How do you choose which businesses to visit?

That’s one of the questions I frequently hear as the Association of Washington Business team climbs onto a bus every October and circles the state, stopping at small, medium, and large manufacturing companies along the way.

Sometimes, the places where we stop are large and well known. On the second day of this year’s 10th annual bus tour, we went to Boeing’s North Line in Everett, where the company is building 737 MAX airplanes inside what’s described as the largest building in the world by volume.

More often than not, though, the bus stops at small- and medium-sized manufacturers housed inside nondescript buildings where most of the people who drive by every day have no idea what’s going on inside.

What’s going on inside those buildings is a miracle of sorts: skilled women and men are making the things that surround us every day — furniture, technology, clothing, machinery, and food. And they’re not just making trucks, airplanes, tractors, compressors, and rockets — they’re making every part and component that goes into them.

As Washington’s state manufacturers association, AWB aims to tell that story to the world. It’s why we started the annual bus tour in 2017. Since then, we have stopped at roughly 300 different Washington manufacturers: from breweries and boat builders, to fishing rod and drone makers, and just about everything in between.

How do we choose the businesses we visit? The truth is that we often choose businesses that fly under the radar. We want to shine a spotlight on an easily overlooked industry sector and tell the stories of the women and men who make it — and everything around us — work. 

We seek out companies like Custom Source Woodworking in Tumwater, which makes architectural woodwork for commercial use nationwide with a focus on Washington state. On the day we visited, Central Washington University was preparing to open a new arts and humanities building with a grand staircase built by Custom Source. 

We also visit businesses like Rogers Machinery in Centralia. The company, which was founded in 1949 by two World War II veterans who served together, makes air compressors and vacuum systems that are the lifeblood of manufacturing operations everywhere. 

As we've discovered so many times over 10 bus tours throughout the state, the companies we visit are often connected to each other. As the bus was just about to roll out of the parking lot at Custom Source Woodworking on this year’s tour, we learned that our next stop — Rogers Machinery — had recently installed a dust removal system at Custom Source.

These kinds of connections are no longer surprising, but expected. Every manufacturer not only makes the things we need for our everyday lives, but also relies on other manufacturers to make the components and machines and ingredients they need to make those things. 

In 2024, we went directly from TigerStop, a Vancouver-based manufacturer of automated stop/gauge and pusher systems, to Adventurer Manufacturing in Yakima, where we saw TigerStop equipment on the shop floor helping build truck campers. 

In 2018, during our second annual bus tour, we stopped at Lane Mountain Company, in Stevens County, where silica sand products are manufactured and sent to Cardinal Glass, in Lewis County, a manufacturer we visited the year before during the inaugural bus tour. 

Following the conclusion of the 10th annual AWB Manufacturing Week bus tour earlier this month, we’ve started the process of answering the question: Which manufacturers will we visit next? 

It goes on and on. Just like the wheels on our tour bus. 

Kris Johnson is president of the Association of Washington Business, the state’s chamber of commerce and manufacturers association.