YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
YOUR BUSINESS AUTHORITY
Springfield, MO
What began in the 1980s as a small machine shop in Nixa called Gamble Metal Masters is now Springfield-based Watson Custom Tanks, which makes stainless steel tanks for customers all over the country in its 85,000-square-foot facility. Whether it’s a bucket-size tank or one that soars into the sky, Springfield-based Watson builds every tank to customers’ specifications with material that’s mostly bought locally.
SBJ: Why is a stainless steel process tank an important product?
Beau Barnes, vice president of sales: A stainless process tank is about as sanitary as it can get. You don’t want the milk you’re drinking made in a dirty carbon iron tank or a plastic tank that can leach. You want anything that goes on or in the human body to be made in a stainless steel tank.
SBJ: How do the tank sizes vary?
Barnes: It’s totally customer driven. If we need to fit a tank in a low ceiling that has 10-foot-tall ceilings or if we have blue skies above, they can tell us what size tank they need and all the requirements and then we build per order, so we’re completely custom. We don’t have tanks sitting in the back lot that you can point to a catalog item and just pick out and have the same day. It’s just like a blueprint to a house. We get all the parts ready and then it eventually makes its way to the shop floor, and the guys put it together. They read the blueprint the whole way through, and then we’re ready to ship it out the door. We can build anywhere from a small 5-gallon tank the size of the bucket that you have at home all the way up to a 350,000-gallon water tank that’s built by our field crew all over the country.
SBJ: Where do your field crews go?
Barnes: We’ll send a crew of three to six people to the East Coast, West Coast and everywhere in between to build or service. Things eventually break down. A tank is no different. So whether a tank gets a leak in it or whatever the case may be, we have a full-time field service crew that travels all over the country.
SBJ: Who are some of your clients people would recognize?
Barnes: Most of our work is for food and beverage, so if it’s in a grocery store all over the country it’s guaranteed it has a product that has been touched by a Watson tank or made in a Watson tank – Hiland Dairy, Coca-Cola, Colgate, Johnson & Johnson, all the major companies have used our tanks. We’ve done multiple tanks for The J.M. Smucker Co.
SBJ: Where are you seeing growth?
Barnes: All the electric batteries that are going into cars or going into solar. There are a lot of ingredients that go into a battery ... you’ve got to store those products in a tank before the batteries are made. We’ve probably done $5 million in the last few years geared toward your Teslas, your Fords, your General Motors that are building big, big plants to target the battery market.
SBJ: What is an unexpected use for a Watson tank?
Barnes: We’ve made tanks for beef slaughterhouses, because there are things you don’t think about, like where does all the blood go, where does all the byproduct of the cow go? They’ve got to put it somewhere, so there’s a whole market in the inedible side of a cow, a pig, a chicken.
A trio of brothers own Southway Storage LLC, which opened Oct. 7 and has 289 units to serve customers in Ozark, Nixa, Springfield and elsewhere in southwest Missouri.
