Kenneth Statton, a third-generation machinist and tool builder, shared some advice Wednesday at the Tulsa Regional Chamber’s Manufacturers’ Council Meeting.

“If you always take the high road, if you always do what you say you are going to do, and you fall on your sword when you’re supposed to fall on your sword, the work will come to you,” he said.

Those words certainly have benefitted Statton.

MST Manufacturing, for which he serves as president, was recognized in September as 2024 Manufacturer of the Year by the Tulsa Small Business Awards, a program of the Tulsa Regional Chamber.

Wednesday, Statton was part of a panel discussion on innovation led by Council Chair Colin Jones and featuring Amy Skeans, plant manager of Milo’s Tea Company, and Doug Sullivent, CEO of Muncie Power Products.

About 40 people attended the event, which was sponsored by Greenheck Group and held at McElroy Manufacturing’s campus in Broken Arrow.

Statton said he and his son rebranded MST about seven years ago with $16,000 in the bank. This year, the company crossed the $30 million revenue mark. MST is pre-booked with business until 2031, representing about a $405 million backlog, he said.

“Not too bad for a little Claremore machine shop,” Statton said.

Embracing automation has been key, he said.

“Now, we can go home at night, and I can look at one of the 65 cameras on my campus and I see parts running,” Statton said. “In some instances, parts are being run and checked through an automated process. It’s pretty fascinating, right?”

Milo’s, an Alabama-based maker of all-natural, fresh-brewed teas and lemonade, built a facility near Owasso in 2020.

“We all know that innovation comes from people,” Skeans said. “It’s their imagination, it’s their ideas. It’s having an open environment that fosters that.

“Hiring remarkable people takes a lot of effort. We’re filling with remarkable people versus filling numbers to meet staffing needs.”

Muncie recently moved into a roughly 200,000-square-foot facility at Peoria-Mohawk Business Park. It will be the Indiana-based company’s primary manufacturing plant for the making and assembling of power take-offs and other hydraulic components for work trucks.

Sullivent said maintaining an innovative culture means giving employees the freedom to better their work environment.

“I’ve seen some really boneheaded ideas,” he said. “Some of them came from me. But I’ve seen some great ideas that all of a sudden, out of nowhere, allow the company to realize thousand-dollar savings on just a simple little change, a simple movement of the machine tool or a redesign of the assembly line.”

The Chamber sponsors bi-monthly meetings of the Manufacturers’ Council, which convenes Chamber-member manufacturers for networking and discussion on issues impacting their companies and the sector. For more information about the Manufacturers’ Council, please contact Brien Thorstenberg, the Chamber’s vice president of economic development, at 918-560-0231.