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#302 Growing a team, getting them to solve problems
261 Plays2 years ago
Topics:
- New full-time employee at SMW
- Hiring and firing
- Grimsmo's lathe machinist taking a month vacation
- really tough week at SMW
- complicatons of robots
- sharing your vision
- Fusion 360 video
- Growing a team, getting them to solve problems
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Podcast History
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode number 302. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. John and I talk candidly about what we're doing well and what's on our mind as CNC machinists and business owners. Every week? Every week. For five years? Six, I think. Plus, I don't know. Is it? Oh my god. It's a lot. Yeah. It's good though. Yes. Part of the day now, part of the week.
Alex's Journey from Intern to Employee
00:00:27
Speaker
Alex, today's actually Alex's first day as a full-time employee at Saunders machines. Really? Which is awesome. He graduated college last week and has worked for us now as intern consultant, full-time summers, part-time holiday, you know what I mean, like all over the place. But I am definitely glad to, I think that's one of the tough things about
00:00:55
Speaker
The ideal mindset of like the perfect world running a business versus reality is like, for example, a month ago, there were some couple of things that we were struggling with. And the answer was kind of a well, it will be easier when, number one, we have more manpower. Number two, we have Alex here. And, you know, I didn't want to necessarily be distracting him with certain things when he's finishing up college, both for legitimate study reasons and frankly, for fun reasons. But anyway, it's great to have him
Internship Challenges and Decisions
00:01:23
Speaker
here. Awesome.
00:01:24
Speaker
It's good to know that he came back and wanted the full time and like wants to devote the next portion of his working career to, uh, do you guys, that's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. Couldn't agree more. Cool. Yeah. I mean, you've brought his name up several times, uh, many times over the podcast, over the years. And, uh, it sounds like he's been a huge impact to you guys in developing Lex and just working and doing all the fun stuff that he does. I don't know.
00:01:51
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And he is a wonderful story that started with him writing that, what I think of as now an infamous email because I brought it up a couple of different times of, hey, I'm a high school student on a state winning VEX robotics team and I'm interested in
00:02:10
Speaker
you know, learning more. I met with him the next day, hired him on the spot. And that's not a feather in my cap in terms of my ability to recognize immediate talent and immediately snatched up. It was more of a all the check boxes were checked, you know, attitude, background, interest, hustle. But
00:02:32
Speaker
But we have had, I think, 21 interns now. Wow. Yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. And we've had some great ones. And we frankly have had some not great ones.
Team Dynamics and Employee Longevity
00:02:45
Speaker
I've had a couple that I've actually stopped the program early.
00:02:51
Speaker
Those are not easy decisions, but as I reflect now on the 2022, I'll just say what I think could be awkward. I'm not going to let it be awkward. I don't regret a single person being off the bus that's off the bus. The reality is that's just, especially as a micro company, we're not a publicly traded company with a thousand employees where you can
00:03:15
Speaker
figure somebody else out in a different department or culture or go through like you got to fit in here or it doesn't make sense. So I mean that is it can be tough to find out who the right people are and the reality is you just need to figure out having them on the team who works out who doesn't and when they do work out boy, it's great. Yeah, when the team's flowing, it's working really good. Yeah, we've had a couple people leave over the past four years or so and
00:03:45
Speaker
It's, you know, when everybody's here, you think everything's great. And then after they leave, you're like, Oh, you know, for a tiny bit, there's a little void where they used to be. And then after a tiny bit, you're like, everything's good. It's actually better. Like, you know, yeah, everybody who was on the bus needs to be on the bus. It's great. Yeah. Yep. Agree.
Impact of Vacations on Production
00:04:05
Speaker
And you had, um, you still have sky, right? Or is he now? Yeah. Okay.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, Sky and Angelo, Sky started as a co-op student. So it was part time going to school and all that stuff. So similar to an intern, I guess. And he's been full time now for like three years, four years. And he's him and Angelo both are coming up on five years here in a couple months. Yeah. That's huge. Yeah, that's awesome. Good for you. What's been going on? I'm just cranking busy. Pierre is off to Corsica for the next month.
00:04:37
Speaker
So yeah, he's having a good time there. And he had to lay over in Amsterdam and he's like, I'm at the airport for seven hours. I don't think I should leave the airport. That's not enough time to leave the airport.
00:04:51
Speaker
I don't know. A layover. Anyway, yeah, so that's good. Everybody's set up to perform. And although I got to say like without him here, it's a little quieter, a little, you know, one less person to get stuff done to have conversations with. It's good. And then even the two lades that he runs all day, the Swiss and the Nakamura.
00:05:14
Speaker
I haven't touched the Swiss yet, and Angelo's been running the Nakamura somewhat, but on top of his other daily responsibilities. So he's doing about half the production that Pierre could do full time. And you kind of feel the void of those machines are now quiet for a while, you know? Yes. We've planned for it. Everything's good. And I will crack into the Swiss probably next week sometime. But yeah.
00:05:43
Speaker
There are days I wish this conversation wasn't a podcast, but you don't have to say it's okay if it's not okay, John. It's totally okay. I'm saying it is. Okay. Yeah. There's one part we need to make pivot for Norseman because we made a bunch and they're kind of bad and we escaped some defects that the surface finish could be better. I got to remake those.
Balancing Personal and Company Challenges
00:06:06
Speaker
Other than that, I don't think I have to make anything on that machine. We're actually quite good on inventory for parts.
00:06:11
Speaker
Oh, okay, awesome. Yeah, it's a topic I enjoy seeking advice and guidance on from others, but because you, you know, life's this journey where I'm proud to have the
00:06:24
Speaker
folks on the team. I've seen both sides of it. My first job was kind of the, you will take no days off, you will work the weekend. Zero things given about any interest outside of life. I love that hustle, but it's not also the sustainable way to build a culture that balances hustle and fun and passion. But hey, there's more to it. Let's call it what it is. Somebody leaving for a month is disruptive. It's not always what's
00:06:53
Speaker
Is the company going to be in a better position? Sure, there's a pro bucket of like, hey, no, but creating a long-term sustainable process where that person continues to be part of the team that has flexibility. That's a real win on the flip side.
00:07:08
Speaker
That's a big, maybe it's different in Canada, but in the US, that's not a convention. It's just a small company. You can't always just leave for four months or four weeks. Four weeks, yeah, exactly. Luckily, it's over Christmas, so a good solid week of that is Christmas. But yeah, he had a bunch of vacation time racked up and he purposely didn't take it and he took some time off, unpaid time off, I think, and let him work a little bit of overtime beforehand just to kind of flow things and I needed him. And yeah, it's good.
00:07:38
Speaker
So, yeah, no hard feelings whatsoever. I'm actually really happy for him. And he told us like six months ago. This was very well planned. That's awesome. So, it's good. Good. But it is just quieter. It's just weird, you know? And we're doing other stuff and I'm like, yeah, those machines, like physically, they make a lot of noise and now they're not.
00:07:59
Speaker
Oh, that's funny. Yeah, it is fun. So it's like literally quieter. Yeah. But I don't know. I guess I miss him already. But super happy for him. He'll be back in a month. Be good.
00:08:10
Speaker
Did you end up leaving the Swiss in a runnable state? Or no, you're just going to? Yeah, he set up all the tools, all the collets. He made two test parts of this pivot that I need to make. And he said, he gave me a quick rundown before he left. And he's like, it's made a part. I haven't checked any tolerances, any dimensions. But all the tools are work. It looks like a part. You'll just have to fine tune diameter, thickness, surface finish, things like that. Yeah. Good.
00:08:40
Speaker
We, I don't know what the details were. Was it the Norseman pivot you didn't like or something? Yeah. So similar situation. Definitely not a like.
00:08:51
Speaker
Definitely not a, this product cannot be shipped situation, but kind of that like the great zone that nobody teaches you about when you're getting started of like, it's not binary pass fail. Like there's levels that are functionally acceptable, but now it's not what I want. It's not what I like. And I wish I had known about it sooner so that we didn't make more like this because the fix is often not that difficult, but it has to be fixed. And I guess just to be,
00:09:20
Speaker
candid because I said I always would on this podcast. It's been a really tough last week for me. Yeah. And so rather than Salk, it's kind of okay, what do we need to do? We've got to kind of nothing's should be clear. It's more on a personal level. Nothing's wrong. We're still doing great. But we boy, I've really
00:09:42
Speaker
that idea of me taking a multi-week sabbatical is a freaking joke at this point. Everything from steering the ship on important things like processes and getting better at it to, hey, let's hunker down and
Technical Difficulties with CNC Machines
00:09:58
Speaker
We're going to delay some of the really exciting R&D work. It's not even R&D work. It's frankly easy, but no, no. Let's get our house in order on a couple of other things first period. You know when a decision just is right? You just know this is the right thing to do. It's the right thing to do on that, which is great.
00:10:18
Speaker
Boy, I'll tell you though, one of the reasons I'm really struggling with this idea of like, could I truly run a company that I don't have to be at for an extended period of time is just little things. I mean, I don't want to pick on the Okuma, but that Okuma horizontal for as great a machine as it is, is incredibly fussy. Yeah, I get that.
00:10:36
Speaker
situations where, for example, I accidentally switched it from manual mode, which would be how you run a normal CNC machine, you just load a program, you hit cycle start to PPC mode, which is when the pallet pool takes over and the pallet pool actually runs the machine. I accidentally switched it to pallet pool mode, which is a big honking knob. I don't mean accidentally, I meant to do it. I
00:11:01
Speaker
As soon as I wrote it, I was like, no, I should have done that right there. And it happened to be in the middle of a tool change. When that happens, you might as well pour yourself a cup of coffee. We were covering out of that was an hour and a half. Of learning the process or just normally, like if you know what you're doing.
00:11:22
Speaker
So, we have had similar-ish things like that happen when the ATC recovery does work, as one would hope. This time, it didn't. And you have, in my, I'll say limited experience because I think there's more room to learn, but I have enough experience to understand enough about that machine to not be a beginner yet now. And what I do know is that the further you move away from the situation in which you let the error occur, the harder it can be to recover.
00:11:51
Speaker
Meaning, you sure as heck don't want to power cycle the machine, whereas Haas's are wonderful in this front. You almost can't screw them up, God bless them. Your best bet is usually to try to let the machine continue to do what it wanted to do. I don't mean to go to the trap. No, this is really good because I go through the same things on the Kern or other machines.
00:12:11
Speaker
But I was disappointed because I reached a point where I couldn't get it. I called the support and the answer is anything that's related to the ATC is not something that we will address over the phone because of safety concerns. And you know what? That's not support. That's just not support.
00:12:28
Speaker
I do understand their perspective, but it's not the answer that's acceptable. It's my machine. I'm whatever. It's either you're going to help me or I'm going to struggle and figure it myself. Yeah. Yeah. Side note, somebody needs to push the envelope. You talk about competitive forces driving innovation. Somebody needs to push the envelope for allowing things like FaceTime and video-based service. Yeah. I do that with current a lot.
00:12:52
Speaker
Yeah, good for them. And you and look, Walter grinders that I don't know or care about. Like they had this at emo last year in Italy, where they were like, Hey, all of our machines have an app now that like, I don't know what exactly did. But like, you have an app, you open the app, you scan the QR code, and it tells the person the other end what your machine is a serial number. I assume a lot of those grinders are super bespoke. But
00:13:15
Speaker
because the cynical side of me knows that service is a profit center for those folks. That's fine, but the reality is it's not in anyone's best favor to have four and a half hours of driving time that's scheduled two days down the road to do what ends up being one keystroke to fix. That's my rant. It has very little to do with
00:13:38
Speaker
what actually happened. It has more to do with the fact that I cannot now build a process that foolproofs the use of that machine because it's just the incidental accident that somebody does something that doesn't hurt the machine. It's not crashing. It's like that. But all of a sudden, you just can't get it to work. It's not fun.
00:13:59
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you just need to continually build out those processes, write them down. Whenever there's an error that happens, a problem of process that you're developing, you keep notes available to every person running that machine. That's what we're trying to do for the current, for all the machines. Yeah. Like on the Maury, if you hit reset during a tool change,
00:14:20
Speaker
It's it doesn't like that at all and you have to like manually, you know, drop the pot and rotate and first few times I did that. So now I actually have a label printed on the control right above the reset button like never hit it during a tool change.
00:14:35
Speaker
Once you know the process, it's not hard, but I spent a couple hours reading the manuals and asking people at DMG Moray and all that a couple years ago how to figure this out. Same thing on the current. There's some sticky situations with the aroa that even stump Angelo and I still. We have to like, okay, last time we did this, okay, that happened and now it's like, yeah. Yeah. It's really scary. Yeah, it is. A couple weeks ago, I
00:15:01
Speaker
Somebody forgot to put a pallet in the position in the aroa, like pallet nine was supposed to be there and it wasn't there. And the aroa picks it up empty, puts it into the machine empty, and then the machine alarms out saying, there's no pressure, it's feedback from the pads. So it stops. That's fine. Except in my rushed recovery mode, because I think I had to leave real quick. And I was like, I can fix this real quick.
00:15:28
Speaker
I accidentally told it that it had the small gripper in the hand of the aroa, not the big gripper. Oh, no. Because I have all the passwords listed on the side of the aroa, like some that you're not supposed to have. And I typed the wrong one and it just asked me questions and I typed the password and I said the wrong gripper. So then it tried to park what I thought was a small gripper back into the small gripper spot with the big gripper. And it just kept crashing like like somebody slamming a hammer on the machine kind of thing.
00:15:58
Speaker
And it took us like one and a half crashes to realize this is not right, what's happening. And then I went home for the day because I had to go anyway. And then I think I came back later in the night and I figured it out and I'm like, oh, I was not supposed to like type that password where I typed it kind of thing. Now I know exactly what happened. It took me a while to figure it out.
00:16:18
Speaker
but little things like that. So then I added more notes to like label printed to the side of the aroa, um, which are very simple, very clear, just like a five word sentence or something that answers that question. And then I talked to Angela about it and now we totally understand what happened and how not to do that again. But yeah, stuff like that is like, what is going wrong? Like robots are complicated. No, look for me, um,
00:16:45
Speaker
I refuse to participate in the trolling style opinions of machine tool brands because it's just not my cup of tea. But I think it's a huge
00:17:02
Speaker
I will say this, it's a huge checkbox in Haas's favor of how well they built their machines for user interface and recoveries and so forth in the simplicity of it. And number two is every time to date, I'd heard people kind of caution, concern about machine controls and having variety of controls in a shop. I tended to think more about, okay, keyboard layout,
00:17:25
Speaker
learning the tips and tricks, the probing cycles, the post, but it's really that whole next layer of stuff that I don't want this to become
Machine Maintenance and Support Quality
00:17:34
Speaker
tribal knowledge. And we've started doing a similar thing with notes about the Okuma, and that's a good resource, but it doesn't
00:17:41
Speaker
It's just, I have very little confidence that we won't be in a bind or pickle again. And that's not, well, so okay, what do we do about that? Take off my sulking hat that I am still wearing despite saying I wouldn't. We're doing a more conscious effort right now. This kind of goes back into hunker down mode of building up
00:18:01
Speaker
ample inventory, the stuff that comes off that machine, that's the first step. Second step is then looking at what products are going to be the hardest to move to a different machine if we absolutely had to and making sure those products we either get more of inventory or are more conscious of and so forth. So I know it sounds simple, but that's kind of what we've been thinking about here. For sure. Yeah, because those errors, having process sheets is great, but I still feel like you need
00:18:29
Speaker
A basic to decent amount of experience and understanding of these machines that occur in the Okuma, whatever. Like if you had a new hire, a new operator and you're like, okay, you're a machinist, run this Okuma. You've never run an Okuma before. The easy work is easy but the complications like
00:18:47
Speaker
Even a well laid out instruction manual, it's almost not enough to be like fix this error. I'm going to hold your hand through this and we'll do it together kind of thing. I actually would welcome any help or input from listeners, how I solved the problem last week.
00:19:07
Speaker
And how I saw a service guy solve it in the past was a pretty scary way of doing it, which is when you're in the machine operations ATC recovery mode, you can hold down a button. I don't remember what exactly it says, but it's kind of an override button. You have to hold down interlock release or something. And then you can try to do one cycle return, one cycle advance or return to cycle. Those options aren't all always available at all times. Depends on what
00:19:37
Speaker
So the ATC has like 75 steps. I don't actually think it's incremental. I think it skips a bunch. But nevertheless, there's at least a dozen, maybe 20 steps for the ATC to do everything, which makes sense because it's a robotic spider, like your current.
00:19:53
Speaker
way to fix it, which is super scary is to go into the it's not hidden, but it's you have to know how to get there in the control settings and override force lie to it that it's either one step ahead or one step behind. Where I have been told that's really risky is if you happen to be in a state where the
00:20:13
Speaker
say the robotic spider is holding on to a tool holder in the matrix tree, that could cause it to rip a tool out of the tree and like tear out your tree. Now, it's less, well, it's still risky. It's probably less risky when like to say that I had the other day, which was that it had a tool in one side of the arm, no tool in the other, and I just couldn't get it to move back to there. But the prior step and the next step weren't probably going to cause a crash. You know what I mean?
00:20:38
Speaker
But man, yeah, he has better info on the house on the Kuma war like this. Let me know. But man, it's tricky. She's.
00:20:48
Speaker
And these are all the idiosyncrasies of every machine. It's not just control-based, but it's how the tool changer works, how to recover from a missing tool, from a sensor that goes wonky. Yeah. Like on the Kern, there's these dampeners. They're like shock absorbers in a car. And we have to replace them periodically, like a couple times a year probably, because they get gummy. And I think some of my tool holders are on the heavy end of what Kern wants.
00:21:18
Speaker
Okay. In weight, in pounds, basically. Most of my tool holders are tiny, like eighth inch end mills, quarter inch end mills. But every now and then, there's what's called a PG25, which is like a big honking weight. Probably weighs twice what the small ones do. And that extra weight on the swing arm tomahawk tool changer, as they call it in Kern factory, apparently.
00:21:43
Speaker
Just adds more force onto those dampers. And they just wear out over time. They get sticky. And so, yeah, now we stock a couple and they're super easy to replace now that we know how to do it. But, bae, that first time, it was down for days, you know? Oh, were you? Yeah. Or it was flaky for a while. Like, it would just keep giving this weird error and then fix itself and they'd be fine. And you'd, like, jiggle the tool changer and it'd be good again. But, yeah. Yeah.
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah, well, I'm glad that's really a great thing to hear about current of like, hey, you can get support. I think that's what was that's what upset me was this idea of like, look, we're just it's just not
00:22:25
Speaker
Nothing's going to happen unless a guy hops in a van, drives two and a half hours, and has to get scheduled. Maybe it helps that I'm in Canada, and there's a border and travel. And it's a big deal to have a technician come up, which I haven't had in three years. The current technician hasn't been here. But being a small company, and they don't sell thousands of machines a year, they only make 100 machines a year or something relatively small.
Company Growth and Financial Insights
00:22:56
Speaker
And they've certainly invested, you know, Kern USA is not a big team of people, like far less than 15 people. I don't even know. Um, and, but still they like.
00:23:07
Speaker
They take the effort to hire good service people and I've heard from Tony, he's like, we're still looking for another person at some points. Like everybody's looking for good talent basically at every level of corporation. But no, they're doing really well and they seem to really care. Maybe it's, I don't think it's just me. I think it's all their customers.
00:23:27
Speaker
Yeah, I know what you're saying though. I don't know that you really get special treatment. I mean, whatever. I mean, they're there for me and I appreciate that. It's a weird human psychological factor where it's nice to think that you do, but then I'm also reminded of a big part of my story is I don't want to be completely lying if it's not nice to feel like you're so many compliments your story or what you've done.
00:23:53
Speaker
If a company treats me differently than they treat somebody else, that's not the litmus test by which I want to judge my life looking back on it. It's why I love running a real business.
00:24:06
Speaker
while I do YouTube stuff kind of on the side. Cause it's like, if you're just a YouTube guy, that's maybe it's inspirational to some people, but it sure as heck isn't a replicable or sustainable model. Yep. Yeah. And you and I have now while on the public, um, it seems like we're YouTubers, but that's like nothing part of our business at this point. It's like we are running manufacturing factories. Yes. Which is so fun.
00:24:34
Speaker
It is. Even all the stress and all the headaches and all the problems and crashes and machines and people and everything, it's still fun. I still love it. Yeah, I agree. Would I want to be doing anything else? No.
00:24:49
Speaker
And then I constantly fine tune and mold my life and my work life how I want it to be. If there's an issue over here, I'll course correct. I'll fix it. I'll modify, I'll tweak. That's the whole point of why I have my own business. So I can do whatever the heck I want, like to adjust life and the life of the employees and the company and the company itself and the customers and perception and everything. It's gets to be the vision that I have in my head. And the hardest part is for me to get it out of my head and share it with other people.
00:25:18
Speaker
Well, so on that note, I was reflecting a little bit on year end stuff, both personally and within the company and then within the team. And I wish
00:25:32
Speaker
I had a better way of realizing what Saunders Machine Works was like on December whatever 16th of 2022 or 2021 because- Like a point in time comparison reference. Yeah. I mean there's financial but that's one. There is financial for sure and I am a numbers guy all day long for
00:25:57
Speaker
overall what we do, but it also has nothing to do with the success and happiness on a daily or weekly basis within myself or the team. What I care about is, are we backordered? Are we having problems with the process? Are we behind on this? And if I look at what we have done
00:26:16
Speaker
with inventory levels, with order fulfillment time, with the quality of our products, with the machines that we brought online, the way the team is expanding into a whole separate building and putting machines. All these things make for what I'll say without hesitation is an absolute stellar year for the team. It's funny because
00:26:39
Speaker
you have to force yourself to look back through that. Do you do this? Do you think about? I force myself to sometimes because you look at just one metrics, say financial. We made X amount of money last year and this year it looks like we're going to make X amount of money. It's about the same. We did about the same this year as we did last year, which on the surface is like
00:26:59
Speaker
We can do better than that. I thought this was a great year. It felt amazing. We should have been growing. I know we have grown. We bought the speedio, the Zeiss CMM, and building the router all this year, plus all the other little crap we've been working on. It's been a year of growth and we've hired five new employees this past year. Huge.
00:27:19
Speaker
So equals higher profits and growth, but it hasn't yet. And that takes time to amass. So that is the one data point I can't judge my whole year based on over flatlined, nothing's happened. When I don't do a darn thing,
00:27:39
Speaker
to plan for sales. We don't do budgeting around sales. We don't do any advertising or marketing. I love that, but it's not a strength. It's a weakness of ours. I think you're in the same boat. Yeah, same.
00:27:57
Speaker
I think we're- That'll change. Yeah, it'll change and we'll grow and evolve. I think we're okay with
Sales and Marketing Strategies
00:28:02
Speaker
that. I don't think we- I'd like to do a bit more marketing, not necessarily paid ads or anything, but just more specific videos. There's so many things I could do. My want list in my brain from employees, from new hires, from projects I want to do for videos I want to make is a mile long. But take that list and put it down the shredder, John. I don't care about that list. Yeah, but their goals for growth and things I want to do.
00:28:27
Speaker
Yeah, but this is, oh man, I still wish this podcast wasn't recorded right now because you're going to retire and you're going to not have done most of the things on that list. Of course. Not that it's okay, but I want to hold my feet to the fire, please, John.
00:28:45
Speaker
Part of it's like, okay, new year, Alex is on board. We've got some, this triage list. First off, we're on hunker down mode to fix a couple of things. We need to get fixed here. Then we're going to go into new product mode. Well, as part of this new product release with the gen, well, sorry to say that out loud. Metric plates, accessories related to all that stuff. We're not going to just launch it. We're going to have packaging down. We're going to have inventory down. We're going to have videos down. So to what you said, I don't plan on doing paid ads anytime soon, like SEO.
00:29:15
Speaker
but from a marketing standpoint around not just relying on customers to stumble across our website and buy stuff, which has actually worked tremendously well. But yeah, we need to be a little bit better than that. Yeah, a bit more conscious and careful. And I mean, you got to feed the audience too. You got to feed your customers with not only
00:29:38
Speaker
you know, buy our stuff but with good information and good feedback and good like tips and tricks and good maintenance advice and you know, how do you keep a fixture plate from rusting or whatever? All these little things like great ideas. That would be awesome to share. Let's do it. Let's come up with a plan and we'll, you know, tackle a couple of my massive want lists at a time and we're doing that.
00:30:02
Speaker
it's coming. I just, my eyes are always bigger than my stomach and that's okay. I'm okay with that. We had a guy call sales kind of sales calling. Honestly, it's actually funny. It's the second time this has ever happened. He's looking at a brother fixture plate and he was like, how is yours different than a Jurgens? And I vaguely know the answer to that. Like you're saying this on the phone kind of thing?
00:30:27
Speaker
Yeah. It wasn't a challenge. It was like, hey, we're looking at these two options. Sure. And it was, look, an actual trained salesperson, which I am not, would have a field day with this question because it's like, oh, you have got a captive customer. This is your chance to shine. And I did a decent job, I think, of explaining both the product itself and its attributes as well as who we are as a company.
00:30:50
Speaker
So I was happy with my answer, but it doesn't mean it was a great answer, I guess, compared to what it could be. And it also made me realize, holy cow, there's a marketing tool that we need to have, which is comparing our product offering to some of our competitors and making that information overtly available or even available if and when we want to share it. But that's not, it's on a list, but it's a list that I don't see every day because I need, we're focusing on different stuff right now.
00:31:15
Speaker
Exactly. It's good that you captured the idea and maybe at some point you can review that idea so that it's captured out of your head. It's not at the top of your head because you know it's not important, but it could be important and it will be important for the growth of the company.
Personal Values in Business Practice
00:31:32
Speaker
Absolutely. We've got those two. Yes.
00:31:38
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Sweet. Sweet. Sorry. We're in a better mood. Actually, I was really happy that I did a Fusion video this week that was a total like, oh, this is such an awesome feature. And this is why I love doing YouTube videos. There's a less-ish known functionality in Fusion where you can, I think you have to have a preview enabled, which we show in the video, but Fusion can automatically find
00:32:07
Speaker
things in a model that you import from a customer, a friend, McMaster, GrabCAD. There's a checkbox infusion where you can automatically remove drum roll list. Number one, holes. Number two, fillets. Number three, all chamfers. Number four, extruded. Really? Yes. What?
00:32:26
Speaker
watch the video. And it's three minutes long, and it tells you exactly what you need to know. And I show where it worked well, why it didn't work, but how you can kind of overcome a couple of areas where it doesn't do super well. Like holy bananas, the ability to take 25 chamfers and automatically remove them without having to control click and God forbid you click the whole body. Yes. Or click the wrong one, have to undo it or click away. Yeah, totally. Yes.
00:32:53
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. That's my, that's my PSA. Watch that video. Sweet. That's fun to share that stuff. Do you do a year in review personally, or I mean, you do a preview. I assume you do a year end process with the team or no? Um, I wouldn't say officially, no. Okay.
00:33:11
Speaker
Yeah. And even you and I have talked now for six years and you've been consistently more consistent with kind of a year in review. Like you've got your, what do you call your notepad? Yeah, life. Life open something, right? I love you, John. How do you know that? Yeah. It sticks, right? Yeah.
00:33:34
Speaker
So no, I don't typically do a year in review, but I'm reviewing constantly. But every now and then like end of the year becomes this like, you know, the books get closed and
00:33:44
Speaker
It does make you reflect. It does make you think. You take some time off for Christmas. We're basically taking the whole week off between Christmas and New Year's and give the guys a couple of days there. And it's going to be nice. So we did the same last year. It's nice. It's pleasant. And yeah, it gives you time to step back and be like, what are we doing good? What are we doing bad? What do we need to improve? I think that the whole team is communicating better than ever before. And it can still grow to be better, which is amazing.
00:34:15
Speaker
I get to overhear little difficult conversations here now, you know, with process basically, still struggling with this, or it took way too long to do that, or I'm not happy with this, and these are all good, yet sometimes difficult conversations to have. And awkward for me if I'm a fly on the wall, just kind of observing it, but it's also really good that I'm letting it happen, and not just jumping in and solving the problem, you know, letting the team solve the problem.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yes, John, yes. It happened this morning and I was like, okay, I'm just here, just listening, see what you guys got. I have much to say but I don't think I need to say anything, you know? So that's cool, it's cool to see. What you just said is one of the more significant things, like that's legit. Yeah, thank you. You don't realize these things, you don't look back and review and reflect and be like, oh, I've done more of that this year.
00:35:09
Speaker
Yeah, well, and I don't know that it's anything more than my personality. So like, I don't know that I'm better off than you for doing it. And I don't know that I would push other people to do it. I just do think sometimes you've got to remind yourself of where you're at in the wind.
Team Communication and Decision-Making
00:35:25
Speaker
This sounds silly, but I care about caring. It's like that sales call with the customer. I probably shouldn't say this. The shop line forwards to my cell phone right now, and that includes after hours. So this guy called after hours from the time zone. But I'm also like, I care.
00:35:43
Speaker
And it's not to say that a big company doesn't care. And frankly, what I'm doing isn't sustainable or scalable. So egg on me for that. But I want your business. I don't need the business. But I want your business. I want to earn your trust. And I care about making this. That makes sense? And that comes through the team, blah, blah, blah.
00:36:06
Speaker
I forget the word for it and not selfish but there's a side of you that's like i'm the best person to feel these calls right now. No it's like.
00:36:15
Speaker
Well, actually now that Alex is here, it's the question of, I don't want to just dump it onto his plate, but it is something we will figure out. Sure. But to that regard, he's not going to answer a call at 9 PM. Like you wouldn't want that on him. You know what I mean? Sorry, totally. Totally. Yeah. I didn't mean to apply that either. Not at all. Not at all. But the point is, as far as developing scalable processes, like
00:36:38
Speaker
you answering calls anytime because they just happen to come to your phone. Like I don't answer my phone like ever. My ringers on silent 24 seven. It has been for like three years and it's the best. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Well, so you brought up something that really hit home with me a minute ago, which is okay. So I'm going to keep this a little bit generic.
00:37:05
Speaker
But, you know, we had a couple of low points, a couple of frustration points. I actually did mostly take a step back and sleep on it. And this continues to be the most awkward, hard thing to do, but it's the right thing to do to give yourself some perspective on it. And then you kind of rehuddle back up on it. And that ends up being a really good process. But I had to laugh because one of the outcomes that we all agreed on is that
00:37:32
Speaker
I really, and I'm putting this on myself, I really screwed up by letting our manager meetings fall by the wayside. And it wasn't intentional. It has to do with one person who has for good reasons had a schedule change. And that actually schedule change works out really well. And another person who's also had separate schedule changes type stuff, but it meant that those meetings just weren't happening. So it wasn't like a decision to stop them. And, and we hadn't even had them for that long. So it wasn't like,
00:38:02
Speaker
It wasn't like it was this immediate absence. We have such a good process with Lex and Shopify and everybody having distributed decision making power that the stuff still happens. But boy, a real detriment. We are worse off for that and it'll get fixed. It already got fixed today. So okay, we solved it.
00:38:24
Speaker
Yeah, but trial and error, basically, like even if it's an intentional trial. Yeah, it's good. That's a good perspective, because you get to see what you were missing and what you had before. Yeah. But that was another point that was brought up was I had sort of overtly said like, if I
00:38:47
Speaker
don't have the chance to weigh in on something. It can be difficult if that thing becomes way bigger, but the appropriate response is, but we do a great job at not needing to bring everybody in at all levels at all times, which is of course, you could grief the right thing. Um, but it's the forest fire analogy of like, if you don't tell somebody about the small forest fires, the whole forest burns down and they're like, what just happened? Yep. Yep. That's not what happened, but you know what I mean? Um, and,
00:39:15
Speaker
all I said, have said, and it's something I've gotten more vocal and have more conviction about is sort of a that's fine. But you can't you have to go into situations, whether they're personal work related or work, work related, that the less the other person knows, the more carefully you have to tread about why they don't have that knowledge. At this point, you know, it makes it obvious, I don't need to keep the size of Derek. But like,
00:39:50
Speaker
If somebody finds a minor, this is not what happened. If somebody finds a minor QC problem, they think they can fix it, but they're not sure, and they don't tell anybody about it. That can have major downstream consequences to processes that affect others. And then if after three people have struggled with it for three weeks, and then they all of a sudden tell you, John Grimsville, and then you're like, wait a minute here. Well, there was no point in time where it was gross negligence where they thought, hey, let's not tell Grimsville about this. Right. It's like, I fixed the problem and moved on. Yeah. Yeah. That's a very good example. And that has absolutely happened here. Yeah.
00:40:08
Speaker
It's just a good way to think about.
00:40:19
Speaker
Yep. And it's such a nuanced thing because you don't want like you want to raise alarm bells if you're having an issue, but you don't necessarily want to like bring every tiny little issue to your manager to the owner or to everybody or you know, say I messed up or things like that. So we're towing that line. Angelo has been really building the team to
00:40:44
Speaker
find the balance between take care of your own stuff and like raise the alarm bells immediately. If, if you're stuck, if you're struggling, if it's supposed to take half an hour and if it's taking two hours, like I heard him say that this morning, you know, it's okay. We're here to help. We're all a team, you know, but if it's taking 35 minutes, then that five minutes is yours to like figure out kind of thing.
Managing Scrap and Production Issues
00:41:05
Speaker
Um, yeah. And I'm, you know, being the, like we always say the,
00:41:11
Speaker
Bootstrapper become entrepreneur, become business owner. I'm really trying not to micromanage every project. Oh, it's 1,000% for sure. It's so hard. And I'm taking a conscious effort to be like, you can handle that. You can make those decisions. What do you think? Trust your opinion. How do you want to deal with this customer? They'll bring customer service issue to me and be like, what do you think? That sounds great. Let's do that.
00:41:41
Speaker
And yeah. So something I, if you don't mind, I'm going to run here in a second because whatever I'm going to run. Um, something I want to talk about next week is something that I would have written off wholeheartedly because I think it's feels toxic, but I am thinking about, is it a better way to have
00:42:05
Speaker
as an example, scrapped parts need to be kept at a machine or operator station throughout the day. Not that it happens, not that you're filling bins every day, but like a way of visually realizing, okay, I need to get more people involved or more help here. And it's funny, I don't like it because it's not what I care about. I don't, we have a great team, I don't necessarily care about
00:42:33
Speaker
And I won't even allow there to be a culture where it's like, Oh my gosh, XYZ did XYZ. That's not the point. But it's also, hold on, wait a minute here. We can't. We do. This does this period. This does matter. Ultimately, tools matter. Material matters. Process matters. Learning matters. Anyway, it's a weird thing to think about. Can we talk about next week? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we scrap a significant amount of parts due to various reasons. And we try not to, obviously. But, you know, we've got green bins for good parts, yellow bins for maybes and red bins for bad parts.
00:43:03
Speaker
Oh, that's interesting. And just U-line bins, or 3D printed bins, depending. So especially on the Swiss, Pierre is setting up to make the tip on the pen. And his red bin is full while he's setting up. And there's 100 plus parts in there. And he's dialing in, the thread's still bad. I keep breaking drill bits, yada, yada. So he's struggling. That's OK. But his several days of setup is a pile of red parts.
00:43:30
Speaker
And for a while, for handles and blades, we had a red bin that we labeled February. So every bad part just goes into the February bin and then bring it to us. And then we can see, we can, you know, analyze. February is a bad month. And in my head, it'd be cool to see like the progression throughout the year. Like March was a good month.
00:43:49
Speaker
Oh, so it's not, I thought you meant like in February, you have a build party where you make scrap knives and out of the bad parts. Some of the scrap parts are usable, but it's more of a visual indicator, like you said, of like, how many bad parts are we making? Because if they just go into a drawer, that drawer overflows and nobody looks at it, nobody cares, nobody shares the information. Yeah, it's good to know. Good. Yeah, it'd be great to talk about next week. Okay, good. I'll see you next week. Sounds good, man. Bye.