The American Way

Far from presenting a threat to American values and living standards, today's immigrants -- be they Asian, European, or Latino -- are refueling our entrepreneurial economy

northeastern ohio looks like an American cliché come to life: rolling green hills, well-tended Amish farms, and old, red-brick industrial towns whose economic zenith seems long since past. Yet where many, especially in these recessionary times, see only the fading of a nation, Vinny Gupta finds a vista of opportunity and renewal.

"People in America think luxury is a birthright," says the Indian-born entrepreneur in his spartan office, in Canton, Ohio. "But this country can move ahead only if we bring back the ethics there used to be."

For Vinny Gupta those ethics are not the stuff of parental scolding but the foundation of business principles that have helped him turn around three failing midwestern foundries. They are values that, taken together, might in the past have been described as the Protestant ethic -- based on thrift, willingness to defer gratification, and single-minded devotion to building an enterprise.

Today, however, one is more likely to encounter such archetypally "Protestant" attitudes among Hindus -- or refugees from Southeast Asia -- than among assimilated Americans. Like Vinny Gupta, the newcomers have come to America with fresh eyes and fresh convictions, and with a willingness to face competitive industrial challenges that too many of our more established corporations hesitate to confront.

Gupta learned about the erosion of values at the feet of masters. After earning degrees from Michigan Technological University and Case Western Reserve, and joining Gould Corp. as a metallurgist in 1976, he saw an industry dominated by conglomerates that were either feverishly abandoning the die-casting business or milking their foundries dry. Everywhere he went, whether at Gould plants in Wisconsin and St. Louis or, later, while working for the then-Connecticut-based conglomerate Condec Corp., Gupta saw pervasive disdain for employees by line managers, and apathy among "the hotshots in corporate jets."

To Condec executives, the old Orrville, Ohio, foundry where Gupta was general manager was just one of several businesses that included more highly prized operations elsewhere. "The managers in Connecticut didn't know anything about the business," recalls 39-year-old Gupta. "I'd go to these lunch meetings in Connecticut and go into the dining room -- everyone there had one of those beepers -- and I'd get to spend 10 minutes talking business, and they'd spend two and half hours talking about what they'd do on their vacations."

By the early l980s, Condec was under financial attack and scrambling for cash. Orrville, which was losing $125,000 each month, seemed ripe for closing. Gupta saw an opportunity to make his mark on a foundry no one wanted. Using his own savings, a long-term note from Condec, plus cash from Akron investor Jerry Pollock (who took a 40% interest in the plant), Gupta bought the foundry.

Finally in control, Gupta proceeded to do all the things that, beforehand, he could not push through Condec management. He cleaned up the plant, often taking up the broom himself. He invested in necessary new or scavenged machinery, and he found economical ways to purchase raw materials and processing equipment.

His approach was neither arcane nor revolutionary. He simply dug into his business elbow-deep every day.

Since Gupta bought the facility, the company, now called Technocast Inc., has soared from less than $2 million to nearly $9 million in annual sales, with pretax profits last year reaching close to $500,000. Over that time productivity among the plant's 125 employees has improved fourfold, to more than $70,000 per worker. And improvements in quality have enabled Technocast to attract a long list of new, top-drawer customers.

Things are working out so well that Gupta has bought two other plants, one in Michigan and another in Ohio, where he is attempting to replicate his success. "Foundries are dirty work," the casually dressed Gupta explains as he walks through his recently purchased century-old factory. "Having an education in a dirty business is a unique asset. A lot of educated people don't want to work in a dirty business. There's always opportunity where the other guys don't want to go."

Vinny Gupta and the industrial renewal represented by Technocast reflect a phenomenon repeated not only nationwide -- from the sewing shops of Manhattan to the high-tech laboratories of Silicon Valley -- but across centuries. Newcomers to the United States are today among the nation's greatest assets in the global economic struggle. But then, historically newcomers have always been among the nation's greatest assets,~ more American in their attitudes and aptitudes than the third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans whose society they joined.

Today's immigrants reaffirm a long-standing historical pattern in American entrepreneurial culture that has been constantly reinvigorated and reshaped by waves of ambitious newcomers. Indeed, contrary to conventional characterization of immigrants as economic burdens on their new homeland, newcomers to this country have played a critical role in the molding of our industrial landscape.

In the early 1800s, during the "cotton-mill fever" that marked America's first industrial boom, British immigrant Samuel Slater typified the newly landed opportunity seekers who brought their values along with their skills. Builder of what may have been the New World's most modern textile plant, Slater, along with his contemporaries, transfused American entrepreneurs with the ethical mind-set of the British dissenters -- a mind-set that raised devotion to work, order, and self-control to the level of a moral code. As the 19th century wore on, the Germans, French, Greeks, and Jews immigrated to the United States, followed more recently by Asian, Latino, and Middle Eastern newcomers. Though strikingly diverse in nearly all respects, each group brought its own version of Slater's work ethic.

That most truly American ethic has as its source what Steve Hui, founder of Everex Systems Inc., calls "the refugee mentality," an outlook that demands thrift, self-discipline, and the willingness to defer gratification. It creates entrepreneurs who invariably work hard and well and keep close to their businesses. It rests, ultimately, on a fundamental belief that, in the end, one's circumstances are one's own responsibility. And, as Vinny Gupta would remind us, those precepts are the secrets to economic success.