INDEPENDENT ADVICE FOR PRECISION MANUFACTURING
Find what matters
Where a technology can win, what a market entry will really take, why a good process is losing money, how a part should be made and by whom, and whether an asset can do what the thesis says.
Most advice in this industry comes with a stake attached. The process vendor recommends their process. The rep firm steers work to the plants that pay them. The market study arrives from an analyst who has never run a shop floor.
I own no plant, represent no process, and take no commission on where the work lands. What I sell is judgment: forty years operating precision-components businesses on three continents, applied to one question — what’s the salient point here, and what do you do about it?
I own a technology or process.
Is there a business in it — and which market do we enter first?
→ Commercialization Assessment
02I run a manufacturing company.
We’re entering a new market — or a process that should be making money isn’t.
→ Market Entry Planning / Process Assessment & Recovery
03I need parts made — better, cheaper, or somewhere new.
What’s the right process for this platform — and who should make it?
→ Process & Sourcing Strategy
04I’m buying, investing, or diligencing.
Can this asset really do what the CIM says it can?
→ Transaction Support
How I work
Every engagement starts with an assessment — bounded, fixed-scope, ending in findings you can act on with or without me. Most engagements end there. That’s by design: you can’t credibly promise to open doors in a market before you’ve established the client can win there.
When the opportunity justifies it, I stay on — introductions, first customer meetings, coaching your commercial team until there’s a real program in the funnel. You stay in command.
THE RECORD
- 01Founding team member at one of America’s first MIM companies
- 02Led the planning and execution of a greenfield MIM operation in India — then returned as President years later, growing the business into the world’s largest metal injection molder
- 03Past President, Metal Injection Molding Association
- 04Stood up certified aerospace, medical, and automotive operations from zero on three continents
- 05Planned the pilot facility for an MIT deep-tech spin-out
John Gaspervich
Founder, Salient Industrial
ABOUT
Forty years of finding the point.
I started in metal injection molding when it barely existed as an industry — a founding team member at one of the first American MIM companies. Everything since has been variations on one job: put real production capability where it doesn’t exist yet, and say plainly what it will take.
One of Japan’s major metals companies was lagging behind on MIM production experience, so they did a joint venture to get it. I trained their engineers at our US plant, then spent six months in Japan helping their MIM facility run. What I brought home mattered more than what I taught: Kaizen, Six Sigma learned at the source — as the way a plant is run, not a certificate on a wall.
I left to stand up and run a captive MIM operation for an automotive manufacturer in Florida. When the company where I’d started needed someone to carry MIM to India, they called me back. I helped hire the original team, ran their year of training in the US, helped design and commission the India facility, and stayed until the first production parts shipped.
Years later its owner asked me to run the company. I said no — and took West Coast sales for them instead. A few years of selling taught me the real problem: they couldn’t make what the market was asking for. When he asked again, I took the presidency knowing exactly what the job was — close the gap between what the market wanted and what the plant could do. We started with the engineers: every one of them through Six Sigma, green belt or black, wired into onboarding so it stuck. The discipline Japan taught me, installed in India. On that foundation: revenue up more than 400%, an aerospace division certified to AS9100C, NADCAP, and a Pratt & Whitney approval in eighteen months, a medical cleanroom that turned a $100K investment into $14M in contracts, and $100M of adjacent business built from scratch. By the time I moved on, the company I’d once declined to run was the largest metal injection molder in the world.
In between and after: I ran a metal matrix composites group making electronic packages for the F-35, fixed a money-losing magnesium Thixomolding division by fixing the machines instead of the org chart, planned the pilot facility for an MIT deep-tech spin-out, and advised manufacturers on three continents — including a European investment caster that wanted an honest answer about whether MIM was worth entering and what a facility would really cost.
The pattern, if there is one: whenever someone needed metal-forming knowledge moved to a place it didn’t exist — a Japanese joint venture, a Florida startup, an Indian greenfield, a European foundry, an MIT spin-off startup — they sent for me. This practice makes that a service instead of a favor.
The name. In plain English, the salient point is the one that matters. In military usage, a salient is the part of the line that projects forward into ground you don’t yet hold. Both are the job.
I take a small number of engagements at a time, and I’ll tell you in the first conversation whether yours should be one of them.