Noah Donsig is Turning a Freelance Gig into a Manufacturing Network

We all have a purpose in life, but the path we take to find it is different for each of us. Some find it through a teacher who inspires us to look at the world differently. Others find it through a career change that challenges us to develop a new skill. 

Noah Donsig found his purpose after seeing the same problems again and again while working as a mechanical engineer. 

“I spent the last ten years seeing the same problems impacting our industry and our customers. At some point, you stop working around them and decide to start fixing them,” Noah said. 

Noah spent his childhood watching his father launching and growing businesses. He said he saw how combining entrepreneurship and purpose creates opportunities to unlock our true potential.  

“I worked for my dad from a very young age. He always ran his own businesses—a deck building business, a home building business, and even earlier on an ice cream cone manufacturing business,” Noah said.  

But by high school, Noah still wasn't sure about what he wanted to do. 

After graduating, Noah was accepted to Conestoga College’s Architecture - Construction Engineering Technology program. It was during the program that Noah realized he preferred mechanical engineering and switched to the Mechanical Engineering Technology program.  

“I instantly realized that I loved this,” he said. “I joined the Conestoga Formula SAE team, the electrified go-kart racing team. That opened my ideas to what it meant to be a part of small organization and lead a team of passionate people” 

When Noah joined the Formula SAE team, it didn’t have a vehicle yet. It gave Noah the opportunity to see how a team can come together to deliver. 

“It made me realize I really wanted to do this. I wanted to build a team that builds things,” Noah recalled. 

In 2020, Noah launched Noah John Design, a freelance mechanical engineering business. His projects included everything from designing kitchen tables to engineering a culvert protection system. 

Noah had started the business before hearing about the Conestoga Entrepreneurship Collective (CEC), but seeing a post on LinkedIn inspired him to get in touch to see what the CEC had to offer. 

“I just called the number listed under contact information for the director of the CEC, Rose Mastnak, after seeing her LinkedIn post. She asked me what kind of business I wanted to start. I sent her my current client list and project examples, and she said I was already a perfect fit,” he said. 

While Noah had the engineering and design skills, he knew that the business side was critical to building a sustainable revenue model. Noah’s Gig Lab coach, Marios Matsias, showed him what different pricing models or revenue models look like and how to find the model that worked right for his industry and his customers. 

“A lot of freelancers struggle with per hour pricing,” Noah said. “I did everything per hour, and if you finish a project in three hours, you might not realize it is worth $1,000 but you only charged $200.”  

His coaches also helped him understand service models, value propositions, and what his role was as a supplier to customers.  

“They taught me to remember who I’m designing it for. It helped me move from being design focused to being customer focused,” he said. 

One of Noah’s mentors asked him to design a table, and that project led to one of Noah’s first large contracts. 

“I was manufacturing this table at the time and had to pick up some parts at a machine shop. The machinist asked me if I designed them and we started talking. He said he knew a business looking for design help and gave me their number. It ended up being a project to design a proprietary mechanical production system for a growing food brand,” he recalled. 

It was an interesting project for Noah, involving 36 revisions over two years of work.  

“I think my youth and entrepreneurial spirit paid off because most businesses would have turned it down because there were no firm deliverables or requirements—it was pretty much, ‘Here's our new production line. It doesn’t work the way we need it to. Can you help us figure it out?’,” Noah said. 

After almost five years of freelancing, Noah said he saw the potential for the business went beyond design and extended into fabrication. In 2024, he launched JointWerks Design & Fabrication Inc. to provide mechanical design, metalworking, and fabrication services. 

“I had customers that wanted us to make more and more parts, not just prototypes. I realized that we were turning over the designs and then someone else would fabricate the parts. Whoever's making the parts is going to generate the most profit over the product’s life cycle, so we pivoted,” he said. 

JointWerks started manufacturing finished goods from out-sourced piece parts in Noah’s mom’s basement and then quickly moved into his mother’s garage. The company’s client list started to grow rapidly in 2024, at the same time JointWerks was presented with the opportunity to move into their first dedicated workshop space. 

“It was the chance to have a real shop, not just a garage. We moved into it in November 2024 and I brought on a co-founder with a lot of experience ‘under the bucket’ who knew how to do pretty much anything in a fabrication shop.” he said.  

Unfortunately, trying to bring on a co-founder who had a full-time job and then put in another shift on the shop floor was not sustainable. 

“We agreed that we needed to realign ourselves and the business, and I bought him out halfway through 2025,” Noah said. 

The business continued to expand as Noah recognized and capitalized on the power of aligning his manufacturing requirements with local existing businesses who had capacity, equipment, and a wealth of existing fabricators or machinists. In 2025, JointWerks saw a 514% growth in sales revenue from 2024. His landlord was so impressed he offered to become an investor in the business.  

Noah started to question what was driving JointWerks growth. The existing job-shop manufacturing service model isn’t broken. There are a number of medium and large players—many with more equipment and staff than JointWerks does.  

So how is JointWerks able to grow in this already saturated industry? 

The growth didn't come from outspending the competition, it came from out-thinking them.  

By treating local manufacturers as partners rather than competitors, and by staying close to his customers through every stage of design and production, Noah had quietly built something the industry hadn't seen before: a nimble, integrated, regionally rooted manufacturing business with the ambition to scale. The numbers spoke for themselves, and the people around him were taking notice. 

Noah’s deeply passionate purpose is to preserve, innovate, and connect the regionalized job-shop style manufacturing model. Through JointWerks Design & Fabrication Inc., he is building more than just a fabrication business. He is laying the foundation for a new way forward. 

By combining design, manufacturing, and local customer integration into a unified system, Noah is working to ensure that the knowledge, capability, and craftsmanship of this industry not only survive, but continue to grow for the next generation. 

JointWerks is expanding to a new dedicated 7500 square-foot manufacturing space, adding three full-time employees, and investing $100,000 in state of the art equipment to meet its customers' growing demands.  

“We are excited and focused on our strategy heading into the future,” Noah said.