Morganton manufacturing software business sold to Swedish-based company, employees staying (2025)

Thirty years ago, Jimmy Wakeford set out on his own to sell software to local manufacturers.

After building a successful business over the decades, Wakeford, the owner of Barefoot CNC in Morganton, recently sold his business to Swedish company Sandvik.

Barefoot CNC’s name will change, but his employees will stay on with the company, Wakeford said.

Barefoot CNC sells software that tells industrial manufacturing machines how to make specific parts. The business also provides training for people to use the computer aided design (CAD) and computer aided manufacturing software (CAM) with the industrial machines.

Sandvik, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, is the parent company of Mastercam, a specific software that Barefoot CNC sells.

Sandvik also bought two other U.S. resellers of Mastercam software, CAD/CAM Solutions, based in in Monroe, Georgia, and CamTech Engineering Services, based in Port Orange, Florida, according to a release from Sandvik.

The sale was official on March 3, Wakeford said. He said the parties agreed not to divulge the sale price.

Until Hurricane Helene, the Barefoot CNC office was located in the River Village shopping center on Sanford Drive in Morganton. The business will remain in Morganton but will now be known as Mastercam.

Barefoot CNC has more than 1,000 customers in North and South Carolina, Wakeford said. Local customers include Toner Machining and James Tool, and several in Hickory, he said.

“We work with everybody from small one-man shop all the way up to large companies like Ruger and Owen (gun manufacturers),” he said. He has worked with NASCAR teams since the late 1990s, Wakeford said.

There were not always so many companies using the technology.

“When we started out, you know, not everybody had a CNC machine. CNC machines were new technology for most shops,” Wakeford said. “So they buy the CNC machines, and then they find out, programming it by hand is hard. So they started buying the CAM software.”

The software turns a computer model of a product or part into the machine language so the machine knows how to move to create the part, Wakeford said.

A CNC machine uses a mill or a lathe to create a part. A machine takes a chunk of steel and cuts away at it until it’s an aircraft part or a power part or the specific part a business needs, Wakeford said.

“CNC machines are basically just robots. They only do what you tell them to do, and you’ve got to write a program to tell it what to do,” Wakeford said. “Well, converting the model into code, that’s kind of a trick but we’ve done it for 30 years.”Wakeford learned to use computer aided manufacturing programming software at Western Piedmont Community College about 35 years ago.

He worked at Henredon Furniture in research and development, as a CNC programmer and in process development. The company sent him to various manufacturing plants to implement the programing software.

Contractors working on the machines and computers told Wakeford that he was good at it and he should start his own business.

“They talked about how easy it was going to be, how much money there was going to be,” Wakeford said. “I believed them, man. So I struck out on my own.”

In 1996, Wakeford formed Barefoot CNC and opened an office in downtown Morganton.

“I was a manufacturing consultant, and I was recommending that people buy Mastercam so that I could then customize the software to fit their particular need, their particular shop,” Wakeford said.

When Wakeford started the business, most customers didn’t have internet or email. He would load up a desktop computer and a big screen, and hit the road, traveling Interstates 40, 95 and 26, visiting customers and shops.

“It was about 50,000 miles a year, plus,” Wakeford said. “And then as customers started getting email, life got a little easier.”

As a Mastercam seller, now bought by the owner of Mastercam, Wakeford likened the sale to Ford Motor Company buying up dealerships and the dealership employees becoming employees of Ford Motor Company.

The Morganton office employees will stay on, Wakeford said, except for him and his wife, Katie.

“The reason Katie and I didn’t stay is, you know, ‘I’m tired, boss,’” Wakeford said.

Wakeford said he wants to take some time off but he may later work as a consultant with the company or get into the educational market in some capacity.