The Last Brass Note
What Eastlake Lost When the Spreadsheet Won: A $6 million problem had a solution. It was standing right there on the factory floor.
A story like this one is a minefield. Write about a plant closure in Ohio and you risk earning the ire of the government, which promised to protect exactly these jobs. Or the investor, who made a business decision and doesn’t appreciate being second-guessed by a stranger. Or the union, which fought hard and doesn’t need an outsider explaining what went wrong. Or even my own employer, which might prefer that its plant managers keep their opinions to themselves.
So why write it?
Because what if what I have to say stops everyone—government, capital, labor, management—and makes them think of another path? Not a path where one side wins and the others lose, but a path where a $6 million problem gets solved by the people closest to it, and a factory stays open, and 150 families keep their livelihoods, and the investor actually makes more money, not less?
That path exists. I’ve walked it. And the fact that nobody in Eastlake, Ohio, was ever given the chance to try it is what compels me to write.
I live in Wooster, Ohio. I run a manufacturing plant here. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s real work, done by real people who know things that can’t be Googled.
Two hours northeast of me, in Eastlake, Ohio, 150 workers at Conn Selmer just learned that their plant is closing. By June 30, the last American-made brass instrument factory will go silent. The tubas, sousaphones, and French horns that have been built on Curtis Boulevard for decades will now be made in China.
The company says the Eastlake plant lost $6 million in 2025. That’s the number that sealed the decision. And I have no reason to doubt it.
But here’s what I can’t stop thinking about from my plant in Wooster: What if that $6 million wasn’t a verdict? What if it was a solvable problem—and the people who could have solved it were the very workers who just got told to go home?
What Happened in Eastlake
On January 7, 2026, UAW Local 2359 sat down for what was supposed to be the first day of contract negotiations. Robert Hines, the local president, had spent the entire holiday season preparing his proposals. The union came ready to bargain.
Conn Selmer came ready to announce a funeral.
“They started off with a presentation of telling us how bad we were doing,” Hines told reporters. There would be no bargaining. The plant was closing. Professional French horn production would move to a non-union facility in Elkhart, Indiana. Everything else was going to China, where Conn Selmer had quietly established a production operation in 2024.
The workers say management had previously praised their productivity. Both things can be true simultaneously—the praise and the losses—when a company has never systematically asked its frontline workers to help fix the problems that leadership can see but can’t solve from a boardroom.
Former union president Joe Manni told reporters about the last time he met the company’s owner. He had one question: “Is your plan to keep this an American-made, American instrument company?” The answer was yes. “That’s all I needed to know,” Manni said. “And here we are today.”
The $6 Million Question Nobody Asked
Here’s what I know after 36 years of running factories on three continents: a $6 million annual loss in a 150-person plant is not a death sentence. It’s a diagnosis. And the treatment is almost always standing right in front of you, wearing safety glasses and steel-toed boots.
Six million dollars across 150 workers is $40,000 per employee. That’s the gap. In my experience, that gap is nearly always closeable—not through layoffs, not through wage cuts, not through offshoring—but through the systematic deployment of the intelligence that already exists on the factory floor.
Every manufacturing plant I’ve ever walked into has the same hidden reservoir. The line worker who knows exactly why the third station jams every Tuesday afternoon but has never been asked. The quality inspector who can hear when a bell flare is wrong before any instrument confirms it. The maintenance tech who rigged a fix for a chronic breakdown that engineering has been studying for six months. The veteran who trains every new hire and carries thirty years of process knowledge in her hands.
This intelligence is already there. It’s already paid for. It shows up every day, clocks in, and waits to be deployed. And in plant after plant, year after year, it never gets asked.
Instead, what happens is what happened in Eastlake. The losses mount. Leadership looks at the balance sheet. Labor appears as a cost—the single largest controllable cost. And the logic kicks in: if labor is a cost, and costs should be minimized, then the answer is to find cheaper labor. China. Vietnam. Mexico. Somewhere the number on the spreadsheet gets smaller.
But the number on the spreadsheet isn’t the whole story. It never is.
The Intelligence That Walks Out the Door
Conn Selmer’s own IPO prospectus, filed when its parent company Steinway Musical Instruments prepared to relist on the NYSE, contained this remarkable admission: “Many of the skills we require are not typically taught in traditional universities or schools. The process of bending the Steinway piano rim is an acquired skill and not widely taught. Similarly, the skills required to construct and repair our instruments are taught only in highly specialized trade schools or passed down from generation to generation.”
Read that again. The company itself acknowledged that its competitive advantage lives in the hands and minds of skilled workers whose knowledge is transmitted through apprenticeship and mentoring. And then it decided to eliminate those workers anyway.
This is the accounting error that haunts American manufacturing. Capital treats labor as a depreciating cost—something that loses value over time and should be replaced with something cheaper. But skilled manufacturing workers are appreciating assets. Their knowledge becomes more valuable with every year on the floor.
A twenty-year brass instrument maker doesn’t just know how to solder a joint. She knows why certain joints fail in certain climates, what the brass sounds like when it’s been worked correctly versus when something is slightly off, how to diagnose a problem by ear that would take an engineer a week to find with instruments. She carries in her muscle memory and judgment the accumulated intelligence of a craft tradition stretching back to 1875.
When that worker walks out of Eastlake for the last time, her knowledge walks out with her. And it doesn’t walk into Qidong. You can ship the tooling. You can ship the drawings. You cannot ship the tacit knowledge that makes the difference between an instrument that technically meets specifications and one that a musician picks up and immediately knows is right.
What Deploying Intelligence Actually Looks Like
I’m not theorizing here. I’ve done this work.
At a plant I led in India, we inherited an operation that everyone had written off. The numbers looked terminal—not unlike Eastlake’s. The conventional playbook said cut headcount, cut costs, or cut your losses. Instead, we did something radical by modern management standards: we asked the people doing the work what was wrong and what they would fix.
The answers came fast. They came specific. They came from people who had been watching problems go unsolved for years because nobody in a corner office had ever asked. A machine that had been running at 60 percent efficiency for a decade got fixed in two weeks because the operator already knew the root cause—he’d just never been given the authority to act on it.
Within months, those same workers—the ones the spreadsheet said were too expensive—had driven improvements that transformed the operation. Not through heroic effort or longer hours, but through the systematic deployment of knowledge they already possessed.
The math is straightforward. If you have 150 workers and you need to close a $40,000-per-employee gap, you don’t need miracles. You need to unlock what those workers already know about waste, about quality failures, about process bottlenecks, about the hundred small inefficiencies that accumulate into millions of dollars of loss. In my experience, the frontline knows where 60 to 70 percent of recoverable value hides. They’ve been watching it leak out the door every shift. They just haven’t been asked to stop it.
Think about what that means for Eastlake. A plant full of highly skilled workers—many with decades of tenure, people who know the peculiarities of every machine, every alloy, every product line. Hines described it as “close-knit.” That’s not just sentiment. In manufacturing, close-knit means people communicate, cover for each other, solve problems informally across shifts and stations. That social fabric is itself a form of intelligence.
Could the Eastlake workers have closed the gap? I don’t know their operation. I don’t know their specific cost structure. But I know this: they were never given the chance. The first day of bargaining became the last day of the plant. The intelligence that could have been deployed to save the operation was instead told to go home.
The Real Loss
Drive across Ohio and you can map this pattern onto the landscape like geological strata. Youngstown, where the steel mills went dark. Lordstown, where the GM plant closed. Dayton, Springfield, city after city where the factories shuttered and the knowledge walked out and never came back.
Now add Eastlake.
The pattern is always the same. A plant loses money. Leadership studies the numbers. The workers are identified as the problem—too expensive, too slow, too many. The decision is made to close, to offshore, to automate. And in every case, the one thing nobody tries is the one thing that might actually work: treating the workers as the solution rather than the cost.
A tuba isn’t a widget. It’s a musical instrument that will be played by a student in a high school band in Iowa, or a professional in the Cleveland Orchestra, or a kid in a church ensemble who discovers for the first time that she can make something beautiful. The quality of that instrument—the resonance, the intonation, the feel of the valves—is determined by the skill and care of the people who make it.
I know this not just as a manufacturer but as a musician. I play the sitar. The finest sitars in the world come from Miraj, a small town in Maharashtra, India, where families have been crafting them for generations. The knowledge lives in specific hands, in specific workshops, passed from father to son, master to apprentice. The wood selection, the gourd shaping, the fret tying, the bridge placement—every step carries accumulated intelligence that no manual can capture. If someone told me my next sitar would come not from Miraj but from a factory in another country where the labor was cheaper, I would know before I played a single note that something essential had been lost. Not because the measurements would be wrong. Because the judgment would be missing—the ten thousand micro-decisions that a master craftsman makes by feel, by sound, by instinct trained over decades.
Every serious musician understands this instinctively. The question is whether the instrumentalist who picks up a Conn Selmer horn five years from now will feel the difference. Whether the brass will resonate the same way when it was shaped by hands that learned the craft last year in Qidong rather than hands that carried thirty years of Eastlake knowledge. Whether the intelligence that lived on Curtis Boulevard is transportable across an ocean.
I think musicians will know. They always do.
Conn Selmer says it remains “deeply committed to U.S. manufacturing, as we have been for more than 150 years.” But you cannot be committed to American manufacturing while closing your only unionized American brass plant and sending the work overseas. Words are not commitment. Sitting down at the bargaining table is commitment. Investing in your workforce is commitment. Asking the people on the floor what they know and what they’d fix—that is commitment.
On February 5, the Eastlake workers held a “Save Our Plant” rally. They didn’t show up to mourn. They showed up to fight. These 150 people are refusing to go quietly.
This is what I mean when I talk about the intelligence that lives on the factory floor. These workers aren’t just skilled at making instruments. They understand their own value. They understand what will be lost. They understand, in a way that the spreadsheet never captures, that manufacturing capability is not a line item you can move from one column to another.
The question isn’t whether Eastlake was losing money. It was. The question is whether anyone ever seriously tried to deploy the intelligence already present in that plant to fix it. The answer, as far as I can tell, is no.
That’s the real loss. Not just 150 jobs. Not just a factory. But the proof—never gathered, never tested, never given a chance—that the people on that floor could have saved it.
From Wooster, I can hear the silence coming.
Dr. Venki Padmanabhan is a manufacturing leader based in Ohio with 36 years of global operations experience spanning GM, Royal Enfield, and Ather Energy. He writes “The Long Game” on Substack and is the author of the forthcoming book Already Paid For: Why Unlocking Frontline Intelligence Beats Automating Workers Away. He is a co-founder of the Capability Capital Institute.