🕯️ What a 100-Year Company Looks Like in 2025

When people think of a company that’s been around for 100 years, they often picture oil rigs, rusted signage, sepia-toned ledgers, or a grandfather’s name etched into stone. They think: old money, old ways, old legacy.

But what if we redefined it?

What if a 100-year company isn’t defined by how long it’s existed, but by how willing it is to evolve without losing its soul?

In 2025, longevity isn’t a trophy, it’s a responsibility. It means acknowledging that your employees aren’t just cogs in a well-oiled machine, but humans with rhythms, needs, dreams, and limits. It means honoring what was built before you while making it strong enough - and soft enough - to hold what’s coming next.

My father’s company, Farley Machine Works, has been around for over a century. It was born from another legacy - Richmond Drilling, a now-closed family business rooted in oil and gas. My dad is a fourth-generation oil man, and when my grandfather passed away, the drilling side had to be sold off. Farley Machine Works remained. A machine shop, reshaped by the times.

It’s not flashy. There’s no neon sign. There’s no Instagram page. Just two machine shops in Sterling, CO and Great Bend, KS, keeping things running. Making parts. Making it work.

When my mom and I drove to Seattle a few years ago, we stopped at both shops. I thought it would be about nostalgia. But it wasn’t. It was about presence.

There, on the other side of the door, was another family. The foreman. His wife, the secretary. Their son, doing the field labor. They worked for us, but it didn’t feel like hierarchy. It felt like belonging.

They knew who I was. I was a Reigle. I didn’t know them, but they carried a kind of emotional blue-collar reverence for my family. One of them had spoken at my grandfather’s funeral and got choked up doing it. A man I’d never met, grieving a man I thought only we had lost.

That’s what a 100-year company looks like. It looks like a daughter walking into a machine shop in the middle of Kansas and being recognized by name. It looks like someone who remembers when your grandfather bought his first truck crane. It looks like quiet, unflashy love held in a warehouse that smells like metal and memory.

In 2025, a company doesn’t endure by tightening every screw. It endures by staying human.

It knows that success isn’t measured only in revenue, but in retention, ritual, and repair. It builds systems that last because they’re willing to shift. It knows how to receive feedback without defensiveness. It doesn’t need to say “we’re like a family,” because it shows it.

It knows that legacy isn’t what you leave behind. It’s what people carry forward - willingly, and by heart.

And it knows the deepest truth of all:

If you want to be around in 2125, you need to start building like you deserve it now.

A company that lasts 100 years doesn’t just survive economic change, industry shifts, or generational turnover. It survives because somewhere along the way, someone made sure the human parts were preserved.

The quiet integrity. The unseen care. The choices that don’t show up in a ledger, but are felt in the air.

I didn’t inherit a business plan.

I inherited a story.

And now, I get to ask what story comes next.

Postscript: A Note from the Drawer

After I finished writing this, my dad sent me a quote.

It was something Audrey Hepburn once said, words my grandfather had written down and kept in the drawer of his office desk for years. Not hung on the wall. Not shared aloud. Just quietly carried. And now, passed down.

“For good eyesight, see the good in others. For good posture, walk in the knowledge that you are never alone. People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed. Never throw out anyone. If you need a helping hand, look at the end of each arm. We are given two hands—one to help ourselves, the other to help others.”

That quote didn’t just echo what I’d been trying to say.

It revealed what had been guiding us all along.

Because maybe that’s what a family company really looks like after a hundred years.

Not shiny. Not corporate. Not immortal.

But held together by people who kept their values in drawers.

And believed that restoration wasn’t just for machines

but for people, too.