Built by Association

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Like many associations, NTMA publishes a buying guide, which lists all members and goes out to potential customers. Its annual industry surveys -- one on wages and fringe benefits, the other on operating costs and executive compensation -- help members position themselves in relation to their peers. Sixty-five percent of NTMA's 3,000 members rate the surveys as the benefit they value most. Bruce Braker, head of the Tooling and Manufacturing Association, a Chicago association with ties to NTMA, finds that the operating-costs survey alone justifies membership.

Education And Training
Almost all trade associations offer their members opportunities to improve their management skills. If NTMA members tend to take the offer more seriously, it may have to do with the nature of their industry.

There are roughly 12,000 tooling and machining enterprises in the United States, a number that has remained remarkably stable since the industry exploded during and shortly after World War II. Most are small family-owned businesses -- with 25 employees, maybe $6 million in sales. Half are precision machine shops, like Tamasi's; the other half are toolmakers. Tools, in this case, are not hammers and saws but made-to-order components that manufacturers buy to make almost anything that's mass-produced: a fender on a car, a cap on a pen, a valve in an engine, even the peens on hammers and the blades on saws.

Like AccuRounds, many businesses in the industry were started by skilled tradesmen. "A journeyman toolmaker is trained to do lots of very important things," Coffey points out. "But the thing he is not trained to do is to run a business." A guy like that might want to attend a management seminar or buy a video on a topic that interests him. Both of those are available from NTMA, but he can learn a lot just from reading NTMA's Business Management Advisories. Free to members, it's an anthology of more than 100 easy-to-read articles, including "Disciplinary Communications with Employees," "When, Where and How to Use Manufacturers' Representatives," and "Business Succession Planning."

Basic stuff. Over time, however, as founding chief executives have passed the reins to their college-educated sons and daughters, and downsizing manufacturers have begun making more complex demands of their suppliers, articles like "Activity-Based Costing," "Implementing SPC," and "Preparing for Your Quality Audit" have found their way into Business Management Advisories.

Local NTMA chapters operate 13 regional training centers -- some of them freestanding facilities, others run jointly with local community colleges -- to train the next generation of toolmakers and machinists. NTMA writes the curricula, publishes the textbooks, and hires the teachers.

Lobbying
It's not for nothing that so many trade associations -- including NTMA -- make Washington and its environs their home. Trade associations lobby; it's what they're known for.

Actually, though, only 43% do it, according to a report by the Hudson Institute, in Washington, D.C., another think tank. And the process consumes, on average, a bare 6% of expenditures, twice that if you add in so-called public information. Still, when trade-association executives get together at conventions of their American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), it's the big guns like the American Road and Transportation Builders Association that keep the others enthralled with tales of billions diverted from federal coffers into the pockets of their members.

We do wonder, sometimes, whether lobbying is a smart allocation of scarce resources. We're thinking of the point Reunion Time's Fiore made earlier. Dynamic companies don't wait around for the tide to rise in their industry. They usually find a way to prosper no matter what. And the Kenan Institute's Bremer cautions that "the government these days has fewer goodies to give away. So if you're in the business of getting goodies, that's not necessarily a good business to be in."

All the same, we wouldn't say the attempts of trade associations to influence public policy are, by definition, futile or wrong. Lobbying, in fact, was NTMA's original mission back in 1942. Shop owners pleaded that skilled toolmakers be exempt from the draft, on the theory that they were vital to the war effort at home. Congress was so persuaded. Last year NTMA devoted a quarter of a million dollars of its $3.7-million annual budget to lobbying, mainly on issues that affect small business generally: taxes, health insurance, and government mandates in whatever form. "They just don't like government meddling," Cox says of his constituency.

Maybe if Coffey belonged to the trade association for trade-association executives and spent more time with those guys, his attitude toward lobbying would be more macho. ("I don't think of myself in the same context as ASAE thinks of itself," he explains. "I don't think of what I do as building a profession. I think of it as servicing the customer.") As it is, Coffey relegates lobbying to a supporting role, in service to NTMA's larger mission.

"We have to be a center of knowledge on government," Coffey says. "That doesn't mean we need to be a lobbyist. That doesn't mean we need to be a legal intervener. It means we have to know everything that's going on and know what impact it's going to have on the businesses we're trying to serve. It may mean that we actually lobby at some point, but that's not the driver."

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