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Business of Machining - Episode 8
302 Plays8 years ago
Welcome to the John Grimsmo & John Saunders Business of Machining Podcast! We (John and John) have talked every Friday morning for the past year and we realized how helpful it has been to share our successes, struggles and stories with each other! So helpful that we have decided to record our conversations and share as this podcast!
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Business of Machining, Episode 8. I am one of your hosts, John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. Good morning. Good morning, sir. How's it going?
00:00:13
Speaker
It's going really, really well. I put up a YouTube video day yesterday. I'm very excited. We had a event here in town called the shark tub, which is a playoff shark tank, but it promotes entrepreneurship here in southeastern Ohio. And these companies get up and make their pitches. And there's actually a lot of what I did in college at Babson and the entrepreneurship program. But that's my really lame excuse for having forgotten and then not watched your videos. I'm going to watch it as soon as we get off this call. What is anything crazy? I missed. I look like you had a bit much updates on what's been going on in the shop.
Shop Updates and New Challenges
00:00:43
Speaker
Yeah, it was a solid 30 minute update of just running around the shop We talked about the grinding wheel and we showed the pictures of it or video of it talked about a new employee Barry my father-in-law So got to officially introduce him to the world Yeah, just we are we're crushing it and it feels amazing and it's nice to be able to share finally Did Linda get you that new grit wheel? It's been ordered. Okay. Oh, that's right It takes three weeks something. Yeah
00:01:06
Speaker
Yeah, so a week ago, it was three to four weeks. So it's in process, hopefully. So it's funny, though, because we are excited about grinding. I just got our Okamoto really running. I dressed the wheel last night. And today, I'm going to attempt to grind in the chuck. I'm really nervous, though, because I don't want to take too much off because those chucks are so expensive. And that chuck has some life taken out of it. So I don't want to go. I don't want to take five thou out of it for no good reason. Absolutely.
00:01:33
Speaker
Yeah, I guess you can figure out how far out it is pretty easily. Yes. But like I'm told even that you don't want to put too much Dicom or fluid on it because that stuff can load up your wheel. And when you dress a surface grinding magnetic chuck, you want a pretty open dress so that it doesn't load up because you can't really dress the wheel while you're grinding in the chuck. Does that make sense? So what could go wrong?
00:01:55
Speaker
You'll get it. That was fun, though. But we've got to mix up the coolant. We've got some Quali-Chem Extreme Grind.
Supplier Negotiations and Business Hurdles
00:02:01
Speaker
It's actually awesome. This is a good example, I think, of entrepreneurship is I've talked to the Quali-Chem people a few times about our Haas and our water system and using the 251C that you use as well. And then I asked, hey, can I use that for the grinder? I'd really like to have one coolant. And they basically said, no. I mean, you could. But you're better off using their Extreme Grind or whatever. Interesting.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yeah, we're using 251c on our surface grinder, the Tormach one. But we have a belt system. And we're not being really picky about it. It works great. Yeah, it's funny. You don't get what you don't ask for. I bought numerous five-gallon pails of 251c. And I said, hey, can I have a free five-gallon test of the grind? And they said, sure. I think they'll do that for folks. That's amazing.
00:02:45
Speaker
We'll see how it goes. Yeah, we've just got a little fog buster hooked up to our surface grinder. Yeah, that's gotta help though, right? Yeah, it really does. It, you know, does everything it's supposed to do. It washes away and... How's your week? Ups and downs, but generally really, really good yesterday and today, so that's awesome. Good downs or like bad downs? Bad downs. Without getting into too much detail, PayPal is really screwing us around.
00:03:07
Speaker
Are you serious? Yeah and that's basically our main source of money coming in and they're giving us a lot of trouble so we're just battling that and it's it's no fun. Right but that's tough though because we filmed a video yesterday with a local a friend who's a patent attorney he's a pretty good patent attorney and
00:03:25
Speaker
the pitch of the video was why you shouldn't get a patent. And one of my things was don't spend, they're incredibly expensive, they're very expensive to defend, but it's also don't spend all your time and energy as an entrepreneur focused on silly things like this. Like you, John Grimto, shouldn't have to be dealing with and spending your energy on this. You should be making awesome parts and working on your process.
00:03:45
Speaker
Mm-hmm, and I would love to spend my time doing that. Yeah, sorry. Yeah. No business, you know, it's like this business, right? Right. Is it I assume it's mostly because of the border? No, it's mostly because of the pre-order that we did what? Yeah PayPal does not generally like pre-orders unless you can ship products within 21 days and they they kind of caught wind of the fact that we're
00:04:06
Speaker
significantly behind 21 days in fulfilling our pre-order. The customers are happy and they are completely aware of what's going on, but PayPal is not happy. So they have held a bunch of our money. Yeah, I don't want to go into it, but it's a big headache. It is worth noting because when I got my first merchant account, boy, 10 years ago, it was like rough and tumble back then, at least for an online business compared to how easy it is now with Shopify and Stripe and even PayPal, that's better. Actually, I think is a law where you're not allowed to use a credit card
00:04:36
Speaker
And maybe it's not a law, but it's a agreement between you and the merchant provider. But basically, you're not supposed to take credit card. No, I think it is a US law. You're not supposed to take a credit card order unless you have the product available to ship.
00:04:48
Speaker
I've heard something like that too, yeah. I could be wrong, but anyway.
Cost-Saving Shipping Strategies
00:04:52
Speaker
Machines running good? Yeah, I had the mill running a lot, lathe running a lot, ran it all day yesterday. Sweet. And it's awesome. It's awesome, yeah. Actually, it's super exciting. We're sending out our first freight order ever, really, to be honest about it. So fun fact, freight is really cheap.
00:05:07
Speaker
So we send out these tormach fixture plates for anodize and we've been sending smaller orders because we have been kind of batching them and making sure everything's good as we get anodizing done and test tolerances and designs and so forth. But now I've got 300 pounds worth of them and I was originally gonna, don't laugh, I was gonna send out two or three 50-pound boxes just via FedEx Ground, just normal shipping because that's the dumb way that the old John Saunders would have done it. And I was like, yeah.
00:05:36
Speaker
You know what? A guy dropped his business card off for LTL for eight. I should just call him. And so I called him and I was like, Hey, I want to ship, you know, 150, 200 pounds to, you know, it's not far away, a hundred miles away. And he was like, uh, yeah, 70 bucks. And I'm like, are you serious? I was like, no, there's no pickup fee, drop fee, like blah, blah, blah. I sorry. And 70 bucks plus a fuel, 19% fuel charge. So it'll be $87 or something. Yeah.
00:06:01
Speaker
He's like, yeah, calls by one o'clock. We'll be there the same day to pick it up. And now that he said that, we waited and ran a bunch more than we know are nailed down. So we'll have, you know, 200 or 300 pounds on one pallet. Right. And it makes anodizing cheaper too. Right. Isn't it crazy?
00:06:16
Speaker
That's awesome. Economies of scale. I mean, that's, that's a real word. Well, and obviously with a pallet, we can put our, we've got cardboard and packaging in place and then strapping and wrapping. So probably that we had before with shipping was when these 50 pound boxes get manhandled, things get dinged up, which is unacceptable. Now knock on wood, it's just forklifts and no problem. That's awesome.
00:06:36
Speaker
So you got some real stuff going out now. That's great. I'm excited. Hey, but I actually wanted, I'd made a note on my list to talk to you about packaging because I've really started to think about it more. And I think you guys do such a good job with the delivery of your knife. Like when I got mine, it had the case that had the custom foam with the logo, the spot for the oil. Walk me through that.
00:06:56
Speaker
Well, several years ago, when we first started making knives, I kept it cheap and simple. I ordered little cloth baggies from Uline. And I used newspaper to package them and cheap white boxes. And at the time, I was so frugal that I thought it was fine. I didn't care. The customer's not paying for the packaging. They're paying for the knife. So why would I waste my own money on extra packaging? And I was in that mindset, but that was the old John Rimsmo.
00:07:21
Speaker
being broken and super frugal. And I'm still super frugal, but now I realize the presentation becomes very important. I put up a video of my old packaging a couple years ago and I got a bunch of comments going, you know, packaging is really important. It's perception, it's perspective right when you open the package. Yeah, it sets the tone. Yeah, I met this guy in New Zealand, Magnus. He's been crushing it with Kickstarter campaigns and he's got a decent Instagram account and really good guy.
00:07:49
Speaker
And he taught me a lot about packaging, how it can be very important. So now we have these, they're not Pelican brand, but they're basically little Pelican cases. Yeah, it's like a super hard shell. It's really nice. Exactly, with two little clips on it. And there's this company in California that is a distributor for them. And they have a little CNC router, I guess, that makes these foam inserts out of a pretty high density foam. Custom fit and everything. So we had the model up for the Rask, for the Norseman.
00:08:14
Speaker
And we stepped it up even further. I mean, we're not the first person to make knife cases, but I think we're the first people to include the Torx wrench, high quality Bondus Torx wrench, and nano oil with every single order that we ship. More value to the customer.
00:08:30
Speaker
No, it's 100% true. It sets the tone when you open the box to the point where I would say if there's a problem or a defect with the product when it's just thrown in a bag with a bunch of junk, newspaper, you're going to have a different perception than when it's that way. And so we were looking at Uline for some custom, or not custom, but for box size that would fit
00:08:52
Speaker
some of our fixture plates, and I was like, oh, that doesn't fit,
Branding Through Packaging
00:08:56
Speaker
but if we wrap it four times with bubble wrap, it'll be okay. And then I was like, John, quit this, like just go Google custom cardboard boxes. And I found this company called Paclane, and I just placed an order yesterday, so I have no idea if it's gonna work out well or not. But we got custom sized folder boxes, so they tab open, they look really nice, you know? Custom sized to fit our product with our logo printed on them.
00:09:20
Speaker
25 of them for $2.70 a box. Legit. Right? It's not even different than Uline pricing. Exactly. And now it makes sense. Now you're going to open the thing and it's going to be beautiful. Right. So it's the frugal choice of do you do the quick and dirty, just open the Uline catalog and pick whatever fits. Right. Or do you spend a little bit of extra effort and find a better solution that makes everybody happier?
00:09:44
Speaker
You know, something I've been meaning to get for a long time is just simply a rubber stamp with the Grimm's Monives logo. And I've been putting it off for three years now. I've been thinking about it, and I still haven't done it. But it'd be great just to throw on the outside of the box or on the inside, under the flap lid or something. I demand that you buy that. That's a 20-minute project, Max.
00:10:04
Speaker
I'm going to write that on my list. I just did that on Amazon. I bought rubber stamps through Amazon for less than $10. One of them has the Ford deposit only for our bank account. So I don't have to sign checks anymore or endorse checks. And the other has our return address for when I have to stamp our address on stuff.
00:10:20
Speaker
They were custom for your name. Literally, you go to Amazon, Google custom, you know, bank deposit thing, and when you click checkout, it just asks you to type in your bank account info and all that. Couldn't be easier. That's fantastic. Yeah. Okay. So I'll do that. Another quick thing we've been doing for the past few months, probably.
00:10:36
Speaker
Inside the flap of when you open the shipping box, we're writing, like, thank you, Joel. That's cool. John and Eric. And I've seen pictures on Instagram, and I've seen review videos on YouTube of people opening the box for the first time. And they're like, oh, that's such a nice touch. Right. And now they're going to keep the box forever. Yeah, maybe. Or put it up on the wall or something like that.
00:10:56
Speaker
Yeah, I'll tell these little things. They seem stupid when you say it the first time, but then the second, third, fourth time, and when you hear the customer enjoy it, it's like, oh, yes, that's important.
Innovations in Machining
00:11:04
Speaker
I just didn't have that vision. I thought like you, I thought like the important thing is to get the, like take our clamps that we sell. I thought the important thing was to get the clamp to the person. And now I'm realizing, no, you need to present it to them. Like we, the way we wrap it, the way we put stick around it, the way we put in a box, like it's a point of pride now.
00:11:22
Speaker
Yeah, it reflects your entire image of the brand and everything matters. Yep, I actually want to try, I was talking to Ken about this. Ken Spaulding, a friend of ours that's a knife maker and a machinist down in Southern California who used to work in the packaging industry, but I think we're going to try to do a video series on machining a custom vacuum form mold, which apparently
00:11:43
Speaker
vacuum form companies don't care about using your mold. Like an injection mold company would never let a normal person try to machine a mold that they would stick in their press. But I guess with vacuum, they don't care. So we're going to try to machine those, you know, those like thin plastic things that like Girl Scout cookie trays. Yeah. I'm going to try to make a model for one of our products for those, machine it and then get the trays vacuum form, which will look even nicer.
00:12:08
Speaker
That would be wicked. And what a good video series, too. I think they're not pennies, because we won't order tens of thousands or anything. But I think it'll be $0.20 of tray or something cheap. OK, I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it because you're you. What? Can you make your own vacuum form? Yeah, you can. But I'm going to say this because you're you. John Grimsmoke, quote of the century. I want to be able to do anything, and that doesn't mean I should do everything.
00:12:37
Speaker
Yes. Fair enough. No, somebody was saying you can take the mold, your shop vac, and a heat gun and buy a sheet of the plastic. I don't know where you buy it from. I'm sure you can get it online. Yeah, can't be hard. And you can heat it up with a heat gun and try it with a shop vac and just suck it down. But literally, that's like, I don't even, maybe I'll do that. I bet you I'll just set it off.
00:12:59
Speaker
But I'm excited, like that's cool. Yeah, mold making is a fascinating thing. I've been interested in it for a couple of years now, but it's like, I don't need it. I just, I enjoy the accuracy and the, you know, finishes and the toolpaths and all that stuff. Speaking of mold making, we had a guy in our, one of our CNC training classes last week who, or last month, who was asking about knife blanks. And we ended up having this conversation pretty extensive about
00:13:23
Speaker
Do you plasma cut? Do you bandsaw? Do you mill? Do you water jet? Do you laser? Knife blanks. And you know more about this than I do, but I know a lot about it just as a material prep perspective. One of the things we sort of talked about is could you, and I guess do knife makers in the higher quantity, do stamping? I'm sure they do, right?
00:13:41
Speaker
In the higher quantities, like Swiss Army knife? Right. Absolutely. But even like a Spyderco, I mean, they're making hundreds of thousands of those indoors or whatever, right? Right. I'm pretty sure Spyderco does laser. They have their own laser in-house. Laser, you know, people are up and down. It does have a heat affected zone that has to be cut off. But if you plan for that, which they obviously do, then we do water jet. I mean, the material comes, you can buy it in strip form, like all of our Damascus comes in two inch wide strips. So we can just machine that easy.
00:14:09
Speaker
But, you know, when we buy in bulk, the sheets are like four foot by eight foot or whatever they are. Which means it's better for something sort of a gantry process like laser. Will you always water jet? I think so. I've had a lot of comments and people suggest that I think look into laser, but if the end result is the same and I know what water jet does for me. The advantage of laser is just price. Smaller curve.
Scaling Production and Outsourcing Challenges
00:14:32
Speaker
Faster, I think. Sorry, price meaning it's faster.
00:14:36
Speaker
Right. Water just slows molasses. Yeah, so if you have a powerful enough laser, it could be really fast. But the heat affected zone might be an issue, I don't know. I've never had laser work, so I don't know. Interesting. Yeah, we have some parts lasered out for us on a product, and it's crazy how cheap the company that does a laser work for us. It's like automated lights out, sheet loaders. They have batching queue software that just automatically runs jobs. It's really cool. Wow. That's awesome.
00:15:03
Speaker
And it's cheap, but not cheap in a frugal, beat up your supplier way, cheap in a like that industry is just, it's that model that I love. I was telling, oh, so we had these first robotics kids from a local high school came to our shop two nights ago, which was great. And I kind of walked them through our history and I haven't shared a lot of this on our YouTube and I'm thinking about doing it now because I'm tired of the trolls wondering why we're successful.
00:15:26
Speaker
But one of the first products I brought to market, we made the first 1,000 of them on our Tormach. And then literally, when we first placed the first PO from a real machine shop, it was for a quantity 1,000. And that's a very different process than if you just call a machine shop up and say, I want one, and then I want 10, and then I want 30. Which is the frugal way to do it.
00:15:48
Speaker
And there's nothing, it's necessarily wrong with that, but it's just, it's a very frustrating process because it's so expensive and it makes you harder to make changes. Like I'm so glad that I have a machine now that lets me make stuff. But at the flip side, I don't think I ever want to be the guy running thousands of something unless I can automate it. And so it was, it was a great, you know, it was great way to roll that out.
00:16:11
Speaker
But I mean, some of the guys that we know, like our friends, are in that position. They're job shops. They want to run thousands. You know, big batches are good. It's steady work. Right. But in the key thing is I have the confidence as the person who's made that. I know how to make it. I know what tolerances I care about, what I don't. I'm not over tolerancing it. And I can
00:16:28
Speaker
but basically order a thousand and not stress at all. Whereas, man, I remember the first time we spent, you know, the money, it was a four-figure check to order, you know, quantity six of something. And we were like, all we know is that it's gonna be wrong and bad. We just hope it's not so bad that we can't use it. Exactly. Yeah, you were in a good position where you had your own machine, the first tormac, and you could do all the prototyping and R&D and fine-tuning. And then once it was perfect and you had your tolerance specs, you already knew what was gonna work and not, you could send it off. Yep.
00:16:57
Speaker
I like that. Yeah, it worked. It seems to be as simple as it gets. But it was cool to talk to the first kids. I don't feel old, really, in life. Normally, yeah. You're sitting there with a bunch of 15, 17-year-old and you're like, wow, it was cool. But I was happy for them because I didn't have a robotics club in school. I didn't either, no.
00:17:20
Speaker
God, I feel like I would have fit in great in something like that. Yeah. That could have changed both of our entire outlook on life. That's true. Early on. Yeah. What'd you do in high school?
00:17:31
Speaker
I rode my mountain bike. Oh. Actually, no, I took three years of video class. Serious? Yeah, so that's where that started from. And I filmed my mountain biking. We used to go out in the woods and just make jumps. What did you film with? Like an actual camcorder with mini A tapes? Mini A tapes, yeah, exactly. That's awesome. Yeah, and we had Final Cut Pro 2 or whatever it was. So you had to play the tape back to import it into the computer? Yes. I remember those days.
00:18:00
Speaker
This was 98, 99 probably. Right. Isn't that crazy how things have changed? Yeah. So it's funny. Like, like I did have a video background because I enjoyed doing that in high school and there was nothing really else about high school other than ceramics class where we made, you know, pottery, which was just fun and easy. It was like the, the write off class, but yeah, high school, I kind of, you know, I did okay, but I didn't excel at anything. I didn't, I excelled in math, I guess, but I didn't really take it seriously. Yeah. High school. I just kind of coasted through it. You know, I had my own stuff going on.
00:18:28
Speaker
So you did mountain biking, not because your brother does the BMX stuff, right? Yes. I can't picture you as like a BMX Nandara Lee rad dude like that. No, I've always been against BMX bikes just to the core.
00:18:40
Speaker
So mountain biking and I was into this biking called trials biking, which is, it's kind of like urban biking where you just kind of scoot around town and you can, you can hop on your back wheel and you can jump from object to object. Just a very slow motion, like from your back wheel to your back wheel, a very, very high balance, very high breaking ability and skill. And I really enjoyed, cause it's like slow motion, you know, mountain biking is you're tearing down the mountain. Right.
00:19:05
Speaker
But trials, you're going slow, and it's very precise, very precision movements, and a lot of skill involved. So I really enjoyed that. And I still do it a little bit with the kids. I was going to ask, do you ever ride your bike anymore? Yeah, I do. That's cool. Yeah, I've still got two of my bikes from way back in the day. It's funny, I took William to his first soccer, and he's three. But soccer, I'm making air quotes right now.
00:19:28
Speaker
And I think, like me, he's probably not going to be getting an athletic scholarship for any future endeavors. But it was super fun to kick the ball around and start that. Your kids are a little older, but that's going to be fun. Speaking of kids, when Clara was young, the first few years, I wasn't down. But in this aspect, I was like, man,
Balancing Family and Business
00:19:51
Speaker
I've got a kid now I can't go off and do all the adventurous stuff that I used to do when I was younger and single and by myself and then finally one day it occurred to me I was like oh my god I can do it with my kids like it didn't occur to me for like the first many months of her life and then I was like oh she just needs to get a little bit older then we can go biking together and hiking and you know all this stuff is funny that no that's that's
00:20:13
Speaker
Amazing. Even having William, not to make it dull, but having William come to the shop is now fun, because he actually likes certain parts of it, which is great. Yeah, my kids do. Life's coming over with Meg tomorrow. Oh, really? Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, he's turning four tomorrow. No, he's coming over today. Happy birthday. Yeah, so he's turning four tomorrow. We've got a birthday celebration at school, so we're going to go in and have some cake.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's cute. So I have a question for you. Shoot. From your vast YouTube experience knowledge, now that I've put out a video after three months of silence. I wasn't going to give you a hard time about that. What would you tell me to do? How should I grow my YouTube channel from this point forward? What advice do you have for me? I mean, I know what I could do. I want to hear what you suggest. And for everybody else listening.
00:21:00
Speaker
Yeah, so I mean there's a bunch of like core things to YouTube that are important and you I think you know them If not directly, you know them subconsciously, but you know good decent video quality decent audio quality quality You know you're using that gimbal stabilizer, which is good because I think the people the bar has been raised so people are less Patient for video that's super bouncy or whatever, but I think the number one thing is you have to do it consistently
00:21:26
Speaker
And so pick a schedule that works for you. If you're not going to post every week, that's fine. Someone has told me that the YouTube algorithms stop caring about you if you only post every, if it's less than I think every three weeks. So YouTube kind of has this threshold, if this is true, where if you post within every three week period regularly, then they will look favorably on you for search results. But on the flip side, John, like your audience is,
00:21:54
Speaker
You're not, how do I say this, you're not looking to necessarily find new customers through, you know, you're not looking for people to go to YouTube.com and search for, you know, the world's best knife maker and have you come up, right? You're more looking to like communicate with sort of an audience that you already know, or already knows you.
00:22:11
Speaker
I'm looking to provide them as much value as I can, from what they like, from me, from what they've expected, from before. So that's what I've always thought is make it super easy, a tangent that I think is relevant to this.
Improving Shop Efficiency
00:22:23
Speaker
We were trying to go kind of lean. I was super inspired by the Pearson Workholding Tour in California last week. And I was getting frustrated with myself and with Jared because I was noticing that the hex, we have a set of metric and inch hex wrenches for each machine on a machine cart. The machine cart is next to the machine.
00:22:41
Speaker
And I kept coming back and all of them were laid out, two or three would be laid out on the table. And I'm like, why are they not in their holder? Like that's where they go. And they weren't in their holder because the holder was like three feet to the right. When you turn around, you just want to drop it and pick up the next thing. And I'm not a dumb guy, but I've been doing this for nine months like this. And then I realized you need to move it to the other side of the cart. That way, when you turn around, it's right there. You can't put it somewhere else. You know what I mean?
00:23:09
Speaker
So the analogy here for you is you need your GoPro that's charged up with the SD card with the gimbal and every second Wednesday or second Tuesday or whatever is sustainable, and you always do this. I tell you to film 10 minute videos, you always film 30 minute videos.
00:23:26
Speaker
Because I don't do them very often. Yeah. There's two amazing things in life. Compound interest. No, seriously, like getting ahead in life in terms of being financially savvy like that. Compound interest and the power of small things. It's much easier. You know, I do it now with my accounting. I spend probably five to seven minutes doing my reconciliation on accounting every morning. That is so much mentally easier and task easier than batching it every week or two. Right.
00:23:55
Speaker
I find that when I ignore videos for a long time and then I start talking, I just have so much to say that it becomes a 30 minute video. The past four videos or whatever, they've just been giant update videos and I'm not really sharing a process, a product, a thing. So I'm really looking forward to doing a specific video on whatever it is. You're overthinking it though.
00:24:16
Speaker
Yeah, like you're actually you're you're John Grims way in this like you're you're looking that Delivers so much perfection value like just just say hi, you know, I've never once talked to you and been bored Seriously, seriously, you and I hope the same is true Like we have so much in common and we're always trying to do new things and try maybe some of this is solved though by the this is kind of weird to say but this podcast is
00:24:39
Speaker
I've talked to three different people that I barely know that looked at me and were like, yeah, I've been loving the podcast. How do you even know about it? People are actually listening to this and like somebody commented on Eric's Instagram picture about a fact said in the podcast. And I'm like, how did you know that? And he's like, Oh yeah, I've been watching the pod or listening to the podcast the whole time.
00:25:01
Speaker
I haven't even looked at the stats or numbers. And it's funny too, because it's also like, who cares? As I mentioned, getting some of the trolls on our YouTube channel, it's kind of like, you want numbers because it shows that you're doing something right. Obviously, if I switched my channel to talking about German philosophy, everyone would be gone.
00:25:23
Speaker
But on the flip side, seeing the numbers is what makes me happy. It's my own desire to do this and share it with people I like and learn and inspire and all that. If 1,400 people are listening to this podcast or 14,000, who cares?
00:25:39
Speaker
Yeah, because it's just you and I talking. We do it anyway. And there's two things that are true. It's not the smallest podcast audience and it's not the biggest podcast audience and it will never be either. Right. And we thank you to our listeners. We thank you to our listeners. Oh my gosh. I like wanted a high five Yvonne yesterday morning. Last night we were driving to that event and she's like,
00:25:58
Speaker
When I get to work, be able to just say, these are the two things that I need to accomplish.
Work-Life Balance and Future Plans
00:26:02
Speaker
And if by the end of the day I've gotten them done, I need to like be okay with that. And I'm like, yes, this is- Yes. I could hug you right now. That's awesome. Anyways, what are you trying to get done today? Today, it's kind of a half day because I've got life's birthday party and yeah, I'm going to make more rasp parts on the mill, get that thing running. Cool. Might even make a few Norsemen.
00:26:20
Speaker
Norseman knives instead. Bring that back in. There's so many people that want them. That pie knife looked good. Yeah. Was that a rask? It's a Norseman. And actually, yeah, that auction is going up today. The podcast is posted later, obviously. Sorry. Yeah, but I did announce that in the YouTube video. Yeah, that thing was really cool. And I also really liked the number of pie. 3.1415926. That's all I keep it memorized.
00:26:49
Speaker
And real quick, what are you up to today? You know what? I'm actually going to kind of take it easy. I know. It's OK. We had a local customer, not a local customer, a local company come tour our shop to consider sending us work. By all means, I take pride in what I do and I wanted to impress them and so forth. But I also was like, you know, I'm not going to.
00:27:11
Speaker
I'm not going to apologize for anything or try to be someone I'm not. There's actually quite a few machine shops around here and we're different. We do the training, we do my own products, the YouTube channel. I'm not one of these job shops that you walk into that are just different. I think they were impressed by some things. I think they were pretty shocked that it's only three employees.
00:27:33
Speaker
And part of me was like, well, we're small and we're also lean. And by the way, modern machine shops, you know, three guys can be running nine machines. Well, there's a lot of story and a lot of respect that comes with being so versatile when new people meet you.
00:27:49
Speaker
And I think that can go a long way. You know, if they're just looking for the bottom line, they want the best parts and the cheapest price, then maybe you're not the guy. Totally. If they want a partner, then... Exactly. And that's kind of what I took it as, you know, would love to do work for you if it's a good fit. And if we're not a good fit, like seriously, no hard feelings. You know, the high school kids were asking about that, like, whoa, you know, five year, 10 year goals plans. I'm like, I don't know what I'm going to be doing in two years. I do what's happy. I make sure I try to do things that also support the business.
00:28:16
Speaker
It kind of goes back to that saying of you need to be doing whatever you need to do to support the lifestyle you want to live. But no, I want to get those plates out to anodize. I got physical therapy this morning for the neck, which is doing better, but still kind of frustrating. And then I'm going to run some steel parts. I got one job shop job to do. I might try to leave early there to pick up the kids. So that was your two things.
00:28:40
Speaker
No, those are all doable. Yeah, exactly. Tomorrow morning, I'm actually filming with our new video person. She's been editing on her own, but I want to have her come in and start filming with her to see how that feels and works. So I'm excited to try that. Fantastic. Yeah. Let's get going. Sweet. Crush your butt. Have a good Friday. All right. You too. Thanks. Bye. Bye.