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Mark: My father worked at another manufacturing company making gun drills. He must have done work on Saturday morning, so my brother and I had to go in and we were exposed to a larger shop.

They were making gun drills, and we were mechanically minded, so we loved it. We loved going in there. This was in the 1970s, when we were elementary school-age kids, and then we had tools. And then when he bought his plastic machine shop in 1985, I was in high school. And so I started working for him on the weekends.

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Nancy: I was completely left out of all of the mechanical musing that were going on at our house. And I pursued a totally different path.

About 25 years ago, my mother was working together with my father in their business. She did the bookkeeping, and she wanted to retire. So they recruited me to leave my job in Boston and come down to Connecticut and work in the shop and learn everything about all the financial information, the tax information. I ended up doing a lot more than my mother did because I took over website advertising, customer service, things that she didn't do.

Mark: I approached Nancy and — we've always gotten along. We've always been like minded as far as siblings. We don't argue. We understand each other and it was a natural fit.

Mark and Nancy Rohlfs left their family shop to start their on January 1^st, 2006. Over the past 19 years, they’ve managed risks and opportunities to grow from a garage shop to a 10,000-square-foot facility producing plastic parts.

Nancy: I think that we were both ready for a new opportunity and wanted to make a change and it was at the right time in our lives where we could do both. Take some risk and start a business.

Mark’s the risk taker. I am more risk averse, which is probably a good balance between the two of us.

We don't come to disagreements too often because we always will go with “who's the expert on this decision,” and then they get to make it. So if you're not the expert, you can put in your two cents, but you don't get to make the final decision.

Mark: Yeah, even if I'm not the expert, Nancy still lets me make the decision if it affects my work and I'm the one working in that environment.

Nancy: Mark has a lot of “out of the box” schemes, and East Coast has been a good opportunity for him to test them out. And I like to remind him of the times he's made some questionable decisions. But for the most part, I say he's battling at least 95% on his schemes ending up working out.

Mark: What we learned is patience and stringing our finances along and being stingy and innovative. So you have to have years of patience and you have to have enough money upfront to string you along through all the lean years. And if you add one customer a year, you have to think, “Go 20 years out and this is gonna be something.” We take a long view.

Nancy: We're kind of in a small industry, which is — I think — good in a way. As long as you make a good product, you're reliable, you have good pricing and good customer service, it allows you to kind of differentiate yourself within a smaller group. The metal shops that are in the United States, or even our competitors, if they're doing metal they are much larger. And I think it would be harder to break into that business than plastic.