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#223 - Machining Acrylic & Monitoring The Most Important Numbers In A Business
190 Plays4 years ago
TOPICS:
- Both John's are reading Traction by Gino Wickman. Has tons of great information.
- What are the most important numbers to monitor in your business?
- Do you watch cash on hand on a daily basis?
- Standardize info without the noise.
- Grimsmo is trying to machine acrylic, which is tougher than it looks.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Episode 223
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning, and welcome to the Business of Machining, Episode 223. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. John and I talk each week about how we're doing with our businesses, the resources, the things that we're doing to grow.
Exploring Business Growth with 'Traction'
00:00:15
Speaker
Actually, I have a great segue for that. The book that I think you recommended, which is we often think of growth as external growth. But actually, equally, if not more important, is internal growth.
00:00:28
Speaker
Which book? Traction. Yeah, you started? I just started it. It's fantastic. You like it? I'm to the point where I finished it. And I haven't started a new book yet because I need to go back and do all the things that I just read. So I'm kind of rereading some books and every night keeping up with it. But it's fantastic. For a company's our size and bigger, it lays it all out. One thing I really liked is his perception of,
00:00:55
Speaker
It's going to be difficult. There's decisions that have to be made that, yeah, it's going to suck. But if you want forward momentum, you have to do it. Yeah.
Reading and Retaining Insights
00:01:07
Speaker
What's your process for reading a book? 10 pages every night, no matter what. OK.
00:01:14
Speaker
And do you just read or do you like, will you reread paragraphs? Do you take notes in the book? Do you take notes on a piece of paper? If I like the book, I will not hesitate to underline things and bracket like chapter or paragraphs on the side.
00:01:29
Speaker
If I'm getting into the book and I'm like, I don't know if this is like a keeper, then I won't sully it. But if I like it, I'm like, this is mine. I want to refer to this. Six months from now, I want to crack it open and just flip through the pages and be like, oh, yeah, that. I remember that. Now I remember that. Yeah, so I highlight and underline things. And otherwise, yeah, just do my 10 pages. And then it tends a good number because it
00:01:57
Speaker
I force myself to do it. I don't have to force, but I do it no matter what. It's good because it's not too much. You don't get bored of it. It's not so little that you don't gain anything. After 10, you can chew on it for a day.
00:02:14
Speaker
So I really like that. I like to just kind of think it through and mull it over and it pops back into my head a couple times throughout the next 24 hours and then it accumulates like that. So you generally won't go beyond that. Like you won't read 30 or 40 pages if you're in the field. Okay. Maybe like 15 if it's really good or if I want to finish the chapter or something. You know, I kind of limit myself because it gives me, you know, 10 to 30 minutes depending on the book to do that. And I just, uh, it's enough.
00:02:42
Speaker
There's a lot there's a lot to be said for reading Even a paragraph or a sentence or five pages and then stopping and being like, okay What what just happened? Like what did they say? What do you think?
Summarizing and Referencing Books
00:02:54
Speaker
Because too often I find myself Reading for the sake of saying you want to get a certain amount read or a book done and that's not the point Yeah, it's not just to like put another notch in your belt but I
00:03:09
Speaker
Usually what I'll do is I'll make very light underlines, like one word, or I'll just put a little like an open-ended bracket next to a few lines on the side of the page. Then what I do is usually on the inside cover, which is usually empty, I will start marking the page numbers that I care about. When I'm done with the book, I'll have 75 page numbers,
00:03:38
Speaker
And I then will open up a single Word document that I started about 15 years ago that has every book I've read where I wanted to do this. So not a novel or whatever. And then I will re-go through each page. And it's, I think, really valuable because you get a second perspective. Some things are more important. Some things are less important when you've synthesized it and are re-digesting it. And I'll try to create my own Cliff Notes summary
00:04:07
Speaker
I like that it's in a single file because I know where all those books are and I can immediately go pull something up. Even right now, if you and I want to talk about Dale Carnegie, I can go. I know where those things are. I don't have to find the copy book. Yeah, it's cool, but I'll tell you, John, I don't actually use it that much. I'm not sure that's a bad thing, but you read these books like Traction or E-Myth.
Skepticism Towards Business Books
00:04:30
Speaker
It creates this mentality, this mindset. This obviously can get you pretty excited, but I wonder how ... I'm not doubting it. I'm just wondering how much they impact in the end. I read a great quote that said, inspiration without action is just entertainment. Right? Yeah. No, totally. I'm a very cynical person.
00:04:55
Speaker
like hyper cynical, especially when something like a book, like this is a guy who's trying to move, you know, he's trying to sell books to make money and he's almost certainly also trying to subtly or not so subtly upsell you on a service and pull you into some sort of a click funnel, you know, like come onto my website and do your evaluation now. And even when you break down the first welcome chapter of traction, it's kind of,
00:05:24
Speaker
doing everything a structured marketing plan would do, which is like an infomercial, like let's present the problem. Let's show how we can solve it. Let's directly address, you know, this book isn't like all other books. This is the book that talks about action. Well, that's what everybody says. And it's interesting because that stuff works and it doesn't necessarily make it bad content, but it also just makes me chuckle about how everyone's guilty of the same thing. You know what I mean? Yeah. Marketing's funny like that. Like
00:05:54
Speaker
The better people are at marketing, the less you notice it, unless someone like you is noticing it. It's like, wow, I see what you did there. He's trying to sneak one in. Yeah, I'm fairly cynical when I try to read these books, too. How much do you want to believe the guy, the author, whatever? And everybody's got their own level of acceptance for that.
00:06:17
Speaker
But having read the book, this guy's got another book that I read too called Rocket Fuel, which is similar but slightly different. It's got a nice twist to it.
00:06:27
Speaker
But he's been doing business coaching for the past 20 years, kind of like Emith Guy. He built the company of coaching, and the book is the end product after all the experience. So throughout this book, he's got lots of great examples. He's like, this company makes t-shirts, and they do $10 million a year. And here's the examples of how we broke them through to the next level, and how they resisted, and how they had their board meetings, and everybody was yelling at each other.
00:06:54
Speaker
One thing I did have with this book that I don't normally do, but there's a section like page 30 or 50 or something like that where it goes through 20 points, 20 questions you ask yourself about your business. So I grabbed a white sheet of paper, and I slapped it in there, and I wrote down my answers to that.
Applying 'Traction' to Business Vision
00:07:12
Speaker
And then after I got done with it, I did that immediately. And then it's still in the book. And then afterwards, I went to the website
00:07:20
Speaker
I thought it would be like a PDF on the website that you could just print out and fill out, but no, it's like click through saying, so that annoyed me. I found a PDF copy somewhere, like scan from the book, and I printed out five copies, and I gave one to each of the leaders in our company. I was like, fill this out, let's baseline ourselves.
00:07:39
Speaker
and see where everybody's at. And then you add it up and kind of compare the scores. And I was super hard on myself on that. So I got the lowest score of anybody. Everybody else is more optimistic. Give me some context of what that is. Is that about your internal operations? Is it about what's this whole? Did you see the list of questions yet?
00:07:56
Speaker
I did what I think a lot of people do, which is I was like, I need to do that. Because I said I needed to do it, I didn't even read it. It's actually open in my browser right now. I started the book this morning. Do you read the questions off the just one or two? Yeah. We're actually looking at the- They're like business leadership marketing. Do you have a vision in writing? Things like that.
00:08:20
Speaker
Yeah, that's what kind of struck me. It is a good timing because it's asking questions like if you ask all the employees at your company what the vision is, how different is that answer? I've done that. I've asked almost everybody here, not everybody yet, but it's really interesting to see where everybody's temperature is at for what the vision of the company is.
00:08:36
Speaker
Yeah, so it's called an organizational checkup. And it's things like we have a clear vision in writing that has been communicated and shared. Our core values are clear. Our 10-year target is clear. I'm paraphrasing. Our target market is clear. Our unique differentiators are clear.
00:08:53
Speaker
Uh, all the people are the right people. Uh, there's an accountability chart. Everyone's in the right seat to meaning they have the right job and capacity to do their job. The leadership is on, you know, continue questions like that. So look, there's nothing wrong with this. And it would be arrogant and hyperbolic to say that you don't need to do this stuff because I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, Hey, you know, we have some new people on board. We have a new focus.
00:09:18
Speaker
I know we can do better this stuff, so let's do it. You know your business inside and out, but those new people and even some of your mid-experienced people might not know what your vision is, what you're planning on, why they're there as a greater goal kind of thing.
Focusing on Saunders Machine Works
00:09:32
Speaker
Well, we have a decision to make, which is I want to and have been thinking about everything I do in terms of under this roof in my time as Saunders Machine Works selling fixture plates, mod vices, and accessories around work holding. That's my mindset these days. I still do other stuff, but I've been very much making sure that the priority is Saunders place.
00:09:55
Speaker
some outside suggestions that have been logged my way from people I look up to have said, careful, what you might want to think about is a little bit more of a lack less focus more broad based. What we do is help people that are new to machining or want to be better at machining and you do so through
00:10:18
Speaker
through YouTube, through education, through fusion training, through and through the fixturing products that you make and sell. And there's nothing wrong with that. I think it's a different
00:10:30
Speaker
It's very different. It's a different way to look at it because you do have that holistic package and you are actually trying to educate and improve people's workflow. Absolutely. And it is the package. You're not just a product division. You actually want to share information and you're really good at it. And that affects how you, as the guy said, how you structure your tagline, your elevator pitch kind of thing. Yeah, right.
00:10:59
Speaker
Cool. Yeah, reading through that list. Some of them are kind of difficult to read and to apply to yourself because you're like, yeah, I know I should be doing that. I haven't done that yet. Yeah. A few of them, you rate yourself one to five. So a few of them, I was able to be like, yes, we're at a five on that. But some of them are like a one. No, I don't have my vision in writing, clearly communicated to everybody on the team. Yeah. And maybe we should. It's not hard to do. Yeah.
00:11:29
Speaker
We are going to change up a few things, again, tying in the fact that we now have Dustin on board as our director of marketing. And we're actually, I would say, doing a very good job of working independently, so much so that we actually need to do a better job of rehuddling periodically, which I kind of like that idea that we almost went too far the other way, which is
00:11:55
Speaker
I think I share most office workers disdain for unproductive, just rigid, scheduled over length email or meeting. So starting to get together on a more regular basis, which works out great because we have some folks like the interns coming back full time for the summer. So it's much easier to do that stuff in person. And then also just making sure we're all on the same page about, hey, what's the focus? What are we doing well?
00:12:23
Speaker
Then tying to also tie that in with some analytical perspective so because of traction I started thinking about what sort of Metrics or report would I want to see and how often again? I don't want to create lots of busy work, but if I could step my foot, but don't worry about that Let's think about what you want before you think about how hard it is to get so it's like hey I'd love to know basic stuff like how many
00:12:47
Speaker
Plates did we sell? How many discrete orders did we have? How many new customers did we have? How many inquiries did we have? How many plates did we make internally, like separate from what sold because we're building up inventory now? And then even things like, hey, what are the top
00:13:03
Speaker
few problems that we're hearing about or people seem to be seeing and how do we think about tackling those. Such a collaborative thing like Alex just got the Shopify API working for our people inventory. Nice. Yeah, which is great. But hey, that matters to Ed, that matters to Julie, that matters to Garrett now, that matters to me. It matters to everybody in a slightly different way. It's good.
00:13:29
Speaker
Yeah, so that kind of stuff needs to be clearly communicated amongst everybody so that everybody can kind of pump their fists in the air for their own reason, a different method. Did you read the desert island quote about that? I don't know where it is in the book, but he's like, imagine your whole leadership team is stuck on a deserted island and every day one piece of paper comes in with a bunch of numbers on it. What numbers of your business do you want on that piece of paper?
00:13:53
Speaker
And so I think about that, too. I'm like, well, how many knives we made? I want to know how much money is in the bank account. I want to know how many problems there were, how many customer emails we got, things like that. And then each person on the team can be responsible for one of those numbers. And whether it's daily or weekly, it's up to you. But it's a cool way to think about one piece of paper, what do I need to know to understand where things are, what the temperature of the business is today.
00:14:24
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. So I was actually thinking I might do that with Barry. Just ask him every morning, shoot me a text with how much money is in the bank account. And then I just want to know where we're going with that. I know it's going to ebb and flow, but it gives me the sense of careful, because I went down that rabbit hole. Can I ask, why do you care how much is in your bank account?
00:14:50
Speaker
That's a good question. You could look at sales, but I know mostly because I don't always know. Why do you care?
00:15:00
Speaker
When I buy stuff, I know I can feel like I can do it. Let's dig deeper. Is it because you're concerned you could run out of money or you could just bounce a check because you have money in the wrong account? Yeah, it's part of that, but also I want to see it growing, not dwindling. Although daily, I know it's difficult because you're like income, outcome, income, outcome. Maybe weekly might be better or month. I know he tracks it all.
00:15:27
Speaker
That's
Understanding Key Financial Metrics
00:15:28
Speaker
a number I would like to see a graph of. You know what I mean? I feel like that would be nice. No. No? Too much emphasis in Western civilization on this balance sheet number. And it's literally what you're doing right now is you're at the first step of developing an actual
00:15:51
Speaker
accrual balance sheet, where it's not just on a balance sheet, it's assets, which is everything that you possess, not necessarily owned, but possessed equals liabilities plus equity. A simple example, if you buy a $100,000 machine tool,
00:16:08
Speaker
but you finance it, so let's say you put $10,000 down. You have a $100,000 asset on the left. On the right, you have two different things. You have a $90,000 liability because you owe the bank 90 grand, and you have a $10,000 equity because you put $10,000 into it. What you're looking at from the bank statement is you want to know
00:16:25
Speaker
your liquidity in cash flow projection, which is super valuable, John, 100% valuable. But that number is going to vary based on how soon payroll is due, how much if you just bought 10 grand worth of titanium, if you were doubling up on inventory for good reason, if you just bought a new machine.
00:16:44
Speaker
And so really, what you want to see is not that, but you want to see cash plus other current assets plus other inventory amounts, because it's not fair to think you're $10,000 poor if you just bought inventory that you're going to turn into profitable product. Yeah, and I understand that. Obviously, somebody has to be watching that number, and he does. Maybe sometimes I feel kind of out of touch with the day-to-day flow, and that's good, but I'm missing it a little bit.
00:17:12
Speaker
But no, it's a really good perspective of, I'll make sure to keep asking myself, why do I think I want that number on the page? Yeah. And to clarify, I commend what you're doing. Just don't do, I think, what's so easy to do, which is to think that you, John Grimms, are personally are more or less successful or happy based on the number that that happens to show. I think I could not do that. I think that would be fine. But maybe.
00:17:38
Speaker
Maybe the text comes in one morning and you're like, what the heck? Why is it down? Like 40 grand. Well, because I paid for a lot of stuff yesterday. Yeah, so I wouldn't want that. Maybe it's something that we'd try and I'd find that out on week three and I'd be like, yeah, this isn't working. Do it weekly or something. We only know our own personalities, but it seems
00:18:00
Speaker
We're very predisposed. For some reason, if that number pops up a bunch, you're thinking, oh, awesome. You don't ask why. Maybe it's because you sold an asset, which doesn't in any way make it a good thing. And so you think if it's higher, you're happy. And if it's down, you may be bummed, or you may start rationalizing it. Well, let me make sure it's not down for bad reason. Then you see it's just- That's a good point. It's going to bring up more questions on a daily basis then. Why is it down? And then it wastes a whole bunch of time.
00:18:29
Speaker
just tracking down leads that are already taken care of. What I had a living realization of this past week is classic business dilemma of why isn't the bank account growing? It's the same question you're asking.
00:18:47
Speaker
Obviously, I want to see it grow to accept. Same thing. Something on our end has to do with we bought more inventory and growth each cash for breakfast. So far as I can tell, going through our statements, we're fine. We really are fine. But what it reminds me of is the scenario in which you are
00:19:08
Speaker
charging an adequate profit margin on your products. So you may make some money when you sell a product, but the reality is you're turning around and buying your raw material. You're paying your overhead. You're paying your rent. And so it's this constant cycle of in and out where at the end of the day, you're just treading water. You're never actually making money. So from that standpoint, a
00:19:30
Speaker
income statement showing your one week or one month or trailing 30 profitability is much more important. And what a lot of companies will do is try to look at numbers like EBITDA. I can quickly get fancy here, but strip out things that are non-recurring to look at more of a run rate. Like, hey, literally, how much profit did we make from our contribution margin? Knives sold, pen sold, minus the cost of goods sold. Yeah, exactly.
00:20:00
Speaker
Yeah, and we do that. I guess it tracks that monthly. You can't track that daily because everything ebbs and flows too much. You can.
00:20:11
Speaker
But yeah, at the end of the day, I'd say it all the time here. Well, with Barry, it's profitability is what matters. You know, it's like 100%. That's what makes you money or not. And if you're at 1% profitability, you're not doing so good, even at, you know, more 10 or 15, 20%. Like, if you're buying stuff and growing that money disappears. Yes. I mean, so we're always trying to push push that profitability so that we can grow and still make money and have more money to grow. And then like,
00:20:38
Speaker
you know, buy a building or more machines or invest or heaven forbid, take out money for the owners. Yeah, right. No, totally. But for the last 10, 20 years, certainly in the US, probably longer, but I wasn't around as an adult, a profitable company with a track record,
00:20:56
Speaker
can easily gain access to capital. I'm not saying it's right for anybody and I'm not necessarily encouraging debt, but whether it's borrowing, lines of credit, access to capital won't be a problem. Make sure your statements support it. So I would say don't worry as much about what that balance or that checking account number happens to show, but rather look at, hey, are we making money?
00:21:22
Speaker
Awesome. Good, great topic,
EBITDA and Business Performance
00:21:24
Speaker
dude. Yeah. No, I used to be scared of money in general five plus years ago. And then since Barry and I talk about it all the time now, and we have quick meetings, but also deep hour, two hour meetings over the past few years about it. I've learned so much. I respect it more. I appreciate it more. I can understand just about every word you just said, except for the EBIT one and whatever that was.
00:21:47
Speaker
But I can carry a conversation talking about finance now. And I really like that skill. It's cool. It's important. Can I explain EBITDA? Sure, yeah. So it's more of a metric that's used for publicly traded companies or big companies. If I recall, it's not technically a GAAP term. So it's not like a rigid accounting number. But it's a generally accepted term. It stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.
00:22:17
Speaker
Okay. That sounds like a lot, but it's actually pretty simple if you break down what EBITDA is. EBITDA means how much we earn before we paid things like interest expense, taxes, and then depreciation and amortization are non-cash charges for things like, hey, you're Mori, Siki, or you're Nakamura. You get tax advantages by debiting that machine over five years or seven years. Same thing with amortization.
00:22:45
Speaker
So it basically shows how Grimms with Knives would be doing by selling its products, buying its cost of materials, paying its employees, paying its rent, but not worrying about the interest expense on the machines. Because that's kind of how you've chosen to capitalize a company. And it's not worrying about how you get tax treatment for how you depreciate stuff, because that's smart of you. But it's not affecting the core business of how do we make a Norseman, sell it, and make money. So it strips out all the
00:23:14
Speaker
fluff and just does input output kind of thing. Yeah. And it's sometimes called a proxy for cashflow, not really because things like interest expenses are real cash expenses. It's money. But nevertheless, this idea from a financier standpoint is that you can choose interest for big companies. Financing and interest rates are just a tool, a mechanism, not necessarily a means of survival. So you can actually literally choose to adjust that stuff as they want to.
00:23:44
Speaker
They can borrow more money, it may be at a higher rate, but that's their decision. Technically, that doesn't affect operations. Bingo. Yeah. Cool.
00:23:57
Speaker
You make sense? I'm just trying to think of if I'd want to know it. You know what I mean? If somebody called me up, this is completely theoretical, of course, but if somebody called me up and said, hey, John, the owner of Spyderco just died, would you want to buy the company?
00:24:16
Speaker
I couldn't afford that company. Not my industry, not my world. But one of the things you'd want to understand is, does Spyderco make money? Sure. They may have a boatload of interest expense, but that may just be because they're over capitalized because for some reason, they just took on a lot of debt. Now, you'd have to figure out how to pay that debt off. But if you could, and you could still get the right return on your investment, that could be a super profitable company that's just been mismanaged. Again, completely theoretical. I just know Spyderco is like the name I think of when I think of
00:24:45
Speaker
Nice. Yeah. Nice companies. Yeah. Makes sense? Yep. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's kind of, you know, we talk about it over the years, you know, an investor walks into your building and I was like, I got $10 million. What would you do with this money? He would want to know numbers like that on the first minute of being there, you know? Yes. Bingo.
00:25:05
Speaker
That's cool. And as an owner who has no interest in selling, it's good to have that perspective, though, to think like, I just want to have a pulse of what we're going on. You're always selling. No, you're not looking to actually part ways with your ownership, interest, and growth, but you're selling yourself to... You're selling yourself your personal decision to continue to invest in this company. You're selling the bank if you do want to borrow money. You are selling it. For sure. Yep. So you have to know this stuff.
00:25:37
Speaker
Good. There's a great quote, actually interaction, kind of one of the like, Oh, I like this too. In the beginning when he talks about, it has a lot of parallels to that topic you and I've talked about, about if you had, if you approach your own business like an investor, and he talks about like, Hey, do you have the ability to look at your own business, not from your personal perspective, but from a higher level, like be an outside analyst of your own company of what's going on, and what's going well, and what's not.
00:26:08
Speaker
And that's hard to do because so many of us are just head down. I just want to make a part. I just want to keep the customer happy. I just want to develop a new thing or just keep the machines running. I'm so busy buying animals and coolant and material. You shouldn't be, John. No, I'm just saying theoretically. Classic entrepreneur thing.
00:26:30
Speaker
No, as far as outsourcing purchasing or offloading purchasing, I don't buy anything anymore. I almost did it last night because I'm like, it's right here in my email. I could just reply to the email and say, please order this again. I was like, nope.
00:26:44
Speaker
I printed it out, and I asked Barry to order it, and it's a thousand bucks. I didn't want to just order it willy-nilly. One of those next-gen coolant coalescers. Got it. Yeah, for the Willyman coming in. So I was like, no, Barry can handle it. And I wrote on the thing. I said, order at your discretion, but we need it for when the Willyman comes in. So you handle it. I thought those were like 500 bucks.
00:27:05
Speaker
Yeah, US, 500 US. And then I got the extra smaller float, not the big three ball. Sure. There's a small one. That's another 130 bucks. So yeah, Canadian, it's 1,000 bucks by the time it's all done and taxed and everything. Any update on the woman? It's in Toronto. I guess just in storage. I have an email from LNS that I got a look at this morning about the bar loader and then
00:27:33
Speaker
We'll see. Congrats. Hope it gets here soon. It's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, so we're trying to figure out exactly where to put it. We've got two spots in the shop that it could go. And the question is, are we getting another Swiss sometime in the next year? If so, it's going here, not the Willimand. Or if not, then the Willimand can go here. And I don't know, still not fully decided on that one. Isn't it foregone that you will, can, and should buy another Swiss? Just a question at the right time? Probably.
00:28:04
Speaker
Yeah, probably. I'm proud of the team.
Innovative Product Development
00:28:14
Speaker
Alex came up with a new product idea. We huddled on it real quick. It's a great idea.
00:28:20
Speaker
Grant is using our dual spindle lathe template to tackle programming the part, writing the part, setting it up. I'm not sure if this is worth the point of a full repeatable cycle on this, but pretty darn awesome of hey, idea, execute, tools, resources, rock and roll. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, I've got Pierre yesterday.
00:28:50
Speaker
programming a Swiss part almost from scratch, which is good. He hasn't gone through that process yet. We gave him the outline, let him go for a couple hours and then check in and let him go. He had a lot of great questions. He put a little macro if statement in there because we've got two versions of the same part.
00:29:10
Speaker
Do you start in like infusion even with that? Or is it just all hand-coded from scratch? All the operations are in fusion, turning, grooving, threading, things like that. And then we post each operation and snippet out the main bulk of it. But in our template gcode, we have all the spindle on, coolant on, because that's not good in the post right now.
00:29:35
Speaker
Literally my next question, not trolling you at all, but isn't that stuff that if the post worked? If the post worked, yeah. And I do have a post, but it's really picky and it's weird and I haven't moved into it yet. You know what I mean?
00:29:49
Speaker
Yeah, look, if you're not job shopping, it's just a little bit of ... I kind of hear you, you know? Yeah. This guy on Instagram I was watching finally got a spree for Cam and it seems legendary for Swiss stuff. He was like, the learning curve was brutal, but I just posted a 15-op program and it worked. Yeah, that's awesome. On a Swiss. He's like, okay, I'm sold. This is cool.
00:30:16
Speaker
That's the first I've ever heard of that. Not that I had my ear to the ground on all Swiss stuff, but smart guys like Chris Welch are still not using cam soup to nuts. Was it part maker that used to be kind of Swishish? Yeah. Yeah. Esprit is the one that pops up all the time for Swiss. As far as I know, that's their biggest seller. I don't know. I'm making that up. But it's the only time I hear about Esprit is in Swiss stuff.
00:30:43
Speaker
I definitely hear about it on the B axis mill turns, which is sort of simple. Yeah, right. But I know area four nine was using their master master camp for that master cam for the lathe. Cause I think partly also because their, their lathe guy is a master camp guy, but then inventor for the five axis grove and horizontal, et cetera. Yeah.
00:31:10
Speaker
I have a question slash for you an audience and dilemma, which is we're trying to again standardize
00:31:18
Speaker
collaborating as a team, access to information without additional noise. So when we place orders from companies, distributors, et cetera, you often get an
Streamlining Order Confirmations
00:31:27
Speaker
email response. And that email response has a number of great tidbits of value. Part numbers, order date, tracking number, something you can search to find it again later if not everything goes into the ERP and that's okay. But man, I don't really want McMaster and MSC
00:31:46
Speaker
whatever other next-gen coalescers. I don't want that to just be my personal inbox. Gmail style inboxes are so much more efficient and good at searching than trying to look through order histories on each proprietary vendor's website. Trying to think of a way, we use Google Suite, which is great, but
00:32:06
Speaker
I kind of want a way of having all order confirmations to go to a specific email address that we all have by default in our access to like when I search my Gmail, it could be there without having to like, Alex came up with a pretty cool way that Google Suite promotes, which is we would create a new
00:32:27
Speaker
orders at Saunders, separate account, which bootstrapper comment. I don't love it. It's an extra $5 a month. I should get over that. But nevertheless, I'm like, hold on. I don't want to pay more right yet. But you could do that. And then you could delegate
00:32:41
Speaker
Everybody could become a delegate of that account, which is you could access it to send emails at it and so forth. So that's not a terrible solution. I just feel like in this day and age, there's got to be something I'm not aware of that would be a better way of is it like a slack type thing? Or is it some other sort of a general inbox so that you could search?
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah. Things like that are where email haven't evolved, I guess. Yeah. You know, with the delegate, like Fraser's a delegate to my, um, personal email because most stuff is still going through my personal, although I am moving to a corporate email, but yeah, he's been delegate on there for awhile. And, uh, you have to basically switch users in Gmail. It's not in your inbox. It's like flipping the page to a whole new thing. So if you had that for orders at Saunders, it's just annoying, you know?
00:33:30
Speaker
I mean, maybe it's not because you want to look for, let's say we ordered some boring bar insert three years ago. We don't use it very often, but I want to find it. I don't necessarily want that in my main inbox. And the nice thing is that all the orders would be in that separate account. So you don't, again, that's the concern is you don't remember, did we buy this from MSC or McMaster or was it a one-off.com site? It'd be easier
00:33:57
Speaker
Maybe not the end of the world, but I just feel like when you're in your... Do you use Gmail? Yeah. Okay, so yeah, like you see there's your like other all-mail or other inboxes where you can have stuff be scheduled as red, but it doesn't have to show up. Yeah, it auto disappears. Yeah, exactly. Just feeds right in there. But still searchable. Yeah, I do quite a bit of that. You got all the folders and the parameters.
00:34:24
Speaker
Mark the email I read and just park it right in here. I ended up doing that for sales. An order comes in. I was like, I don't need to see it. Good for you. But I need that record of it.
00:34:38
Speaker
Yeah. For a while now, six months or something, I have no idea if any orders are coming in or not. Turn off all my notifications. I don't get the emails anymore. Fraser and Barry are totally on top of that. I just don't need to. Do you look at Shopify or some report though? Nope. Ever, huh? Nope.
00:34:57
Speaker
I get updates from them. So, I mean, I'm kind of removed in a sales aspect. I know things are selling and I know things are coming through and it keeps me fairly updated. But with things like that and cashflow, I just kind of want the quick update. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's fair. I think about that.
00:35:18
Speaker
Yeah. What else going on? Uh, so I've been trying to machine acrylic and it does machine great, but it's super brittle and I've cracked like five pieces. Um, so I, they're like one and a half inch diameter rods.
Machining Challenges and Solutions
00:35:33
Speaker
Um, I dovetail the bottom, but I've had like three dovetails rip off. Cause like when you're tightening in the vice, you're like, how tight do I go? I don't know. Not that tight. Not that tight. Um, and I was watching one of them and.
00:35:47
Speaker
Pierre and I were watching it and you could just see it start to bounce a little bit and he's like, it's bouncing and then it flew out. Do you have a way of holding it in a column or round?
00:35:57
Speaker
That would work really well. But no, I don't have anything that big. But at the end of the day, it hit me like a text to G last night. It hit me like a ton of bricks. These need to be 3D printed. I don't know why I'm still trying to machine this. I'm beating my head against the current, trying to make this cool work because it's cool and I put so much time into it. And I'm like, dude, I can't do it on my Prusa because I need super high resolution.
00:36:24
Speaker
How many people do I know have an SLA printer, or I could just send it to a store and have it printed? So I did that last night immediately. Good. And $112 gets me five pieces printed. It's like, done. And then I stopped thinking about it, do something else. Awesome.
00:36:42
Speaker
Yeah, I was laughing. So yeah, in the context of this conversation was that I somehow like Rob Lockwood or somebody was talking about printing and I had commented that man, when I first got our SLA printer earlier this year, I loved it. So cool. And I've now reverted to the average or the normal response, which is SLA is a pain in the butt. The resin is just a pain in the butt. Like FDM is so much easier, but FDM is not as detailed.
00:37:10
Speaker
And I wholeheartedly encourage outsourcing that SLA type stuff to the people that do this every day. You had said there's one 20 minutes away. I'm like 20 minutes away means Canada post. Do not drive there and pick it up. You might go pick it up. I know. But just drop it in the mail. It just shows up on your desk. Yep. That's the best. Like Shapeways too. I don't think I've ever ordered from Shapeways, but I've been tempted a bunch of times. Yeah.
00:37:38
Speaker
Shapeways, we've done 3D hubs and we actually did Xometry for a bigger, a little bit more of a like, I want to make sure this turns out okay, which was nice for that part. Nice. Is Xometry as in a freelancer working for them or they have their own 3D print? Xometry, I'm 99% sure. Well, I know they have a huge in-house 3D printing. Okay. It's totally different than their
00:38:04
Speaker
The job shop stuff is basically everybody's partner. It's not any Xometry owned spindles, but the 3D printing stuff is. When we were driving down to Washington DC for that Smithsonian Adam Savage thing, we stopped by the Xometry headquarters to meet them. I saw all the poly jets and SLA printers and stuff. It was pretty cool. Nice.
00:38:28
Speaker
Yeah, and then I had a thought. So I sent off the files last morning. I called them four times. Nobody answered. So I'm like, whatever. I'll just order it online. And then this morning, I'm thinking about it. I'm going, wait. Can you heat press the threaded inserts, like the little brass threaded inserts you shove in with the soldering iron? Can you do that on an SLA print? I don't know. After it's done, you mean? Yeah.
00:38:53
Speaker
Like with FDM, because you can, because it just melts. It's easy. Yeah. But I don't know about SLA. And there's two of them in these models. And I'm like, I need to talk to them before they start printing stuff. It's not a thermoplastic, to your point. But there's got to be some procedure. Depending on how critical it is, I wouldn't hesitate to press it in with some adhesive as well, though.
00:39:15
Speaker
Yeah. Do you know if small threads work okay on an SLA print? Define small. 440.
00:39:24
Speaker
I am sure SLA printers could print 440, whether yours will or the right settings resolution, you can't answer that. I don't know. I need to talk to them about that. I have no problem chasing it with a tap, but I don't need it to hold well. I just need it to hold. Or I redesigned it and I put a nut in the back, so that would work too.
00:39:45
Speaker
Yeah, do the little hex release in the nuts, or doesn't rotate. Yeah, I was just sort of rushed in my mental state of like, gosh, just gets us 3d printed. So I export the files immediately without thinking about it and just uploaded to their website and hit buy. I would guess it'll work. But yeah, okay. Yeah, I'll call him today. Cool. That's exciting.
00:40:07
Speaker
We're working on, I'm loving it, this fixturing recap series. We've done like three or four of them publicly. I've got another three or four more edited. And we're just going through these videos that we've done where the topic, the video subject or topic wasn't necessarily focused on large part recording or multiple part recording, but the video talks a lot about that. So we're kind of re-discussing, here's a five minute video where we go through eight projects using soft jaws or eight projects that we held in large parts.
00:40:36
Speaker
with the sole point of like, let's say you or a new intern or Sky or somebody who was like, hey, I don't know how I'm going to hold this. Well, hopefully these videos will be a resource where you can watch in five minutes, eight different examples that are quick. And you can go down those individual rabbit holes or resources if it's kind of what you're looking for. But I'm really hoping that's a good resource and tool for folks. Yeah, yeah. Whether it's pit bull clamps or anything. Yeah.
00:41:06
Speaker
That's good. I like that. Now, question for you. Do you save all of your footage or are you ripping this from finished published YouTube videos? Oh, we save footage for sure. Yeah. Yeah, we have a little NAS. Cool. Good to know.
00:41:21
Speaker
earlier on I always kind of thought this is kind of funny to think about but I thought there may be a day when YouTube gets bought or shut down or you know kind of like the way of real player or even the old school remember Google video used to be a thing separately from YouTube so I thought and YouTube was in a weird way it was more important to me when I left my day job because I thought YouTube might be
00:41:42
Speaker
more of what we do as a thing. So I was like, oh, I got to save all this footage. What if I need to re-upload it? At this point, I'm not- Are you talking about an edited finished video or all raw footage? Oh, sorry. We only keep the finished video. Yeah, okay. Good grief. Yeah, of course. Yeah. The raw footage. Yeah, exactly. That's what I was wondering. Do you? Yeah, we do the same. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Especially when he films in 4K or whatever. He's like, that was 30 gigs of two minutes of footage or whatever.
00:42:11
Speaker
I actually think we have like a one terabyte SSD that is like the most recent years worth of stuff that we may be more likely to query again and then the NAS is kind of slow, platter drives. It's just insane how cheap storage is. I bought another 128 gig SD card, a one terabyte SSD is like whatever, under 200 bucks or something. Exactly.
00:42:33
Speaker
Yup. Nuts. Yeah. And like the micro SD cards, 128 gig, that's insane. Right? Like 10 years ago, a USB stick that had eight gigs was like a good day. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. My college, like welcome to college thing was, I think a 32 megabyte SD card or USB, sorry, USB.
00:43:00
Speaker
It's crazy. Fun to reminisce though. Cool. What do we have today? Call the 3D printing company. Mentally shift my brain to another project now that that project is waiting on them. So that's good. I don't know actually. Interesting. I will look through my list and I will find some cool things to make. Got it.
00:43:28
Speaker
Try to transition Norseman parts onto the Kern or partially. So the Kern will make some operations and then other fixturing ops like up two or three or whatever can go on the Maury. And it's working great. I just need to spend some time to multiply it. You know, like I've made one repeatedly, but now I need to pattern the code or whatever I got to do to make sure it goes all the way around the tombstone and makes all the cool parts. Got it. So yeah, that's probably what I'll work on today.
00:43:58
Speaker
I mean, in a good way, too much to do on my... I want to make a note to ask you about something next week. Too much on my to-do list, which is kind of good because I've been...
00:44:10
Speaker
I would give myself a really strong grade for the past month of delegating and making sure stuff's happening. It's really phenomenal. I don't say that for any other reason than just to document, memorialize that we're doing it.
00:44:28
Speaker
were the US, the CDC guidelines have changed. We're kind of rethinking our COVID policies now in a good way. Just got some new polo shirts in. I want to make sure I like those. And getting people here up to speed on what... It's just simple stuff like making sure job descriptions, responsibilities are clear.
00:44:48
Speaker
I'm actually going to film a shop update, including an overdue update on what's happening with Johnny Five. Nice. Look for that soon. That's awesome. That's exciting. Cool. Have a good day. Well, last thing. Fraser's suggesting that we film a complete shop tour walkthrough. Yes. Absolutely. This is what the building looks like from the outside. Do you have a perspective of what our shop looks like?
00:45:17
Speaker
I don't. Yeah. I feel like I would like to watch a shorter version. I know you could do a like hour long version. I feel like it'd be awesome to have a like 10 minute version as well. Just a fly through. Kind of. Yeah. Okay. Good to know. Or just timestamps. I don't know. Timestamps are phenomenal on YouTube. Yeah. I got. Yeah. Yes. Awesome. Have a good day. You too, bud. Take care. Take care. Bye.