The Accidental Metal Empire

A lot of what you might want to know about Jim Belosic can be learned from his childhood home.

Belosic grew up in an immaculate Victorian house that sits on 2.5 acres in Genoa, Nevada. Genoa is the oldest town in Nevada with the oldest saloon (still operating) and has all of 1,300 residents. Historically, Genoans worked on ranches and farms amid a bucolic setting where the Sierra Nevadas give way to pastoral lowlands. As such, there was not much of anything around the Belosics’ house when they started building it in 1977.

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Vic and Julie Belosic had fled the bustle of Southern California in an Econoline van looking for something different. (Well, Vic was looking for something different. Julie was quite happy.) They were both good with their hands and decided to construct their Nevada home themselves. The project began with a barn (where the couple and their young daughter lived) and then expanded to the main house a couple of years later. The house itself was a work in progress when Jim arrived in 1980 and remained that way through much of his adolescence.

Belosic is the founder and CEO of SendCutSend. Many of you reading this story will not have heard of SendCutSend. But, if you craft or manufacture things as a hobby or at work, then you probably know the company well.

SendCutSend operates factories full of machines that cut, bend and shape metal into custom parts. We’re talking objects for people trying to modify their cars right on up to the key components of rockets, robots and defense equipment. Many of SendCutSend’s more than 300,000 customers were turning to China for this type of work until Belosic, who founded the company in 2018, figured out how to make lots of metal parts well, fast and cheap and offered an option right in the United States. As such, SendCutSend and Belosic have become key players in America’s effort to learn how to manufacture things again, although playing a part in a national movement was never really Belosic’s intention.

The origin story of this manufacturing phenomenon goes back to the Genoa house and its ongoing construction during Belosic’s childhood. At six, Belosic stood by his dad in the dining room catching squares of wood as they came off a table saw. Belosic would then sand the edges and hand them back to his dad who nailed them up near the ceiling to create dentil molding. At ten, Belosic had a bandsaw-themed birthday party where he and his friends built Pinewood Derby cars. Not long after that, Vic decided he didn’t like the look of the staircase and set to rebuilding it, so the family relied on a ladder to reach their bedrooms for several months.

“On Sundays, the few other people that were living here would get in their cars, and they would mosey down into town and have a good time as a family,” says Julie. “But not us. We were banging hammers. It was so quiet around here that we could hear the hammers bouncing off the mountains.”

Out back, Vic always had a half-built car project going with nuts and bolts scattered all around it. (Vic has the mangled hands of a proper maker.) Belosic would help out on those efforts too or explore the possibilities presented by the neighboring wood and scrap piles. “You had to keep yourself entertained,” says Belosic. “There was no internet, and just one neighbor three miles away who I could make it to on my Go-kart.” Besides exploring, Belosic made money through garage sales and by mowing lawns so that he could afford to improve his Go-kart or buy a radio-controlled car.

This environment bestowed a love of tinkering and building inside of Belosic, and this fit his disposition anyway. School was too easy for him, and he didn’t care much for its structure and regulations. Belosic attended the University of Nevada, Reno for six weeks before dropping out to start his own business. “He had to be an entrepreneur,” Julie says. “He was not going to work for somebody else.” To which Jim adds, “What she’s saying is that I’m a really shitty employee. I was forced to work for myself.”

JIM BELOSIC is 46 and can often be found in similar attire – work boots, jeans, a black long-sleeve shirt and a black SendCutSend baseball cap. He’s got a thick, brown beard and glasses. His manner oscillates between straightforward and confident and easygoing and jovial. Mostly, he comes off as focused and is something of an anomaly in this moment of reindustrialization hype and plentiful bullshittery in that he’s quite matter-of-fact when he talks about SendCutSend’s business and about the prospects of the U.S. revitalizing its manufacturing backbone.