Company Names Evan Grose to Operations Manager
DENVER, NC – Aug. 9, 2021 – Change can be hard, but it also can be very good.
Gray Manufacturing Technologies, LLC, a 5-axis-based machining supplier of precision metal components for the aerospace & defense, medical and space markets, has begun to undergo changes to its management staff.
The Compass Precision operating company announced it has promoted Evan Grose to Operations Manager.
”Evan has proven to be an extremely valuable contributor, the consummate professional,” explained Compass CEO Gary Holcomb. “He earned this position through hard work and dedication to Gray Manufacturing.”
Evan’s promotion fills a void that’s been at Gray for nearly a year.
In the typical Compass Precision operating company structure, the Operations Manager role is responsible for machine shop production and reports to the operating company president. But at Gray, Compass did not hire or promote anyone into the role after acquiring the operating company in Aug. 2020.
Even though it took some time for the promotion to come, Evan was an obvious choice for Operations Manager. He has worked at Gray for more than five years over two different stints. To begin his second tenure at Gray, Evan served as Manufacturing Engineer. In 2018, Evan received a promotion to Quality Engineer, the role he was in prior to getting the Operations Manager position.
In Feb. 2021, Compass named Evan its Employee of the Month. He is one of just two Gray employees to receive that honor.
”Compass prefers to fill positions from within, and when we have an opening we look throughout our company for good candidates,” stated Gary. “In this case, we did not have to look very far.”
Evan’s co-workers and friends have described him as a “student of knowledge” or a “sponge” for learning. He graduated first in his class at Catawba County Community College.
But not only is he a source of information, he enjoys learning the why.
“I don’t only want to know the answer. I want to know why it’s the right answer,” Evan said after being nominated as employee of the month. “I don’t like to be just told, ‘Well, this is what it is.’ I want to know how we got there.”
He also loves accomplishing tasks as a team. He called the ability of the Gray staff to get through problems together his favorite part about working at the Compass operating company.
Evan has nearly two decades of engineering and CNC programming experience. He left Gray in 2017 to work at Centro Inc., where Evan actually worked prior to joining Gray. But Evan says he immediately missed the new challenges Gray presented him on a daily basis.
Within a few weeks of leaving Gray, he returned. Now, he’s Operations Manager.
Gray Manufacturing operates from a 25,000-square-foot facility in Denver, NC, which is 30 miles northwest of Charlotte. The company concentrates in creating extremely complicated components often made out of difficult-to-work-with materials such as titanium and Inconel.
The Compass operating company was founded in 2013. Johnny Gray, a wealthy entrepreneur, financed the creation of the company and then sold it in 2020 to Compass.
Main Street Capital Holdings, a Pittsburgh-based private equity firm, founded Compass Precision in 2019. Main Street acquired three CNC machining sister companies — Advanced Machining & Tooling, LLC, Quality Products & Machine, LLC and Tri-Tec Industries, LLC — in the Charlotte area during 2019 and placed them under a new umbrella company, Compass Precision, LLC.
Less than a year later, Compass added Gray in Aug. 2020. In March 2021, Compass expanded outside of North Carolina and acquired Douglas Machining Services, LLC in Winona, MN.