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"Running a Shop, Leadership & Getting Things Done."
197 Plays5 years ago
Being in a position of leadership is a tough thing to learn. John & John go in depth about not only leading people in the proper direction but to also be a good leader to yourself. Grimsmo has been holding a super tight timeline to get Rask's back online while Saunders talks "Nuking" the shop. The boys mention an article here about "The soul of a new machine" By Tracey Kidder.
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Transcript
Introduction & Shift to Process Building
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machine episode one hundred seventy seven my name is john rims mo and my name is sean saunters this podcast talks about john and john we run cnc machine we love that but now we are also super focused on how we're building the processes and systems around these businesses that we run.
00:00:19
Speaker
Yep. It's becoming a bigger and bigger part of what we do. There's the making stuff, which is important, obviously, but we're building teams around that too. It's not just us. That's something I'm constantly on a daily basis reminding myself that I don't have to do. You don't have to do what? Production, for example. Like the work. That's why we're building teams.
Theme: Leadership & Action
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah, I hesitate to talk about this because the overall theme I wanted to kind of get with you on today is this idea of leadership.
00:00:58
Speaker
doing and not talking. It's great to have a podcast or share our successes, but let's make sure that those are backed by real actions and progress. We're behind on that.
Synthetic ERP System: Alex
00:01:10
Speaker
It's time to go on that. What we're seeing with Alex, which is our synthetic ERP, our internal system that we're using is
00:01:21
Speaker
It started as just a way of, say, tracking or automating, reordering existing stuff. And what it's clear is that it's going to take the place of some systems like we saw on the SNH machine tour, or certainly a lot of what we saw at Metal Quest, which is Alex is going to be what handles
00:01:41
Speaker
internal work orders. It's going to be how we organize the location of things. It's going to be what a work order is to generate products will be the same sort of process for maintenance. A work order is going to generate the monthly or quarterly, hey, probe the Renishaw on this machine or swap the batteries out or weed, go weed outside. Alex will become the background of the company. Yep.
00:02:08
Speaker
100%. And I'm really happy to hear that you guys are taking that internally.
Handling Systems & Family Business Dynamics
00:02:14
Speaker
I've been slowly working with my dad on our own version of that, although not in the past six months. But I'm a little envious in your end because you guys are handling it in-house. And my dad's really close, but he's not. I can't go in and fiddle with it the way he's programming it.
00:02:33
Speaker
So it's just cool how you guys are doing it. And ours is going to turn out pretty sweet too. But I wish I could just get in there and massage it. Maybe that's just me. Don't take back what you said. It's not cool. It's work. And I need to be held at like, we need to do it. It will be cool. But a little bit of it is I think it's worth sharing. I don't know. I struggle whether to share this or not because
Post-Vacation Challenges & System Prioritization
00:03:01
Speaker
I think there's people I look up to who power through stress or power through versus getting all soft and mushy. But darn it, I had kind of a tough week. And honestly, part of it was because I took a vacation last week. And it wasn't that bad to be out. But I don't know. It was, I guess, different. So we had those two machines come. We had training classes. I was out. We had
00:03:27
Speaker
Brand new pallet racking show up like awesome example of I went from nothing to realizing that that's a completely obvious and appropriate solution for us. We've got to pick up a stack or forklift things that we can get some on off the pallet racking without having to use the sit down forklift.
00:03:45
Speaker
And so we've got a lot on our plate to tackle, to implement that. What I remind myself is that the future will be kind for I intend to invent it, but I got to go do it. I just have to go
00:04:04
Speaker
buckle down, you know, coming up on July 4th, I think next week is when I'm really going to hit the run rate of this kind of the days off in the shop. Thank you, Morgan. Do its days off in the shop, like put down the put down fusion, step away from the CAD, subway from the cam, because at the end of the day, we will still always be in the business of making parts, but I can't let this go on any longer without really making it a priority to get this stuff implemented.
00:04:34
Speaker
Absolutely. Because those things, whatever they are on your on your do its list, they will drive you forward or they just are things that need to get done. Yeah. Yeah. And if they don't get done, then yeah, problems ensue. Yeah. Yeah. Good. But so how is it coming back? Like, did the world explode while you were gone? And or was it great? Was it fine? Oh,
00:05:04
Speaker
Yeah, I like working. I mean, it was good to be away. I didn't, I love being, I loved, I had a great time. Don't get me wrong. I wasn't, I'm not one of those folks that just sits there and wishes he was back at the shop, but I like working and we're, I'd argue we're at a critical time. I wish, maybe it's too easy to say this as a entrepreneur, but I wish the vacation had been at a different time because I've got this energy. And I think I was reading,
00:05:33
Speaker
Ugh, pretty good.
00:05:35
Speaker
page in the Jocko book on leadership and it's kind of just talked about, look, leading by example, leading by doing, and, um, it didn't sit well with me to have this passion, this energy, this need to do stuff. And then I go away. I didn't like that. Yeah. Yeah. I get that. But it's my, you know, but, but so tough, like that's okay. You know, everyone, everyone, everyone should be balancing work in life and vacation is a real thing. It's not a luxury. It's part of life. That's okay. Exactly. Yeah. Especially with family and kids and,
00:06:05
Speaker
Yep. Yeah. So you think about the team that we've got.
Team Collaboration & Quality Control
00:06:10
Speaker
We've got a great team, making sure we build systems that play into whatever weaknesses there are. I remind myself QC is important. We've generally done a good job, I would argue, but like a little quirky things that
00:06:28
Speaker
aren't always something you can measure with a mic. At what point do you make the judgment call to replace an end bill if it's got a little streak to it? I think you're the type that just sees it immediately and addresses it, but how do you create a system around that?
00:06:44
Speaker
Yeah, so that everybody else on the team does that too. Right. Yeah, it's tough. So either you go full measurement or visual pictures or something. I mean, we notice it here. It usually comes down to a lack of communication between everybody.
00:07:00
Speaker
If I sat down with everybody who's ever going to touch an end mill and said, here's the limit. It's a visual thing. It's a feel. I trust you guys, but let's have this discussion. Otherwise, I'm just assuming you're going to do what I do, and that's a bad, bad assumption.
00:07:17
Speaker
or vice versa. They're assuming that I'm going to do what they do. And if we don't talk about it, then we're not on the same page. And just more open discussions like that, which will be good. We had a blade. The guys came to me and showed me a blade that had a gouge out of the spine, the back part of it. Not huge, but very noticeable if you're looking for it. And that blade had gone
00:07:39
Speaker
Past milling all the way through heat treat, I think through lapping all the way through the tumbler and to Eric before Eric noticed the gouge and that's bad. Bad because Noah caught her back because you added value to a thing that you ultimately were going to scrap or? Both, for sure. Mostly that nobody caught it, but that's not a thing we're looking for.
00:08:05
Speaker
We have a couple tolerance checks we do when the blade comes off the machine, and then it just goes through the process, goes through heat treat. And I'm just kind of surprised nobody noticed it. But that said, I haven't said a word about it except for the person that brought it to me and showed me the problem. So I need to.
00:08:21
Speaker
just mention it. Things like that, it's wasted time, wasted value. I don't mind that we scrap the blade. That's not the problem whatsoever. The problem is nobody caught it. Right, right. This is very fluid. I literally was talking this morning before I walked in here to do the podcast about, hey, let's have a meeting. Let's everybody sit down. I like the idea of
00:08:46
Speaker
So like we we have pretty darn good process on fixture plates, you know, they're serialized They have their own individual QC sheets the way they get looked over I'd say we're pretty darn good at that the non serialized higher volume stuff for example a
00:09:02
Speaker
one of the jaws on the mod vice. Those are never going to be serialized. It's not that type of a product. But what I'm thinking is, and this is what I was asking last night on WhatsApp. I can't remember, gosh, maybe I saw it at Pearson's shop. I want to find it just because it's nagging me. But there's a rhyme or reason or logic behind some form of statistical process control. And I vaguely remember it being relative to the lot size.
00:09:30
Speaker
So if you're doing 100 parts, you check the first one by a third party, like a first article inspection, then you check the fifth one, the 10th, the 25th, the 50th, something like that out of 100. And if it's more, you do more. And something doesn't sound right about that. So I may be wrong, but whatever it is,
00:09:46
Speaker
Um, we need a system that it's a system period better or worse. It's once the system's there, you can tweak it. Um, and I've always been a big believer, uh, in, in having somebody else periodically look at the part because you just, it's, it's, it can be, and we're actually thinking about, uh, having somebody who's not out on the shot for handle that right now, because, uh, they are, they have a good intention to do. Yeah,
Leadership & Quality Standards
00:10:14
Speaker
exactly.
00:10:14
Speaker
And when you're doing the same thing over and over again, you get a little lazy and complacent. For example, for our lathes, the first hour or two while the machine's warming up, we're checking a lot. But then it starts running all day and all day. And you walk over and you check one every now and then. That's not a specific time. I can't tell Sky every now and then and expect him to know what I'm talking about.
00:10:36
Speaker
But then you get in this mindset of like, wow, everything's great. Every time I go there, the parts are great. So maybe I'm going to check a little bit less. Maybe I'm going to be a little lazier in my chat because everything's great. And then you're not catching little things. And I'm speaking to myself here more than anybody.
00:10:53
Speaker
The fact that everything is great means that eventually something's going to wear. You're pushing the boundary of everything being great because it doesn't last great forever, even though your brain just says, oh yeah, it's fine. It's been fine all day. It'll keep being fine.
00:11:10
Speaker
Yeah. There's a huge element of human judgment that comes into this. You can't build tool life manager of everything or engraving tools or wear on inserts. I think that's probably why I really had a hard time was questioning my own leadership
00:11:30
Speaker
Am I doing a good enough job of instilling that, of leading by that, of demonstrating that? Because to pull in the extreme ownership concept, it falls back to me to do that. And I think that's what hit me so raw was that kind of undermining that is kind of cuts to the core.
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, because we're both hard on ourselves just because we have such high expectations of ourselves and goals for the future and know that we can do better. And for me, especially, I know that I can do better. I know that I will do better. So I'm even harder on myself because I know it's possible. And that's what pushed me and driving me forward.
Customer Engagement & Social Media Success
00:12:15
Speaker
But it's tough doing that to everybody else. Dude, from the looks on social, it looks like you're just crushing it.
00:12:24
Speaker
I'm having a lot of fun. I'll say that. Good for you. Yeah, no, the team's doing killer. Things are amazing right now. And Fraser's been having just an insane amount of fun on the Grimsmo official page, making customers pee their pants basically all day long. He's hearing so much feedback. He gets hundreds of DMs a day. Guys are like, this is just the funnest thing ever because we're doing these. We got rid of all the pandemic knives. We sold them all.
00:12:53
Speaker
And he's like, all right, I'm doing a sign-up form for 15 minutes. Sign up now. And we had like 200 people sign up in 15 minutes to be able to buy this knife. And we did 24-hour ones before. We'd get 500, 600 people. And then he did a six-hour one. And he got 600, 700 people. Holy cow. Yeah. And then he just delete the list when it's done. We don't need the information. And then do it again next time. So we're going to keep doing these kind of sign-up sales, the real quick, short-term
00:13:22
Speaker
Man, everybody's just so excited. Good for you. That's amazing, John. It's all coming together. It's no one thing. It's this accumulation. I was talking with my dad about this last night. The example I gave my dad was I've had many times in my life when I'd sit down with Meg and I'd be like, honey, trust me. Listen, if we just get this one thing, if we just get this one machine, all of our problems will be solved.
00:13:45
Speaker
and we'll crushable dominate after that. That never happens singularly. I remember that conversation when we got the Nakamura in 2016. We need to make our own hardware, and then we can make flashlights, and then we can make pens, and this will all come together in the next six months. It'll be a great decision. It worked out. It's been a good decision.
00:14:07
Speaker
We haven't started really, really, really crushing it until like the past year. And it's this coming together of all of these individual decisions into a package with a team, with a great support staff, and the great equipment and product and customer base, and it's all coming together. Yes. Yes, John. What an awesome story.
00:14:36
Speaker
It's fun. But as you know, there's been many crying alone in the woods moments. Right, right. And that's what happens. That's what makes us worth it. That's what lets me smile now and be like, we're only on a certain rung of our ladder of the journey right now, but I'm really happy and proud with what we've gotten so far.
00:14:58
Speaker
And how we're doing? Good. How's the current?
Production Consistency & Process Improvements
00:15:01
Speaker
The current's been awesome. I was looking at my I've got a little calendar next to each machine that we write down what we did that day. You know, six knives on this machine or 400 screws on this machine. And on the current, I've run it every single day for the past like three weeks. Nice. And that's just feels really good. Oh, speaking of that, totally off the cuff. But today we're recording this on July 1. It'll air July 3. Where are you on the risk?
00:15:28
Speaker
Exactly. Not nearly as far as I expected it to be, but I have no ability to actually pick a deadline and know if it's even physically possible. So I just pick some abstract thing and just go for it. Go nuts. I worked a lot. I was here till 4 a.m., 3 a.m., 2 a.m., a couple nights, which is very not normal for me. But it was fun. It's like, you know, set a deadline and just try to hit it no matter what.
00:15:56
Speaker
And it's fun to do that every now and then. I used to do that a lot more. Anyway, we have a lot of fixtures. A lot of fixture parts have been made. Handles will be finished by today. I've got all the fixtures I need to make the handles. And programming the top side of the handles is going to be like cakewalk easy. It's not going to take me long at all and making them. So that's all the work is in the setup, the fixtures, the design, and all that. Yes, I'll have handles done today.
00:16:25
Speaker
And then I just need to grind the blades, which will be its own kind of linda wheel type process. I've got some really cool ideas with the new version of the linda wheel that we did two, three years ago. And I'm hoping for ecstatic results on that. And then I have to make a lock bar insert out of, what did they do, 56 Rockwell steel. So I'll be milling it fully hard in a window fixture. Got to make the fixture.
00:16:54
Speaker
And then make the clip, which will be relatively simple and straightforward. And then we have a knife. Is that it? Really? How many discrete parts there are? In a Norseman, there's like 44 if you count the 21 ball bearings. There's 20 something made parts. Wow. Okay. What about a rask? The rask is about the same.
00:17:21
Speaker
And I'm adding complexity by doing the lock bar insert. So normally we have a titanium locking face that works fine. But a hardened steel insert has the potential to work better and be easier to finish and assemble and make and all that stuff.
00:17:42
Speaker
So I'm shooting for some current level tolerances and then hopefully fit up and assembly and stuff will just be cakewalk easy. And you know how we have two stop pins in our knives? Yes. Are you familiar with that? Mm-hmm.
00:17:58
Speaker
So they're adjustable. We have all these different sizes in one-thou increments, so that when Eric's assembling the knife, he can be like, no, it doesn't feel right here. Let me put a bigger pin in. Oh, yeah, that's perfect. So he's got this range of pin sizes that, and lately, for the past few years, on the Norseman, it's within a range, but it's kind of variable. Like knife to knife might be one or two pin sizes off.
00:18:20
Speaker
just due to various little tolerance stackups and things like that. And I was telling them, my goal for the Kern is every knife is going to use the same pin. You just wait
Metrology & Tool Accuracy
00:18:28
Speaker
and see. Yeah, right. Or you'll start doing the pins in tenths. Yeah, oh my gosh. That would suck. That would be so many to inventory. I don't know. Would it be? Well, I mean, I'm having fun here. Already, we probably have 40 different pin sizes in stock in thou increments.
00:18:49
Speaker
But if you increase everything by a factor of 10, you could have 30 or 40 pins in 10s. Exactly. It's just silly, but we have used the Deltronix gauge pins for years now and absolutely love them. And we picked up a second set. And when I bought the first set,
00:19:11
Speaker
It's kind of like one of those where you want to like reach through the phone and punch your distributor. I bought the half inch and then I bought like 10 minus and 10 plus or something. And then somebody told me or made me aware later that they sell a
00:19:27
Speaker
like a plus minus set. So you pick a nominal size and then it gives you, I don't know how many, 10 or 15 below and above it. And the cost is better because I think there's a savings in the fact that it's a set. And it comes in this really nice little plastic molded case where the main nominal is in the middle and then above and below are all the plus or minus. And I'm kind of like, seriously, you couldn't have told me that?
00:19:49
Speaker
Um, I was just thinking about that the other day of having like, I'd say most people have tried to hit a nominal value. Like our, our pivot hole is one eight seven five. I want a one eight seven, four, three, two, zero, and then a little bit higher. And just in its own set in this is all that it does in its own set. I don't need a big box with 400 pins in it. I just want that. Oh, they just buy the individual there, John, they're like $12 a piece. Yeah. Yeah. In 10 increments.
00:20:20
Speaker
You could just buy an individual. Yes, they come in tenths. I don't believe they come better than that. They're double-sided. Yeah, we've only owned half and maybe some three-eighths. I've never bought a three-sixteenth size. I wouldn't be surprised if they're actually a few bucks more, but again, not compared to a Trimike or a Borgage where you could be spending $200 to $900 on a single deal. Yeah, and we've thought about getting that for sure.
00:20:50
Speaker
And it's how accurate does it need to be? How much are you actually going to check it? These are the questions we ask ourselves. In what environment are you going to check it? Because one of the ops we do is a barrel lapping process with a diamond lapping compound.
Shop Organization & Tool Accessibility
00:21:03
Speaker
And they have a 1 8 7 5 pin.
00:21:06
Speaker
that they've been shoving through that diamond lapping compound for years. It still measures okay, but it looks terrible. I wouldn't want to put a $900 tool in that environment.
00:21:22
Speaker
the more consistent we can make that hand process, the better product we're going to have. So I'm always thinking about stuff like this. But yeah, I've been using, especially on the Kern. I guess because I'm trying to hit nice tolerances on all the bores and good finishes and stuff, I've had my pin gauge set, the whole set from 62 thou to quarter inch in thou increments. And then I had to bust out the quarter inch to half inch set.
00:21:49
Speaker
to hit a 275 bore yesterday. It's just nice to have that set of metrology equipment, like super basic gauge pins on hand and be like, nope, that hole is, you know, 274, not 275. Oh, and then you feel the little wiggle and you're like, okay, I get it. You'll love them if you pick some up. I think they're very crazy. They scream you.
00:22:11
Speaker
It's part of this, probably a bad term to use, but we're saying nuke the shop. We're putting the finale on this process of re-establishing the flow and where stuff is and things that we just don't use. I hesitate to say this because I said it before, but what I think we're going to do is build a little tool room. I don't think it's going to be a physical room, but
00:22:38
Speaker
the manual laid the drill press. It all just clicked. I came about it in this weird way where I was like, oh, we have all these machines. I want to use them, but they're really for this. I'm like, oh, that's what a tool room is. It's important for a metaphoric reason of the approach and the thought behind it. Ed and Jerry were saying, hey, well, let's really standardize where we keep the tools and where we keep all the drill bits. Again, we're not bad at it, but I want to drive that home.
00:23:07
Speaker
Yep, can always be better. How often do you go looking for something and it takes you a while to find it? Very rarely. Really? Yeah, we're good at that. We are not great at, we still have clutter and unused stuff. So like a toolbox, at this point, no joke, 30, 40%, maybe stuff that we're going to get rid of.
00:23:29
Speaker
Yeah. And we have a large shop relative to where we work. So the kind of Pearson like, hey, you shouldn't have to walk 44 steps to get a drill bit. Why aren't the drill bits near the drill?
00:23:42
Speaker
Yeah, I've noticed when I'm aware of it, sometimes I'm not. I do go looking for stuff sometimes. You know, might be things I don't use very often, but things I should know if I have it, I should know where it is, and I shouldn't have to go searching for it.
00:24:00
Speaker
And I think some of the guys on the team do that too and don't really realize that it's a waste of time. It's like, well, the goal is to find this thing, so I'm just gonna find it and then I'll use it. But that's a lot of downtime, a lot of effort and energy that goes into just finding it. That's not even solving the problem.
00:24:22
Speaker
Yes, so what we're doing is Alex will potentially take over this, but I still think this is a good at least first step and it may actually remain is many of our toolboxes have now been numbered. The drawers are numbered. Nice.
00:24:39
Speaker
And then some of them are also labeled. So like they says deburring tools or files or one, two, three blocks or something like that. Um, but then we're also putting those labels into a simple spreadsheet. So if given, if it's a new person, you just don't remember, or, you know, our shop got moved around with those VF sixes. So if you want to search for five C college, it's going to tell you, Hey, Brown, Kennedy, drawer five. That's really helpful. Now, ultimately, I think that'll get pushed into Alex because Alex will be the.
00:25:08
Speaker
the overarching ERP, but sometimes just keep it simple. I like that. By nuke the shop, what do you mean by that? Eliminate clutter or? I started it yesterday. I have not had the time to focus on it because of- It is that new.
00:25:33
Speaker
Oh yeah. No, but just, you know, we have, I have raw material that I don't necessarily want to get rid of all of it, but it takes up a lot of space. It's not well organized. So we're going to purge some of it. And then I think what we're going to do is, um, to take some of the existing 12 foot sticks, cut everything down to little taller than six feet. It's more weight. It's more manageable and then probably stack what we keep vertically. Um,
00:25:57
Speaker
organize that dirty side of the shop and then kind of those toolbox examples of if you have two or three doors and a toolbox of stuff that's not being used, time to go.
00:26:09
Speaker
Yep. Yeah. Yeah, we've got our one main toolbox. We just bought two more rolling toolboxes that are, I guess they're starting to fill up, but the one main toolbox is definitely half full of garbage. And that's the one I've had for the past 12 years. And a lot of, like one drawer specifically, two drawers, three, two and a half drawers have not moved. Like they're still my junk from pre-knife stuff. That's funny.
00:26:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's wasting time, wasting space. But that's the main central toolbox in the shop that everybody uses. Yeah, right.
00:26:42
Speaker
Yeah. And so some of the times I'm just like, we've been moving stuff into my old office or the Julie's office area for now.
Pride in Shop Setup & Visual Production Tracking
00:26:51
Speaker
But what I want us to be, what I want someone who comes and sees our shop or hears about it, or even just on the videos, I want us to have a process and the system that we're proud of. And I'm not proud of what we have today.
00:27:06
Speaker
I will be proud of it. I'm proud of some things, but too many. I'm not into the hole. Let me just show you the good stuff and not show you where we're struggling. Yeah. That's a good, I was thinking like, it'd be a neat video right there.
00:27:23
Speaker
Like, let me show you not just the good stuff, but show you where I'm struggling. I wish. I don't know if that would come across well enough on a video. Yeah. But who cares? I've never tried to do YouTube videos to impress like that. I've tried to show. It's a good point. You said something that caught my ear. Why do you write down what you made on a machine each day? It all started, well, especially
00:27:52
Speaker
It's a way of tracking our flow. It's a nice visual to look at a week, like say on the Maury, how many Norseman knives do we make this week? So we can write, we're in four pallets today, three pallets Tuesday. Only two pallets here because I did this other thing as well. And then at the end of the week, you can say, OK, we did 30 knives. And it's a quick, I think it's the only way of tracking right now we have that tracks what the machine did.
00:28:20
Speaker
And then we have our finished output, you know, what Eric and his team have finished and he's done and ready to sell. We track that separately as well. But I've just found it nice to look at the machine and be like, wow, it's been a busy week. You know, we did 30 this week, 30 last week. What happened the 22 week? And you can look and be like, oh, because we had some downtime because of this. And then especially with the Kern, I look at a blank month and I'm like, what the crap? Like I got to get on this thing. It just starts to feel bad after time and with the Swiss too, because we don't run it every single day.
00:28:50
Speaker
And then the other benefit is like, when is? Thinking, what is the last job we ran before this one? Thinking tool changing life and all that stuff. Because switching between titanium and stainless has some rules with tool replacements. So you can just look back last week and be like, oh yeah, the one we ran before this, especially with two people running the machine, was this job?
00:29:12
Speaker
We made 400 of them, and it's been good. It's not perfect, but it's much better than having nothing. That's written on paper, and you keep it forever by machine?
00:29:29
Speaker
Yes, but we don't really look back on them. Previous months, it's more of like a snapshot kind of thing. But it's an excellent habit, I think, for us all to get into, showing that, look, you're tracking your own work. And if you had to write Zero Knives on there for a day, then it's your own accountability kind of thing. It's written in stone. There's no hiding from it.
00:29:55
Speaker
So it's a good start to a system. And as we build out the ERP system and continue tracking things like that, then everybody's used to it. I just think back in the day, three years ago, when Barry first came on and Eric and I didn't track anything, he'd be like, how many knives do you make this month? I'm like, I'm not sure. What did you do last week? We were busy. I don't know, though. And he started this. He'd print out these things and be like, write down how many knives you finished every day.
00:30:24
Speaker
It was hard at first because it feels bad to write a big fat zero on there. It helped drive us forward. It's something that's stuck thanks to him and kind of hard to shake now.
Outsourcing & Balancing Work Enjoyment
00:30:38
Speaker
Let's improve it. I like this idea. It's interesting.
00:30:54
Speaker
The other thing that I've been thinking about, you mentioned it last week, and it's been churning in my head for a while, and you said something like, it's like, Grimsmoid, I still don't think you get it.
00:31:07
Speaker
with regards to whether it be outsourcing work or sharing responsibilities or like you said, hiring somebody to only run the current and I'll never touch the current again, something like that, in a way to grow the shop and to let go of responsibility and me handling and controlling everything. And you're right, I probably don't get it to the level that I will get it in 10 years from now, but it's,
00:31:33
Speaker
It's the more I think about it, the more it's opened my mind to like, you know, sending out some work to have done some some parts that of course I can make because I built this amazing machine shop and I can make anything. But I shouldn't because that part doesn't make me money. So it's like what what if I just spend time on parts that make us money, and then pay other people good money to make parts that is necessary for us to make money to an extent. And it's just a lot that's been crunching around my brain.
00:32:03
Speaker
Good. I saw a post on Instagram that really spoke to a very legitimate issue or philosophical question is, what if you just want to have fun with the current? Good grief. I completely sympathize with that. And that's right. If you can't do that, then what are we doing this all for?
00:32:27
Speaker
On the other hand, your business is way past the point of a, hey, I'm just a guy in my shop having fun. You've got real obligations and equipment and you owe it at this point. You aren't the business, you work for a business.
00:32:42
Speaker
in a good way, but it's true. Don't kid yourself about that. I don't think you have for the record, but I think about a couple of folks I know who have bought businesses, and that really flips it on its head where it's the complete opposite of what you've done, which has literally started with, what was your first machine, a C?
00:33:06
Speaker
the Grizzly X2. Grizzly, sorry. Yeah. You have built it with blood, sweat, and tears, and garages, and weekends, and nights, and all that. It's your baby. These are folks that have bought companies. They just think about, hey, it is literally that figurative $10 million example of, hey,
00:33:28
Speaker
We've used other people's money or investors or whatever to buy this thing. We now own it. How are we allocating resources? How are we finding people to hire, to run it, to do stuff? It makes sense?
00:33:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's a much more clinical way to look at it because you don't have the 10 years of experience of love and deep-seated emotion next to it. Right. And of course, you buy a business, you immediately start having appreciation and love for it. But it's different than having the 10 years of growth within it. But the point is, especially us at our level and where we're going and you as well,
00:34:08
Speaker
to maybe at least for periods of time take that investor just bought a business mentality and how would they run it and what needs to get done and what's clear because I think you and I have happened to be clouded in emotion a lot of times and that served us well in a lot of ways but maybe we need to step back and put that on the shelf for a few minutes and just see what the business looks like without it and I try to do that more and more lately and
Business Growth & Product Line Expansion
00:34:34
Speaker
you know we're doing extremely well and we could be doing insanely well and what's it going to take to get there like what is actually missing what do we what else could we be doing or should we be doing to get us to the next step the next phase and is it is it our problem is it a machine problem is it a staffing problem is it
00:34:54
Speaker
a customer problem or a quality problem or product problem. I try to think of all these things. And for the most part, we just got to buckle down and do work. Yeah, but that's good for you for pushing yourself. But maybe you're, and I don't think you'll ever rest your laurels. I don't think you'll ever sit back and pat yourself in the back. But it sounds like you're at that point where just keep doing what you're doing, John. Yeah.
00:35:21
Speaker
Sure. Work on the RP. Maybe you find somebody to help with the current or maybe you push more outsourcing outside your shop or even just within your team, but good grief. It's 50 of those little things are going to make huge differences because we could very easily just continue on, make six Norsemen a day and do that for the rest of our lives.
00:35:43
Speaker
not happening. I have such higher goals than that. And that gets by. That is what's required to do half decent and continue on and pay everybody well and everybody's strumming along. But we have so much more potential than that. We have so many more product ideas in line.
00:36:04
Speaker
And one of my goals for the future is to have a core set of products that are always in production, always in rotation, that I don't want to be like, yeah, we've got 10 products, but we really only have time to make one of them at a time. I want to be able to bring everything up as core products together, unless they happen to be purposefully a limited run or something like that.
00:36:29
Speaker
No, you're doing it. You've built that foundation, John. Exactly. And we put the rask on hold for three years. And it's coming back. And it's coming back to stay. I want Norsemen to be in production. I want rasks to be in production. Sagas are kind of coming in and out as we can. And I want that to be in steady production, too. So those will be the three core products that I want to finish them every single day. I want to finish x amount of each product every day and build the system so that we can sustain that and grow that.
00:36:59
Speaker
You're so right on the cusp of getting to that point. I know. That's what I feel like. You're going to buy that second Swiss or that second vertical. It doesn't even matter. Whatever these relatively minor things are, the risk profile is so small. The execution is there. Freaking awesome.
00:37:18
Speaker
Yeah, you guys will come up to me like, if I had a second heat treat oven, I'd be a lot more efficient. I'd be like, dude, done. $2,000? Of course. Why haven't we ordered this yet? You want another $10,000 Tumblr? Explain to me why. Yeah. OK, it's not as obvious, but yeah, let's just do it. So it's cool. And I'm trying to get everybody to think about these things too, right?
00:37:42
Speaker
Good segue though to a interesting philosophical counter to that. The soul of a new machine. We didn't talk about that, did we?
00:37:53
Speaker
No. I can't remember who recommended it, but it's a book by a guy named Tracy Kidder. Good Wikipedia summary if you don't want to read the book. I would recommend it for a fun read. It's not intentionally a business book, although there is this whole theme about leadership and team collaboration work that is absolutely, it rings true so well because it's not a self-help business book like that.
00:38:19
Speaker
But it's about developing one of the first thirty two computers back in the late nineteen seventies and this the guy in the leadership and how he orchestrates this team and how he does decisions that don't look like they are helpful. And they don't look like leadership that i think we send to see today which is very.
00:38:38
Speaker
single layer like, I am leading you. He was thinking two, three steps ahead. Sometimes the team didn't understand that and you see how it all comes together. Part of one of those things was, and I think this will probably always hold true for me as a bootstrapper, is we will always
00:38:56
Speaker
push ourselves to do a lot with a little. Yes, at some point we buy that pallet racket or you buy that second heat treat oven. On the flip side, hey, no, let's make sure we're absolutely maximizing what we have and not just swimming in new stuff all the time. Correct. 100%. Fun. What's up today? What's on tap?
3D Printing Innovations & Team Exposure
00:39:22
Speaker
So on that note, I had a buddy send me a Prusa Mark II 3D printer. Really? That he's got like 15,000 printing hours on it. And he's like, I've got better printers now. I'm not using this. Do you want it? And I was like, yes, that's so exciting.
00:39:39
Speaker
So it's the slightly older version than yours, the one prior to that. And oh my gosh, this thing's amazing. I just got it yesterday and I started printing a Triceratops skull that was just on the SD card, like a factory setting. And I was like, this thing's faster and quieter and smoother and better than my old $200 model price mini printer that I've loved. And it's the only thing I've ever known. I'm like, this is cool. And it's got a bigger print volume.
00:40:05
Speaker
I feel almost guilty being so excited about a printer that retails for like $700, but it's cool. I just love it. It just shows how much I love this stuff. Yeah. I am super excited. We finished editing it. It's uploaded. Hasn't been released. It's a 3D printer one? Yes. I was thinking about that all yesterday. Yes. Is that up yet? Sorry. It's completely...
00:40:31
Speaker
real, like every single, I don't know, there's probably 30 or 40 parts in there and maybe it's, let's say there's 40, I bet you 33 of them, you're going to say that's, that's real. It's not that like silly. So I feel like 3D printing got plagued with this kind of pointlessness for a while. Yeah. You print a little marching or a, a benchy boat or whatever, and that's useless, but yes. Okay. I can't wait. So here's, here's the thought I want your opinion on.
00:40:55
Speaker
I am tempted to gather the whole team around and just show this new printer and explain what it does and show some of the parts that we've made, exactly what your video is going to do, and even get everybody on the team to just go to Thingiverse and download something cool and print it so that they can start getting their mind around how and why and what this thing can do for us. Because I was thinking about it, and I'm like, only two people in this shop out of seven or previously eight have ever touched a 3D printer.
00:41:24
Speaker
and only three of us really understand what it is and how it does. And I just think that would be cool, like exposure to everybody to kind of get that feel for it. What do you think? Yeah.
00:41:39
Speaker
I mean, the Prusa, I had never printed on one of our other printers on my own, just without talking to anybody. And I now print on our Prusa. Ed changes up the filament sometimes and the nozzle side. We have to make sure the slicer settings match the printer.
00:41:57
Speaker
And I would recommend, I think Ed said on the 0.6 nozzle, so it's a little bit coarser. You can still print threads and it's a lot faster, but it's amazing to just be like, Hey, I want something just printed. It's amazing.
00:42:12
Speaker
The thing that I love most about it over the past few years is the ability to design crazy stuff. You don't have to worry about fixturing. You don't have to worry about holding it or anything. And you just build these crazy things, slap them together real quick in Fusion, and then hit Print. And you just walk away.
00:42:31
Speaker
And you come back and you're like, that worked, or the odd time that failed, but whatever. And it's, it's, it doesn't take a lot of like, time and brainpower. And that's, that's what I like about it so much. And then you print these useful things, even if it's just like shallow bins or something, right? That stack. You know, the black plastic knife cases that we sell everything in? Yeah.
00:42:50
Speaker
They do not stack. And it's been driving us crazy for years. Because we stack them. We have lots of them around. They don't stack. They slip off of each other. So I'm going to print these little nesters that let them stack. That's like the first big project I have on this bigger printer, because my old printer wasn't big enough. So I'm biased for that.
00:43:10
Speaker
Also, it's hilarious how similar our lives are in that sense. Literally, right now in the SD20Y, we are making these conical spacers. It looks like a rocket tip, but then it's a little bit tapered back and then down. Jared wanted them because we stack our fixture plates when we're either work in progress or even in inventory.
00:43:35
Speaker
And we had for years used PVC trim, like for your house, like quarter round or square stuff. But the PVC trim, if there's any chip that gets on it, we'll press into it and then it'll scratch. And so Jared designed these spacers. I ran 50 of them just one at a time. And then I was like, Jared wanted 200 of them. And so I was like, okay, this is absolutely, if I don't have a workflow that works for the sub spindle here, then
Sub-Spindle Operations & Template Setup Focus
00:44:05
Speaker
I have failed. That's tying back into leadership and what we're doing and making sure you're putting this into place. We had a template before that was pretty darn good, but it didn't pull in the way we're handling the sub-spindle transfer and parting from a process reliability standpoint. I had to tweak one thing on it and I now have a lot more confidence that I can dump a part in
00:44:29
Speaker
And here, all we're using the sub spindle for is to hold the part so it stabilizes it when it gets parted off. But then also the sub spindle has pulled the bar out accurately, which is absolutely the way to go. And it's working great. See, that's part of that, that do it list that is
00:44:52
Speaker
establishing that template and that format is something that doesn't have to get done because you can do it the hard way. But that is hard work up front that makes everything else easier. And that's what you're great at. That's what I'm great at. And that's what we need to teach the team to be great at as well. But it's tough to do sometimes because you've got to stop everything to dive deep on this template restructuring. I've got 10 of those projects that I'm avoiding. But that stuff has to get done.
00:45:20
Speaker
That's literally why I haven't nuked the shop as much today as I had hoped. I told myself, I don't care what I am starting this. I did start it, but the cycle time is like 55 seconds for one of those things. You have to take advantage of the machine. It took me about an hour to fix the template. I was pretty nervous because you don't want to
00:45:43
Speaker
put yourself in a mindset of I'm just going to rush it so that I can say I got it done quicker and then there's a sub-swindle partying and transfers and pools and all that. That's how you crash lays. Exactly. It's only an hour, but that's an hour of focus of yellow vest, please leave me alone. Yeah, right.
00:46:03
Speaker
Fun fact, I've had a yellow vest. I don't think I've ever actually worn it yet. It's more of a threat, but I should wear it because, I don't know, maybe I'm making it too big of a deal. I don't want to offend people, but it's got a purpose. Or don't. It was a great idea, but we haven't done it either. Do you have one?
00:46:24
Speaker
Uh, no, don't even, I bought one for that purpose and everybody knows what it's for, but yeah, it's funny. I still like the concept.
00:46:33
Speaker
That's how we're wrapping this conversation up. I am turning off the, I want to learn more. I don't want to learn about more yellow jackets or lean techniques. My learning penchant to learn, desire to learn will always be there. I need to turn that off for a week, two weeks and do. Yeah. Good. On that note, let's go do. Let's go do. See you bud. Take care. Bye.