Ruger Needs Gun Loving Engineers

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Ruger CEO and President Michael O. Fifer recently said on a shareholder analyst call that the company needs a lot more gun loving engineers. From the call transcript …
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Brian Gary Rafn – Morgan Dempsey Capital Management, LLC:
Mike, you talked about your new design engineers and some of the constraints there. So you were talking about 60 to 70 and now at 89. If you had a perfect world and you can drop in as many engineers as you could, like you dropped in a Navy SEAL team, how many engineers would that be at Ruger today? Could you use 100, 120, given the projects that you had today?
Michael O. Fifer – Chief Executive Officer, President and Director:
I’ll take 18 more this afternoon. Remember, I mentioned that we had 3 substantial projects that just are just sitting on ice that we had taken through Phase 1 and then had to park. And typically our engineering teams are kind of 6 engineers, maybe 3 line engineers, 3 manufacturing engineers and then throw in a supply chain guy. Sometimes the project manager comes and goes from the group grew but we like them like that. Engineers really are successful and kind of unit to 5. You have a single engineer and the atrophy. You put 5 of them together all at 1 table with their screens and they’re all kind of working together and competing together and feeding off each other and they do really well. It’s exciting to watch them at work, so that’s what we like. So we’ve got some great projects and I need more engineers. If you can find me 18 mechanical engineers that are good at manufacturing, good at LEAN and love guns, send them my way.
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If I was an engineer I know where I would be posting my resume!