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Business of Machining - Episode 11
280 Plays8 years ago
Saunders shares a golden machinist's moment. Grimsmo has been spending time "putting out fires" but why? Saunders offers perspective on the impact of unrealistic expectations and an interesting way to get into a better mindset when problem solving and making decisions. Grimsmo lights up when sharing his new thing: tracking tool life via a simple macro calculation.
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Transcript
Introduction and Networking
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Good morning. How's it going, bud? Welcome to Business of Machining, episode 11. Yeah, I'm John Grimsmough talking to John Saunders.
00:00:13
Speaker
We just, it's funny, the social media, we talk to a lot of the people that we've met over the years, and there's a fellow in San Francisco that we've met, I think at IMTS, and he created a new, what was it, what's that app we use? We app? What's app? What's app? He created a list called The Johns.
00:00:33
Speaker
Yeah, the two Johns. No, but it's funny. I get a lot of help from that all the time. You and I are on a couple of different little mini group chats, and we talk with people. People that we know, people that we've met, but little things for help, infusion, and sanity checks. Yeah, and you grow a lot closer to people when you have a direct conversation, like an ongoing chat messenger kind of thing. Right. We've been talking to some of these guys either since IMTS or even further before that. It's just
Challenging Customer Job
00:01:01
Speaker
really nice.
00:01:02
Speaker
Yeah, it's good. You need that. Again, entrepreneurship, you need that sounding board. It's kind of, I guess it's sort of like a mini version of our talks because it's therapeutic in the sense that I feel like on that, especially on the one with the two other guys that I'm thinking of, we share our successes and our failures and our frustrations and it's kind of private enough where I think we all trust each other. Yeah, and you can share some stuff that you don't want to put straight up on Instagram and show everybody. Right. Yeah, some of the failures, you know.
00:01:31
Speaker
Almost asked but then I did I felt like it was too much to ask but I had a really weird one where a customer Potentially a new customer dropped off a part at our shop. So it's obviously local customer Left the print. I looked at the print. I was like, okay, you know, we can do this I didn't I didn't have time at the moment to get too into it and the afterward I realized it was actually a very difficult I'll explain later if part and and then he's like we'll pick it up in two days. Just telling me to
00:01:58
Speaker
And I didn't know. I was funny. I kind of was like, okay, I think they're either kind of a test of us, but I also wonder if they did such a short turnaround time to make sure we did the part and didn't send it out somewhere. Not that anyone thinks that we're just that disingenuous, but that is a way to make sure the person that we want to hire to do this work is the one actually doing it.
00:02:20
Speaker
But then I'm like, gosh, how do I build this? Because, boy, I would normally say that's a complicated part. New customer on a rush job. You want all three. Fast,
Completing the Test Part
00:02:31
Speaker
good, and not cheap. But yeah. Right. Yeah. Two out of three. Huh. So was that two days ago?
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, they're actually coming at nine this morning to pick it up and it felt so good because we crushed it. Nice. What's tricky about it is it's a hole, two inch deep hole in steel. And there's two sections of the hole. The first section is a reamed straight wall plus one thou minus zero. So, okay, no big deal. I can walk that in. Below it is the same sized hole, but tapped.
00:03:08
Speaker
Oh, thread mill? Well, yes, you have to be a thread mill because nominal taps are actually over the OD of the straight wall. Let's say it's a half inch hole, but half inch 13 tap, if you mic it, is actually 504 or something. So thread mill works, but most thread mills don't come with enough relief. So we had to set up a single point thread mill on a grinder and add back relief to it and stick it into the hole.
00:03:38
Speaker
Nice. And the parts look awesome. They felt really good. Perfect. How can that even... What's the purpose of a thread inside a hole if you can't put a screw in there to thread it? They actually dropped off the part that mates into it. Is it like how an orange vice, how it's...
00:03:56
Speaker
Well, it would be, yeah, but the orange vices actually have the residual thread. The crest of the thread actually cuts into the straight wall tape or straight wall board. Okay. Okay. That's what you mean. And here it doesn't. These look pristine, which is not really a problem on the orange.
Engineers and Machinists Collaboration
00:04:11
Speaker
And I don't think it would here, but I didn't want to do it because I wanted to, I don't know. It reminds me, honestly, John, it reminds me of you, of just being so proud of what you do. And like, I actually am super excited. I kind of hope.
00:04:25
Speaker
This is probably a little bit childish of me, but I kind of hope that they sent the print as a test for me to fail. Yeah. And I didn't fit. Yeah, you know, you crushed it. Right. And I want them to be like, we don't hear you weren't supposed to be able to do this. And I want to be like, I did it. Yeah. That that or the engineer just said, that's what I want. And I don't know how to make it. But
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah, well, they're a long time company, but it is a good question about engineers. It's something I appreciate more and more, the relationship between engineers and people that actually make stuff. Right, and being DIY kind of guys, I've always laughed at the relationship between engineers and machinists and how they're so separate. One guy designs it, one guy programs it, and another guy machines it, and they can't do each other's jobs. And how does that even work?
00:05:20
Speaker
And we had a, I don't forget what I just posted a YouTube video where we talked about this and we got some really good emails back from people. So we're gonna try to do some chip break series with people in industry talking about how to correctly tolerance parts. Okay.
Balancing Multiple Roles
00:05:35
Speaker
I don't even, like how do you correctly decide what needs tolerance relative to other things and for fits and all that, which should be exciting.
00:05:42
Speaker
in the design phase of the product. Right. Right, yeah. Or like Tim Paul at Autodesk was talking about how people will often over tolerance things because they can only locate off certain things. And if you realize you have modern day probing, you can create the bore first. And after you machine the bore, probe it and make things relative to that and not worry about, say, the outside of the part that happens to be cast or saw cut. Right, right. Then the outside does not matter. Most of the time it doesn't.
00:06:12
Speaker
How was your week? It was a bit of a weird week. A lot of production, a lot of good happened this week, but the whole week I kind of felt like I was at the whim of Eric and Barry in the shop. Oh yeah. I texted you, you said you were kind of stressed about...
00:06:35
Speaker
Is whack-a-mole? Yeah. One problem after another, and I'm the firefighter putting out fires, making everybody else's life easier. And maybe that is the job of the CEO, of the guy in charge who's kind of doing everything. It's making
Stress and Time Management
00:06:51
Speaker
everybody's life easier by putting different systems in place, by making sure parts get machined more accurately, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:00
Speaker
you know it's on one hand i love what i do and i love to get to make parts on the lathe but i don't love dropping everything just to make a few things for eric you know at a moment's notice three times throughout the week and part of that is my problem because i'm not ahead enough on certain things but you know what i mean it's like do this okay what why is this happening eric's not new and barry isn't even new at this point so why is it happening now i don't know it's a good question
00:07:29
Speaker
I don't know, I've been busy with a lot of things, so some aspects of production on my end are falling behind. Got it. And Eric is holding a pretty solid speed, so he's running out of my inventory. It was just a good problem to have, but. Are you spending enough time, like John Grimsmough, the entrepreneur, John Grimsmough, the operations guy, to think about stuff? Or are you just playing John Grimsmough, the machinist, knife maker every day?
00:07:59
Speaker
Maybe that's the problem is I'm just playing firefighter every day making what I haven't made yet. So I'm not spending enough time doing the things that I need to do, running the business, ordering the proper materials and making sure everything gets paid for and all this stuff. And I feel like the now things are coming more ahead of line of the important things. Does that make sense? Yeah, totally.
00:08:29
Speaker
And there's kind of like a weird feeling about just doing what's important right now versus what's greater important.
00:08:35
Speaker
Oh yeah, it's classic long term, short term. How do you get ahead? Right, right. I had this weird thing where I'll switch. It actually started in my high school. We didn't have classes every day. Certain classes skip certain days. So it was more difficult to do homework because it wasn't like every day it was due the next day. And so I created this system where you would basically try to figure out when you had to have stuff to do by. It was a really good life lesson.
00:09:02
Speaker
But what I would do is I would sometimes change it up and sometimes I would do the stuff for two or three days ahead first because then I knew if I finished it, I couldn't then decide to just call it a night or be done with it because the stuff to do tomorrow still wasn't done. And I wasn't pushing myself too hard, really, but it was just more of a way of like, how do you, it comes back to that theme, I forget which book it was, but pay yourself first.
00:09:27
Speaker
So should you spend an hour in the morning thinking and planning and then hop into go mode, task mode? It's probably a wise choice.
00:09:41
Speaker
But knowing me an hour is not enough. Oh, that's true. But yeah, it's defining what is important when and just making sure it can all get accomplished. And I'm always guilty of spending too much time on somewhat unimportant things,
Outsourcing and Vendor Relations
00:10:01
Speaker
my things, when I get to the end of it. And I'm like, ooh, that took a lot of time.
00:10:06
Speaker
Maybe I should have been doing this instead. So I'm constantly mindful of like like where my time is going, right? but don't second Don't have self-doubt like don't second guess yourself at this point I think you continue to judge time relative to some fictitious Speed that will never be achieved like maybe like there is no more pie time because that's now normal Yeah, so it's really only when you go pi squared that I'm gonna get upset and
00:10:36
Speaker
I like that. No, you know what I mean? Like quit judging yourself against something that doesn't, like at the end of the day, we only get one shot at life, you're crushing it, make sure you love what you do, and if it takes you too long or longer than you think it could, so what? That's fact of life. That's the way that I do business.
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. No, you go. Okay, you, I'll go. I almost forgot what I was going to say. It's just in being a self-taught entrepreneur, I'm sure there's several people listening to this that get in the same ruts of you want so much and you only have so much time and there's only
00:11:19
Speaker
Like the success is never sweet enough because there's always more to do. Yeah, but this is just you being way, I mean, look, don't get me wrong. I love pushing myself and I love pushing the people around me that I respect and love and so forth, but you are being too hard on yourself.
00:11:36
Speaker
And look, I do this too. I've been filming more on the weekends because it's quiet here and blah, blah, blah. I came in Sunday and I had this expectation of getting this partner on a Wednesday widget and I was like, oh yeah, I could get this done by 11, 11.30, be home with the family and all that.
00:11:53
Speaker
And that's when I'm like, no, quit it. Like you completely unrealistic about the lack of ability to predict what could go wrong and how to set this up and blah, blah, blah. And I find you're actually so much, it goes back to a thing where it's like slow is, what's it called? Slow is fast. Yeah. And where if I'm like, just cool it, Saunders, just relax, shrug your shoulders a little bit, smile, stop and smile, it really helps. And then I just walk over to the machine, I set something up, I'm actually,
00:12:21
Speaker
awkwardly slow paced and I end up going faster. Yeah, you make less mistakes. That's a phrase I've been thinking about all week actually because I heard you mention it somewhere again. That slow is fast. It's been rolling through my head several times and I've said it to the guys in the shop here.
00:12:38
Speaker
I'm really starting to take notice of it, because you make less mistakes, you know? Yeah, you're just less jittery. So I keep wanting to, my list of things to talk about today, because I'm struggling with some stuff here, is I have a list of, I don't know what it's called, but it's in my little life excel file about
00:12:57
Speaker
It's like seven or eight people that I really look up to. They aren't necessarily people I know super well or intimately, but they're people that have had an impact on me. When I really struggle with something, I pull that list of those names up and I look through and I think, what would Joe do? What would Jack do? What would Matt do in these situations?
00:13:19
Speaker
And I have this,
Tool Life Tracking System
00:13:21
Speaker
because I know them well enough, I feel like I'm able to sort of project what I think that they would say, which is enough to force me into a different mindset of how to iterate through how to solve this problem and think about it. That's a really fascinating example. Sometimes I'll think
00:13:37
Speaker
what would Meg do, my wife? Would she buy this or buy this? Or take this time or take this time? And the choice is pretty obvious with her. Don't waste time, just get it done kind of thing, which is often different than my natural way. I'm going to make my own sleeve liners for the lathe. Exactly. I'm going to do it myself.
00:14:01
Speaker
the bootstrapper in me is still cheap. Yeah. You and I need to take our bootstrappers out to the back and just put a bolt in their head. Yeah. Well, we got to watch each other about that then.
00:14:13
Speaker
No, we do, seriously. I mean, what's that line? I found myself yesterday, a guy offered me a really awesome piece of equipment at a pretty good price. And I was like, oh my, I was drooling. And then I was like, I actually pulled that list up and I was like, no, it has nothing to do with my happiness or my business success or my ability to do things better over the next two or three months. It could in six months or a year, so that I'll go buy it. And if it's a little bit more expensive then, or I don't have the sweetheart deal, who cares?
00:14:43
Speaker
Yeah, same exact thing happened to me somebody local core print patterns. Oh, yeah said he found a lapping machine 24 inch lapping machine For any it even look like it looks like a Disc sander laying down. I don't know. Yeah, it's 24 inch Just rubs the two platters together returns them just one platter so one side of the park gets gets done at a time and
00:15:11
Speaker
OK. But it'll produce up to a mirror finish on whatever parts you want. And we do get some of our handles and most of our blades lapped out of house. It's not an expensive process. It's just time consuming. But it's like, I don't need this piece of equipment. Even if it's a great deal, I can't. I shouldn't be buying it right now. I don't really have the room for it. All this stuff. But you still get excited for a few minutes about it. And it's like, well, what would Meg do? Not a chance.
00:15:39
Speaker
Yeah. No, you're good. That's very healthy. You have to always snap out of it sometimes. Yeah, and the quicker we can snap out of it, the happier we're going to be, because otherwise we just fall down these rabbit holes. Like you said last week, I'm six layers deep in this project. Yeah, it's funny.
00:16:01
Speaker
But it's also good, too. It's funny, the whole outsourcing, post-services, all that. I got a quote back on something and I was...
00:16:10
Speaker
like blown away at the pricing. I was like, that doesn't make sense. And it felt really good. I was able to call up a couple of people that I know and say, Hey, you know, ballpark, you know, it's funny. So I know that these people have this service done as well, but it's none of my business to just say, what do you pay for this? So I usually phrase the question like, Hey, I'm trying to do this. What, what would you, what guidance would you give me on what I should, you know, ballpark expect for a service like this to be done, knowing that they basically have it done. But again, I'm not necessarily asking to pry it.
00:16:37
Speaker
It usually is a much more disarming way. And most people are willing to
Outsourcing Communication Challenges
00:16:41
Speaker
say, hey, no, I can get those done for 25 to 30 bucks if I batch them in at 30 at a time or something. And that's, in this case, exactly what I needed to know. And it saved me all this hassle and headache of worrying about having bad information. Yep. A lot of times what happens with my buddies is I just say, where do you get this done? Or they'll come and ask me, where do you get this done? Because you've already established some trusted relationship with someone.
00:17:07
Speaker
Do you ever view that information as competitive? Depends, but for DLC I'm starting to think so a little bit because it's been such a hard process to find the right shop. And it's such a value add, it's not just the shop, it's the relationship, the specs, the P, right? Yeah, the time that I've put into the relationship, absolutely. That being said, I can't get a hold of them at all.
00:17:36
Speaker
I sent my parts like a week and a half ago and I've called four times, I've sent a text. Is it a one man band or? No, it's a pretty decent company, a dozen people maybe or more. Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, it's just funny. Anyway, I'll try to call again today. I'm expecting, I'm literally expecting just a package to show up at the door one day.
00:18:00
Speaker
Yeah, right. But that's frustrating because, like it's funny, I've had a heck of a week with outsourcing stuff. And I was on Peter's heat treat website just pulling up their address to drop some stuff into them to heat treat. And I saw it just popped up on their website. It was like real time order tracking. Like this company needs to have a case study done on them. Do it.
00:18:21
Speaker
I want to get to know them better and then I want to say, hey, because they're in Pennsylvania. Can I come out and film a tour of your facility and sit down and talk about how you guys run your business because you guys are just crushing it. They're always happy. They're always nice. And then I can log into their website and just look at where my order is, which saves them the hassle of handling phone calls.
00:18:42
Speaker
Wow. Can I join you? Come. Oh, absolutely. We're like each halfway, probably. Yeah. No, seriously, let's do it. Let's do it. Definitely after the open house. Yeah, maybe this summer. Yeah. Which isn't that far away. Sounds like a short day trip.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yes, we filmed a video about an anodizing problem on a separate job last week or something called how to deal with outsourced vendors when things go wrong. But coincidentally, we had a different problem with a different anodizer this past week. And I was really ticked. Parts were out of spec. I called them, told them that, left a voicemail for the guy, the business guy. And four days later, he hadn't called me back because that was my
00:19:25
Speaker
The limit so I called him again, and I was like did you get my voicemail, and I was pretty ticked But what does what good is being mad to do you know it's either time to move on from this relationship because he's not a good fit for us or or there was an innocent mistake and He it was such a like heartwarming reaction. He was like. I'm so sorry. He's like look I was out of town, and I just forgot to call you back and
00:19:52
Speaker
There was no BS, no long-winded, blah, blah, blah, no list of excuses, just an honest to goodness, I was gone and then I forgot, I am sorry. And then it was a, let's, he's like, can we walk through what happened? Not a, you didn't machine the parts of Spectre, how can you prove that they were right when I got them, blah, blah, blah.
00:20:11
Speaker
And then we had this phenomenal conversation. I'm a little frustrated because I've been trying to force this conversation earlier in the relationship to understand how to work together better. I was like, hey, should I come up to you? Blah, blah, blah. But we had this great relationship to understand the information that they need to know before, during, and after the anodizing process to get better parts. Everything from fixturing to understanding the part geometry. And so we're going to go up there and film a video with them and talk about that and share it because it was such a great way to turn what it limits
00:20:41
Speaker
eliminate. Isn't it so wonderful when that situation works out for the better? Right and again I could have screamed and burned
Entrepreneurial Decision-Making
00:20:51
Speaker
this vendor and found another anodizer and probably risked this I mean the same the same problem you know. Yep absolutely because some of it is just fundamental you know issues with making that kind of part you're always going to have those same issues with everybody it just depends on how well they communicate ahead of time. Right.
00:21:15
Speaker
What's on tap for today? Today, I've got to... I'm going to make a lot of rasp parts. I added... Oh, cool thing. A couple days ago, I finally remembered. I've been playing... You have macros on your host, right? Obviously. Oh, yeah. So I've been playing with a way to track tool life via a simple macro calculation.
00:21:38
Speaker
Really? So I believe on your Haas, somebody showed me on his mini mill how the Haas tracks tool life fairly decently right from the tool life menu, doesn't it? There's a, I think that's somewhere I've never opened it up. Yeah, but on my Maury there's not. Like if I want to know, I thought there was, you showed me. It's very confusing though. Well of course it is, that's because it's a Fannock. Yeah, exactly. But anyway.
00:22:09
Speaker
I was looking at my parts and I'm like, okay, I'm essentially making the same palette over and over and over again. Do I count tool life in minutes? Like how many minutes this has been in a G123 kind of cut? You know, that's cool, but it's maybe too complicated. And what does, you know, 37 minutes actually mean to me?
00:22:30
Speaker
What if I just count up in parts or even in pallets? How many pallets this tool has gone through? Because it's fairly consistent every single time. It's always going to, you know, that way I can know this tool makes 15 knives or whatever it is. So at the end of every tool, when it's successfully, you know, if it gets probed to make sure it's not broken.
00:22:47
Speaker
It just goes, say if it's tool six, I go variable 806 equals 806 plus one. Oh, no kidding. So every time it gets used, it just adds up one. And I have this screen of macros where I could label it. Tool six for the count. So this tool. It's so easy. And then I've also put in the date of when I put the new tool in. Right.
00:23:11
Speaker
So March 23rd, put new tool in, and it's counted up this many times since March 23rd. And then if it breaks or wears out or whatever, I can see how many times it's done it. And then in variable 906, I can put a max limit. So this tool does 20 pallets before it's worn out or tends to break or whatever.
00:23:29
Speaker
18, I can do a quick little math check at the beginning of the code and say, oh, this tool's already done 18. You should probably replace it before. Yeah, like a look ahead. Yeah, like a preliminary before bad things happen so that you might replace it a little bit early, but it's reducing potential scrap. So you'd be calling, you'd be incrementing the variable with every T command or MO6? Every tool six.
00:23:56
Speaker
Yeah, so that's weird though because if you, I guess you just know because you're in production, but sometimes you might call up a tool for, it's a difference between having a tool buried in material for five minutes versus a whisper cut for 10 seconds. Absolutely. And sometimes I carry, I call the same tool several times throughout the different palette, but in Fusion I can choose where to insert this custom line.
00:24:20
Speaker
Oh, it's not calling. I'm sorry. It's not calling up every time it does the. OK. Right. I'm sorry. Gotcha. Yeah. So I'm purposely choosing where I want to add the plus one. And I'm only doing it once per palette.
00:24:31
Speaker
Perfect. Dude, that's brilliant. Yes, really. It's working really good. I'm going to do a YouTube video kind of explaining it and walking through it because already it's like so super duper handy because otherwise, I mean, I'm sure you've seen this on your house. Like you don't know how old the tools are. Right. When it's funny, the bootstrapper and me, this is where I admittedly, I have a really hard time.
00:24:52
Speaker
But John, if that tool had six more pallets in it, you can't change it out. It has more life. It's like, get over yourself. And this is why the
Production Efficiency and Empowerment
00:25:01
Speaker
Sandvik Rep brought me a phenomenally looking eight inch long, quarter inch, through spindle drill from a factory that was, quote unquote, done with it. It's because it's not worth it. It's done its job. It's made its money. It's time for him to move on. It's not worth the mistake.
00:25:21
Speaker
I'm still not there. And I've got a pile of beater end mills that I can use for any weird job, which comes up every now and then. And that way I know that the machine is always fresh and safe and steady. Have you learned much about Six Sigma? No, I certainly know what it is, but no.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, so I know very little about it either, but the one sentence explanation that I really love of it is six mistakes in every million parts. Yeah, that's crazy. No, think about that. Legitimately think about that. I make a million knives and there are only six mistakes in all of them. That's insane. But to get to that level of mistake proofing is a really interesting road. Let's go for like four and a half sigma.
00:26:13
Speaker
Yeah, totally. It's crazy, but it kind of changes your mindset with how you plan things, how you mistake-proof things, how you idiot-proof the process so that anybody with the lowest level of intelligence can do it satisfactorily. Right. But that's what I hate about what you just said with Six Sigma, is you're talking about
00:26:34
Speaker
Six errors per million. That's the output Six Sigma has nothing to do with the output. It has everything to do with the input How do I create the processes and structures and systems in place so that that happens to be the outcome? Yeah, I mean yeah because they were all human we air I mean good grief a couple weeks ago Amazon web servers or Amazon what AWS went down bringing like the whole world to a Western civilization to an end and
00:27:00
Speaker
And if there's a single company that could spend six, seven, eight, nine figures on Six Sigma, it's them. But that's really cool, though. And somebody was talking on the WhatsApp, one of our machines friends, about a random dude who pulled up in a conversion van and was like, yo, I want to buy all your used carbide.
00:27:23
Speaker
Really? I think so. I think it was K.S. in Southern California. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he offered like a price per pound for his used carbide. I never thought about used carbide being worth that much. Right. Yeah, it can be for sure. Of course, we have very few broken tools in our broken tool bins. So my peanut butter jar is almost full.
00:27:49
Speaker
You should do that today. Put that on Instagram and have a guess the weight. Ooh, that's a great idea. I will actually. It's really cool. I always hand it to people whenever they come over because it's like ridiculously heavy for what you think it is. You actually do break more tools I feel like than you should. I don't know why. But they're all tiny tools. Like I'm looking at the thing and they're almost all eighth inch end mills.
00:28:13
Speaker
I found the first Lakeshore tool that I don't like. I don't like his three flute, eighth inch aluminum end mill. The gold one? Yeah. I got to order some two flutors because I'm going to say that I know what I'm doing. I'm very conscious of this tool breaking. I'm very conscious of chip evacuation and chip load. And I can't get that sucker not to chip weld in the flutes.
00:28:42
Speaker
And I do great, I use a lot of 7 64ths on one job that we run. I've used smaller, 3 30 seconds. I use 3 16ths all the time. But this one 3 flute, 8th inch, I can't get working. Either give them a call or try someone else.
00:28:59
Speaker
Oh, I think it's just, that's a fair point. Yeah. Two points is the way to go there, I think. Yeah, especially if you're having chip evacuation problems. Like it depends on the kind of job, like how long, how deep you're cutting and you know all this stuff. Yeah, speaking of which, I just ordered about $2,000 in end mills from him yesterday. Sweet. I think that's my biggest order yet.
00:29:18
Speaker
Isn't this crazy? I figured if I asked you this before, do you know of Dave Ramsey? You listen to him some, never? Yeah, my wife listens to him a lot, so I overhear him a decent amount.
00:29:29
Speaker
I remember him talking and it was just such a good little whimsy anecdote about how somebody like interrupted him during a meeting to buy a I don't know there's a thirteen thousand or thirty three thousand dollar new server for their Tennessee headquarters and he was like do not bother me about stuff like this and he was kind of talking about how there was a point in time where three thousand dollars for a computer was
00:29:51
Speaker
stop the presses, we need to agonize over this for a day. And now he's literally like, please make sure you don't bother, not in a rude way.
Future Business Reflections
00:30:01
Speaker
That's what got me thinking when you first said this week with Eric and Barry. You've read Four Hour Workweek, right? Yeah, of course. I mean, are you not doing a good enough job of enabling them to make their own decisions? That's a very good question. I need to think about that.
00:30:22
Speaker
That's a concept that I'm very familiar with, but I haven't thought about in weeks, if not months. I'm going to put that to practice and be aware of it. That's really good. I play whack-a-mole every day. I hate it. And it's not because I'm important or I'm smart. No one wins if that's the outcome. You've got to have people around you that can do stuff.
00:30:47
Speaker
Yeah, can make their own decisions. There's a level of, as you said, it could be a dollar amount, it could be a decision limit, but all the simple stuff does not need to be bothered, does not need a team vote to get it done.
00:31:03
Speaker
Well, and I'm jealous of you because I had the problem with a sort of lack of focus in the sense that we do all these different things you Have a the ability to focus through process through product through outcome. Everybody knows what you're trying to do So spend the time to it goes going back to those Kanban cards with inventory levels, you know, yeah Eric Eric should be able to tell you you need to do this not because Eric's your boss or vice versa but because the process wins and
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah, and I've been thinking about that a lot. You know, we're all working for the business, not for each other. Yeah, it's just annoying to drop flow in order to put out fires. Right. But that's a management problem. I mean, that's an organizational, like...
00:31:49
Speaker
Yeah, we'll get there. No, but I still have like I still don't get it with with that Fast cap guy when he's like, oh we can change blades in this machine now It used to take a half a day and now it's in 13 minutes. I'm like, yeah, I'm still not there It still takes me four hours to set up a lathe exactly also because I hate lays These are awesome. They're just they pull your hair out Yeah, something like that. Yeah
00:32:13
Speaker
I got a message from somebody who in Pennsylvania who was like he kind of like collects tops or loves tops and he got one of yours and just Couldn't it was just over the mood about it. Oh fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, we've been we've been shipping out a lot more guys to England and all over the US and
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah. It's like I was telling you, I think it was after we stopped recording on the podcast last week, but dude, you're going to crush it. Like you are going to do, I know we're all in the weeds right now and it may be hard to, our personalities aren't think big, think success long-term because we kind of focus on the president, but you are going to do so freaking well.
00:32:48
Speaker
I really appreciate that. It's just a very critical time in our business right now and I feel like I don't want to make mistakes and I don't want to blow anything and all the responsibilities on my shoulders. What makes you say that? A lot of reasons.
00:33:06
Speaker
a lot of non-podcast-y reasons. Yeah, that's fair. It doesn't have to be me, but you gotta share this stuff. I love my wife and she is a saint, but there's only so much you can dump on your wife.
00:33:23
Speaker
It's not fair to her if we go out to dinner and have a date night out that I just decide to share in the highs and lows of work. Yeah, and just talk business the whole time. Isn't that a funny thing? Like years ago before I really had a decent sized business, we'd sit to dinner with
00:33:45
Speaker
older people are in-laws or parents or whatever and sometimes they just talk business all through dinner and we're like, do you just talk business all the time? What is this? And then now it's the same way. When you have your own business and you're deep in the weeds, it's like, yeah. But it's different for us because this is my livelihood. If I literally, if someone handed me a $10 million check tomorrow, I would
00:34:09
Speaker
buy more machines and keep doing exactly what I'm doing. Totally. It wouldn't change anything. No, no. Absolutely. Should we call it? I think we should probably call it. Sweet. Do a crush it today. Will do. You too. I'll see you. Take care. See you next week. Bye. Bye.