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#221 - A Business Is Only As Strong As Its Employees
189 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- This week Saunders & Grimsmo give a deep dive into all their employees and what they do.
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Focus
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 221. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. John and I talk every Friday about the business of running our machining and manufacturing companies and sort of unplanned today. We're basically going to only talk about employees. Yeah. I'm actually really excited about this. I figured let's, as you suggested last week, let's go through kind of the list of all the people we have and kind of what they do.
00:00:29
Speaker
Yeah, and as a backstory, John and I have stayed pretty close on a business level and a personal level over the past number of years, but between COVID and the fact that we now do this as a podcast instead of just talking randomly, I don't feel like I know your shop anymore. I know your machines, but we've both grown and I've certainly had successes and some failures. I'm happy to talk about that from a
00:00:54
Speaker
generic staffing side, but I said, John, can you next week tell me a list of everyone that works for you and maybe kind of what they do or whatnot?
Challenges of Discussing Employees
00:01:01
Speaker
And we thought, hey, this is a good idea. I love it. Yeah. And I totally, I often feel out of touch with your side of the business too. Like, like this, you've got a bunch of interns working for you now and they come and go and you've got your long-term employees. And I'm like, how many people are there? And you know, what, what does everybody do? Yeah.
00:01:21
Speaker
And we'll try to keep this honest, but obviously we know that, frankly, I'm excited and happy that some of our employees all listen to this. So that's the toughest thing is I want, you know, we all get to some extent choose what we want to do in life. And I like, you know, I don't care if 10 people listen to this podcast or a hundred people, but I want the people that listen to it to be able to extract some genuine sincerity and honesty around it. And this is probably one of the toughest issues
Evolution of Employee Perspectives
00:01:48
Speaker
It just is it just is so if it feels like we're dancing around a couple things Well, we probably are but I want to be able to talk openly about some things and just just what it's like growing the business because I'll tell you ten years ago if you'd have asked me if I ever want employees I was that heck No, I want to be in my garage by myself doing whatever I want for the rest of my life And that that has changed Yeah
Early Team Members and Their Impact
00:02:12
Speaker
Well, kick it off. Yeah. So, do you want me to go through my whole list and then you go through your whole list? Sure. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, my first employee was my brother, was Eric and brought him on as a partner. I mean, I guess it was a kind of an employee, like as a brother originally, and then we partnered up about two years in, like officially, he became a partner in the business.
00:02:38
Speaker
But yeah, basically I've been, I've been struggling myself for the longest time for a couple of years, trying to find something. And then I found, you know, the knife industry. And then probably eight months later, I was like, Eric, you got to move. He lives living in Seattle at the time. You got to move over here and you got to like.
00:02:56
Speaker
do this with me. So we moved across the country, lived in our basement for years, and we built the business out of our garage together, which was good. And then we built it to the point where
00:03:09
Speaker
We could get that first shop, get the Maury, and then we struggled for a couple of years. We got to the point where it's like, we have plenty of orders. We're in debt up to our eyeballs. We need help, but we can't afford anybody. That's where Barry stepped in, our father-in-law, my father-in-law. He worked for no pay for a year, and we racked up hours. We did pay him back for that year.
00:03:32
Speaker
That was kind of the only way to get us out of that, and it was amazing. Started off as just kind of general labor, but turned into a CFO position, which is his wheelhouse.
00:03:43
Speaker
couldn't have done it without that. We were seriously in debt, badly, and we owed hundreds of knives from this pre-order. It was great. He came in, whipped us into shape, helped. It was amazing. Can I jump in? Please. I completely get what you're saying. We couldn't have done it without him, except you're wrong.
00:04:05
Speaker
Not that you're not wrong, but this is like the best takeaway that's eye grabbing when you talk to somebody you look up to or you respect and they're like, I couldn't have done without this. And it's not that that's not true. It's that you don't know, like John, yet you would have. Like it's the path that worked and you can't overanalyze it, but darn it. I guess what I don't like about that is that's hindsight bias. It's not like you could flip that around and be like, doing this will be what makes it work. And the only thing that, you know what I mean?
00:04:34
Speaker
That's all. No, that's a valid point. I often flip flop back and forth between the two, obviously trying to respect him and his contribution, but also trying to respect me and my determination to win at any cost. Right. Oh, yeah, that wasn't a competitive experience. No, absolutely. You would figure it out. To that point, this has been a point of contention for years between us. I could have done it, and he was like, no, you couldn't have. Either way, we're both in a great place right now. Things are awesome.
00:05:05
Speaker
Yes, then he came on and then about nine months later, we hired our marketing person, Erin, which now turned into Fraser. She was here for about two years and then it evolved into Fraser. So basically Fraser now handles our
00:05:20
Speaker
It's pretty easy now to call it sales and marketing because he basically does all customer interaction, all sales, all marketing, YouTube videos, taking pictures for the website, handling Shopify, all of that, which has grown from what Aaron was responsible for.
00:05:39
Speaker
And it's fantastic. And I'm reading in a book right now, Traction by Gino Wickman. It's a fantastic book. And he says, I basically wrote this book for companies 10 to 250 people. And I'm like, that's me. And it's like the e-myth, but different and amazing. Something like halfway
Role Division and Business Structure
00:06:04
Speaker
into it. It's fantastic.
00:06:06
Speaker
He basically said every business breaks down to three categories, sales and marketing, operations, and finance. I basically have those three divisions now, Barry heads finance, Fraser heads sales and marketing, and Angelo heads operations. I'm on top of that.
00:06:27
Speaker
That's funny you say that because I was making some notes to talk today and I jotted down. I'm not sure what the point of this, but I nevertheless thought it was important enough to jot down, which is that you and I at this point are basically good at making parts. It's not doesn't mean we don't have to figure struggle or mess around with it, but like that's no longer really the value that we add. It's just a given. So really the difference between now and the future for us is going to be the business and marketing decisions.
00:06:50
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. It's evolving. It's changing. I've said several times in the past few days, I just want to make parts, man. All this business crap. I do enjoy the business side of things, but it adds in its significant amount of stress and difference. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Who else do we have?
00:07:15
Speaker
After Barry and Aaron, Angelo came along, basically pulled him out of the aerospace industry. He was making fancy landing gear for big, huge airplanes, project planning and all that stuff. He decided to leave that industry and start our little four-person company, help us grow from basically the ground up.
00:07:35
Speaker
So now he's our director of operations. He makes sure all the machines are running. He makes sure all the parts are flowing. And I'm constantly giving him more and more responsibility now, like with ordering material and planning and things like that. I need to push as much as he can handle that direction. And he runs some of the machines and leads the other guys that run the rest of the machines, which is great.
00:08:03
Speaker
Sky was our next hire, young guy. He was literally going to university or college one block away from our shop. And he's like, can I come by? And I'm a huge fan. I'm so close. Can I just walk there after school one day?
00:08:19
Speaker
And he did, hired him as an apprentice, or what do you call it, the school program? Co-op? Yeah, exactly, co-op student. So we did the full co-op student program with him, which is great because the government pays, I think, half his salary for certain periods of time, which is great. But I've always viewed him and paid him as a full-time employee. And now he's been a full-time employee for the longest time. He's probably been here for three years.
00:08:47
Speaker
So he has jumped around a couple different roles. He did lapping for a while, but now he's working with Eric and his team doing all the handle finishing, anodizing, pen finishing, heat treating. He's very good at heat treating.
00:09:01
Speaker
Yes, he's more on the finishing side, which is great. Um, Steven was our next guy. Eric met him in a booster juice smoothie restaurant. And, uh, yeah, there was some like, I think Eric was wearing a Grimm's most shirt and Steven looked at him and said, uh,
00:09:23
Speaker
said, Hey, man, I like I'm a big fan. I follow follow Grims most on Instagram. And he's like, Hey, I'm Eric. He's like, No, crap. What? And he just walks away because he can't even believe it. That's hilarious. And we're literally at the time when we're looking for another employee to do like lapping specifically, but also finishing and things like that. And Eric's like, Yeah, you know, we're hiring. No way.
00:09:48
Speaker
So, yeah, he's been on for a year and a bit, and he's been fantastic. Good, hard worker. He's the kind of guy that will get it done, which is great to have on hand. Like, you need this transformer put up on the wall? No problem. I'll do it. And he's become great at lapping.
00:10:07
Speaker
So, his job is probably like 60% running the lapping machine and 40% whatever else needs to be done in the shop, which is great. He loads the worry, loads fixtures, things like that. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. Yep. And then going through and then Pierre has been here for almost six months, five or six months, hired him on as a lathe machinist.
00:10:31
Speaker
put out a video on YouTube. He reached out. We got probably 10 applicants back from that video. And he was clearly the best one. We interviewed a whole bunch of them. And it was just great. He had his Kennedy toolboxes in the background of the video. And he just has a passion for it and his skill and his experience. Not a ton of experience, but enough that I was like, this guy knows what he's talking about and is hungry and willing to learn. And the past six months has been awesome. I don't think the Swiss has been off
00:11:01
Speaker
since he started. That's awesome. He's probably doubling my output, just given the amount of time he can focus on the Swiss. Because I would certainly go for days where I'm like, today's a current day, I need to Kern, right? And, and he's now just keeps the Swiss running. So he runs the Swiss, the Nakamura and the you Mac.
00:11:22
Speaker
as his job, and then any other little things we need done for sure. And his role is slowly growing over time, but it's only been six months. He's crushing it. It's so wonderful to have someone. He's dedicated, he's passionate, and it's good.
Employee Roles and Contributions
00:11:39
Speaker
Great. And then we hired David to be another finishing guy, because our old finishing guy, Yo, decided to move on. Now he lives on a farm, and he raises pigs.
00:11:52
Speaker
Yo was here for a couple years, did great. And now David is doing the finishing of the blades, assembling the knives, doing like the pre assembly for Eric, running the tumblers, things like that. So basically, Eric is in charge of now Sky and David in the finishing department, we give them machine parts, and they make magic happen.
00:12:13
Speaker
Yeah, awesome. Yep. And then just as of two days ago, we hired the other David, David B, who's my wife's uncle.
00:12:24
Speaker
Oh, interesting. Yeah. So he's going through some tough times in his later part in life, kind of spent his life taking care of everybody else, family and grandparents and things like that. And now he's in a position where he's like, I need help. So like, I got some part-time work for you. Like, how about facilities maintenance? He's like, yeah, I can do that. Absolutely. So yeah, as of this week, he's going to start mowing the grass, weed whipping, mopping the floors, janitorial.
00:12:53
Speaker
doing grocery runs, all kinds of stuff. So we probably give them halftime work for that. Yeah. And yeah, so it hasn't really started yet, but I'm excited for that. That's going to be great. We can help him. He can help us. Everybody wins.
00:13:09
Speaker
sort of that balance of facilities maintenance where I want, I do want everybody on the team to clean up after themselves and keep a clean shop and, you know, not rely on the janitor to clean up your mess. Yeah, so I got to be sure that that stays true. But still, there's spider webs and there's corners that never get swept and there's lawn that never gets mowed and etc, etc. It'd be nice to have a guy to do that.
00:13:35
Speaker
And then the last person who's been on for just over three months is Ryan. And he's now our, I guess, shipping coordinator. But he also does. He works directly with Fraser. He's actually Fraser's college roommate. So they're best friends. And he's got almost all the video skill that Fraser has, photography and video.
00:14:00
Speaker
So we hired him on, he takes all the pictures of the knives right now, helps upload them to the website and does all the shipping. Oh, legit. Yeah, totally. Dedicated. So he's mostly part time. Some days we'll bring him in for full time and we're just trying to build up the workload to transition that to a full time position. But sometimes there's just not.
00:14:21
Speaker
Did he switch careers to come over to Grinnisville? I guess he graduated not too long ago and it's been sort of between work for a while. So he was looking for something. And you know, we've talked, like Fraser's been here for a year and a half and the whole time we've known about Ryan and we're like, yeah, maybe one day we'll grow to the point of needing Ryan and we're there and I'm thrilled and he's great.
00:14:47
Speaker
Really quiet and dedicated, but him and Fraser were great together. I want to grow his responsibility in the marketing as well and making videos and taking pictures and things like that, not just daily product photography. There's room for growth there, which is great. That gives us, including me and Eric, that gives us 11 people total.
00:15:14
Speaker
Was that 11? Yeah. Wow. That's crazy. It's nuts. Good. It's, I mean, since I know everybody so well, and we work closely together, it's, it's kind of like my second family. You know, you hear other businesses talk about this. And I'm like, you know, it's, it's true. Like these are my guys.
00:15:34
Speaker
I care about them and hopefully they care about us and I want everything for them. I want to pay them well, I want to give them good work, I want to work them hard but not stressful. I keep telling everybody, we have a daily meeting 12 o'clock every day where we get together for 10 to 20 minutes and just talk about issues and goals and things we need done and things we want to do.
00:16:01
Speaker
I tell them, our job is, we all have work that we have to come in and do every day. It's like, put parts on the mill, change a tool, tumble the parts, sharpen a knife. That's all like normal daily work. And the work should be easy. Everything else is problem solving.
00:16:17
Speaker
What do you mean? The daily normal make a knife should be easy. It should be straightforward. It's our job to make it straightforward. Got it. Because you come in, you do your job. It's great. Everything on top of that is problem solving. Let's make it better. Let's figure out this problem. The mill broke, or this tool keeps breaking. That's problem solving. And that's what adds to the stress.
00:16:39
Speaker
But the goal is to make the work the daily normal stuff like cake, you know,
Improving Efficiency and Operations
00:16:45
Speaker
yeah, yeah. It's the odd segue, but we're watching this show at home called the food that built America actually awesome show and some really cool stories about like 1800s food stuff that was
00:17:00
Speaker
you know, Kellogg and Post and Hershey. And now their segue, they've transitioned into like McDonald's. And I've seen the founder, which side note, if anybody's in any way interested in a good movie that meets business entrepreneurship, some tough lessons, Frank, the founder about Ray Kroc and the McDonald's brothers is phenomenal. I got to watch that again. Yeah, right. It's like just great.
00:17:24
Speaker
They talk about how they drew out their kitchen on a tennis court with chalk and like mimicked, like actors mimicked, um, making these burgers to reconfigure it and so forth. And, uh, literally the last night I was watching, I was like, gosh, you know what?
00:17:39
Speaker
I don't I don't often dream big like this is me perhaps silly but you know what I want is I want like a carousel or a feed feed rack next to our main machine that has all of our steel on it so that when you want a certain size you just dial it up and it just turned like thinking of what we do right now where we kind of have a mess of plates in different spots and we're approving it we've gotten better but nevertheless it's not
00:18:04
Speaker
a point of pride right now. So what would it like, that's not going to change unless you do what the McDonald's brothers did, which is like, Hey, I'm flipping the burgers. I'm going to turn around. The buns need to be right here. They need to be ready. Then next to that needs to be the condiments next. That needs to be the burger shoot that size it down to the cashier who doesn't bump into the other guy who's running nice across. Like all that orchestra has to happen. Um, and it's much more relatable to me than when people are like, Hey, we building a 20,000 square foot factory and we're doing a spaghetti map. Like I get that, but like, this is more visceral.
00:18:34
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Like you hear about people building U-shaped cells that have kind of the parts flow. All great ideas. But yeah, that scene, the orchestra scene where the guy's literally standing on a folding ladder with a conductor's like stick, whatever, and he's like, okay, you over there, you over there. And he's orchestrating the whole thing. It's one of the most beautiful scenes of the whole movie. It's like, yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Gosh, now that I even think about that, it's like, hey, we should be thinking about a procedure so that when
00:19:04
Speaker
you know, you have a plate on the machine, you have a plate on, what do they call it in baseball? Like on deck and then you wanted the whole like, cause you know what's coming next or you generally know what's coming next. Of course exceptions happen, but then while that's running, you can have the other one ready. It's all staged. It's all orderly. You've got the, uh, we've, we've implemented runners, which are great and they give us the information that we need. Um, and yeah.
00:19:30
Speaker
Anyway, nice. Yeah, we're actually working on because there's always been a bit of contention now that we actually have two buildings. We have, you know, the front shop that's all finishing in the back shop that's all manufacturing. So parts are flowing back and forth constantly. And it's always been difficult because the
00:19:47
Speaker
the finishing guys are always waiting for parts like parts come off the machine so I can work on them today. So if they get in early, you know, they're coming back to the machine shop going, Okay, the parts ready? Are they off the mill yet? Can you know, from the night run? Are they ready yet? And if we've got other stuff, or if a tool broke, or if the machine still running, or, you know, if the parts are not ready, then there's often this little like,
00:20:09
Speaker
hesitation of like, well, what am I, I'm waiting for parts. I, it's that waiting that lean waste of waiting. Um, so Eric and I've been chatting about this a lot lately and what we need is we need a one day buffer and unequivocally. So like anything that comes off the machine will not get touched until tomorrow. And then there's a pile of parts first thing in the morning tomorrow when the guys come in, they just grab them and go. And that's, that's your daily work. And that would solve so much frustration in our business. I'm implementing that like today.
00:20:39
Speaker
Good. Love it. Yeah. It makes so much sense because otherwise everybody's waiting for everybody and everybody's stressed that it's not there. Yeah. Well, as a follow-up to that, I think I've mentioned to you how many of our problems were coming from that January, February backlog of orders and it's no exaggeration. I mean, the amount of stress
00:21:02
Speaker
from customer service to shipping issues. I mean, COVID has complicated it, but okay, big deal. You got to deal with it.
Team Dynamics and ProvenCut
00:21:10
Speaker
And vendor delays, material hiccups, getting QC stuff done, rushing or not rushing. And by and large, they're all gone. It is wonderful.
00:21:23
Speaker
And you kind of forget that. It's like the absence of a negative doesn't always equal positive. But you got to remind yourself, no, we were trying to deal with a lot. We thought about putting in like Zendesk or some other customer service software. And I was sort of like, wait a minute. No, that's not, that's what do you call it? Solving the- That's abandoned. Well, that's like you're treating the symptom. Let's just cure the disease.
00:21:49
Speaker
And so now we're, we've been continuing to build up inventory so we can get a little bit more aggressive on our website. And from a marketing standpoint, being like, Hey, you know, if you want this, it'll ship now or, or within this window and being smart about how we maintain inventory and then labeling it. And that's kind of the next, actually literally the next step where we're right on the cusp of having some of our interns transition from school and work to just full-time summer work.
00:22:16
Speaker
And that's going to be one of the big projects is kind of rounding out some of our inventory storage system and so forth. Yes. Which is a good segue to the Saunders Machine Works team. Let's go. Yeah. So from a manufacturing side, it is really Ed at this point. I think he's probably as close to, if I want to call him, corollaries to, well, I'm blanking. I'm sorry. You're Aaron. Angela. Thank you. Angela. There's so many people now.
00:22:46
Speaker
And it's actually, it's just wonderful. I met Ed through Richard King's scraping class that he attended. I think maybe he had known the channel or we had known each other through some prior interaction or he was working at a local makerspace. And so at the time he kind of came on board to do
00:23:03
Speaker
like projects, R&D, Arduino, kind of more video-y stuff. And since then has really become just an absolute expert and stand out on how we manufacture things, process, like just, he lives and breathes this stuff, which I love. And, you know, look, I'm proud of our whole team and Ed's a great one to start off with just as, you know, being here and what he does.
00:23:29
Speaker
Ed works with Grant in the shop. Grant is relatively new within a year. Kat, a machining background, came over here, doing an absolute great job.
00:23:40
Speaker
You know, I don't, I think there's a form of leadership that comes from just knowing that we're doing things well. And sometimes that's, it's like the difference, you know, you don't, it's not like college or school where you get grades. But Grant is great. What he does great temperament, you know, has implemented a number of little improvements, running parts, helping maintain inventory, working with the team has kind of has that attitude of, look, if we need to do something, we just do it.
00:24:04
Speaker
Right now he's also helping with some of the forklift unloading of material. That's something I want to change over time. But, you know, Grant's been great. And then we have Vince as well. Vince is also relatively new. He's known as Vince Fab on Instagram. He is the absolute, I would say one of the best guys in the country at knowing and crushing it on a lot of the smaller horsepower machines.
00:24:33
Speaker
the shape OCOs and pocket and Cs and so forth. And Vince is really siloed into Proving Cut. He also does a little bit of video work. We've got him on the host some both because I want to let him learn and he wants to learn and that's great. And there's a lot of housework for Proving Cut. But Vince has been learning the Tormachs. He's been continuing to build out recipes and handle a lot of the customer service and recipe requests from Proving Cut.
00:24:59
Speaker
And I've gone both ways in terms of the management of style of like, hey, do you let somebody kind of float around? Or is it better to have somebody focused? And I very much think focus is a good thing. Doesn't mean you can't have a minor, if you will. Like, hey, we need to help out on this. Or I think I came up with an idea for a pretty cool way to hold a coax indicator that I've never seen before that's going to be, I think,
00:25:24
Speaker
It has a couple of trade-offs, but it's pretty nice. And so Vince is working on making one and doing a video on that. So he's not rigidly siloed with ProvenCut, but he's focused on ProvenCut, which is great because that business is doing well and he's great at it.
00:25:40
Speaker
And then we have Julie, who probably needs no introduction. Actually, one of the longest term employees at this point, which is crazy. And for a long time, only did video, filming, media, graphics,
00:25:55
Speaker
that sort of thing. And then a little under a year ago when we started to grow and realize we needed to overhaul a lot of how we run our business. So that's everything from Lex to ordering material, to organizing, to shipping orders. Shipping is no joke. Yeah. Right, John? It's time consuming. Yeah. I was just joking with Fraser yesterday. I'm like, as far as printing labels, I'm like, can't that be automatic? Do you think Amazon is going in there through ShipStation and clicking all these options for every order? No. No.
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's like, I think it was a key bar a long time ago, had like an Instagram story showing how his all his ship station is automated. And like, he'll like just walk over and the label printer is just just pumping, vomiting. Yeah, I've seen a few of the guys that I follow, it's just spitting out hundreds of labels. And that usually comes from like a pre order, or some sort of like bulk order. But there's always like for us, it's always like the international client or the, you know, the one off or the weird thing that just it needs some extra attention.
00:26:55
Speaker
I don't know. I always laugh when I get Amazon packages. I don't know if this is the most uncool thing or the most genius thing ever, but they're so... Instead of throwing the label backer away, they just put it in the box. What? You ever had that? I don't think so. That's funny. That's awesome.
00:27:14
Speaker
Anyway, as an example, yesterday we had a pretty stressful little quirk trying to figure out the perfect storm of a order that got merged. Two separate orders got merged into one. It was international. It was a carrier. The customs information wasn't matching the package slip.
00:27:35
Speaker
You've got to figure it out. You want to figure that order out, but you also want to figure out how you fix that going forward. But Julie's done an absolute great job at really now wearing both of those hats, balancing some amount. I mean, I don't make it up, but like half the time continuing to do video stuff and half the time helping ship orders.
00:27:56
Speaker
On some of the days of the week, we have intern help, which is phenomenal. I'm really proud of it. We've had now over, I think, 10 or 12 interns over the last four years. Most of them have come from a local high school machining program, but some have come from... The other big feeder has been another high school's robotics program. And
00:28:21
Speaker
Um, right now, uh, we have, well, Alex is technically an intern because he's still an intern, but he's been here quite a long time. He's in college, but he's been great from programming parts to the, the treadmill recipe calculator that we made to help you with content on NYC CNC.com to helping single handedly write Lex. Um,
00:28:43
Speaker
Alex is a great find and that started from an email. It was kind of like your sky story of he wrote a pretty well written email that said, I'm really interested in this. I'd like to experience, I was on a state winning VEX robotics team, kind of that balance of like, Hey, I'm hungry, but I'm not arrogant, I guess. And he's been great. We're proud to have him on the team. Does he run machines daily?
00:29:08
Speaker
Not daily for sure, but he has made many parts for sure. I don't know how much he's run on the Haas at all. Certainly not lately, but yeah, like he's made, he made that like Lego brick removal tool on the Tormach. He came up with a fixture at the second hop, maybe blight an angle. Like he's, you know, he's, he's, he's good. So to interrupt, uh, in general, do you have a lot of guys that can just like hear, make this thing and they can design it and cam it and like they could make it?
00:29:39
Speaker
Ed, yes. Grant, yes. Vince, yes. Alex, yes.
Interns and Future Marketing Strategies
00:29:42
Speaker
And then Garrett, another intern, is a senior in high school. He's literally just transitioning to making some parts for us. Cool. And that's the part where you struggle to balance it. We have the need for people to do manual work, sorting material, loading the machine. She's a huge job.
00:30:02
Speaker
QC has been a huge thing. QC, every single fixture plate, packing up orders, packing up sub-assemblies, and a lot of that falls on the interns. That's just how it goes. All of our internship programs have always been paid. I think that's the right thing to do. I want them to be better prepared for what's to come in life.
00:30:26
Speaker
I want to make sure we try to get them time on the machine and fusion and so forth. So Garrett's helping to make some, we have a new idea of how we're going to ship stuff, package stuff up to anodizing. So he's making some machining, some clips for that. And then beyond that, we have Peyton who's kind of Garrett minus one year. So he's a junior, same program, relatively new.
00:30:46
Speaker
Scott is another intern who's been helping a lot on all that similar type stuff, packing order, film and so forth. And then Samuel, who also came out of this robotics program, has been sort of siloed off, works kind of on his own schedule, single handedly focused on Johnny Five. Nice. So including me, that is 11 as well. Really? Yeah.
00:31:13
Speaker
Oh, sorry. I forgot. I skipped forward to the insurance because it was a natural segue. The 11th is our newest full-time hire, which is Dustin. I don't think I've mentioned this yet, but Dustin came on board as the director of marketing strategy or director of marketing. Oh, I know you've been looking for this for a while.
00:31:29
Speaker
Yeah. It is absolute awesome role. I'm super excited. He has a lot of experience in this arena, but not much in the manufacturing space or really any. That's great because we can help him learn that, teach him that. He's been on, I think this is his third or fourth week.
00:31:54
Speaker
doing a great job, started implementing a lot of analytics data, being smart about how we think about
00:32:03
Speaker
leveraging Shopify and so forth, email campaign stuff, starting to look at retargeting ads and focusing in on what I want to do, which is use things like YouTube and Instagram to share our passion for manufacturing. And we may make a few bucks, but as you saw in an Instagram comment a while back from a troll, we're a manufacturing company. Saunders Machine Works is what we do here. 100%. No, you just make YouTube videos. You're entertainment. Yeah.
00:32:29
Speaker
No, I'm proud of that. Well, holding the conversation. So the next step is to kind of start building out the key attributes. Why should somebody have a fixture plate? What's the mod vice able to do for them? And helping get that in front of customers, whether you're a Shapeoko, Nomad, Carbide 3D, Nomad customer, or Torlock, or Haas customer.
00:32:51
Speaker
And then making decisions about how we want to emphasize, you know, there's, um, I have a huge passion for the hobby guys that are trying to learn. And frankly, the mod vice works great for those machines because it's low profile, very flexible, holds odd size parts. Great. You're not going to drop a machinist vice on a, one of those on the flip side. Uh, we make more money, uh, on higher ticket items. So it's, it's, there's an argument for, Hey, let's make sure we're selling VF two plates and VF four plates, because I got to sell X number of, uh,
00:33:21
Speaker
your book of plates for the same as one plate of air. Yeah. And even if the margins are the same on both, still the dollars come in on the bigger ticket items, unless you get your volumes up like crazy. It's like the difference. We have to sell three pens to equal the revenue of one knife. And we're making a little bit more pens than knives every month, but not by much. Got it.
00:33:46
Speaker
It's not like we can just make 600 pens a month, uh, easily. Um, although once that Wilhelmin comes in, maybe. Yes. I tell you, we were like, that's actually the machine that we should get. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah.
00:34:01
Speaker
Yeah. 80 grand could be yours, except it's not because it's mine. Yes. Noted. Noted. Well, if you think about getting it all tooled up in party ways with it, give me a shout. Yeah. They exist. They're out there, I guess. But yeah, it's funny. Our buddy Chris from Swiss Ovation was pissed when I got it because he was like one day away from buying it. It's funny. He's like, oh, somebody got it. Who was it? It was John Grimsmough. Okay. I don't feel so bad. At least he's a friend.
00:34:29
Speaker
So just send them a, send them a blurb of like, Hey, we can run some parts on it if you need it. I'll send them a pen once we make it or something. Yeah. No. So like, look, I'm on employees is, uh,
00:34:43
Speaker
You know, everything that people say, you can ignore it if you want, but it's true. Like it's, it can be difficult to manage a team and you've got to be, it's one reason why I've enjoyed getting to know the area four one nine guy, John, because I think he and I are similar. I get passionate with you and I'm passionate about manufacturing, but I'm introverted when I think when it comes to leadership, I think you are as well. Very much. But, but we have a team that is good at what they do. I let them do what they need to do. I want to get involved.
00:35:13
Speaker
But generally, Grant was a great example. I maybe paused a minute ago when I was describing what he does. I don't have Grant, Lex, and Ed, and the team, and Asana tells Grant what needs made, or he works with them on that front, and the material is labeled. It's a good system in a strange way.
00:35:33
Speaker
Yeah, you ideally build a system so you don't have to micromanage everybody, you make sure they have what they need. And I always make sure to ask everybody either in the team or directly like, like, do you have all the materials you need? Do you need anything, any tools, anything break? Are we running low on, you know, handle inventory or something like that? Otherwise, just you know what to do. Like, I don't have to be here to have everybody know what to do every day. It's fantastic. And then everything else is problem solving.
00:36:04
Speaker
Yeah. That's actually kind of, I'm making a note to myself because I think, you know, how I told you, like one of the keys about entrepreneurship is being honest with yourself. Yep. It's so hard. Oh, it's, it's, it's actually not possible on something else, but seriously. Cause you're blinded by your own, like, no, but that's the way I want to do it. When we built Lex, you know,
00:36:30
Speaker
I made the conscious decision not to do inventory for a couple of reasons, one of which was also just we want to get it built and that was complicated. And it didn't do us any good unless it integrated with Shopify. We're now at the point where I think for some things it could really help. And so I want to make a note to myself to look at, don't
00:36:49
Speaker
be closed-minded about it. Shopify has an API or plugins or apps, so we could write something where Lex talks Shopify or Shopify just talks to Lex. It doesn't have to be super sophisticated or even a weekly audit or reconciliation. I bet you we could figure it out.
00:37:06
Speaker
Absolutely. The API between Shopify is very powerful. We've used it quite a bit, getting various programmers to talk to it back and forth, and almost anything you want to do. Either there's an app that exists that usually is not featured the way you want it to, and they usually won't change it for you, or you find some programmer on Upwork to hopefully do a good job.
00:37:28
Speaker
be very clear about what you want, what your expectations are, and yeah. Yeah. Well, that's actually how it started that we didn't plan intend to keep it. We intended just to build it enough as a proof of concept and then send video screenshots or a working sample of it over to an Upwork guy to be like, okay, this is what we want.
ERP System Management Challenges
00:37:47
Speaker
Here's all the things that it doesn't do. I don't know what language this needs built in, but it's way better to start here than it is
00:37:55
Speaker
just a napkin sketch and ends up, we just built it. That's fantastic. On that note, one of the more difficult things I have to do right now is I have to fire my dad. Not Barry, that's our CFO, that's my father-in-law, but my actual dad-dad, Ingvar.
00:38:19
Speaker
who created GURP, our ERP system. I'm doing that today, this afternoon. My heart's pumping already just talking about it. No, not really. It's been a struggle the past few weeks and it's not working out. Everything's at 80% and I just don't think
00:38:40
Speaker
More specifically, his programmer overseas, who's doing all the legwork, it's costing way too much money. It's taking way too much time, and the results are not there. And everything's constantly at 80%. And I just need somebody else to finish it. End of story. The more I talk about it, the more I talk with our team, with my wife, with Fraser and Barry, it's just blatantly clear, even with all the money in the world, I don't think this programmer can finish what we need.
00:39:10
Speaker
Yeah, it's tough, though, because my dad's running him. They've worked together for the past 10 years. Without him, my dad is much less valuable to the project as a consultant, maybe. But I need somebody else to finish this. So yeah, that's tough. I had a really rough day yesterday, just anxious and overwhelmed about that and everything else going on. And I'm much better today about it. And I'm ready to do it. But it's tough. Super tough. John. John.
00:39:40
Speaker
Yes. Yeah. I mean, anything I can do. Yes. Don't be unsolicited advice. Don't be apologetic. You're not at fault. It's not you, his son. It's the business. It's not the right fit and period. You don't be sympathetic apologetic. We have to look out for the business's best interest.
00:40:03
Speaker
Um, looking forward to working again when it sees fit, which is a genuine comment, even if you realize it may not be a good fit, like, you know, you're not out to, um, you know, publicly emasculate anybody, but nope. Absolutely. Yep. It's it's yeah, that's what it is. It's just the capability and the, um,
00:40:21
Speaker
accountability, and quality. And you know, I've been thinking more about defining the core values of our company, like say, in five words, and specifically in this situation, what does this situation not embody that I want in our company, like, like,
00:40:36
Speaker
what core values that maybe we have that this programmer does not fit with. Accountability is one of them for sure. Pride is another one because he's uploading stuff and saying it's done and it's not done. It's broken. We're spending hours and hours proving that it's broken. It's tough. On that note,
00:40:57
Speaker
in the market for another programmer, and I'm steadily on the fence if I do some freelance guy or if I actually hire somebody in house to do this and bring them into the team. And we've got a lot of weird programming work that we want to build. We want to build into the system, into the company, and have it grow. And yes, I'll be looking for that over the next few weeks. It's exciting.
00:41:23
Speaker
Are you, um, it, you know, feel free to just pass. I'm talking about this further, but are you prepared for, uh, you kind of a counter, uh, give me a second chance or, you know, I know it's going to happen. I don't think I'm prepared for it now. Okay. Like they're going to ask for it for sure. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, I'm just done. Yeah. You know, it's tough. Okay. Yeah. And do you want that person to, again, don't respond, but think about whether you want that person to play a role in the transition or not.
00:41:53
Speaker
Yeah, I've thought about it. I think, especially the programmer specifically, I don't have a lot of love for the programmer. He's just a guy. He's my dad's guy. Yeah, sure, but he's just a guy.
00:42:07
Speaker
Obviously, love and caring for my dad too and I don't want to ruin anything there, but now basically he's done. I want him to upload all the source code to somewhere we can find it and just find somebody else to start digging through it. Yeah. Don't disagree with that. There's weird scenarios from my wife's company's bankruptcy where it's like, wait a minute. No, you need people to help transition.
00:42:28
Speaker
No, that's how this is going to work. You're like, oh my gosh, but my people, they'll just figure it out. It's kind of weird, but yeah. Clean cut. Part of me is afraid that some other programmers are going to look at all the source code and be like, what? I don't know if that's true or not, but that's one of my fears.
00:42:46
Speaker
But the one thing is it is what it is. Even if that's true, it doesn't make you a bad person. It doesn't make you a bad leader, a bad entrepreneur. GURP was for sure working to some extent. It wasn't as if you never saw any of it and all of a sudden you've been defrauded. No, absolutely. So don't let your mind go down those rabbit holes. You're absolutely right.
00:43:09
Speaker
It's just, what's it going to take to bring it to completion? And I need somebody else to do that. And I value and I appreciate the 80%, the bones, the structure that they've built. It's all there. Just that nothing works. One thing I would consider doing, I'm a very risk at first person like this is before, even today, before you talk to your father is go do a video. We use Screencast-O-Matic or any other video recording software, screen capture, and just record some visual walkthroughs.
00:43:37
Speaker
just in case, because it didn't cost you anything. And then in case you have to start further more from scratch than you planned, at least you have a visual representation of what it did. Because reality is most relational databases actually aren't that quirky and complicated and hard. And it's going to give somebody a big leg up when you're trying to reintroduce into that. That's a great idea. Yep.
00:43:59
Speaker
Look, on that note, I have had to fire both full-time employees and interns. It's one of those things like having a kid. You can talk about it, you can read books about it, but until you've done it, it is not easy. Some of those firings have been easier in the sense that it was
00:44:22
Speaker
unquestionably the right decision. And some of them were a lot more raw, period. And I will say this, not a single one of them was the wrong decision. And not a single one of them should have waited a day longer. You can criticize yourself for waiting too long. There's no point. I don't generally believe, especially for companies our size, that there's this mantra of like,
00:44:46
Speaker
No, everybody has a role where you can find it, make it work. You can give everybody unlimited chances. Some people develop the wrong attitude or aren't qualified or period. It's really difficult with an intern because
00:44:59
Speaker
You feel some more of a paternal or caretaking role over their younger age. But I think sometimes, like it or not, that's the lesson that they may need to learn at a younger age. And I don't think that I know that they will most likely be, well, there's bad apples period, but they'll most likely be better off if that ends up being sort of a wake-up call about what they want out of life and so forth.
Company Culture and Employee Management
00:45:28
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Good. So to wrap up, I guess. Yeah. I guess first question that comes to my mind is, do you enjoy having an 11-person company?
00:45:46
Speaker
Well, there's no other way about it. You can't make products and ship orders without employees, period. Unless you're doing like super tiny volumes by yourself, but then you're frazzled the whole time. Yeah, there's people that do that. Adam Demith comes to mind and I give him a ton of credit, but it's generally not possible or whatever.
00:46:12
Speaker
Look, there's some questions about what you want out of life. Again, going back to the food that built America, the McDonald's brothers didn't really want to franchise. They had one successful restaurant in San Bernardino. They loved plying their craft of not really grilling hamburgers, but operationally executing. And Ray Kroc was like, no, I want to scale this nationally, make a bunch of money. And they were like, it's kind of that question of really think hard about what you
00:46:42
Speaker
have that you, so you don't have that you want when it comes to money as an instrument. I'm proud of our team. I'm proud of what we're able to put out. I'm proud of how we improve stuff. I need that hustle. I need that hustle in my life. I need that. Not bad stress, but like, hey, we got to figure this out. We got to figure this out.
00:47:04
Speaker
I like that. You know what I mean? Part of that is manufacturing problems. Part of it is for sure the form of leadership, which yeah, it's a hard thing to talk about. I don't think I'm bad at it. I do think
00:47:20
Speaker
I don't know that anybody would ever say that they're, well, I think there's some people that are natural leaders in the sense that like the person that carries the story at a party and has everybody talking, like that's not me. You know what I mean? Sure. Yeah. No. And I truly enjoy where we are, even as stressful as it is, as dark as it is sometimes. I like where we're going. I mean, it's evolving this way because I'm letting it.
00:47:43
Speaker
And if it needs to be something else, I will make sure it becomes something else. But I really enjoy this. I enjoy seeing other people solve problems. I enjoy, you know, teaching them and having them build and grow. And I enjoy having a team of people that like work happens and I don't have to be involved. It's fantastic. Yeah, yeah. Trying to make sure that I'm giving people a sense of purpose and belonging and like, that they enjoy being here.
00:48:12
Speaker
Yes. I don't ever just want this to be a factory work where you punch in, punch out, and go home and never think about it. Yet, I totally understand, as the entrepreneur that never stops thinking about it, that I can't expect my guys to be out hiking in the woods and be like, I wonder what kind of fixture design I should be ... I can't expect that from them. That's okay, even if I want to.
00:48:36
Speaker
But the fact is, everybody here is crushing it. And it's my job to enable that. It's great. I like it. I do want to grow more. What you said nailed it. It's not sustainable or scalable to think about as an entrepreneur the desire for employees to go home and living and breathing the business. Don't know. That's not what you want. But I think about, do I do a good enough job? And I want to compliment everybody.
00:49:03
Speaker
when julie crushes it on editing or helps implement new organization systems and coming up with new fixturing grant the silliest thing grant found little broom clips and made brushes with stems on them and all they're on most of the machines i freaking love it yes and it's like yes keep doing that and vince comes up with new ideas for machines and the way they work and you're like dude this is amazing like i don't yep
00:49:27
Speaker
I want to make sure, and it's a good reminder to make sure I do a good enough job of saying, you keep feeding that. Yes. Encourage that. When the guys come up to me and they show me some little thing or tweak and they're all nervous and like, what do you think about this idea? I'm like, holy crap. Yes, just do it. Why did you even ask? That's amazing.
00:49:46
Speaker
Yeah. Well, it's easier to talk about the good stuff. I think I have a friend, different industry, local friend who's going through some struggles with a bad Apple type of employee. And the thing we talk about, I try to remind him is it's not just that employee that's the problem. It's that you're now as a leader basically condoning that, saying that that's okay. And you're not willing to fire them if they should be fired. And you're not willing to right the wrong and create the right culture.
Reflections and Future Aspirations
00:50:15
Speaker
In worst case, you have your best employee who's like, I'm tired of dealing with bad employees stuff. I'm going to now look at other opportunities.
00:50:26
Speaker
not easy decisions, but I think that helps clarify like, oh, no, the better thing to do is that person not be here is what they, period. Yeah, that's tough. Then trying to create a culture that people actually want to stay. Fraser said he's already gotten emails. A couple of the guys have that have been headhunted from other people. They're like, oh, I see what you've done at Grimsmoyo. How much is it going to take you to come work for us? Fraser's like, pissed off. It's not happening.
00:50:51
Speaker
So that's actually what's about our time. That's the thing I just read. I want to start thinking about we don't have super formal like 360 evaluation performance reviews, blah, blah, blah. We're a small company.
00:51:06
Speaker
And no one I've talked to at our level has successfully implemented something like that that really works well. Something I saw that piqued my curiosity was the idea of doing stay interviews. So coming out of the idea of larger companies, if you choose to leave, you often have an exit interview. Well, that's like the wrong time to do an interview.
00:51:27
Speaker
So kind of this question of like, hey, why are you staying here? Which sounds, I got to flush this out more, but it's a way of sort of saying, hey, what are we doing right? What do we need to be doing better? Like you said, making sure this is the right place. It's work. You got to work. You got to bring your A game. I expect people to be focused.
00:51:43
Speaker
But also, you know, uh, you, you, you know, I want saunas or humerus to become place where you're like, Hey, no, I enjoy the team I work with. And generally on most days, enjoy what I'm doing. Like it's, it's a sense of purpose. That enjoyment is tricky because I feel it because I love what I do, but I,
00:52:02
Speaker
I want everybody on the team to be like, yeah, I love what I do. I come into work and blast around and, you know, do all my stuff. It's great. But maybe that's not fact, you know, like, like work is hard and stressful and machines are stupid and, you know, it's tough. So I don't know. I just want everybody to be here because they want to be, you know? Yeah.
00:52:27
Speaker
Good talk. That was great. Yeah, this was good. We had to unpack more of this, I think. Yeah. It's nice to have a singular top. I mean, have we ever had a podcast that was one topic? I don't think so. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, it is good. It's good. All right, man. Hey, see you next week. Okay. Take care. Bye.