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#349 End-of-year goals
338 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- Distributing tasks among the team
- SmarterEveryDay Nasa video - watch it!
- End-of-year goals
- DSI video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubQ1LLYvaaU
- 4th-grade class lecture
- DLC coatings on pens and knives
- Costing mistakes
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Company Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 349. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. This is the weekly podcast where John and John talk about their past successes and failures and wins and future plans for their manufacturing companies. We just shoot the breeze with what's day-to-day going on and what's on our minds. Yes.
00:00:24
Speaker
What's on your mind? Well, lots of things at the moment, whether it's machines or people as my wife always likes to say. So,
Challenges in Manufacturing Management
00:00:35
Speaker
you know, fixing machines, broken machines, buying machines, selling machines and then people as well what the future of
00:00:42
Speaker
hiring and growth and training is a lot of things that are constantly on my mind. Sometimes I just want to sit in a quiet room and program parts. But the reality of being the tip of the spear for a business our size is just a lot running through my head at all times.
00:01:04
Speaker
I think there's more going through your head than you let on. Part of me admires that because you hunker down, buckle down, but I also think long-term a wise person may push to say, nope, we need to figure out.
Empowering Team and Structured Processes
00:01:22
Speaker
Have a shake some of the stuff out. Yeah, absolutely. Either answer those questions that I'm constantly turning through my mind and get them done. Thinking is not doing.
00:01:32
Speaker
and also offloading some of those thinking tasks to other people and to allow them to do it. Like we had a thing yesterday where we had to dig deeper into a situation and I said, okay, Eric, you're leading this investigation. And I felt very cool and like policey to say that. And he was like, whoa. And I was like, yeah, because you can handle it. It won't be easy, but I don't need to do it and done. Yeah.
00:02:01
Speaker
We had a almost identical tone thing at our lunch where we are working on various either R&D or like super minor production, like making 10 or 20 if something is a test. I guess that's really R&D, but I'm involved, Alex is involved, but in a good way, those are things that can fall to Grant or Garrett or Caleb, but we have
00:02:30
Speaker
moved away and we're in an awkward tween stage of like moving away from just walking over and saying, hey, can you make this? And
Feedback and Goal Setting
00:02:38
Speaker
rather moving that into Lex and saying, hey, we're gonna actually make a work order for it. And nice, I think, you know, I like hierarchies, they come at the risk of, well, actually, I'm gonna talk about that with smarter everyday video, which is really good. But basically,
00:02:55
Speaker
Basically, it's a good thing to tell people what to do, and it's a good thing to be told what to do in a kind of polite way. But it's like, hey, Grant, we're going to put that fork on your plate. If you have time to do it great, if it makes sense for you to distribute it within the shop, go for it. I'm not going to worry too much about it. But we need to be smarter about
00:03:16
Speaker
kind of planning and then triage like, hey, this is helpful to get these pull studs done versus some of these test washers because of XYZ reason. Yes. The order of events is critically important. That's project management, project planning, something Angela and I have been talking a lot about too because a thing might be super valuable, but not important right now.
00:03:39
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. For sure. And that's a distinction we recently made. It was like, yeah, that's a great idea. Totally. That would help. But that is not the top of the list. And unless we look at the list and realize that this is the top of the list, then this is what we do first. Otherwise, we're just always running in unimportant directions. And we're really trying to focus down on that. Yes. Yeah, I agree.
00:04:04
Speaker
I wanted to mention this, I wrote down Mr. Smarter Every Day because he just put a video out of a, he calls him talky talk. He did a keynote speaker talk to a bunch of very high level NASA and US space engineers and decision makers. Okay, that's the NASA thumbnail I haven't clicked on yet.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yes. So watch it. It's really good. And he does something that I think too few people do. And it's top of mind for me, which is
00:04:38
Speaker
be more willing to give negative feedback or feedback that needs to be given regardless of how it may be personally perceived. And it gives the kind of engineering analogy of a PID loop of like if it just, if the PID loop only goes one way, good or bad, it's gonna go haywire. It's okay and it's good and it's necessary and it's probably where I'm not a great manager, could be a better manager.
00:05:05
Speaker
of course, correction and commenting and maybe I'm not bad at it, but I don't think it's a, I don't know, it's an awkward thing, I guess, to do. Yeah. Yeah. I think even more so for me, I'm quieter about it than even you are. Yes. Yes. So. Interesting. I like that. I'm going to watch that video because it's those kind of analogies that I, you know, add a lot of perspective to my view of leadership and management and business. Yeah. It's a little bit,
00:05:35
Speaker
It ties back to it when you have more conviction about the even short-term goals of what you want to do as a company. It can help keep us more on track. I think about it, look to be a little bit oversharing. If I see folks in the shop, maybe goofing off a little bit.
00:05:52
Speaker
I genuinely don't care that. In some ways it's a good thing that people get along. We're not stressed or it's not a bad place to work in that sense. But on the flip side, what I care about is more of like, hey, there's a chance to be helping get us closer to a goal or making a process. I hate to try and stop using the word process because I'm tired of it. But helping make stuff better, do stuff better. And when that stuff's in place and happening, and to be clear, I'm not saying that it's not.
00:06:23
Speaker
It's what comes to mind, right? Well, in defining those goals and those battles that you're fighting for the team, for the company, if they're not clearly defined and everybody just comes in and does their normal work every day and it's just every day is a normal day, it's
00:06:42
Speaker
I find it harder to keep people like on point, but when there's a battle to fight and like, okay, we got to do this. Here's our goal. We're going to do this. It's, you know, we do it in spurts and it works extremely well. And then when we kind of forget about goal setting and don't share it as much, it's always in my head, but if I don't share it with the team, it doesn't exist. Right. Then, uh, it's harder to keep everybody as fired up all the time. Cause these are just come into your work, make a bunch of parts, go home. Awesome.
00:07:13
Speaker
But you see people that get fired up too when there's a mission, you know? What do you mean by you do it in spurts? I mean when I, so we have our team meetings currently every Monday and every Friday.
00:07:29
Speaker
And sometimes they're just kind of what's going on. And sometimes they're like, no, no, here's what we're going to be doing. Here's the plan. Here's either short term or long term goal. And I do it in spurts because I don't always think about or get around to defining it very well. And it takes effort and energy to be in those meetings and be like, all right, guys, here's what we're going to do. Versus just like, hey, how's everybody doing? Maybe we did this, we did that, everything's good.
00:07:55
Speaker
So you're referring to the actual communication meetings, not so much like I've heard of the audited people doing, there's a term, I don't remember, Scrum development. We're basically like, and I'm not sure I'm getting this correct, but you'll say, okay, for the next two days or next two weeks, all we're going to do is hyper focus a ton of resources on one small task. And it kind of has that feeling of being a surgeon, like ignore the other stuff.
00:08:23
Speaker
and just let's get this going. I've thought about that here. Hey, we could disrupt and stop other things to all to focus on something. Speaking of which, if you want an excellent book to read, Scrum. Oh, really? The Scrum book is fantastic. I haven't read it in a couple of years, but I would happily pick it up and peruse it again. I forget the author, but it's the Scrum guy.
00:08:49
Speaker
Did I get it or is it? Tell me, tell me more about what it is. It's I gotta bring pull, pull back from my memory here from a bunch of different books, but I'm drawing a blank.
00:09:03
Speaker
But as you said, it's a way to communicate and hyper focus on certain projects and I don't remember. I just remember it being a great book. That's why I got to pick it up again. Some books deserve my pen where I underline lines and pages and write notes and things like that. And some of them don't and this one absolutely did, which means I can pick it up and refresh myself pretty quickly. Yeah.
00:09:28
Speaker
When I was reading, that's a goal I failed on this year. I do keep a running Word doc of book notes. A 2-300 page book may have 15-20 bullet points, which is 20. I usually just write the page number and the synopsis of the bullet point.
00:09:49
Speaker
that to me works way better. Because if I want to go look at, you know, an old Tim Ferriss book or the goal book or leadership or negotiating book, that is I can pull that up right now, like with you on the call, I could pull that up and I can exactly, you know, it's the books at home in your office and yeah, I'm gonna flip through it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I like that step.
00:10:12
Speaker
Excellent. So what else will go with you? Okay. I'm going to list my topics and then it's, uh, Ooh, I got a great choice. Um, talking to a fourth grade class, screwing up a less Cox of goods, cost of goods sold my remainder of 2023 and first quarter 24 plans. Some other machines were selling concrete patch repair. I got the flu and screwed up the machine and our quality control horse stall idea.
00:10:42
Speaker
I'm going to start with the end of your goals. Okay, so
00:10:49
Speaker
I'm going to half apologize because I think folks that have listened to this podcast for a while may be tired of me hearing of this, but on the flip side, maybe that's also a little insight into life as a leader, business owner, manager, et cetera.
Balancing Leadership and Technical Roles
00:11:03
Speaker
But I am doing technical work if you want to use the E-Myth. E-Myth, yeah.
00:11:15
Speaker
where I'm involved in programming, setting up, etc, improving out stuff, but only from a R&D standpoint, which, you know, like it or I'm like, I see her and try to rationalize it, but I enjoy it, I want to do it. I'm not the only one doing it, you know, other like in so the latest thing I was doing this morning, somebody else made the fixtures, I installed them on the horizontal, I'm testing and tweaking some camp.
00:11:37
Speaker
I like doing that. I want to do that. And there will be an end path to that. But what I'm going to do today is sit down. And I'm actually probably going to do it with somebody else here as just kind of an accountability. And I often work better. And it's kind of one of those things like they may not even add a lot. It's just kind of me doing it there. But I need to put some polish. It's very minor amounts of things on the Gen 3 mod vice, which is
00:12:05
Speaker
the apologies, like I've been talking about this too long, but we're so close. Also, ironically, kind of ties back to the other flu. I got the flu thing, but that's there. Then there's some puck chuck stuff, which is in the similar bucket that I could start to phase out as I bring on the next step, which is
00:12:25
Speaker
I'm going to structure, like literally calendar structure, some half day projects of stuff that I'm just not getting to. And it reminds me of the goal book, not the book, the goal, but something, one of the books was, but you know, defining a goal is often the wrong way to think about it. What you want to do is instead document what you need to input or do to get there. And so what I'm going to do.
00:12:51
Speaker
There's a couple of things on this to-do list. One of them is going to be Monday morning for three hours. I'm going to focus on a corner or a section of the shop, like a quadrant, if you will. Cleaning stuff up, purging stuff, deciding what needs to happen. I will do some of it, some of that I can also upload or whatnot. That's interesting. But if I do that, and let's say it's eight sections, eight days across a couple of weeks, I know the outcome of that will be
00:13:20
Speaker
great with looking at with the benefit of hindsight i need to spend a morning on updating reviewing process bins not only what's in them but also. How we were putting the process been sometimes some of them are kind of scattered around the shop and that might be okay but i will have more conviction about where they are and then.
00:13:39
Speaker
Well, yeah, those are the big items. But basically, it will be then that I will be, once that's done, will be in an even better place. And I think that's a good lean in adaption. When I say that, I don't mean that we're in a bad place now. It's just like that will be better for us. And it's improvement. That's everything. Bingo. And it will mean that
00:14:02
Speaker
I am no longer in any way tied to regular production here. Okay. I will get involved cause I like it is to some extent, but it will be either as we have problems creep up or something of this sort. And even that it's probably not good long-term, but, um, you know, other people here are responsible for all of the fusion CAD cam posts, QC, et cetera. It's excellent. It sounds like,
00:14:32
Speaker
Both of us are trying to find a longer term view of our role in the company and how we make sure that it, I don't want to say runs without us, but certainly runs without our forceful hand at every turn kind of thing, which is fascinating. And that's not new to us. We've spent the past five, 10 years thinking about things like that, but it's getting more and more real and more and more necessary. As the business grows, as it spreads out,
00:15:02
Speaker
I like that. I like the quadrant idea actually because you've talked quite a bit about purging old stuff and it's crossed my mind a bunch of times and I look around the shop and I'm like, there's just junk everywhere. I'm exaggerating but there's still stuff that doesn't need to be there. It's that whole analogy of like if it doesn't make a knife, it doesn't belong in this building.
00:15:25
Speaker
Yeah. DSI just put a customer story visit up. I think Devin was at the shop that was just recently built and you saw and you're like, oh, wow. That shop is clean and new and free of the burden of what we have, which is only eight years. It's not 20 years, it's not 30 years. Again, hashtag apology. We are continuing to upend things, sell things, purge things, all that.
00:15:55
Speaker
Well, like you said, eight years. We've been here now just about four years.
00:15:59
Speaker
But I still have a few cardboard boxes from the old shop. That's just stuff, you know, old car parts or like whatever and it came with us and it's sat there. How important is that stuff if I haven't needed it in four years? You know, some of it's like pure trash. Some of it's like, well, it's like cool, you know? Yeah,
Educating Youth on Manufacturing
00:16:18
Speaker
and that stuff doesn't bother me quite as much as like the quadra idea will be like, okay, when I'm on the Kuma horizontal area, it's like what a week do I want to put a
00:16:27
Speaker
either buy a Kaizen phone thing, make one, 3D print something, like getting, you know, you see people post like, hey, don't put stuff on vertical surfaces. Like how do we organize the tools? That's the kind of stuff in addition to just like, I look, we all have the junk room and that sort of thing. Interesting. Yeah, like, like, you know,
00:16:56
Speaker
Tell me about fourth grade class. The Williams in fourth grade, my son, his teacher asked two parents to come in to talk about their small businesses. It's interesting to gauge what is the appropriate level of discussion for a fourth grade audience. I only have 10 minutes, which is great, but it's not a lot of time.
00:17:20
Speaker
kind of explaining the basics of, hey, I had this idea. And this is what a CNC machine is. And then I'm bringing in just part of a lot of advice to say, OK, we buy this for $6 and we sell it for this price. And that's, obviously, I'm not going to use the phrase contribution margin. But you might think that's our profit, but it's not really a profit because we have other expenses. And I'll ask them to, that's kind of like the idea of trying to talk to them
00:17:51
Speaker
about it and then forget whatever else. I have a short like 10 second video of the Akuma doing a tool change and coming in and facing the part.
00:17:59
Speaker
but trying to keep it interesting and engaging, but also the point is not, it's her list of questions. It's like eight questions. It's like, what sacrifices have you even had to make? Do you have competitors? Are you profitable? I'm like, it's a lot of meat for a short conversation, but it's good. I commend them. It's awesome to see them raising those kinds of questions with an audience that young. So you haven't done it yet.
00:18:22
Speaker
it's the day this podcast airs Friday. Nice. Nice. Yeah. Good. Good luck. Yeah. Thank you. It'll be fun. Yeah. I mean, you don't, it's like you want to dumb things down for a young audience, but you also don't want to treat them like they don't know anything because you want to build them up to the next level. Yeah. And kids are smart. And as long as you can keep their attention, then yeah, it's neat. Yeah. Yeah. I remember years ago, I talked to Claire as like,
00:18:50
Speaker
second grade class, third grade class, something like that. I just took a bucket full of parts from the Swiss. We cleaned everything extremely well. I just poured it on the table in front of everybody. They all came up and held all the screws and stuff. I just talked about how we make things. It's cool. Just open their eyes to what's possible. That's what I love about little kids in manufacturing is now my son knows he can look around him and be like, everything around me is manufactured.
00:19:17
Speaker
And I'm starting to learn the different ways that how things are manufactured. And it's really cool.
00:19:23
Speaker
Yeah, and I wanna try to do a good job at reading the room for engagement and interest, but man, I wanna explain, a lot of kids in our community will grow up either shooting or hunting or have familiarity with that. So it's like, hey, how do you think those firearms are made? Or how do you think those Nike Air Jordans, how were they made? Well, the mold, the sole of that shoe was molded and that mold was made on these same machines. Like kind of that V8 engine or that chainsaw,
00:19:50
Speaker
you know, and he's starting to explain some basics around that and just just you know, really like the wind for me would be in three years or four years if one or two kids was like, Oh my gosh, I remember vaguely that thing. It just started to connect a couple of dots. That's all that William's dad said. Yeah, not about me. Yeah, but but yeah, that guy. Yeah, yeah, connect the dots. I like that. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, for me, it's
00:20:15
Speaker
I think of those career days and you got your doctor, you got your lawyer, you got your, you know, the, the corporate jobs, the suit jobs that come in and board the class. And like we do fun stuff and we're passionate about it. Like it's quick opportunity to just be like, guys, making stuff is cool. Yeah, for sure.
00:20:33
Speaker
And that a job can be enjoyable is another aspect, you know? Yeah. I thought about that. And I was like, I don't have enough time. And it's not the right to talk about, you know, like existential fulfillment and all that stuff. Although I do think that that's good. A good subject matter. Yeah. Yeah. What's on your mind?
00:20:59
Speaker
We've been getting quite a bit of PVD coding lately for our pens and going to send out some nice parts too. It's been going really well. This is a company we've worked with on and off for close to 10 years and Angelo's worked with them even before that. Depending on who's working,
00:21:20
Speaker
is the quality of parts that we get. Lately, they've been really, really good, but kind of souring me like three, four, five years ago where it's like, you just scrapped a whole bunch of parts. How do I... What do you get to do? Anyway, lately, we've sent hundreds of pens to them and almost everyone comes back perfect. Sometimes there's a little spot or a little shadow of coating because some of the coatings are line of sight, let's say.
00:21:49
Speaker
In the PVD chamber, the puck is mounted, let's say, to the wall and the part is negatively electrodeed or whatever and all the molecules fly through the air and attract to it. The fixtures usually spin the parts, but sometimes we see shadows where one side gets coated heavier than the other. Like on a black DLC coating, you see it. That's not as fun being able to scrap parts, although I very much enjoy putting those parts in my pocket and saying they're mine now.
00:22:18
Speaker
But for the most part, we've had super good coatings and it's good to have them back in the lineup. I can't wait to get them on the knives too.
00:22:32
Speaker
Why not think about ways of offering your products at different grades or tiers, like not necessarily going like, hey, here's a Crimson product and here's a BLEM, but like, you know, the listening to the Spencer web's podcast and talk about linear rails, the cheap
00:22:51
Speaker
cheap China rails are just the end cuts of the good rails type of thing. Stare in a midst of toy, you sell different grades of metrology tools. It's interesting. You and I both had this scrap problem for us. I'm not going to, if it's out of tolerance, it's a work only product. It just gets a lot more awkward to think about it. Although look, we do.
00:23:13
Speaker
I'm sure somebody listening to this has been on the receiving end of this. We had a one hole out of a thousand on a brother fixture plate where we screwed up the chamfer. I don't like it. It's not good. It has no effect on the, no practical effect on the end use. We offer the customer a discount and offer them, hey, we will remake this for you. It'll take a couple more days, or you can take this discount or this free upgrade. And I think, I don't think we've ever had somebody not just take it as is, but. Yeah, yeah. Now I also know that we got,
00:23:42
Speaker
We used to have some blends available for sale. We still do on our site, but I for sure don't like the trained customer behavior of like, well, I'm not going to buy it. I'm just going to wait until I can get one as a blend. I think it's tricky for us because we sell a premium expensive luxury good that
00:24:06
Speaker
I don't even know how to price it at a discount. I don't want to establish that structure where it's like this is our blam price. Also, the other aspect is so say we do sell a blam at a discount or whatever, just a visual, there's a nick, a scratch, a thumbprint in the DLC coding or something.
00:24:25
Speaker
The only way to do it would be to mark that product well. Yeah, understood. Sure. So that it doesn't get sold secondhand. They make crap stuff. This is no good. But you could do that. You could. It's just more work to demarc every single component. Do you mark just the bad parts? I don't know. I guess we haven't answered those questions or spent a lot of time thinking about it. We just put the scrap aside and move on. But scrap gets expensive. It slows you down. Well, that's what
00:24:54
Speaker
That's what I'm kind of getting at is not, I'm not looking at expanding a revenue stream by compromising quality. That's not at all the point, but like we're also as, as we move to away from individual decision making and trying to get in more, um, your processes volume, all that stuff. It's like, Hey, we need to be, we need to be.
00:25:19
Speaker
more honest than we've been with ourselves of what's reasonable. And if we're going to put a tolerance of plus or minus X, and the truth is that I'm going to pick a number, it's a foul. And the truth is, are you truly going to say when it's 12 tenths, you know, 1.2 thou, that that gets scrapped? Is that really what you want? Maybe you do. But I, we are,
00:25:44
Speaker
move more aggressively, stopping things that are sustainable period. Like, and so I guess my point would be is if you're going to have this double digit percentage scrap rate on a process or coding, you've got to be, I'm not telling you, I'm not, man, you got to be honest about what do we do about that outcome? Do we just account for the fact that we're going to have a quarter of them scrap? Okay, great. If you can afford that, no big deal, but that stinks. And then you got parts that are good otherwise, but have a little like, like shimmer in them or something.
00:26:13
Speaker
What do you do with those? We can only absorb so many of those before it's just a waste, and ideally work with a vendor to reduce that scrap. If it's the nature of the beast, that's one thing, but if it's laziness or sloppiness or avoidable, that's a totally different thing.
00:26:31
Speaker
But that's where I'm trying to push back on myself and I guess on you is the solution is not the false belief that you'll just get this done better in the future. It's kind of like, no, it's going to continue to happen. It's going to be this percentage of it.
00:26:51
Speaker
Do you want to build a rework platform? Do you want to do a different grading platform? Do you want to just literally scrap them and know that that's... But then basically you're going to, in a perfect world, you'd measure your scrap. That's totally fine. 15% go into the trash. I get that. That's totally fine. I don't care. I'm not asking them to do better. I'm not mad that they have
00:27:13
Speaker
Whatever, you know what I mean? Yeah, you just have to set those expectations. So lathe parts are a good example for that, especially the Swiss parts because it makes thousands of parts. And we do have those hard tolerances. If it's 18725, it's garbage. If it's 18720, it's good. Anything above this hard cut, because we have to put a hard cut, otherwise it's all loosey-goosey. Sure.
00:27:37
Speaker
sometimes at least to a lot of scrap, but parts are quick enough that we just accept that absorb that and be like, we'll try not to try to keep within that range lower. But here are your hard cuts and make parts within this tolerance period. Otherwise, when you're designing parts yourself and making parts yourself, you're like, does it really have to be that loose? Exactly. Right. And Skye and I had that two days ago, where on the knives, we have the main hole in the knife, the pivot where the blade like rotates from the axis of rotation,
00:28:07
Speaker
We, over the past few years, we've gone through so many different ways, drill it, interpolate it, cogs still burnish the hole. Currently, we're just reaming it with the carbide reamer in the soft blade state. So we ream it to 1.870, and then we use a barrel lap with diamond paste to barrel lap it to 1.875. So we're taking off 5 tenths diameter. Not much. Takes either not long or up to a minute kind of thing to barrel lap, no big deal.
00:28:37
Speaker
This guy was saying that the gauge pin that they used to fit was being weird or whatever. And so I'm like, can you measure the gauge pin for me? Because it's supposed to be 1.875 gauge pin. And he goes, it's measuring 1.870. They've worn the whole gauge pin down 5 tenths just from using it so much. And I was like, OK, so your gauge is no longer accurate.
00:29:00
Speaker
You're not measuring normally. What do you measure and engage with, though? With the mic, whatever. But the pin itself is wrong. And it was, right, years ago when they started using it.
00:29:10
Speaker
So we found that similar situation. The mic was worn. Often a problem somewhere, right? Yeah. This is all of a sudden that like egg on your face moment when you realize this is why you have tools calibrated. Exactly. It's also just by a new one for us. We replace our deltronic gauges, but we had a mic that was because we measured
00:29:35
Speaker
All the time, only ever at the half inch range. I'm not sure it would have been any different. It's not like a lead screw or you're oiling it when you move it a certain amount on a machine.
00:29:47
Speaker
Yeah, I would urge caution to assume it was just the gauge pin. It is definitely the gauge pin, especially in our case because the hole has diamond dust in it and we're using the gauge pin. The gauge pin wears out. We bought them a black coated gauge pin like a wear pin that shows the wear.
00:30:10
Speaker
But they didn't use it because it was so much bigger than the one they use every day, even though it's the right size. So it just led to some things like, OK, let's start using the black bin. Let's barrel up to the size. Even if the knives go together, even if they work, let's try to hit our tolerance.
00:30:27
Speaker
and learn a bit more about it, which is good. You said the black one is not bigger in diameter, critical diameter. It's just awkwardly large as a tool or? No, it was just, I think, the habit of using the pin that's always been used as opposed to trying something new. I don't know. I don't actually know the answer. But I think the small pin was fitting. And they're like, the knives go together. So whatever, even if the tolerance is not what it's supposed to be. Right.
00:30:55
Speaker
But then if we have some pivots that are made at the upper end of their tolerance and the hole that's made at the lower end of their tolerance, we're going to have a problem down the road, right? Yeah, sure. It's that theory of interchangeable parts.
00:31:10
Speaker
Well, that's what's been top of mind after that book about the Toyota system is kind of a think about random change of subject slightly. We have a FFL and I don't really use it, but some we've got some Palmetto state lowers in and the I mean the thousands that they must make every day and in the amount of QC points and so forth is it kind of makes you realize there's there is
00:31:39
Speaker
there's just a single tribal tribal went out the window. When you were, you know, 1000 times smaller than you were now than with the amount of things that you're shipping. Yeah. Yeah. And makes you makes me you want to makes me want to think about getting better at looking at how those companies are doing stuff period, right? Kind of rethink everything. Yeah. Well, and I've been kind of our manufacturing team has been
00:32:08
Speaker
getting deeper and deeper into watches for fun on the side kind of thing, like fancy Swiss watches. And we're watching these Swiss watch tours and these are companies that were founded in the mid 1800s that are still existing and thriving. The founders long dead, been dead for a hundred years kind of thing. And the company still has an ethos and still has a skill and like an image and a style that has transitioned for generations and generations.
00:32:36
Speaker
You know, our company is 12 years old now. And I'm like, is that possible to build, you know, from this outset? Um, and that's where kind of the tribal knowledge and the process control and the documentation and everything. So you can hire new people and still keep the same, the same vibe, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Right. Interesting. You're going into the watch business. I will see. Oh, interesting. Watches are very fascinating. Yeah.
00:33:06
Speaker
I got to share this one because it was a good lesson learned.
Handling Cost Overruns and Hiring Challenges
00:33:10
Speaker
We had an incorrect cost on a material in Lex and it's a particular type of material that we buy and the vendors good at what they do but a little bit difficult to work with which is
00:33:26
Speaker
Frankly, makes it worse as an excuse because I should have known, hey, they are frustrating with how they communicate, so forth. I should have done a better job at really scrutinizing it. Basically, we would spec, I think we'd buy 80 pieces at a time.
00:33:44
Speaker
And I mean, this is really embarrassing. They were not sending us 80 pieces. They were sending us 80 feet because in the kind of fine print, the unit of measurement was not pieces. It was feet, which is frankly BS, but I would be like, I want quantity 84 and it's a length 40 inches or something for what worked well in our bar feeder. And so it ends up being two and a half, four times
00:34:14
Speaker
more expensive than we were accounting for. Now, good news is we're fine on these products. So you ended up buying a lot more material than you expected? No. It means that what we thought may have been a dollar of material is $4 of material. Interesting.
00:34:33
Speaker
a fun thing to discover. Yeah. We've noticed that. It didn't fall into the trap, but we noticed that when quoting, like, say, titanium from Boston Centerless or something like that when other vendors price an inch and this vendor priced in foot or in piece or something like that. You do have to be very clear, especially with lathe bars, like the unit of measure because
00:34:56
Speaker
Yeah. It's different. Or some price by weight. And I'm like, I don't know how heavy a bar of 3A titanium is. I don't care. I just, what's the price of a bar?
00:35:07
Speaker
But I've heard some stories of companies in the past that realized, you know, months or years into a product, something that they had their cost of goods sold way wrong. And when it's a one man band, and you're just, you know, John Tonderson did job shop work where I did a job myself, quote the material, get it in, make it like, you know, everything that happened in this,
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, so kind of on that same list for me next year is going to be because I won't be as involved in day-to-day production. It will be not only looking at that stuff, but even evaluating. Like I've already distributed that project to somebody else on the team to say, hey, start taking a look at this stuff and can weigh in on their results, which is good. Like that all of a sudden puts us in a good place. Do you guys keep a pretty tight ship on your cost of goods sold?
00:35:56
Speaker
Yeah, very tight. Take a picture. Yeah. Yeah. We're trying to, but we find that there's so many things and so many materials and so many tools and so many things that makes it difficult to always know what's fully happening, especially with scrap on the machines and things like that to end product, retail price, how much it's cost of goods sold for each product divided from the whole company's expenses kind of thing.
00:36:25
Speaker
Yeah, I think I'm realizing more and more how wired that way I am. And frankly, how, to me, sacrilegious it is to like, you have to know that stuff. Because at the end of the day, what makes a difference between the true profit and cash flow is, you know, we have sold this particular product, we have sold literally
00:36:50
Speaker
five if not six figures worth of them and to be that wrong is luckily. The way I price this product is based on what I think it's worth. It wouldn't have necessarily changed. It's not like it costs a good sold markup type thing, but still. It changes your profit tremendously. I think to clarify, our accountant Spencer,
00:37:10
Speaker
It keeps a really tight chip on it, but I think he wants it to be perfect. I think we're having a hard time delivering the numbers that allow him to make it perfect. I think there's that discrepancy there because he's not a manufacturing guy. We don't track our scrap really kind of thing.
00:37:27
Speaker
So whether we have inventory on the shelf of finished parts or it's all that kind of gray area that I don't want to struggle with, but it leads to some unanswered questions on his end anyway. I did a video years ago. I think it was the one called why we aren't making any money and it kind of broke down.
00:37:46
Speaker
that like, hey, if you sell something for $400 and your material is $300 or $70 or whatever, well, guess what? What about the freight to get the material to you? What about how many pieces you had you scrap? What about the credit card fee when you sell it? Yes. I'm not talking about general overhead. I'm actually talking about specific costs you can allocate to that thing. That product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:38:15
Speaker
There's a whole world in and of its own, and I'm glad Spencer handles it, but we got to be able to feed him the right data that is valuable, you know? Yeah, for sure. Um, we, so we've been working on hiring a machinist precision machinist and had some really, really good applicants, um, in and out, some of them are, uh,
00:38:42
Speaker
moving on to other companies or something like that. I guess the answer is I'm still looking for a machinist. If anybody out there is listening and wants to consider working at our shop, we're in Stony Creek, Ontario, looking for people. Definitely reach out. That's my pitch there. Chances are to run some pretty solid equipment. Yeah, fun equipment, exactly.
00:39:10
Speaker
Yeah, so that's been a fun journey the past few weeks. A lot of interviews, a lot of really good people. It's always weird when somebody's like, ah, I took a job somewhere else. I'm like, no, not acceptable. Why? Yeah. But yeah, it's good. Good. Awesome. Good luck on that. Yeah.
00:39:33
Speaker
You don't get what you don't ask for. Fair. Exactly. Put it up on Instagram. I have to be less shy about asking because that's exactly. That's what I tell my kids. You don't get what you don't ask for. Yeah.
00:39:48
Speaker
That's my same sort of bucket is us selling equipment. So we
Reorganizing for Efficiency
00:39:54
Speaker
have put it up on, if you go to sauntersmachineworks.com at the very bottom of the site, because I don't really want to spam it in people's face, but at the very bottom of our site, we have a page called equipment for sale. And we are selling Tormach machines, we're selling Haas machines, some accessories, compressors. The dilemma that I have is we've actually already potentially sold three or four of the larger machines, which is awesome. We'll keep that set up to date, by the way.
00:40:18
Speaker
worry about that if you're looking. That was fast. Yes. But John, we have so much random stuff that is of value, but I don't know how I would possibly justify spending the weeks or months to sell all individually. But I'm not going to feel bad about selling the big items directly if I can, and I think I am.
00:40:42
Speaker
Basically, I had thought about having an auction house come in and do an auction of a continuing business. By the way, a couple of folks have reached out. We're doing great. We're going to reposition a few things in a really good way, not any struggles or problems, etc. This is a really good thing.
00:41:03
Speaker
We've got welders, we've got used Heimers that we're not going to use from our Tormox anymore. Those are Heimers' new $400. Do I want to put the four Heimers that we have up individually on eBay and pay 15%? Sure, fine. But it's a lot of work to sell it, list it, ship it, all that. I guess I could have a little yard sale where people could come here and I could do... I'm not trying to be the hero, but I'm also... I haven't called one of the auction places yet because
00:41:32
Speaker
They're not going to like it if they find out that... Big stuff's already gone. Exactly. But from a dollar standpoint, maximize my money there and then just get over the fact that some of the other stuff, you're either going to incur some fees or not get max awkward. That's not the point. It's just like, I don't want to sell a... I'd rather not sell a $400 Hymer for $72. You would think that that should sell for $200, $300, right? Yeah, exactly.
00:42:02
Speaker
Yeah. But that's my dilemma. Yeah. I can't, I can't compromise three months of good work at Saunders on looking stuff just to handle that. But it's also, it's also happening. Like it's not, you have my word. I haven't picked a hard date, but like pick March 31st, that stuff won't be here. Full size. Like gone. Done. Good. Good. Yeah. What it's used today. Um, today.
00:42:32
Speaker
I'm finalizing the grinding blades on the speedio saga, and I think we're switching to that full stop, like today, which is good. Okay. The reason you bought the machine. Exactly. Getting super good results, I'll grind a blade, I'll give it to Sky to polish up, and he says they're fantastic. They're just exactly what they need to be. They're consistent, they're good.
00:42:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think we're just moving to that full stop right now, which will give the Kern more free time to do what it's best at doing, what it's got to do, more handles, things like that. And that'd be really good. So the caveat is the, the Aroa is still not hooked up on the speedo. So we'll be hand loading fixtures for the short period of time until it's done. But I think it's almost done. They were, they're waiting on a cable to come in, which should be here this week kind of thing. And then it should be ready to rock. I know it's painful.
00:43:27
Speaker
But yeah. Good. Awesome. And then I wanted to add, if anybody does have any questions they want to add for us to discuss little notes, topics, things like that. Happy to discuss some customer questions, some listener questions. Viewer mail. Viewer mail. Viewer mail. That's a good way. Yes. Yeah. So we'll also do a thing on Instagram today and we'll bring in some good viewer questions.
00:43:54
Speaker
And John, I can crunch on them and discuss our thoughts on those things.
00:43:59
Speaker
Yeah, you don't know like, that's the one thing about entrepreneurship is it's lonely in the sense that like most days I just spend here with our team. And so what do people I mean, I'd be I would welcome, you know, I would I would say criticism, but like, what do you guys think? Or what is the perception? Or you know, how does this happen? Or like, like we said last time, you know, give a question about your career path or, you know, happy to weigh in it to the extent that we're qualified to do so. Yep.
00:44:27
Speaker
Cool. That'll be fun. Awesome. Well, have a good day. Other than that. Yeah. Yeah. You too, man. All right. Take care. Take care. Bye. Bye.