We’re continuing our Cohort Spotlight series for the Women’s Entrepreneurial Fellowship with Caitlin McMahan, the co-owner of Marcellus Metalcasters, a Michigan-based manufacturing company and one of the last foundries in the US doing low-volume runs of small to medium-sized iron castings.
What makes them stand out isn’t just what they make — it’s how they operate. Caitlin and her team bend over backwards for their customers, their community, and their employees, and she’s honest about both the rewards and the hard realities of running a small manufacturing business.
We sat down with Caitlin to talk about what it’s really like to run a foundry, what drives her, and what she’s working toward as she builds the company into something even bigger.
We covered it all in a Q&A and on an episode of the Happy Hour Hustle podcast.
Here’s what Caitlin had to say in our Q&A:
Q: What do you wish people understood about being a small business owner?
A: I wish people better understood what a balancing act being a small business owner is. The employees think we’re greedy and should pay more, even when I worry every week about paying bills. The community complains that our equipment is loud but then asks us to help plow their driveways when their cars get stuck, using that same equipment. The state makes it hard to understand regulations and expects us to meet MIOSHA requirements that even their inspectors don’t enforce consistently. Being a small business owner is a lonely and thankless job. I wish that I could be better at all of the things, but at the end of the day, I have to balance everything. Doing a bad job on the HR front today, means I did a better job on the finances. Tomorrow, I will prioritize HR stuff over production. I would love to have a ton of money to spend on the latest and greatest safety equipment, but instead I am going to put money into quality improvements today, so that we are more profitable next year, so we can buy even better safety equipment the year after that. We try to be the best employer, neighbor, and manufacturer that we can be, but running all of this, without a dedicated sales, HR, quality, and safety team, is hard in a way that most people are not capable of understanding.
Q: Why did you apply to be a part of WEF?
A: I applied to WEF because my dear friend, Nancy Marshall, encouraged me to apply. I was completely unfamiliar with the program, but when she told me about her own experience with it, I felt like it would help me navigate many of the challenges that I am facing in my own life, both on a business level and personally. I love my business but I don’t always like it — I am excited to leverage this program to start thinking about the long-term plan for the company and to determine what steps I need to take to build it into the company that I want it to be.
Q: What makes your business unique?
A: We are unique in that we are one of the last foundries doing low-volume runs of small to medium-sized iron castings in the US. We are unique in that we don’t come from a family that has been doing this for a century — we’re the new kids in the industry. We are unique in that we are working hard to build the company into something more for our people, with better-paying jobs, promotional opportunities, and teaching them to have the self-discipline and self-respect that many of them have never been taught to have before. We bend over backwards for our customers — we know that the parts we make literally keep the lights on by keeping power plants operational. We bend over backwards for our community — we don’t write big checks or have a fancy marketing campaign to tell people how charitable we are, but we take care of our community, making replacement parts for the DPW, making trophies for local contests, and opening jars for the old lady that lives across the street, because she just had shoulder surgery and can’t use one arm. We bend over backwards for our employees — we hire individuals from all walks of life, and in exchange, we work around their parole meetings, help employees understand what credit is and how to use it safely, and drive them home if they need a ride. We are unique because we choose to be a better kind of business.
For the latest updates from Marcellus Metalcasters, you can check out their website. Keep up with Caitlin on her LinkedIn.