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If you ask Tom Haas how he’d describe the various departments within Univex, he doesn’t hesitate: “front of the house and back of the house; just like a restaurant.” Out front, the world sees the finished product. Back here, it’s Tom, Shawn LaJoice, and Craig Gagnon: the small crew making sure everything comes together before a machine ever ships. With Craig in the middle, Tom and Shawn dive into what their day-to-day.  Two people who work almost entirely independently have quietly become each other’s right hand.

Tom Haas, Plant Manager: 42 Years and Counting

     Tom has been at Univex since 1984, back when the plant ran two shifts. He vividly remembers a time where Univex was, in his words “a full house”.  That was when the team was really a full house and the market for commercial restaurant equipment was much more condensed.  Starting in the stockroom and working his way through shipping, receiving, and production control, Tom found himself on the shop floor before landing in the role he holds today.

     Ask him what he actually does, the honest answer is a little bit of everything. “I pretty much work with everybody here,” he says. Team leads, department heads, whoever walks through the door with a question: Tom is who Operations, Assembly, and the Machine Shop all go to when they need to keep the day moving. He jokes that his office works a bit like a therapist’s couch: people come in, talk through whatever’s going on, and leave with a plan.

     Forty-two years in, Tom’s seen the business change shape more than once. The market has gotten more crowded since the ’80s.  The team has gotten leaner, yet, the volume of work hasn’t dropped off. If anything, the pandemic proved just how resilient the operation is: Univex never missed a beat, running full tilt while demand stayed strong.

     What keeps him energized after four decades isn’t any single project. It’s the problem-solving itself. “It’s always a bit of a mess,” he says with a laugh, “but working through the issues and getting to a solution, that’s the fun part.” His favorite piece of equipment on the production side is the Prep Mate, an older machine that’s earned its keep through sheer longevity and steady demand.

     Tom keeps things simple. He’s seen the good times and the hard times. He’s watched the company evolve to what it is today, “I’ve enjoyed it all,” he says. “It’s a good place to work.”

Shawn LaJoice, Purchasing: The Right-Hand Man

     Shawn just marked three years at Univex, a milestone that snuck up unexpectedly, since it feels like he’s been here much longer. As the purchasing manager, Shawn is responsible for essentially everything that physically enters the building: parts and components for our production and assembly teams, tools, supplies, and machinery for the floor.  If it isn’t a pen or a piece of copy paper, it goes through Shawn.

     The job is equal parts negotiation and firefighting. On any given day, Shawn might be chasing down a supplier over a late shipment, running a bill of materials for sales to check whether a large order can be filled on time, or untangling a quality issue.  Shaun recalls the time a batch of custom castings for a rotary plate came in defective and needed to be replaced fast to keep production moving. He runs inventory reports daily, sometimes more, especially when a part is in high demand.

Where They Come Together

     None of that happens without Tom in the loop. When Tom releases a build and spots a shortage, Shawn is the first to be flagged. When Shawn hits a quality question he can’t resolve on his own, Tom is the one he leans on for a judgment call. Because Tom sits closer to the sales side of the business, he’s often the one giving Shawn a heads-up that a big order is coming down the pipe, buying Shawn precious lead time. “I’m his right-hand man,” Shawn says. “If there’s a shortage, or he just needs to know how long something’s going to take, I’m the one he comes to.”

     Despite how tightly their work is linked, Shawn describes his day-to-day as fairly solitary, a “one-man band” when it comes to purchasing itself. Shawn and Tom’s open-door policy allows for minute-by-minute collaboration.

     Shawn’s favorite way to describe what he buys has nothing to do with spreadsheets: “Anyone who’s been to a Domino’s and seen the machine spinning dough in the kitchen, that’s the kind of equipment I buy.” It’s a small detail, but it’s clearly one he enjoys, a rare moment where the abstract world of purchase orders turns into something everyone’s actually experienced, either using the equipment or enjoying the pizza it makes.

     Shawn got the same closing question we’ve asked every manager, what he’d want people to know if Univex shut down tomorrow. His first instinct was to think about what might have gone wrong on his end. But he landed somewhere more generous: he genuinely cares about the company’s success, takes pride in negotiating better prices to keep Univex competitive, and measures his own wins by how much they help keep everyone else working. “I like to lift people up,” he says. “That’s where I get my motivation from.”

The Unsung Third Piece: Craig

     No conversation about the back of the house is complete without Craig, Univex’s inventory manager. Tom and Shawn were quick to point out just how much the operation leans on him.

     When parts come in the door, Craig’s the one who puts them away, manages them in the system, and keeps the stockroom straight. When an order gets released, he’s the one pulling the parts together, kitting them onto a cart, and getting them out to the floor, then handling the transactions that keep inventory accurate. He does the same on the outbound side, assembling and shipping parts orders as they come through. Shawn relies on inventory counts being correct more than almost anyone. He puts it simply: when something in the system doesn’t look right, Craig is who he calls to go count it by hand. “He’s just a walking database,” Shawn says. “I think he’s got a much more important role than me.”

     Although Craig prefers to stay behind-the-scenes, he’s very much part of why the back of the house works.

 Independent, But Never Really Apart

     Tom and Shawn operate almost entirely on their own: different rhythms and different responsibilities. Yet neither one’s job would function without the other, and both would tell you the same is true of Craig. Tom depends on Shawn to turn a flagged shortage into parts on a shelf; Shawn depends on Tom to know what’s coming before it becomes an emergency; and they both depend on Craig to make sure the shelves are accurate. Their partnership runs on trust more than process, the kind that only comes from decades of proving you’ll show up when it counts.