Dec. 23—The company’s products run the gamut — automobile and aerospace parts, medical equipment, bicycles and high-end backpacks.
Southwest Composite Works is an Albuquerque manufacturer that has been building parts for various products for 30 years. It started in Moriarty in 1994 and is now in its third location in Albuquerque, a 15,000-square-foot facility near Sandia National Laboratories.
John Groth, the founder, president and CEO of the company, was the guest on this week’s episode of the Business Outlook podcast, which focused on small business.
With 15 employees, Groth runs a small manufacturing business in Albuquerque. He said finding and training reliable employees is one of his biggest challenges. The vast majority of his workers don’t have college degrees. It takes time to train them up but that makes them more competitive, and they can be hired by other larger businesses in the area.
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Here’s a preview of the conversation, which has been edited for clarity.
To start, can you explain what carbon fiber is?
“It’s a cloth material and it’s a composite material. Being from New Mexico, one of the original composites was adobe brick. Mud and straw made a composite. Two join together to make a stronger unit when they’re combined. The real buzzword in carbon fire is that it’s seven times stronger than steel and half the weight of aluminum.”
You make components that are used in a wide variety of industries, from aerospace to recreation. Tell us about your customers.
“We launched our business in the backpack market, making carbon fiber backpack frames that we sold to boutique manufacturers in the western United States. These guys were selling 10,000 to 20,000 packs a year, primarily for big-game hunting markets.”
Why would you want a carbon fiber backpack?
“It’s lighter. If you were going to use an aluminum sheet rather a carbon fiber sheet, the aluminum, once it’s bent it stays bent. Carbon fiber is a spring. It’s very tough and it always goes back to its original form.”
You make products for a wide range of industries. What the common theme with all the products?
“Quality. For example, we are aligned with an aerospace manufacturer here in Albuquerque and are doing some non-flight critical components for their heating and cooling systems that go into a regular Boeing airplane. These are very special fiberglass material and it’s a composite component that we’re making for them. It would also come into play with a robotic arm that may be working over at the Amazon facility in New Mexico. It could be used as an automotive component. Many automotive components are all about the cosmetic look; it’s perceived as black luxury. So you’re using other attributes of the carbon, the look, the strength and the weight.”
Are your customers local businesses or national companies?
“Some are large and some are local. We do work with Sandia (National Laboratories), and they’re awesome to work with. We do some very cool custom carbon composites. We align ourselves with innovative, growth-minded companies.”
There’s not a lot of manufacturing done in New Mexico, right?
“Yes. The last few years its been up and down since COVID. But we delivered 130,000 parts out of our facility last year. So we’re pushing some pretty good volumes and we’ve worked with automation to try to minimize touch labor. That kind of touch labor is tough because we have a lot of offshore competitors and most of our offshore competitors work for less than we do.”
Can you describe your manufacturing facility?
“It looks like an operating room. It’s clean. We’ve wholly embraced lean manufacturing. It clean and shiny and organized, which is at the forefront of our business model, which brings efficiency. About half the shop is machining and manufacturing the molds and dyes for our carbon fiber components, and the other half of the shop is composite manufacturing where we’re running heated presses that compress the carbon fiber at about 30 tons of pressure. The other components that we’re doing is for aerospace, and they are run through an industrial oven. We have vacuum pressure that squeezes the fiberglass and the carbon fiber.”
What kind of talent do you need? Who do you hire?
“We work through most of the people internally. We do have some experienced high-level machinists. We have our composite leaders train our other folks. It’s really been homegrown. We’re the first and only composite manufacturer in New Mexico. If we were in Seattle, there are Boeing and sailboats and the yacht industry. There’s a lot of people in the business. Same in San Diego. They’re a huge hot bed for composites because they started with the boating industry. We’ve had to train most of our people.”
What are the challenges that you have?
“One of the biggest challenges is employment. Recruiting people out of state is possible, but it’s been a challenge. And we’re up against the larger national lab in town. And they’re aggressively pursuing talent. So they’re a competitor.”
What’s the future of your company look like?
“The future is bright. We’re in a great market. The whole composite industry is still potentially in its adolescence. There’s more adoption of lightweight materials, especially in electric vehicles, electric airplanes. Reducing fuel emissions requires airplanes use lighter equipment. I think Albuquerque is great and there is a lot of upside.”