Denver Machine Shop in Henderson, CO does heavy industrial repair, as well as being a prototype machine shop, and they have been family owned since Fred White bought his partner out in 1916. Denver Machine Shop is a generational business in terms of its ownership, but also its employees. As Scott White, President, said, “Being a generational business is not just our family, but it’s the families of all of the employees that have past knowledge of all we do from one to the next.” There are several father-son teams in their shop, and they love having that continuity in the office and on the shop floor.
The current owners of Denver Machine Shop are Scott and Eric White, who are identical twin brothers and Fred White’s great-grandchildren. Scott and Eric bought Denver Machine Shop from their parents in 2002 with the aim of making the shop grow. They were very successful in that. In 2001, the shop made $1 million in revenue and they took that up to $7 million in revenue in 2020 with Denver Machine Shop and Kendo Inc., a business they bought in 2016. However, they didn’t only grow that revenue by buying another shop.
Back in 2007, Scott and Eric realized that they wanted their shop to grow and that they would not be able to do that with the paper system they were using to track things around the shop. Scott was also worried they were missing things, like knowing how long a job actually took to run. Since it was hard to get all of their information in one place, it was hard to know if they were looking at complete and accurate information on everything from billing to the cost of a job. So, they decided to get an ERP system.