How one Houston-area machine shop is changing with the times – and winning

Posted by btaylor.media@gmail.com on 10/08/2025 9:30 am

By Bart Taylor, GHMA

Jim Cheatham rode out of Odessa and a family history of oil field machining and services in West Texas to stand up Minco CNC in Conroe, in 1978. Good fortune favored Cheatham with a bank loan, warehouse space, and Wayne Gentles, a machinist who helped manage the initial workload and is still with the company today.

It follows that Jim’s son, J.B. Cheatham, found his way through the shop growing up and is today General Manager, leading the company into a bright future. “My Dad and Wayne, they’ve built this business together,” Cheatham says. “I came here as a kid, obviously, working in high school and everything. And so I learned a little bit, but not much,” he laughs.

He learned enough, it turns out, to see what was important. “This business has had the same customers and made a lot of the same parts, the entire time. That’s changing; we're making completely different parts now, but we have the same basic customers, which is amazing,” he says. “I don't think that's something you see very often.”

Yet an oil and gas customer base is inherently volatile. “There have been some tough times. I know in the mid-80s, it was bad here and he almost lost the business, just with the lack of work and cash flow and all those problems. The business has grown, it's contracted, it’s grown, based on external forces around us, like downturns in the 2016 timeframe. And COVID obviously hit us hard,” Cheatham says.

But if change is constant, for the Cheatham’s, it’s also a guiding principle. “Through all that time, we've endured. And we've endured because one of my dad's main premises that he taught me since I was a little kid, was that if you don’t change, you die,” J.B. says. “The thing is, we all know that's true, but it's not easy to do. And so we have a really, really good change mindset here because of him. Everybody here knows we just have to change — or we don't make it.”

As a result, Cheatham keeps tabs on a shifting industrial profile in south Texas that’s presenting new opportunities — and risk — as contract manufacturers like Minco diversify into new industry supply chains.

“Texas is changing,” Cheatham says. “Oil and gas is always going to have the biggest flag planted in the ground around here, no question. But with the advent of AI, AI plants coming in, SpaceX and the massive amount of work they're pumping into this market — even companies like Apple are coming back here in a way that impacts us. One of our programmers left us for Apple. He works in Austin at a job shop that's owned by Apple; he's a programmer there and runs machines!” That was also news to me.

Like so many companies I’ve encountered over the years, Minco is focused on execution over externalities to tackle a shifting marketplace. Or as Cheatham tells me, “We don’t have an aggressive marketing plan here. More an emphasis on quality, (on-time) delivery, and safety, to attract new business.”

For J.B., looking inward has also involved a personal “lean” journey — with Paul Aker’s 2 Second Lean — that’s transformed the company. “I was going through all these books, and I came across 2 Second Lean, a really simple book. I read it and thought, ‘you know what? I can teach this in the shop. I can implement what he's talking about in this shop.’ This is not (as complicated as) the Toyota Way.

“I just poured myself into it because I knew that that's what we had to do to get out of COVID. I knew we had to make really quick changes really fast and get lean and get really strong with our elimination of waste,” he explains — including stuff that was just taken for granted. “We probably had three trash bins of things that we threw away over two years, that we walked by a million times and didn't notice. It's all out of here now. The only things in this shop are the things that we use to make parts. We created probably 2,000 to 3,000 square feet of floor space, just eliminating waste, which allowed us to bring in two more machines.”