Compass Moves Advanced President Into New Corporate Position
CHARLOTTE, NC – July 31, 2025 – It’s been awhile since Keith Felts worked anywhere else besides Advanced Machining & Tooling.
Keith became the company’s president when he co-founded it in 1985. He was in the same role, leading Advanced to incredible new heights, for longer than some of the company’s employees have been alive.
But Keith was ready for a new opportunity when one presented itself this summer.
Compass Precision, a Charlotte-based manufacturer of customer, close-tolerance metal components for mission-critical applications and Advanced’s parent company, announced Thursday it has promoted Keith into a newly created corporate role – VP of Engineering.
“Advanced Machining is an excellent machine shop. I’ve enjoyed all the work that it took to get it to that point,” said Keith.
“But this new position affords me the opportunity to work with other people, which I very much enjoy, and to help initiate improvements and change within those other companies. So, I’m really excited about it.
“To have totally new environments to work in and new folks to interact with is going to be very interesting.”
As VP of Engineering, Keith said he will try to assist any of the general managers at Compass’ nine operating companies. In addition to Advanced, there is Tri-Tec Industries, Quality Products & Machine, and Gray Manufacturing Technologies in North Carolina; Bergeron Machine and Pocasset Machine in Massachusetts; R&D Machine in Florida; Douglas Machining Services in Minnesota; and Strom Manufacturing in Oregon making up the nine Compass operating companies.
Keith expects to mostly provide technical assistance to those nine machine shops.
He officially started in his new role on July 1. During the first month, Keith helped a couple operating companies begin searching for new machining equipment. Keith has also been involved in the recruitment and selection process for the new general manager position at Pocasset Machine.
Compass officially acquired that machine shop in Pocasset, MA on July 21. Keith will be traveling to Pocasset within a few weeks to assess the operating company and devise a plan to offer further assistance.
At Advanced Machining, Patrick Reynolds, who was previously the company’s operations manager, will assume Keith’s leadership role. Advanced is also changing the responsibilities of a few other employees and hoping to hire three new machinists.
“I’ve been working to mentor and train Pat for years to eventually assume this position anyway. With my move to corporate, that just hastened that move. Pat is completely ready,” Keith said. “Then we had some other folks who were already in mid-management and some others that will have added responsibilities moving forward to make sure that we still have the same function as before.”
Although he has begun his new role, Keith has remained involved at Advanced on a daily basis. While Keith will always be available to support the operating company as VP of Engineering, his daily involvement with Advanced will end once Pat and others transition into their new roles.
Advanced aims to hire three new machinists by the end of 2025 because this year is on track to be a record-setting one for the operating company.
“We were already trying to beef up our staff before my role change,” Keith said. “Advanced is extremely busy and needs more people.”
Prior to co-founding Advanced, Keith worked as an application engineer for Agie Charmilles. At that company, Keith became an expert in EDM equipment, which was Advanced’s first focus.
Over four decades, Keith led Advanced into new areas for the company to grow. Advanced added its first milling machine in 1989 and expanded into 5-axis machining in 2006. Then in 2022, Advanced purchased a sophisticated mill/turn to continue meeting growing customer demand.
In each case, Keith Felts and his staff didn’t know a lot about those new machines when Advanced first bought them. But the company’s employees “learned, succeeded and eventually excelled” with each new expansion.
Compass announced Keith’s promotion to the newly created role about one week after the company promoted Bill Canning to President. Bill will be assuming oversight of all nine Compass operating companies.
He is replacing previous Compass President Gary Holcomb, who is remaining with the company as CEO.
“I am thrilled with Keith taking on this new role as Compass’s Vice President of Engineering,” explained Gary. “That promotion, combined with Bill’s elevation to President and strong contributions from Jim (Miller, VP of Sales) and Paul (Wilhelm, VP & CFO), really positions us for continued growth and success going forward over the next few years.”
Compass Precision was formed with the acquisition of Advanced, Quality and Tri-Tec in October 2019. Compass began adding on to its portfolio with Gray in August 2020.
In 2021, Compass acquired Douglas. Then during 2022, Compass added R&D Machine and Strom Manufacturing.
Compass made its first expansion into New England with Bergeron in 2023. The parent company added Pocasset this July.
All Compass operating companies serve a diversified group of blue-chip customers in the aerospace & defense, space, semiconductor, medical, industrial automation, power generation, telecommunications, high tech, and specialty industrial markets.
In addition to expansion via acquisition, Compass has also grown significantly since its formation in 2019 by investing aggressively in advanced equipment and adding new customers drawn to the company’s mantra of “we do the tough stuff”.
In particular, Compass has concentrated its CAPEX expansion on machines capable of running unattended, lights-out, and/or in multi-tasking mode whereby previous discrete CNC machine processes are combined into a single operation.
For more information about Compass’s management team and its capabilities, please contact Compass CEO Gary Holcomb at gary.holcomb@compassprecision.com.