The Machinist with Purpose, with Doug Rizzo-EP 273

******** Listen on your favorite podcast app using pod.link. My guest today, Doug Rizzo, has been working in machine shops for over 55 years, and he's only 62. Doug worked in his father's company through good times and terrible, and did applications for Doosan. Now, he's a plant manager by day and runs his own shop for six or seven hours at night. Doug says he loves all of it, from doing applications, to making fixtures, to cleaning oil off machines. He says it's where he's meant to be. It's where he finds flow. Machinist Since Age 6 Doug Rizzo's father owned a machine shop. He started on drill presses and Bridgeports at six. At nine he was running an NC-controlled lathe. Summer vacations, weekends, snow days. He was with his dad in the shop, Madison Sprocket and Gear. They ran Acmes, Brown & Sharpes, Wickmans. Many of those machines came from Graff-Pinkert, long before Doug and I ever spoke. Day job, night job Today Doug owns Franklin Lakes Machine, a contract shop with six CNCs in Englewood, New Jersey, ten minutes outside midtown Manhattan. By day he's plant manager at Lentron Corporation, which makes components for elevators and escalators. At night he does what he calls a Clark Kent costume change and goes to his own shop to get parts out for next-day delivery. Weekends he's around the New York metro doing applications and setups for other shops. He's also helped a lot of guys get their own shops off the ground, applications and quoting and tooling, what his father called training wheels. When people ask if he's arming his competitors, he says there's enough pie for everybody to have a slice and you can come back for seconds. For now, the day job pays the salary and the insurance, and his own shop is the gravy. He never has to chase a raise. And if he's tired, he doesn't go in. The shop he didn't get Doug worked for his father for about 30 years. Half a career in one building, and he always assumed he'd take it over. His father had a partner, one of Doug's uncles. After Doug's mother died, his father didn't plan for what came next, and someone else came into the picture who didn't see the business the way Doug did. The business closed in 2009 after roughly 48 years. Doug had power of attorney, so he took two CNC lathes he'd personally uncrated new and never wrecked, and paid a few dollars for them so his father's partner wouldn't be short. Then he put them in storage and went to get educated. For three and a half years he took short assignments on purpose. Six months here, six months there. Swiss machines in a medical shop. Boring mills in Pennsylvania. A packaging machinery builder. He was upfront with every one of them about what he was doing and nobody minded. In 2012 he went to Doosan as an applications engineer, and a number of those same shops became Doosan customers he'd walk in and get running. Where he's supposed to be When there's no work at his shop, Doug goes in anyway. He wipes down the machines and the toolboxes and sweeps the floor. He calls the shop solace. The sights, the sounds, the smells don't change from one shop to the next, so walking into any of them feels like walking home. In his office he keeps a coffee maker, the cam software he's teaching himself, the rocking chair his mother rocked him in, and a photo collage from his father's 60th birthday. I asked him why he loves it this much. 'I'm supposed to be there.'