Protomet with Jeff Bohanan

Jeff Bohanan is the CEO of Protomet, a manufacturing and machining company based out of Oak Ridge, TN. Jeff and another partner started Protomet in 1997 with the goal of becoming a world class provider of engineering and manufacturing services. Jeff started his career, not as an entrepreneur, but as a design engineer at the Y-12 Complex at Oak Ridge National Lab. He used the skills and knowledge he learned from that job to start Protomet.

At the very beginning, Jeff and his partner did a lot of consulting work for Y-12 because they still needed the engineering support. He got his big break finally when he landed a contract with Johnson Controls to manufacture a part for a Mercedes SUV. The job was a 5 year 2.5 million dollar contract to make about 1 million parts. The deal was very gutsy for Jeff because he didn’t actually have the equipment to make the parts and could only buy it after he landed the contract. This meant that he had to use contract out work from other machine shops to make prototypes of the design before they landed the contract with Johnson Controls.

Since then Protomet has expanded their business does work in the Medical, Automotive, Boating, Homeland Security, Energy and Power, Architectural, and General Industrial Hardware industries. One of the keys to Protomet’s success is the quality of its employees. Jeff would feel perfectly comfortable not working for a few weeks because he is confident in the people he has surrounded himself with. A testament to this point is that one of his process engineers was working late the night we visited. Protomet is able to compete in the globally competitive manufacturing industry because of the lean measures it has implemented. They work around the clock with three CNC machines to one person.

Jeff no longer works in a technical engineering role but is the primary sales person for Protomet. I gathered that part of the reason for Jeff’s success is the way in which he treats people and the passion he has for his work. This has been common thread in all the talks we have had with local entrepreneurs. Jeff, just as the other we have talked to, believes in treating everybody with respect and not holding secrets from the people you work with. He also loves getting up in the morning to go to work which in turn allows him to be good at what he does. One of our classmates used to do business with Jeff and told everyone that part of the reason they continued doing business with Protomet was because Jeff was so enthusiastic ,interested, and had a great ability to remember a lot about every part that they produced.

Jeff finished his talk with the following quotes to help guide those who want to run their own business one day.

“We tend to overestimate what can be accomplished in 1 year and we tend to underestimate what we can accomplish in 3 years.”

“The formula for Innovation is a step function… output is not proportional to input… though steady input is required to get to the next step.”