Taking care of business

Chamber has plan to keep Hutto companies in Hutto

Francisco Perez brought his machining business to Hutto 10 years ago for a number of reasons. Now, the Hutto Area Chamber of Commerce wants to make sure he stays and that he has everything he needs to do that.

And to do that chamber president Tom Britton has been making personal business calls to the top 20 businesses in Hutto to find out what it will take: what brought companies to Hutto, what keeps them here and what they need to stay.

“We want to open up lines of communications between the businesses and the city, the county, the school districts,” Britton said.

With just a pen, a list of questions and awareness of the area and the company he’s visiting, Britton has been able to determine a number of needs for PereDel Precision Machining: better lighting in the industrial park his building is in and better law enforcement patrol to protect his company and equipment.

But with that same list of questions, Britton has learned much more: that Perez has built his business from a leased, 1,700 square foot building to owning his own 10,000 square foot building; that the toll road has cut Perez’s commute to work in half and that some of Perez’s employees have been with him from Day 1.

He’s also learned what drive’s Perez’s business: customers.

“Our work is done right and on time,” Perez said. “That’s the name of the game. If you don’t do that, customers go somewhere else.”

PereDel’s motto is: Our customers are our business.

Right and on time means different things for different businesses, but for Peredel, it could be as small as 1/100th of a millimeter and as quickly as only a few days turnaround, or as much as 10 feet and months of work.

Peredel provides a number of precision machining, engineering, computer aided drafting and tuning jobs across the state and the world. With customers in Dallas, Houston and overseas, the work Perez, his brother Manuel and his staff do is used for a multitude of industries: medical, industrial, oil, racing and even music. The tiniest piece of machined metal in Perez’s shop could fit on the tip of a ball point pen and goes somewhere inside the human body.

Being in Hutto is part of why PereDel has been in business for as long as it has been and why it is still growing.

“When we first started, we were in a small building. 1,700 square feet. We had one machine,” Perez said. “Now, we bought this building, we have 23 machines. Last year was slow, but already this year looks very, very good.”

Perez and his wife, Martha, said Hutto has been a wise choice for the two, who live in Georgetown. The toll road brings business practically to their doorstep, allows them to send out products faster and will bring growth that will help them continue to prosper.

Hutto has allowed them to purchase their own building, save money and time they would have lost in bigger cities like Austin or Round Rock and gives them the small, community feel they like working in.

And while they do have a hard time finding skilled machinists when big jobs require the extra hands, that’s where the Chamber comes in.

“We have identified PereDel as one of the Top 20 businesses in Hutto and we want to find out how we can keep them here,” Britton said. “Too often companies leave and when we ask them why, there are all these things. If they had told us, maybe we could have helped.”

So helping is what the Chamber is doing, though PereDel needs very little help.

The company is on pace to remaining a top business in Hutto, and with its hands in more than seven industries and space, skill and machinery to do the job, business is looking good.

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