Who We Are, What We Do Video Transcript

About This Video

GAT’s channel-launch video (2024-02-05, its oldest and most-viewed upload) — a company overview covering GAT’s history, its in-house custom controls shop, and its approach to turnkey finishing systems. The video cuts together several different GAT team members speaking (at least two distinct voices are audible, including the same speaker heard in Hands-On Solutions, whose “instead of just selecting something out of a price book” line appears in both videos), rather than a single narrator, so it reads as a company-culture montage more than one person’s script.

Full Transcript

We’re basically a company started in the late 1950s. I’m currently third-generation owner — I couldn’t be more proud of where the company has laid its foundation in the industry, growing out of a small regional company in Missouri, in the Midwest, to servicing clients all over North America. We’re always trying to deliver a unique solution driven by that client’s needs, toward what we can bring — in terms of not necessarily a cookie-cutter approach, but using very tested methods that we’ve proven out over the decades, and applying those in a different way for each client. I would say, in general, GAT and our sales staff have a way to solve a problem for a customer, generally based on the space that’s allotted for a solution — and we know how to do more with less in regards to that requirement.

We’re a complete custom controls shop, so we do all of our own programming and panel-building here in-house, and a lot of that comes from input from our customers: what they want to see, how they want it to look, how they want it to feel, what kind of feedback they want.

Part of what we’re excited about is that moment when we get to hand the keys over to the customer, and they have a brand new system that they’re going to run on their own. I think many times in manufacturing we tend to really focus on the product, and the process, and we often forget the people. Everything that we do has to do with people. For me, the most important thing is to make sure that we have the right people in the right places, where they can thrive and be the best that they can — and the team within the plant, every single day, takes the time to work together and say, “How do we solve this?” Making sure that the product going out is a quality product.

People want more data now — they want as much as they can to be communicated to their own data systems. So that’s one of the strong points for us: trying to engineer and come up with new solutions for that, as well as still being able to provide the same types of service we always have, making things as smooth and easy as possible, down to the operator level. We make finishing systems, but each one is specific to the actual customer. It may be the same system in theory, but it’s not the same actual parts for every customer — so we’re able to adapt and make a wide variety of parts from our shop here.

In today’s coating world, our customers demand turnkey, complex solutions. Because we’ve expanded our efforts here — we’ve invested in engineering, we’ve invested in our production capabilities — we’re able to deliver those complex and unique solutions.

One of the things that we realized early on is that we needed to make an investment in those manufacturing rep partnerships. Ultimately, that effort allows us to improve the experience for our clients — from sales proposal, sales closure, approval, engineering, fabrication, installation and startup, and training. And instead of just selecting something out of a price book and saying, “This is what I can offer you,” I actually have the opportunity now to sit down with a customer, understand their challenges, their pains, what they’re trying to accomplish, and go through that process from the ground up to design a system that meets those specifications.

So, an exciting thing for me, coming on board with GAT, is recognizing that they have fourth-generation ownership in line to carry this company into the future — that fourth-generation owner is right within my age range as well. So we have an exciting opportunity to take this company and help drive it and grow it into the future.

I had to go around to each individual department, learn how everything we build is made — from raw sheet metal to finished product. So it was really valuable to me, stepping into the sales portion of it: I was able to speak the language of both the engineers and the guys maintaining the equipment for our customers, so that really helps me refine the customer’s wishes and wants into something — a system that I believe will be reliable and serve them long term. But now, as we’ve gotten bigger, we’ve gotten more advanced — everything about this company is better. I’m getting more and more excited about where we’re going to be in 10 years and 20 years. It’s my job, as a generation coming up, to leave this place better than I found it, and I think that future is very bright for us. We’re very excited.

Long term, part of what I’m most proud about is we came from a small start back in the late 1950s to a company now that’s over 55 employees, working on its fourth generation of ownership transfer, and has provided a wonderful career path for the engineering staff and the manufacturing staff that’s worked under our tutelage. I think where the company’s going in the future is to vertically integrate within the industry, to more pre-engineered, commonly manufactured items, while also expanding its custom manufacturing capability in terms of full turnkey finishing systems.

Watch on YouTube.