Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
#344 Blinders In Business
218 Plays1 year ago
TOPICS:
- SMW Willemin is fixed! Replacement Fanuc motor worked.
- Haas UMC350
- Office Phones
- "Lean Built" podcast with Jay and Andrew
- "Sooner, not faster"
"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast"
"Speed is fine, but accuracy is final"
- Blinders in business
- Wera tooling
- SMW is selling Proven Cut
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Importance of Peers
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machine episode number 344. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmo. You need your peers and your mentors out there. John and I talking this weekend just happened to hit record. Try to keep it as real as possible. Yeah. I think it's been super helpful. Doing good, busy, busy, lots going on, lots going on. Can't think of any specific examples outside my head. How are you doing?
Machine Issues and Repairs
00:00:30
Speaker
I'll kick off on a good note, although I've got some meatier stuff to for sure to dive into, but the Wilman is fixed. Yes. Oh, that's been a nagging issue with the U-axis gaining a tenth every bit. Yes. It was a win in all accounts except the minor-ish most
00:00:52
Speaker
takeaway is I wish I understood why because I do, but that's the John Saunders that I have to quell and put aside and just recognize it's a business decision. And it actually was great. Everybody, nobody could point to any real reason to think it was something other than
00:01:13
Speaker
replacing the whole drive motor servo motor from FANUC and the and what was I say you just couldn't so the bummer to recap were that the FANUC product was not returnable if it was the case that we replaced it and it was the sole problem that was going to be that outcome. I also
00:01:32
Speaker
So shout out, I don't remember the gentleman's name, but on Instagram mentioned to TEI. Let me look him up. Tennessee TEI, FANUC, Servo, Tennessee, industrial, something or other. But is that FANUCworld.com? Oh, shoot. Yeah, I think so. So there's seem like there's a million different like FANUC folks out there.
00:01:54
Speaker
to the point where a guy like me can pretty easy get lost in understanding who's the real deal versus who's not. Yeah, Tennessee Industrial Electronics, TEI Industrial, they seem to be in a whole different class, TEI Industrial.com. They never did anything with them in the end, but they had this motor at less than half the price as a factory refurb, which I would have been totally fine with.
00:02:18
Speaker
So that's a bummer that I didn't know about that. But also they just, they're one of those companies that clearly takes a different stance. I talked to a real person, they care, they're like, hey, tell us which motor it is. Okay, they're like, let's figure out what are some options here. Here's a quote on just having us go through and overhaul it. But that was like servos gaskets or
00:02:37
Speaker
gasses cleaning, painting, stickers. It didn't seem like it was going to be the meat of what needed to be. They were going to test it, unclear if that testing would have evaluated anything. But then they're like, look, Rusty and Tom are our two top thermophanic techs. They've been doing this for 30 years. Let me get you in touch with them. Let's have a little call just to see what your options are, which is just like, I mean, I know they meant it, but even if they didn't mean it, that was the most wonderful. Yeah, man. Somebody's got your back.
00:03:05
Speaker
Yeah, and then I had a good talk with them about, I just was very candid. I was like, hey, we're a small shop. I'd rather not take this $2,500 motor, which is defective, and just throw it away. Is it worth fixing it? And would you guys buy it back? Or should we fix it and keep it on the shelf? And they actually have that sort of a program they looked at. They're like, this isn't going to make sense for us to buy back. And so I am, I think, going to throw it away, which
00:03:33
Speaker
That's the bootstrapper in me. The real win was, Grant did a lot of the leg work. I helped out, Caleb helped out, but we replaced it on our own. We were told it was tricky. Honestly, the only thing that was tricky was the coupler that couples the servo shaft to the ball screw. It's got one of those flexible couplers things. To get at the two and a half or three millimeter
00:04:01
Speaker
cap screw that holds that coupler in, it is buried in the casting and below a hydraulic line that is directly above it. So it is, I mean it is very difficult to get at it and we
00:04:17
Speaker
use a USB borescope from one side with a USB cable as long enough that I could watch the borescope. We would take turns because your hands would get tired, but Grant would hold the borescope. He actually was really good at that. I would feed in there with a hex driver totally blind, but I'm looking at the computer. Sort of like how a surgeon does arthroscopic surgery.
00:04:40
Speaker
and getting it off was easier because as soon as we could get the tool seated in the cap screw and loosened, we were done. That's all the pulling out really was. Putting it back in, I didn't anticipate this was more difficult because
00:04:57
Speaker
We is if for whatever reason was a little bit harder to get the wrench seated at first and then You weren't able to know how tight you really got it and there's no torque wrenching happening folks Yeah, just trust me on that And we got a tight but I'm like crud do I need it to be tight dirt? Yeah, but uh, it's uh
00:05:19
Speaker
It's working fine. Honestly, the whole thing from sheet metal to sheet metal, from machine off to cycle starting in was like three, four hours. Nice. It's great to have that machine back up again. Yeah. Good to know. I think you and we all learned quite a lot from that. Buying an older machine, yes, something's going to go wrong. Something went wrong. There are options to fix it. There's that Tennessee motor place that can rebuild
00:05:45
Speaker
anything. I have a servo winding repair shop blocks away from us that has rewound a motor for us. Not a FANUC motor, but a one horsepower big cage motor for our air conditioner actually. But they say, yeah, we rewind FANUC motors all the time. They cut the old windings off, they wind new copper on there, and they
00:06:12
Speaker
you know, pack it together again and paint it, and they can paint the outside and they can rebuild it. And on our Wilhelmin, it's still gonna do this, but the Z-motor brake, when you E-stop or when you open the door, when you turn the machine off, the Z drops a good two, three millimeter, or yeah, I don't know, a bit, like at least a quarter inch.
00:06:34
Speaker
And that's no fun. But they're like, yeah, I know exactly how to replace that Z motor brake, which just need new shims or rebuild or something. So they're like, take the motor off, drive it over to us. And that's on our list of things to do for sure. Yeah, sure. Awesome. But yeah, it's good to know our solutions for older machines, machines that are worth keeping around.
00:06:55
Speaker
Yeah, and it felt great. That's awesome. Like, nostalgic. I pulled this motor out, and it was dated 1999. Wow. I was software in high school. And that machine has put in its time. So to think that almost all of my life experiences since high school have occurred while that motor was working. Yeah.
00:07:17
Speaker
is just crazy. It's weird. It's like miles on a car, right? It's got a couple hundred thousand miles on it. And you're like, yeah, that car is due. It's not going to last much longer, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Machinery Trends and Market Discussion
00:07:30
Speaker
That was a big win. On an oddly, not a low note, but a strange-ish note. Did we talk about the UMC 350? Not really, no. I think we talked about it slightly offline on the WhatsApp, but Haas seemingly has discontinued the UMC 350. Their new baby 5-axis, yeah?
00:07:52
Speaker
Yeah. And, uh, the, the story I'm hearing is, uh, they are going to rework it for probably next year, uh, which is great to hear, um, with, with, uh, more tools, which is a point I was, I think vocal about from the outside of like, yeah. Um, the promise is there's never enough tools. This one has 18 or 18 plus one. The new one might have 30 I'm hearing, um, maybe slightly more rigid. Again, rigidity is a continuum of, of.
00:08:22
Speaker
You look, this is a 6,000 pound machine that can be pallet jacked. We haven't had noticeable problems yet in that sense, but more rigid, of course, is generally better. And what else did they say? Oh, so I think some sheet metal stuff around chips, which honestly I care more and more about as I continue to be involved in machining, like chip evacuation and process reliability around the fixtures, chips packing and nooks and crannies.
00:08:51
Speaker
I think the odd mark is FOSS is good at what they do and they debuted this machine a year ago at ITS. I don't know that there's a strong precedence for this public of a machine being brought to market and then they're moving the rest of the education platform, I think, to move out the rest of the inventory. I'm a little bummed because
00:09:09
Speaker
Well, I'm not bumping. We got a great machine at a good price. And it's here giving us the ability to do what we need to do. And ironically, our training classroom is kind of the educational world. But of course, it always stinks to be like, oh, we've got one of the ones that needs to make it.
00:09:23
Speaker
I hope the new one is good. I hope they keep that size and price point where it is because I think if that machine is done correctly, the sort of garage, low, low, low, low six figures, five axis is phenomenal. It's hard to find. That doesn't exist very much, right?
00:09:41
Speaker
Well, it's funny, we talk about this. I mean, FANUC has those robo drills, like that methods machine that's half a million that has the. With a hardbelly cell on the side, and yep. Bingo, yeah. I mean, that's a, at its core, a five axis drill mill size. And then Brother now, I can't keep track of it. Yeah, Brother has the U500 or something like that. That is, apparently first it was positional five axis, but now the new one's coming out that is simultaneous five axis.
00:10:09
Speaker
probably in the high $100,000 range. I don't know, 150, something like that, maybe more. And then you option it out, right? With your spindle coolant and everything jacks up. But still, compared to a traditional 5-axis, a Hermely or Rope or whatever, it's probably one of the more affordable ones.
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah, sure. Because even a Robo drill, you buy the Robo drill, you add the five-axis table to it, basically. It's like a trunnion add-on thingy. Yeah. It's not really a built table, built simultaneous kind of thing. Yeah. So that's that. It is what it is. Oh, this is a random
00:10:55
Speaker
shop court that needs to get solved, which is a phone system. Do you guys, is there a Grimspoon landline? There is a Grimspoon landline. I don't think we advertise it on the site. About a year, year and a half ago, we set up. We're like, okay, we need a shop phone. We need a customer service phone. We need an admin, like accounting kind of phone purchasing, things like that. And then Eric needs one in the front shop. And guess how many got used? One of them.
00:11:22
Speaker
Spencer, our accountant is literally the only person that uses the phone because he calls vendors and he pays bills and he does that. He has some vendors call him back, banking stuff. It's great for him to have it, but literally nobody else uses it. We've slowly canceled all the other subscriptions and he's just got the one right now. Other than that, I have no interest in having a landline for my purposes.
00:11:52
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So we meet, we have one and we need one and it's on our website. And some of this stems from back in the strike mark days, my business partner, Jan made a really smart move on the top of the old strike mark website was our strike mark phone number. And it was like call to talk to a real person.
00:12:11
Speaker
And I kind of love that because 15, 20 years later continues to be true. Nobody is excited to hear calling tree. Nobody's excited to hear that your menu items have changed. Nobody's excited to hear that your call volume is above average. By the way, it can't be above average 10 months out of the year if it's average.
00:12:32
Speaker
Uh, so I like that whole, like you call us, we're going to talk to you. Now there's some quirky things. Like we'll get everyone saw a fan that calls in at once. You know, we have a couple that have like demanded like fusion help. And it's kind of like, well, when they demand fusion help, it's actually easier to sort of pass politely. It's the ones that are sympathetic. We're like.
00:12:49
Speaker
We answer the phone mostly for Saunders Machine Works products, if you will. But that does matter. We get sales calls from folks, and we're enthusiastic and help to take those. And we get folks calls from like, hey, trucking company is like, hey, I'm running late. I'm going to add delivery for you. It's good to answer those. But right now, we just have what came with our spectrum landline that rings at all phones at the same time. That's not good. Interesting. So you don't have extensions or like
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah, we don't have like a phone system or anything of sorts. And I spent a little bit of time looking into like, Google Voice doesn't seem like a good option. A few of the VoIP options that look real, look like they're 20 bucks a month per user. And look, I'm gonna say right now, it's not worth four users, 80 bucks, 1000 bucks a year, like nope.
00:13:41
Speaker
So I'm curious if anybody has any suggestions. I don't want to have any of us, like there's a grasshopper service that moves all over to everybody's personal phones through a work app. I don't really want to do that. I basically want us to buy like four or five phones where they need to be in the shop and then have probably our shipping person or Yvonne be able to answer the phone and then patch it through. Yeah. How many physical phones do you have right now? Four.
00:14:13
Speaker
Are you suggesting four different numbers or? No,
Communication Strategies in Business
00:14:17
Speaker
it would be the same number. You call it a person answers. And if that person needs to transfer for a sales reason to Alex or to me, they can punch in our one-to-one extension type of thing or whatever. I feel like that assumes the phone won't ring at every handset. It wouldn't. It would only ring at the main one. Assuming there's somebody there, right?
00:14:44
Speaker
Yeah. And it seems like the technology these days, which I'm clearly behind on is such that if it doesn't answer in the first three rings, it could then ring elsewhere or forward or the, you know, there's, I mean, I'm excited to know how behind the scenes. I'm sure there's probably snail stuff or like, whatever. How much work stuff goes to your personal self? Basically not. Interesting. Cause my, my personal number is on a lot of stuff like, like shipping companies, um, Amazon delivery guys, whatever. So.
00:15:14
Speaker
I like those phones like, Hey, I'm at the front door. Like, is this your building? Um, and my phone's on silent. So I miss every single one of those, but it's fine. Um, yeah. So there is stuff like that. That is, is we're trying to transition to the company phone for things like that. Um, cause Spencer's usually at his office around and is happy to answer those kinds of stuff. But yeah, still a decent amount of it is ported to my phone and kind of shouldn't be, but just legacy kind of stuff.
00:15:41
Speaker
I have some of that too, I shouldn't. Like relationships with people, like our actual gentleman who is our FedEx rep, he has my cell, but like that doesn't- Yes. It's not a logistical problem. He calls me rarely, like he called me when the UPS was going to strike. Yeah, yeah, fair. Package rationing, like I'm okay with that phone call. But it actually reminds me of, I started listening to Lean Belt with Jay and- And Andrew, yeah.
00:16:07
Speaker
And I did what they talked about a while back, which is I have sort of separated work and life. So I like my personal Facebook is a personal Facebook now, which I don't know if I remember sharing this publicly or not, but I got some hate mail from some people who somehow noticed that I defriended them. These people are people that I met. Interesting. And it was kind of like sign of like, you know, you got to find your own peace in life. It's it's you know, it's not good for
00:16:36
Speaker
Anybody's mental health, I'm fine, but it's a little weird. But I don't get work emails. I am voracious about unsubscribing from newsletters unless it's something I care about because I treat my inbox as if something hits my inbox, then it's getting my attention for
00:16:57
Speaker
five to 60 seconds. So I am a zero inboxer and I don't get work calls. I don't get in books. I don't get Facebook spam. I don't follow anybody on Facebook anymore. I did what Andrew did. I purged all that stuff and Instagram is, I don't know, just changed.
00:17:15
Speaker
I remember us talking about this like five years ago when you're like, moving away from John Saunders personal email to Saunders Machine Works business email. And that was at a time when I it wasn't even on my radar, everything was through my personal Gmail.
00:17:30
Speaker
Since then, I've set up a work email and past two, three years probably been transitioning to it. Now, I basically check both all of the time and I still get a decent amount of work emails to my personal, but a lot less than I ever used to. That is pulling back and transitioning into like, this is a corporation now and I need to treat it as such. It's not John Grimm's most personal company anymore.
00:17:53
Speaker
And it's a concerted effort. And a friend who had like a $50 million business six, seven years ago told me, he's like, yeah, it took me like five years to remove myself from the business in that sense. And I'm like, well, five years, that's so long. Well, this conversation happened about six or seven years ago. So like time passes. Absolutely. Yeah.
00:18:19
Speaker
No, I got, I just, I looked up, I got about 15 emails yesterday total. Uh, and some of those were like, I ordered some more steel 3d grade parts. One of them was a, uh, HR thing I'm working on personally. So like I have.
00:18:35
Speaker
I guess I would say I've sort of checked that box, but I do check about like, nope, it's no longer all that. Okay, back to the Lean Build podcast with Pearson and Henry, Andrew Henry. So I started to listen to that too a couple weeks ago and I blasted through like, I think first four or five episodes.
00:18:53
Speaker
I'm expecting to listen to a bunch of them on my road trip to Chicago and back, but I never did. I just didn't even listen to anything. Um, but something that Andrew Henry said was it hit me like a ton of bricks. And he said, one of his guys is a competitive shooter. And he has a phrase he likes to say sooner, not faster.
00:19:15
Speaker
Yes, I remember that. And in the context of business and manufacturing and lean manufacturing specifically, having something sooner is way more valuable than having it faster because faster could still be like the process could be faster, your cycle time could be faster. But if the next person doesn't have it sooner, it's not any faster overall. So the faster cycle time doesn't matter if the dude doesn't get it till tomorrow.
00:19:43
Speaker
And I haven't told anybody else in the company about it, but I want to figure out a way to explain it.
00:19:49
Speaker
in a way that works for us and lets us utilize it for success. Because, I mean, moving parts throughout the shop, we've got different departments. It's literally hand to mouth sometimes, like we machine apart and goes to the next guys. They want it sooner. They don't want the cycle time faster. They just want a flow of parts as consistently and quickly as possible. And I think there's something in there
00:20:14
Speaker
a way to describe it and explain it that will help me and our team provide those parts sooner. That's good though. Yeah, it's huge. I hadn't heard the saying, but similarly remember enjoying the way Andrew set up that example. Exactly.
Business Operations and Growth Alignment
00:20:35
Speaker
But it reminds me of my days as a USPSA shooter, where I'm not a terrible shooter, but I am terrible at footwork. Every part of those stages is footwork. And somebody saying, I think it was a guy named Kyle DeFore, that slow is fast and fast is smooth. Or, you know, there's another one that's like, speed is fine, but accuracy is final.
00:21:03
Speaker
I like that. A little more cryptic, but it doesn't matter if you dump six shots quickly. It's like, did you get two on? Yes. And look, I'm guilty of this. I tend to move pretty fast, but the fastest, slow is smooth, smooth as fast. I think that's the same. Sorry, I think you had it wrong. Is a good reminder of just that little like everything, everything moving at the right pace to keep everything jiving through the shot.
00:21:30
Speaker
It reminds me a little bit, I don't know what Jay Pearson really means by the pursuit of peace. I think I know, but I think that could be a lot of different things on a lot of different levels, but that sense of organized structured hustle, but not chaos. We're working, we're busy, we're enjoying it, but there's a flow and there's no frantic, anything frantic. Yeah, and that is the goal. I think in our shop,
00:21:58
Speaker
The only frantic things are the, at least from me and my jobs and my perspective, is the amount of unfinished projects that I can walk through the shop and be like, I got to work on that. I got to work on that. It kind of adds to the brain busyness of stress, I guess. Like this unfinished, unsettled, you know, unfinished business kind of thing.
00:22:23
Speaker
But as far as processes for the shop and the way everything runs, we do try to keep it smooth. We try to keep it flowing. Yeah. What I wonder is how is that comment going to be different on October 25th, 2024? That is a very good question. I want to find a way to
00:22:46
Speaker
I think it'll involve hiring more people to tackle more because I'm the master of starting projects and never like fully finishing them. Yeah. And I want to find a way to make that happen. And that might not involve me. You know what I mean? Like that might be like I delegate this job to somebody else. I have the vision. This needs to get done. It needs to be made. You finish it, please. Are you started or whatever? Yes. I'm bad at that. And I'm, I'm working on getting better.
00:23:18
Speaker
It's important. It's hugely important. It's actually slapping me in the face how important it is. Yeah. The comment that sunk in with me a lot is Rob's comment, Rob Lockwood. Again, shout out to him as an individual who encouraged us to record this podcast.
00:23:40
Speaker
He, it kind of reminded me of how easy it is to have blinders on. And not even in a bad way, but just blinders. And he, I'm both paraphrasing and putting this in my own words, but basically there's an argument that you and I, or even companies like you and my, you, yours and mine in our positions might have done a really good job at operational leadership, which is true. I'm actually pretty proud of the gains we've made there.
00:24:10
Speaker
But it's kind of the question of what is leadership and what's needed. And the sort of topic was more around the visionary future leadership. And I'm not sure I have the answer yet for that, but I've started to think about it because I don't know
00:24:24
Speaker
There's a cynical side of me that's like, dude, we make fixture plates. Like, let's not confuse this with like, we're not trying to change the world, we're not visionaries. We make a really good product in an existing market that has utility and there's some things we can do better to market it and sell it, blah, blah, blah, but like, I don't know, visionary? Like I'm not, I'm not, you know, no. But I do think there's a lot of stuff that goes beyond the leadership of operations that happen inside these four walls.
00:24:53
Speaker
that I haven't. You don't put any weight to like, Yeah, and I'm not really good at it. Yeah, like, I would actually rather clean a toolbox. Then, I'm just not a visionary.
00:25:13
Speaker
I don't know. I got to join us one more. Yeah, exactly. I hear you. And I think the topic Rob was trying to put out is pain points, failure points, future looking pitfalls kind of thing. And if you or I disappeared, would the company even, like it could operationally survive, but would it visionarily survive and grow without our natural, for better or worse,
00:25:40
Speaker
effect, you know, built. And that did kind of strike me as, you know, something to think about for sure. And do you build? Do you want to build a company that legacies past you? Or do you want to just purely operate an amazing company that just like, Hey, we're here, we're doing it, we're having fun? I don't know. But
00:26:02
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's where I've, so far that I've gotten is recognizing, just trying to be very candid and honest. A lot of my passion that got me to where I am just simply is the fact that I freaking love machining. And like lots of solo printers that move beyond that.
00:26:20
Speaker
You know, those, that road splits. There's a fork in the road, the business operations and leadership versus being in fusion, posting programs, checking parts, building fixtures, stuff that I still think is fun.
Product Development and Sourcing Challenges
00:26:32
Speaker
And what do I want out of this versus what does the business need out of me? And from a visionary standpoint, you know, we're good at work on it. We're good at the products that we make, the value they represent. I've talked about it before in the podcast. We care a lot about the hobby world, even though
00:26:48
Speaker
growth opportunities, the visionary side is more in the in the machining center world just because the numbers are bigger. But, you know, I don't know anything about, you know, what happens at these major tech companies. But if you think about somebody that's playing in the augmented reality or virtual reality world, those companies have visions of trying to change the way we live in entertainment and education and training and embracing technology. Like those are all
00:27:17
Speaker
to start extrapolating that sort of visionary stuff into the mod vice, just seeing NBA marketing BS. Let's just relax. It's a very simple, inexpensive vice. Yeah, exactly. Anyway. Yeah. No, but I think you have huge long-term value in marketing to the hobbyists, because how many hobbyists do you know who've gotten their Haas or Okuma or built? Yeah. You're playing the long game, and it's working out for you.
00:27:44
Speaker
Yeah, no, no, that's true. And it is good. I'm at a point where I'm really grateful of the position right, which feels really good. Yeah.
00:27:52
Speaker
And that was my list. I think I started talking about like, what do I want out of the rest of this year and starting into the next year. And it was kind of, okay, Puck Chuck needs a lot of attention for marketing, for product development, for manufacturing processes. We've been killing it. I think I mentioned it on 3D printed QC gauges. This is one I'm open up of keeping it simple. It's one part with one machine operation that's complemented with 3D parts that allows us to do kind of idiot foolproof QC checks. You know, we could have a,
00:28:22
Speaker
Let's say somebody who's been through a machine internship program, day one, minute five, sweep the part across that gauge and understand how it works without things that are particular to an operator or risk of bad measurements. It actually took a lot of work to get to this. Previous version of it was a over-engineered monstrosity that was not reliable. This makes me proud. Yeah. It's incredible. 3D printing for the win.
00:28:52
Speaker
Not for sure. What's going on with you? So my guys told me we have one bar of Delrin left and we use this for making the bearings, the ball bearings inside of our knives, the bearing cage.
00:29:14
Speaker
And either I buy it locally or I buy it from somewhere else. And it's kind of like for the local place you call them, go pick it up kind of thing. Except the bars are bent like tacos and they can't auto load in the Swiss. They work and they're local and they're fine. And then we also got a bunch of super oversized ones that will not fit in the machine. Come on. So I was looking for other sources. You can buy centerless ground plastic bars. I didn't know that. That's kind of cool.
00:29:42
Speaker
Um, and then I, I have an email chain from two years ago with the centerless grinding company that specializes in grinding plastic. I thought that was interesting. Um, and they're like, we don't accept bars from our vendor unless they're extremely straight period. And I'm like, Ooh, I like these guys. So I looked at the quote and then I looked at McMaster and I'm like, wow, McMaster sells five foot bars of Delrin for like $8 a bar for half inch Delrin. And I'm like, that's almost free.
00:30:09
Speaker
It's not ground. I don't know how straight it is, whatever. We ordered four or five bars or whatever and they're great. Super straight, super awesome, cheapest chips. I'm like, guess where I'm buying Delrin from now. Sweet. But it's like something that we only make these bearings probably once a year and we make thousands of them. So you totally forget about
00:30:30
Speaker
You know, the inventory and like, Oh no, we ran out. I thought we had bars, but they're oversized and they don't work. So it's a bit of visual, you know, indicators of either throw them away or label them, tape them, something make them, you know, Oh no, get those gone. Yeah, exactly. When, uh, or return them. I don't know. Yeah. Not worth it. Yeah. This was a little, I.
00:30:55
Speaker
I'm nudging myself and I'm nudging you to enable your team to handle that stuff. Yes. It's, it's hitting me because a lot of this is still on my plate. The, you know, Oh, we're, we're out of this end mill. They don't make it anymore or something like that. Um, that's yeah, I can't be the one solving all those problems anymore. Yep. I think I still have a lot of, um,
00:31:23
Speaker
Attachment to some of these because like especially specific things like well I sourced it I created it I had the vendor, you know Make it just for us kind of thing or whatever whatever and to move that away from like, okay now It's your responsibility or the team's responsibility or whatever I think bit of subconscious like still holding on to it kind of thing or I'll just take care of it I'm the guy for that So I gotta learn how to yes get rid of that but I mean yesterday past two days was quite a bit of that actually like
Vendor Management and Efficiency
00:31:50
Speaker
We use this tiny little 1 16th inch high feed end mill on the Kern for doing titanium and it's fantastic. Compared to a 1 16th end mill, the 1 16th high feed removes slotting material in a way that will break the 1 16th regular end mill all day long.
00:32:12
Speaker
Yeah. So we use a great, except we got it from Seaco and Seaco gave me like an eight week lead time to get more. I'm like, I'm on my last one. Oh man. They're usually pretty easy to get. So I searching the internet, every source, every carbideapo.com, every MSC, everything I could think of. Nobody makes a high-feed end mill less than two millimeters. And I'm like, what? So anyway, I think I got a solution. But yeah, that took a lot of time, right?
00:32:42
Speaker
No, it does. And this happened yesterday. There's one washer that we sourced from a specific vendor versus a MSC or McMaster type company. And I'm talking to a rep right now at one of those big companies that we buy a lot from. And I'm like, hey, can you guys help us get this moved over to you?
00:33:01
Speaker
this that's over, like we're not doing this anymore. And even in that case, the pricing doesn't appear to be as good. But it's like, wait a minute here, you're talking about a part that's going to go from eight cents to 12 cents. And I actually don't not care about that. But I've got to remember in the grand scheme of thing,
00:33:19
Speaker
Nope. We don't, you're talking about, is it a hundred bucks a year, a thousand bucks a year to pay a higher price, but consolidate out, uh, away from a one-off vendor. And more importantly, here's the bigger leap that I didn't estimate. Not only do I not want to be part of that, like.
00:33:40
Speaker
like the trigger of buying something like the PO goes into Lex, the PO gets pushed. But I don't even want to have visual like seeing it like being aware. So like I'm not paying invoices anymore. I'm not tracking inbound stuff, which means
00:33:56
Speaker
all of those subconscious pulse checks of what's happening in the business are gone. And so now you start to appreciate a lot of this is like embarrassingly simple stuff of growing up. I don't even, I don't have a clue what's going on in a good way, but I do want to have some understanding of.
00:34:11
Speaker
of, you know, this is, it makes you realize why there's like reporting stuff. Yeah. How many POs, how many POs got pushed from our ERP, the system and how much, you know, I'm making this up on the spot now, but like how many were over 10 grand and how many were items that haven't been ordered in six months? Like thinking of what are things that I or a manager would want to know about? Yeah, exactly.
00:34:33
Speaker
When you get your fingers in the weeds, you see and you assume everything is important and you want to know it all and you look at all the stats and you wrap your head around. You want to see all the invoices, you want to figure it out. I don't know what our utility bill was last month and I don't care because Spencer handles it. There's a lot of things like that.
00:34:52
Speaker
that operationally, I'm proud to be completely ignorant on. I can check in, I can look up, we do monthly reporting meetings where it's sales worth, things like that, expenses and all that, a bit of vision planning, things like that. But yeah, a lot of stuff I'm blissfully ignorant to.
00:35:10
Speaker
I got to make sure it doesn't get out of control where I have no idea what's going on. I keep touching base, but I don't need to know that stuff. That's operations. The business is starting to run by itself, which is fantastic. I try to step back and think, where do I want this to go? Do I want more of that? Do I want a self-sustaining business that doesn't require me in five years, 10 years, something like that?
00:35:35
Speaker
Or do I want to keep my fingers on the pulse at all times? And so I can lead it and guide it and massage it, you know, take it where I want it to go. I don't have the answer right now, but I definitely think removing myself from as much as possible is the way to go so that I can focus on my biggest impact things, developing new products and having, you know, doing what I'm greatest at and what I'm having most fun at.
00:36:01
Speaker
That's interesting. I feel like I want to unpack that more about, okay, so sure, you need to do a better job, I need to do a better job at getting over basic business improvements of building a team and distributing. Set that aside. Why? Yes, the visionary, the planning, but what if that's not a priority? What if
00:36:24
Speaker
It's just like, no, we're going to just keep doing this as is. I kind of, kind of rewind it back to like, is this sustainable? So do you know, do you, are you making enough money and profit to have this work today? Is it, you know, long-term competitive enough to make sure you're not going to get out innovated by somebody else? That's a real thing that I don't think you and I talk a lot about, partly because we have respectively nichey, interesting products. But then is this what you want? Like, is this,
00:36:53
Speaker
if you can, as the owner of the business and the manager, whatever you call it, in the next two years, five years, 10 years, it's just more of what we're doing now. Is that good? Is that what we want? To write your own story? I don't know. Yeah. And I think a lot of businesses
00:37:13
Speaker
maybe think they want growth, but maybe don't actually want growth, or some definitely do want growth, or some are like totally happy and totally fine where they're at. And they're like, no, we're at a good level. I don't want more hassle. I don't want more employees. I don't want more taxes. I don't want more anything. Keep it stable. Keep it steady. Keep it at that level. And I think a lot about where we want to go. I do want to grow. I do want to accomplish more. I want to make more things. I want to be able to sell more products.
00:37:42
Speaker
have a bigger breadth of offering like that. That's not going to happen in the current state of the business. If I truly do want that, then I need to figure out how to be able to accomplish all the tasks that are currently on my plate. When all those balls start dropping, it doesn't work.
00:38:12
Speaker
We're standardizing or trying to or going to around Wira tooling. Nice. I've got some. Yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, it seemed like that. I think we talked about this. Apparently Snap-on tools now does charge for warranty repair work, which
00:38:30
Speaker
I've never owned a Snap-on tool, but I've always kind of heard, it's the end of the road, super high quality stuff, local, domestic, yes, the trucks are round, but like, it's also the joke of like, do you really want to pay $250 for a box and wrench, whatever. And part of it was like, well, you know, I'm done repairing a wrench, like we're going to buy one for life. But heard that, learned that. And then I saw, there's all these like really high quality PB Swiss, we-ha, we-ra. Lawrence had mentioned another one,
00:39:00
Speaker
We seem like the right fit of assortment of stuff and they are a formal Amazon affiliate or partner. So everything you can get on Amazon, which just makes it easy for us to do our purchasing. And so we've been buying a number of their torque wrenches and ratchet wrenches.
00:39:19
Speaker
It's nice stuff. Yeah, it's really nice. I've got one or two of their torque wrenches and some little hand tools, little screwdrivers. They got really nice rubber grip handles. The torque wrenches are mint, beautiful, fantastic. Price is up there, but the quality matches and they're just beautiful. They're just cool. Yeah.
00:39:42
Speaker
kind of jokingly coming back to that point about what I'd rather do. The team actually did a lot of the cleanup around our tool insert area. I helped a little bit, but then I did a lot of the lead effort. We had this toolbox kind of right in the center of our shop that had become a hodgepodge of miscellaneous screwdrivers, wrenches, knives, knives, all that stuff.
00:40:03
Speaker
And I was like, this needs to end. And so I spent two hours, kind of one of those projects that feels perculean, but when you spend two hours doing it, like, you know, I could hang up this podcast and do another one of those before lunch. Like it's not a big deal. And ended up putting all of our
00:40:19
Speaker
We found two or three empty toolbox drawers, or rather, some of them have old lathe stick tools from 12 years ago. That's gone now. I put in inch drivers, is what I call it, metric drivers, and torques drivers. So I don't care if it's an Allen key, a hex driver key that goes in a socket, a socket set itself. Any version of that, if it's inch, it goes in the inch drawer. And that drawer can frankly be a mess for now. But if you need to find an inch thing, it's going to be in there.
00:40:49
Speaker
I like that a lot. Same with metric. And then there's not really a, because I've never, we've always failed at trying to organize them within that, like putting every single hex bit in a little hex holder or sockets on things. Now, different story, like at the machines, we have 3D printed things for the eight millimeter tour, the six millimeter tour, but I'm just talking about the shop catch all bins should be a good improvement. Yeah. Yeah. I started doing that for our pneumatic things.
00:41:16
Speaker
Like the MPT fittings, things like that. And that's been awesome. I separated all MPT fittings with the push to connect fittings. So now I have a nice drawer with the grid finity bins with all my push to connects that are all labeled and beautiful. So if I need a quarter to quarter hose, butt to butt push to connect fitting, I've got a little spot for it and it's just so nice.
00:41:40
Speaker
That's been good because they used to just be all blended together and you can't find anything and you don't know what you have. I've actually started over buying a little bit so that we have inventory because it's amazing how wonderful it is to have that quarter to eighth inch NPT adapter in brass in stocks. You don't have to run to the store and fix an airline kind of thing.
00:42:02
Speaker
We keep a bunch of that stuff around, but rarely use it. Why are you... I don't know. Maybe we just use more airline stuff, projects, valves, things like that. Not in an airline somewhere or something? Yeah. I'm trying to think of an example. But you playing with the puck chuck, you're messing with airlines all the time, right? You must have a various selection of
00:42:23
Speaker
Yeah, no, we have a lot. And for sure, like when I buy it from the master Amazon or sometimes local Home Depot, when I'm buying one, I'll just get two more out of mail. Just that we have them. Because if I can solve my problem without leaving the shop or ordering anything, that is hugely valuable. Yeah, that's true.
00:42:42
Speaker
What's the update on your ROA?
Technical Integration Challenges
00:42:44
Speaker
So the local techs, Ferrotechnique, our sales company, came in last week and spent like three days. The amount of relays and switches they had to add to the back of the speedio is mind boggling.
00:42:59
Speaker
I remember you saying that. It's like, holy cow, like 25 new relays because he said the speedio has a 24 volt system and the aroa has a different 24 volt system and you can't cross them. So they need opto isolated relays to be able to send a signal from one to the other without touching those two 24 volts together kind of thing. Yeah.
00:43:22
Speaker
something like that. There's some decent amount of communication happening between the two machines with E-stops and door opens and chuck opens and pallet numbers and things like that. But the speedio side is now done. I think they're waiting on Iroa, the company to schedule a tech to come up and install and that Farah will come with them and they will tie the two together. It's a huge job. I'm
00:43:46
Speaker
both baffled and kind of annoyed at how big it became and how long
Leadership and Vision in Business
00:43:51
Speaker
it's taken. It's been a year and a half since I ordered the machine. I've had the machine for just over a year, but... Wait, you had the speedo for a year? Yeah. August to year and a year ago. Holy cow, John. That's nuts. Yeah. And like we use it, but not a lot. Not like the vision, right? The vision is like sweet pallet load. We're going to run blades all day, every day. And I'm not there yet.
00:44:15
Speaker
And part of that is the John Grimsmoor not having enough John Grimsmoor to go around. Same reason the Willimant doesn't run every day, et cetera.
00:44:27
Speaker
Yeah, but that's like what Andrew Henry was talking about was not having a boss, not having a board. I remember the context of the conversation, but like it's great and it's liberating, but it's also, I do value accountability. So I try to set enough time aside with myself, with my spouse, with you, with another friend that I have regular meetings with to try to just kind of lay it on the table to say,
00:44:56
Speaker
you know, yeah, what's, where are we at? Do you, I do that generally, but I don't have somebody who's specifically, I'm accountable to for specific tasks. Like nobody really knows what's on my plate.
00:45:17
Speaker
some specific tasks, but you know what I mean? I don't actually like offload to somebody close to me and be like, this is what I'm telling you I'm going to do. And then check with me tomorrow to see if I've actually done it kind of thing. I don't really have that. So I guess I'm kind of on my own there.
00:45:31
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't have like specific tasky stuff like that. But I do, first off, it's only as valuable as you want it to be. Just be honest. And, you know, this is one of the things where I mean, I know you and I have very candid conversations, but this would be probably a level of rawness and intimacy that's not going to be on a public podcast.
00:45:49
Speaker
Yes. And it's not like, did you do this? It's more of, kind of ties back to when I mentioned on a prior episode or two, kind of like the whole, don't take this the wrong way, but like this business has to work or else it's not, or else it's over. 100%.
00:46:04
Speaker
And like, Jay Pearson was talking about in his on his podcast, I just listened to these policies, lean bills for the first time, which is why it's top of mind. In his mentor, peer business group that he's in, there's one guy there who's like a true entrepreneur visionary, which is
00:46:21
Speaker
Not me, but it's something I've been thinking about the relevance to of like, that would be the example of a person that comes in and starts a knife making or fixture company by just literally being like, okay, I'm hiring an awesome marketing person. I'm hiring two or three machinists. I'm hiring an engineer and we're going to sit down and talk about what they need for equipment and processes, turn them loose, and then I'm going to check back within them very regularly, but like never ever even remotely once, you know,
00:46:51
Speaker
gets up on the steering wheel of the bulldozer. Right, because he doesn't know how to drive the bulldozer, but he knows how to steer the company kind of thing. And you and I are not that person, because we are technicians at heart. But we need to continue to learn to be that type of leader in a way that so many things happen without us. And the business starts to evolve and grow in a way that we fall ourselves into that role.
00:47:21
Speaker
It's not going to happen accidentally. If we want it, it's there, but you got to work for it. But that's why I feel like I'm trying to nudge you about making sure this isn't the conversation that we have a year from now. Yeah. I'm sure it will be, but at a different level. It's like money problems 10 years ago. We're a 10th of what they are today kind of thing. Things grow, but they're still there. Your nature is still your nature. I don't know.
00:47:50
Speaker
But we'll see. We'll see a year from now. Yeah. Yeah. Sweet tweets. What do you see today? I don't know yet. Fair enough. Yeah, honestly, not sure yet. Angel has been off this week, past today and past two days. So I'm kind of like he runs the shop. So I'm doing that. So there's a lot of running around and trying to figure out what he normally does.
00:48:18
Speaker
Got to keep it on board. So I'm saving time for that, I guess, is my answer. Well, I'll throw out an interesting one to end with, which is we are planning on selling Proving Cut. Oh.
00:48:33
Speaker
So this is both a sharing thing as well as a gentle. And it's simple. It's a great service and it's profitable. And I care about it, but it's also the simple way of explaining it is I'm not, I don't have to spend time on it today. And I'm not spending time I'd say in the, in the, you could have a long argument about this, but the site and the
00:48:58
Speaker
thing is mature, but it could use new energy, fresh perspective, somebody that wants to carry it to the next level. I'm not going to be doing that. And even if I won the lottery, it's not what I would do. So it's kind of like, okay, you could just keep, you know, quote, unquote, cashing the checks. But no, I'd rather it needs a new home. Yeah, that's cool. And so, you know, it's kind of one of those, you know, I care about
00:49:20
Speaker
having the right home on the flip side, that's the next order to decide how and what to do with it. Plan on being pragmatic about valuation because it's profitable, but in the grand scheme of what we're doing, that's the other reason this needs to go is that what it's going to transact for overall is going to be small relative to what we're doing at Saunders. It's all the more reasonable, okay, needs to
00:49:46
Speaker
I'm proud of what I've done, needs to find a new home. That's fantastic. Quick question, because we should wrap up soon, but for evaluating a company like that, I'm sure you're going through all the ways to value a company, right? Like, okay, this is our income per year, extrapolated, whatever. Or realistically, it just needs to go. It's like selling an old machine and you just price it to sell or car or something like that. Sure. Are those thoughts going through your mind? I'm sure.
00:50:13
Speaker
Oh, yeah. My favorite saying is it's worth what somebody will pay for it. Period, full stop. It is simple in that it has a sustained subscribership, or subscribership, revenue and profitability, full stop period. We have regular new subscribers. We have people that cancel their subscription because it's served its need or they just don't need it anymore, et cetera.
00:50:36
Speaker
So the simplest thing would be to look at the income stream. In this case, there's some other, you know, strategic reasons, like it has a huge customer list and the other reasons that could be complimentary, but like, you know, we'll see. Neat. That's fun. Yeah. Good for you. Yeah. It'd be good. Isn't it crazy? You built something that you could sell, like, like a small company, you know? Yep. That's next level. Good for you, man. I'm, I'm, I'm excited for that, that part. And I see it. It totally makes sense.
00:51:07
Speaker
Awesome. Well, go make the most of your go. You got it. I'll see you too, man. Bye.