skidsteer Archives - SHIELDS® Windshields Blog

2024 – A year we will not soon forget!

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!

THIS IS SHIELDS® Windshields: Creating solutions for businesses, big and small

What does it take to be the best? With 2023 being a record-setting year, SHIELDS® Windshields has proven its vision and core values are continuing to push the company in the right direction – and 2024 has the potential to be even better.

It starts with having a great product that serves more than one purpose. Safety is always a huge benefit, but not to be underestimated is the financial impact of keeping machines in operation and reducing downtime.

This is the third in a series of conversations hosted by Tim Surber about how the business took shape and grew over the past four and a half decades. Second-generation family member and President, Brad Shields, sat down with his daughter, Director Alyxa McKee, during a podcast where they discuss the company’s year and outlook.

https://www.shieldswindshields.blog/this-is-shields-windshields-how-it-all-began/

The big reveal

After receiving form-fit-function approval, SHIELDS® recently rolled out a new window for the Wirtgen Reclaimer. (It’s pronounced “Virtgen”) The company is excited about offering both the door and windshield for this incredible machine.

President Brad Shields explains the importance of it.

“It’s an amazing machine. Everyone’s seen it but you have no idea what it does. It looks like something from the Star Wars movies. It’s really large. It basically drives on the old road and chews it up, sifts through it and spits it out. Some of it is reusable material, so it’s almost like recycling.

“They’re almost like the cartoon world, the Jetson world, where you’d see it chopped up and the road laid right down. It’s amazing and an amazing machine.”

The Reclaimer will benefit greatly from having windows that can stand up to the rigors of working on the road.

The Wirtgen Reclaimer

https://www.wirtgen-group.com/ocs/en-us/wirtgen/wr-250i-88-p/

The benefit of a SHIELDS® window

Safety is always a prominent concern for every window the company produces, but it’s not the only one. Brad explained the different considerations of having a work stoppage and why SHIELDS® puts its windows on machines that aren’t necessitated because of safety.

“Any time glass breaks, there’s a potential for something bad to happen to the operator or someone nearby. But that’s not the one driving this – it’s the harmonics of vibration of this machine.

“But the glass is going to break. It could break on the way to the job site. You’re going to get all kinds of fragments coming up hitting it. Not enough to need a forestry package, but when that window breaks, that machine is done until it gets a replacement – and you’re replacing it on the site. You’re not pulling that thing back to the shop.”

Production has now stopped, and everyone sits there, waiting to get back to work. Expenses mount while deadlines are compromised – and that’s the SHIELDS® focus – to keep you safe and on time.

“Safety is first and we want to keep you on time. We also want better performance. There’s a lot more to it than just ‘this doesn’t break’,” Brad said.

This window is now available for purchase in the company’s growing list of offerings.

How to buy: https://www.shieldswindshields.store/

SHIELDS® has record-setting year

Because of the industry taking note of the benefits of a SHIELDS® window, the company enjoyed a record-setting year.

Director of Operations, Alyx McKee, reviewed the highlights.

“Based on your (Brad’s) tracking, we had eight record months. October was the best month in the company’s history – in sales, as well as volume. None of that usually happens within the same month. So, incredible. Our growth has been tremendous.

“There’s a lot of records, a lot of growth, a lot of change – an exhausting year. But we’re just getting started – and I had a baby in the middle of all that.

“One of the bigger things I was pumped about was that we shipped 20,244 parts last year, which was an eight percent increase in our throughput from the previous year. Our growth has been tremendous,” Alyx shared.

Brad concurred.

“As I mentioned at the company holiday dinner, my proudest thing about that is more than 20,000 operators are staying on time and going home safe – and that’s 20,000 minimum.

“It’s the start of the impact that we can be an integral partner in the world of construction. To not only help them stay safe but stay on time and be a better business.”

https://www.shieldswindshields.blog/this-is-shields-windshields-building-within-the-framework-of-community/

SHIELDS® Creating solutions

With the increase in exposure, customers are finding out just how good the windows really are, and they perform as advertised.

In addition to a good marketing plan and business strategy, word of mouth is still one of the best strategies for growth, and SHIELDS® has seen its profile increase within the business community as customers test out the company’s products and share about their experiences.

With an expanded reach has come increased opportunities. SHIELDS® growth as a company has come in both the window market, as well as businesses finding uses for polycarbonate with SUPERCOAT™. The company’s market share has increased dramatically in both areas.

But the goal moving forward is still the same.

Win the window world.

Brad shared his vision for what the company is looking for in 2024 and beyond.

“I’m not competing against the polycarbonate market. I’m not badmouthing anyone else making it. But they don’t do what we do. They certainly don’t do it how we do it.

“I’m after the window world; I’m not after looking to make the next cheapest widget. I’m not trying to do something that’s a quick sale in the sense of let’s just get it done. No, these are solutions, and that’s what we want.”

SHIELDS has record-setting year

A place for the individual contractor

Dominating the market involves more than appealing to big businesses. It means keeping the individual contractor in mind as well.

Brad’s passion continues to be to meet the needs of every sized business.

“I’m romantically still attached more to our individual’s retail, the men and women that work every day. I’d like to take my truck (which is the baddest ass truck on the planet!) and go door-to-door to self-contractors. I still like walking up to construction sites and talking to the workers and seeing their reaction to our windows.”

https://www.shieldswindshields.blog/we-found-a-fraud-website/

Values driving the business, record-setting pace

The company’s multi-faceted approach to becoming the leader in formed and post-coated polycarbonate will also happen because of the vision guiding the process.

Alyx is excited about the SHIELDS® team embodying the company’s mission statement and core values.

“It is our core values that we embody that will empower us to become the world leader.”

Integrity.

Innovation.

Intention.

Those words will be unpacked in days to come, but are the key ingredients to the future of the company’s mission and goals.

The bottom line for SHIELDS®

Brad sums up the business in a nutshell, “If you don’t have the best product, everything else you do is a waste of time. If you have the best product, your marketing is not done, but it’s there.

Alyx concurred.

“We educate, we don’t sell. It goes hand in hand. There is no scheme.”

Contact information

To learn more about shields and our commitment to windshields with performance proven toughness, visit shieldswindshields.com.

For any inquiries or to explore our range of products, call 1-800-554-7527, text us at 765-913-8121 or email info@shieldswindshields.com.

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