Exploring Turnaround Strategies for Small Machine Shops

The decline of manufacturing in the United States has caused small machine shop owners to pursue turnaround strategies. The findings from this ethnographic case study of management turnaround strategies provide insights to the machine shop owners towards a systems theory approach of the value chain. Research participants for this study were representatives of a small machine shop consisting of 15 employees. Each participant was a current employee of a machine shop in northeastern Ohio. Through the use of convenience sampling, all employees who agreed to volunteer participated in the study. The combined data collection approach included informal interviews, participant observation, field notes, and company documents for a period of 5 weeks. The data were categorized into themes that derived from a summary of codes. Themes were applied to turnaround strategies for analysis. The findings of this study indicated that a growth strategy was the preferred method of recovery for a small machine shop. A growth strategy entails any number of investments and process improvement initiatives, notably within the value chain. Business owners who grow their machine shops provide benefits to social change and the economic climate of the community through increased employment and community tax revenues. .