece is asking, “how does it fit with telling a story today.”
Jim extends the same encouragement to the companies he features. When Regal Holdings, a Wisconsin pot-and-pan maker profiled in Chapter 10 of the book, posted on LinkedIn about being included in the book, Jim made a point of commenting. As he told me, he wanted them to know it was one of his favorite stories “because you guys are making things that make all of our lives easier and better. And you need to be thinking about it in that way.” It’s a small moment, but it reflects something Jim believes deeply about the industry. Manufacturers haven’t always been great at telling their own stories, or at seeing why their work matters. Someone has to remind them.
Integrity is foundational
When I asked why American Manufacturing leads with integrity, ahead of ingenuity and “modest heroes,” Jim didn’t hesitate: “I don’t think you can call any company successful that you can’t say is a company that acts routinely with integrity. That’s why it’s the first in that list of things in my subtitle. Integrity first.”
I asked which experience had tested that value for him. He chose a personal one.
Years ago, a boss forged emails to make Jim take the fall for a problem the boss had created. Jim was already well along in a job search, looking to get out of what he already recognized as a “poisonous atmosphere.”
Jim’s new job came through just as another leader from another department stepped in to support Jim with evidence of the truth. When Jim addressed the incident with his own upper management, he was met with anger and told to leave. Jim resigned the next day.
What stayed with Jim was that a leader from another department saw something wrong and spoke up. Moving into leadership, Jim told me, means taking on the responsibility to stay attentive to problems like that. To act with integrity as a leader, “you’re going to act like the other department manager did,” he said, “calling out the problem” and “trying to correct it from where he sat.”
Integrity is the standard Jim used to decide who belongs in his book. He told me that “over time all these companies have been winners,” even if some were “sometimes not winning” along the way, and that “having those principles in place makes them our heroes.” Jim also sees hope in young people coming up who “know that it’s going to be hard work” and choosing manufacturing anyway.
Despite decades of watching American manufacturing get “battered,” he still says, “Never bet against America,” or “against American producers.”
What this means for marketers
Jim’s story offers a set of working principles worth borrowing for anyone who tells manufacturing stories. Here’s what I took from our conversation:
Before you tell a “people first” story, check it the way Jim did. Jim says the real problem comes “when mistakes are ingrained in a company’s culture, and they become acceptable.” For Jim, you don’t “separate the moral dimension from what you do day-to-day,” and it starts with treating people fairly and as individuals. It is also how he chose the 22 companies in his book, by how their leaders talked about their people, and by what outside sources said. For marketers, before you publish a story about culture, run a check. If the evidence doesn’t back the claim, challenge the claim.
Get on the factory floor, and don’t stop at the executives. Jim’s view is that everyone in a manufacturing company belongs on the floor. “I don’t care if you’re an accountant, a marketer, a communications professional, whatever, you’ve got to be part of telling that story and you can’t do it without knowing what’s going on in the factory.” Without that input from the people doing the work, he says, you won’t capture the “cool factor” or convey it to a general audience.
Don’t settle for the staged tour. A staged tour hides the most important facts from the people who need them the most. If you’re a marketer being walked through a spotless plant, ask to see a regular day too.
Admit the industry hasn’t told its own story well, then ask better questions. “Manufacturers are really good at making things. Most are really bad about marketing.” Jim’s starting point for any marketer is to acknowledge that up front, then ask two questions: Why should the average Jill or Joe care about what you do? And what do you do that you think is cool?
The most unglamorous product in your plant might be your best story. Hellwig makes springs and torsion bars. Nobody thinks that’s cool at face value. Find the cool factor in the story anyway. Jim did.
Tell people why their work matters. The people doing the work, like the team at Regal Holdings, often don’t realize how remarkable their own work is. Someone has to tell them, and public acknowledgment can help them see it. Consider doing the same on social media or your intranet.
Accept responsibility for the bigger purpose. As marketers, you aren't just telling the story of your own brand or product. You are representing an industry with a rich history and cultural value that is often misunderstood today. Build communications and campaigns with that responsibility in mind.
To order a copy of American Manufacturing, visit Manufacturing Talks.
Next in this series: what is possible when marketing actually gets out onto the floor, and what happens when they don’t.
