Nearly three decades after starting Winton Machine in the basement of her Georgia home, Lisa Winton has learned that the most important things a manufacturer builds may never appear on a production floor.
Written by: Skyler Grey, Editor-in-Chief, Built America Magazine
There is a photograph somewhere in the Winton family archives that tells almost the entire story. A Volvo sits inside the garage of a 2,600- square-foot Georgia home. Beside it are old computers from the DOS era. On the other side, a machine is being built for a bicycle manufacturer. The office was upstairs. The machine shop occupied half the basement. Assembly and software spilled into the garage. There was a young family growing inside the house, a business growing underneath it, and almost no certainty about what either would become.
Neither had a grand blueprint for what Winton Machine would eventually become.
“I went to the library,” Lisa remembers.
“I checked out VHS tapes and was watching them at night on how to start a company, how to incorporate, how to do all these things.” One of their earliest lessons came when a check arrived made out to the business and the bank would not deposit it because they had not yet opened an account under the company name.
The stakes grew quickly from there.
“We had no idea,” Lisa Winton says. “We were just kind of winging it.”
There were children to raise, lost job security, equipment purchases and financial risk. Eventually, Lisa and George made the decision to put everything into making Winton Machine work.
That was 1997.
At the time, Lisa was working in retail buying and financial planning. Her husband, George, was an engineer with a background as a machinist.
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