5 minute read
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.
Michael 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. 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
Shown below: The Mojotone crew loads a container with a shipment for Thomann Music, its distributor in Germany. Above: Michael McWhorter
I’m good at what he’s not,” McWhorter says. “So, he handles the technical side, and I progressed to the management and [human resources] side of the business.”
Mojotone’s growth wouldn’t have been possible without its employees, who speak instrumental terminology, pursue common goals and focus on the work at hand. “Over the years, I’ve learned to stay away from folks that bring really strong opinions not related to what we’re doing here, like religious or political,” McWhorter says.
-Michael McWhorter
McWhorter says finding, keeping and training staff hasn’t been an issue. Most applicants know Mojotone products and are enthusiastic about the music business. “The easiest hires are guitar players,” he says. “It’s not hard to get a guitar player excited about everything we have in our warehouse and everything we’re doing. With the exception of a few people, we have trained everyone who’s come through the door. If they come in with an excitement for guitars or music in general, it’s fairly easy to teach someone what we do. With guitar pickups and magnets and wires, it’s easy to train.”
Mojotone never missed a beat when COVID-19 arrived in spring 2020, though its arrangement changed. “Our sales guys went home and could answer the phones remotely,” McWhorter says. “Andy and I came back and started pulling orders and processing orders, which we personally hadn’t done in a few years. We were able to spot problems we weren’t aware of, like with the warehouse layout. We got to pull up to 200 orders a day and work out some issues. But we were able to keep everyone employed then bring people back in. We never fully shut down, but it was about 30 days of not even half the staff in the building.
The pandemic has been a boon for the company. “We were fortunate that, like with people forced to be at home, they were playing their guitars or fixing stuff or modifying their amps,” McWhorter says. “A lot of guys wanted to build amps while they were at home.”
Mojotone’s future is bright. “I’m really excited right now about manufacturing and making things, so our plan is to figure out new products,” says McWhorter, who keeps Fender Stratocaster and Gibson Les Paul guitars in his office and plays with his college band a few times each year. “We have our own woodshop, and there’s nothing we can’t do. I’m proud of our electronics division. We have all the right people and all the right parts.” ■
