Founder & CEO Ed Brown of Topper Industrial, joins us again to discuss how COVID-19 has affected their company– not just for worse, but also for the better!
Danny:
Okay, welcome to today's IndustrialSage episode. I have Ed Brown who is the CEO and founder of Topper Industrial, a manufacturer in Wisconsin. Ed, thank you so much for joining me today.

Ed:
My pleasure. Good afternoon.

Danny:
Good afternoon. So Ed, real quick, just wanted to sit down and have a chat with you just to get an understanding of how you guys are handling the whole COVID situation, what things look like on your end, but before we get into that, I kind of want to set the scene. For those who aren't familiar with Topper, tell me what you guys do and where you guys are located specifically and all that good stuff.

Ed:
Well, thank you. Topper Industrial is a full-service steel fabricating company that about 20 years ago got involved in building industrial parts, and it's kind of taken over our life. Our company is decent sized. We have about a hundred employees right now. We're located about 20 miles south of Milwaukee, and we are one of, we consider us fortunate during this very difficult time. Not only has Topper not experienced any of the Coronavirus cases at our shop particularly, but even in our home community of Racine County, there's not been a major outbreak. So we're actually pretty lucky, and we're still up and running with some changes.

Danny:
Sure. All right, for those that want to know, we had an interview with you, and that was released, I don't know, probably a couple months ago, maybe January, February, so any viewers who'd like to go see that, we went in depth about, actually, a really interesting story about, was it your junior, your 11th grade or junior–

Ed:
Senior high school teacher.

Danny:
Senior high, yeah, so I don't want to spoil the story. They'll have to go watch that on the other episode, but I really enjoyed that. Okay, so you mentioned, you've obviously got some changes. What's going on in your neck of the woods?

Ed:
Well, to try to keep our operation as safe as possible, my son has taken the company, and we normally are a one shift operation, he's divided it into two. So about half of our people are on the second shift, and fortunately, I have two sons. One runs the second shift, one runs the first shift. We did that to keep our employees very far apart, probably 35 or 24 feet between all of my people working. We've rearranged our lunch room. We took out a bunch of tables, we put it down to 30 tables with one chair per table. And we split breaks. We split lunch so people are 15, 20 feet apart at all times. All of our office staff, except for a couple, we bought computers. Everybody's working at home. I'm working at home.
The day that the gang came into my office and handed me a new computer and said, "Go home. We don't want you here." I almost cried 'cause I'd never been kicked out of my company. But they said I'm 71 years old, and this corona stuff is bad on the older people. So they said, "We'd feel a lot better if you'd just go home." I thought it was going to be easier. It's harder. I don't have six fabulous designers at my disposal. I'm doing everything myself, and I'm not as good with a computer, although the last two weeks have been a learning experience, and here I'm operating with the famous Danny Gonzales all by myself. So we're making headway.

Danny:
Oh, you're making great headway. All that,