BY TIM PENNINGTON EDITOR
Innovation makes Lincoln Industries be a 2016 Top Shop
Nebraska fnisher grows with help of an innovation team.
The U.S. map that Marc LeBaron saw in 1992 did not lie. The
map showed his company, Lincoln Industries, smack in the
middle of the country, and not anywhere near the customers
he needed to be close to in order to grow his finishing business.
"You could draw a 200-mile circle around us without
seeing much manufacturing located close," LeBaron says. "It
was clear we needed to have something extra special to offer
people to come to us."
It was in the early 1990s that LeBaron was coming off the
chairmanship of the National Association of Metal Finishers
(NAMF). He had spent the past year visiting over 100 plants in
the U.S. as part of his NAMF responsibilities, and what he saw
was many good electroplating shops, but not many that were a
major player in the plating world.
"There weren't that many shops that broke through that 'small
company' level and really grew as an entity," he says. "And with
us being in Nebraska, it would make it even tougher to grow
as much as we wanted to. If we didn't change our thinking, we
would be just another electroplater and another job shop."
In 1952, his father, Dale LeBaron, started Lincoln Plating
in Nebraska as a small custom shop for local manufacturers,
specializing in made-to-order solutions for a relatively few
number of customers, but steadily grew the shop as a regional
business that was doing fairly well.
After Marc took his whirlwind tour more than 25 years ago
and saw an opportunity to become a national player by offering
more services and expertise to large OEMs, Lincoln began to
drastically change.
New Approach
"We really took a step back and started looking at the world a
little differently," says LeBaron, who by then had purchased
ABOVE: Lincoln CEO Marc LeBaron (right) and President
Tom Hance have led the company into developing more
innovative coating processes for its customers.
16
APRIL 2016 — PFonline.com
THE VOICE OF FINISHING
80
YEARS
TOP SHOPS BENCHMARKING T O P S H O P S B E N C H M A R K I N G