How I Made It: Allison Giddens, Co-President of Win-Tech

Allison Giddens is on the forefront of CMMC regulations, and has attended meetings at the Pentagon where she advocates for small businesses amid representatives from large defense companies.

It was kind of an accident that I stumbled upon manufacturing. I was working for a big media company right out of college, and I enjoyed the time there. I had no real qualms about where my career was headed, but then I got passed up for a promotion.

So I had pet sat for Dennis Winslow, who was the owner of Win-Tech at the time. And so I called him and said, “I want to come work for you.”

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I sat across from Dennis and he said, “You can answer some phones and file some papers and learn a little bit here and there.” And he slid a number across the table to me and it was 30% less than what I was making.

Dennis had said on his way out the door, “I know it's not what you had your heart set on money-wise, but if you trust me, I think you could run the place one day.”

I ended up on the shop floor for a few weeks with three different journeyman machinists as they were creating a collet holder for the manual mill department. I had no idea what I was doing. But those men were so kind to me. Because they were welcoming and willing to teach me things, I think that was part of what kept me falling in a slow love with manufacturing.

By about 2018, my now business partner, John, and I walked into Dennis's office and said, “We've got all these grand ideas and we want to institute this and that.” Dennis sat back and he said, “Starting Monday, you two run the place for a year.”

Allison Giddens and her co-president, John, split their responsibilities for Win-Tech. While John handles the shop floor, Giddens handles the front office and ensures the shop stays in compliance with its requirements. This delegation has enabled her to prepare the shop for CMMC.

We make a very good team because right from the get-go, we established if anything is on the shop floor and we don't agree with it, it's John's. If it's on the office side, then I get veto power.

A lot of small businesses don't have time to go into the minutiae of CMMC, especially when it's not immediately returning investment. For John and I, while he's actually running the shop floor, my job is operations. My job is finance, IT. The weeds are where I'm supposed to be.

I made it a point. I thought, “This is going to set us apart.” And so we started going after CMMC in 2019. By 2025, when we could sign up for an assessment, we went ahead and did it and we weren't rushed.

We've branched out with the Veterans Accountability Court. When we found that organization, it was great because there were a handful of people in the program that either manufacturing was already on their radar or it was something they were willing to learn and they already had love for country. They had all these things that, if you're going to work for an aerospace and defense shop, well, we already know you're sharing some of these values.

It was COVID that prompted the Advanced Manufacturing Virtual Internship, the AMVI. This is coming up in July, and it's going to be our sixth year doing it. We've got 20 students. We started off at 12. The whole intent was, “How do we get this in front of people that may not otherwise have the opportunity to do so?” Now it's evolved into, “How do we also show other industries what we're all about?”

I think with the future of manufacturing, we're going to figure out how to do what we need to get done, but it's going to be more efficient. I do truly believe the future is going to be driven by wherever we figure our bottlenecks to be.