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Business of Machining - Episode 129
220 Plays6 years ago
Our podcast name is DA’ BOM
In other words, welcome back to the Business of Machining folks, where we talk about business, machining and in this case, budgets.
Grimsmo and Saunders dive into all those little bits of business advice you would never think to give to a new entrepreneur if asked. They talk best budgeting software, time management, shipping, and lots of seemingly mundane, but equally important, technicalities to running a business.
Look out for a Chip Break episode on the NYC CNC YouTube channel where Saunders covers the necessity of budgets, accounting, and how to motivate yourself to get. It. Done.
DREAM BIG...no. BIGGER!
Grimsmo has brought Grimsmo Knives to a place he didn’t even allow himself to imagine it could be 4 years ago.
“I just didn’t understand that it was possible” - Grimsmo
The Johns discuss how big to dream in the beginning, and about the importance of small steps (like when Grimsmo anodized knife handles to get his foot in the door of the knife making world.
Growth happens.
“The fixture plate we made 18 months ago was great, and there was nothing wrong with it, but the one that we shipped today was better” - Saunders
PERSONALITY QUIZ!
Are you a push or a pull person? How about BOTH?
Grimsmo and Saunders discuss the difference between these two types of people, and how you can be different ways in different situations.
It ain’t always breezy bein’... an inhabitant of Canada.
This summer has been HOT, and the Grimsmo crew up north has especially been feeling the heat with the AC broken for the last two weeks of July. Next step: find a new shop.
Saunders makes a new product, which he calls his “Norseman”. AKA his MASTERPIECE! What is it you may ask? Well, this description is no place to find spoilers, so you’ll just have to listen to find out!
Recommended
Transcript
Origin of Podcast Name
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining, episode 129. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. I really like the name of our podcast. I do too. Like early, early, we're like, what do we call this thing? I don't know. Let's just call it that. And then it totally stuck and it totally was awesome.
00:00:22
Speaker
It's the subtle innuendos of it's the business side of things, but it's also machining, but then it's also the brief because we all call it bomb around here. So it's like, yeah, the plan bill of material. I don't know. I think it's, it's good. Yeah. Yeah. People ask me what it's about sometimes. And I'm like, well, it's, it's about business and it's about machining and yes. Yeah. End of story.
Challenges in Entrepreneurship
00:00:46
Speaker
Yeah. I was doing, um,
00:00:50
Speaker
some budgeting and thinking, or whatever you call it, the top level of the e-myth. What is that level? Entrepreneur. Yeah. I'm starting to feel the fatigue of the use of the word entrepreneur, mostly in a social manner. But there was a really funny trolling type of YouTube video, one of these actors who's like, I'm an entrepreneur. I sell vitamins or stuff like that. Anyway.
00:01:17
Speaker
I was thinking about sort of the budgeting cash flow, the sort of financial element of a business and something occurred to me that is ever so subtle yet not, which is when you're thinking about, the best example would be if you're thinking of bringing a new product online or a new widget online or something, are you trying to solve an income statement problem or solution or are you trying to solve a balance sheet solution?
00:01:47
Speaker
So, let's say you can sell $1,500 worth of these each month and there's $500 of material and tooling or whatever. So, you think you'll reasonably clear $1,000 of profit or cash flow. We're assuming profit and cash flow are the same thing here because you and my businesses are generally things that aren't really paid on extended terms. You don't take terms from customers, right? It's all cash to ship. Yeah. So, you have $1,000 a month.
00:02:17
Speaker
At this point in our businesses, $1,000 a month for a balance sheet solution, in my opinion, isn't that much. You do it a full year, you have saved $12,000. $12,000 isn't a substantial sum of money relative to things like the cost of a 55-gallon drum of coolant or payroll or insert cost here or the next machine tool. Agree?
00:02:46
Speaker
But if you can have the confidence that you can build your business and add $1,000 a month to your bottom line, to your cash flow, to your profit, as an income statement, that's actually worth a lot to me. Is this just a difference of perspective?
00:03:06
Speaker
Well, it's kind of tying on the fact that money is not equal. And it's really a way that we have snowballed or bootstrapped our business, which is if I've got a little bit of money I know is predictable, I can take a little bit more risk, rewind all the way back to the New York
Financial Strategies and Cash Flow
00:03:26
Speaker
days. And it was like the perfect situation from a total lifestyle standpoint. I was married or
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think we were married. No, we were dating at the very beginning, but generally sharing an apartment, so sharing a living expenses, no kids, we were both working, and then no other extraordinary expenses. And so I was able to save money, and that money you save there you could roll into the business and not worry about. Just like today, you know, if you get a little bit extra money, that could be going toward saving up for something. Yeah.
00:03:59
Speaker
I generally don't agree with the debt, but that could be the way of thinking about, well, I'll give the extreme example on debt. If General Electric came to you with an ironclad contract for 20 years that was never cancelable and said, we need you to make these parts, so you need to tool up for it, good grief, yes, you would consider borrowing money to make that happen. Now, that situation doesn't exist, and there's lots of caveats and concerns about contract law and risk and performance and so forth. But my point is that,
00:04:29
Speaker
As you add confidence to your cash flow, it changes the risk profile and your ability to make decisions within your business. For sure. That does make sense. I still don't know if I get what you're saying about the difference between the balance sheet side and the income statement side. I kind of do, and it's just the way you're looking at it, right? Like the way it makes you feel.
00:04:55
Speaker
Well, just because if I'm trying to save up for the next, for the UMC 500, $12,000 a year, it's going to take me 10 years to get to the machine or more. That's not exciting. It's kind of easy to say, ugh, no, that's ridiculous. But man, when I rewind back to before I did machining full time, $1,000 a month was actually a pretty
00:05:19
Speaker
a large amount of money relative to my take-home paycheck for my day job. I'm like, hold on a second here. If I can do this two or three or four times or maybe cut back a little on my life overhead, I can maybe get to doing this full-time. That's awesome. That's really exciting.
00:05:39
Speaker
Yeah, when you compare it to say your annual gross revenue, it might be not very much. But maybe if you compare it to the, I don't know, the profit of the year or
00:05:51
Speaker
You have to split your business into each individual product. So say Modvice is bringing in this much a year, and this new product is bringing in this much a year. So you're shrinking the comparison, not just business gross revenue adding $12,000 a year. It just feels like nothing. But it could be something. And it could be a scalable product, maybe. Well, our businesses are intrinsically levered in the sense that
00:06:18
Speaker
we have fixed obligations in the form of rent and overhead that are not insignificant these days. So I obviously care a lot about comfortably covering those. And if you ever talk to a lender about financing a machine, the first thing they're going to ask you, or one of the first things they're going to look at is what is your, usually they call it a debt service coverage ratio or some ratio, basically how many times over
Machinist vs. Business Owner
00:06:45
Speaker
can you make this payment? If the payment is $5,000 a month, they want to see at least $7,500 a month in cash flow or profit usually, one and a half times, maybe a lot more. Again, when you start to look at those ratios, I don't need a lot
00:07:03
Speaker
thinking out loud here. I don't need a lot in life aside from obviously satisfying the base needs of the business, right? Like I don't, I don't care if I delay a vacation or some extra savings outside of this or whatever. So, so long as I can really comfortably nail those sort of fixed obligations in our business, life is good, right? Like that lets me then decide, I get to sit in the captain's chair and decide what do I want to do? How do I want to steer the ship? Where do you want to go with this? Hmm.
00:07:33
Speaker
Do you like doing that? You know, to be totally honest, no.
00:07:40
Speaker
Really? Yeah. I think that's an important thing as an entrepreneur is to admit what you like and don't like. I think I'm good at it. I honestly am comfortable with it and pretty decent at at least conversing in that stuff. But that was actually one of my takeaways from all this stuff was it was something I was thinking about adding to the list of chip break videos that we want to start doing again this year, which is there is a big difference between being a machinist and running a machine shop.
Collaboration in Business Strategy
00:08:09
Speaker
Yes. Huge. I've been talking too much on this episode already, but I've got a couple end bills on my table that I want to test this morning. Would I rather run cash flow budgets and analysis and all that? Well, I'm good at it. I like Excel. It's fun to look at all the numbers move, but no, I'd rather shut all that stuff off and go run a machine, to be honest with you.
00:08:31
Speaker
No, I get it. Absolutely. I guess in my situation is a bit different because I have Barry to do most of that and then him and I sit down and strategize. I get to strategize and he does the work, like the financial work. In my situation, it's pretty sweet and I do enjoy the strategy and the planning. We're actually going out for breakfast this morning because we got some strategy and planning and strategically to crunch through.
00:08:59
Speaker
Yeah, I guess it is a little bit different, so I get to go play and try those new end mills. I think you're very fortunate because I think a lot of businesses your size or our size don't have that level of financial. I was talking to a small business owner here in town who
00:09:18
Speaker
who pays a CPA to do some work for them. And it's not the kind of work that Barry does. It's much more just busy work. And the amount they pay for it, it's four figures a month. And I'm just like, oh my gosh. I think most people have to learn some. You've learned a lot about your comfort around that stuff, right? For sure.
Vision and Business Growth
00:09:38
Speaker
Yep. Yeah.
00:09:40
Speaker
Yeah, but this all came up too in light of a business or a NYC CNC member who was asking about kind of that threshold of quitting your day job and what are the hurdles you need to meet? How do you need to think about it? And it kind of reminded me back in that scenario of what are you trying to solve? The balance sheet problems, building up cash or quote unquote wealth is a longer term thing and it can feel daunting.
00:10:07
Speaker
How can I remember us talking three or four years ago and want that same thing? How do you think about those long-term big gold pictures? Would you have ever thought four years ago you'd be stressed about making sure you get the Swiss finalized before your current shows up? To be honest, no. I did not think we would grow to this size and still have ambitions further. I just didn't even understand that it was possible.
00:10:36
Speaker
It's like you can only dream about what you allow yourself to visualize, like to actually see. And this, even currently, like today, right here in this shop, I think is further than four, five, six years ago than I allowed myself to see.
Quality and Innovation in Business Decisions
00:10:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:10:55
Speaker
But I don't know how you would ever even replicate it differently. I don't think I would respond well to a young, ambitious person who said, in five years, we're going to own XYZ machine. It's kind of like, dude, just stop talking and go do work, which is what you did. Exactly, right? Yeah. Interesting.
00:11:23
Speaker
But it's like conversely, you still want that young person, the startup to have a plan, to have a direction in where they're going and having those next steps, those decisions definitely guide you towards getting closer to them. Otherwise, you're just doing busy work and not moving the needle.
00:11:42
Speaker
But that's the difference. You knew from an almost oddly early point in your business where you had your quote unquote failures, the car stuff, the paintball stuff, which I love. I love reminding folks that you didn't roll out of bed and invent the perfect horseman. Definitely not.
00:12:04
Speaker
me as well, to be clear, I'm very much in the same bucket. But from a pretty early point, you knew what the Norseman was and how frigging perfect it was going to be. And those things I think really kept you on a path that has made the rest of those decisions kind of consequences or results of that path. Yeah, that's a good point. They're not means to an end necessarily, but
00:12:28
Speaker
the requirements of our products and of our dedication towards those products are so extreme that it has led to these decisions of, you know, buying a tortoise was laid for hundreds of thousands of dollars and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Product Evolution and Learning
00:12:44
Speaker
And air quote, needing this equipment, but actually wanting this equipment in order to do justice to the products that we make and make them efficiently and profitably and, you know, build a sustainable business that
00:12:59
Speaker
makes amazing products and hires great people and you know, does it.
00:13:04
Speaker
And allegedly though, in a quote unquote red ocean environment, you're, you're basically, you chose to jump into a product that had known or a, uh, what would you call it? A product market segment that had known demand with good margins. Now you've got to build a brand and compete in that, but I think that's a, that's, uh, one of the hardest things to work with someone else on is when they think they have an idea, they think they have a product.
00:13:31
Speaker
and the market's not that deep for it, or you're just never going to convince people to spend $400 on this little esoteric widget support tool that no one cares about. It's the quintessential speed vice handle. Lots of people think they're kind of fun and cool, but there's no sustainable business model built around just them. Yeah, exactly. Especially the speed vice handle. It's the kind of
00:13:56
Speaker
sort of inconsequential product that anybody can make and everybody kind of dabbles with and nobody really needs. Yeah, some people love them for sure. But it's not by itself a sole business model. But it could be a gateway to many things. Like we had that in the knife industry, we started by making the aftermarket handles. So you buy a Spyderco and put our handles on the knife. Definitely not a sustainable business model by itself.
00:14:22
Speaker
because you're asking a customer to pay $80 handles for a $60 knife and they have to have that exact knife and want to spend more money on it. The goal was always to make our own knife, but
00:14:41
Speaker
It took like a year to get to that point of making a knife. So it opened us up to a new customer segment. It kind of got
Improving Product Quality Over Time
00:14:49
Speaker
our feet in the door. It gave us a product immediately to start selling and to get out there that wasn't that difficult to make. There's just slabs of aluminum. I made them on my converted X2 mill, you know, my $500 Grizzly.
00:15:04
Speaker
So that opened us up to the market, got his customers and kind of bit by bit led us towards making the entire package of a knife with, you know, like 40 pieces involved instead of just the one. So that was cool. And I could see that parallel to most businesses. If they're starting with the, you know, example of a speed vice handle or something like that, it could be the gateway drug, you know?
00:15:31
Speaker
And you learn a lot from selling a product, the process of buying material, making it, standardizing it, shipping it. That's so undervalued. Figuring out how to take people's money. It's easier nowadays with Shopify and PayPal and so forth. But nevertheless, putting that process in place is a good thing. Yeah. It's interesting, though, too. Go ahead. You almost want a simple product to get through all that busy work.
00:15:59
Speaker
setting up the website, getting your name out there, learning how to market, you know, nowadays learning how to Instagram or YouTube or whatever your Facebook thing is. I would, in the beginning, there's so much work, so much upfront that if I was trying to build the perfect Norseman from day one and start a business, it's too much.
00:16:24
Speaker
Nah, nonsense. Now you're just talking yourself out of it. Yeah, maybe. Just saying. But it took its years to build a great Norseman, you know? Yeah. I think that's always it. I mean, there was nothing wrong, like nothing wrong with the fixture plate we sold 18 months ago. Like seriously, nothing wrong with it, but the ones we shipped today are better.
00:16:45
Speaker
I know, right? Right. In fact, I actually can proudly say that we had one fixture plate that the customer pointed out a ... I forget even what was wrong with it. Frankly, I think it was a residual defect due to anodizing. It wasn't like blatant machining issues. There was one where I was like, let's just make this one a no-brainer on a
00:17:06
Speaker
I think we gave them a full refund and then, or applied that plus a substantial discount to upgrade from aluminum to steel or something crazy. But that makes me happy. And it's not to say that we won't make mistakes or have problems. We've had maybe two damaged in shipping or three, not in a long time though, since we've revamped the way we've packaged stuff and that's awesome. It made you revamp the way you package stuff.
Challenges in Shipping Heavy Products
00:17:29
Speaker
Mistake lead to growth, lead to further
00:17:35
Speaker
Betterment. That was shockingly seemed like an unsolvable problem because you have these heavy plates. Some of them are almost a hundred pounds. How do you prevent a parcel carrier from not damaging them? I'm not interested in the trolling of how every single carrier is the worst person ever in the history of mankind. They do terrible things.
00:17:57
Speaker
Really, these things can get dropped or shifted around. They're heavy. We have a pretty cool way. It's not exactly a secret because anybody that buys a fixture plate sees it, but we use corner protector. We use really good boxes that are custom made, and then we use corner protectors, and then we band those together, and then those get nested inside another box.
00:18:20
Speaker
And that has, since we've been doing that, I don't believe, I'm tempting fate now, that we've ever had a single problem. Nice. So they are wrapped in cardboard with foam protectors, corner protectors. No foam. The corner protectors themselves are a corrugated cardboard. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. At what weight does something not be hand-heldable? Do you need a pallet for it or something?
00:18:49
Speaker
I believe it's technically 120 pounds, but from experience, when you start getting over that 80 to 90 pound mark, you're really tempting fate slash you need an excellent packaging solution. Right. Because they just get awkward to carry and hold, I'm sure. Yeah. And look, I mean,
00:19:08
Speaker
There's a difference between what your legal right is to ship something versus what's just, you know, I don't want to pick up a 120 pound box either. And that was another crazy dilemma was when we started selling the Haas plates, which have become honestly our best sellers. I was like, yeah, it feels good. I was like, oh my gosh, how do we build crates? How do we ship LTL freight? And we started with one LTL freight carrier. And then I realized, oh my gosh, there's way more options out there with better
00:19:37
Speaker
options and pricing. And so now we've got that down. We've got their API pushed through to Shopify. It does all the automatic quoting and we can ship a 200 pound Haas plate to California for like 170 bucks. It's not that much money. One plate that weighs 200 pounds. No, but once you get on the pallet and some like model. Well, we built crates for them, but yeah, I say pallet.
00:20:04
Speaker
So would you say that aluminum plates go in cardboard and steel plates go in the pallet, the bigger ones? We only do aluminum for Tormox because you have to batch those through the anodizing and so forth. And the Tormox steel can still go or the smaller steel ones can still go parcel. Yeah, that makes sense.
00:20:23
Speaker
It's fun, though. It's very cool. Yeah. But yeah, just on the surface, there's so much more behind the scenes that even in a conversation, you wouldn't think to tell somebody about business.
Problem-Solving and Practical Experience
00:20:36
Speaker
You know, if somebody's like, oh, you're starting a business, you wouldn't think to tell them about shipping the product necessarily, you know, there's like, there's like a lot of things involved here.
00:20:46
Speaker
But they wouldn't, it won't even help in my experience because it's a push versus pull. I can tell you, I tell a budding entrepreneur all about ShipStation and LTL-free APIs, and they won't care, but all of a sudden when they need that, rightfully, that's when they wanna, so I guess that ties into your sort of the network and resources. I'll jot down some notes to myself, but even that's really difficult. So remember like, hey,
00:21:15
Speaker
Two years ago, I met a guy who was really good at helping this. If you ever need help on that, that's very difficult to turn into a tool. Yeah. How many Spyderco handles did you sell? I don't have a proper count, but I'd say somewhere around 150. Okay. Yeah. You made enough of them to be real.
00:21:37
Speaker
Yep, yep. Yeah, I had two different knives, the Mannix two and the paramilitary two. And I still get the odd request. Oh, you still making handles? I'm like, No, I haven't made them for like seven, eight years. But I appreciate it. There are guys I don't know their names, but I tell these customers like just they exist. There are people still making them, you know, look around, you'll find them and have fun with it, you know, support that next new maker. That's that's trying to do it. So
00:22:06
Speaker
It's funny though, because there is the opposite exists in the firearms world, especially with things like the Ruger 10-22. It's the quintessential, probably the most popular ever semi-automatic 10-22 rifle. And the receiver or the whole gun from Ruger costs maybe $200, $300. And it is not uncommon to see people having dumped between $800 and $4,000 into those guns. Now, the stuff that you're putting on there may not be
00:22:35
Speaker
custom to that gun, like it could just be a general scope or something else. But still, people will go crazy with how much they can spend to do on them. I get it. Well, thinking what we were saying earlier, I think I've built my entire career on, I guess you'd call it a pull system.
00:22:57
Speaker
where I'm faced with a problem and I learn everything I need to know about that problem right then and there and I get it done as opposed to the
00:23:08
Speaker
It's the opposite of the pull system. Yeah, the push system where I'm like, I'm, well, on the other hand, I do like to just binge learn as much as I can, but it's usually a deep dive into one topic, not like a broad spectrum of everything. I like to solve the problem at hand by learning everything there is to know about it. Whether it's a machining issue or, you know, tying ship station and PayPal together or whatever the example is.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah. Just figure it out on the fly as, as we go. I think you're, this is going to sound weird.
Resourcefulness in Learning
00:23:45
Speaker
You're probably, you're right. I think in that you're a pull person on that stuff, but you are a push person overall in your ability to recognize and be resourceful on how to figure stuff out. I get a whole nother level above that. You're a push person in it. Like, you know, when do you go to YouTube? When do you go to forums? When do you actually go buy physical books? Um,
00:24:07
Speaker
That's the key thing that is the sort of self-help mentality. Well, and I think, yeah, okay, so I'm both, but situation depending. But I got a lot of that from, you know, in the mid 2000s when I was super into cars and I would spend a lot of time on the car forums, just learning everything there was to know about Volvo 240s and how they worked.
00:24:33
Speaker
I had the long-term ambition of doing all of these modifications, of building that engine, of swapping to that fancy transmission, and I'd learn and I'd learn and I'd see other people do it and I'd learn and I'd figure it out and I'd be like, well, when I'm in a position to do that, when I have $400 to set aside and do this mod, I know how to do it now. So I've binged for years, and I only ever used a few percentage of it or whatever.
00:25:03
Speaker
It did give me this overall perspective of everything, of how it worked, of how everything ties together. I think how everything ties together is very valuable, especially in the business sense. Yeah. You think you'll ever work on an engine again in your life?
Passion for Cars and Engineering
00:25:23
Speaker
You know, I do think about that every now and then. And I don't know, you know, even if I do get to the point where I can get some fancy cars or whatever, I have the inkling to like build some really crazy cool car myself, but also not like you don't want to build it. I just want to have it. I don't know yet. Yeah. I honestly can't see myself spending like hours a day of personal time.
00:25:52
Speaker
alone in the garage, wrenching on a car. I'm like, I got other stuff to do. Yeah. That's interesting. I'm not sure we'll ever answer that question, but it's interesting because if you want to do that and you can't do that, how does that reconcile with life goals? Right.
00:26:08
Speaker
Or is it just, I wonder if it's just like a lingering desire from 10 years ago when I used to be super into cars and that's all I wanted to do. Is it still like reminiscing of the good old days, you know? Or is it an actual like current desire and be like, that would be really cool. Or do I just want to own that car and drive it and have fun?
00:26:29
Speaker
and not go through the work. Sorry. I don't know yet. I wonder what it is about cars, because I'm not even what I would consider a legit car guy. I like them, but not like some people do. You do. And part of me still, I have so much respect for a car mechanic.
00:26:45
Speaker
you know, to be able to know the intricacies of the air cooled Porsches. And you know, oh, you got to watch this on the filter intake, or this is how the turbo system like, I would love to shadow one of those guys for two days and just help him do I mean, I would like strip rust off of not, you know, rusted bolts just to like, sit there and enjoy it. Yeah, absolutely.
00:27:08
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's fun. I used to do all that stuff. I don't necessarily miss it, but I'm super glad I have that base and understand how it all works. But I was driving into work this morning and I saw this bright blue, like dark blue car with black accents driving up the freeway and I'm like, what is that? And I got closer later and it was like a brand new McLaren.
00:27:36
Speaker
I was like, that thing is so insanely gorgeous. And I kind of pulled up next to it and this old guy just kind of cruising along and I'm like, that's so cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Carbon fiber everywhere. If it's the ones I've seen a few pictures of on the internet, there isn't like a single square edge on that whole car. Like everything is like, I don't even know if I had to like try to model that in cat, I literally don't know where I would start. There's no flat surfaces.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yeah. Who would you start? Well, then you see like the, uh, I want to say kids, but the people out there that will just, in order to learn fusion, they'll design the craziest stuff. Like they'll design a legit car just for fun, like in their basement with no intention of building it, but to learn fusion and to design and to get it out there. And it's like, holy moly, how on earth are like, I don't have that skill infusion to be able to freeform model something nuts.
00:28:36
Speaker
Andrew Barth, the college kid that did all the project egress stuff, I think he had learned fusions a little bit before he started on that project. But that was, I don't even know, thousands of parts. And I've now gone through them that says the project is over and poked at some of the other files. There is some really complicated modeling in there. Stuff that I don't...
00:28:57
Speaker
have a lot of confidence I could do without some pushing and pulling, pun intended. And yeah, I guess it's hard to think back to what it was like when we had that kind of time.
00:29:12
Speaker
Right? Yeah. No, but I did have that kind of time back in the day. I mean, that's how I learned Solid Works, is I designed an entire engine, well, the upper half, the valve train of an engine. Wow. And I made it a rotating animation. So everything was relationship together. So as the camshaft rotates, the springs compress, the valves go up and down, and it was all legit to a Volvo 850 dual cam engine.
00:29:41
Speaker
That's awesome. I had parts in my hand. I had the $20 Harbor Freight calipers, and everything was measured up. This was 2005. I learned this. I just figured it out. I can remember moving from a Libre to something, the next thing I used. I almost uninstalled it because I have to learn this new software to stop going back to the one that you're comfortable with. Yeah, a screw cam or something probably. Yeah, there was a CAD in between there. Anyway.
Family Time and Creating Memories
00:30:11
Speaker
What have you been up to this week? I had an amazing weekend with the kids. It's end of July right now, so we've got like a month left of summer.
00:30:28
Speaker
We're moving in a week and a half, so that's super exciting. I don't think I've mentioned it on here, but we bought a house. You know this. We bought a house, our first house ever. Super duper duper exciting. I'm thrilled. My wife is thrilled. We've been trying to buy a house for over 10 years, and as a business owner,
00:30:48
Speaker
it's not the easiest to get financed for a house because they're like, yeah, but you make no money. Well, but the business is worth a lot of money. Yeah, but blah, blah, blah. Anyway, it's been tough and I'm super glad we're at a point now when we can do it. And it's a sweet place in 1937. It's gorgeous. Anyway, so summer's rolling to a close with all that busy next month and
00:31:14
Speaker
I was like, I just want to take the kids somewhere. Let's go do something. So I'm like, Hey kids, let's leave mom at home this weekend and let's just go somewhere. Where? I don't know. It doesn't matter. Let's just, we're leaving Saturday morning, 9am. No destination. I just want to drive West. That's awesome. And when we see something, we'll stop and do it. So we did it.
00:31:36
Speaker
And we were gone all of Saturday, all of Sunday. We came back Monday morning. We stayed a holiday in the Best Western with a pool. And the kids were just overjoyed. And we ate Subway and got candy for the car and went swimming in Lake Erie and went fishing a lot and just catch and release. And it was such a magical time with the kids.
00:31:59
Speaker
And I was mostly able to turn my brain off from work and just be with the kids. And it was beautiful weather and it was just, it was awesome. I'm so happy we did it. And Meg got her first weekend alone in 10 years. No. Oh my gosh. That's awesome. That's a win. I don't think she's been without a kid in 10 years. And it's like, holy cow. Well, good. Is Clara 10 years old?
00:32:25
Speaker
She's nine. Yeah. Okay. Still. Oh my gosh. Wow. That's crazy. Good for you. That's great. Yeah. That's, that's kind
Work and Personal Life Updates
00:32:34
Speaker
of all I can think about now. Cause it was like such a great trip, but work-wise things are pretty good. I don't think I saw. Yeah. Our air conditioning finally got fixed. Oh, that's gotta be. Yeah. I bet you, uh, that feels good. That feels amazing. I'm like, it's cold in here. What was it? Just, uh, low on Freon or, or you didn't need to replace it.
00:32:55
Speaker
one of the motors need to be replaced and it was like a week or two out. So we were without it for two weeks and it was, it was toasty in here. Nice. So that's awesome. Our, ours is, is already in and being taken for granted already. Like we're like, you totally forget what it was like when it was, it's, it's just because it's wonderful. It's great. And we don't even, it's so far, we haven't got our first electric bill yet, but so far,
00:33:23
Speaker
what I had hoped would be true is proving true, which is that 77 is fine. Like you don't even care. So it's not like we needed to turn the place into an ice cube. Like I remember when you and I were walking through military, I was like, I need to go get a fleece. This is freezing in here.
Finding a New Business Space
00:33:40
Speaker
And ironically, the thermostat's mounted somewhat close to the VF2 electrical cabinet. So the thermostat's actually hotter than the rest of the room. I think we could move it or figure something. I made a little ducting around it. But I set the thermostat at 80 because it sees that exhaustion, the VF2. And that keeps the room at like 77 and life is good. The humidity's down. It's awesome.
00:34:04
Speaker
nice. Yeah, it was getting up to 91 92. Throughout last week. And it's like, just sweating standing still. And I mean, a lot of people live in this temperature and, you know, work every day in a machine shop to this temperature. But it was almost always colder outside than it was in the shop. Because we have a small place with three machines pumping out heat. And
00:34:29
Speaker
Yeah, it was, it was just uncomfortable. And especially since we used to like 70, 72 of AC. So yeah, but yeah, now we keep the door. Yeah, we had it open. We bought fans. It was still hot. Yep. That's the worst when your shop is worse than Al's door here. So yeah, yeah, exactly. That's awesome. Okay, so let's figure out operation. Find you a new shop. Where are we?
00:34:58
Speaker
Uh, still in the hunt. Okay. Still looking. I've slacked a little bit. I haven't looked in the past, haven't looked hard in the past few weeks. Um, let me pick that up again this week, but yeah. You're using broker or brokers. Yeah. Yeah. I've got two that I'm working with and then I'm looking at myself, you know, what's publicly available. I'm trying to track down even stuff that's not publicly listed yet. You know, you hear about little things here and there. So, um,
00:35:29
Speaker
trying to track down leads that way. But yeah. And there's nothing you're interested in, but it would be a compromise? Like you're just, it's clean slate right now? I mean, there's always stuff available, especially in the several thousand square feet range. And there was one that was 8,000 or 16,000, depending on if you split it or not.
00:35:58
Speaker
But anyway, it was like 30 minutes away and I'm like, I personally like often go to work like three times a day, you know, home and back, especially in the summer when the kids are home. I don't want to be 30 minutes away. I'm 12 minutes away now. It's perfect. I want that or less. And a lot of it's maybe I'm just being picky, but at the end of the day, this is my business for the next, you know, ever. Um, I want to be picky. Yep.
00:36:25
Speaker
I wonder though you don't, other than the Kern, which is a kind of a soft, they can kind of sort of hold that thing within reason as long as you need them to. I guess I'm worried that that means you're not, deadlines are a good thing, right? Like pressure. Absolutely. Pressure to act, find it and so forth. Yeah. I just heard the Kern will be ready for shipment in November. Oh, wow. Okay. Further than I thought.
00:36:53
Speaker
Yeah, it was always up in the air. Like we don't know when the parts are coming in and stuff that the a row a pallet changer and stuff, but yeah, I think he said November ready to go so that if they need to, they can sit on it for a few months. Um, otherwise it's ready at that point. So we, we could easily have it by the end of this year. Does it go curious? Does it go down the St. Lawrence Seaway into Lake Erie?
00:37:16
Speaker
Somebody was telling me because we mentioned it before and they said, I forgot what they said. I think it does until Montreal and then they truck it from Montreal to here or something. I don't know. I guess I didn't really get that. Toronto has a huge port though. I didn't know Montreal was, I don't know Montreal. I don't know. I really don't know. Interesting.
00:37:39
Speaker
That stuff always fascinates me.
Tracking Machine Shipments
00:37:41
Speaker
How does it get from garbage parking kirken to a shop? Well, what we're going to do is I have a friend, the guy who actually bought my old tormach, my mill, Jesse Houston. He makes sear wheels for the circus acrobatic world, like those big rings that people stand in. Yes.
00:38:04
Speaker
So he makes sweet zero wheels with like LEDs that light up to the music and stuff. And he's loving the tormac and he's a super Arduino nerd. So him and I have kind of gotten together and he's like, I could I could put some cameras on your current crate. No, no. Arduino based that will film for like six weeks. No. So we're like, yeah, let's put two cameras on the outside of the current crate. So I asked Kern if they can do it and they're looking into it. I'm sure they can.
00:38:34
Speaker
Wouldn't that be cool? Yeah, I worry. All I can think about is a story when somebody, some blogger put a camera on his suitcase going through airport stuff and there were a lot of federal agencies that visited him, confiscated stuff, blah, blah, blah, security, all that, because what you're saying would be amazing. Oh my God.
00:39:00
Speaker
I guess it's going to be the inside of a container for two weeks. It's not like you're going to have a bird's eye view of the ocean crossing. But even if you could find out what ship it was on, because you can look up those apps. With Arduino, you could GPS track it. Oh, yeah, of course. Oh my god, that's amazing. So yeah, Jesse's already figured out a lot of this stuff.
00:39:24
Speaker
As you said, it's going to be idle or boring for most of it. But if you do time lapse, you can just cut the boring parts. And then, yeah, I didn't really think about the legality issues of it, but this is, I don't know, it's freight. It's different than like airport security where you see people's faces and stuff. It's, I don't know. And you'll be inside, the thing is you'll be inside a C container. So it actually shouldn't be, I wouldn't think it's a problem slash not going to see much.
00:39:53
Speaker
You know what I mean? It's not like you're going to be able to see the boat that it's getting loaded onto. Okay. I don't even know how they go. It's in a big wooden crate. The closest I've ever seen to this was when we filmed the Natsura open house thing up in Connecticut and they brought a bunch of mams and then LXs in and that was
00:40:15
Speaker
Some of those seemed to have come straight off the boat. So they were the... Sorry, it didn't use as much wooden crates as they had these really cool kind of metal reusable, like almost like built up, like tilt up wall type things, but it would have similar to wooden crate, but they fit inside a seat container.
00:40:34
Speaker
I didn't even think about
Optimizing Shipping Logistics
00:40:35
Speaker
that. Okay, so when you see that, you know, that Hamburg sued or Marisk ship, you could have t shirts next to food next to Kerns. You don't even know.
00:40:48
Speaker
Next to, there was an awesome article in Jalopnik that, not awesome actually, but Porsche had a couple of, one of the GT2 RSs on a freighter going to Brazil or South America and it sank. And these were one of like 200 or 300 cars. And so Porsche actually reopened the line
00:41:09
Speaker
and remade two more to help to get them to the buyers. But it's also crazy to think that when you see those containers, there could be McLarens on them or whatever. Yep, yep. That's nuts. Yeah. What do you see this week? My, let's see.
00:41:36
Speaker
I don't know, lots of stuff. Good pens rolling again. Nice. Awesome. Yeah. Uh, most still on the knock. You're not going to do anything on the Swiss yet. I'm ready to analyze the parts and figure out what's going on the Swiss next. Okay. Oh, cool. So yeah. Have you been running a Swiss lights out at all?
00:41:55
Speaker
No, I'm not quite there yet. I don't know why I'm just, I need to just run it more, get more comfortable, see more bar changes and just prove out any problems while we're here. Um, so that we don't have problems while we're gone. But it's not, it doesn't sound like it's that far away or your, no, it's not. It's not. Did you ever, I think I have, I have all my guide bushings. I have all my call-its. I just need to play with them and install them. And I'm still waiting on more centerless ground material, like all of our titanium stuff.
00:42:25
Speaker
So did you ever get the, quote unquote, correct college? Yes. Where from? Switzerland. Oh, they did. They shared Meister. Awesome. Yeah, they came fast. They were like two days. Yeah. Once we finally shipped them and once I paid them an online bank draft transfer thingy. Yeah.
00:42:49
Speaker
Yeah. So it took me like two weeks to figure out how to order by two days to get here. That's hilarious. Yeah. We've done DHL to like Australia and Europe and it's shocking how fast stuff gets there. I mean, it just gets on a plane and goes. It's not that crazy, but it is. Yep. Yeah. Cool. What are you up to this week?
00:43:09
Speaker
I've got an end mill on my desk that I want to go play with.
Launching a New Product
00:43:12
Speaker
Oh, so for the folks that are on the beta list, we have finally had one last lingering bug that was bothering me on the signup process for the new speeds and feeds thing. So that is, we think, solved. I say we think because there's always a chance it quirkily rears its head again. But we didn't want to send out dozens or hundreds of emails at the risk of creating a bunch of customer service issues there. So I think that's done.
00:43:39
Speaker
So I actually have a call this morning to finalize that. So if you were on the beta list, you should start to see that stuff this week and next week. We don't want to send them all at once again, because we want to have hopefully 25 or 50 people go through it, make sure everything's OK, and we'll kind of trickle that out.
00:43:56
Speaker
But some of the initial feedback we're getting has been just absolutely awesome. Even one guy who was like, I didn't really understand the whole video point of the speeds and feeds until I started using it. And oh my gosh, yes, I get it.
00:44:14
Speaker
Okay, so next week I guess hopefully we'll have a little bit. It's that confidence factor right of just a certainty of being able to really start to market it and turn it loose and build more recipes. That's a big thing we're focused on and then.
00:44:31
Speaker
There's a whole second phase of stuff that I'm also excited to roll out, everything from a type of a calculator, because we can't have every recipe, but we've got a unique way of solving for the recipes we don't have, and adding turning.
00:44:47
Speaker
with recipes to it. And it's just, it's fun. This is my Norseman. This is my, I love it. I care about it. It has a market demand. It's our chance to disrupt a market. I'm passionate about it. And I legitimately, you know, yes, I love fixture plates. I've used fixture plates since the tag day, but this to me is a much cooler and bigger opportunity than a relatively nichey market like fixture plates. Sure.
00:45:20
Speaker
You'll create a big ripple in the marketplace with this.
00:45:24
Speaker
Look, we've got some work to do. It's for me to convince a guy like you or Amish or Rob Lockwood or some Phil to sign up. Why the heck would they sign up? They know how to run tools. Well, fair point. You don't necessarily need it, but we're at a price point that I think makes it pretty competitive and no-brainer, and we've figured out a way. Even Autodesk
00:45:48
Speaker
Some people artists didn't know this was possible. We figured out a way on the website when you see a recipe you like, you click once and it just opens in Fusion 360. There's no downloading, uploading, entering emails, waiting. Literally, you see, oh, hey, that adaptive and 304 stainless, that looks awesome. Click it once and it just pops open in your native Fusion. You've got the recipe with all the whole cam operation, or you could just grab the tool.
00:46:16
Speaker
That's cool, right? Yeah, that took a while to figure out. Yeah.
Learning from New Machining Products
00:46:22
Speaker
So I'll put you on the, I don't even know if you're on the beta listing, but I'll send you the beta email that we're sending out that has a little marketing video to kind of watch some of the things that we're touting. We've got some pretty cool, like you can switch the whole site from inches to metric, imperial to metric. But then if you want to see the alternate unit, all you have to do is hover your mouse over any value and the alternate unit just pops up.
00:46:46
Speaker
Oh, that's cool. Right. You must have like hundreds of these little, little hacks that it's like, that would be cool. Yeah. Let's do that. Because like I'm an inch guy, but all the time I'm like, Hey, two 36, isn't that six millimeters? I don't want to convert the whole site. You just want that quick, like, Oh yes, it is. So it's fun.
00:47:03
Speaker
Yeah, or you're drilling like I use a lot of metric fasteners, but that's kind of the only metric thing that I do. Um, but I'll use inch drill bits like all the time for it. Yeah. Right. So I'm trying to find the nearest, you know, conversion. Um, yeah. Cool. So that's what I'm working on. So I've, I've learned increasingly probably over the past year about
00:47:26
Speaker
speeds and feeds and how they apply to my business and my parts. And just gaining a deeper understanding of what they are and how they work. And I'm hoping that your system will further teach what's happening, why this versus that. It's not necessarily going to teach you. You mean like in terms of, it's not like tutorial videos, no? No, no, but just through experience and understanding of why this works and that didn't work.
00:47:56
Speaker
I know you're trying to make it easy and just the solution is presented, but hopefully that will guide people to just natively in their head understand speeds and feeds a bit better than the shoot from the hip like we were going before, run everything at 10 inches per minute. That definitely will. For example, and again, you're
Testing Machining Tools
00:48:17
Speaker
you know your product line so well, but let's say you need to go make a quick aluminum fixture or Sky or Angelo, it needs to. Great examples, we had a guy who was like, hey, I need to cut a one 30 second slot. Well, we only have 300 recipes right now, so we're working on growing that obviously, but we got fortunate that we have one 30 second slotting recipes and he was number one, couldn't believe that that would work.
00:48:43
Speaker
He was like, that won't break the tool. That's the whole point of the video. You can see it working. And when you have multiple recipes as part of the results, you can then sort by gauge length, sort by stick out, sort by material removal rate. So yes, you can look at and say, well, here's an adaptive that's hogging out. What are the differences between these? Because if I sort by material removal rate, they get less. Oh, that's because the stick out increase. So you have to just slow down, that kind of thing.
00:49:12
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Okay, so as you're going through the menu, even just just looking at the results, you're developing an understanding of stick out length equals slower equals, blah, blah, blah, that's cool. So you're doing the hard work the testing to then
00:49:30
Speaker
obviously train the customer without even training them. Yeah. There is a little bit of a learning curve in terms of, I think the folks that will become power users and really will understand it are the folks that was, it's not that hard, but the filter system and then the results and looking through it. Yeah. Because that's the sort of the next level of testing. Right now we're testing to get through a wide data set of base core recipes, your materials, your basic machines. But what I will be doing is
00:49:57
Speaker
Taking the same tool and just sticking it out in longer holders in longer stick outs Comparing the hydraulic versus the milling chuck to see how we how far we can get so you can Literally, you know grim smoke and look, you know, so we won't have any just K 40 right now but nevertheless you can compare a tool that you may care about actually we do have a just case because we have a person that's contributed recipes as a DMG with an HSK taper but um
00:50:25
Speaker
You can say to say, oh, that's interesting. So the results were different between a shrink fit and a hydraulic. You can take that for what you want out of it. That's super exciting. I'm excited. Yeah. Cool. Sweet. And then I'm in Portland next week. So I'll email you to figure out a time. OK. For the oddest
Upcoming Projects and Business Activities
00:50:45
Speaker
thing. Super cool. Sweet. Have a good day, buddy.