Good luck keeping up with these Joneses.
This week, owners Roger and Susan Jones are celebrating the 30th anniversary of their company Microtronics, LLC.
Microtronics is located east of Iola on Highway 54, and manufactures wireless industrial remote controls and other related products.
They have about 15 employees.
Their products are “mainly for the mobile hydraulics industry, concrete pump trucks, cranes, grinders and mixers,” Roger explained.
“When we first started, we basically had two products, a little pistol hand-held unit and a cask aluminum unit,” he added.
“We’ve grown so much, in what we could do,” Roger said. “I never guessed we’d be here 30 years later.”
BEFORE starting Microtronics in 1991, Roger was working in related fields, and pointed to a request from a friend as a catalyst.
“He kept after me, and finally I did some research and, sure enough, there wasn’t anything like he was needing,” Roger said.
“There were some products made like this overseas, in Europe and such, but nothing here.”
Before long, Microtronics had burst into existence, and was attempting an intervention in the towing industry, by designing radios for wheel lifts.
However, as Roger noted, at that point, “everybody was kind of old-school, and scared of remote controls”; hence the going was a bit rough.
BY CONTRAST, as Roger explained, “we started hitting the brick trucks … and my gosh, it took off.”
Said trucks, he noted, “had a crane that went over the top of them, and then it had a fork that would lift pallets of bricks.”
“As time went on,” Roger added, “we got a lot of the early gamers and Nintendo guys, and they picked up on it … that helped out as much as anything in getting this industry going.”
