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By Lucy Sutherland
Kerstin Forrester Stonebridge
As she walks through her 13,500 square-foot Worcester machine shop, Kerstin Forrester’s enthusiasm is infectious. Picking up a gleaming aluminum part milled to perfection, she says, “I think they’re beautiful! I get really excited. These things add value to our economy.”
Forrester is the president of Stonebridge, a precision machining and certified welding company she has owned and operated for five years. The company, with revenues in the $2 million range, employs 16 and caters to a wide array of industries, including defense, oceanography, medical instruments and electronics. With fierce competition both at home and abroad, Forrester has carved a niche for herself by specializing in low quantity requirements. “But we can also do production runs for up to 5,000 pieces when our customers need that,” she says.
With a bachelor’s degree from Clark University and an MBA from Northeastern, Forrester began her career in corporate finance. At Norton Abrasives, a global manufacturer of industrial cutting and polishing materials, she worked her way up the ranks to controller and director of finance and eventually to the high-level position of director of finance and planning for its North American abrasive operations.
As the first woman general manager for a business unit there, Forrester developed an interest in the manufacturing process itself. “I love manufacturing: the part of making something, seeing it made, when you look at the raw material and at the finished product,” she says.
But the demands of her job at Norton “were tremendous,” Forrester says. “I was away from home 75 percent of the time.”
She also chafed at the constant micromanaging of her superiors. “That’s the really tough part in a corporation. When you’re general manager, you need to be left to manage an operation,” she says. “But often the knowledge you have about business and its customers and employees is not considered when someone at the corporate level decides to go in another direction.”
In 1998, Forrester bought Stonebridge, then based in Holliston. “I’m in control and it feels good!” she says. She quickly modernized the company’s operations and decreased lead times for manufacturing contracts from two months to two to three weeks. “In today’s world, no one wants to carry inventory, and where cash flow is king, you want to shorten that cash flow cycle,” she says. A grant from the Office of Naval Research helped provide lean manufacturing training for all of Stonebridge’s employees, she adds. “Without the implementation of Lean, we would not have survived the past three years. We’re now poised to grow.”
Forrester’s success results in part from a participatory leadership style. “I’m very much into consensus building because I think it works well,” she says. “I believe firmly that if you treat people fairly, if you share successes with them, that you’ll succeed. If you’re profitable and share that with employees and don’t get greedy, you’ll succeed beyond your wildest dreams.”
Like most in her industry, Forrester is concerned with the future of U.S. manufacturing. Her board involvement at the Manufacturing Advancement Center, an organization founded to increase the competitiveness of small local manufacturers, makes her optimistic about the future of her sector. “Working with them has really been fantastic in looking at what manufacturing is capable of doing, and what we can bring to the economy to turn it around,” she says.
Forrester is also concerned that manufacturing is still saddled with an image problem. “I think my generation probably didn’t want our children to go work in a factory because it was lowly, it was dirty, it was hard work. That’s not true in today’s world. It’s high tech,” she says. “Manufacturing isn’t for dummies.”
®THE PROFESSIONAL AND BUSINESS WOMAN’S JOURNAL February 2004
Reprinted with permission by Women’s Business Boston 2/04
