When the recession hit during the early 2000s, Michael Garvey left his fast-paced life trading equities on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to help save the “family farm,” a bronze foundry in Youngstown, Ohio.

Garvey said his parents and many other manufacturers got caught in the “perfect storm” that led to the implosion of the former heavy industrial belt, or rust belt along the Cleveland-Pittsburgh corridor. He worked hard to restore the manufacturing base that had been his family’s business for almost 100 years but never forgot the pressures that his dad had internalized as he struggled to save the business. “I committed to myself that I would never get myself into that situation,” Garvey says.

Garvey spearheaded a 15-year “phoenix activity” to build a new manufacturing company, M-7 Technologies, an engineering, manufacturing, and research organization. “I wanted to make sure that I created as sustainable a business model as possible,” he says, and read dozens of books and hundreds of articles in Harvard Business Review, Industry Week, and The Wall Street Journal, among other journals and industry research.

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