Jamie Marzilli
Working to the Highest Level
Not getting the teaching job was the second-best thing that happened to Jamie Marzilli.
A graduate of the Diman Regional Voc-Tech co-op program in Fall River, Massachusetts, he was top of his class, placed second in a vocational contest, apprenticed at Gillette, and honed his machining and lean manufacturing skills for 12 years at a small shop. He took all the tests necessary and became a certified teacher. He wanted to teach at his old school, but he didn't get the job.
Jamie Marzilli was, however, lucky enough to have the best thing happen to him. Her name is now Lee Marzilli, and they met on Match.com when he was struggling with how to move forward professionally. Lee Marzilli encouraged him to start his own business, and the result is Marzilli Machine, a contract machine shop in Seekonk, Massachusetts, where she is the CEO and Jamie Marzilli is the president. Customers today include household names in the aerospace, defense, , and medical industries. Dozens of younger machinists and those seeking a manufacturing career benefit from Jamie Marzilli's teaching skills.
“My passion is for the machining trade itself,” says Jamie Marzilli, who now has 30 years of experience. “I lost the teaching position to really qualified candidates, but I never lost my passion for teaching. Fortunately, I still get to do what I love, because Marzilli Machine is essentially a school we run for profit.”
Marzilli Machine today employs 27 people in a newly refurbished 13,000-square-foot facility in Seekonk. The shop equipment includes mills and lathes from Haas, Hurco, Matsuura, and Okuma; quality control equipment from Keyence, Hexagon, and Mitutoyo; and ERP software from Excellerant, High QA, and ProShop ERP.
“I've built a classroom up in the mezzanine that functions as our break room/training facility,” he says. “We hire people for character, then train them for skill. We built this amazing facility to attract talent. We really believe that we can teach machining to anyone. But you know what you can't do? You can't train people to be good human beings. We hire people who we think are going to fit into our culture here. We teach them how to be machinists, and we set them on a path so they can find their own greatness.”
Shawn Cordeiro is a Diman graduate who split the last portion of high school between academics and getting paid to work at Marzilli Machine. Upon graduation, he became a full-time employee.
“As a co-op student, I had a guaranteed position after school instead of going to college and wasting four years for something I'm not going to do,” says Cordeiro. “There is definitely a lot of room to learn here. Everyone here is willing to teach, especially Jamie. Everyone here wants you to learn, and they want you to do the best you can.”
Shop foreman Joe “Senior Cowboy” Plante went to school for machining and worked at other shops before joining Marzilli Machine nine years ago.
“The main difference is Jamie,” says Plante. “Most places I worked, the owner or the boss wasn't a machinist. They understood the business side of it, but not the machining side of it, and that just didn't sit right with me. Jamie teaches me things all the time. Learning is a constant thing, so I'm staying on top of all the new kinds of stuff coming out, such as tooling.”
Dan Atilano-Cruz started at Marzilli Machine three years ago as a shop hand. Now, he is a Class 2 machinist doing his own setups and is responsible for managing projects such as a 40,000-part job running on three Matsuura horizontal mills.
“I work here because I get to do a lot of stuff – more than just machining – and Jamie is a pretty good teacher. If he doesn't have an answer, he uses his network to find it,” says Atilano-Cruz. He notes Marzilli Machine's approach is to start new machinists on the Haas mills, then move them to Matsuura, Okuma, and Hurco horizontal machines to see if they can become proficient in new areas or discover a new aptitude.
“I'm OK with the Haas machines, but with the horizontal mills like the Matsuura, my brain can actually think properly,” says Atilano-Cruz. “I can take those offsets and think in 4-axis instead of just 3-axis for the Haas.”
In addition to learning from Jamie Marzilli, every employee, regardless of position, has the opportunity to take the Titans of CNC Academy online course and receive a $1-per-hour pay raise upon completion. Jamie Marzilli also leads a Titans of CNC “Academy Small Group” for focused learning. Marzilli Machine was the third “small group,” which means it was an early adopter of the program. The Marzillis connected with Titan Gilroy at IMTS 2018 and have made repeat appearances on his podcast since then.
Love and Grit
Like many small businesses, Marzilli Machine started in part because Jamie Marzilli thought he could do a better job at running a machine shop – well, the back half of the shop.
“When Marzilli Machine first started, I started it by myself, but that is not to say that we didn't do it together,” says Jamie Marzilli. “This is one of these things that people don't really talk about. When you start your own business, someone has to keep you alive. Lee made sure I was sleeping and eating and clean. You work a hundred hours a week, and you don't even realize what's happening because you're in the thrill of the moment.”
When Jamie Marzilli started the shop, Lee Marzilli was working on her MBA (see her story), and she joined the business upon graduating.
“That was the best move that I could have made, because you can't do this alone,” says Jamie Marzilli. “I'm significantly better at machining, but I have no business doing what Lee does. At the highest levels of your company, you have to trust your partner 100%. Also, sometimes you just need somebody to tell you it's going to be OK and to keep your head in the fight and to tell you they believe in you.”
Marzilli Machine's first shop was in a residential area, in an oversized 4,000-square-foot garage that Jamie Marzilli notes was packed with 2X machines. Its aisles were so tight that staging raw materials and finished parts required logistics wizardry. Lee Marzilli affectionately called it a dungeon.
Like many small startups, the couple initially struggled with learning to manage cash flow. Luckily, they had each other. For example, Jamie Marzilli explains that if the shop received orders for hundreds of pieces that were due multiple times throughout the year, their complementary strengths would emerge.
“Your first instinct is to make all of them at one time, so you avoid breaking down the job and resetting it,” says Jamie Marzilli. That's when Lee Marzilli would step in. In this scenario, she would explain the cost of money to him and her concerns about tying up cash if the shop had to order stock for the entire job or sit on finished parts before invoicing.
“Lee will bring that scenario to me and ask what our alternatives are,” says Jamie Marzilli. “In this case, I'd respond that we could use zero-point tooling to minimize the amount of time we'd spend in setup, taking it from six hours down to an hour. Then we don't need to tie up cash with inventory while keeping our labor costs down. For big projects, Lee has taught me that we can't be shy about asking customers for deposits, either.”
Continuing Education
While the Marzillis pass on their wisdom to others, they also continue to learn, most notably mastering ProShop ERP software (see sidebar on how it works).
“We were already in business for nine years. The training ProShop gave us on how to use their ERP system changed how we thought about how a machine shop should run, covering everything from the purchase order to the packing slip,” says Jamie Marzilli. “The training was super intense by my choice. We became huge advocates for ProShop, and I'm on their customer advisory board. We quickly shot up to one of their top five power users.”
The motivation for moving to an ERP system came from shifting more of the company business to government and Tier 1 and Tier 2 prime contractors. These contractors require a large amount of documentation. By automating data collection and document management, Marzilli Machine was able to better manage its percentage of nonproducing and producing employees.
Continuing education also comes from attending IMTS, which the Marzillis first did in 2018 and again in 2022.
“A lot of what I wanted out of IMTS was the ability to open your mind and to touch the things that you can't see in a magazine or on a website,” says Jamie Marzilli. “IMTS is tangible. You can pick up workholding systems, flip them over, and see how things go together. We take pictures of a lot of that kind of stuff, bring it back to the shop, categorize them, and build these portfolios of different workholding types. We use them in our war room meetings for initial planning. We do this on a digital platform, so everybody has access. It has pictures of different mill-turn applications, collet chucks, vertical setups, and horizontal setups and tombstones, applications for fifth axis, and different toolpaths and programming techniques. It has a lot of the physical ‘how did they hold this part?' type of stuff.”
Between the 2018 and 2022 shows, Jamie Marzilli saw “a lot of inventiveness come out of COVID that resulted from people being trapped in their business and figuring out what they could do to make money.” That creativity impressed him at IMTS 2022, where he first saw Carvesmart's dovetailed jaws, which replace time-consuming cap-screwed jaws.
“Nobody was really using a lot of dovetails,” he recalls. “Carvesmart is part of Kurt, and now dovetails are one of the primary ways we do workholding, especially 5-axis. A lot of the newer zero-point tooling solutions also interested me. Going to IMTS opens your mind up to what's possible, and then you can add those new solutions to your personal toolbox of capabilities.”
Register now for IMTS 2026, Sept. 14–19, at McCormick Place in Chicago, where teachers become learners and discover how to achieve the impossible.