The promise: the owner of our Small Business of the year said he'd never lay off anyone. How the recession tested this welder's bond.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: COVER STORY

Doug Salkewicz has a yam about every place he has ever worked--and he usually caps it off with a pithy lesson learned or even a moral. "What goes around, comes around," he will conclude like a modern-day Aesop. Or, "It's not what you accomplish that's important, it's who you help along the way." One in particular sticks out in his mind. "It was the only job I ever quit on the spot," says the president of Advanced Technical Welding Inc. in Etowah, a mountain community near Hendersonville.

It was just down the road from his boyhood home in Saddle Brook, N.J. He distinctly remembers Bernie, who sat behind a window overlooking the shop floor. When Bernie watched, everybody worked. "But the moment he stopped, it was like someone had blown a whistle," Salkewicz, 63, recalls. Production halted. Talking began. Gossip was rampant; back stabbing, routine. "It was a horrible place. The friction was so thick, you could cut it with a machete." Lesson learned? "Bernie in the window produces nothing except forced labor and a forced end result." Moral? "A harmonious environment is a breeding ground for good."

Thus spoke Salkewicz (pronounced Sal-ka-wits). It'd be easy to dismiss him as just another sententious storyteller dispensing tired saws--were it not for the fact that he had to stand behind one of his pronouncements. Since 1987, when he set up his shop specializing in making emergency repairs via microscopic welds, he has vowed he would never, ever lay off an employee. In 2009, he had to put his money where his mouth was--specifically $39,000 that came from cashing in one of his own certificates of deposit. The 39 grand was about two-thirds of what his company lost last year, the only time it has been in the red. He cut his own pay 25%. "I'm remembering what paydays felt like, and I'm saying to myself, 'You can't let this car crash.' I guess it was put up or shut up. 'You said you were going to do it.'" And he did.

"This business seems to represent and embody the standard to which every business should strive," says Shane Gebauer, general manager of Brushy Mountain Bee Farm Inc. in Moravian Falls, last year's BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA Small Business of the Year. It's one reason Salkewicz's company is this year's winner. "Quite frankly, Advanced Technical Welding's commitment to employees pushed them to the top for me," says Gebauer, who with N.C. Small Business Commissioner Scott Daugherty and BNC Publisher Ben Kinney judged the competition.

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Salkewicz's storytelling starts with his Polish immigrant grandparents, who lost their candy store in Bayonne, N J.--and everything else--in the Depression. They wouldn't take charity and shunned soup lines. "My father came home with something one day, and my grandmother wouldn't eat it. She was infuriated. That's the way I feel. I can get credit anywhere, but I don't want credit." His father did home renovations and kitchen remodeling. "I had four jobs when I was a kid. We were brought up with a good work ethic."

He still remembers the day he was sitting in his high school's guidance office, poring over books on careers when he came upon a description of...