There’s news from Gear Scout that Freedom Group has fired Lynsey Thompson, AAC’s plant manager. This comes on the heels of Kevin Brittingham, the founder of AAC, getting the same treatment last month.
Lynsey Thompson ran AAC’s Atlanta, GA based plant where they made all of their equipment and put a lot of time and effort into making their own before being purchased by Remington. She was recruited by Kevin after college to work for him at AAC and has been there ever since. From our interview with Kevin Brittingham:
The best thing I’ve ever done was – there’s 20 or whatever 26 people or something like that – and I’m probably smarter than three of them. It’s really the best thing that I did. Lynsey started washing my cars when she was like fifteen and she runs our company. It’s always worked for me… When she got out of college I couldn’t wait for her to get here and that’s really when we turned shit around too. There’s three people who work here that were self-made millionaires before they were 30. You have to want to dominate, and to me our management style is very open minded – I have smart people, I recognize it, I make mistakes with them every day, I give people too much latitude and it bites me in the ass – but at the end I get a lot of stuff done. It’s one problem that I have with Remington that they want to micromanage a lot of shit and I understand that’s their money now and they’re a big company and it’s compliance or HR or whatever, all these other things that we don’t have complete control over.
Gear Scout is indicating that this may signal that Remington is consolidating their production of AAC’s products at their Ilion, New York plant. This may turn out to be a false rumor (the moving, not the firing) as one of our readers got in contact with Mers at AAC who reportedly said of the reportedly impending move “don’t believe everything you read on the internet.”
This is distressing news, especially since Kevin and his hand picked team, combined with the environment of their Atlanta plant, created the special sauce that has resulted in numerous breakout designs including the increasingly popular .300 AAC Blackout cartridge and the Honey Badger. There’s unfortunately no longer any doubt that a shake-up of this size will have an effect on their productivity, quality and innovation going forward.