Q&A with Manufacturing Technologies Inc. CEO Daniel Adams
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Since its founding in 1926 as Adams Engineering, a small tool and die shop serving South Bend’s automotive boom, Manufacturing Technologies Inc. (MTI) has undergone a remarkable transformation.
From a humble subcontractor for Studebaker to a global leader in advanced friction welding, MTI has not only stayed the course through industry shifts and economic turbulence but has also grown into a fourth-generation family business with a global presence.
Inside INdiana Business spoke with CEO Daniel Adams about the company’s investments in talent and technology, research partnerships and social impact initiatives. This article has been edited for brevity and clarity.
How has MTI Technologies evolved over the years and what has kept the company in South Bend?
We started in South Bend primarily because my great grandfather found an opportunity as a subcontractor to Studebaker. He started the business in 1926 as Adams Engineering; it was a tool and die shop primarily serving Studebaker. He immigrated from England in the early 1900s and spent some time working in St. Louis before finding his way to South Bend. The business has evolved since then; we started getting into special machine build and automation. When Studebaker started to have issues, we started looking for ways to pivot.
We started building inertia welders for Caterpillar Tractor Co. in the 1960s. By then we were a third-generation family business. We ended up buying the rights and patents to the inertia welding process from Caterpillar in late ‘75, and we opened Manufacturing Technology in ‘76 as a daughter company to Adams Engineering.
We’ve stayed in South Bend primarily because of the supply chain. Everything we need is within 100 miles. There’s ability to fabricate and machine items. The city has a strong background in the automotive industry and there’s some heavy industry in the area. Moving the business someplace else meant moving the skill set and establishing a new supply chain. Our commitment and ties to the community are really strong, and we want to make an impact. We’ve actually taken that vision of making an impact in our community to our other businesses in the UK, Slovakia and India, making sure that we’re partnering with people that want to do the same things.
Adams speaks on why the company chooses to remain in South Bend.
Who is MTI’s primary customer?
We have several hundred customers, and we serve lots of different industries. We serve astrospace, aerospace; we have parts that go on rockets and parts that go into aircraft engines. We have parts that go into automobiles, medical devices, oil drilling equipment, agricultural and construction equipment.
Part of our ability to survive over the last 60 years since we began friction welding is not being dependent on any one industry. We’ve had times where the automotive industry was really quiet, but the aerospace industry was booming. Being able to diversify across industries has really helped us in that capital equipment space, because capital equipment is difficult.
Since COVID, rising interest rates and quite honestly, a strong dollar doesn’t help us either when you’re trying to export from a price competitive standpoint. Even with political things like tariffs, having the ability to manufacture in other places so that we can deliver equipment to countries that might have a temporarily poor relationship with the United States helps from a diversification standpoint.
We went through a real growth cycle in the early 2000s because of the weak dollar; we were exporting all over the world. At that point, I’d say 80% of our work from year to year was export. That’s now challenging because of a strong dollar or other political considerations. Even in the first Trump administration when duties were imposed on China and China had reciprocal duties on American imports, we would say we’ll build this machine in England, where we can ship it to a customer without any tariffs, in order to help us keep that business. Our competitors are in China, Japan, Taiwan, India, the UK, Germany, so we’re on a global scale. We’ve had to punch above our weight as a small business and find ways to satisfy the customer in spite of the market conditions around us.
Are you exploring other growth opportunities for the company?
Right now, we describe ourselves as an engineering company. Currently, we do friction welding but that doesn’t mean that we’ll do friction welding forever. We’ve diversified our friction welding portfolio to different styles of friction welding since the early 2000s. We’ve also acquired a resistance welding company in the UK and Slovakia that helped us grow.
We’re launching a new product right now that is a hybrid between the two technologies. I like to think of MTI as being customer intimate, where we understand what our customers need in order for them to be successful sometimes better than they know what they need. Having that market focus for our customers, that intimacy, will guide us through whatever the next challenge would be as we as we get to the fifth generation.
How have you been able to recruit talent in the region?
Recruitment is difficult for us because it’s not a typical mechanical engineering role. It’s not typical software engineering or controls engineering. The combination of mechanical, fluids and controls working together using high forces is different from what you find in a lot of industries. A lot of manufacturing engineers or mechanical engineers will go into automation, robots or light duty manufacturing, and that doesn’t really equip them with the ability to work for us out of the box. So we end up having to recruit for aptitude and then teach them what it is that we’re doing. So we do a lot of homegrown education, a lot of homegrown training, whether it’s on the leadership side or from a technology side. Because we can’t just go out and hire someone who knows what we do, and by the time that you recognize that you’re short on engineering resources, it’s too late. So we have a pipeline of people coming in, and we’ve done this really well in the United States.
We have a very young and yet experienced engineering team, because we invested in that between 2010 to 2015. But now we’re coming to the point where our controls team is inexperienced and we’re having to reinvest in that. We just had a journeyman graduate through our apprentice program for machine building as a builder. We want to expand that to our service, software and controls teams. We also have an apprentice program in the UK, so we believe in being able to build people up internally.
Does that involve any partnership with any of the higher institutions in the region?
Our apprentice program is done in partnership with Ivy Tech Community College. But we also have programs that we’re working on with the University of Notre Dame where we’ve sponsored a couple post-graduate programs. Currently, we have a Consolidated Rail Infrastructure & Safety Improvements grant with the mechanical engineering department to research a safer way of welding rail for rail car and rail transportation. We’ll work with the University of Notre Dame to develop a new technology for the rail industry.
That opens the door to Notre Dame students, graduate programs and other faculty members. Notre Dame has been reaching out to the community, trying to find ways to keep their students here and to partner with local businesses. So I’ve been working with their development team for quite a while to try to find that right opportunity, because we’d love to be able to tap into their their talent pool from a recruiting standpoint as well.
You mentioned that community engagement is a big part of being a family owned business. How has MTI been able to do that over the years?
In several ways. I started off looking for opportunities within the education space, trying to find a way to entice high school students to stay in manufacturing or to go into manufacturing, as opposed to going to college. It felt like the education system was pushing people towards four-year colleges, whether or not that was right for them or not.
So I started working with the Career Academy on internships that we could do here, promoting getting people out of high school and into manufacturing jobs, because I felt like manufacturing had gotten a bad reputation. At the time, my son was 14 and in order to come work for us, he had to get a work permit from the local school system, even though he didn’t attend the local school system. So we went to a guidance counselor at one of the local high schools and she asked the name of the company, and I said Manufacturing Technology Incorporated. And she goes, “Manufacturing! Oh, that sounds dangerous.”
I was surprised that the person who was supposed to be promoting the industry to kids didn’t know anything about our business, and that her first instinct was that having someone work there over the summer might be putting them in danger. There’s this idea that manufacturing is dark and dirty, that you come home looking like you walked out of a coal mine. But we run a clean factory. It’s brightly lit. It’s safe and we do some really cool stuff. And so we started inviting folks from the school systems to visit.
We were looking at how to get people off robotics teams because those are exactly the kids that we want, self-starters. They’re interested in problem solving and engineering. So we were looking for ways to partner with school systems that had robotics teams that might want to start feeding kids into manufacturing instead of a four-year education. I handled that personally for several years, until we handed that off to our human resources department.
Now, I’m serving on the board of directors for Beacon Health System, having an awareness of what’s going on in the community from a health perspective, social determinants of health, etc. We’re on the west side of the city where there is a low-income population, and we want people to come work for us. We have a lot of people that either walk or drive short distances in order to work with us. Just finding ways to make sure that we have access to that population and it starts with health. That’s been a great way for me to learn.
I have a story with respect to the same sort of interaction in India. In India, young women typically don’t get educated because there’s no return on the investment for the family. The woman is going to go off and be a part of another family when she gets married, so there’s no incentive for them to pay for her education. In the last couple of years, the business that we ended up acquiring a 51% majority stake in, has paid for the education of every employee’s female children. That is the type of impact that we want to have in the community around us and was a great cultural fit as we started looking at how to do business in India.
When you think about the next generation, how are you building leaders within your organization?
We talked about it from a technology standpoint that we really have to do some internal training in order to bring people up to speed. We take the same approach with respect to leadership and in doing so, we get to empower a lot of people. The younger generation is already running the business for us and the executive team is really there from a cultural and guidance perspective. I like to think that I’m trying to create a bunch of smaller CEOs that have the authority and empowerment to make decisions that are in the best interest of the business. I’m not sure that people get that opportunity at larger employers and hopefully that helps differentiate us a little bit as we’re trying to attract talent.
What are the chances for a fifth-generation family takeover?
My father had one sibling and when she got married, her husband wanted to do something else. So my father ended up buying her out of the business. As it got to the fourth generation, there were three of us and it was a much smaller business. We decided if we were going to have a chance for a fifth generation, we were going to have to expand. So we set out on a strategy to grow the business, which I think we’ve done fairly well. We went from $14 million a year to $50 million and from one facility to five different locations in four countries.
So now we’re looking at what our experience was coming into the business versus the experience we want the next generation to have. I had a great opportunity when I came back to do a tour of the business, the different departments and establish relationships with people who were doing the work at that time. But it was still a lot of hazing in terms of training because that’s the generation that was now training me. So we started looking to create an onboarding program that would do the same thing for the next generation, minus the hazing.
So we created summer internship opportunities for the next generation. For example, an accounting major would get experience outside of accounting, so that you can see where the numbers come from. We could put you in a manufacturing project engineering role, so you can see the data flow that might help you become a better accountant. If you want to be a mechanical engineer, then let’s put you on the build floor so that you can see how machines go together, as opposed to just how drawings are made and give a broader experience. We also involved them at the board of directors level, taught them how to read financial statements so that they could see the business from the bottom up and from the top down. We figured that even if they went off to work someplace else, we’d give them a little bit of a leg up from an experience standpoint.
We have our first fifth generation kid, who just started this winter and I think we’re going to get two, maybe three more, if we’re lucky. We have a total of seven. Right now, I know my daughter is not interested; she’s going to med school next year.
And why do you think it’s important to be a part of IDEA Week 2025?
I’ve been following IDEA Week for quite some time and it’s really strong community engagement. None of our customers are here, so we don’t do a whole lot of business in the community. When people ask me where MTI is, I usually describe it as the big blue building across from Frankie’s, because everybody knows Frankie’s but they have no idea who we are. So in order for us to make an impact, we have to be out there. There’s a strong vibe associated with IDEA Week that we wanted to be a part of. We’re looking forward to it again this year.
We’ve done other things, for example, Manufacturing Week where we bring kids in from the school system. Anytime we can get somebody interested in what we do it’s positive both from a community standpoint and from a business perspective.