I run a calibration company.

Almost everything manufactured: engine parts, medical devices, the aluminum in an airplane, gets measured on its way to existing. The instruments doing the measuring drift. A gauge that read true in January reads a little wrong by June, and nobody can see it by looking.

That's where we come in. Most of the time, we go to the customer. A tech shows up with the standards, tests the instruments where they live, corrects what's off, and leaves a certificate that says: you can trust this reading, and here's the proof. On a schedule, we come back and do it again. Some work comes into our lab in North Haven instead. Either way, it's not glamorous. It's the reason the parts fit.

When I took the company over in 2019, it was 100% onsite. That was the business my uncle ran out of the back of a vehicle, and it was a good business. Building the lab didn't replace the field, it gave us another way to serve. Today roughly three-quarters of the work is still onsite, the rest comes through the lab, and the lab share is growing on purpose. The spine is still showing up where the instruments are.

We live in the ISO 17025 world, the accreditation standard for calibration labs. In plain English: auditors show up and test whether we're as precise as we claim to be. Most businesses get to round up. Mine doesn't. I picked an industry where the product is literally trust, measured to the decimal. For the kid who ironed his money flat, this is the correct industry.

I didn't found Custom Calibration from zero, and I didn't grow up in this industry either. In January 2017 I joined my uncle's calibration business, brand new to the trade, and spent two years learning beside him, traveling from customer to customer: the instruments, the customers, the business. He was an owner-operator out of East Falmouth, Massachusetts, one man, working out of the back of his vehicle, a great business, customers he treated extremely well and who were happy to say so. It didn't need rescuing. It needed a home and scale.

In 2019 I took over and brought the company from East Falmouth, Massachusetts, to North Haven, Connecticut. I started out of the back of my car and my basement, still onsite, still in the field. In 2023 I moved into the lab I'd built out. I grew what he built 5×, past $1 million a year, and the customers stayed happy.

What I brought with me wasn't calibration experience, it was the empty desk, the docking station I grabbed myself, the title I worked my way into without asking permission. That story is on the story page. The short version: I'd already proven I could learn a business from the inside. This time I learned it standing next to the man who built it.

Because most of our work is onsite, the operation lives and dies on the schedule. Who goes where. When we said we'd be there. Whether the right standards are in the truck. A customer waiting on an onsite visit has a hole in their day the same way a customer with a gauge in my building has a hole in their line, the promise is still the date we gave them. Miss the routing and you don't have a calibration problem. You have a trust problem.

The lab is the smaller slice, and it has its own discipline. Inside the building I run FIFO: first in, first out. The oldest job gets worked next. Not the loudest customer. Not the easiest ticket. The moment you start playing favorites with that queue, turnaround stops being a fact and becomes a negotiation. FIFO isn't the whole company. For the work that comes through the lab, it's non-negotiable.

The numbers I watch before 7am are almost boring: revenue pace against the month, receivables aging, the day's onsite schedule, and the FIFO board for what's in-house against the turnaround we promised. Four numbers, every day. I wrote up the exact routine in the first post below.

And the part that outweighs every number: I have employees who count on me. Payroll is a moral document. There was a version of me nobody would have trusted with a twenty-dollar bill, and now people plan their lives around this company holding. I never get casual about that.

I'll say it directly, because coded ambition is just insecurity with better manners. My goal is for Custom Calibration to be one of the largest calibration companies in the Northeast, a place my uncle would be proud of, and a place my employees are proud to be part of. I check myself that the goal is ambition, not fear of leaving well enough alone. I want to grow the field and the lab. I want to acquire other companies to get there. I want to keep building what I learn into the next company, and the one after that.

Every post in this section is me showing the work toward that, in public, while it happens.

One more thing, said once: if you own a calibration company and you're starting to think about what's next for it, email me.