When Greg May sold his share in Trimed Manufacturing, a medical tools company in Warsaw, Ind., in 1989, his former partners told him he was nuts to move to Sault Ste. Marie to start another company.
"I wanted to live up here and bought a place on the river," said May, a native of Saginaw who had fallen in love with the Upper Peninsula. He was speaking of the St. Mary's River, which flows southeast for 74.5 miles from the Soo Locks in downtown Sault Ste. Marie to Lake Huron and separates the U.S. from Canada. "I love the outdoors. It's God's country. There's a lot of water and nature. There's not a lot of traffic. There's not a lot of people."
"My partners said, 'You'll never make it there. There's no workforce.'"
But May offered something at his Precision Edge Surgical Products Co. LLC that was exceedingly rare for the Sault — labor that required a lot of training and rewarded it with high pay and fringe benefits.
"The funny thing? The first few people I hired are still here," said May.
The company thrived, almost too much so. "It grew faster than I planned, and I needed help with management," said May.
That was 1994. Coincidentally, that year a customer of his asked if would be interested in selling the business.
The customer was part of the Marmon Group, a Chicago-based industrial conglomerate that made the Pritzker family one of the wealthiest in the U.S. Robert Pritzker and his brother Jay bought a struggling company in Ohio called the Colson Co. in 1953 and built it through a series of acquisitions.
Terms were quickly agreed to.
"The Pritzkers have been outstanding partners. Bob Pritzker asked me to stay on for five years, and I told him, 'Bob, I'd like to retire here,'" said May, who continues to work full time for the company as its technical director in charge of research and development and new-product development. "I'm 63, now, and have no desire to retire. I have a passion for this work. The business keeps me engaged, and I feel that I'm part of something."
Much of the Marmon Group was sold to Berkshire Hathaway in 2008. By then, revenue had grown from $3 million when the Colson Co. was bought to $7 billion. The Pritzkers held on to several medical device manufacturers, including Precision Edge, under the banner of the Colson Group.
Jay Pritzker died in 1999. Robert Pritzker died in 2011. His nephew, Jay Robert Pritzker, is Illinois' governor. The Pritzkers are known for their philanthropy and have funded the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, the Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park in Chicago and the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago.
Precision Edge now employs about 195 at its plant in the Air Industrial Park adjacent to the Chippewa County International Airport on the southwest side of the city, and it employs another 80 or so at a manufacturing plant in Boyne City. Some older, high-risk employees decided to retire in March when COVID-19 hit, though the Upper Peninsula has been largely spared from the worst effects of the pandemic.
"It was a very challenging couple of months," said Todd Fewins,a 1992 engineering graduate from Michigan Technological University in Houghton, who has been the company's president since 2016. "Absenteeism was up and production was down. Do you come to work? Not come to work? But we've already started to hire for both of our buildings."
The company makes a wide range of surgical tools and parts for tools, including bone saws, soft-tissue blades, drills, broaches, rasps, burs, implantable screws and bone taps.
About the time May was selling the company to the Marmon Group, because of AIDS and HIV, the federal Food and Drug Administration mandated that tools used to cut tissue in surgery be used just one time, reducing the risk of infection for other patients and dramatically increasing sales for Precision Edge.
Fewins was an engineer with Ford and Visteon in southeast Michigan and then with Dura Automotive in Mancelona, Mich., before becoming the manager of the aerospace unit of Skilled Manufacturing Inc. of Traverse City in 2007.
In 2011 he was recruited by a former boss of his at Dura to open a new facility for Precision Edge in Boyne City. Five years later he was named company president.
Precision Edge, which runs two 10-hour shifts a day, has some 5,000 different SKUs in its portfolio. Fewins said the company makes 150,000 units a year of its highest selling products, and as few as 20 every two years or so of its lowest-volume products, such as drill guides for surgery that don't cut tissue and can be used repeatedly. All sales are to device OEMs and none are direct to health care systems.
Casey Kindel is the global supply chain manager for Englewood, Colo.-based Paragon 28 Inc., a medical device company that specializes in surgical tools and implants for feet and ankles.
"We're the fastest growing business in our market segment," said Kindel, who said he purchases upward of 200 different products from Precision Edge. "They are a very key partner for us, particularly in single-use products. Precision Edge is a primary supplier of our cutting instruments. I can't say enough positive things about them, both from a product standpoint and service. They do a phenomenal job of making products to our specifications.
"About two years ago we signed a vendor-managed inventory system with them, which helps us save money. They've been the best of all our partners at having inventory on hand when we need it."
Closer to home, Precision Edge helped revive the machine-shop program at Boyne High School and was instrumental in landing a community development block grant of $350,000, in cooperation with the Michigan Economic Development Corp., Charlevoix County and other industry partners, to create a mobile CNC lab for North Central Michigan College in Petoskey. The lab is set up in a trailer with 12 work stations and visits area high schools on a recurring basis.
The grant came after Precision Edge invested capital into its Boyne City facility and hired 30 employees, with the goal to produce skilled machinists, which have been in short supply in northern Michigan, for area employers, including Precision Edge.
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