Learning with Leo: The Cost of Cleaning and Protecting the Ozone Layer
Nolan’s Notes: Cleaning With Smaller Geometries
Standard of Excellence: Building Excellence From the Inside Out
A motto on the conference wall at Mid-America Taping and Reeling, “Promise only what you can deliver and then deliver more than you promised,” has led Barbara Pauls from the has led from starting her business in her parent's basement to a thriving company with locations in Illinois and Florida and 75 employees.
IPC member Mid-America is a leader in supplying tape and reel services to the electronics industry. It specializes in surface mount, axial and radial taping, baking, dry packing, lead forming, and memory device programming.
Barbara was a college student in the mid-1980s, working for a printing broker who had set up his own business. As she watched him, she realized, “I could do this. I want to start my own business. I don’t want to depend on someone else for a living, and I want to forge my path.”
With that determination and an innate curiosity, she sought opportunities to realize her dream. Her first outreach was to her own family. “I went to my uncle, who had made himself a multimillionaire in eyeglass frames,” she says. “I told him I wanted to start my own business and asked him for ideas. He said he’d met someone who was selling an axial lead taping machine. I had no idea what that meant, but I learned that this was a growing industry.”
She shared that information with her father, an engineer at Navistar, “who told me that it was a way to sequence electronic components for automation and that I should investigate it,” Barbara says. “There was no internet back then, so I researched the Thomas Register of North American Manufacturers at the local college library to find out who was putting circuit boards together and who I could approach for a sale.”
Barbara and her father set up her first axial taping machine in her parents' basement, and she started cold-calling local businesses to build a client base. Her first client, Bally, agreed to give her their business only after an audit. “I was mortified when he said he would come to the basement of my parents' house since I didn’t have an office,” she says. “But I passed the audit with flying colors," and her business was born.
Read the rest of this article in the Winter 2025 issue of IPC Community.
