What Is the Three-Legged Stool Philosophy in Manufacturing?
The three-legged stool philosophy is a Midwestern business management philosophy. The idea is that you must have all 3 legs of a milk stool to be successful, because if you don’t, the stool topples over. At SOR Controls Group, this means:
- Customer Service. We go out of our way to help solve problems, and we are willing to do the right thing even when it’s the “hard” thing.
- Delivery. We protect the integrity of our lead times and work quickly and efficiently.
- Quality. We focus on the “quality” of our products and the “quality” of our relationships.
Roy Dunlap, founder of SOR Controls Group, originated this philosophy in 1946, initially framing it as quality, delivery, and customer service. The principle remains: lose balance in any one area, and the entire business becomes unstable.
How a $2,000 Investment and an Overheard Complaint Built an Industrial Instrumentation Leader
In the 1940s, Founder Roy Dunlap met Clinton Nelson while working in a World War II defense plant. Roy had saved $2000 from his service in the U.S. Navy and purchased a lathe and began producing precisions parts and industrial graving out of his garage in 1946. Clinton Nelson helped build the parts. One early product included the Tel-A-Dial scale attachment. At the time, the company was called MechniArts.
The First Breakthrough: TWA Airlines Tray Tables
The airline needed better food service tray tables, something passengers could adjust to use. Roy and Clinton engineered an adjustable design that worked, giving them steady orders and a real business.
The Diner That Changed Everything (1956)
Ten years later, Roy sat in a Kansas City diner listening to two oil workers complain. “When is somebody going to invent a pressure switch that actually works?” one said. Pressure switches would quit working because the parts would break down from friction and wear and tear.
Roy sat down with the oil field workers and listened to their issues and sketched his ideas on a napkin. Soon after, he called Ben Brown, a physics professor at the University of Kansas. They met and brainstormed ideas:
- What if you used a static O-ring seal to eliminate the friction and wear and tear on the parts?
They built a prototype. It worked exactly as calculated. Roy had found his real product.
The Product That Built the Company
That Static “O” Ring pressure switch changed everything:
- Gave the oil and gas industry a durable and reliable product they couldn’t get from existing switches
- Word spread, orders came in
- By 1967, the company renamed itself from MechniArts to Static “O” Ring to capitalize on the product’s reputation
Roy built his business on what he called the three-legged stool: quality, delivery, and customer service. Eighty years later, that same philosophy supports everything we do.
How the Three-Legged Stool Actually Works in Practice
Most companies talk about values. We’ve built an entire business model around three equal priorities that must stay balanced. Here’s how that plays out.
Quality: The First Leg
Roy’s first leg was quality, but not quality in the abstract sense of “well-made.” He meant building something that works for a specific application. A beautifully machined pressure that lasts and lasts. Some of these pressure switches have been in service for 45 years.
This is why quality starts with understanding what customers need. When a customer brings us a problem, our engineering team doesn’t pull out a catalog. They start with questions. What are you measuring? What are the process conditions? What’s failed before and why? Quality means getting the right solution, not just a well-made product.
That approach led to our nuclear-qualified instrumentation in 1982. Nuclear plants needed switches that could handle extreme conditions and meet regulatory requirements that didn’t exist for standard industrial products. We didn’t try to force existing designs into nuclear service. We engineered new products specifically for those requirements, based on our original technology, then qualified them through rigorous testing. That’s quality: the right solution, built right, proven to work.
This is why engineering our products to meet each customer’s specific application is our modern expression of Roy’s quality leg. Quality through engineering means continuously developing solutions that work for what customers need to do.
When we say we’re an instrumentation manufacturer with Engineered-to-Order capability, we’re describing how we achieve quality: by engineering each solution to match the actual application rather than making customers adapt to what we happen to manufacture.
Delivery: The Second Leg
Roy’s original second leg wasn’t simply “delivery.” Not just shipping products on time, but delivering what you promised, when you promised it, working the way it should. That’s harder than it sounds.
Many companies engineer great solutions but can’t deliver them reliably. Lead times stretch from 6 weeks to 12 weeks or more. Quality varies batch to batch. Customers learn not to count on promises. In critical industries where downtime costs six figures per hour, unreliable delivery isn’t just inconvenient. It’s disqualifying.
We’ve built our entire manufacturing approach around predictable delivery. Our 2006 recognition as one of America’s Top 10 Machine Shops came from demonstrating that we could deliver both precision and speed consistently. We manufacture engineered-to-order pressure switches, and we do it on schedule, whether we’re making 100 of the same switches or one we’ve never built before.
This is what enables our Engineered-to-Order with Off-the-Shelf Speed approach. The “Off-the-Shelf Speed” part means nothing if you can’t deliver on time. We maintain it through manufacturing excellence with documented processes that ensure consistent quality (ISO 9000 certified in 1992), systems that meet functional safety standards (SIL certified in 2012), and production expertise that handles variations without missing the schedule.
Manufacturing excellence isn’t the goal. Reliable delivery is the goal. Manufacturing excellence is how we achieve it. When a customer orders a custom pressure switch for an offshore platform, they’re not impressed by our machine shop awards. They care whether the switch arrives when we say it would and works as specified when they install it. That’s delivery.
Customer Service: The Third Leg
Roy’s third leg was customer service, but he didn’t mean just being polite or answering the phone quickly. He meant genuinely helping customers solve their problems, even when that wasn’t the easiest path for SOR.
The three-legged stool falls over if you ignore this leg. Some companies engineer brilliant solutions nobody needed, and manufacture products customers couldn’t use. Quality and delivery don’t matter if you’re not serving the customer’s real needs.
This is why we sell through manufacturer representatives rather than direct sales. Customer service at scale requires local relationships. A representative in Houston who’s been calling on refineries for 20 years understands those applications in ways a corporate salesperson never could. A representative in Beijing working with power plants knows which customers are expanding, which processes are changing, which regulations are coming. That local knowledge is customer service in action.
Our 86-country representative network exists because customer service means being where customers need you, speaking their language (literally and technically), and understanding their specific applications. You can’t serve customers well from a distance.
This customer service focus shaped our SSi Temperature Sensors acquisition in 2013 and our SENSOR Sampling Systems establishment in 2016. Both came from listening to customers tell us their temperature measurement and grab sampling problems weren’t getting solved. We built capabilities to serve those needs.
Customer service also means being honest when we’re not the right solution. Sometimes a customer needs something we can’t deliver competitively, or an application doesn’t fit our expertise. Saying so builds more trust than stretching to take every order. Real customer service sometimes means losing a sale to make sure the customer gets what they specifically need.
We talk about customer partnerships now because that’s how we practice customer service. It’s not transactional support. It’s genuine collaboration where we’re invested in the customer’s success. But the core principle is still Roy’s third leg: serving the customer, whatever that requires.
The Three-Legged Stool in Modern Terms
“Quality, delivery, customer service” made sense in 1946. We’ve adapted the language for modern manufacturing while keeping the core principle.
The three-legged stool philosophy isn’t just company folklore. It’s the operational principle that’s carried us through eight decades of industrial change.
Major Economic Challenges We’ve Navigated:
- Recessions in the 1970s
- Oil crash of the 1980s
- Financial crisis of 2008
- Pandemic disruptions in 2020
During downturns, the temptation is to cut costs by reducing engineering staff or deferring equipment maintenance. That’s losing a leg. We maintained capability in all three areas, which positioned us to recover quickly when markets improved.
What Leadership Means After 80 Years
Being a leader in industrial instrumentation manufacturing isn’t about size or market share. It’s about still being here (owned by Roy’s Family) after 80 years, while many competitors from 1946, 1970, and even 2000 have disappeared.
Market Leadership Through Long-Term Relationships
Our manufacturer representative network across over 80 countries includes partnerships spanning 30+ years. Many are multi-generational businesses like ours. When we were named a finalist for the 2025 Kansas Governor’s Exporter of the Year Award, it recognized this relationship approach. We don’t just export products. We’ve built lasting partnerships with representatives who grow their businesses while helping us understand local markets.
Looking Forward: The Next 80 Years
Industries still need accurate measurement instrumentation they can trust. Processes still demand reliable control that works when it counts. Critical applications still require instrumentation that performs correctly, every time, for decades.
SOR Controls Group will keep doing what’s worked for 80 years: listening to customers who have problems that need solving, engineering solutions that fully address those problems, and manufacturing products that last. Engineered-to-Order with Off-the-Shelf Speed isn’t marketing talk. It’s the current expression of Roy’s three-legged stool philosophy applied to modern manufacturing.
Whether you need a pressure switch with specific requirements for an offshore platform, high-temperature sensors for a metal processing operation, nuclear-qualified instrumentation for power generation, corrosion-resistant measurement devices for chemical processing, hazardous area certified equipment for explosive atmospheres, or complete sampling systems for quality control, we’ve probably solved something similar.
We’ve been at this since 1946. We plan to keep going.
Do you need help finding the solution to your process industry challenge? Reach out to your local SOR Controls Group Representative to solve your challenges today.
