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Department of Plastics Engineering



Lean and Mean:

Running a Start-up in the Teeth of a Recession

Brendan CahillBrendan Cahill is one of those transplanted northerners who
found the south by accident, then woke up one day to realize it
was home. He was born and raised in Massachusetts, graduated from
UMass Lowell in 1993, and then worked in New England with G.E. till 1998, when he was transferred to Louisville to work as a processing engineer. By the time he left three years later to open a consulting practice in Washington, D.C., he had married a Kentucky native, and the bluegrass was in his blood. The couple was gone four years; but it didn’t take that long before they knew they wanted to return.

“Traveling [as a consultant] was getting more extensive every year,” Cahill told a Kentucky reporter a year ago. “And Louisville is wonderful—everything from the weather, the amount of daylight we have, the people . . . .” Also, he says, he was asking himself: why should he be going on the road to help other manufacturers succeed when he had the knowledge and training to bring the success on himself?—or, as he put it at the time, to “take that expertise and bring it in-house.”

So the Cahills returned to Louisville. And in February 2007, Brendan opened his own plant across the river in Indiana— PTG Silicones, a manufacturer of thermoplastic
molding—with three employees, 5,100 square feet of floor space and a half-million dollars in state-of-the-art equipment.
PTG Silicones
Right from the start, it was a lot of work; there were nights he had to sleep in his office to oversee the unmanned equipment that can operate 24 hours a day. But the company has prospered, winning clients in the healthcare, automotive, aerospace and industrial fields— even in the teeth of the recession.

“We’ve had to be lean and mean,” says Cahill today. “It’s not easy.We had to let go of three part-time employees not long ago; there’s no fat in the operation at all. But we’re a highly automated company— one of the very few in the country that can operate around the clock if we need to, part of the time unmanned. That keeps costs low, and wins us clients in the end. The challenge now is sales. We have to have the resources to go out and find new clients. It’s tough in this environment, but we’ll manage. And I feel very good about the future.”

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