Published June 6, 2024
By Lauren Lawley Head – Contributor to Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal
Tony Winick grew up surrounded by the family business.
When his paternal grandfather was ready to pass on the reins of his specialty manufacturing business, Winick’s mother was starting to look for a career. She held a pharmacy degree from her native Philippines, but applying that in the U.S. was daunting, so she took over Aero Assemblies in 1983. A few years later, Winick started working in the business alongside his mother and father.
“It took a few years before I was old enough to participate in the office, earning a little bit of money helping out on the factory floor and doing some manufacturing,” he said. “In 1991, when I graduated from the University of Illinois, I had an accounting degree but didn’t really aspire to be a CPA. I did have skill with bookkeeping and numbers management, so I came right into Aero Assemblies and became the de facto controller of the company.”
Winick’s oldest brother, cousin and his cousin’s wife were already a part of the company, and the four of them now comprise the core leadership team. Winick’s brother Wayne Winick is vice president of purchasing; cousin Rob Wild is vice president of sales and Tracy Wild is general manager. They took ownership of the business from Winick’s mother in 2003 and maintained its certification as a minority-owned small business from the National Minority Supplier Development Council.
Today, the Burnsville-based company specializes in making components for original equipment manufacturers. Its largest industry is athletics, where Aero Assemblies manufactures specialized cable assemblies for multi-station workout equipment using stacks of weights. It also makes cable assemblies for boat lifts, garage doors and other applications, among other types of components.
“Our skill is to take the design another manufacturing company needs and their requirements for a subcomponent, build it to their specifications and then supply them with the part,” said Winick, now president of the company. “We don’t build the machine. We just build the cable, and we’ve built many, many, many of those.”
Aero Assemblies has been working with international part suppliers for decades. Winick remembers his father sitting at a telex machine — which predated fax machines — to send messages to vendors. He said maintaining good relationships locally, regionally, nationally and internationally has been a key to the company’s success.
One of the biggest expenses at Aero Assemblies is its inventory. Because of the customized nature of its work, the company needs to buy parts in bulk and then hang onto those supplies for a long time.
“One of our least attractive items if you were to look at our financials would be our inventory balance and the turns per year,” Winick said, pointing to a recent $50,000 purchase of a container of cable from Korea. “We won’t see that shipment arrive for another month or two, as it is literally on a slow boat from Korea. That will hit the shores and then gets moved to a train across the country. Then, it will get put onto a truck and then delivered. If we do it well, that will last us for a couple years.”
Like many businesses, personnel expenses are also a significant cost. Aero Assemblies maintains a relatively small payroll of 11 full-time employees and augments that workforce through a long-standing arrangement with a manufacturing staffing agency. Currently, the agency supplies six workers.
Through most of its history, Aero Assemblies has managed to generate consistent but slow annual growth, Winick said. A combination of strong market demand, targeted growth strategies and a new banking relationship has helped the company boost that to 20% to 30% increases in recent years.
Aero Assemblies began banking with Highland Bank in 2022. Vice President and Commercial Banker Sarah Anderson quickly helped the company more than double its existing credit line. The bank also provides the business with full cash management services and supports its international wiring needs.
“We always love family-owned businesses,” Anderson said. “Aero Assemblies had such a nice model and product offering. They really knew what they were doing, and Tony was on top of the numbers. It just felt like this was a relationship that we could really grow.”
That security in its partnership has allowed the company to focus on growth, from approximately $3.5 million in annual sales before the pandemic to more than $5 million in 2023.
“Sarah really brought us to a level of comfort with financing,” Winick said. “Now, the last thing on my mind is, ‘Where am I going to find the money to finance?’”
Although their sights are set on growth, Winick and his family maintain their commitment to the community and Winick’s heritage. His mother was a founding member of the Cultural Society of Filipino Americans, which works to preserve Filipino culture through folk dance. Winick now serves as president of the organization and oversees Philippine Day, the largest Filipino-American community gathering in Minnesota.
“It’s a festival for the Filipino culture,” Winick said of the event, scheduled for 3 to 8 p.m., July 20 at Ojibway Park in Woodbury. This will be the event’s 35th year. “Coming out of the pandemic, people were itching to get back together, so we had the first outdoor festival in 2022 in Woodbury, and that really brought it to the large event it is now.”
Aero Assemblies is a third-generation family-owned business that has been providing specialty fasteners, components and assembly services since 1972.
Lauren Lawley Head is a freelance writer for The Business Journals Content Studio.
