By: Melissa Dillon, SHIELDS® Marketing Manager

 

Wow, it’s been awhile since we’ve posted on our BLOG!! My what a ride 2024 was. Somehow we are already a month through 2025. Time is a thief!

We had several moments in 2024 that will not soon be forgotten. The absolute highlight of the year was being selected in the Top 100 Small Businesses in America by the Chamber of Commerce. It’s called CO-100, which for months we called it C-O 100 and were corrected in D.C. that it is Co, like Co-Op… oops.

The whole event exceeded our expectations beyond belief. We knew it was an honor to be selected amongst the seventy some thousand small businesses that applied across the U.S. We knew the honor was prestigious, but it wasn’t until we got there that we realized just how big it was.

Coming from our small town of Martinsville, Indiana, it’s surreal to see us and compare us to businesses across America. We live and work here, we love what do and we do it with some of the best people in our community. We have a couple employees that live outside our county, but most people have grown up together playing softball, going to church and went to school together. We are a family, and a small one comparatively. It is difficult to see the impact that a bunch of us small town folk have on the rest of the world with our windows.

As we stood there on a roof of one of the tallest buildings in Washington D.C., overlooking the White House, sipping wine in our best dress, we wish we could’ve brought everybody from our SHIELDS team there. They all deserved that honor and we toasted together.

It was a two-day event filled with knowledge, classes, dinners, social gatherings that were all leading up to the final dinner and award ceremony. One business would come out the “winner” of the dinner. If you asked the employees that got together for a viewing party to watch us on TV, we did not win. But oh we won. We were there and OUR team earned that. Big deal? Abso-freakin-lutely.

We returned from D.C., emotionally overwhelmed, but deeply happy and proud to come home to our team to share our experiences. Then we hit the ground running for holiday season and all the joys and challenges that it presents.

Earlier in the year, we finished our last piece of our building puzzle. We call it Building D and it houses our two brand new CNC machines, a corner for marketing and trade show storage, our press brake and some odds and ends.

We took a moment to view a near once-in-a-lifetime full solar eclipse. Which personally, was one of the coolest nature experiences I’ve been apart of.

We produced our first real TV commercial late in 2023 and had a sequel, if you will, in spring of 2024. Our president turned into a cartoon! The commercial has gone viral on a few different social media platforms to the point he feels like he start bringing a sharpie to sign t-shirts and posters. Still waiting for that one person to ask for that! Look for a sequel of his cartoon in 2025!

VIDEO LINK >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxwbvplPGKU

As far as trade shows go, this was an “off” year. We only had the PRI Trade Show right in our back door of Indianapolis. It was a great show. Now we gear up for Utility Expo in October, our second largest show and then ConExpo a year from now, our biggest trade show. Buckle up!

Our engineering team kicked butt! We produced 91 brand new products, just shy of two windows a week. One of the coolest windows we engineered was a window for the Lane Motor Museum. The rear window basically broke the laws of physics. The picture below, yes, there’s actually a window in there. Our team did such a great job that you can hardly tell there’s a window. We’ll share more photos once the car is finished!

We finished the year with a charter bus trip and wonderful dinner at Weber Grill as a whole team, with a little shopping before coming back to the plant.

We thank you all. We sure couldn’t and wouldn’t do this without our wonderful customers and fantastic employees. We added some wonderful new team members, promoted some internal positions and made huge changes in our production to streamline our stock program. And of course, we had some fun along the way.

2025 is going to be the biggest year yet. We have a huge surprise for you hopefully this summer that could really be a game changer in the heavy equipment world. Stay tuned!