Service first for tool company that sells too
That ordering differentiates Franklin’s Knox Machinery.
Business Name: Knox Machinery
Location: 375 Industrial Drive in Franklin
Owner’s name: Greg Knox
Years in operation: Celebrating 25 years
Describe what your business does: Knox Machinery is a machine tool service and sales company, specializing in the sale, integration, training and servicing of metal-cutting equipment for the local manufacturing sector.
What inspired you to start this business? My wife and I are both New York City expatriates, and we decided we wanted to raise our six children in the Miami Valley region because of the family first values and morals typical in this region. So I started my own company and, after achieving success in our first year, I moved my family to Ohio. We have loved it here ever since.
How has your business embraced innovation? Knox Machinery lives in the high-tech sector — and we make our living assisting local manufacturing companies in becoming more productive and profitable by embracing and fully utilizing cutting-edge technologies to help level the playing field in a globally flattened and hyper-competitive manufacturing sector.
What’s your biggest challenge right now? Our biggest challenge this year has been, by far, for our sales force. When you
are selling six- and seven-figure capital equipment, invariably you need to take the customer on field trips to the factory (in our case, Mazak in northern Kentucky) and or to end users of similar equipment. With the forced government shutdowns, this has been impossible. Sales is a “contact sport,” and there is only so much you can do over the phone or with a Zoom meeting.
What’s your biggest opportunity right now? In 2019 Knox Machinery was appointed the exclusive dealer for Mazak Machine Tools — the No. 1 machine tool brand worldwide. We have spent the past year learning and assimilating Mazaks hundreds of machines — and customers — and our great opportunity now is re-introducing the Mazak product line to all of the customers in our territory who have not looked at a Mazak in a while. They have truly developed game-changing technologies that give our customers competitive advantages that are practically unfair.
What do you want readers to know about your business today? Knox Machinery differs from all of our competitors in that we are genuinely a service company — that also sells machines. We take a service-first approach — and not just on our machines — 80% of the service work our deep team of engineers tackles on the average day is working on a machine that one of our competitors sold. It is well known in the industry that the Knox guys work on anything, and when we do work on our own equipment, we have over $90 million worth of spare parts right in northern Kentucky, where Mazak makes most of the machines that we sell. (Yes — truly U.S. made!)