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Roy Dietsch envisions a world where it's easy, cheap and fast for manufacturers to order custom machine parts online.
His company PartsBadger aims to do that in a way that will "fundamentally change manufacturing," Dietsch said — similar to the way in which Amazon Prime changed the market for consumer goods. PartsBadger offers instant online quotes and efficient production of manufactured parts for industries ranging from aerospace to consumer goods.
Dietsch started PartsBadger after struggling to purchase a customized part for his aerospace video systems business Rugged Video LLC, which is still in operation.
After sending out requests for quotes from 12 different companies, waiting a week to get responses, and finding only one shop that could make the part, Rugged Video determined it would be cheaper to buy the necessary equipment and make the part on its own — so it did.
"That whole experience kind of brought to my attention that the market for machine parts is broken," Dietsch said.
Dietsch, who studied economics and mathematical sciences in college and took computer programming classes while earning an MBA, wrote an algorithm that would instantly provide quotes for machine parts. He also bought a computer numerical control (CNC) machine to manufacture the part for Rugged Video.
With that machine on hand, Rugged Video's business transformed from developing one product a year to eight products a year, Dietsch said. From there, he officially formed PartsBadger.
Today, PartsBadger is both a technology company and a manufacturer that leverages innovations it develops on its own shop floor, as well as technologies it designed to help it source other parts from manufacturers around the world.
"(The company) took off, more or less, overnight," Dietsch said. "We really hit the nail on the head from a market perspective as far as combining the technology with manufacturing."
With more than 3,000 customers including NASA, General Dynamics, Toyota and Johnson Controls, PartsBadger ranked 525 on the 2021 Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. and was the second-fastest-growing private firm in metropolitan Milwaukee based on its reported 936% three-year revenue growth.
PartsBadger is on track to go public within four years, Dietsch said. It previously tried to raise private capital multiple times without success, he added.
Along its growth path, PartsBadger is expanding its in-house manufacturing capabilities and working to decrease production costs and lead times through increased automation. It currently has a 15,000-square-foot facility in Cedarburg but is looking to expand to around 60,000 square feet in Ozaukee or Washington county in the next 18 to 24 months, Dietsch said.
"We want to fundamentally change manufacturing," he said. "We want to change how products are developed and how innovations get to market and we want to help all of our customers ... get their products to market faster (so) they can innovate faster."
Company name: PartsBadger LLC
Headquarters: Cedarburg
Year founded: 2017
CEO: Roy Dietsch
No. of employees: 70+ globally (including 47 in the U.S.)
Website: parts-badger.com
The product: An instant online quoting engine and machine shop for manufactured parts. PartsBadger currently specializes in CNC machining, which it said is a key manufacturing method for parts used in industries ranging from industrial equipment to medical devices.
How it makes money: Sales to thousands of customers across the U.S.
Size of the market: $60 billion to $80 billion annually, according to PartsBadger
Competition: The 19,000 traditional machine shops in the U.S.
Competitive advantage: PartsBadger said it developed technology that uses an estimation engine to analyze complex parts and provide accurate quotes instantly online. It leverages technology it developed in-house to manage aggregated manufacturing capacity across the globe to manufacture nearly any part from prototype to production. It said it also deploys technology directly on the shop floor that allows it to produce goods at roughly half the cost of traditional U.S. machine shops.
Business it could disrupt: The machining industry, in which it's currently difficult to accurately quote the price of customized parts. It currently takes machine shops three to five days to provide quotes, and machine shops are generally small and specialized, so customers often have to go through multiple shops to get parts, according to PartsBadger.
Key leaders: CEO Roy Dietsch, chief operating officer Jimmy Crawford IV, chief experience officer Kimberly Crawford, innovation deployment director Alex Sparr, operations director Von Sutter-Rolon, human resources director Ashley Williams, marketing director Brandon Spenneberg
Investors: Bootstrapped
Capital raised: $0
Ideal exit: PartsBadger said it plans to go public within the next four years.
