Meet Danny West of West Industries in Miramar

Today we’d like to introduce you to Danny West.

Danny, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Following grad night of my 1979 graduation of my senior year in Thousand Oaks High School, I drove to Point Loma San Diego to live with my Father. I had been accepted into UCSD in the pursuit of a career in electronic engineering. It was there I was impassioned with computer programming, and molecular biology but something was missing. I had a craving to create along with the need to be free to choose my own way. College was regimented, structured that clashed with the very nature of my being.

I had grown up in a family of entrepreneurs, my siblings and I had always been knocking on doors to collect bottles, weed the neighbor’s yards, sell holiday cards, and a host of activities that generated the seasonal holiday gifts under the hanuka bush, I bought my bicycles, guitars and my cars. Those early entrepreneurial experiences led to the opening of the “VCR Hospital,” a small chain of VCR repair locations in San Diego that helped pay for my loan free UCSD tuition.

One day, I was visiting one of my VCR Hospital locations in San Diego and I met a local entrepreneur whose VCR we had just repaired. He was ecstatic; the previous repair shop made a bowl of spaghetti out of his VCR. The gentleman had coincidentally been looking for someone to assemble a handful of electronic devices. I promptly suggested I could get the job done. I helped him get the 1st batch assembled within a week and then two weeks later he returned with a huge box of parts. I began to offer jobs to the personnel in the lab I was doing my masters in at UCSD. Shortly thereafter, I was faced with a dilemma; should I continue to work in the lab for free for the next 4 years after obtaining my Masters, or, build a company that could fuel my real passions of having a manufacturing company where I could be creative and play a more controlling role in my future?

Needless to say, that one assembly request turned into a manufacturing company, West Industries, LLC. 10 assemblies grew to 5000 per month and on to a multitude of new products to be developed and assembled by my company. We were growing rapidly but there was a serious concern, I only had one client and if you have one client and they get a cold, you get pneumonia. Sure enough, that unwanted, fateful day arrived, I was told to stop all productions until further notice. Apparently, there were financial problems at the root and everything was in jeopardy with our only client. I recall pacing back and forth in a newly purchased condominium garage, thinking, how am I going to pay the mortgage. I realized I needed more clients to solve the problem so I hit the payment and picked up another client, then another and another. We adapted to the circumstances and the patient was off the operating table, we were thriving again but this time we had a growing client base.

One of the greatest opportunities and personal achievements I can recall came one Saturday with an engineer from Northrop Grumman. He had searched for fabricators in the area and saw our sign. He was beyond desperate to get a set of parts fabricated in a short time. After processing a few legal documents, I began to fabricate the parts using my CNC machines into the night, on through Sunday. The following Monday morning I had the parts ready and he took them away back to his team. A week later, I was asked to make a few more parts. It went on like this for several weeks until one day, I was asked to come in to Northrop Grumman for a meeting to discuss my fate as a potential approved vendor. Apparently, Northrop Grumman was engaged in a hot project with the government and they needed numerous copies of the prototypes I had been working on but due to the cost of the program it would have to go through an approved vendor. The challenge was, there was no time, the government was not in a position to wait the average 8 to 12 weeks the approved vendors were quoting to complete the list of parts. Since I had everything already developed; tooling and know-how I was well positioned to start a production quickly.

I drove up to Northop Grumman’s offices at Mt. Carmel. I was nervous as I was led into a room with an extended conference table seated with at least 20 officials involved with the escalating project. I recall the questions were direct and the meeting seemed like a lifetime.

There were many quality assurance stipulations to resolve but in a nut-shell, when I left I was grandfathered in as an approved vendor with a list of parts that were subsequently delivered in 4 weeks,

I am proud to share it has now been 9 years and we now are an ISO9001:2008 soon to be ISO9001:2015 manufacturing company in San Diego. We have 4 CNC Mills and a CNC lathe. Our latest service is laser etching and marking. And would you believe it, my very 1st client is still with us and has since regrouped and coming back strong. I am truly a kid in a candy store; I thoroughly love what I am doing.

Please tell us about West Industries.
We have an average of 5 fulltime employees and at times we have up to 8 full and part-time employees. We specialize in CNC fabricated small parts, plastic and metal. We are small and yet agile and quite capable, we can often maneuver more quickly than large companies.

We recently added laser etching and marking to our list of services and are known for our rapid expediting capabilities.

Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
When I turned 5, my mother gave me a pony, Fawn. She gave it to me very early in the morning in our kitchen of all places, while 1/2 asleep, she had put me on it. Apparently, I went back to sleep and when I woke I told my mother of a dream I had, that I got a pony for my birthday… She showed me the pony and I was wide-eyed with a smile cheek to cheek, elated it was not a dream.

Contact Info:

• Address: 7949 Silverton Ave unit 924
• Website: www.west-industries.com
• Phone: 8585787881
• Email: danny@west-industries.com
• Instagram: West Industries, LLC
• Facebook: West Industries, LLC
• Twitter: West Industries, LLC
• Yelp: West Industries, LLC

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