Our Story
With this being the initial blog post, I thought it may be fitting to tell the story of how Doerr Motor and Pump came to life. As we continue to grow and accomplish new goals every year, I often stop and think about the grind of starting with nothing but an idea. My hope is that one day I will look at today and say "at least we don't have to do it like that anymore". I hope this story motivates those who are in the place we were, and I hope it shows our customers that we are willing to do whatever it takes to achieve success.
Like many people in the electric motor industry, I did not wake up one day and say "I think I would like to rewind electric motors". Like many people, I went to college, got a job, didn't like it, and ended up an apprentice winder. I jumped ship mostly for the pay and befits, but I also had an extensive family history in the trade. I also went to the shop were a lot of family worked at or formerly worked at. Now, you don't go to school to learn winding. There are none that I know of. You have to learn it from an old guy who is willing to teach you. They tossed me right in and before too long, I was rewinding small motors to put into stock. Then I moved to smaller customer jobs, and within a year I was the only winder in the shop. I can recall doing anything from fractional HP electric motors all the way up to 500HP electric motors. I also spent a lot of time rebuilding motors, vacuum pumps, gearboxes, and other specialty equipment. I really wanted to learn every aspect of the shop that they would allow me to learn.
The shop experienced its fair share of setbacks in my time there. The whole shop flooded 4 feet deep in water in a 100 year flood, many large customers disappeared, and the owner was disinterested in the business. Those are all stories for another day. But I will say I learned about how to run a motor shop with nothing during the flood recovery. I also learned a lot about how to not run a shop. In the years after that, things progressively got worse and I started spending a lot of time being laid of, abruptly coming back, then getting laid off again. This eventually drove me to take a job as an industrial firefighter, in which I had the qualifications to do thanks to being a volunteer firefighter/EMT. This was a key component to my transition to starting my own shop.
There was always talk around the shop of buying out the owner, or becoming employee owned. I liked the idea, I always wanted to own a business, but I had nothing to offer but my work ethic. They were talking about each of us spending 10's of thousands of dollars each for a failing business. I ended up writing that off and just telling myself if it is mean to be it will happen. Right about that time Bill Davis called. Bill Davis owned a small motor shop in South Peoria. he worked on small HVAC motors and appliance type stuff. We used to help Bill from time to time, removing stuck bearings that he couldn't get and things like that. My dad went down and changed light bulbs in his shop once. He called and said he was retiring and wanted to know if we wanted anything that he had. We knew the business had been for sale but he was ready to be done. My dad and I went down there to look around. There was not a lot there that we felt we needed. It was then that Bill said "why don't you just buy the whole thing". His price was low but the building was old, a lot of work would have to be done. I decided this was an opportunity that we should take. We pooled together everything we could to buy the building.
I did not immediately open for business. We sat on the building and continued to work. We would go down on nights and weekends to clean up the building. Bill Davis had decades worth of old parts scattered all through the building in an order that only he would know. I remember taking six truck loads to the scrap yard and feeling like I did not make a dent. Eventually it was mostly cleaned out, and we had sold some of the old equipment that was in there to antique collectors. While we were there, people would show up and bring motors for us to fix. We started helping those customers out as much as we could. It become so frequent that it had turned into a part time job. Then, word got out to the wrong people.
One day I got a call from my dad. He said we had both been fired and we had to remove all of our belongings by the end of the day. Our coworkers found out we had bought the building and that was grounds for termination. That was a bad experience because everyone who we had worked with for years now hated us. I went against the tide and did my own thing, which I will never regret doing. In a way that gave me the fuel to pour into this. I now had something to prove. That night I registered Doerr Motor and Pump LLC and we were open for business.
We had only the equipment that Bill Davis left behind. Mostly homemade stuff. The winding machine was made from parts from a sewing machine, a drill press and a lathe, the oven was a metal box with a heating element in it, the burn off oven was a metal box with an old cast iron burner in the bottom. We had no testing equipment. His test was "plug it in and see if it works". I called around and I was able to secure some jobs from some companies that knew my work personally. I was able to keep the lights on, but I had to work my firefighting job to make it work. During this time I worked basically non stop. I would put 40 hours in at the shop and 48 hours in working nights. I worked a lot of 24 and 36 hour days throughout the next year.
I invested every dollar the shop made back into the business. Buying used broken equipment and rebuilding it. I bought a 1968 Potter and Rayfield winding machine and totally restored it. That is the main machine we use today. I bought a balancing machine and various testing equipment from our former shop's bankruptcy auction. I bought a Bayco burn off oven from a shop in Ohio that had a fire, and rebuild it. I bought a steam cleaner that did not work and rebuilt it. I bought a 1970's forklift from a junk yard, got it running and fixed all the leaks it had. Our first truck was a 1986 Ford F350 flatbed with an inline 6 and 4 speed manual. It would not go any faster than 55, and it gave you a concussion every time you drove it because of how bad it shook at high speed. Very slowly, I was able to upgrade things. It was important that I do it all in cash to lower the risk.
This did not happen over night. This was the result of several years of working non stop for little to no reward. It was important that we just kept going, no matter how tired we were and no matter what we had to do to get the jobs done. it had to be done. Things are a little easier now and we are as equipped as we need to be, but there is still much to do. Stay tuned for much more to come.