How Holland Nameplate Wins in Uncertainty: Clarity, Self-Discipline, and Curious Innovation

Manufacturing leaders don’t need pep talks. You need practical ways to grow in any market condition. That’s why I sat down with Bob McCarthy, President of Holland Nameplate (and a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel), to ask how his team consistently maintains a high standard. His answers were refreshingly simple and remarkably effective.

1. Compete Into the Headwinds

When many companies hunker down, Holland leans in. Bob was blunt about the current demand picture: “Our focus on continued pursuit of customers with whom we’ve not done business in the past has us slightly ahead of last year, year-to-date. If that was not our primary sales focus, we would be at the mercy of the tide. In this case, we would be behind because the customers we’ve had for more than 12 months have… pulled back 6-ish percent year-over-year.”

Translation: Follow-on sales to your existing customers sustain your business, but gaining new customers is your growth engine.

2. Lead with the Why and Make Clarity a Kindness

Military leaders learn early that resonance wins. The same is true on the factory floor. “You’ve got to explain to folks the why,” Bob said. “We are a manufacturing operation. It’s all linked together. So you’ve got to explain to folks the why.”

He didn’t stop there: “Candor and clarity are two very kind things we can provide to our teams.” 

Bob distinguishes kind from merely nice: “Nice is OK. Kind is better. True kindness is caring enough to have the conversations that you need to have to move people from where they are to a better state. Clarity is kindness.” 

His favorite counsel from a commander still applies: “You can love your soldiers to death. I want you to love your soldiers to live. Enforcing standards keeps your soldiers alive.”

3. Build Standards People Can Actually Remember and Live By

Long lists don’t produce discipline; they produce confusion. Holland runs on four simple standards with the goal that all relentlessly adhere to them, and more importantly, hold one another accountable to them:

“Process discipline, preventive maintenance, 5S*, and first article inspections… and all of the above are enabled by self-discipline, the choice we each make to do the right thing whether or not anybody’s looking.”

Why these four? Because they prevent the expensive problems before they start. “If we do quality first article inspections, we catch it when the problem’s really small, before it’s big and has teeth and claws.” When these standards are alive and owned by the team, leaders can stop playing whack-a-mole and can focus on improving the business.

[* 5S stands for Sort (eliminate unnecessary items), Straighten (organize remaining items for efficient access), Shine (clean the workspace), Standardize (create rules and procedures for consistency), Sustain (maintain the system through continuous audits and improvements).]

4. Get Out of Firefighting Mode

Bob’s litmus test for leadership time is one every manufacturing CEO could steal: “You must invest time to work ON the business instead of getting trapped IN the business.” If you’re doing the shop foreman’s job, nobody is doing the President’s job. “You’re attacking the urgent at the expense of the important.”

Scheduling time for the important but not urgent tasks, such as leader development, strategy, planning, innovation, and culture strengthening, is fire prevention: the more you do them, the less fire-fighting you have to do. 

5. Put AI to Work Where It Pays Immediately

Holland deploys AI to save dollars and downtime.

“We started uploading operations manuals for new equipment into ChatGPT: ‘Give me an Excel document that lays out daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly preventive maintenance to be conducted at the operator level and the organizational level.’ 3 minutes later, and a couple of adjustments, you get output that you can deploy…and continue to improve.”

The team then incorporates those preventive maintenance plans into their rhythm: “Now this all generates a dashboard, which enables faster visibility with a much greater degree of fidelity.” Has it helped? Bob didn’t hesitate: “Less downtime? Yes, absolutely, but we have plenty of room to improve.”

Two underrated lessons in that story:

• Trust, but verify. Bob eased skeptics by printing AI-generated maintenance schedules and leaving them on engineers’ desks. Seeing is believing.
  
• Close the loop. “We can go back and ask GPT. It learns every time we engage, and we’ll go back and adjust.” AI plus disciplined human judgment is a force multiplier.
  

6. Explain Decisions—or Pay the Culture Tax

“I’m really good with explaining the same thing about three times,” Bob laughed. “After that: have I failed to give you a clear explanation, or do you just not like the answer?” 

What if you don’t explain? The cost is steep: “People think you don’t care, and our individual operators are the greatest source of innovation in our business. So we absolutely don’t want them to think that way.”

7. Onboard to Standards and Values, Not Just Paperwork

New hires don’t absorb culture by osmosis, so Holland front-loads it. “They go through several hours of orientation over the first three days before they move into their full-time role,” Bob said. He teaches Holland values and the “big four” himself: “I want them to understand our culture from me, as I am ultimately responsible and accountable for it, and how they can hit it over the fence.” Clear standards make success obvious and culture mismatches visible earlier: “If you don’t want to do this, now’s the time to leave. That is perfectly OK. We’re not a fit for everybody.”

8. Reward Curiosity; Refuse to Become the “Best Buggy-Whip Company”

Uncertainty punishes stasis and rewards learning. “You have to encourage and reward curiosity,” Bob said. “You’re either getting better or you’re getting worse. There’s no flat ground.” That mindset drives moves like retiring obsolete equipment, testing new processes, and sending rising leaders to industry events. “They know we value them because we’re investing in them and we’re trusting them to help plan our capital spend.” His warning shot about innovation, paraphrasing from Other People’s Money, could hang on any plant wall: “You’re going to wind up turning into the best buggy-whip company on the planet while Henry Ford is making the Model T.”

Here Are My Takeaways

1. Keep your pipeline moving with new clients even as you delight your existing clients. Consider raising fees or parting ways with your low-margin clients.
   
2. Set standards. Teach the why. Make clarity your kindness.
   
3. Run the big four daily: process discipline, PM, 5S, first-article inspections, powered by self-discipline.
   
4. Schedule time for the important-but-not-urgent: fire prevention > firefighting.
   
5. Deploy AI to cut downtime and reduce/eliminate administrative tasks.
   
6. Onboard to culture and standards, not just compliance.
   
7. Reward curiosity and keep a visible hit-list of legacy processes/equipment to phase out.

About Author

Chris Kolenda

I work with leaders who want to build unshakeable business endurance.

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