Riding Out the Perfect Economic Storm
Walking through a machine shop full of lathes and presses and assorted tools that have put bread on the family table forever, Tim Sebestyen points to a newfangled 10-foot-high machine that seems out of place among the old industrial relics.
“Notice it’s not making any noise right now,” Sebestyen says. “That’s costing us money.”
In other words, if the thing were up and running and making precision machine parts as it’s designed to do, people around the shop would be a lot happier. But the computerized machine -- a concession to change even in an industry whose workers still go home at night with dirt under their fingernails -- isn’t purring. Bought for $130,000 that the family-owned business had to borrow, it’s been needed for only one job.
Oh, this economy. Is it ever coming back?
Usually, that question is directed at some high-tech firm or retailer or big employer. It doesn’t get asked of people such as Zsigmond Sebestyen, a 66-year-old machine shop owner in Fullerton who signs a dozen paychecks a month.
Sebestyen runs things at California Mold -- fashioning things like tiny parts for laser eye-surgery equipment or airplane fuel tanks -- while 30-year-old son Tim handles the books. The father is watching the economy as closely as any high-tech entrepreneur.
And with an assurance that makes his son chuckle, the elder Sebestyen says, in a thick Hungarian accent, that without doubt his blue-collar company will ride out the storm. “I always survive,” he says happily. “I will survive.”
Asked how he can be so sure, he says, “Because I know. I just survive, no matter what.”
Other small companies like Sebestyen’s may not be as lucky.
“We’re going to lose a lot of companies in this downturn,” says David Goodreau, the head of the Small Manufacturers Assn. of California.
Goodreau likens what’s happening to manufacturers to the shrinkage of family farming in America.
He has written that a variety of factors, the proverbial “Perfect Storm,” have joined to imperil the industry. And when manufacturers or other employers aren’t making things, they don’t give work to machine shops that make or refurbish those parts.
No one knows that better than the elder Sebestyen, who left his native Hungary in 1957. Trained as a machinist, he came to California around 1960 and found work. By 1971, he had started his own company. In 1995, he moved to the current off-the-beaten-path location.
Sebestyen has seen downturns before. Almost as gospel, he thinks they can’t last. As they have for centuries, people will always need to make things, he says, and if and when the government and private industry tap into a new round of innovation, they will need new machines -- and new parts -- again.
That is the hope that keeps a shop like this going, operating on an eternal optimism that America will start to build again.
“At the moment, we’re doing very well,” Tim says. “In the last three months, we got a couple nice contracts. Before that, it was horrible. We lost 35% of our business the last two years.”
Even as he says that, papa Zsigmond has a contented look on his face. The early 1980s were tough, too, he says. He’s confident he’ll still be in business when he retires in five years or so and hands the business over to Tim and two other sons.
“Dad is always kind of a solid oak,” Tim says, with all due deference.
“He always says we’ll get through it. I’m feeling great about this year, so far.”
But then, perhaps fearing the sound of his own optimism, he quickly adds, “But I don’t want to jinx it, either.”
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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana .parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.
