Matthew Nix is president & CEO of fifth-generation NIX Companies, which started as a blacksmith shop in Indiana in the late 1800s and has since grown into a family holding company focused on service-oriented businesses, real-estate and other supporting services. Much of that expansion has taken place within the past two decades, under the guidance of the current generation. In this interview, Matthew talks about how that incredible growth was achieved and offers some advice on how NextGens can make their mark.
A portion of this interview originally appeared on the Family Business/Business Family podcast. Don’t miss an episode! Follow Family Business/Business Family on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Family Business Magazine: How did your family business get started and how has that business evolved over time?
Matthew Nix: Like a lot of family businesses, we have a rich heritage, going way back. my great-great-grandfather emigrated from Germany in the late 1800s. He originally settled in Southern Illinois. We’re about 11 miles from the Indiana-Illinois border here and we started as a blacksmith shop. At about the turn of the century, he moved to a small agriculture town called Poseyville in southwestern Indiana, which is where we’re still headquartered today. It remained a little mom-and-pop blacksmith and welding shop for the better part of three generations. We went from blacksmithing to welding and a small machine shop.
We predominantly fixed farm equipment and the business really stayed that way through four generations. We kind of defied the odds. There’s the old saying, ‘If you’re not growing, you’re dying.’ Somehow, our family found a way to not grow and not die. So, they really stayed this small mom-and-pop shop with no employees outside the family and the biggest that ever got was about four people working there at the same time. Then I joined the business.
I grew up working in the business and graduated from high school in 2003. I joined the business full-time after one year of trade school — no four-year education — but I just had a lot of aspirations to grow. And we’ve grown the business and evolved to today, where we call ourselves a custom manufacturer and industrial repair company. So, still very much metal-oriented. We still fabricate and run a machine shop, but it’s a much more advanced and sophisticated organization and a lot more diversified customer base. And instead of serving farm customers in a 50-mile radius, we’re serving commercial industrial customers nationwide. That’s kind of the Cliffs Notes version of our evolution. And most of that growth and evolution has happened under the current generation with me, my brother and my wife.
FB: After so many years of remaining very small, how has the business achieved this significant growth under the current generation?
MN: I have spent some time thinking about it and when I really boil it down, the recipe is not really complicated at all. The execution, as everybody knows, is where the difficulty lies. But, to me, the recipe was really simple: One, it was a clear, compelling vision of where we wanted to go. And two, it was assembling a world-class team in order to accomplish that.
Long before I had the title of president and CEO — even when I was sort of unofficially leading the business — I had to create a clear and compelling vision of where we wanted to go. And I had to sell that vision to everybody. My father was still a 50% partner with me at the time and I had to sell him on that vision and on taking risks. It’s not uncommon for the older generation. As we move toward retirement, we get more risk averse. That’s only natural, I think. At that time, we were a four-generation family business that had never had any debt. We had a great middle-class lifestyle. We weren’t particularly wealthy, but we never wanted for anything. So, there was not a huge need for [my father] to take much risk.
After selling him on the vision, I had to start selling team members and then bankers and so forth. Then, we had to assemble a team [to execute the vision]. We were pretty opportunistic in bringing that team — which today is our executive team— together. Several of them left much larger organizations to join us and took pay cuts and they did that because they believed in where we were trying to take this thing.
FB: What were those conversations like with your dad? How did he eventually come around to the idea of taking some risks?
MN: Well, a couple of things. One, he likes to say I just wore him down. [laughs] I mean, I was in my mid-20s at the time and people have got to remember that the business was very small and not sophisticated at all. So, an early 20-year-old’s ability to grow and influence that is substantially different than, say, what my kids will encounter. It’s much more complicated now. I knew which levers to pull.
But also, I asked for forgiveness a lot more than I did permission. I’ll give you a few examples. Whenever I would go out to do welding jobs in the service truck and I’d try to call back to the shop for whatever reason, the phone line was always busy. I realized, “Gosh, if I can’t get through, our customers can’t get through.” We didn’t even have an answering machine. And so, I wanted to put a second phone line in and [my dad was] like, “Oh my gosh, that’s $40 a month! We can’t do that!” We also didn’t have our name and phone number on the side of our service truck. He said, “Why would we do that? Everybody already knows our phone number.”
So, I didn’t ask for permission. I just went out and put decals on the side of the truck — I still remember they cost $70. And the first time I went out on a service call after that, a contractor that was new to the area and was going to be in town for a few years doing some infrastructure projects saw the truck. The next thing you know, they became a longtime customer of ours and spent many thousands of dollars with us. So, it was things like that early on. It was really that simple. Then, of course, those things build. You do something and it works, you do some more things and they work. I think that, even though he was resistant and holding me back, my father, deep down, saw it was working. And so, that led me to, “Now I’m going to hire some people and now I’m going to buy another building.” We just kept rolling from there.
FB: For NextGens looking to make their mark, asking for forgiveness rather than permission is sometimes a good tactic.
MN: For the NextGens out there, I would just tell you that I think sometimes the older generation wants to see that. Especially if they’re the founders — that entrepreneurial spirit is what got them where they are. They might have boundaries and you might feel like they’re holding you back, but as long as you’re not reckless, find areas where you’re really confident that you can move the needle for the business.
First of all, make sure it’s going to work and then maybe you can ask for forgiveness. [laughs] But I think, if it works, you’re going to earn your stripes a little bit.
To dive deeper into NIX Companies’ incredible story, check out the book, “Forging Ahead: How Five Generations of Small-Town Values Collided with Big Ambitions to Spark One of America’s Fastest-Growing Companies.”