Tours de Force
The Weekly Report – January 26, 2026.
Manufacturers can build valuable relationships with elected officials by showing them their operations.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a manufacturing tour can be ten times that. During tours, legislators see that the non-descript buildings they regularly drive by are clean and well-lit, with engaged employees who use state-of-the-art advanced manufacturing equipment to create products used around the world.
This week we’ll join leaders at Scipi Companies in St. Cloud as they host State Senator Bobby Joe Champion (DFL-Minneapolis), who is president of the Minnesota Senate and chairs the Senate Committee on Jobs and Economic Development.
Scipi (formerly St. Cloud Industrial Products, Inc.) offers an ideal showcase of manufacturing for policymakers. Started by two childhood friends in 1959, Scipi now has nearly 300 employees across its family of companies, which includes North Central, Inc., Sunburst Memorials, Parts Midwest, and VPOC.
Scipi has been 100% employee-owned since 2014 and provides an outstanding example of a manufacturing workplace where employees are deeply engaged. We’re excited to add it to a long list of manufacturers that have opened their doors to elected officials to help increase understanding of manufacturing and the challenges it faces.
Tours play a critical role in helping elected officials understand manufacturing and the challenges it faces. While some manufacturers have met their legislators at local events, at church, or at a high school game, many elected officials still don’t fully understand how valuable their companies are to their constituents and communities. They often don’t understand how they operate.
The solution: invite them inside. As they talk with the owners and executives leading the tours, elected officials reach a new level of understanding of how valuable manufacturers are to their communities, often providing the best—and highest paying—jobs in town. They begin to build relationships with the legislators, who develop a growing understanding of the potential impact of their votes in the legislature.
We started inviting elected officials to tour our client companies years ago, and to date we’ve helped arrange more than 500 manufacturing tours for legislators, Congressional members and their staff, and local mayors, fellow manufacturers, and other business and economic development leaders.
We are particularly eager to connect with legislators who might seem like the least likely supporters. Often those folks simply haven’t had the opportunity to meet manufacturers and learn how valuable their companies are to constituents, their communities and the state’s economy.
The bottom line: tours work. There’s no better opportunity to show your elected officials who you are, what you produce, the great jobs you provide, and your impact on the community. When we help arrange tours, we always come along; we’ve seen the impact of these visits. It’s rare when policymakers don’t express surprise at the great things manufacturers are doing—right in their own districts.
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