by James Heine

St. Charles, Mo.--When Ronnie Besselman opened Allied Motors nearly 20 years ago, the last thing on his mind was that he might someday embark on a career in international business. Today, Besselman and his son, Jason, have customers as far away as Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, and StrokerKits.com, the division of Allied Motors they formed in 1994, now accounts for approximately 40 percent of their company’s business.

Besselman founded Allied in 1984 as a combination repair and machine shop. About two years later he set aside the repair part of the business to focus exclusively on machine-shop work. “It was hard to get other shops to send us work because I was their competitor, basically,” he said.

Today, his core business is machine-shop work for racers, hotrodders, hobbyists, and do-it-yourselfers, Besselman said. Very little work comes from local garages, as it used to, or from other machine shops or neighborhood parts stores.

“When I started, I could count about 15 parts stores within a two-mile radius,” Besselman said.  “Today, there’s just one independent store. You can’t get work from someone if they’re not in business.”

Unlike many machine shops, Allied does no brake work, Besselman said. “We’ve probably spent a half-million dollars on equipment, and we don’t even have a brake lathe. We’re strictly internal engine parts.”

To meet the needs of his customers, Allied recently acquired an RMC V30 CNC machine. One of only a handful in the United States, the computer-controlled machine is absolutely unbelievable, Besselman said. “It will probe a block in six minutes and tell me how far the holes are out of location, where they’re supposed to be, and where they actually are,” he said.  “It will bore out a block in under five minutes.”

A decade ago, he would have dismissed any thought of computers in a machine shop, Besselman said. Today, he said he sees them as a valuable asset, not only because of the precision they offer, but also because they improve a shop’s efficiency. “The new digital equipment allows us to get stuff in and out faster than we did 10 years ago,” he said.

If there is a downside to digitally controlled equipment, it’s the expense, Besselman said. Sometimes, he added, “I feel like I’m not working to make money; I’m working to make payments.”

As an ASE-certified master engine machinist, a member of the Automotive Engine Rebuilders Association (AERA), and a member of the advisory board of St. Charles County’s Lewis and Clark Technical School, Besselman takes a broad view of trends in the machine-shop business. The increasing sophistication of the business leads him to believe that machine shops should be rated, just as restaurants are.

“If you go to a five-star restaurant, you know what to expect,” Besselman said. “I think that machine shops, regardless of their size, need to have a rating. They should be rated on their certifications, on their equipment. You can’t work on 2000 cylinder heads with 1960s equipment. I think ratings would help equipment manufacturers. It would help machine shops.”

Allied’s StrokerKits Web site was a natural outgrowth of his focus on motorsports and the hotrod and hobby market, Besselman said.

Acquiring the domain name was a combination of good timing and good luck, Jason Besselman said. “The domain happened to be open, and it has been phenomenal for us. When people are trying to find stroker kits, that’s what they type in [to their search engines]--stroker kit--and we were lucky enough to get the name. We get close to 700 or 800 new, unique hits a day.”

Add the new hits to the 1,200 regular hits the site records daily, and it boosts the site’s ranking past some of the manufacturers whose products they carry, Besselman said.

While the Web site is the reason for their overseas sales, to retain those sales Ronnie Besselman said he has to offer a superior product and the service to back up that product, because for many world locations, the cost of shipping and taxes are not insignificant. “It costs $800 to ship a kit to England, and then there’s a 30 percent duty fee when it gets there.”

That customers are willing to pay the shipping and duty fees proves that people value good kits and the work that goes into them, Besselman said. “We do a lot of balancing before we ship the kits, especially when we ship to places that don’t have a nearby machine shop.”

Customers also value the help they get through the Web site, through e-mails to StrokerKits.com, and from calls to the shop, Besselman said.

“I spend eight hours a day answering e-mails, taking phone calls, and so forth,” Jason Besselman said.

Stateside and locally, Ronnie Besselman said his business is also growing, even though he does very little advertising. Most of the company’s business comes from  repeat customers and referrals. “I’m only in the phone book because we have a telephone,” he said.

Ronnie Besselman sets up his shop’s RMC V30 CNC machine to square-deck a block. The computer-controlled machine not only performs precision work, it also allows Allied Motors to be more efficient, he says.