Some shop owners work their way up from the shop floor. Chris Basgall arrived from the opposite direction. Before buying Catamount Machine Works, he spent decades leading IT, operations, and large-scale transformation inside one of the world's biggest telecommunications companies, serving 350 million customers across continents. Then he walked away from corporate life, moved his family to Florida, and bought a 15-person machine shop with paper travelers, scattered data, and a tech stack that hadn't changed much in years.

Chris didn't choose Catamount for what it was. He chose it for what it could be. He came in with a 3, 5, and 10-year plan built around three pillars: advanced technology, smart automation, and rigorous certification. Over the next few years, that strategy became reality. Catamount migrated from clipboards to servers, from manual workflows to digital structure, from three-axis machines to three-plus-two automation cells, and from scattered documentation to ITAR-compliant, audit-ready systems. They added robots, upgraded Mastercam, implemented High QA, achieved AS9100 and CMMC 2.0 compliance, and positioned themselves for the aerospace work they knew they could win.

But the biggest shift came from adopting ProShop and building a fully interconnected architecture. Estimates flowed cleanly into parts, quotes, and work orders. Inspectors worked inside a single source of truth. FAIs became a one-click process. And the shop finally had the operational backbone it needed to support complex assemblies, dense specs, and multi-system data flow without drowning in rework or duplicate effort.

Today, Catamount runs fewer people than when Chris bought it, yet they produce more, respond faster, and scale smarter. They've added multiple aerospace customers, landed significant prototype work headed for production, and have built a foundation capable of supporting explosive growth in 2026 and beyond.

This episode isn't just about technology adoption. It's about what happens when a small shop embraces enterprise-level thinking, builds systems before scaling, and gets every person aligned behind a clear, communicated vision of the future.

LinkedIn - Chris Basgall: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbasgall/

Catamount Machine Works: https://catmw.com/

Audio and Video Production and Show Notes by - PODCAST FAST TRACK