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#263 - Choosing Managers, Touring Shops & Oil Troubles
192 Plays3 years ago
TOPCIS:
- John & John share their recent persectives on life & sharing information online.
- Custom quotes in Shopify.
- Choosing manager, book on "setting the table".
- Grimsmo is going to play in a CMM room for a day.
- Saunders provides a horizontal update.
- Grimsmo is still dealing with swiss althe oil problems.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining episode 263. My name is John Grimsmough. And my name is John Saunders. And this is our weekly podcast where we get to talk about all things manufacturing and all the fun little projects and issues and struggles that we go through. Exactly.
Maintaining Positivity in Life
00:00:19
Speaker
How are you doing? I'm good. I'm in a good mood. Okay. Yeah. Things are flowing. Um,
00:00:29
Speaker
I guess, I don't know. You're always in a good mood though. I typically very much try to be in a good mood. Although, you know, life gets to you sometimes and other times you're like, yeah, things are great. And other times you have to like, you remind me, you have to step back and you have to look around and you can be like, holy crap, my life is pretty great right now. Even if I'm in a bad mood or stressed or whatever, like,
00:00:51
Speaker
I got nothing to complain about. It's perspective, right? Yup. Yeah. When you get this tunnel vision where you don't always get that perspective, you lose it, you forget it.
Social Media Pressure vs. Personal Satisfaction
00:01:02
Speaker
Agreed. But it's also why all of us out there, I took a casual pause from some social media and then coming back to it a little bit, you see how much
00:01:16
Speaker
It's wonderful. It's intimidating. There's so many folks out there doing so many amazing, incredible things. You just keep plowing ahead. Keep doing what you do. Yeah. It's like a catch-22 with social media.
00:01:33
Speaker
especially with more people doing wonderful things, I get jealous and envious and I feel bad. I feel like I'm not doing a good job because everybody else is crushing it better, whether it's the way they're presenting like the videos they make or the content they post or whatever or the type of business and the success in that and all those things.
YouTube as an Educational Resource
00:01:53
Speaker
But at the end of the day, I look back and I go, I love what I do and we're doing a great job and we're getting better and like what more could I want?
00:02:01
Speaker
Yeah. And John, I hear you. I'm right there with you, but I'm going to tell you, don't fall down that rabbit hole. I know, right? It's one reason why I am
00:02:18
Speaker
I have very conflicted feelings about YouTube because there are channels that are way more successful and there's just no way of not looking at what you do and measuring it, something on that front. On the flip side is what we've said before. It's the reason I love YouTube because all of the funny, interesting, educational Instagrams or TikToks are effectively a moot resource going forward for folks. You're not going to find out how to do that fusion chamfer toolpath or that
00:02:47
Speaker
resource for something down the road and that's one reason thing I love about YouTube is
Creating Engaging Short Videos
00:02:55
Speaker
It is that wonderful resource that it's a gift to humanity right now, your ability to do everything from learning how to change the... Work on that 944 project unit, learning how to change the windshield gasket on a 1985 car all the way to like, hey, I want to think about videos and tutorials around managing and growing a small company to ERP systems to all that stuff.
00:03:23
Speaker
Yup. And the fun, sexy, exciting, super popular videos with millions of views, don't always have that meat and potatoes. Like this is how you change a windshield on a Porsche 944. And you're like, that's what I'm here for right now. I need to find that video. Yeah, exactly. Right. Here's something. Good.
00:03:48
Speaker
We were just talking yesterday about doing much more like two minute videos.
Life Goals and Present Focus
00:03:54
Speaker
Yeah. Because like I was looking for some information on fluid filtration, like water filters and stuff. And you know, you search on YouTube and there's all these videos. A lot of them are two minutes long. A lot of them are like 15 minutes long. Guess which ones I'm watching. I'm watching the two minutes one first. Yeah. Because like I need one piece of information and no more fluff. Otherwise I'm skipping through it all. Right.
00:04:18
Speaker
Yeah, Vince and I talk about that a lot. Vince is incredibly good at diving into these rabbit holes. And I've been leaning on him to say, okay, let's turn that into a video. And it's not because I'm addicted to videos. It's because we need to not reinvent the wheel here or allow other folks to piggyback off of.
00:04:41
Speaker
Hey, what did he figure out? Oh, he figured out a really cool surface footage, kind of issue or bug in toolpaths around thread milling. It's like that's really interesting and resourceful, horrible video. Like from a YouTube algorithm standpoint, horrible video. But oh man, that's my jam. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Here's something I want us to think about. Not philosophically, literally. Like literally is you're not quite 40, right?
00:05:11
Speaker
38, nine, something like that. Yeah, exactly. But I think I turned 39 next month. I don't think I do turn 39 next month. Yeah, I'm in August. Okay. So 11 years from now, first off, I hope we're not doing this podcast. I love you, but I hope we're not doing this podcast. We won't be doing this podcast. I don't know if and how this podcast ends, but we're not going to be doing it in 11 years. I want to find a little lake cabin place on Lake Erie.
00:05:40
Speaker
kids probably won't want to come because they'll be too cool for us by that point. But let's go up and on a Saturday or Sunday, let's just hang out, go for a hike, sit by the water and look at what
Tech Integration for Efficiency
00:05:55
Speaker
the journey was like. I'm not saying that we're going to be retired by then, but I do think a lot about like, hey,
00:06:00
Speaker
I want to give this a really good two-year run to make sure I'm focused on the present of what needs to happen right now to grow this into what it is. I don't think much beyond six months, honestly. What do you want out of this? Because you're going to look back then and I know this, you're going to look back and I'm going to look back and we're going to wish we had less self-induced anxiety or caution around
00:06:27
Speaker
Oh man, that guy just totally crushed this part, whatever, that silly jealousy that comes out of... Yes. Am I tracking you? I'm not sure I'm doing a great job explaining this.
00:06:42
Speaker
Yeah, it's a difficult thing to explain, but you're right. The perspective looking back 10 years, you're not going to remember all of the little, like you said, anxieties and jealousies, and they don't matter. They matter so much in the moment, but big picture long-term, it's useless. I want you to tell me your story. I want you to tell me, and I'm going to tell you my story, things like in the present, we realized
00:07:08
Speaker
It's so funny, John. I cannot tell you how funny these little quirks are. We had a problem with our accounting system on POs and custom quotes for schools and so forth where
00:07:25
Speaker
if we created the quote in zero,
Balancing Work, Family, and Responsibility
00:07:27
Speaker
our accounting software, made it a real pain in the tush to then convert that to a real order because we want to use Shopify even with manual orders, which Shopify now allows, because Shopify candles our quantities of inventory quantities and our reporting and our shipping, like, hey, this is the packing list. And so we realized
00:07:50
Speaker
We really need to be doing all of this in Shopify. Well, sometimes it's a lot of work to create an order in Shopify from scratch because they may have 27 items at various quantities. And it occurred to me what's really stupid is sometimes we get screenshot PDFs or printed out shopping carts that are then manually scanned and emailed to us. I'm like, wait a minute here.
00:08:13
Speaker
These people had this stuff in our cart, and then now this is like faxing it to me, the equivalent of it going backwards. So I took a second to kind of live in the present and thought, William, what's this problem and how do I solve it?
00:08:29
Speaker
is looking at how can you create quotes through Shopify. Well, googling it in literally five seconds tells you there are a plethora of options for quoting plugins to Shopify. And we added one, the one we added I didn't like because it allowed you to quote the customer to create quotes, but not to really modify them. So we're trying a second one. But here's the irony. We installed that app at about noon on a Thursday.
00:08:57
Speaker
We had two legitimate quotes created in the next four hours, which by the way, that's like a resoundingly good outcome. It's not like we have sales every 10 minutes. It solves
00:09:13
Speaker
all of these problems and it speaks to, you know, going back to you and me having this, you know, fireside or lakeside chat, you know, Hey, a big part of Saunders machine works business includes things like custom plates, and it includes working with distributors and educational resources and end users that where we want to comply and make it as easy to work with your, your system and your processes and get you our products in an efficient way. Um, I shun paperwork. I shun.
00:09:43
Speaker
busy work. It was a key for us to tell you what you need from us to make your parts better and to fix them better and to get that stuff transacted as best possible. This is one of the silly things where I never thought about it, but I'm like, oh my gosh, we will never go away from not having
Parenting Styles and Adversity
00:10:01
Speaker
that option. Yeah. You don't think to look for it. Even if there's 20 options out there for it, you haven't gotten that far yet. You have your way of doing it and you just do that.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah. And we're constantly finding little things like that, whether it's redundant paperwork or printing things that don't need to be printed or tracking things that don't need to be tracked or finding more automated ways to do information gathering. It's like, why were we doing it the old way before? That's silly. Yep. The other thing I like about the sort of like, hey, let's kind of recap our careers.
00:10:39
Speaker
in looking back, is it's an implicit way of reminding ourselves, John, it's all going to work out. You already are
00:10:49
Speaker
there. There's a lot more left to do. It's all going to work out, but there's also a finite time to do, you know, I'm a little bit guilty of the whole like, Oh man, I'm realizing now like I can't, I'm, I'm going to be too old to like go have a completely third career. Totally true. But like, um, we only get so much time to, to play. Yep. Yeah, exactly.
00:11:16
Speaker
Well, I mean on the flip side like Ray Kroc who took McDonald's from a one man, one shop to McDonald's. Started when he was 53 I think. Oh my gosh, yeah. Great movie the founder. That's probably an area where you and I are pretty weak is like
00:11:35
Speaker
having to go through putting food on the table through the amount of rejection you face as a cold selling person is, uh, that's a pretty interesting track in life. Yep. I'm kind of glad I didn't have to go through that. I mean, we certainly had a good decade, my wife and I of, um, putting food on the table and nothing else. But that's good to think back on that perspective and
00:12:05
Speaker
Not everybody has had that. Some of the people in my life act like they're struggling, but they've always been fine. Yeah, that's fair. I think about this a lot with raising kids. I think an amount of adversity and strife creates a sense of independence and internal burn that needs to be there, period.
Generational Growth Through Adversity
00:12:30
Speaker
One whole another question, but like, as you and I grow in our success and our financial success, and then our kids grow up with hopefully not very much stress, you know, like, how much do we allow them to struggle and
00:12:47
Speaker
work for it and how much do we give to them? Where's that balance? I don't know. Our kids are still young, so I'm only starting to really think about this. Oh, I don't think they're too young at all for these kind of lessons. I think there's a question of our personal view on this and I think it's kind of a question of how that view dovetails into society. I do think jokes aside about
00:13:12
Speaker
What's the joke about? The current generation is a group of weak people who have no appreciation for how hard their elders had it and it's like Aristotle, 440 BC or something. That's a perpetual myth, but I do truly believe that, and you frankly see this through the government's action in the United States of the amount of use of the treasury to
00:13:39
Speaker
literally send people checks to mitigate any possible risk of any hardship or strife. We've never gotten political on this podcast, but the idea that a year ago we were trying to pass a $4 trillion or something infrastructure deal
00:13:58
Speaker
It's like to solve what problem? There's literally no one's available to work. You're trying to create jobs? No, that's not the problem right now. We're all in a pretty darn good place.
00:14:14
Speaker
quick decisions like for us, I think about like, Hey, kids got to make their breakfast. They got to do the jet chores. They got to work. And sometimes working means I don't want to say like you miss your sports games because sports are important in that group activities report, but like, Hey, you know, it's not always like, um, you know, I'm not always here to, I'm not here to be your friend. It's kind of the attitude about it. And I'm not here to be your slave either. The kids, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. Sure. But it's there's work, you know? Absolutely.
00:14:44
Speaker
I did not grow up on a farm, but we have a farm and I grew up working a lot on it.
00:14:52
Speaker
Man, I didn't love it at the time, but that
Traits of Effective Leadership
00:14:56
Speaker
work discipline and what was a bad attitude and chip on the shoulder sometimes has turned into an appreciation for... At the end of the day, you've got to be smart and tactful and you got to have fun. I think I'm probably a little bit guilty of being too uptight about everything sometimes, but man,
00:15:16
Speaker
all the people I look up to still put in hours and work and that's just, you know, that's who I am. If that doesn't work for you, we don't have to work together. You know what I mean? That's fine. There's other people that do things differently, but work, darn it. Yep. And I'm probably
00:15:34
Speaker
somewhat on the opposite end as far as the uptightness. I'm pretty relaxed and chill and let things slide probably more than I should kind of thing, but still work. I have very high expectations, mostly of myself, but also generally of those around me, especially in the company.
00:15:54
Speaker
Yeah, I've got my son here, Leif, today. We're recording at 7 o'clock in the morning and he's like, yeah, I want to come in with you. Awesome. We're going to count some inventory together and see what else I can get him up to. Have you thought about Leif or Claire coming to work at any in the shop? Leif has... I mean, I'm not going to push any of it, but if there is interest and Leif's
00:16:21
Speaker
life basically wants to have his own lab when he's a grown up. Okay. And with employees and you know, he's, he wants to do totally different things than what we're doing here. But he's kind of sees that we can see that it's possible. And he's like, Oh, yeah, I'm gonna have 100 robots. And, you know, yeah. Yeah. Awesome.
00:16:44
Speaker
Danny Meyer book is still really hitting me in all the right places. I'm really enjoying it. He offers a section on
00:16:55
Speaker
what happened when they hired managers and the process they go through and building out that kind of whole layer and level in a way that I've never seen another business book talk about it.
Passion vs. Judgment in Work
00:17:06
Speaker
It's his experience firsthand. It's not even the great books like Small Giants and Good to Great. There's still a lot of theory. There is experience in it, but it's very
00:17:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's a little bit too cherry picking of anecdotes and examples that don't get me wrong. I enjoy those as well. But this is more like, hey, this is what we've learned. And he lists these, what they look for. The sort of short version of the list is things like infectious attitude, self-awareness, charitable assumptions was a good one. Kind of assuming that managers and employees and customers assuming that
00:17:43
Speaker
Any of their mistakes or mishaps are honest. When you assume the worst of people, you get the worst out of people. It gives the example of how- Interesting. ... especially right in a New York City restaurant, we assume when someone's late for a reservation that there could be a legitimate excuse. There's a moral hazard to that because there's the frustration of people who book three reservations in a night and just pick the one they want to go to. Not the coolest move, but it's an interesting attitude about how they want to
00:18:12
Speaker
push their culture around not getting cynical and frustrated and accusatory, but rather charitable assumptions. Trust, approving patience and tough love, not feeling threatened, character. And he kind of concludes all this by thinking like, you ask yourself, why would somebody want to be led by me? Which comes back to that reminder of,
00:18:39
Speaker
I think about this about, hey, I'm going to work hard and that's going to be part of my example, but part of wanting to be led is where we're going as a company, but also how we're treating people. It kind of makes me remind myself to stay balanced on that front. That makes sense. I legitimately love and enjoy what I do. It's okay to show that. You know what I mean?
Impact of Measuring in Business
00:19:05
Speaker
Have fun with it.
00:19:07
Speaker
And that's the thing sometimes is we get either self-conscious or stuck in our head too much and I get afraid to show how much I love what I do. Don't. I know. Don't. And so, I mean, I've hardly posted on Instagram at all the past few months and I'm like, why? I don't know. Am I? Yeah. Because you're sizing yourself up. Sometimes. Yeah. It's not always that, but sometimes it is for sure.
00:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, sometimes I just prefer to back off and just put my head down at work. But yeah, I got to make sure I'm doing it for the right reasons. It reminds me of the wonderful scientific sort of phenomenon, especially in the metrology world. It's not possible to measure something without affecting it. Okay.
00:19:56
Speaker
Like you cannot measure something scientifically without changing the object as it's being measured. Like you're touching it, you're heating it, you're putting light on it, anything to affects it. So it's just not possible. And it's the same thing. Like there's a lot of things I wish we could share more of on social and YouTube, but it requires me videotaping myself or being videoed or, and it's just that changes it. Yeah. Yeah. It's like when.
00:20:22
Speaker
When one of my guys is doing a process, say he treat and he says he does it this way and then I watch him and he's being watched. It's like, I'm doing it better now and look, it's perfect. Not to say that they do it wrong or anything, but it's that perception of I'm being watched, I have to do it differently. It's not your natural rhythm when nobody's looking. It's like singing in public or singing in the shower. It's different.
00:20:53
Speaker
Neither are good for me. I don't know. Neither one of us. It's funny. Yeah, but that's the like, what is it? Measuring something changes the object. Yeah, yeah. And in our business, we like to track and measure a lot of things, whether it's time or output or quality or whatever, but it does kind of change the process and the way you look at it. Sometimes for the better, sometimes measuring it obviously gives you results and data that you didn't have before.
00:21:20
Speaker
So it changes you for the better, but good to keep that in mind.
Solving Issues in Knife Manufacturing
00:21:25
Speaker
Yeah, agreed. Speaking of measuring, I can segue into a slightly different topic here. So in a couple of days, on Thursday, I'm traveling to Elliott Matsura, our local machinery dealer for the whole afternoon, and I'm just going to play in the CMM room.
00:21:43
Speaker
bring a whole bunch of parts and I was like, because we've been having this knife problem where some knives work great and some knives have lock failure. When Eric like purposely tries to fail the lock.
00:21:57
Speaker
And Eric's putting them together, and he's like, it's pass or fail. Some of them work great, and some of them don't work great. And we don't know what the difference is. We can't figure it out. So I'm just going to bring a whole bunch of parts, good parts, bad parts, to Elia Metzer. And let's measure everything. I need to know what the difference is so that I know how to fix it. Because I don't know where the variable is, whether it's a hole size or a hole-to-hole location or some 3D taper, some 3D machine surface that's the wrong angle or something. I don't know.
00:22:27
Speaker
Um, so I'm going to have their full arsenal of Zeiss CMMs and optical and digital and everything. And we're just going to have fun.
Enhancing Precision with CMMs
00:22:35
Speaker
Awesome. Yeah. I, um, that's awesome. Dennis was showing me there Zeiss and I think it's Calypso and, um, I very cool stuff. I don't know what the right answer is if, if, and when we need one, but I can see why, um,
00:22:55
Speaker
that will be a phenomenal resource to have that data. They were showing these parts that they make and they have the constant scanning. This is the Creations Unlimited tour that'll be up in a few months, hopefully on YouTube. Moving a, I call it a trigger, but that
00:23:16
Speaker
point of the sphere, like as it triggered, I don't know why I say that we're triggered, but it's like moving along the shape of the part. They can literally zoom. Yeah, exactly. Like it's not actually, it's not truly creating like, it's not like it's sketching out a line. It's just creating lots of points and lots of points become lines, arcs, splines, whatever.
00:23:40
Speaker
he zoomed in and they literally showed where two tool paths blended together with like, I want to say it was tenths of variation that you couldn't see until you zoomed in a lot more. And then all of a sudden it was like a hard right. What? And that's the kind of stuff you're going to go nuts over. Yeah. Yeah, it's crazy.
00:23:59
Speaker
Well, as far as I understand, and I'll learn more on Thursday, but I think you can get a CMM for as cheap as $50,000, like a good one, but they can go up to $200,000 or $300,000 for the really good one, right? Yeah. Size depending, obviously. There's room sized ones that I'm sure are not cheap.
00:24:18
Speaker
That's great. The smallest one will most likely work for you. Smallest one, but a certain accuracy. The 3D scanning is probably a very expensive option. I just don't have a good feel for the pricing and the need and all that yet. I've seen them in use. I've been to shops that had them. I went to Melterra and they measured a bunch of parts, but I wasn't actively involved doing it. I want that feel. I want that tactile.
00:24:49
Speaker
And I watched that I felt guilty going to Melterra because I was taking away from their production. It's like a production company, production room and a couple hours of my time.
Isolation in Entrepreneurship
00:24:58
Speaker
And whereas at Elliott Metzer, they have their demo room and yeah, it'll be good. Yeah.
00:25:04
Speaker
Go watch our video that we did when we went up to Zeiss in Michigan. Right. Just because it's going to be a force multiplier. That way, when you get to Elliott Matsura, you're going to ask more specific questions. Yeah. I'll open it up right now. I remember that it's not just the software unlock for the scanning option. It's actually a different head. Yeah. You're obviously not going to look at a manual CMM. That's verboten for you. Correct. It would be a computerized one.
00:25:34
Speaker
Yeah. All right. Yeah. That was my other, sorry, good. That's it. That was my other kind of note. I miss, I miss getting together with everybody, not in a like, um, not in the whole like cabin fever from COVID way, but more just like, man, we had a lot of fun over the years at IMTS, which hopefully will happen this year or AU and like seeing people and engaging and all that. And, um,
00:26:05
Speaker
It reminds me of how lonely entrepreneurship can be where you're running your own company in your own isolation and you sometimes don't have a good perspective because there's almost too much of just a vacuum chamber or you're in an echo chamber type of thing.
00:26:24
Speaker
Mm hmm. And that's a good point. I hadn't thought about that recently. And maybe, maybe I'm falling into that trap the past two years because I haven't really gone too many places or done too many things outside of my own life or business. And part of me is totally fine with that because I'm a total introvert and like, put my head down and do my own thing. I love it. But I you're right. I also loved going to AU and IMTS and when you and I went to Germany and all those little trips and tours and
00:26:52
Speaker
experiences. It gives us so much better perspective. I mean, we get to kind of cheat with that with Instagram and YouTube and seeing how the rest of the world operates. You get those hits of knowledge and experience and friendship.
Organizational Changes and Structure
00:27:08
Speaker
But that's the whole, it's being measured thing. It's what they choose to show and how they show. True, yeah.
00:27:15
Speaker
I like the whole, if we're having a candid conversation and you see in the background or somebody just brings up real time like this is how this happened. Man, I'd love to, I don't even have any idea what COVID borders are like with candid these days, but just to come up and be a fly on the wall and see what happens in your shop. I think you'd see a ton of changes in our shop even just over the last few months about how we're
00:27:42
Speaker
organizing, meeting. We've gone from no meetings a year ago to having a Friday group lunch with everybody to now we have a manager's meeting on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and rolling up information, pushing it back out through. Big change. Really? Yup. Yup. Exactly on that point, I think the last time I went there was maybe like two and a half years ago, maybe three, something like that. Yeah. I think it was on the weekend, life and I went down and
00:28:10
Speaker
you and I just hung out, but it wasn't working time. We went to the shop and toured your shop, but it was quiet. Ed was there messing around, but I didn't get to experience the work environment, which is super valuable. Like you said, even just the past few months, it's a bit different. It's the same thing here. If you came up,
00:28:32
Speaker
shine the floors up a little bit for you. And they're normally very clean, but you know what I mean? Like we'd be on top of it because we've got a visitor coming. Yeah. Yeah. I haven't even seen your new shop. I know. We keep waiting. We'll be in another shop. Oh yeah. That's funny.
Lessons from Past Ventures
00:28:50
Speaker
Not funny. Um, what was I gonna say? The, uh, Oh, I lost my train of thought. Anyway,
00:28:59
Speaker
Horizontal update. That's going to bother me. What was I going to say about that? I don't know. The install is underway. For all of those that peppered us with biting criticism and comments around the fact that we put the tool matrix right up against the back wall.
00:29:23
Speaker
That's not where it goes. What they have to do is they have to shove it against the wall. That way they had access to the actual horizontal machine for a couple of days to get things hooked up. Then what they did is they scooted the matrix up against the machine. There's like 22 inches off the wall, plenty to walk through it. Last night they put the first
00:29:46
Speaker
like load station kind of in place and then started to get the APC pedestals in place, which is really cool. The tool changer is working and yeah, I mean, it's just freaking awesome. I love it. Are the load stations like freestanding and bolted to the ground? They are, yeah. Okay, interesting.
00:30:10
Speaker
All of the, I think there's four or five pedestals, the load station are all anchored into the ground. So they're not on what I kind of figured, which was a giant weldment or sort of base that would make them their own kind of third part of the machine that could be moved around.
00:30:27
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. And like I've seen pictures and videos from Dennis' shop and he's got like a walk-in cell that's huge. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like you open the door and you walk in and you have, I don't know, 20, 30 huge pallets around this, you know, half moon arc. Yes. And the aroa has this long arm that just reaches everything. And I'm like, holy cow, that's a serious setup.
00:30:55
Speaker
Yeah, that's cool too, because that shares with his methods vertical. I can't wait to get that video out. Yeah. Yeah. That's a pretty dialed setup really. What's funny about being friends with him on WhatsApp anyway is we get to see his live thought process. He's like, Oh, I think I'm going to put a, you know, a vertical next to my grove and have the ROA feed both. And we're like, okay. And then he does it. Yes. Yes.
00:31:23
Speaker
I think I'm going to get two more speedios and put a Aero compact 80 between them and he does it. That just jarred my memory of the thing I lost from the train of thought on the other day. We're watching the dropout, I think. It's the Hulu on Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos that just came out. Okay.
00:31:46
Speaker
which have you listened to any of the podcasts or read about Theranos and her? She was a Stanford dropout who created a company about 15 years ago called Theranos that had this single drop of blood testing machine that could really revolutionize healthcare in the US or world by a single drop of blood, being able to tell you like, I don't know, some crazy number, like 40 or 140 different things about your health from cholesterol to heart disease to,
00:32:15
Speaker
diseases and so forth, which
00:32:18
Speaker
The current technology requires multiple vials of blood to be drawn at a lab and then sent to LabCorp or somebody where these big machines processes across the stage. This was the opposite. Literally, in your home, one drop of blood every morning could tell you everything you need to let your health. Well, long story short, total fraud. Machine never did anything remotely close to anything that they purported. She was, I believe, already found guilty of many SEC charges around her.
00:32:45
Speaker
fundraising and investor stuff.
Structuring Roles in Growing Businesses
00:32:49
Speaker
She went from the youngest female billionaire to bankrupt and probably going to jail. So it's quite a captivating story. She's super weird, like changed her voice to make her voice lower and blah, blah, blah. But in the show, and I'm not really giving anything away in terms of spoilers, it shows her though as a young 20s college dropout who has raised money
00:33:13
Speaker
and is building a team, this couldn't be the more extreme opposite for certainly of me and somewhat of you as well. Think about yourself as a 22 year old Grimsbow with 10 million handed to you to go tool up a team and shops and so forth. We bootstrapped day by day into our 40s now or approaching that. But what it made me think about is here's this 23 year old who
00:33:36
Speaker
has an accounting team and has a manufacturing team and has a science research team. And that's a little bit what we're focused on now at Saunders is like, hey, we have an operations team, even if that team's two people. And we have a production team. And I think there's a lot to be said for this goes back to that whole concept of advice is only contextual. You know, now that we're in that context, the idea of setting expectations and how we measure
00:34:06
Speaker
the success of a silo or group of our business is kind of business 101. It's so basic. I hesitate to sound like I'm a basic
00:34:19
Speaker
an inexperienced business person to talk about it. You know what I mean? Because we've grown from a total bootstrap from in the garage, from doing everything ourselves, and we've grown and grown and grown and grown and grown, and that now we have to restructure it and actually put some silos, like you said, into it. We have
00:34:38
Speaker
operations, which is manufacturing, and we have sales and marketing, videos, Shopify, sales, everything, website, shipping, and then we have finance as well. Those are the three big things. Because we have the two shops, we have CNC manufacturing, we have finishing, they're two sides of operations that we do. Outside of that, there's nothing that we do that doesn't fall into one of those categories.
00:35:01
Speaker
So Eric and I realized a while ago we're like, we need to put specific people in charge of each of those zones and figure out who falls under them. And then, oh, all of a sudden we have an org chart, you know, and let's build on that.
00:35:16
Speaker
And it's had its struggles, but it makes perfect sense to me. They said it in the traction book. They're like, every business, I don't care how big or how small, from Amazon to the one-man shop, like operations, finance, and sales marketing.
Importance of an Org Chart
00:35:30
Speaker
Those are the three categories that every business has. Interesting. I don't know if I agree with that. What else outside of it that doesn't fall into those? Not for the sake of being argumentative.
00:35:47
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting. One of the questions too is what drives what? I love manufacturing. That's just what I love. I am excited to just sit down at this horizontal and start building toolpaths. But sales and marketing,
00:36:12
Speaker
is the lifeblood. I will always figure out how to get stuff made. It's a question of whether we can sell it. You have the opposite problem, I know. Correct, right? Wonderful. Yeah. Which is why my sales and marketing team has two people and my manufacturing team has four to seven, depending on if you look at both shops. How are you willing to talk about, if it makes sense on the public form, how the reporting works there?
00:36:38
Speaker
So Angelo's our director of operations. He has tons of experience, knows his stuff. I trust him. He runs the shop now.
00:36:47
Speaker
In a way, when I work there, I report to him. When I'm a machinist in the company, to an extent, there's certainly some muddiness between the two of us as to my role and his role interacting. But as far as Pierre and Steven in the shop, they report to him. They tell him when they're late. They ask him for materials or parts or problems. They bring it all to him. And he handles that, and it works well.
00:37:15
Speaker
and we're going to hire another person like an entry level manufacturing position and he's going to be an active part of that hire and help us choose and interview people and he's going to train them and run them and they'll be kind of like the base level, you know, deeper this, clean that coolant tank, learn how to do this and we'll build them up from there, but we need that bad.
00:37:41
Speaker
Yeah, it's working well. And then in the front shop, Eric being one of the owners of the company, but he's also the manager of the front shop and he's got two guys that work there full time, two and two and a half and everything they need to go through him. Yeah, okay.
00:38:01
Speaker
The comment you made is also top of mind for me about the muddiness because it's like, wait, I'm the owner, blah, blah, blah, but I also work for you. It's not going to be muddy because you're not going to let it be muddy. Just be clear and concise about it. That's something I don't have the total answer yet, but there's a lot of folks at Saunders that are stepping up in a good way and doing good work from a
00:38:28
Speaker
for lack of a better word manager
Challenges with New Machinery
00:38:30
Speaker
level, but they are also, all of us are technicians and enjoy being technicians. So from that org chart standpoint, I literally drew out an org chart and it's kind of like, do I put, I'll pick myself as an example. Do I put myself on the org chart more than once because I wear different hats? Or is that just getting too creative?
00:38:51
Speaker
And it doesn't matter because it's just an org chart, but it does matter because when I think about Ed, I want to think about Ed as a guy who's doing fixture development, process development, and so forth, but then also as kind of the quote unquote team leader.
00:39:07
Speaker
I don't know. I think the solution to that, we've talked a lot about that over the past year and done various org charts and structures and stuff. The key is to define the role and if your name is in 10 different roles, that's okay, but think of the role as if like maybe one day we'll hire somebody to take care of this. Yeah, I take care of it now. I do the bookkeeping or I do the Shopify website or whatever, but as a role, that's a job, maybe not a whole job, but that's a thing.
00:39:36
Speaker
And then, you know, Ed wears a bunch of hats, you wear a bunch of hats. So it's, I'd rather start with a padded org chart that has my name 10 times, and then kind of pair it down from there. And maybe hire or delegate certain tasks and jobs to other people as well. But I think especially in a small nimble company, it's fine to have most of the people's names on there more than once.
00:39:59
Speaker
Your org chart is the largest font in the org chart bubbles is the task, not the name. I guess. Not to say we have a printed org chart on the wall or anything like that, but it's a lot more theoretical than it is physical, but we've been playing with it and thinking a lot about it. Got it.
00:40:24
Speaker
Can I change topic? I think, like Oscar, you know me last night, I think we found, we
Machine Maintenance Strategies
00:40:33
Speaker
either found a ship conveyor that we can use temporarily or I think our May Fran might actually be shipping on Monday, which makes it irrelevant, like good to go, which I am super excited for. Because the machine is useless without a cooling tank really.
00:40:51
Speaker
Yeah. Yes. Like, I mean, you've got brass, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to, we're going to crush it on these plastic mod devices. We can only test so many parts. Yeah. Well, no, there is some work to do. Um, I have to, I thought I just had to drill and tap the tombstones for our fixed stream, but, uh, I got to put them when I mount them, I'm going to have to sweep them to see how
00:41:18
Speaker
well they line up, or I'm going to have to potentially deck them, even if it's a foul. And I'm like, oh man.
00:41:27
Speaker
Do I do that prior? It might be wishful thinking. Uh, I've also readily acknowledge I'm suffering from like new machine syndrome where when you get a new machine and you're like, I am going to take care of this thing. It's going to look great, great, great, great. And then it eventually just becomes a machine. It's just a machine, but I'm thinking about if I cut all that cast iron before we ever run flood coolant through it, then I can shot back most of that stuff out and avoid contaminating. You never cut casts for any reason, right?
00:41:57
Speaker
Uh, no, like maybe once or something. I don't know. But it's like the little fixtures you make are 41 40 or something. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Got it. Yep. Yeah. If I cut anything cast, it's I'm modifying a vice or something like, you know, something existing. Yeah. Got it. Yep. How's the current doing? It's good. Like, let me, I was still running when life and I came in this morning.
00:42:24
Speaker
That's awesome. That's crazy. I'm going to look in right now just to see what the current hour time is because I'm curious. Let's see. I've got a pop-up message. It's been running for 19 hours, 43 minutes unattended. Pop-up message says, tool 200 grinding wheels approaching minimum radius of 0.4 inches. You have a few days until it reaches minimum. Put a sticky note on the door to remind you right now. Write this on the note, yada, yada, yada.
00:42:48
Speaker
Love it. So that's a eff-brained message that I made up. So it's a pop-up on the screen. And yeah, I'm loving the current. It's so good. So like now that we're actually stretching its legs and running it, you know, 130 hours a week, it's what I wanted. You know, we're finally, we've been here for a while, but we're at the point of why I bought it, you know? Yeah. Yeah.
Enhancing Machine Efficiency
00:43:14
Speaker
So good. That's, speaking of which, like,
00:43:19
Speaker
reliability wise, like the machine is totally reliable. But I've noticed we've had some scrap parts. And I found the solution. It's because when the aroa does a pallet change, sometimes little chips get under the feet, mating surface, and there are air blast jets under there that blow it away, but they don't always get them all because some of them suction down to the thing. So I
00:43:41
Speaker
For like a year now, I've been doing, when it changes out the pallet, it leaves it empty, and then it does a wash down with coolant. But I just upgraded that last week to a through spindle coolant wash down, where I bring the spindle down with an empty tool, like a specific tool in there. And through spindle blast every surface of that interface, including the hole where the pull stud goes and spirals out to clear the chips away. And I think it's working perfectly now. So that's been fun. OK, that's great.
00:44:11
Speaker
Yeah. That's what I'm a little nervous for on the horizontal is when we load parts, especially op two parts, man, if there's one chip in there and those parts are pushed, even if it's only angled 3000 across 20 inches, I don't want that. And I don't want to necessarily have to probe for that every single time. So the thing about what's the way we build that process in
00:44:32
Speaker
Well, some of the machines, I think it's Dennis's Grove, has flood coolant coming out of the bottom, the interface where it just washes it away, I guess. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. It keeps that from ever happening. Yeah. Sometimes you have to trust that the machine tool builder has been through this before, but even in my case, I still need that extra wash down.
00:44:54
Speaker
just to add that reliability. And you don't find that out until months later. You're like, yeah, this problem we've been having for a while, I found it. Yeah, totally. It's kind of like, oh, robots do call it sick. It's not just perfect. Exactly. And then one more thing, last thing I wanted to mention, we talked last week about how to notify between the two shops. Yes. And I had, so on the Kern, I have a Raspberry
Production Challenges and Solutions
00:45:21
Speaker
Pi set up with a Raspberry Pi webcam.
00:45:24
Speaker
into a little online software called MotionEye for Raspberry Pi. And so I had another setup with that. And I'm like, with just a cheap Logitech webcam, I'm like, let me just throw it over the transfer table and see if it works. And it is perfect. So now in the front shop, they have a laptop with a live web feed of what's on that table. And it's so good.
00:45:51
Speaker
Not only can they see that there are parts, but they can see which parts are there and then they can instantly tell if they need those parts now or if they can let them wait or let them sit or whatever. It's perfect. That's it. That's what I want. Good. Done. Done. Good. That's what I wanted to ask you because I had in the back of my head asking about the current because I was thinking that there was a problem with the current. The problem was with your boil in the Swiss. Correct.
00:46:18
Speaker
have not figured it out yet. We had the Blaser guy come in, take a sample. They're shipping it to the States. We should hear back any day now. We still have air in the system and we can't really run it. It's probably been down for two weeks now. Sorry. It's a lot of production.
00:46:34
Speaker
I mean, things happen, but we took the pump apart and found a tiny little bit of rust inside. I don't know where from, but maybe that was the thing, put it back together, still sucking air. All the o-rings are good. We've replaced every hose, tightened every fitting. I don't know. The guys are stressing about it.
00:46:57
Speaker
It's no longer a fun challenge. It's like do we call LNS and pay thousands of dollars for them to fly up here and fix this for us? Or is this any hydraulic system is the same? Do we just call a hydraulic expert locally and say fix it? I don't know.
Backup Strategies and Automation Risks
00:47:14
Speaker
Right. You can't do the whole tissue paper test where you hold a tissue paper while it's running and see if it pulls it in to look for air bubble leak like soapy water.
00:47:28
Speaker
The theory is that it's sucking in air bubbles, not blowing them out. Sorry. Yeah, fair point. I don't know. What about when you look for a head gasket leak with a smoke test? Can you fog it? I don't know. You know what that is, right?
00:47:53
Speaker
I don't know if I do. I'm jogging my memory here. Google like fogging an engine block, but they smoke or fog it and then it will show where you have a gasket leak. Like it comes, it sucks in or blows out.
00:48:07
Speaker
Watch the video because I don't really know what I'm talking about here. There's a specific spot where you create or inject the fog. Is it the cold air intake or somewhere else? Then it just basically acts like the fluid or gas or air that should be going through but you can't see or obviously fog will seep out of any hole and then you'll get to catch leaks which can be really useful in vacuum systems and gaskets and so forth. Interesting.
00:48:37
Speaker
That's, yeah, I'll look into that. Because it's not like a little bit of air bubbles. It's like a lot of air bubbles. Got it. And the LNS were telling us that if it's sucking air in, it should be gently leaking air when it's a static system, like when it's just off. Oh, interesting. Leaking water, like oil, I mean. And we don't really have any leaks that we can see. And if it's anything past the pump on the pressure side,
00:49:05
Speaker
This is a low pressure transfer pump that then transfers to a super high pressure 2000 PSI pump. But if there's anything after either of the pressure pumps, you'll see a leak. It'll just leak. It'll go out. It's not going to suck in there. I don't know. We're struggling with it. I wouldn't hesitate at all to have a local hydraulic guy come over because probably at that point where you could use a fresh perspective. Yeah, that's true.
00:49:32
Speaker
I mean, think about it as a business. As entrepreneurs, we're like, oh yeah, we can tackle this problem. You guys got this, no problem. But it's been two weeks of no production now, and that has cost. You think about the money involved in that. That machine should have run 10 to 20 hours a day for the past two weeks, and it hasn't been.
00:49:51
Speaker
That reminds me of two things that I should run. We started working on backup quantities of stuff. For example, especially the SC20Y, which has been an absolute war course for us. It's been great. We used to use that machine periodically. It now runs every day all the time for products, but it's the one machine we don't have any redundancy on.
00:50:14
Speaker
And it scares me because of crash risk or spindle issue potentially. And so we're started working on maintaining minimum quantities of products like you, where we know they're very unlikely to have a rev change.
Reflections and Future Goals
00:50:27
Speaker
So I want to have a buffer in case we have a situation where we're down for a while.
00:50:33
Speaker
The second thing is we posted a video on Insta of the Okuma Horizontal Tool Matrix Tool Change Robot, which is the coolest thing ever to watch it go pick one of the 218 tools, bring it over to the preload station, change it in. It is absolutely amazing, except the complete counterpoint
00:50:53
Speaker
comment around that is there are so many things that can go wrong on that. So many centers and linear rails and motors and motions and grease and oil. So it's kind of one of those makes you appreciate the simplicity of umbrella or side mount changers. Or even like the Speedy or RoboDrill tool changers. It's like the simplest and most brilliant system ever, but limiting. Yeah.
00:51:20
Speaker
All right, I got to run. Go, man. I'll see you. Take care. Bye. Bye.