IN THE MID-1990s, during 10 days of intense chemotherapy, Wes Dooley asked friends and family the question that death presents every one of us: “I asked everybody who knew me, ‘Who am I?” Dooley recalls. “And the answer came back, ‘You’re the ribbon-microphone guy.”

To understand what that answer meant—and why Wes Dooley’s Audio Engineering Associates is now world famous for an American-made microphone that you’ve probably heard but have never heard about—takes some time. Let’s start at the beginning.

ALUMINUM HAD ALREADY been in use in a primitive form for most of recorded history—for medicines and dyes, mostly—but only in the late nineteenth century, following a kind of pre-industrial space race among European scientists, did humans figure out how to isolate it into something like the stuff we use widely today. In the early 1920s, two Germans working in a Siemens lab produced a new microphone, the key component in which was pure aluminum beaten to ribbon-like suppleness—at 1.8 microns, “wafer” doesn’t begin to explain how thin this stuff is; a human hair is about 1,000 microns thick. When suspended between two magnets, this aluminum ribbon translated sound waves into electrical signals that could be amplified. Later that same decade, Harry F. Olson, an Iowa farm kid with a doctorate in physics, built upon the Siemens ribbon technology, creating for RCA—formerly the Radio Corporation of America—the 44 ribbon microphone. That RCA 44 microphone—“mic,” for short—was to sound engineering what the personal computer is to almost everything. It radicalized the possibilities of human communication. And it would give Wes Dooley existential meaning.

ADVANCES IN ACOUSTIC TECHNOLOGY have produced different, maybe even better microphones (Dooley calls them “hyper-articulate”), “but many people simply prefer the ear feel, the tonal quality of the ribbon mics.” He recalls that rock guitarist Eddie Van Halen, already the proud owner of one of Dooley’s 44s, came back for a second “because it sounded through a speaker like what his ears hear in the room.” Listen to that and consider: in a century when technology raced to produce “better” microphones that roared and whistled beyond human capacity, the boxy, art-deco 44 became the favorite of audiophiles, sound engineers, radio talent, filmmakers, orchestras, geeks, rockers and others because it produces a sound that resonates with our species. You know Nipper—that dog listening to His Master’s Voice through the trumpet of an early Victrola? We’re like Nipper. Dooley heard the 44 as a young man, and like Nipper knew it was something like his master’s voice.

IF YOU’VE RAISED A CHILD, you know that part of your job is to find the path of least resistance, to identify the thing for which your kid seems to have been born and to create the space for that thing to go Big Bang, exploding into its own remarkable fractal of the cosmos. Who knows where Dooley’s affection for microphones really comes from?

We can identify some possible causal relationships. Dooley is a descendant of the do-it-yourself hotrod culture of Southern California in the 1950s, except that his mad affection morphed from cars to electronics. He is an artisan and a brilliant tinkerer, and was so apparently even in youth. While a kid, he tore apart electronics to see what made them work. He talked a TV repairman out of a tube he could run off batteries. In high school, he and friends built radios from box kits and parts they bought at Pappy Dow’s. In mid-century America, when schools routinely offered shop, Dooley enrolled.

Beyond electronics and mechanical devices, there was something of music and radio in the Dooley DNA, too. He heard stories of an uncle who worked sports for WEEI Boston. When another uncle gave young Dooley a radio, the kid became infatuated with a steel-guitar country station in nearby Long Beach, where the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet sat at anchor and the nation’s burgeoning aerospace industry brought Southerners—men and women who came for work, stayed for the weather, but insisted on their own music. Dooley’s mom was a pianist and dancer—“I grew up on Gilbert & Sullivan,” he says. A friend who worked sound for the Los Angeles Philharmonic introduced him to classical music and opera. There he discovered “it was really fun to set up mics for really good players.” He took an electronics course at Pasadena City College, hosted a local radio show, and engineered sound for acts at the high-profile Troubadour club in Los Angeles. In the 1960s, he and friends began tearing apart professional mics and putting them together again; they favor the RCA 44. In the years since, Dooley has worked as a forensics expert in criminal cases, has been a visiting lecturer and has taught courses all over the world. He earned a BA—in human development. He is, he says, an engineer not because he ever got a degree but because of the generosity, the openness of “real engineers—and 50 years of work.”

IN THE 1950s, while Dooley was just discovering his passion for something at the intersection of music and electronics, German sound engineers struck again, this time with condenser mics that “were much better [than ribbon mics] for tape recording, which was very big now.” RCA continued producing ribbon mics, but they became a marginal business for the electronics giant. The microphone that had been the disruptive technology from its introduction until mid-century was suddenly largely supplanted. In 1976, RCA abruptly quit manufacturing professional microphones. That’s how Wes Dooley found his bliss. Dooley’s chief engineer suggested they put their skills to work repairing the RCA mics. That colleague “introduced me to his friend Jon Sank, the RCA microphone production guy. Jon welcomed me into the basement of his home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.” There, Sank gave them the equipment they’d need to repair RCA’s ribbon microphones, “and we started the business.” Eight years later, they began importing and selling BBC-designed ribbon mics, too. “They are lovely microphones,” Dooley says, and thus begins his hymn of praise to the thinness of the aluminum ribbon (“instead of 1.8 micron aluminum beaten leaf, they were 0.6 microns!”), the elegance of the BBC design.

EMERGING FROM HIS MID-90s cancer death-match with a new sense of mission, Dooley recalls, he ran into reality—his wife, Sara. “She asked, ‘So, do you want to do this as a hobby?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘Yeah, I’ve looked at the numbers, and we’re spending three times what we bring in.’ ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you mean do I want to lose money at this hobby?’”

“I realized we had a market position,” he says. “We’d been importing and selling and servicing microphones. I knew there was something to this.” By the end of 1998, the Audio Engineering Associates began manufacturing RCA-style ribbon mics, and exporting them all over the world.

THE PASADENA, CALIFORNIA, FACTORY where Audio Engineering Associates (AEA) handcrafts ribbon mics is a modest place. “I wouldn’t really call it a factory,” says Sara. “It’s more like an assembly room.” Ten employees crouched over workbenches—we imagine their early-modern European clockmaking counterparts in similar postures, except for the fact that these guys are listening to audio books and lectures. They favor suspense thrillers, but on the day I’m talking with the Dooleys, the craftsmen are listening to Bill Nye the Science Guy. While Nye talks about varieties of human sexuality, the workers slice razor-thin aluminum into ribbons and pop wire grills over chrome-plated brass frames. The transformers are U.S.- and German-made. The industrial-cool carrying cases are made in Indiana. But everything else is sourced locally. When hand assembled, they are among the very best microphones in the world, shipped to clients around the world in ones and twos via UPS, FedEx, DHL and the U.S. Postal Service with a price tag of up to $5,000 per copy.

The Who’s Pete Townshend has called the AEA ribbon mic his favorite. Willie Nelson’s harp player carries one of AEA’s pre-amps on the road. Audio publications cheer. “A quality ribbon like the [the AEA R84] can take a production to the next level, injecting some butter into a margarine world,” enthused Mix. Said another: “The coolest thing about the R84 is that it sounds like a vintage ribbon with the advantage of lighter weight and smaller size . . . On brass and strings, it sounds divine, lending a ‘Hollywood film score’ vibe.” Other critics celebrated the AEA microphones’ “versatility,” “excellent wind-blast protection, the reduced proximity bass boost, the clean, even frequency response, great high end,” its “quiet gain.” Said another, “You truly have to hear it to believe it.” And, what can only be explained as true geek love, another reviewer concluded the AEA ribbon mic “rounds off transients in true ribbon fashion, adding a naturally compressed sound that flatters even the most strident source.” You don’t have to understand the recondite language of electronics to understand they’re all applauding.

Despite all the applause, the Dooleys were—and remain—determined to stay small, like monks producing beer. “At some point we decided we really were a mom-and-pop shop,” says Dooley. And they liked it that way. “We were never going to be a billion-dollar company.”

Dooley has boiled down the lessons he’s learned to these:

 1 MARRY WELL

Wes Dooley needed a sense of mission to guide him compass-like through cancer. And he needed a business partner when he emerged. And that partner was Sara.

The daughter of a biblical archeologist, she spent part of her youth in the Mideast while her father taught at the Beirut College for Women, now the Lebanese American University. That’s where she picked up her love of the French she later taught in middle school. Her family lived in Europe “and all over Asia.” They lived everywhere, she says, but in sub-Saharan Africa. She aims to travel there—after she and Wes return from an upcoming trip to China to meet with an existing dealer in Shanghai and other places farther afield.

 2 AND WHEN SEEKING ADVICE . . .

Remember scale. A friend of Wes Dooley’s was a financial VP for a $250 million company. Ask him questions about exporting and importing “and he will give you wildly different answers. It’s all about scale.”

 3 TRAVEL (PART 1)

The pair travel rigorously—like legendary touring artists Bob Dylan or Bruce Springsteen. Dooley says there’s no journey he enjoys so much as the three-block walk between home and office. But he kids: He travels around the globe to speak at audio conferences and to meet men and women like himself. “Anybody who loves audio is a friend of mine,” he says. “It’s the first area where I felt normal. I make friends.” Friends and business contacts: In their business partnership, it’s Sara who functions as the foreign diplomat. She loves language and mapping the cultural terrain—down to the personal likes and dislikes of potential AEA dealers. “My wife will try to figure out how to say something in Danish or Flemish in her notes to them,” Dooley says with admiration. “There’s nothing like reaching out that way.”

“Everybody has preconceived notions of what a place will be like,” says Sara. “But there’s always some shift that occurs when you spend time with people in that place. You’ll have no sense of the customer until you have been physically in that location. You can look at every picture, every [computer] app, and you’ll have no clue till you’re there. You can’t seriously understand a person’s business until you’ve been with that person, in that place. You don’t have to be there long, but you have to be there. When you spend time with them personally, you appreciate their lives. It’s always interesting to be with people to see how they handle business situations, because those are very cultural—and then there’s the personal on top of that. The more you learn, the better the relationship.”

Dooley says their favorite (but not exclusive airline) is American. If he had to pick a hotel, he’d stay with Hilton Express: “It’s predictably comfortable, and not so upscale that we look like rich Americans,” he explains. It’s affordable, too, he says—and that helps the Dooleys spend cash on something much harder to find at home than a comfortable bed: amazing food. His favorite international food memory: Buenos Aires. “Not many people realize that half of Italian emigrants from 1860 to 1960 ended up in Argentina.” They produce “absolutely amazing, unique Italian food.” He put on five pounds during his most recent visit.

 4 TRAVEL (PART 2)

“We assume everyone is like us. For example, in the U.S., most bands that tour rent sound systems or use the venue’s.” But in Mexico, “the bands all have their own sound systems and have their own sound crew.” That means his strategy for selling in the U.S.—sell to the major sound studios and tour companies—won’t work in Mexico. “You have a lot of people in Mexico making the buying decisions rather than a market like the U.S. where a small group of users makes the buying decision. It’s a different market. It changes the whole dynamic.”

 5 TALK TO PEOPLE YOU KNOW

“I’m astonished how helpful most people are, if you just ask them,” says Dooley. Of course, Dooley gets as good—to turn the old saying on its head—as he gives. He’s an active member in alphabet-soup audio engineering societies. He travels the world to meet men and women who, like Dooley, love the science of sound. He joins trade groups. Unlike those of us who run the gauntlet of tradeshow booths at conferences—picking up ridiculously large rubber gag pencils and branded thumb drives—Dooley actually talks to the exhibitors. And nearly everybody he meets becomes his friend. And those friends become his teachers—“as long as they’re not direct competitors.” He recalls “a guy who ran an outfit called Summit Audio. That owner, when I’d see him in like Copenhagen or Amsterdam at conferences, he and I would talk.” It was that guy who gave Dooley the solution to a international payments problem he couldn’t seem to resolve. “That guy was the one who told me to try credit cards before it became so easy to move small amounts of money around. In the early 1990s, that was real useful information: You give me money, it gets in my bank, I send you stuff.” He’s since adopted more thoroughly modern methods—credit card fraud became its own unique problem—but the point remains true: People are generally good, and they can become your global-trade teachers.

“It’s like the blind guys and the elephant,” he says of international networking. “You talk to as many people as you can. They tell you stories. You weave those stories together. And then you have something like reality.”

6 MAKE IT PERSONAL

A few years ago, Wes and Sara met with a potential dealer in Hamburg, Germany. “We just went out for coffee,” Sara recalls. “We were at café shooting the breeze, talking about politics, and he said, suddenly, ‘The hotels in town are too expensive. Now that I know what kind of people you are, you need to spend time with me, on my farm.’” And they did, shifting their venue from a downtown hotel to a home in the country. That man is now among their best dealers, and to this day Sara writes to him—in German—and “I always ask about his tomatoes and his children, and I remind him of the enjoyable night we spent drinking wine on his farm. That’s doing business on . . . well, I’m not sure what that business model is, except that it’s exceedingly personal.”

 7 CASH AND CARRY

In 2010, AEA’s “excellent, pioneering dealer” in Adelaide decided on a career change—more studio sound engineering work, less selling of Dooley’s microphones. Their dealer recommended “a guy in Melbourne,” Dooley recalls. In December 2012, the new dealer offered several explanations for his slow payment for a shipment of microphones, but emailed his bank’s documentation of a wire transfer. Dooley shipped the equipment and waited for the check. It never came. “The .pdf they’d sent us was photoshopped from an earlier wire transfer,” Dooley says. AEA lost big on the deception, and soon the relationship was over— “a disaster in an important market.” But Dooley still had connections through workshops in which he’d generously given away his expertise in audio engineering—an entirely separate, but equally important lesson that might be subsumed under the heading “Pay it Forward.” “It helped hugely that I’d been on the ground there,” Dooley says. Within a month, they were back in business Down Under, with a bonus: the company now had more and better Austrialian dealers and picked up one in New Zealand. Within a few months of that, business was back up to pre-fiasco levels.

 8 JUST DO SOMETHING

In the early 1980s, Dooley designed, manufactured and sold an M/S stereo box—“m” for mid-channel and “s” for side-channel, a kind of coding that can be expressed in what is, for most of us, an incomprehensible algebraic-looking formula that’s well beyond the scope of the subject at hand, but which really, clearly intrigues Wes Dooley and other audio geeks, among them the sound and recording professionals in the movie and TV business who bought the things. “We thought it was cool, but really didn’t have any idea of the size of the market,” Dooley recalls. “We built only a few hundred,” including five for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was “a dangerous success,” something that was expensive to make and had no real market—“good enough to keep you going, but it never makes you a lot of money.” It was also, he can see in retrospect, a global loss leader, “a handy mousetrap,” a few of which “made it overseas” and into the hands of music geeks. It was like a high-tech calling card. His willingness to produce a high-end quality product on the thinnest of margins, and his readiness to sell that overseas, gave him name-recognition, the sort of global brand-awareness you can’t really buy any other way. “Fifteen years later,” he says, M/S stereo-box “dealers in places like London and Amsterdam” became dealers of Dooley’s more profitable ribbon mics—and gave him, he says, a foothold in Europe. “The M/S box got us London, and London got us Paris.”

 9 CHINA? MAYBE NOT

Dooley considered manufacturing in China very briefly. But then he talked to friends. “I had a friend who went to work with people manufacturing electronics in China some years ago. This was in the 1990s, when labor there was still cheap. He said, Here’s how it goes: If I—or one of the other guys—is in China once a month, we get pretty good stuff. If we’re not there once a month, we don’t—the stuff we get starts veering off track.” And at Chinese New Year, between late January and mid-February—Chinese workers in industrial cities head home. Dooley picks up his friend’s tale: “Some of the crew doesn’t come back to work after New Year. So you absolutely have to be there then to make sure the people who do show up to work know what they’re doing.” So while he could have saved money by manufacturing in China, Dooley says, “if you factor in the lead-time, miscommunication, the amount of travel and such, maybe you saved about 15 percent. And this, remember, is at a time when labor there was astonishingly cheap.”

Then there’s the problem of piracy. Another business friend produced very high-end speakers. People told him, as they were telling Dooley, “to go to China. And he did. And that was the end for him. All over world, suddenly, his speakers—with a different label, at half the cost—started showing up. Once they have the factory and they have your procedures down, they’ll produce your product on their own and ship ’em anywhere.” He points to the case of Sennheiser microphones, a story that’s infamous in the audio world. “They produced in China, and 18 months later an engineer at Sennheiser is talking to someone who shows him Sennheiser-labeled mics that aren’t Sennheiser: You pull the little three-pin connecter, and it has different colored wires. That’s the Chinese copy.”

Sennheiser did not respond to a request for comment. But its website hosts a list of more than 500 “non-authorized dealers,” and the Internet is almost overpopulated with consumer advice on spotting the knockoffs. All of that is evidence enough for Dooley: “Whatever you’re making in China, unless you’re being supervised closely the way Apple, for instance, supervises, everything you’re making is suddenly available to anybody in the world.”

10 BE PREPARED TO SELL

In August 2011, the Dooleys traveled south to Montevideo, Uruguay, for the Audio Engineering Society’s Latin American conference. Following Wes’ presentations, the Dooleys made the short boat ride up the Rio de la Plata to Buenos Aires. “We knew [Buenos Aires] was the largest market at the southern end of the continent. And we knew some people we should talk to. Most were too busy to meet, but there was one dealer who made time for us. I carry demonstration mics with me all the time.” Inside the Buenos Aires studio, Wes set up his ribbon mics for a guitarist already strumming his magnificent 12-string. Wes recalls the studio had set up “normal Neumann mic—pretty much top of the line—and I just put up a couple of our mics where I thought they might sound good.” Sara joined the studio owner in the control room, and she recalls that when he switched the sound between the Neumann mics and the American-made pair from AEA, the studio owner “audibly gasped.” It turns out that good ribbon mics had not gotten down to Argentina yet; “they’d heard nothing like that before. The studio owner turned to us and said in Spanish, ‘I’ll take everything you’ve got.’ He met us at the hotel and gave us cash.”

Wes sums up the experience this way: “We were fortunate. Nobody had tried to do anything with the new generation of ribbon mics in Argentina. I was prepared, and, of course, my wife speaks Spanish.”

By the middle of 2009, the U.S. economy had already driven off a steep financial cliff, with the rest of the global economy screaming in the back seat.

It was perhaps an odd moment for TGV Partners, a boutique private-equity firm, to think about buying Horton Archery, a leading American manufacturer of hunting equipment swirling down the bankruptcy drain. American consumers were striking non-essentials from their shopping lists. Retailers were locking their doors and turning off the lights for good. International credit markets were iced over.

But TGV’s Geoff Moore and Mitch Vance saw an opportunity. Confronted by declining tax revenue, state and local governments, constitutionally bound to balance their budgets, were looking everywhere to boost revenue. In many states, one piece of that strategy was to extend the deer-hunting season several weeks on either side of the traditional Thanksgivingish start—to extend it only for hunters willing to track their prey in ways mostly recognizable to our ancient forbearers, armed with bows and arrows, including, now, crossbows like those manufactured in Ohio by Horton.

The expansion of deer season for such old-school hunters satisfied environmentalists—who might tolerate a sport that gives the hunted a fairer shot at escape and still controls deer populations. And the expanded-season hunting license offered a new source of revenue for squeaky-tight county and state budgets. Everybody won, it seemed, except for the fur-covered, four-legged guy with the antlers.

TGV was betting that the market for crossbows would boom. And it did—at upwards of 20 percent, Moore figures. “Across the next three years,” Moore says, “we had one state after another extending the special season, and that increased the potential crossbow market by almost 10 million hunters”—hunters who might become potential Horton customers.

“There was almost no other consumer category growing like that,” Moore says.

Then, just as it did for Bambi’s mom, everything went red for TGV’s crossbow business—a victim of global supply-chain problems it inherited but did not immediately grasp and a U.S. trade war it could not have foreseen.

“It was that classic situation where, as you get older and encounter a problem, you say, ‘I’ve dealt with all these situations before and handled them,’” says Vance, one of TGV’s founding partners, “but never all of them at once and for so long.”

IN THE BEGINNING, it was all happy hunting for TGV. Founded in 1990, the boutique firm staffed by brilliant financial guys already had a record of extraordinary investments. One of the firm’s early deals came in 1990, with the $44 million buyout of Manischewitz, the company whose food products including matzo are Jewish staples. When TGV liquidated its holdings six years later, Manischewitz’s valuation had risen to $65 million. TGV parlayed its $42 million purchase of Empire Kosher Poultry in 1992 into a $95 million sale in 1997.

But the deal that had TGV thinking about mounting deer heads on the walls of its Newport Beach, California, office was its 2004 purchase of Thompson/Center Arms, the fifth-largest manufacturer of firearms in North America, and the leading maker of old-fashioned muzzle-loaded black-powder rifles. In partnership with the company’s senior executives, TGV bought Thompson/Center for $40 million; three years later it sold the business to legendary Smith & Wesson Holding Corp. for $102 million.

Horton Archery “was so much like Thompson—the same marketing, the same distribution, the same sales channels,” Moore says. Under TGV, Thompson/Center sold single-shot rifles to the very customers (including such big-box retailers as Bass Pro, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Cabela’s) and consumers (hunters) who would buy Horton’s crossbows. And there was this historical parallel: “About a decade before, the black-powder rifle market experienced extraordinary growth as states added special seasons for muzzle-loading hunters. Now the same dynamic was being repeated in the crossbow hunting segment.”

And TGV had a special weapon in Gregg Ritz, Thompson/Center’s CEO and TGV’s partner in the Thompson/Center acquisition. Ritz is one of those rare men who does not at all look preposterous wearing camouflage and kneeling in a dun-colored field under a slate-colored sky while holding the young-adult-sized antlers of a beast he’s just knocked down or while propping up the apparently grinning, man-sized ram he’s shot through the heart. And Ritz was—you’ll pardon the mixed-animal metaphor—bullish on the crossbow business. He would head the new Horton Archery.

The Wall Street Journal reported the late-2009 sale was about $5 million for a company that produced roughly $15 million in annual revenues.

“When you cut all the way through it, it was a regulatory-driven growth play. And we tried to repeat the success we’d had with Thompson/Center,” Vance says. “It just seemed like a perfect fit.”

Except that it wasn’t.

SOME OF US LEARN THE WRONG LESSONS from our greatest successes. What TGV Partners learned from Thompson/Center’s manufacturing operations turned out to have little to do with the reality of running the 100-percent sourced, supply chain-driven Horton Archery.

Thompson/Center was a vertically integrated domestic manufacturer with a 600-employee plant in Rochester, New Hampshire, and no international supply chain. When TGV acquired it, Horton Archery was down to just 10 employees in Akron, and an unwieldy, recently outsourced global supply chain. While Thompson/Center produced almost every part that went into its rifles, Horton sourced parts for its shockingly complex modern crossbow—with upwards of 150 distinct parts—from scores of vendors around the world.

Says Moore: “We just didn’t appreciate the complexity of working with all those vendors on a seasonal production cycle”—a seasonal cycle that meant designing, prototyping, producing and delivering new models in a very narrow window, just before that extended fall hunting season. “Unlike Thompson/Center, we were totally the hostage—or the beneficiary—of third-party vendors.”

Nor did TGV completely understand the hellishness of the global supply chain it had inherited. Horton Archery was in bankruptcy because its previous private-equity owner had been caught short of cash in the middle of a grand plan to offshore U.S. manufacturing and supply to China. When TGV arrived with cash, expertise and enthusiasm borne of success at Thompson/Center, Horton was still using legacy software to manage its untested global supply chain and, in early 2010, already bumping up against the official opening of hunting season. That season is not, as you might believe, the appearance in fields and forests of orange-jacketed armies of bow hunters in September, but the neon-and-casino-bing-bong of the January trade show in Vegas, or the slightly more sedate February show in Salt Lake City, or the myriad, regional shows from Sacramento to Pittsburgh that launch new products in the outdoor business in the first quarter of the calendar year.

In retrospect, Moore says, it’s clear that TGV ought to have looked closely at Horton’s decision to move production to China. Instead, TGV pushed forward.

AT FIRST, “EVERYTHING went exactly to plan,” Moore says. The market for crossbows turned out to be “stronger and grew more quickly than we anticipated.” The January and February 2010 trade shows produced a bumper crop of sales based on new Horton Archery designs that looked splendid on paper.

And then Horton’s untested global supply chain nearly brought down TGV’s newest investment. The company’s legacy software system couldn’t manage its untried, elaborate vendor network. “Our database was littered with inaccurate parts specs and bad supplier-purchasing parameters,” Moore says. Horton’s half-established “master-sourcing” office didn’t master much. A Chinese GM, a bookkeeper, and a few employees in Changzhou—set up to manage communication and product flows between the new American owners with their new designs and just-in-time delivery demands, on one hand, and new vendors, on the other—broke down.

It was Global Trade 101.

“We immediately started having translation, time and distance problems,” Moore recalls. Language turned out to be more critical than anyone guessed it would be. The vast distances made communication and travel more difficult. The result: Parts were either badly built or arrived late—or both.

“What seemed really obvious, simple challenges became amplified and heightened when you started dealing with literally millions of different parts trying to come into tens of thousands of units to assemble,” Moore says.

Outside, retailers were hungry to feed the growing market for crossbows. “And we were there with 30 percent of our orders unfilled because of our Chinese vendors,” Moore says. “The market is growing up to 20 percent that year, and we couldn’t meet demand.” Missing parts appeared miraculously but late and had to be caught up with otherwise complete crossbows awaiting shipment.

Looking back on it, Moore says, “We should have leveled out the production cycle.” Instead of introducing annual innovations, selling and producing in just a few months before the seasonal sales cycle, that is, maybe Horton should have spread out the process over the course of a year or more. But just as the company learned the wrong—or at least very different—lessons from its wild success with rifles, it didn’t fully vet the mission-critical information system it had inherited and, most critically, failed to appreciate the risk associated with the unproven China supply chain that came with the company it purchased out of bankruptcy.

TOWARD THE END OF 2010, the first full year of operation, vendors began hitting their delivery deadlines. Parts fit and product shipped. “We thought we had China figured out,” Moore says.

And then Horton Archery made its third mistake: it introduced more change into the system.

“We had a better-functioning supply chain,” Moore says, “and then we brought out a new product.” The frantic global supply-chain fire drill began again in earnest—design new crossbows, sell those new designs while they’re still on the drawing board, produce and test prototypes, fix production problems, postpone delivery, play catch up.

“It was as much our fault as the China end,” Moore says. “We had these great designs and specs, with a level of detail that would have been sufficient if we were operating with a one-hour time-zone difference—if you have a problem, you know, it’s a one-hour plane flight or maybe a three-hour drive. But the distance and cultural difference amplified all the problems.”

The problems of 2011 sound like a rerun of 2010, and they killed the introduction of Horton’s state-of-the-art, unprecedented reverse-draw crossbow. The traditional crossbow is like a rifle stock with a horizontal bow at the far end. Because the weight is out there at the end of the stock, the conventional crossbow is a little unwieldy—certainly clumsier vis-à-vis Horton Archery’s new reverse-draw. On the new model, the bow is located on the stock above the trigger—about the middle of the crossbow. Even if you’re a non-hunting vegan pacifist you can appreciate the subtlety of that design, perhaps the most significant change in bow technology since our forebears tracked beasts that no longer roam the planet, or since the devastating deployment of huge numbers of longbows—six-foot monsters—by Henry V’s troops at Agincourt.

“Moving the weight like that created a revolutionary bow,” Moore says with evident and reasonable pride. “We were the first producer, and the leader by a long-shot in that new crossbow category.”

Celebrity hunter and Horton CEO Ritz was convinced the reverse-draw was the future. But the company was undone by its own innovation and subsequent global supply-chain demons. “We crippled ourselves, crushed our supply chain,” says Moore. “We left 50 percent of the demand on the table, simply because we couldn’t ship product. We knew we had great, patented designs, and we knew we had the dominant first-mover position in this new category”—a new category that was growing faster than the rest of the fast-growing crossbow marketplace, a new category that would go hungry for Horton.

EVERYTHING CHANGED AGAIN IN 2012. And because everything changed, you might say, nothing changed.

Horton Archery hired a new chief operating officer, a top exec out of the hospital-supply business, a man who knew supply chain and who came in with a strategy: forget China. Onshore all production in the U.S.—all design, manufacturing and assembly.

“He said, ‘Let’s shut down China. Get out of the wholly-owned subsidiary business, eliminate that layer of cost [and create] a more compressed supply chain,’” Moore recalls.

The company applied the painful lesson of 2011: in 2012, it would limit product innovation. Where possible, it would standardize components across crossbow models.

It seemed brilliant. But if you’re following along at home, you already recognize that, as they entered their third full year under TGV, Horton Archery was introducing more noise in the system, more chaos into its supply chain.

“It was as if we were back to being new again—or maybe more like ‘New Cubed,’” Moore says with perfect hindsight. “The company’s production was newly moved to China when we bought it. In some ways, it was new again in 2011 when over 80 percent of our sales came from new products. And it was new again, for the third time, in 2012 with a new U.S. supply chain. You look at that and you say, ‘Were you out of your minds?’”

Problems quickly emerged with the new U.S. vendors. In testing 2012 post-production models, Horton found bowstrings snapping—literally kertwanging in the process of being drawn back. That led them to investigate the cam—what you and I might call a pulley, a little wheel at each end of the bow’s outstretched arms, around which runs the bowstring. When drawn back to fire, the crossbow generates tremendous force on several key parts—the arms, the cams, the string itself; when released, all that force rockets the arrow at something in excess of 200 miles per hour. Close inspection revealed tiny abrasions on the U.S.-supplied cams. Horton voluntarily recalled several thousand crossbows dispatched to retailers’ warehouses. The company scrambled, ordering immediate delivery of cams from old vendors in China—at a huge markup in manufacturing and air-cargo costs.

Even that wasn’t the end of Horton’s supply-chain terrors. With the re-machined cams fixed and the reverse-draw crossbow shipping out to retail warehouses, internal testing discovered yet another problem, one that “as much as anything,” Moore says, “sank us.”

To understand that problem, you have to understand something about the physics of crossbows and the inexpensive mechanism manufacturers use to keep the weapons from dry-firing—that make it impossible to draw and fire the crossbow without an arrow notched in the bowstring. Dry-firing is a practice which, like nervously clicking a ballpoint point or rapping your knuckles on your desk or dry-firing an unloaded pistol, can produce a kind of comforting, satisfying snap. But dry-firing a crossbow unleashes so much force without any resistance—like a baseball player swinging for the fences and completely missing the ball—that it can shred the bowstrings and even wreak havoc upon the weapon itself.

Consumers who are new to crossbows will often dry-fire their crossbows—regardless of grim industrial warnings about the dangerous practice. So industry has developed a kind of safety mechanism to make dry-firing nearly impossible.

With cams fixed and the crossbows shipping to warehouses, Horton Archery discovered that its $2.50 anti-dry-fire device—Moore describes it as tiny spring inside a little metal box—did not work, or worked so well that when engaged would not unlock for anything.

“The problem came out of a China vendor,” Moore says. “We say it was wrongly installed; they say our specs were bad. They had the spring reversed. That was it.” On a more than $300 product, a $2.50 mechanism made in China with the spring installed backwards had “locked the bow so that it wouldn’t fire at all.”

There was an easy fix, of course, and that was simply to remove the anti-dry-fire mechanism and remind hunters of the dangers of firing an unarmed crossbow. “That proposed fix didn’t satisfy some of our big-box retailers” who, Moore says, worried about a perception of danger—“despite the fact that the dry-fire issue didn’t affect crossbow safety.”

It was already August. Opening day was just weeks away, in September. “And right then, in the middle of the selling season when we’re supposed to be refilling product orders because they’re so hot, we had to actually stop our production line and launch a field warranty repair program on about 20,000 bows.”

They cut a deal with two of their big-box retailers “to send our Ohio production people to these distribution warehouses just to change out a $2.50 anti-dry-fire mechanism.”

SOMETIMES, THE TRADE GODS make playthings of intelligent, honorable, struggling men and women. In the midst of resolving what Moore calls “self-inflicted” wounds to its supply chain, the U.S. government was acting on allegations that Chinese manufacturers were selling solar panels in the U.S. at “dumping margins ranging from 18.32 to 249.96 percent,” according to the Commerce Department.

The Obama Administration struck back with a series of measures aimed at everything connected with solar panels except the sun itself—and including the aluminum that went into the manufacture of Horton Archery crossbows.

There’s an old saying, sometimes attributed to ancient Africans but more recently employed by dramatic pro football, soccer and even cricket commentators: When elephants fight, the grass gets trampled. Moore recalls the day TGV was notified there was trouble at the Port of Los Angeles. A random inspection of Horton Archery’s inbound container of China-made crossbow parts had turned up aluminum covered by the federal government’s bland-sounding but lethal 120-page trade document, “Certain Aluminum Extrusions From China.” Horton, desperate for the $100,000-worth of parts in that container, could have them, Customs officials said, for a price: a “countervailing duty” of 170 percent of the value of the goods—$170,000—plus the same 170 percent duty on all similar products imported by Horton Archery dating back to beginning of hostilities in 2010.

“It’s hard for me to say whether the Chinese were dumping in terms of solar panel pricing—that’s what [the Administration was] going after them for, not the aluminum,” Moore says. But in the Administration’s broadband assault on what it called dumping, Horton was collateral damage—trampled grass, a victim of something no one could have foreseen. And if someone in the U.S. was getting huge discounts on Chinese aluminum products, it wasn’t Horton: “We certainly weren’t getting ‘dumping margins’ on those aluminum parts from China. In fact, for that identical part we had recently secured a second supplier in the U.S. who was quoting about 10 percent cheaper price than the China supplier.

“We just got swept up in a policy decision.”

Horton decided not to pay.

Along with supply-chain problems, Moore says, the Administration’s trade war with China meant “we were toast. We just couldn’t fill orders.” He figures the company failed to fill 25 percent of its booked sales that year. “And, once again, we ended another production season with too few finished goods produced, but millions of dollars of unused parts inventory. “Our bank lender was unwilling to advance further working capital loans,” Moore says, “and we had reached the limit on how much of our own capital we could risk on this business.”

In June 2013, TGV reluctantly let go. Horton’s assets, mostly its huge parts inventory, was sold to one of the company’s primary crossbow competitors.

THE HORTON ARCHERY EXPERIENCE was for TGV “a very painful lesson in what can go wrong in the global supply chain,” Moore says.

But in the middle of getting schooled, Moore and colleagues did at least one thing right, and they did it several times: as new information became available, as reality seemed to shift from moment to moment, they revolutionized their business model instantly—radically, dramatically, courageously.

“It’s true,” Moore says. “We shook up the Etch A Sketch a few times.”

In 1998, Drew Greenblatt purchased Marlin Steel Wire Products, a 30-year-old company with a business model that worked until, suddenly, it didn’t.

You might have known Marlin only by the ubiquitous baskets it produced, those wire racks that hold bagels—onion, blueberry, egg or standard-issue plain—in your local bagelry. Business boomed until the anti-carbohydrate diet made famous by Dr. Robert Atkins emerged in the early 2000s.

As bagel sales dipped so did demand for the Baltimore-based company’s wire baskets.

Things got worse when Marlin suddenly found itself in a commodity market with a shrinking customer base, competing with Chinese manufacturers who sold wire baskets for less than the price Marlin paid for steel.

“It was,” Greenblatt recalls, “a horrific place. It just all fell apart. We were floundering around getting hammered, just hemorrhaging cash. The world had changed and we were going to be extinct.”

But then—call it the great bagel-shaped circle of life, Simba—an engineer from Boeing rang. The U.S.-based aerospace giant was looking for a basket that could hold a very specific airplane part. They needed it customized. They needed it made to hyper-precise specs. And they needed it fast. But they needed just a handful.

Now, Marlin was built to supply major bagel chains that bought wire baskets “in lots of a thousand or 2,500,” Greenblatt says. On the one hand, that market was winding down. On the other, there’d be additional costs in gearing up to produce, like, four or six wire baskets just one time.

He told the Boeing engineer that what he was describing would cost a lot—maybe about twice as much as your conventional bagel basket.

The Boeing engineer “was unflappable,” Greenblatt remembers. “He was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’”

That was Greenblatt’s miracle moment: “We’d found a market where they appreciate engineering, quality.”

A new business was born, a business Greenblatt calls “custom-engineered materials-handling containers.”

“We just morphed,” he says.

The word “just” implies that the process was simple, overnight; elsewhere in our conversation Greenblatt describes the process of reinvention as “extremely difficult,” “terrifying,” “incremental.” At one point, he even acknowledges ruefully that it was one of those transformations that you might not take on if you knew in advance how dizzying, unhinged and scary the path would be.

But this revolution unfolded slowly, over the course of several years. In that time, Marlin has invested in robots, managers, and engineers as varied as bagels—“process engineers, mechanical engineers, industrial engineers.” He describes his sales process as “engineer-to-engineer.” And Drew Greenblatt has become something of American industry’s Man of Steel.

WHAT GREENBLATT LEARNED ABOUT PRICE

Today, about 40 percent of Marlin’s super-engineered products move offshore—to 18 countries in Europe, eight countries in Central and South America, and five in Southeast Asia.

And everywhere it sells, Marlin eschews price. That’s because Marlin sells custom. Marlin sells American-made value. Marlin sells fast.

“We ignore markets that are focused primarily on price. In fact, we have exited from all commodity business, because they don’t appreciate well-paid employees making high-quality parts, or engineers coming up with really slick ideas,” Greenblatt says. “We have had seven years of record growth, each and every year, despite the recession, and I attribute a lot of that to exporting.”

“You won’t find Marlin manufacturing ‘baskets for socks in Vietnam.”

Greenblatt cites a Japanese automaker’s recent order of $100,000 worth of material-handling racks. The racks would attach to a robot that loads parts—a function that demanded a highly engineered basket. And the buyer needed them quickly.

“We used a laser made in Connecticut and steel made in Pennsylvania, and all the brains were out of Baltimore,” he says. “That combination developed something so effective that the Japanese automaker went with us. We shipped very quickly, and it worked out so well that they gave us two reorders.”

Greenblatt studiously avoids price by focusing on highly developed markets like Japan. “What moves the needle for us in a certain country is high labor rates in that country, such that we can save them time and money in terms of processing time and also the ability to reduce their scrap,” he says. “These are countries that appreciate quality. As a result, for example, we aren’t going to do so well in countries in Africa and a lot of countries in Southeast Asia.” While Marlin has some customers in higher-end factories in cheap-labor countries—telecommunications or precision sheet-metal fabrication in China, Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, and Australia—you won’t find the company manufacturing “baskets for socks in Vietnam.”

And don’t bother asking about the revenue that Marlin might lose because it has eliminated from its target-market list every country with low wages. “Revenue does not generate the cash that you need to invest in new equipment, to invest in employees, or to create a new marketing campaign,” he says. “Focus on profit.”

Competing on quality means buying on quality, too. And though he could inarguably find a less-expensive place to manufacture, “there was never a thought to leaving” Baltimore, in part because of the area’s “excellent port, BWI Airport, road and transit system.” Access to air, port and ground transit have helped make Marlin the company you call when you need something amazing and you need it there fast.

And when it comes to ocean, Greenblatt has mastered the art of the half container. “For example, we may have a bill of lading to Brazil. My products may take up half a container” moving out of the Port of Miami, he says, “and then the other half of the container is filled with other products also going to Brazil. But the bill of lading will read Miami.”

But Marlin isn’t primarily soliciting bids on price. “We only work with qualified companies to begin with,” Greenblatt says. “Our main requirement is that (carriers) can guarantee the safety and integrity of the products we ship. Second is how quickly it will get there because most of our customers have time elements that are involved.”

Price, he says, even for his own vendors, ranks a lowly third.

THE PROMOTER

Greenblatt is one of those guys whose enthusiasm is like a tugboat nudging an entire industry—an entire country—out to sea. He is not merely about self-promotion. Sure, his company’s website banner reads “Marlin Rising,” but also “Leading an American manufacturing renaissance.”

Such enthusiasm—and business success—may account for Greenblatt’s presence on the board of the National Association of Manufacturers. He’s chairman of the board of the Regional Manufacturing Institute. In 2011, the World Trade Center Institute gave him an International Business Leadership Award. He has been featured on CNN, CNBC, NPR and BBC, and in the New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company magazine, the Wall Street Journal and The Economist. He has testified before the U.S. Senate and Congress more than half a dozen times on topics including small business, taxation, regulations that stifle small business, effects of trade policy on job growth, and techniques to grow the economy; has visited the White House on two occasions, meeting with Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to discuss manufacturing and foreign trade. His plant is often a destination for national leaders, including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

In 2007, Marlin was awarded Regional Employer of the Year from Baltimore City & Baltimore County. Last year the company was named one of the Inner City 100 Fastest Growing Companies in the U.S. and hit No. 4,112 on Inc. Magazine’s 5,000 fastest-growing manufacturers—its sixth appearance on the list. The company earned $4.4 million in revenue in 2011, up an astonishing 33 percent from 2008.

Inc. called Greenblatt “the Go-To Spokesman for U.S. Manufacturing.”

“One of the reasons he’s such a great spokesman for manufacturing is that he believes in the future—he believes in the future of manufacturing,” Mike Galiazzo, president of the Regional Manufacturing Institute of Maryland, told the Baltimore Sun. “He puts his money into it. Small companies ought to take note that this guy is not sitting there saying, ‘Woe is me.’”

Unlike those who believe America is headed for a blissed-out, post-industrial economy, Greenblatt believes the future is with companies like his—small and mid-sized world-class manufacturers that provide good jobs and real benefits.

He underscores the point with an anecdote: When he first arrived at Marlin Steel, Greenblatt says, his was the only car in the parking lot. His employees—all of them, he says—were earning minimum wage and couldn’t afford their own cars. There was no health insurance. There was little worker training. There was almost no investment in new technology.

These days, Greenblatt says, one-fifth of his workforce consists of degreed mechanical engineers, and he’s hiring more. Wages for the factory floor workers (not including those engineers) range from a respectable $30,000 to a flat-out upper-middle-class $80,000 a year.

“Our people are our most important asset,” Greenblatt says. “While most companies look at employees as a variable cost, we look at them as a fixed cost.”

The company spends five percent of its direct labor budget on training, so that the employees are actual craftsmen. “This allows them to come up with better ideas than our competition,” he continues. “In addition, they know how to use technology better than our competition.”

Greenblatt even has an acronymic industrial initiative—Quality Engineered Quick, or QEQ.

“Companies need to identify what really impresses clients today,” he explains. “For us, it is QEQ. We’ve literally trademarked the words because that’s our niche: We want to have the best quality parts, the best engineered content of any company, and the ability

to ship quicker than anyone else in the world.”

“We use engineering as a way to differentiate ourselves from our competition. We become an integral part of their supply chain, rather than someone they can beat up on pricing.”

It wasn’t always thus. Back when Greenblatt first purchased Marlin Steel—back when there was one car in the parking lot—the company used tape measures to determine quality: the tolerance for variances was measured in baskets that were held to a fairly loose standard: baskets that could hold one more or one less bagel were considered ready to ship. Now, accuracy is defined at four one-thousandths of an inch. The company hits that number while producing products 60 times faster than in the past.

The ability to meet more exacting standards is a product of engineers and new technology. While many companies have used the recession as a reason to trim capital investment, Greenblatt says Marlin pumped more than $3 million into robotics. In the last two years alone, the company’s investment in technology has been over 15 percent of revenue.

“This is another way we differentiate ourselves from our competition,” he continues. “We want our people to have the best tools available so that we can ship higher-quality parts with tighter tolerances. The technology also allows us to ship faster.”

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO GREENBLATT

Everybody, Greenblatt says, should be as enthusiastic about exporting as he is.

“Our economy is limping along,” he says, sounding every bit the industrial evangelist. “It should be doing much better. Businesses in the U.S. should stop being so parochial. Ninety-five percent of the world is overseas, so we should vigorously pursue exports. Whatever the Canadians do, we can do, so our goal should be at least 28 percent exports. That would end the recession. I’m not even talking about getting to German levels.” He reels off the export numbers of Germany (where, he says, 40 percent of the economy is export-oriented) and Great Britain and Canada (28 percent). “The U.S. is at a pathetic 11 percent,” he says, incredulous.

He thinks government can help. Like Marlin, Greenblatt says your company should invite elected officials to tour your facility. “In this way, the representatives can understand the hardships and challenges that we go through,” he says. “They can also understand how good of an environment we provide to our employees, and how important these manufacturing jobs are. The average American manufacturing employee makes over $77,000 a year. These are jobs we should be coddling. The only way for elected representatives to understand this is for manufacturers to invite them in for tours.”

Take advantage of the Export-Import Bank and its various programs, he says. “We have an advantage in this country with the Export-Import Bank, which is a good ally for us,” he asserts. “More manufacturers should take advantage of it. By working with this bank, you can extend credit to a foreign company and have your receivables protected up to 95 percent. We pay a modest premium of about half a percent, and they guarantee 95 percent of our credit. This allows us the opportunity to take more chances with exporting than we might otherwise.”

And leverage the Commerce Department’s Gold Key program. “This is an effective way to interact with new prospects,” he says. “I have used this during trips to China, Korea and Vietnam. It was a tremendous help. They provided a driver and a translator, since I didn’t speak the languages.”

THE WORLD IS A FRIENDLY PLACE

There’s always reason to be anxious, of course, but little of that anxiety emerges in conversation with Greenblatt. He’s got a record of success to look back on, to be sure, but he also sees lots of reason for optimism. First, there’s all that opportunity for export growth—bridging the gap between the U.S.’s “pathetic” export economy and the German example, for instance. Indeed, he’s launching his own export revolution: “I am personally going to shoot for 40 percent growth, but we are currently budgeting for 20 percent growth.”

There are also huge, hopeful macro-economic factors.

“First, re-shoring is definitely here”—that’s the movement back to the U.S. of American companies that moved manufacturing jobs to such low-wage countries as China. “And it is definitely going to be increasing,” he says. One reason is that Chinese wages are rising fast. In 2006, the average Chinese employee was making 26 to 28 cents per hour. In 2011, when Greenblatt visited China, he found the average was almost 10 times that—about $2.38 per hour. In the next four-year plan, Chinese wages will rise up to about $5 per hour. After that, Greenblatt figures, some Shanghai factory workers could be making $7.50 per hour.

At that point, it’s advantage U.S.A., Greenblatt says.

“If a customer has a choice between a $7.50 per hour worker in China or a $12 per hour worker in America—where we have intellectual property rights, the rule of law, and significantly lower freight costs—people are going to move their business and factories to America.”

Another big shift: the natural gas revolution. “We hit the lottery in the last four years, in that we have found two times the amount of natural gas that Saudi Arabia has,” Greenblatt says. “We have found it in places like Pennsylvania, New York, the Dakotas and Texas. As a result, we won’t have to trust people who hate us to provide us with fuel. This is a major shift. In Europe, they pay $12 for natural gas. The Chinese and Koreans are paying $16 and $18. We are blessed with $2 natural gas.”

“That’s making U.S. companies that used to be at a price disadvantage now uniquely positioned to win contracts they never won in the past—or haven’t for a while,” Greenblatt recently told NBC News. “Everyone talks about what’s going on in North Dakota, but it’s filtering down now to conventional factories throughout America.”

There is, of course, nothing “conventional” about Marlin, or about Drew Greenblatt, its energetic Man of Steel.

 Additional reporting by William Atkinson and Patrick Dooley.