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#352 Questions and Answers Episode
386 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
· Wen_mir_langwilig_isch
How is lights out affecting cost benefit with the side eye on the time spent for process reliability?
· Burnandturnfabrication
Name one thing that you didn’t think would change the business but made the company.
· Benji_fost
thoughts on haas pulling the UMC 350 from commercial sales? Do you feel left high and dry?
· Felixwin2710
“Hey, I’m currently 19, and I’m in the process of building a small 5-axis cnc, any tips to get to where you are?
· A_knights_life
Swiss Army knife (do it all, mill turn, etc) machines vs. scalpel machines(kern, swiss lathe)?
· Heidelworks
What critical steps did you take to go from a small business (solo) to a multi employee business?
· DFMtoolworks:
Is Die Hard a Christmas movie?
· Amishsolanki
Is Rathi AI?
Laurenswijnschenk
Can you learn Amish how to not break taps?
Cito_charlie
Top 3 book? Business or non business
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the viewer mail or mail call roll call edition of the business of machine podcast episode number 352. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. Happy holidays, everybody. Happy holidays.
Instagram Questions Announcement
00:00:15
Speaker
We're gonna be a little bit more casual and low key. We put out a Instagram request to folks to send in questions and topics that you'd like John and John to discuss about our lives in business. And the response was amazing.
Organizing Listener Questions
00:00:30
Speaker
A shout out to my wife. She compiled the four pages.
00:00:33
Speaker
of responses and she divided them into machines and business, entrepreneurship, general, specific questions for each one of us, and the Tennessee forefinish. So I thought we'd kick it off by letting Grimzow pick his first question that he'd like to address with the reminder that if you are listening to this podcast and somehow don't follow us on social, I'm over at Saunders Machine Works and you are?
00:00:59
Speaker
Instagram is JonGrimsmoKnives and grimsmo.official. It's our Instagrammies. You want to kick us off? Yeah. Yeah. Let's get started. I mean, there's a lot of questions. We're not going to be able to hit all of them, but we'll pick and choose some really juicy ones. So the first one is from, my German is terrible. Wenn mir längid... What was that?
00:01:20
Speaker
My German is also terrible, but maybe not as terrible as it is. You're two times better than mine. I believe that's roughly pronunciated Wenn mir Langvalig ish, which Langvalig is boring. And Wenn mir, I'm not good with the verb stuff here. It's either when I'm bored or who I'm bored of or something like that.
Q&A: Process Reliability vs Speed
00:01:40
Speaker
Interesting. Anyway, he had a great question that said, how is lights out machining affecting the cost benefit with the side eye on time spent for process reliability?
00:01:48
Speaker
So somewhat asking is, is lights out machining worth it? Um, is the process reliability, you know, slowing you down, things like that. That's how I interpret it. We do a lot of lights out machining, especially with the current, um, but also without the machines, even for the past six, seven years, we've tried to run the Maury deep until at night, till midnight, something like that. And the layouts as well. We try to run those a lot. So I view it as both hands off machining and lights out machining and
00:02:16
Speaker
so much effort on process reliability, whether it's, oh, that tool keeps breaking, so we have to solve that problem now. I don't deal with those problems anymore because whether we've slowed it down or increased our chip clearances or whatever to create process reliability is our number one thing. Because actually,
00:02:34
Speaker
When you toured orange vice back in 2016 or whatever and he talked about that he talked about process reliability and he had a he runs his machine 18 hours a day as well at that time and he talked about these things and they're really stuck with my head.
00:02:52
Speaker
about that phrase, process reliability. And maybe I am going a little bit slower, as we talked about last week, than I could be. I could be a bit more aggressive, but I don't like dealing with broken tools. So in my eyes, it's process reliability lets you run lights out, which gives you another.
Q&A: Automation and Efficiency
00:03:11
Speaker
There's eight working hours in the day, but there's 24 total hours in the day. And even if you're going a little bit slower for most of it, I want that 24 hours period. And we're buying.
00:03:22
Speaker
automated equipment and palette changers and bar loaders and things like that to make more money in the same amount of time basically because these are big investments and they got to pay themselves off and we obviously want to be fed as well. So hopefully that answers the question. At least it enforces my love of lights out machining. John, do you have anything to think on that? For sure.
00:03:49
Speaker
There's some implicit stuff in this question of automation. And because you can't do lights out, generally speaking, refers to productive machining, not just letting the last part finish up on the machine, if you will. And so for us, it's not really about the volumes per se. It's more about daytime and non-daytime.
00:04:12
Speaker
efficiency of how we spend our time. And so for me, it's about no setups. The horizontal is 24 different tombstone faces, each one which can be its own permanent setup with unlimited tool matrix. It's limited to 260 tools, but unlimited for my purposes. Same thing with the Willemin. That's the contrast to the Swiss. The Willemin, there is no setup. I'm being facetious, but a set of soft jaws may be a guide channel on the bar changer.
00:04:41
Speaker
Yeah, I did that yesterday. It took me 10, 15 minutes to do a changeover of Vice Jaws and call it and run an old program and whoa, it works. Yeah. That was great. That too. Not only is there almost no time, there's almost no risk. Right. And that really resonated in reading that Toyota book recently about this idea of the bad way of doing it is running too much inventory for three months and then spending three days and a bunch of wasted parts to line up and dial in.
00:05:09
Speaker
the new stamping die in the Toyota example. And so for me, it's not necessarily about
00:05:15
Speaker
It's the first focus is that. It's the time with which we can make decisions to switch things up. The secondary benefit, which is also critical, it's not a perk, it is fundamentally necessary, is that ability to detach billable working hours from how productive the machines can be. But there's nights where we don't run the horizontal on everything. We want to make it a pull system.
00:05:41
Speaker
Yeah, there's not nights where we don't run the current, unless it's broken. We run it every night, which is great. That's great. That sounds like you have your output matched with your kind of demand, which is a sweet job. That's great. Yes, and obviously we want to make more, so we're trying to find efficiencies there too. But you alluded to that too, like how you spend your working day.
00:06:05
Speaker
process reliability has allowed us to run the machines during the day and not have to babysit them, not have to manage them, not have to sit there and load every part or worry about tools breaking or things like that. The machines just run. You want to be able to just come in in the morning and get it started and make parts as quickly as possible. Our process reliability is good. The machines like the Wilhelmin or the horizontal will stop if a tool is broken. Our production reliability is weak because
00:06:35
Speaker
Fun fact, machines don't handle broken tools well. Outside of having a pretty sophisticated ROA system that has the intelligence to say, okay, you broke this tool, pull that pallet out, you can now switch to different future programs which didn't need that tool. Our horizontal, as far as I know, really can't do that.
00:06:55
Speaker
I'm okay with that right now. In terms of the viewers question of like, okay, so you know, once a month, the horizontal doesn't make it very long in the night because to have Yep, yep. And that does happen to the current every now and then whether it's a mechanical problem of a sensor flaking out or something, or it's a tool that breaks, it does happen. But we're gonna go with that.
00:07:18
Speaker
I know how to do what you just said, where it put that palette away, grab the next palette. Hopefully it doesn't need that tool. Um, I just haven't implemented that logic yet. Something I'd like to do. Cause it'd be sweet. Just keep it running. What we started.
00:07:35
Speaker
Jeez, only two months ago, it's so obvious, is we wrote three separate programs on the horizontal, one for drills, one for face mills, and one for high risk hand mills. That program, it's really well commented, and it loops through, so you just put the tool numbers you want in it, and it does, pulls up the tool, it moves it over to the, there's a,
00:08:00
Speaker
saved location, G30P10, which moves the spindle to the operator door location. And then it actually quickly turns on and off the spindle. That is the easiest way to unlock the spindle because when it does a tool change, the spindle's in a locked orientation. And then an option stops. So when you load up the drill and tap program, it pulls
00:08:23
Speaker
subject to you hitting cycle start to loop through them, it pulls every drill and tap up. So now we can create a calendar schedule where every second day we loop through a different one of those programs and just give a quick check on the condition of the tools. I like it. That's cool.
00:08:40
Speaker
Other option is to buy a current, and you can just look at all the tools in the beautiful ATC door. Exactly. And I mean, we've spent a significant amount of time dialing in our tool life in minutes, so that we're kind of big fans of replacing tools probably earlier than they need to be. But they're just starting to chip out, just starting to leave a bad finish, since we make the same parts every day for the most part.
00:09:03
Speaker
We know how long a tool is going to last. Every 100 minutes replace that tool. Every 1,000 minutes replace that tool. And then we get super good process reliability with that. But that's come with time and experience. And if we were a job shop doing different stuff every day, that'd be a lot harder, I think. For sure.
00:09:20
Speaker
All right.
Impactful Business Changes
00:09:21
Speaker
Burn and turn fabrication. I love this question. Name one thing that you didn't think would change the business but made the company. So I'm going to stick to the spirit of the question, which is my initial answer is going to be one thing and one thing that I didn't think would change. And I'm going to give a quick cheat answer, which is a bunch of things that I thought would change the company and did in ways more than I thought.
00:09:46
Speaker
I would never undo that, it was so good. So the simplest answer is in March when COVID hit, and I remember that because I wasn't sure whether our business or any of our businesses were going to make it or frankly, we'd all be alive.
00:10:04
Speaker
pure coincidence. Again, no, no, it was just a coincidence. This was the timing. We figured out a way on Shopify to create what we call bundles or kits. It was a lot harder back then. I think since then, Shopify has kind of made it easier to do this. But basically, when you look at purchasing a VF2 fixture plate, you can buy the plate alone or you can buy a
00:10:26
Speaker
What do they call it? Basic. I get what we call our medium level or pro bundle kit. And that prepopulates your shopping cart with the pro kit is I think, you know, 47 SKUs. And it's such an obvious thing in hindsight that, you know, we know our products, our customers don't necessarily know them as much. And so being able to tell people
00:10:51
Speaker
Hey, here are bundles that you might want. Steer them towards
Q&A: Customizable Products Challenges
00:10:55
Speaker
giving them path of least resistance to maximizing the value of the product that they're buying with the common accessories. And it's great because some schools will say, hey, I've got this grant. I want to make sure I've got everything I need on one purchase order. Saves us customer service time. And the way I like how we do the bundles is when you add a bundle to your cart.
00:11:14
Speaker
It dumps all of the items individually in your shopping cart so you can review it, delete, and adjust as you see fit. It also helps on the order fulfillment side on our end. I like that. That's clean.
00:11:27
Speaker
My cheat answer, I'll keep it simple without elaborating, of other things that made the company that I needed to do, didn't know, underestimated, firing myself from lots of roles, building an ERP system, installing fresh desks, and this is probably one that should be elaborate on, but trusting employees more than recognizing that they're on your team, trust them, step away, check in, but trust them more.
00:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, I read the other day, people are smart and configure it out. And I really like that one.
00:12:01
Speaker
Excellent. Okay. I have an interesting perspective to that question. Let's try to think of things in my situation that answer it. And I have one that I don't like, but I'm going to say it anyway. So name one thing you didn't think would change the business, but made the company. It's not that I didn't think, but I'll tell you why I said so. We kind of built this company making knives.
00:12:28
Speaker
And in the beginning, we were a lot more flexible. Eric and I were just in the garage playing. We'd make whatever we want. We'd have a lot more variety. As we made more and more of the variety kind of shrunk a little bit. And then a bunch of years ago, we implemented what we called buyer's choice, where the customer could literally pick their choices, their handle pattern, their blade finish, things like that.
00:12:49
Speaker
I think made the company for a period of time where people had this, it's like value to the customer. What does a customer want? They want the ability to choose. They want the ability to configure it the way that they want. It's tougher from a manufacturing side, especially at scale to do that for everybody.
00:13:07
Speaker
Due to several reasons, a few years ago we stopped doing that, one of which being the Google script that we were using to pull the names and do all the stuff broke because we were outwitting the ability of the Google script to be able to do it. That whole system broke and we haven't been doing it since. Honestly, I think our business has suffered from not having the buyer's choice option for the past few years.
00:13:35
Speaker
It's been on our mind and I've been working on it in the background, but this question made me realize that it could remake our business if we continue to offer buyer's choice. That make sense? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
00:13:51
Speaker
Because I always think about, I don't spend enough time thinking about what does the customer want? Who is your customer? What do they need? How do you give them value? How do you make, how do you give them more value than anybody else can? How do you solve their problem? You know, and when currently for the most part, we just make whatever knives we want and we offer them in different ways and you know, take what you can get kind of thing. Do I like that? Is that who I am? Is that what I want to be? You know, you can do better. Right.
00:14:19
Speaker
So yeah, so coming into next year, maybe we need to hit that a bit harder than I was planning to buy a choice, because I think it could really make the company. And if we can't figure out the flow of dealing with orders as they come in, because it changes the manufacturing, oh, we got to run that pattern now, as opposed to just like, run whatever pattern you want on the machine. It is going to change the flow of things, but I think we got to figure out how we got to need to do it.
00:14:46
Speaker
It's so Toyota, John. It's like, you know, Japan was so much better at recognizing, let's just build the car, the Corolla that the customer wants instead of America, where it's like, we're going to put 42 Corollas on the showroom floor and we're going to cram one down your throat. Like, get good at, you're so smart, John. Like, if you need to switch between two different patterns, okay, build this workflow and system so that that's just done, no big deal.
00:15:13
Speaker
you don't have to do, you don't have to buyer's choice on every, like maybe you don't allow it for damasteel or something like where it's like, you know, this is too different or. Yeah. Well, at the height of that system, so we buyer's choice, everything. And then not everybody converts, not everybody actually follows through and buys the thing that they said they would, because there's no money down. It's just whatever. So we make the knife. And if you want it here,
00:15:34
Speaker
So then we'd have kind of maker's choice for all the leftover knives. Like the other guy said he was going to buy it and we just put it up on inventory or pick another name and said, this one's done. Do you want it? Kind of thing. And that worked super well because we did the probably like 80% buyer's choice. People get to pick their options and the 20% maker's choice. If we have extra capacity, we make more or whatever, whatever. And they sold anyway. And yeah, we got to hit that hard.
00:16:01
Speaker
Okay. Oh, sorry. Your turn, right? If you have one lined up, you can go. It's a quick one that I don't think you'll be able to answer. So I'll do it quick. Benji Foss, thoughts on Haas pulling the UMC 350 from commercial sales. Do you feel left high and dry? I thought I'd talk about it both specifically the machine, but also is the way I try to recognize you got to live life as a business person. Some things just stink.
00:16:28
Speaker
But no, I don't feel high and dry. Honestly, it's a little bit of a surprising move because Haas seems to be the type of company that tends to do their research and knows how to bring machine to market and the audience and so forth. But we bought the machine for a reason. And the fact that it was discontinued doesn't really change that. I'm also not worried about them discontinuing support, if you will. That would be more of a high and dry feeling if for some reason
00:16:54
Speaker
If Haas went under and we couldn't get service, that's a big deal. And it just gives you a new machine. Maybe it affects resale. Maybe not. It's whatever. But I think the takeaway I have is as a business person, you've got to recognize and have the conviction of why you buy something, what it's for. And similar, very similar thought on how you quote
00:17:17
Speaker
stuff like we're not a job shop anymore. But you quoted at the price that you are happy to win the job and you know, kind of a dollar lesson, you would be happy to lose the job. Like you have that confidence and look forward. Lots of people in the world in my humble opinion are
00:17:34
Speaker
too often happy to be bitter and ticked off and we see it with people that are mad about you know things like this or you know always want um you know they're mad that there was a sale a month later and they didn't get the sale discount i can't change their way they feel but um now it's just kind of a okay it is what is move on i like it all right we have the next question
Advice for Young Makers
00:18:00
Speaker
Okay, from Felixwin2710, he goes, hey, I'm currently 19 and I'm in the process of building a small five axis CNC. Any tips to get to where you are? A lot of juice in there.
00:18:15
Speaker
you need a product or a job to make money. Like building a machine is cool and that's where I started. I took my manual grizzly building machine and my manual grizzly lathe and I converted them to CNC watching YouTube videos and buying plans for conversion kits online kind of thing. I went from being a guy who wanted to make car parts to a guy who was
00:18:37
Speaker
working on machines and building these machines. I guess I wanted to make the car parts on these CNC machines, but I got so much enjoyment and time spent building the machine and not enough time spent building a business and a product and making and selling anything.
00:18:56
Speaker
that it slowed me down for years and years and years until I finally hit on the knife industry and it hit all of the keys for me personally. Boy Scout, I've carried a knife in my pockets since I was 11 years old. I like to make things. I can do this, yada, yada, yada. So I found a product to make myself.
00:19:14
Speaker
If your goal is to build a small five-axis CNC, more power to you, I'm really impressed. But if you want to make money, building a machine does not make you any money, it just spends you tons and tons of money. Do you have a product in line? Do you want to take work on it? Do you want to do out-of-the-zometry work on your panel-built machine or something? Just think about how you're going to make money. What's the goal? If you want to get to where we are, I mean, we have companies that make money. We're not just playing. We're like real businesses that hire real people, right?
00:19:45
Speaker
What do you think? I mean, the shortest answer is don't. But like, no, you're 19. Like, dude, build a five-axis machine. If that comes up in a job interview, it's going to be a great conversation. Totally. And so by all means, I want to support it. But from a business standpoint, it's probably tangential.
00:20:06
Speaker
the caveat. Look, I figured out about fixture place because I bought my first one for my tag. Then I found one for the Tormach and then some of the people that were making them were not great to deal with. Some of the other companies didn't want to talk to like it was kind of that classic like, hey, there's a what's called red ocean opportunity. Yeah.
00:20:22
Speaker
to be a player in a field that already has a fair amount of competition, but it's overall a hyper niche world for us compared to like your world of knives slash everyday carry items. So maybe when you're building a five axis machine, you'll come across something like that. I would urge caution of
00:20:44
Speaker
diluting your like, lying to yourself about how viable a product is. So for example, if you've come up with a really good way to improve how you assemble homebuilt five axis machines, there's going to be like seven people in the world that want to buy that product, like it's not going to go anywhere. So finding, you know, one of my mentors told me the idea of product validation of like, hey,
00:21:07
Speaker
in a group setting with friends, bring up this idea of like, hey, did you guys, like, you got to lie a little bit or fib like, Hey, did you guys see the new, you know, uh, spinner fidget on, on Instagram that's going around where it does this or that? You got to figure out a better way that I'm saying this now, but you kind of want to gauge those reactions to see if people bite versus
00:21:27
Speaker
Just going to family and friends and loved ones and saying, I'm thinking of developing a product, would you buy a that doesn't get you anywhere? The caveat to that is the general public has no interest in fixture plates, but the machine tool industry, I mean, obviously choose your audience as you're asking those questions wisely.
Q&A: Targeting Niche Markets
00:21:52
Speaker
Yeah. I got a lot of blank stares when I tell people we make knives. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, but they're like, what do you think? It's like $50, $100? No, it's like a $1,000 knife. My point is the audience for that product broad spectrum is very small. To find those customers is
00:22:13
Speaker
It's easier once you're in the community and you realize there is a niche group of this. And the same goes for any niche group, whether it's firearms or hunting or photography or audio files or whatever. There's niche groups for absolutely everything. My wife's in a figure skating niche group that's like a bunch of weirdos in every aspect of life that like their weird thing and get together. And that's why we have what's up groups where all these weirdos get together and chat about weirdo stuff.
00:22:42
Speaker
Yeah, like what is it? Pocket NC that's working on that five axis. It's cool, but.
00:22:47
Speaker
It's been many years and it's, I know more power to them, but it's proof that you can't just like, poof, we're, we're inventing a five axis machine and everybody's going to want one, you know? Oh, and there's, there's millions of dollars that would take to bring a machine to a tomorrow. I don't think that's what Felix is asking here. Yeah, I don't know. Well, maybe. Yeah, true. Hey, you're 19. Have fun. Learn everything you can because all skills will be valuable in the future, even once you don't think of now and just stay hungry and, and
00:23:18
Speaker
You might find something, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. I'm really impressed at 19 that you're building a five-axis CNC. That's really cool. Yeah, right. No, that is absolutely awesome. Same page, a knight's life, Swiss army knife. Do I buy a Swiss army knife, like a do-all turn, mill, et cetera, machine versus a scalpel machine, like a specific Kern or Swiss lathe.
00:23:49
Speaker
I'm not totally sure I agree. Like I think a current could probably be a Swiss army, but I'll briefly repeat what we've already said today in our last week's episode, which is it's my beef with Swiss lays are it's huge amounts of time, labor, risk, and skill to do changeovers on them and programming them. It's just all very up top. So if you have the volume to leave them dedicated to a small or one type of part,
00:24:16
Speaker
Then rock and roll, that's fine. Otherwise, it's why I love the Willyman and our horizontal is that they have almost no setups, almost no risk. Everything's ready to go. Once you've created those setups, obviously that takes time, but the repeat. It would take time on either though. Yeah, exactly.
00:24:38
Speaker
So that's my short answer. Yeah. I mean, having someone who has a Swiss lathe and we make, I think it's 14 products on our Swiss. Some changeovers are easy because it's like a same tool, same material kind of thing. Some take eight hours to like fully change over, dial it in, touch off every tool manually. It's a very manual process.
00:25:02
Speaker
rare instances of the Danny Rudolphs of the world who are amazing at job shopping on a Swiss lathe where he can just turn out parts left, right, and center, low volumes, high volumes, whatever, one man shop kind of thing, two man shop. It's amazing. I don't know how he does it.
00:25:18
Speaker
But also, I bought our Nakamura lathe, AS200 LMYS with the half indexing turret and the sub spindle and all that stuff. That's the kind of mill turn lathe. I bought it to make tiny little screws for our knives. I think we would have made a lot more parts if I bought a Swiss lathe in the beginning.
00:25:40
Speaker
I ended up buying a Swiss layup two, three years later, and now we have both. But I bought the NAC as the do it all. I'm going to spend $200,000, $300,000. Let's get one machine that's going to rule the world kind of thing. And when you do that and you don't fully realize its potential and you have a lot of capital tied up in something that you're not utilizing, it's all the horsepower that's involved in it, you do kind of feel a little foolish sometimes because
00:26:09
Speaker
You're like, I over-purchased, or I purchased the wrong thing, or we made it work, absolutely.
00:26:17
Speaker
So I guess the thing is, do you have a dedicated product that you're trying to make lots of or do you need the Swiss Army knife that any job that comes in, I need to be able to pull it off. Hopefully that helps define your solution. We make a dedicated product, we invent it ourselves, we produce it ourselves. I get to be a lot more picky with the machines I buy because I don't need to be able to do whatever comes in the door, I don't want to. So hopefully that helps a little bit. If somebody wants to go raise money, you'll need a lot of it.
00:26:46
Speaker
and build, come to market with a $200,000 Willowman, please call me and let me know when one's available to test or purchase. I think there's genuinely an opportunity there with the caveat that the whole infrastructure and ecosystem around building a machine is unbelievable. But there's empirically no reason that format of a machine as flexible as it needs to cost as much as it does. Yeah. Well, it's sort of like if
00:27:14
Speaker
Brother, the company, like Speedio Brother, made a Willeman type machine at the, you know, two, $300,000 price point, like they would crush. But that's what used Willemons are for. They come with their challenges. Okay. I got the next one from, this is in our entrepreneurship section.
Q&A: From Solo to Team Growth
00:27:43
Speaker
from Heidelworks, what critical steps did you take to go from a small business solo to a multi-employee business? Many years, a lot of pain, a lot of hard decisions, and a lot of fear, to be honest.
00:28:01
Speaker
I mean, I was a solo business for many years by myself, but then once we got into the knife industry, my brother joined us within like six months. So in our current business of making and selling knives, it's pretty much been me and Eric since almost the beginning. So joint, you know, brother system. I'm still going to call that a solo family business kind of thing to bring in our first employee and then our second and third.
00:28:29
Speaker
we waited a very long time, both from a cashflow perspective and from management fear and organizational fear. And we were in our garage. You can't really have people come to your house and work out of your garage kind of thing. Once we got our shop, it still took us a couple of years to get our first employee. And so many fears. I mean, Saunders and I have probably talked about it a lot of times back then on and off camera, like, like when do you hire your first employee? When's it too late? When, when's it, uh,
00:28:58
Speaker
But as for what steps did I take? I mean, we got to the point where we needed the extra help, either from needed more organization, needed some brain power, needed to run machines. We were at that tipping point and we needed the help. So luckily we found people, whether it was family or friends of friends that kind of needed the extra work and
00:29:23
Speaker
we kind of eased our way into it. I wasn't like, you know, throwing up an Indeed post right away, like, I've got this company, I'm going to hire my first employee. It was pretty like first employee was family. Second employee was Aaron to do our media. She was a friend. Third employee was Angelo, him and I had been friends on the internet for 10 years before that. And that got me my first three employees. And Eric before that, without much
00:29:50
Speaker
you know, effort. It was like friends. And yeah, it makes sense. Let's do that. And then we hired Sky as a co-op student. And then we started like, we were already rolling at that point. That's how we did it. What do you think?
00:30:04
Speaker
I think that's a wonderful snippet of somehow trying to collapse 10 plus years into three minutes. I'll try to talk to points that may be either less obvious or counterintuitive to what others may say as a point of advice.
00:30:21
Speaker
You know, certainly the beginning part of this journey was much more selfish in the sense that it was really about my desire and passion for machining and saying that moment when in New York I bought a Teg CNC and realized I could use, you know, sheet cam or Bobcat to computer precise control mill parts away. It was, you know, big checkbox in my life was realized there. Like I was fortunate enough to realize this is what I was born to do. I freaking love this.
00:30:51
Speaker
And so then it's kind of a, how do I justify doing more of this? I had partnered up with a friend from college to create a company called Strikemark, where we built rifle targets. Super short version is the targets were sold, including to some pretty awesome customers, including the Navy SEALs, except total business failure. We machine GoPro mounts that were much more of a success from a product
00:31:17
Speaker
use standpoint and adaptability and volume made and so forth. And that was a huge confidence booster. But that partnership pretty quickly went south for reasons that were probably unavoidable but nevertheless regrettable. And you learn a lot of lessons and so I've avoided partnerships.
00:31:35
Speaker
generally for that reason. Unapologetically so. I don't have, I control the destiny of the ship and I don't have equity investors. I don't have generally speaking lenders and I don't have equity partners, actual operating partners. But the downsides to all that is that I had no direction. It was basically me doing job shop work, selling trinketty products that never went very far.
00:32:02
Speaker
and moved to Ohio, basically relying on a survivable, albeit meager income on job shopy work and was in a very cheap, I paid a small amount of rent, maybe slightly subsidized, but not really. It was just a small thousand square foot shop on a family farm.
00:32:23
Speaker
And so the critical step that changed was when we moved into the building, technically next door to ours, but ultimately making the step up to this building.
Transition to Fixture Plates
00:32:32
Speaker
And then we made our first fixture plate, which was kind of just, I don't even remember the exact genesis moment, but I had a bigger shop. I had the ability to make that product, and so I did.
00:32:45
Speaker
And so then we were, I guess what I'm sort of saying is I didn't push toward the direction of a product. Like you had this vision for, well, I don't really want to tell your story, but like, you know, cause I think you used to do Spyderco handles, right? That's true. Yeah. We got in the knife industry making a handle upgrades for Spydercos because that's way easier than making a whole knife, but trying to send sell a hundred dollar pair of handles to a knife that costs a hundred dollars to losing battle. It's a very limited market, but it got us going, got our foot to the top. So in your story, how did you,
00:33:15
Speaker
convert from being John Saunders to John Saunders who has hired employees? Yeah, that was actually way easier because we relied on part-time work for quite a while. There are some practical complications. Our first two shops didn't have bathrooms. And once in the US or certainly in the state of Ohio, once you have full-time employees,
00:33:37
Speaker
your business changes forever. Your obligations as an employer, the amount of paperwork you have to do state and federally is a significant change. And so I think there's a lot to be said for... And there's some of it would still be required with a part-time employee as well, but it's not quite as much. And I think there's a lot to be learned from starting to be
00:34:02
Speaker
comfortable managing people. Frankly, if you have a day job and you're able at your day job to be promoted to where you have staff underneath you, I don't care if it's at McDonald's. You'll be better off as a – You'll learn so much. Yeah. I never had that. Yeah. Because it can be awkward to tell people what to do. Doesn't mean you aren't kind about it or – Totally. Oh. Unapologetically clear about, hey,
00:34:24
Speaker
Yeah, it took me years to learn the lesson first few employees like there'd be times when they're sitting around with nothing to do and I don't know what to get them to do because I was still holding everything to myself. It was a lot of high skilled tasks and it's like, you know, I'd rather just do it than teach you.
00:34:39
Speaker
take the time to teach you how to do that, which is wrong. It's dumb. But that's where I was at. And I had to go through that pain and that effort and struggle to release tasks and jobs and skills for myself. And then I started to see that, wow, people are smart and can figure it out and grow. And we got more done and more done and more done. And I'm still learning those lessons. I still hold too much close to my chest. But at a much different level than I was at employee number one. Yep.
00:35:10
Speaker
Uh, your turn. I think I did the, I don't know. Well, go for it. You got one. I don't have one yet. I got a quick one. I'm going to bang out three lighthearted ones in the general section. Um, DFM to works asks, is diehard a Christmas movie? Yes. A hundred. Yes. A hundred percent. Yeah. I watched, I watched one and two last Christmas and I'm going to watch three for this Christmas.
00:35:37
Speaker
Yeah, fun fact, and maybe a nice moment to reflect, somebody who was a mentor to me, there was a gentleman named Bob Yellen, and Bob Yellen ran a... That sounds familiar.
00:35:47
Speaker
hear me out, ran a company in Texas that did lots of creative things. He's an incredibly smart guy. And he did electronics design work, he had a history at IBM, he did these crazy visual things. And he is a genius who he was approached, he made the original Tormach wine rack
00:36:11
Speaker
ATC holder which nobody had it was terrible frankly, but it solved the problem that didn't have a solution then Tormach came up with a design I'm paraphrasing with knowledge. It may not be perfectly true But basically they had a design they talked to yelling about it and yums like you're going about this all wrong And he fixed it and made what we now know is the Tormach ATC. It was made by his company Bob became a mentor and a friend and
00:36:38
Speaker
was a great guy, and the reason I bring this up now is he looked exactly like Hans Gruber. And Bob passed away a couple years ago. At far too young of an age, had bought some land in South America to build a house, and it's a good thing to remember. He had a heart condition that, you know, there's something to be said for living life now, and I miss Bob. It was good to do. Very good dude.
00:37:08
Speaker
That segues into the next question, which is actually a typo from a contributor named Amish Salenke. He asks, is Dennis AI? But Amish meant to ask, could you give me some help? It's actually Lauren's question. Could you help learn how to not break taps?
00:37:26
Speaker
A couple of not tongue in cheek tips for folks that may be newer to machining. First off, nobody teaches you this stuff if you're self-taught. There are lots of different types of taps. And the general sort of tap that you might find in your grandfather's toolbox or at Home Depot is a hand tap. They're designed to be twisted around once and then hand backed up to break the chips, blah, blah, blah. So they don't always work so well if you put them into a rigid tapping capable CNC machine and try to run them into a correctly drilled hole.
00:37:56
Speaker
You will never regret buying a high quality tap. They only need to be high speed steel. They're with rare, rare exception. There's no such thing as a carbide tap, very rare exception. And you can get a good tap for 10 to 20 bucks and you can buy spiral flute or spiral point. Spiral flutes look like a traditional tap out of the helix that pull the chip back up. They're good for blind holes. Spiral point, push the chip forward. They can be stronger because they have a thicker core.
00:38:26
Speaker
But the best thing to do is make sure you're correctly pre-drilling the hole. MariTool sells, or if you email them nicely, they may even give you one with your next order, these little drill tap charts that give you the diameters. And if you really want to take it easy, or if you're learning, over drill your hole.
00:38:43
Speaker
If you look at a quarter 20 tapped hole that's 250 nominal, it's drilled at 201. You can drill it at 210 or 215, try out your tap. You'll be significantly reducing the load on the machine, the spindle, the fixture, what you're asking of the tap itself. And if it works, you can correct it later. If you don't think you can over drill it,
00:39:05
Speaker
You can interpolate it, drill it out to 201 with your number seven drill, and then come in with an end mill, open that hole up a few more, gauge it with a set of gauge pins. You can buy a cheap set on China, Shars, Amazon, and they're very handy to have in 1,000 increments. So Amish, hope that helps you out. I like it. He's going to roast me. Yeah, yeah. I'm just looking something up real quick.
00:39:40
Speaker
Okay. What you got?
00:39:49
Speaker
Cito Charlie asks, top three books, business or non-business? And I generally suck at top choices of anything. I don't like to make, you know, favorite meal, favorite, I just don't do, I don't know how to answer those questions. But I was reading this at home and I was looking at my bookshelf this morning. And a couple that stood out, not necessarily my favorite, but ones that kind of changed the way I think about things. The first was Emyth, Emyth Revisited.
00:40:19
Speaker
Not saying it needs to be the first book you read, but it especially at an early stage in business, it got me to reframe the way I thought about the organizational structure of a business, especially going from a solopreneur to a employee type business.
00:40:33
Speaker
It doesn't have all the best info, but it's just wonderful. We brought it up a hundred times on the podcast. You should probably read it. Another one that was sent to me by a friend that I took a while to read. Even once I started, I paused and I went back because it was tough to read because it hit some pain points that I didn't want to deal with at that time. There was one called A Relentless Solution Focus.
00:41:01
Speaker
And the key takeaway is that we always have control of every situation and there's always a solution to be found. And I tend to think of a solution as like the Holy Grail that's done, that's it, solution finished. And that book got me to realize that a solution is simply the next step that is possible.
00:41:21
Speaker
That's a solution. That's a step in the right direction. It's just one foot in front of the other. Call that a solution because otherwise you're overwhelmed with the brain fog of perfect solution and you don't do anything. And this whole book is about finding that relentless solution focus.
00:41:38
Speaker
And like I said, it was kind of painful to read. And once I finally got to the end, I was very relieved and proud of myself. And it taught me some things on goal setting that I never thought of before, setting one-year goals and five-year goals. And I still do things every morning that I got from that book. I typically don't like books that are like, do it this way. This is how you do it. I like books that open my mind and teach me new concepts, new ways to think. This book did both. So Relentless Solution Focus, I do actually really recommend that one.
00:42:08
Speaker
for anybody. Another one that we've talked about a bunch that I just saw in my bookshelf and I really did like it was Relentless by Tim Grover. It's got some pluses and minuses to it, but it's really got me thinking again about being relentless, about finding that solution and about thinking through and having kind of the no options mentality of- No, he says, don't think, just do it. We're our own worst enemy when it comes to sitting there and chewing us up like, no, just stop and do it. Yeah, exactly.
00:42:37
Speaker
And yeah, those mindset books, they work for me. They won't work for everybody. And then he said, business or non-business? So I'm going to throw one in there. I really don't read a lot of fiction books at all. I like them, but I pretty much only read business books. Although last Christmas, my wife got me the astronaut, Chris Hadfield, the Canadian famous astronaut, wrote a book called The Apollo Murders.
00:42:58
Speaker
It was set in 1960s Apollo missions kind of thing and murders in space lunar landing Russians things like that as an astronaut writing a murder fiction very accurate very aerospace space book like this guy's been to space and he wrote a book it was Super enjoyable if you like that kind of action book technical it's just awesome and he came up with another one I forgot what it's called, but the second
00:43:27
Speaker
One, I got it for myself for Christmas, and I'm going to read it this Christmas. I like that. Yeah. I'll give two answers. The one answer is if you're young or unsure, and thus you need help, you do need to read the Eveth Revisited. You need to buy a copy of Small Time Operator, which is kind of a like- I don't think I've read that. You said it's American-ish, but I should probably read it.
00:43:54
Speaker
Sure. I'm not going to tell you no, but at this point, John, you have to control it. This is more for the guy. I remember you brought it up years ago, but yeah. It's an easy resource read type of thing. E-Myth is an actual novel, but it's mandatory in my opinion.
00:44:12
Speaker
And I've talked about this before, but how to win friends and influence people. First time I read it, didn't do anything for me. Second time I read it, changed my life. Third time I read it, I realized this guy's not a good person. I don't want to live my life with people that don't want to allow me to also share some of my life and story. But there is a lot to be said for understanding sales and leadership. But it's worth reading whether you agree with it or disagree with it.
00:44:41
Speaker
Which is a good segue into kind of my overall point, which is to remember books are just a resource. They're contextual. You can agree with them. You can disagree with them. And I think John and I have learned as we've grown in our respective businesses that actually books are bad.
00:45:02
Speaker
not reading a book that speaks to a goal at the relevant time of your business is a false, it's worse than not being helpful. It's bad because you feel energized and it's awesome, except it doesn't really relate to the next step at Graham's Miller Saunders. I agree. My advice would be those three core books and then
00:45:27
Speaker
You know, do the homework yourself, meaning if you are wanting to understand marketing or if you want to understand operations, Google book reviews, but I often times on stuff like this will also include the word Reddit. And many of the younger viewers may know this, I'm a little bit older. And adding Reddit to the search terms will often give you the exact feedback I want, which is like a raw guy from somebody versus the, you know, BS publisher, paid SEO type of stuff.
00:45:58
Speaker
And yeah, that's my point. I totally agree. I've definitely read the right book at the wrong time and the wrong book at the right time. And I was looking through my bookshelf, trying to think of suggestions. And I'm like, that's the good book if you want to learn about leadership. And that's the good book if you have a one person company. And that's the good book if you have a 10 person plus company. And they're wrong at the wrong time. So it's hard for me to recommend them as broad spectrum kind of thing because
00:46:26
Speaker
It's a waste of your time. It's like reading motivational stuff on the internet online or whatever like that. Yeah, it's Rob. Rob makes you feel good, but is it applicable? Does it actually help you? I've actually almost entirely stopped over the past five years listening to any of that kind of stuff because it's just noise.
00:46:45
Speaker
makes you feel good, but it's not actually helping. And it's guys in the like, these are tips that are going to help you grow your business. Um, and sometimes it's true. And sometimes it adds to the mental capacity of your brain, but sometimes you just got to be smart and figure it out yourself and like go through the pain. There's no shortcuts to business period. You got one? I don't yet.
00:47:11
Speaker
I'll do a quick one then while you're looking. Tommy, Turbine, tips on how to organize tools in Fusion when changing them out often in a hobby garage? So lots of little modifying nuggets to that example.
Tool Organization Tips for Hobbyists
00:47:24
Speaker
Hobby garage, I don't know if you're on a Tormach type machine or on a hospital. Either way, first step I would do would be to pick the common face mills,
00:47:34
Speaker
drills and end mills and taps that you are going to use across your core common materials and try to invest as you can cash flowing into mine dedicated holders and then label those with the 3D printed or you can buy them on MSC the little tool tags and then you can create a master library infusion
00:47:56
Speaker
There's huge weaknesses to the fusion side of this, which I've discussed a lot. But you can still have a part file, like a sample file, not a tool library, because the tool library is stink, but a file in fusion that I call master tooling. And then you can at least always try to grab stuff from there. And then your swing tools, if I could give one piece of advice, buy different colored tool tags and try to be religious about
00:48:20
Speaker
tearing them down when you're no longer using them so that way you don't leave the odd blah seven thirty second drill in a holder and not remember what it is or why it's there. Excellent.
00:48:42
Speaker
I got a tough one that I don't know how to answer, but I'll ask it just not for kicks, but for pain. Stangbladeworks is a nice maker that I know. It says, what is the closest either of you have come to giving up and how did you overcome it? I don't have an answer right now.
00:49:04
Speaker
I don't know if I've seriously considered giving up. The thought occurs to you every now and then, but have I ever given it any value? I don't think it's an option for me. It's not going to happen. I don't know if it is my ignorance or conviction or whatever, but I've removed that from my brain as like, no, this is what I want to do and I'm going to make this work.
00:49:30
Speaker
There's certainly been some times when giving up has seemed closer to reality than succeeding and making billions of dollars. We've had some tough times for sure. But being forced to give up and choosing to give up are two different things. The stress and the pain is real and difficult sometimes.
00:49:59
Speaker
You grow to handle it if you love what you want to do. If it's, you know who you are and you want to pull this off, you grow into that role. I think that's what's worked for me. But the reality is manufacturing is not for everybody and maybe it doesn't tickle you in the way that it tickles me. I don't know. Anything come to your mind? I mean, similar is that like I've never
00:50:27
Speaker
there's never been a real like, oh, okay, we're thinking at this out loud, the two problems that would sort of force this could be financial or like a sort of a staffing issue.
00:50:41
Speaker
And I think folks have heard this over the years with the content we put out. We're not going to be in a financial problem because from the get go, we chose to grow slower and just snowball things and avoid debt. So that has the benefit of putting us in a pretty strong position there. That is good, full stop. The caveat is that it also means
00:51:10
Speaker
sometimes having legitimate or falsely imposed deadlines and hurdles can drive you and motivate you. It's probably a good segue to about a year ago. I talked about this on last week's episode of
00:51:27
Speaker
It wasn't in any way a scenario of giving up, but I had this sort of hit this point where I told myself and my wife and some colleagues that I sort of confided in on stuff like this of like, hey, I'm done. It's over. I am not going to
00:51:43
Speaker
subsidize the business with Herculean, which I wasn't already. It's always hard to talk about this because it sounds like it was way worse and different than it was, but I realized we're growing up today. I'm quitting the business, if you will. I guess the best way I would think about it would be, let's say,
00:52:03
Speaker
Let's say I went out and bought a company that paves roads. I thought this was a wise investment and had the money or whatever, and I bought a company that was going to go out and build bridges and paved roads.
00:52:18
Speaker
Under no circumstance in that scenario, am I going to be on a paving machine? You're going to have foremen and contractors or laborers or mechanical engineers or civil engineers, and your job would be, okay, how do we acquire this company? What are the policies that work? What do we need to think about changing? Who's handling bids? I don't know anything about paving.
00:52:42
Speaker
For us, home solopreneurs, you grow into a business in a very different way where you were all those roles I just mentioned. You can let it be hard to fire yourself in those roles. Like so many I was until I realized a year ago, I'm done. This isn't going to happen anymore. That's what we've been doing the past year.
00:53:11
Speaker
That was the quickest 53 minutes I've ever met in my life. That's fine. Yeah. And we've gone, what, 10% of the questions, um, maybe more, but I got one fun one to end with, but go first. You got one more. I don't. Yeah. And you go first. I'll pick another one.
00:53:30
Speaker
Okay. I didn't know what the Tennessee floor finish was. Shout out to job shopper, TN, AKA Patrick. You haven't seen the video of, I think it's him. Is it? It's on Instagram. I came up a month or two ago, whatever. He's like pseudo seriously, like the Tennessee floor finish is the best finish ever. I forget. I love it. Cause it's a little bit lighthearted. It is. You want to explain it?
00:53:57
Speaker
From what I remember a few months ago when I saw it, it's basically him hyping up or trashing on, I can't remember, an adaptive clearing floor finish where the bottom of the part looks like trash, but selling it as a feature kind of thing. But what do you mean trash? You are a master at sometimes making artwork out of finishes. Yep. I think the tongue in cheek joke is that
00:54:25
Speaker
I don't know, maybe I missed the bar, but I think shipping parts with a roughed finish on the floor is a bad thing, but he was hyping it up to be a good thing or something like that. I don't know. And then it just the internet went nuts with it and everything's now the Tennessee floor finish for good reasons.
00:54:40
Speaker
So in all honesty, on a lot of fixtures that we make, I have found that a adaptive finish is acceptable on the floor. Now it's not rough. Like you can rough with adaptions where you feel undulation. But a lot of times I will
00:54:58
Speaker
always without exception leave radio stock to leave and come through with a 2D contour to clean up sidewalls. But a lot of the times I don't add a flat or horizontal finish to come through and clean up the floor finishes for what it's worth. But shout out to the Tennessee Floor Finish.
00:55:14
Speaker
I tried the other night when I was here, late in the shop, I tried the 3D flat toolpath to finish a floor and miss some posts and it left an amazing finish. And it was able to actually do a down over up linear toolpath while missing some posts. There's an option to go over holes, things like that, not avoid them. And it got me the finish I was looking for without having to do a pocket or a 2D contour or something like that. It was actually, I was really impressed. It was awesome.
00:55:44
Speaker
Yeah, don't use flat like use. Excuse me. Don't use horizontal anymore I think I think fusion's only leaving in there because they don't want to deprecate it out for old programs. That's fine Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I've never played with it, but I like that I Don't know
00:56:13
Speaker
Let's see if I can find one here.
00:56:22
Speaker
I mean, my buddy Martin Scott asks, what is a shop or machining related product you wish existed but don't have the time to develop
Q&A: Product Ideas and Time Constraints
00:56:30
Speaker
yourself? I know Martin, you're looking for a thing to develop probably. I've got lots of little ideas that I want to do, whether it's a sellable idea or not, some are, but I literally don't have time to do it. So either I accept that it's not going to happen.
00:56:46
Speaker
and I just move on or I spend the time myself or my team to make it happen, or I get somebody else to like, here, you make this. That'd be awesome. Um, some little things, but nothing, nothing major. Like the, the filtering chip conveyor that we made for this video is truly fantastic, but it's all 3d printed junk right now. And it mostly works amazing. If that was a product, I think it'd be fantastic.
00:57:13
Speaker
but it's not, and that's not my business, and I wish I had the time to produce it, but it's a big thing. It would like ship in a crate. You want to talk about air bearing tool holder stuff for TIR?
00:57:31
Speaker
No. That's another thing developed years ago. We use it. I want one for HSK and for BT30 now. Why am I sitting on this stuff? Years ago, 2017, I think, I was spending too much time measuring runout in the moray while the machine's supposed to be running. You put an indicator on it because we use a lot of small tools and if there's five tons of runout, the tool's going to break or last not as long or whatever.
00:57:58
Speaker
So I developed this air bearing device on the bench that you put the tool holder in upside down and it'll spin the tool concentrically on the taper with an air bearing. You put your indicator on it so that we could bench mount and measure TIR on all the tools and adjust them, take them apart, put them back together, clean it, whatever, while the machine's running. And that was huge for us. And we still use it for the Maury, like not on every tool, but on many of the tools. And that was going to be one of my big products that I like.
00:58:25
Speaker
We do have an opportunity to make a product and sell it to machinists, because we have an audience of machinists. But is it worth the time effort marketing to do? I don't know. So far, no. But we're creative people, and there's a lot of stuff that could be done. But you really got to focus on what you're going to be really good at and follow through on. Otherwise, you're just running in every different direction and not accomplishing jack squat. And I don't want to be that person anymore.
00:58:54
Speaker
I will say it was great to start out with the, well, we didn't start out with the Picatinny GoPro mouse. We started out with a target, which was a complex
00:59:02
Speaker
electromechanical assembly. I shot that target. It's super fun. Super fun. You know, almost figuratively literally broke us because of how complicated it was. Yeah. Compared to a single piece of aluminum that we had to machine. Sure. Anodized laser. There's a huge amount of gains of bringing a product to market and learning that process. You know, buying the 10 cards, stapling it, e-commerce, fulfillment. It's easier these days for sure. Yeah. With Shopify. But nevertheless, you know, there's a difference between reading about it and having done it.
00:59:32
Speaker
But otherwise, I would push you toward the Red Ocean strategy of making something that already exists that you can do something different or better about. And that's a very cliched thing of saying it. But don't overthink it. Even for fixture plates, one of the big differences that we have lots of them in stock ready to ship. So just applying the kind of Amazon style, or modern, I want to buy it online and have it ship now.
00:59:58
Speaker
mentality to it. I would argue something like Maritools probably done that for tool holders versus trying to
01:00:09
Speaker
come up with this amazing revolutionary widget that nobody knew existed that everyone's going to want to buy. I bet everybody sells them. Yeah. I mean, good on you if you come up with that. It's necessary in the world because we have an ever-changing world of technology and future and ideas. We're all smart people that can come up with new stuff, but it is really hard to sell a potential customer of a new market that doesn't exist yet, your new technology.
01:00:32
Speaker
Most of us are nerds who can make a really cool thing but not really sell a really cool thing. That's something I've struggled with is how to sell. I'm not a marketer. I don't pitch people. I don't have an elevator pitch. It's like I make a cool thing if you want to buy it, great. But we're learning as we're growing the company, as we want to go into bigger markets,
01:00:53
Speaker
We're going to have to get better at marketing. We're going to have to continue and put effort into this and not just ignore the YouTube. They're probably just going to have to hire talent to grow that skill as opposed to me spending time to do it. But yeah. We should do this again. We can address more of the questions that we didn't get to. And frankly, it was such a good
01:01:19
Speaker
engagement to hear from viewers of what they want to hear about because I think it's really interesting. I do like making sure with the stuff we're addressing helps other people. But thank you and everybody that's listened this year and over the years. John and I appreciate it. We are grateful. We love what we do. We love being some ever so smart, small part of this otherwise awesome community of machinists and makers and entrepreneurs. And yeah, it's good, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's awesome.
01:01:50
Speaker
As much as we all want to sit on our experience and knowledge and gain it and not share it, when we do share it, it always works better. This is a community we need to share information more. Obviously, it takes a lot of time to share it at scale, but I don't ever want to be the crouch of the old machinist that has all the tribal knowledge and hasn't told anybody. I don't want to be that person.
01:02:19
Speaker
And I, oh, you're not. Well, you know, I don't want to become that person and I want to make sure to avoid, I don't want anybody in our team to become that person. Um, so. Awesome. Hey, happy new year. See you here in 2024. Sounds good, man. Enjoy time with the family. Okay. Bye.