First-Year Quality Employee Earns High Recognition
Bruce Jones doesn’t even remember applying for a job at Quality Products & Machine. In fact, just before the opportunity to work at the Compass Precision operating company arose over the summer, Bruce had already accepted a fabrication position that held more responsibility and had greater pay.
But there was one thing Quality Products offered that Bruce couldn’t turn down – it’s people.
Now, just a little more than four months into his tenure as a fabricator for the operating unit, Compass has named Bruce its Employee of the Month for December 2024.
Bruce is one of two Employees of the Month that Quality Products honored during 2024. The other was Jose Abad in May. Overall, Bruce is the 15th recipient of the award at Quality and the 57th Employee of the Month at Compass since the company began the honor in March 2020.
For Bruce, his admiration for the people at Quality began immediately. Just before starting his new job elsewhere that he accepted in July, Greg Donaldson and Al Farrar called Bruce about the resume he doesn’t remember sending to them.
Bruce loved the fact he heard directly from the people he is now working with at the beginning of the hiring process.
“They were the first guys to call me,” Bruce said. “It wasn’t the HR department. It wasn’t a headhunter. It was just a couple guys who did fabrication. I liked Al. I liked Greg.”
Over his four-plus months at Quality, Bruce has also really liked working with Don Bartlett. Bruce expressed that he and Don have similar backgrounds, which made it very easy to connect.
“It was nice coming in here with a bunch of guys that speak the same language,” Bruce said. “I’m relatively certain that between the two of us, there probably isn’t anything that [Don and I] can’t do. That’s a nice feeling to have.”
Bruce’s day to day as fabricator includes “knocking out anything on the schedule,” as he described it. Bruce hasn’t performed any welding, but he does a lot of press brake work and deburring.
He was hesitant to admit it because it’s still his job, but he called his experience through four months at Quality “fun.”
The other main attraction to Quality for Bruce was the company’s capabilities. He added that the potential for Quality is “through the roof.”
“I’ve been around this game long enough, I just see a lot of potential in this place. And there’s a lot to do. There’s just a ton of stuff even from an engineering administrative standpoint that we can do better,” Bruce said. “But there’s not fatal flaws in place. It’s just a matter of polishing the stone and getting repeatability and getting the processes in place and developing what we do.
“I think this place can rock.”
“We never had anyone named Employee of the Month after just four months,” commented Compass CEO Gary Holcomb. “Bruce says Quality Products can rock. I think so, too. And when it does, it will be because of people like him.”
Bruce has been in fabrication for 18 years. Just before working at Quality, he served as a Fabrication Lead at Boxman Studios. But Bruce described that it wasn’t the right fit, and his tenure was cut short after the company was struggling in the first half of 2024.
Before that, Bruce worked at Phoenix Stamping for 15 years. When he started at Phoenix, the company was strictly metal stamping. But over his decade and a half at Phoenix, Bruce built a fabrication department from scratch.
He also worked with some of the same customers he now fabricates parts for at Quality.
While Bruce is a very experienced fabricator, he has many other skills. He attended night classes to become an English teacher. Although he pursued a different career, Bruce said he has utilized the fundamental teaching skills he learned during his fabrication career.
Bruce has also worked as a travel used cars salesman, daycare provider, steel mill worker, an auto mechanic and go kart engine builder.
In his free time, Bruce still uses his teaching skills at Sunday school. He also rides his mountain bike for fun.
Originally from Philadelphia, Bruce moved to North Carolina in 1996. He has one grown daughter, Krysta, who is a mechanical engineer and works for NAVAIR.