If you can conceive it, the team at Faztek Industrial Solutions can create it. Dedicated to custom designs and fabrication, Faztek partners with businesses, medical providers, data centers, manufacturers and do-it-yourselfers to come up with solutions that make sense. 

“We can serve anyone from maintenance departments to engineers to rocket scientists to the DIYer. You can quite literally do whatever you want, as long as your mind can think it up,” explains Chief Operating Officer Derek Melchi. “Our biggest niche is machine guarding. If someone has dangerous machinery and wants to ensure their people are protected, they’ll come to us and we will make a guard.” 

“What’s great about our business is that if our customer’s need something to be a certain size, or an exact size and exact shape, we can make that happen,” adds Faztek Chief Financial Officer Matt Rupp. 

Founded in 2001 as a supplier of aluminum framing, the company has expanded its offerings to include material handling carts, custom workstations, safety guarding and aisle containment. In recent years, Faztek has worked with entrepreneurs like Justin Kuhn who need help bringing their ideas to life. 

After the deadly shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida in 2018, Kuhn had an idea that would help keep students safer. Metal detectors were an obvious solution, but are expensive. In addition, traditional systems are triggered by anything metal: laptops, phones and belt buckles, as well as guns and knives, so each alarm required human intervention. Kuhn’s solution involved a screening device that has the ability to discern between common items and those that may pose a threat. But that didn’t solve the issue of manpower. 

“Schools do not have the resources or manpower for all entrances and exits, so I thought, ‘You really need to put in a camera and integrate it with a metal detector.’ When that metal detector went off, instantly it would snap a photo and it would send that photo to the school resource officer or safety team,” explains Kuhn. “They receive a text notice instantly and can then go and check on the situation.” 

The problem, he then learned, was that each school entrance was different. He needed customized panels that would help funnel students through the metal detectors. Not only did Faztek come up with something functional, but the designers were able to fabricate something that looked good, too. 

“I reached out to the team at Faztek and they couldn’t have been better. They were great to work with,” Kuhn stresses. “They offered an affordable product that was very nice looking. Every system that I did was custom, as every school had a different setup. The designers and team over at Faztek always did their best to make the configuration work. It was very important to have that correct.” 

“Sometimes customers come to us with detailed designs and simply want us to tweak it a little bit, and other times they show up with a drawing on a napkin and we turn that into a design,” says Melchi. 

What sets the company apart from its competitors is a commitment to exceptional customer service, fair pricing and a dedication to delivering quality products quickly. 

“We pride ourselves on our lead times. Our standard turnaround times are anywhere from three days to a week,” says Rupp. “We have a saying around here, ‘It’s not the big-eating-the-small kind of world anymore. It’s the fast eating the slow.’ We have to do whatever is necessary to be the fastest.”

In order to better meet the needs of its customers, Faztek is expanding. In June, leaders broke ground on a new $6 million headquarters and production facility on Bluffton Road.

It will double the size of the current building and have an initial capacity of 60,000 square feet with the potential to expand to 100,000 square feet. It’s expected to open in the spring of 2024. 

As for entrepreneur Justin Kuhn, he eventually sold his company, EntryShield, but the new owner continues to work with Faztek to design and manufacture custom panels for school security systems. “It’s honestly been a great partnership. It’s wonderful that the new owners and company are still using them. It worked well for me because it was right in my own backyard, and I could pick up the product and take it to schools. Even though the new company is out of Arkansas, they are still staying with Faztek which I think says a lot,” says Kuhn. 

From BusinessPeople.com