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Fighting for Survival
How a 130-year-old business, among the last of its kind in the state,
is fighting back from the brink
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Business New Haven
9/11/1995
By: Terry Pitt
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To read Ken MacKenzie's Christmas card list is to ride the dusty side streets and access roads of post-industrial Connecticut, checking the names on warehouses, factories and public-works garages, hearing heavy equipment grind, smelling the mixture of metal shavings and oil.
Some names, like Bridgeport Brass, are crossed out. New ones, like Merritt-Davis Electric, have just been added. Four generations of MacKenzies have maintained the list since 1864, when Ken's great grandfather, George MacKenzie, started MacKenzie Machine & Marine Works Inc. on the corner of Water and East streets in New Haven. Its present location is across East Street, hard by the Wyatt Fuel complex.
A company gets on the list by needing machinery parts manufactured or repaired - and calling Ken MacKenzie to do it. “It's when time is tight, and new parts can't get there soon enough, that we get called on,” MacKenzie notes.
At 7:30 one morning a few weeks ago, Connecticut Marine, a ship's chandlery on New Haven Harbor not far from MacKenzie's, called MacKenzie with an emergency. A 628-foot tanker from Aruba, the Pagoda, was unloading its cargo of gasoline at Gateway Terminal, another neighbor, when one of its four pumps broke down.
Could MacKenzie repair it? Yes. Could MacKenzie repair it before the ship's scheduled sailing at 1 a.m. the next morning? Yes. In 16 hours, the main shafts and flights, which move the gas like blades in a food processor move batter, were rebuilt. Delivery was made at 11:30 p.m. that night, and the Pagoda sailed out of New Haven harbor right on time, all four pumps in working order.
A couple of days later, a neighbor on East Street, the Pasta Warehouse, brought in a worn-out ravioli-making machine which had been imported new from Italy eight months ago. Could MacKenzie make one just like it? Yes, if they had all the parts. Would it last longer than eight months? MacKenzie insured a longer life by making the new machine from stainless steel and coating it with Teflon.
Then there was the new spring compressor made for the Superior Spring Co. and the ironing roll rebuilt for American Linen Co., both of New Haven. And the rock crusher from Cherenzia Excavating in Westerly, R.I., lifted by a crane onto MacKenzie's four-by-22-foot lathe to be retooled and repaired.
Even the cranes themselves, including the giants used at Gateway Terminal to hoist cargo on and off freighters from around the world, come to MacKenzie's for straightening on the 300-ton horizontal press or for repair of their large gear assemblies.
“We have a lot of equipment in a little space,” MacKenzie says. “We can make or repair any machinery, from a 1055 PNH or Link Belt crane [the biggies] to a Singer sewing machine.” The one-story building had gas lights when it was new in 1922. Pulleys, shafting, hangers and coupling are still on the ceiling, but the machines are no longer run by the belts attached to them and the steam engines which drove the whole system are gone.
From the time George MacKenzie founded the company in 1864, it has served the needs of neighboring companies' machines. Early customers were oyster boats and tugboats, plying their prosperous trades in Long Island Sound. Over time, their engines and cranes and other parts required repair or replacement. Later, the Wyatt Co. built a terminal for Achilles, self-unloading coal tenders. All of the machines in that operation depended on MacKenzie.
But the marine trade itself wasn't enough to sustain the business. A faded picture on the office wall shows steel sand blast barrels being manufactured in the original building. A newspaper ad from 1896 told readers that “improved dumb waiters and invalid hoists, shafting, hangers, coupling, etc.” were available from MacKenzie's.
“Yankee ingenuity has kept us in business all these years,” the present owner says. When a customer calls with a request, the first service MacKenzie offers is figuring out how to meet it in the time available. When the economic boom of the 1980s went bust in the '90s and the demand for MacKenzie's services slowed to a trickle, he used the same process to figure out how his company could survive.
“Revenues dropped from $750,000 [annually] to half that,” MacKenzie recalls, “but I still had the same expenses.” Using what he inherited from three generations before him, he fell back on family ingenuity in problem-solving.
MacKenzie closed the shop, save for a skeleton crew, in April 1994. He let the front office people go, downsizing from seven to three employees, including himself. While looking at all the ways in which he could reopen and market again, he relied on family funds to maintain the building and meet ongoing financial demands like insurance and workers comp.
“Restructuring was my answer,” MacKenzie says. He changed his way of thinking about how to administer the business. Because he could not afford to pay someone in the front office, he farmed out the work a clerk and he would otherwise have done. He went to an employment leasing company, CSS (Corporate Staffing Service), in Seymour, which handles payroll, taxes, workers comp, etc. for three percent of revenues. “In a small business like mine, it's the cheapest way to function,” MacKenzie says. “It creates jobs in another company, and it frees me to go out and beat the bushes for new customers.”
He proclaimed on a banner which nearly dwarfs the front of his building that MacKenzie's reopened on May 1, 1995. The company is rebuilding. His goal is to increase the volume of business, which will require an increase in workers. Freed by CSS from most paperwork, MacKenzie focuses on educating the public, getting the word out that there is a machine shop left in New Haven, a great resource for quick, less expensive reconstruction or repair of machinery, for working out problems of new design, and for building prototypes.
Networking with present customers like local public works departments to find companies which might need his expertise, MacKenzie found Merritt-Davis Electric. He visited the purchasing agent to explain what his company did, and the next day specs for a drilling and turning job came over the fax machine.
He has redesigned and reduced his Yellow Pages ad from his full page of the '80s to a small box. He studies industry journals and business publications, and sends flyers and brochures to prospects.
Stories from hard times are part of MacKenzie family lore. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Ken's grandfather employed eight machinists who had nowhere else to go when the work dried up. They reported to the shop each morning and then went fishing for their families' dinners down by the Tomlinson Bridge.
If a job did come in, MacKenzie sent for the number of men he needed and the others had only the fish they were able to catch as pay for the day. When one of their number was electrocuted on the job, the next morning 40 men lined up at the door to take his place.
MacKenzie is not the only multi-generational family connected with the business. Mark Kovecses has worked there as a machinist since he graduated from Eli Whitney Technical High School a few years ago, following in his father's footsteps. The elder Kovecses was foreman at MacKenzie's, where he
had worked most of his adult life. “The shop gets in your blood,” Mark Kovecses says.
For customers as diverse as Long Wharf Theater (for which MacKenzie's helps in constructing sets) to Foxon Park Beverages (another multi-generational family business which needs Kovecses to repair its bottling machines periodically) to MacKenzie's own machines, which sometimes need repair or
replacement, the 132 year-old business is an unequaled resource. The only surviving business of its kind in the New Haven area, it fights for survival.
Ken MacKenzie believes his restructuring will make that happen. “If people know we're here, we'll get the jobs no one else can or will do,” he says. “When you're the fourth generation, you take the challenge and have confidence in the future.”
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