Werstler looks to take Red Star from startup to midsized company

Scott Werstler began building injection molding machines when he was 18. In fact, as a student at Purdue University, he designed a machine while working for Autojectors that was built and displayed at NPE 1994.

Today, at 46, he's still building machines. But he has a unique business plan that involves molding parts for the medical device industry.

Meet Red Star Contract Manufacturing Inc. It's the brainchild of Werstler, the company president, who launched the business in 2009 after buying out the assets of Pyramid Plastics Group Inc.

The molding side of Red Star came along innocently enough. Werstler said he and his boss, Paul Hendrickson, would sometimes get orders at Pyramid Plastics to build non-standard machines that larger companies didn't want to make.

"One customer said, 'I'm not a molder; you do the molding.' So, in 2001, we started doing injection molding. It was a medical product," he said.

The medical molding now makes up 90 percent of the business for Red Star. And the company has grown by 30 percent in both 2016 and 2017.

"The medical molding side of the business has grown very well. But we've never thrown away the machine thing. We continue to make machines for people. But we've never been in the public eye. We just continue to go with our existing customers. It wasn't until this year when I hired my first sales guy that we decided to go out and start doing that," he said.

Werstler is proud that Red Star uses its own machines that make the plastic parts it sells.

"I was a little hesitant to promote both because I was afraid some of our machinery buyers might see us as competition. But it's actually been the opposite; they embrace it. They say, 'You know exactly what we need.' And it's been very helpful. We actually sold a molding machine to a large medical device company this year, and I think one of the reasons we got the sale was because they know we know medical. We were able to help them calibrate the machine and make their installation qualification move along a lot smoother," he said.

Red Star employs 22 in Larwill, Ind., using 10 injection molding machines — seven vertical, three horizontal — with 12,000 square ​ feet of manufacturing space dedicated to molding and 5,000 square feet for machine building.

Staffing has doubled in the last year with the addition of key positions such as director of quality, supply chain manager and sales and marketing director.

"We're going from a tiny startup to midsized company," Werstler said.

The biggest challenge in this transformation?

"Taking things that are tribal knowledge and making it intracompany communication. Personally, I'm an engineer. I'm not a sales guy. Business has been very good since 2009 without one. But how do we develop a sales and marketing group and make a splash," he said.

Werstler admits his shortcomings in sales and takes it in stride.

"We're trying to get into the public's eye. Maybe what keeps me up at night is how do you do that. If I can get someone in the facility, 90 percent of the time I can make the sale. But I have no idea how to find who those people are and have them give me the time of day," he said.

"We have a joke around here, 'Hi, I'm Scott. You wouldn't want to buy anything, would you?'

'No, I wouldn't.'

'OK, thank you.'"

Werstler calls Red Star a fun place to work and says he is "very transparent and open to a fault."

The molding side of the business will remain focused on medical, although it does a bit of industrial and one military part today.

In five years, he believes Red Star will double sales and that he'll build 25 or more machines per year.

"We knock the socks off anyone on price because we have low overhead," he said of Red Star machines. "Our controls are very user-friendly. We give you what you need. We'll customize it to anything you want. That's where the big guys are missing it."