Blue skies ahead at Signature Tool Inc.

The story of Signature Tool Inc., in Oldcastle, Ontario, might as well be a metaphor for the cutting tool industry in this country.

Sitting on the couches in the shop’s main office co-owners Frank Quint and Greg Soulliere talk about their days at the helm of their shop and seem very much at ease now that the recession is in the rear-view, and they can see retirement (or at least a partial one) on the horizon.

Boom-and-bust days are a reality of the industry, but few could have foreseen a downturn like the mid-to-late 2000’s. Soulliere and Quint admit there were times when they considered packing it in, but through some well-timed investments, out-of-the-box thinking and persistence, the shop is now humming along and things have improved enough that Greg’s son Scott sees his future in the business, and plans to succeed his father at the shop one day.

The co-owners got their start at Valenite Modco, one of the largest cutting tool manufacturers of the day. By 1987 they’d decided to go it alone and started Signature Tool Inc.

Although Quint is himself a machinist and has experience with cutting tools, he took on more of a sales role with the fledgling company while Soulliere manned the shop. Their initial goal was to get their hands on a CNC machine by their fifth year, but it was only one before they had a two-spindle Deckel in their shop. From there business continued to roll, and next thing they knew, Signature Tool had two buildings and was doing a booming trade repairing cutting tools for General Motors and other local automotive manufacturers.

But the elder Soulliere doesn’t mince words when he talks about the bad times either.

“We went from 27 guys down to about 3,” he said. “In about 2007, 2008, things started to slow. We were doing a lot of work with Ford at the time, but the Ford Essex engine plant pretty much shut down and General Motors was shutting down the transmission plant.

“I remember telling (Scott), ‘I’ve had enough of this, man. We’re losing too much money. I’ll take the money home rather than watch it go out the window.’”

But Soulliere credits his son Scott with encouraging them to stay the course and keep plugging away in the hopes that things would get better. Plus, it didn't hurt that Scott came up with some creative cost-saving ideas of his own to improve the shop’s productivity.

In fact, it’s a testament to the elder Soulliere and co-owner Quint that they put their faith in the next generation of the business. Some shop owners have been too hard-headed to give up the reins – or doubtful of a younger employee’s ability to guide the business. After some lean months, suddenly the shop found itself having better months, but decided to take a chance.

“We thought, okay, here we are, everybody’s hungry out there, there’s not a lot of work out there, what are we going to do? So what we did is we went out and bought a machine,” Soulliere recalls.

“And we said this thing is going to make us or break us, so we bought our first Hurco. This was in 2009. It was bad, but there was some opportunity out there.”

It was a risk, to be sure, but Soulliere and Quint decided that taking a chance to give their shop an edge would be worth it.

“Ford even said, ‘I don’t know why you’re buying a machine now’ – and they were giving us the work!” Quint says with a laugh.

But the new machine opened up new possibilities – ones that Scott, and engineer Shawn Morand were able to exploit. The example Soulliere recalls is Scott’s suggestion to cut square parts on round barstock.

“I’m old school CNC machines, doing it all, and I thought I was the best at it – but you have to let these young guys go with it,” Soulliere says. “And they (Scott and Shawn) came up with some ideas – things they came up with had me going ‘oh, this isn’t going to work’ – and he would come and show me what they did, and holy smokes... It was good!”

“What took us an hour and a half to build was now taking 20 minutes.”

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The other feature of the new Hurcos that Scott is quick to credit is the ability to program right on the machine. This let the company invest most of their money in a machine while they could wait to invest in more CAM

software later on.

“That would have been a lot of money to drop for (CAM software) as well – and we could program on the controller. It was slow, so we were getting small jobs. It’s hard to put the time into all that software and then the

time into programming, when you could be standing at the machine and do two parts, make your (money) and move on to the next one,” Scott says.

And so began the company’s road back to relevancy.

Their Windsor-area location is ideally situated in the heart of North America’s automotive market, and Quint started going after some of the big fish right as work was starting to come back to the area.

Signature Tool had been repairing lots of cutters for Ford’s Essex engine operations, but decided now was the time to start making new build tooling for them. They knew of some production issues Ford was having, so they took on the challenge of building new cutters that would give them perfect parts every time.

“At first, they just cut some parts to see if it was going to cut (well) — and it was first part, good part – which was very rare,” Quint says.

Shortly after, the company landed a tooling program with Ford and is now supplying tools for a number of other automotive suppliers country-wide. Suddenly, the new five-year plan is a lot more optimistic than it was a few years ago.

“We’re not afraid to quote on anything anymore,” Soulliere says. “What we’ve done in the past two years, adding this new equipment, landing this first program that we took on – it’s pretty sophisticated work. We got the guys together, and I told these guys, ‘this is the stepping stone. This is going to benefit you guys, not me… this is your future.’”

More importantly, with the tough times now a thing of the past, it’s actually enjoyable to come into work.

“The fun went out of it for those four or five years that we really struggled,” Quint says.

“When we got that first Hurco we were able to lower our pricing and take the package. So that was the catalyst for a lot of this, and now I think some of the fun’s starting to come back, when you have the work and you can do it.”[gallery type="slideshow" ids="102695,102694,102698"]