CASE STUDY: WORKFORCE
Mojotone | Burgaw
IN HARMONY
The right hires allowed Michael McWhorter and Andy Turner to grow a small repair shop into a global supplier of musical equipment. Its customers range from casual players to top-billed acts. ichael McWhorter’s Wake Forest University biology degree was supposed to be his ticket to medical school, where he could ditch his alter ego of guitarist and keyboard player with a travelling band. But the 1996 graduate stuck with music instead. And it led him to his current location — a dead-end road in Burgaw. It’s there you’ll find Mojotone, a supplier of vintage and reproduction musical electronics, parts and speaker cabinets that serves electric guitar and tube amplifier enthusiasts, technicians and builders around the world. Its 78 employees create, repair, market and sell gear to casual pickers and a long list of top-billed acts, including Cheap Trick, Green Day, Keith Urban, Kid Rock, Rush, Sheryl Crow, The Who and ZZ Top. Mojotone started on a much smaller stage in WinstonSalem, where McWhorter’s business partner, Andy Turner, had a repair shop for keyboards and guitar amplifiers. It expanded into surplus deals in the late 1990s, when auction and marketplace website eBay became popular. Turner befriended the owner of Mojo Musical Supply in California, a mail-order company that was facing bankruptcy. He worked a deal to buy its inventory. He asked McWhorter to help move it to a former RJ Reynolds warehouse, where they would catalogue it. That was the birth of Mojotone in 2000. The duo’s haul was a potpourri of parts. “There were vintage amplifier replacement parts, cabinet hardware, cabinet materials, speakers, all kinds of stuff,” McWhorter says. “And we found an 800 [phone] number for [the business], and it just kept ringing.
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At the time, Mojo Music had been the only place to get replacement parts. We started taking orders during the day, would go eat dinner then go down to the warehouse and put the orders on a pallet for the UPS guy to get the next day.” Six months later, McWhorter and Turner hired a furniture builder to open a wood shop and build speaker cabinets and cabinet components. Then they hired a warehouse person to help pull orders and a sales person to answer the phone and take orders. “Then [musical instrument manufacturer] Gibson approached us and asked if we could help them build some amplifiers, and we said yes,” McWhorter says. “We had the parts, but we needed the labor. So, we expanded into that and had a contract for cabinets where we were doing between 25 and 50 cabinets at a time. Then we started with electronic assembly and manufacturing. Then we started putting complete amps together.” In 2002, the pair moved their business to a bigger warehouse in Winston-Salem, where it stayed until that lease expired in 2005. “We were both from Winston-Salem, we went to college together, we’d gotten married and it was time to go somewhere,” McWhorter says. “We chose Wilmington [to be near the beach] and ended up in Burgaw.” They started with a 25,000-square-foot building, bought a 5,000-square-foot place and built a 5,000-square-foot unit. They sold them in 2018 and moved to Mojotone’s current home, a 46,000-square-foot building with office space, woodshop, warehouse and factory floor in Pender Progress Industrial Park. “I’m blessed to have a partner who’s good at what I’m not, and
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