San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Franks Manufacturing sees a need, a way to ‘keep those machines running’
In manufacturing, it’s all about keeping the machines running. So when business started to drop early in the pandemic, James Franks, owner of Franks Manufacturing, acted quickly to keep orders coming in.
Started in 1980 by Franks’ father and uncle, the company produces custom-made plastic products for a wide range of customers.
From automotive parts to movie sets, the company makes nearly any plastic item a client could want. But some of the company’s primary clients — oil field services companies — stopped placing orders as the oil market collapsed.
Franks replaced the lost business with a newly in-demand plastic product: plexiglass shields. Franks said the company makes 600 shields per day. It has contracted with local officials to produce the shields for sites such as the Bexar County Courthouse and probation offices.
Franks, 60, recently discussed how he’s keeping the 40-year-old company on West Blanco Road busy in a time of historic uncertainty. Below is an edited transcript of the interview.
Q:
A: Franks Manufacturing started in 1980, and we were mainly doing agricultural products. We were making lick feeders at the time. That’s what my dad wanted to do. So he brought those in here thinking that was all he was going to do. Well, my uncle didn’t like to do custom thermoforming (heating plastic until it’s pliable and molding it into a product), so he gave it all to my dad, and we ended up being a custom thermoformer. So now we do everything from agricultural to aerospace. We’ll do just about whatever someone wants us to make.
Q:
A: I’ve been working in this since I was 10 years old. I’m also retired military — retired from the Texas National Guard. I was in Iraq in (2005). My unit was an artillery unit that was in Tikrit. We were force protection for the Northern
Command, so we were running all over the place. I was the intel sergeant for the unit. I was running the business before I was deployed. My dad came back in, and he was really just wanting to shut the business down. And I said, “Well, give me a year.” I was gone, so when I came home, I went and got a VA loan and bought the business. That was in 2006. I was 46 years old, and it went from there.
It was a little different, but because I’d been there off and on since I was 10 years old, what’re you going to do? You jump back in the groove and you go. It was a little different coming in and saying, “Yeah, now it’s mine.”
Q:
A: We went from four employees to 20. We changed a lot of our markets. We were doing a lot of oil and gas secondary containment. We do a lot of agricultural products, and we’ve got computer numerical control technology we didn’t have.
We had a large fire in 2014 that burned down the back building. I just decided to go ahead and buy production equipment to replace it that would do a lot heavier volume.
Q:
A: It set us back for about six months. We rebuilt the building and got production running within six months. It was a devastating fire. We lost about $1.3 million in equipment.
Q:
A: We were doing well. But oil field (clients) this year and last year started slowing down. Oil field was 30 percent of our business. Will it come back? Yes. It’ll come back. Now, the pandemic is not helping, because now people aren’t driving. So it has lasted longer than it was going to.
Q:
A: You’ve got to find other stuff to replace it. And replacing a couple million dollars a year is hard to do. But we have branched out and done various other things, and I don’t turn anybody down. We’ve got our own engineers, so if somebody comes in with a widget, we’ll design it and produce it for them.
We had a company here in town call us when COVID first started, so we started making these (plexiglass shields) in the latter part of March, the first of April. I built them 55, and I said, “Well, you know what, let’s put them on our website.” So we came up with eight or 10 different sizes, and we’ve sold thousands of them. We’re making them now. These are the ones Bexar County gave away for businesses.