Membership Memo—Still Learning After All These Years

Every year I look forward to PCI’s Powder Coating Week and this year was no exception. As a custom coater, I find this event to be the best place to meet professionals involved with all aspects of powder coating. I have 33 years of powder coating experience and every year this event reminds me that I still have plenty to learn. It is a must attend event for my company and this year we brought five team members to experience the networking and learning opportunities Powder Coating Week offers. So that everyone can have an opportunity to attend, we send a different team of employees each year.

We all have salesmen visit our companies to sell us their products, but at Powder Coating Week you can spend time getting to know them and work towards building a relationship. Many a time, I have shared with customers that I may not have all the answers, but I have access to the smartest people in the industry through PCI, and at Powder Coating Week you can meet and learn from many of them.

Another valuable PCI benefit we take advantage of is the Peer Group program. As a Peer Group member, we travel twice a year to a different custom coater in our group. The groups are carefully created to ensure members are not competitors. We learn about how our peers do business and all topics are open for discussion, except pricing. With every trip I bring back new knowledge that I can apply in my shop.

We are in the midst of an expansion project at our shop and having my peer group visit during this process proved invaluable. Their input was influential in our planning and likely prevented me from making several major mistakes. Having 12 of your peers share their advice and ideas is simply awesome.

Our participation in the Peer Group program led us to another PCI program—PCI Certification. Through a third- party auditor, PCI Certified companies demonstrate that they have the processes in place to produce a quality powder coated part. It is an extensive program that covers just about everything we do in our shop. We’ve gone through the audit and, with a little fine tuning, we will be a PCI 3000 Certified coater.

PCI provides a wealth of resources to the powder coating community. As a PCI member, participating in one program led us to another, then another—all for the benefit of our company and the powder coating industry at large.

Kyle Ingham is president of Ingham’s Powder Coating.