Jamie & Lee Marzilli
Hire for Character, Train for Skill
Marzilli Machining serves its customers through the people it hires, and owners Jaime and Lee Marzilli grow them organically – hiring for character, then helping them develop as machinists and as people.
When two personalities fuel and complement each other, crazy good things happen. Lee Marzilli dared her husband Jaime to start his own business. With the help of Google and the local Small Business Administration (SBA), they wrote a business plan, raised capital, and opened Marzilli Machine in 2011 in Fall River, Mass. Almost 15 years later, they moved from the original 4,000-sq.-ft. shop to a new 13,000-sq.-ft. facility in Seekonk, Mass., and have plans to grow again.
“People come to Marzilli Machine because we help them to solve their milling and turning problems,” says Jamie. “We take customer service very seriously, and that's the reason that they come here. We give them a feeling that we're here to help them achieve their goals, not just quote stuff.”
Marzilli Machine manufactures military, aerospace, medical and firearms components. Lee, who has an MBA from the University of Rhode Island, handles the front end of the business (see her story). Jaime, a machinist and educator, handles production, training, quality control and customer relations (see his story). Both share in growing the company's talent.
Strength of Character
“We serve our customers through the people we hire,” says Lee. “In my role, the goal for growing talent is helping them develop as people. That can mean anything from healthcare – How do you find a doctor? How do you look for a qualified dentist? – to asking if they need support finding childcare. We help people succeed both inside and outside of work.”
“We believe in growing our people organically. I like to say we run a school for profit, and we take training our people very seriously,” says Jamie. “We were early adapters of the Titans of CNC ‘Academy Small Group.' We teach it openly and honestly, and we encourage people to come and join the team. We hire those people for character, and then we train them for skill.”
Titans of CNC offers an online training curriculum for CAD, CAM, and machining. An academy small group is a team of learners who support one another to complete the Titans of CNC: Academy Curriculum. Small groups are created by a host (Marzilli Machine), with access to a CNC and a safe, clean learning environment. Small groups can either be open (available to participants in a local area, which is the route Marzilli takes) or closed (limited to employees or associates of the sponsoring organization).
Marzilli Machine also works closely with the local high schools and technical schools.
Noah Davis joined Marzilli Machine through Jamie's alma mater, the Diman Regional Voc-Tech co-op program, where high school seniors alternate between classes and industry jobs. Noah recently graduated and was hired as a machinist.
“I'm doing things that I never thought I could even do in school,” says Noah. “I was running small little one-off jobs and now I'm running 30,000 parts production. It's incredible the parts I get to work with, between the firearms, aerospace, high-end medical equipment, it's absolutely incredible.”
Noah now leaves work mentally exhausted – and it's a good thing.
“It's a really nice thing getting to actually use my brain and have my ideas taken into consideration,” says Noah. “It makes you feel valued.”
“My responsibilities in that are to train the technical side and to bring out their machining and problem-solving skills,” says Jamie. “The main thing that we spend our time teaching new hires and young people is how to solve problems. If you can solve problems at any level in this industry, you are going to be successful.”
As an example, he cites Rich White in the QC department. When Marzilli Machine hired him, he had been programming a CMM for eight years and no one had ever bothered to explain to him how his results impacted the rest of the operation. As a result, he would miss details such as making the balloon numbers on prints match the dimension numbers on the software.
“The rest of the team needs to be able to easily understand his results,” says Jamie. “We took what he already knew, taught him how to do it well, helped him understand his role on the team. Quality control is here to support the production floor so we can make money, not to act as a police force.”
In another example, Jamie had a friend of 30 years who was working for a shipping company and hated it.
“We were bowling, and he says, ‘I got to get a new job.' And I was like, ‘I got a job. Do you want a job?' We started teaching him how to read prints. Three years later, he can program all the CMMs. One of our class II machinists previously worked as an assistant manager at an auto parts store. Now he does set-up, programming and debugging on an Okuma MB 4000H lathe. Somebody with drive and who wants to succeed is going to be successful no matter what they do.”
Fast Company
While the company feels the same hiring pains as other manufacturers, Jaime and Lee feel that hiring for character creates less problems down the road. Within a couple of weeks, they have a good understanding about whether someone will fit into their culture.
“If you are going to take more risks with your hiring, you need to be quick with your firing,” says Jamie. “You can take a gamble on anybody, but in two weeks you should have an understanding of whether or not that person belongs here.”
“Sometimes it's okay to let the troubled employee go and to roll the dice on a new employee,” says Lee. “Firing somebody isn't fun, and it's not easy. However, we have never regretted letting someone go and finding a new employee that was a better fit for the company.”
The Marzilli's reference a statistic that says a team player will improve the profitability of the people immediately around them by 20% but a bad employee will reduce the effectiveness of everyone around them by up to 30%.
“I came into this business as a machinist 14 years ago,” recalls Jamie. “I was punching a clock, and there was that guy who worked half as hard as the rest of us and was getting paid the same. When nobody says anything to him, that's poison to your culture. You can't be afraid to fire them.”
On the flip side, when Jaime and Lee find great people who struggle in their position, they blame themselves.
“If you have a great employee, a great person who believes in your company and believes in your culture, but they're not being successful in their position, it's your fault as the owner. You have them in the wrong job,” says Jaime. As an example, one person at Marzilli has worked in more than six different positions. He wasn't a good machinist, he was an OK production manager, but he is an amazing estimator.
“I've also hired people from my child's daycare and brought them in,” says Lee. “They weren't happy at the daycare, so I brought them into the front end of the business and taught them how to use QuickBooks and basic data entry to give them a better opportunity and better wages.”
Getting Out of Their Bubble
Jamie and Lee also work to improve themselves. After attending EASTEC (now MT Series EAST) regional manufacturing show for many years, they were ready for something more.
“We needed to go to a bigger show,” said Jaime. “IMTS came around. We said, ‘It's time to get out of our bubble. Let's do some traveling and make a vacation out of going to IMTS in Chicago.'”
Their first visit was in 2018, where their mission was exploratory. By the time of IMTS 2022, they had implemented ProShop ERP and were on a major growth trajectory because of the improvement that resulted from ERP software (see the stories on Jamie and Lee for more details on ProShop).
“In 2018, it was more figuring out what IMTS was about. It was mostly just walking around seeing the different things that they had to offer,” says Jamie. “In 2022, we went with more of a mission. We saw specific things. We weren't in the market to purchase machines. We went more to the Software Sector to see what else there was on offer.”
“One of my favorite parts was going to the events that the vendors hold,” says Lee. “You meet a lot of other machine shop owners and people that are similar to you, and you kind of bounce ideas off of each other and learn what they know and what you might not know.”
Jaime agrees, saying that there are “Really interesting, awesome like-minded people who were fighting the same fights as we are. They were interested in how we were solving problems, and we'd ask how they were solving these problems. We are friends with a lot of those people now.”
They plan to go to IMTS 2026 and spend an entire week. While they are focusing on their recent move into a new 13,000-sq.-ft. building, they will have a list of things to check out, including AI and AI-enhanced solutions.
“You can only do so much from in front of a computer,” says Jaime. “You need to talk to people and say, ‘Hey, this is what we would do with this machine or software. Is this going to work?' You can't get that from the computer. You go to IMTS to collect ideas and watch the best ones rise to the top.”
Register now for IMTS 2026, September 14–19, 2026, in Chicago.