Manufacturing
Manufactured risk
How to build an innovative culture
By Mike Cottrill
Smart Business | June 2009
Page 1 of 2
Scott Balogh, president, Mar-Bal Inc.
Scott Balogh wants people to know that he’s messed things up pretty bad at Mar-Bal Inc.
Balogh and his brother, Steven, were with the company when it was five people and they tried almost anything to create innovation.
That brought success to the nearly $50 million manufacturer of thermoset custom-molded parts and compounds, but it came with more people and processes. Today, Balogh is president, and he and Steven are constantly trying to convince their 400 people that quality process is king, but they still need to spark creativity.
“What I always try to educate everybody on in any project is you have the voice of the customer,” he says. “You also have the voice of the process. … We’re marrying the two of them, and there’s never a right or wrong answer, but there are compromises you have to make. That’s part of developing that innovation culture; you have to take risks and be willing to make mistakes.”
Smart Business spoke with Balogh about why he doesn’t cry in his beer over failure and how to set realistic employee stretch goals.
Allot room for creativity and mistakes. When Steve and I started, it was the two of us, our father and two engineers. We were a $13 million company and now, quarterly, I address a group of 25. The sales and engineering team alone is close to 20 people. So the first thing that came to mind is, ‘Wow, we’ve grown — our baby’s grown up.’ The next thing is you start thinking about, ‘Well, we better start educating this baby as to how we got here, because (innovation) was a lot easier then.’
So it’s creating the communication networks and connections and developing project teams and giving everybody an opportunity to fail. When it was the five amigos, and three of them were named Balogh, if we screwed up, we let each other know it, but then we just had to get on with it. You couldn’t cry in your beer; it didn’t do any good to blame the other guy because you were going to see each other the next day. … So you learn to take development one step at a time and give people the opportunity and the support to do that. And it’s exceptionally hard because you typically find people don’t want to make mistakes, and we made a ton of mistakes.
We spent $2 million on a facility so we can do development away from the plant. The plant’s focused on cost. We’re focused in the engineering group and sales group on development, so you do have to separate the two at first, and once you start to move through what I call a tollgate, or a process in which we measure the development of a product, then you start to bring in the process engineers and the plant managers and the quality managers.
