The U.S. Navy counts on Metro Machine to diagnose problems within its fleet and repair and maintain ships year after year.

Based in Norfolk, Va., Metro Machine Corp.'s main business includes the repair and modernization of U.S. Navy ships. “The market exists in the regions that the Navy operates ships, including Norfolk, San Diego and Pearl Harbor,” says Richard Goldbach, chairman and CEO. “The Navy wants to repair its ships in the homefronts where sailors live rather than take ships to the Gulf Coast, for example.”

The Navy currently has 250 ships, 100 of which Metro Machine has worked on. “These ships come in 18-months' periods and receive three months of maintenance,” Goldbach says.

Even as the market and competitors have shrunk since its founding in 1963, the amount of work Metro completes has increased every year. “We've done more work in the repair and modernization [of ships] than any competitor in the country,” he says. “Only a few small businesses do this.”

Another major highlight, he points out, is that Metro Machine is 100 percent owned by employees. “That's the most unique aspect of the company,” he says. “We're small, we compete with large companies and we're an ESOP [employee stock ownership/option plan] company; all of these things make us unique.”

Goldbach likens Metro Machine to a football team in the sense that success depends on every component of its work force. “We have diverse players with unique skills that depend on game plans to get them focused on a particular objective,” he explains.

In addition to teamwork, safety is incredibly important because ship repair is a demanding task executed in a non-forgiving environment.

“The safety of the worker is at risk at all times,” Goldbach says. “No matter what the conditions, we want them to go home in the same condition they arrive here in.”

The past 20 years have been challenging for the ship repair industry, mainly because the Navy has shrunken over that time. Not only that, but the Navy has developed larger, more technologically complex vessels. “Shipyard facilities must be the size of the ship it's working on and the larger the facility, the more costly,” Goldbach explains. “Several years ago, because of the ship size increases, we invested $50 million in a large dry dock and longer piers to go along with it.”

The company is now at the back end of this major investment in its new dock dubbed “Speede.” Metro Machine has had to increase its electrical power generation to sustain the large ships.

Perhaps the biggest challenge, he says, is the ability to keep up with the Navy as it makes technological advancements to its ships, especially on its mission-related functions.

“The Navy continues to use more and more complex pieces of equipment and it's a real challenge for our work force to keep up with that,” he says. “Instead of steam service to propel a ship, for example, the Navy is going more toward gas turbines, which is similar to propulsion of a jet liner. It is complex and different, most of all for the workers who have worked 25 to 30 years on one type of machinery.”

Now those workers, he says, have had to learn a completely different system. In addition to propulsion, the Navy is using different weapon systems, more composites, different materials and higher-quality coatings.

Despite the challenges, Goldbach is proud of the company's success and believes it will answer the call as the Navy continues putting more demands on Metro Machine. “We have competed with Fortune 500 companies for these contracts and have won partially because, though a small business, we're much more nimble than the large ones,” he says. E+P