Gray Manufacturing Names New General Manager
DENVER, NC – Aug. 18, 2021 – Thanks to the unique acquisition strategy at Compass Precision, operating company managers always continue in their managerial roles at Compass following a sale. Simply put, that’s how Compass prefers to do business.
But this month, for the first time in company history, Compass has been forced to replace a leader at one of its operating companies — Gray Manufacturing Technologies.
This week, Compass is announcing that replacement to be Jacob Trahan as General Manager at Gray.
Jacob began working in manufacturing on a full-time basis in 2015, but his experience with machining stretches back to the early 2000s when he started running band saws and manual lathes in high school. Jacob graduated from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette with a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering and a minor in business management.
“Jacob is unique because he is the first leader of a Compass operating company that was not already running the firm when we acquired it,” explained Gary Holcomb, CEO of Compass. “But we have confidence that his blend of youthful expertise and experience, including the eleven years he spent as a sales engineer after college, will help Gray take the next steps in its growth over the following years.”
A Louisiana native, Jacob has held four different manufacturing positions since moving to North Carolina to be closer to his grandparents in 2015. In his previous role, he served as Manufacturing Project Manager at Columbus McKinnon in Charlotte.
But in all four positions, Jacob’s managerial philosophy and constant desire for improvement didn’t perfectly align with his employer like it will at Compass.
“I’m not the type of person that likes to be stagnant or sit still,” said Jacob. “If we’re not making the company better, then why are we here? I’m not here just to collect a check. I take my time seriously, and I take everyone else’s time seriously. We have one life, and I don’t want to waste it being average.”
Jacob says Gary has a great philosophy and vision for the operating company and Compass as a whole.
Like Compass, Jacob has identified investing in the latest technology as a vital part of being successful in manufacturing. Gary humorously refers to these investments as ‘toys.’
“One thing [Gary] told me, he said, ‘the guy with the most toys wins at the end of the day.’ And I was like, ‘That’s perfect.’ Because it’s true.”
In his new role, Jacob will be responsible for taking a good company and making it great. While Jacob called Compass’ ability to invest in new machinery and the close-knit team at Gray strengths, he sees chances for improvement in other areas.
Jacob has identified standardizing certain aspects of the operating company’s business such as creating a project database and developing a software system to optimize scheduling as new goals for the company.
Furthermore, over his first couple weeks, he plans to look at every step in the process at Gray from fielding a customer’s call to shipping out parts to determine other areas where improvements can be made.
Jacob will be at the helm of the changes, but he has very little experience with Mazak machines and has never used a Micron machine previously. So, he will rely on the strong Gray staff to help him learn too.
“The guys there have a lot of knowledge,” Jacob said. “I know I’m going to learn a lot from all of them because they’ve been doing the 5-axis high-precision stuff for many years.”
Like Gary, Jacob sees big things coming for Gray.
“There’s so much opportunity for Gray to just grow and expand,” Jacob said. “You don’t want to do it too fast. You want to do it with the right tempo, in the right manner. But if you do it correctly, you can make this place explode.”
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.