Former Marine Receives Special Honor
There’s a greater purpose to the work at Gray Manufacturing Technologies for Second Shift Lead Justen Paul. It’s a purpose so great, it’s not of this world.
But it has helped Justen become an intricate part of the team at Gray Manufacturing. To award him for his hard work, Compass Precision has named Justen the company’s Employee of the Month for July.
Justen is the seventh Employee of the Month selected at Gray since Compass acquired the company in Aug. 2020. Jeremiah Aversa was the most recent recipient of the honor from Gray in February.
Over his 15 years in machining, Justen has worked for several companies and performed lots of different jobs. But he explained that he finds the machining at Gray to serve a higher purpose that makes his current job more rewarding than any other position he’s had.
“A lot of industries, like entertainment, make a lot of money, but there’s no real primal call to it,” Justen said. “We’re building parts that put spaceships into space, which ultimately fuels industry for what potentially might make our species survive longer.
“Many, many years from now, the Earth might not be there, and even if we still evolved as a species, if we’ve still survived to that point, we might not survive Earth’s destruction unless we have a means of getting off Earth and going somewhere else.”
Justen started his ‘primal call’ work at Gray in August 2021. After receiving his training, he quickly became an asset on the operating company’s second shift.
This year, he received a promotion to second shift lead. Currently, Justen is the only employee on Gray’s second shift, but general manager Jacob Trahan has plans to build out the shift with more machinists very soon.
“Staffing a second shift in our business is challenging,” explained Jacob. “The biggest hurdle is finding a competent lead, someone who is both a good machinist and a good leader. Now that we have Justen, we have overcome that first hurdle. We can move forward and add to our second shift knowing we have someone really good to lead it.”
Just prior to joining Gray, Justen worked for Bosch Rexroth. The big corporation requires its machinists to make a high volume of parts, which is the opposite of Gray’s focus on small-to-midsize volumes but intricate and complex parts.
Justen described the complexity of the parts at Gray as stressful but also a lot more satisfying.
He also enjoys the small shop atmosphere Gray offers. There are no supervisors micromanaging machinists at Compass operating companies. That’s even more true for second shift.
Justen also described the advantage of not feeling like another number at Gray, and when he has ideas, he says he’s heard.
“They’ve tried things here that I’ve suggested that they definitely wouldn’t have tried at other places,”Justen said. “If you have a meeting about a problem that you haven’t encountered before, they’ll say, ‘Hey, I want to hear ideas. What do you think? How can we solve this?’
“I haven’t had that in a lot of other places.”
Justen has worked in machining since he joined the Marine Corps at 18 years old. Upon joining, he filled out a basic vocation questionnaire, on which he scored the highest in mechanical knowledge and basic problem solving of mechanical things.
From there, the Marines placed him in a machinist job. Years later, Justen earned a CNC machining associates degree from Nash Community College.
Justen was born in North Carolina but spent the most time during his childhood in Mobile, AL. He returned to North Carolina for a job after his service time expired.
For fun, he likes to design and build things. His latest project was a remote controlled tank he built from scratch. He also loves to draw in CAD.
In his spare time at work, Justen builds convenience tools that help make him more efficient in his position at Gray.