Meet Morgan Zealear, Our Assembly  Solutions Product Manager

"It's amazing how much gets done here with a tight team"

As a manufacturing engineer for the past nine years, Morgan Zealear has created a lot of projects from scratch.

He spent those years at Sierra Instruments in Monterey, where he built prototypes, tested them, wrote procedures for operation, and trained people on how to use equipment.

He worked extensively in fluid distribution and process applications.

Now he's putting that expertise to work for Swagelok Northern California as our Assembly Solutions Product Manager.

Our assembly solutions team are the associates who can do anything from putting a special bend in a piece of tubing to assembling entire subsystems.

A Carmel native, Zealear expected to go out and seek his fortune in exotic places like Chicago. But less than two weeks after graduating from U.C. Santa Barbara, he was offered a job near his home town with Sierra Instruments.

Invaluable experience

He still got to travel on the job and pick up some invaluable experience.

"I've had a couple of great mentors over the years. I've dealt with some huge corporations and some small companies," he says.

He was highly valued at Sierra Instruments, but longed to try something new and get closer to Silicon Valley.

Zealear knew Swagelok Northern California as one of our customers, and saw us as a great place to land.

It took some months before we had a slot for him. Then Neil Ide, who was the previous Assembly Solutions Product Manager, decided to transition into a new role.

Zealear and Ide had worked on some Assembly Solutions projects already when Zealear was a customer, so they already had a good relationship going in.

Within a few days of Zealear starting work here, they had figured out a good system: Ide will continue to support any legacy Assembly Solutions projects he had been involved with, and Zealear is taking the lead on anything new.

"But we will back each other up on each other's projects.” Zealear says. "We get along well. We are like-minded individuals, and I have known him for a long time."

Hire slowly, integrate quickly

As many other of our associates have discovered, it takes a lot more than a quick interview to get an offer from Swagelok Northern California. We have multiple interviews, testing and meetings with many of the people our new hires would be working with. Zealear appreciates the "quality control" of our system.

"Hiring someone is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you are going to get until they join the team and they start working alongside you.” he says. "The rigorous interview process we put applicants through helps take the mystery out of new hires and find the right people. It was the first time I had been given any aptitude testing. That whole aspect was of personal interest to me."

Once he was on board, however, we got him heavily involved right away. He started on a Monday with an orientation, and by Tuesday morning was going on sales calls and assisting Ide with some ongoing projects.

Big plans

Zealear has several pages of plans for the Assembly Solutions department. 

"I think most people already have a good first impression, but I want to keep it moving forward," he says. In addition to creating and testing new assemblies for leaks, he'd like to be able to do some additional testing and generate data sets. He also hopes to upgrade the lab with some added safety features. 

As he settles in, Zealear has been impressed at how much we get done with our current staff level.

"It's a smaller operation than I thought. I figured it was like 150 people, and it was only 65," he says. "It is amazing how much gets done here with a tight team."

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