Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Business of Machining - Episode 103
225 Plays7 years ago
Getting Social In 2019, and sharing reality!
Grimsmo starts to post Instagram stories daily. Bonus: We get more info on the upcoming Saga Pen!
BUT Saunders and Grimsmo agree that they don’t need to stay up-to-date on everything all the time.
“Use Instagram the way that works for you...we’re not just going for clicks and views, we’re trying to build a community of people who care, and want to see what we’re doing” - Grimsmo
Example of a Reality Check: In Grimsmo’s latest video, Jo mentions that we’re using the old tumbler a little more than the new tumbler lately. And that’s just a reality.
Saunders guest stars in another podcast! It’s called The Edge with Bantam Tools
This company is now owned by Bre Pettis, one of the owners of NYC Resistor, and the 3D printer company, MakerBot.
Growing Pains = Long Term Gains
To think about hiring, you’ve gotta think about firing
Saunders and Grimsmo talk about the difficulties of being an entrepreneur.
“I hired too quickly, and I fired too slowly. The problem with having a bottom performer on your team is that he/she gets all the attention, when the second worst performer flies under the radar” - An inspiring entrepreneur Saunders is quoting
“Being an entrepreneur is something I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy, yet all of my best friends are entrepreneurs” - Grimsmo
Great example from The Eagles Biopic on Netflix
What did it feel like when the band broke up? “It was a terrible relief” - Don Henley
Even when there’s no specific problems with the team, as an entrepreneur, it’s still necessary to constantly be thinking about the future (which includes the future of employees).
Saunders and the Mobile Desk
Saunders gets a backup battery for his computer, and sets everything up to be movable. Now he can move his office, into a quieter space.
Let’s talk about finance! Growth eats cash for breakfast!
“I haven’t yet felt the benefits of running a profitable business” - Grimsmo
Saunders and Grimsmo discuss how to regard the finances as accurately as possible.
“Most businesses fail not because of lack of profitability, but because of cash flow”
The Saga: Almost a Year in the Making
The Grimsmo Shop seizes every chance they get to make pen parts when the lathe isn’t making knife parts.
Grimsmo talks about Angelo’s strategies to tighten those tolerances on the super small parts of the pen.
The pens will be sold through the Maker’s Choice list, but it’s not live yet. Subscribe to Grimsmo’s Instagram and YouTube for updates on this.
Lathe is running well, and Grimsmo adjusted the SFM! What is SFM? There’s a video for that.
Saunders has a question for the audience!
The big fan is great for cooling the air, but we want a better climate control system for the summer.
“I wanna buy a beer for an HVAC guy!” - Saunders
ALARM! Wrong tool in spindle
Grimsmo had two pallets alarm out at one custom code that he had put in. It helps protect his tools and his parts with one warning called “wrong tool in spindle”
Recommended
Transcript
Instagram Stories vs. Posts
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning. Welcome to the business of machining episode 103. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Rimsmo. Good morning. Good morning, buddy. How are you? I'm doing really good. Good. Fantastic week. Just pumped, ready to go. Things are going relatively great. What more could you ask for?
00:00:21
Speaker
Yeah, I can't argue with that. Seeing the Instagram posts of the saga is just pissing excellence. I love it, dude. The quality of those parts, the quality of the Instagram photos, the whole saga of the saga, I am a fan.
00:00:42
Speaker
Yeah, I kind of made a little new year's resolution to myself to actually start doing stories and try to do one every day at least. Um, I noticed like Sundays are a little light because I'm like, I'm at home. Like what am I going to post on a Sunday? But anyway, uh, it is fun posting progress update quick little, like there's so much easier than I expected. Just like you take a picture and you post it as opposed to like pining over description and tags and all this stuff. It's fun.
00:01:10
Speaker
Oh, interesting. I never actually consciously thought about that as the difference between a story and an Instagram post is that you don't have to write anything. That's fair. Yeah. It's quick and like first person view kind of quick and dirty, any picture kind of goes. So I like it. It's having a lot of fun with it. When you consume Instagram, do you scroll through the feed more or do you look at stories more?
00:01:35
Speaker
I'd say slightly more stories now. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. But selectively, like I'll fly through them if they're not interesting. Yeah. You had that forward. Yeah, yep. Do you, do you try to like swipe your feet a lot every hour or two? No. Yeah.
00:01:56
Speaker
As I have time, which might be like lunch or bathroom breaks, I can't keep up
Balancing Social Media and Business
00:02:04
Speaker
with it all. I miss a lot of stuff, but I'm okay with it. I'm good with it.
00:02:10
Speaker
I'm there too. Being honest, I wasn't last year. I used to probably, probably every half an hour hour I would catch up to the feed and now it's been nice to detach. The world goes on even if you don't see something posted on Instagram. That being said, I do honestly enjoy being part of that community. I'm not disparaging Instagram in particular, but sometimes it does get to be a bit much.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah, it becomes a time consuming thing and you and I have growing businesses to attend to that are frankly more important than seeing what our friends and not friends are up to every second of every day.
00:02:46
Speaker
Right. Well, and there's an element, you know, I think part of the reason I've enjoyed some of social media is it's, um, and this may sound really corny, but it lets me be who I want to be. Let's be who I am. And that's John Saunders, the guy who does this machine stuff and some technical stuff. I'm not necessarily quote unquote popular in some senses of the word. And you and I, I think probably got to, uh,
00:03:10
Speaker
hit it off early on, not just because of our common interests, but because we have such similar backgrounds, the jokes about, and I love my life, but we weren't necessarily the quintessential popular sports kids or whatever in school. No, definitely. Right? But now, and I don't necessarily fault the folks that are behind the algorithms of these social media engines, but they're kind of pushing it towards, well, whatever is the most popular and the most engaging,
00:03:34
Speaker
gets brought to the top. And again, I understand that. And that's not to say you shouldn't make content even like our, like your saga stuff is primo, like that stuff I think will probably do really well. But sometimes for me, it's not necessarily what stuff I want to go doctor up and take high res photos and move them over to my phone. And like you said, kind of get into this like popularity contest of what this is.
Authenticity in Online Content
00:03:56
Speaker
And so that kind of takes it away from, it's just kind of bringing it back to the stuff I don't like.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's a weird balance of hacking Instagram, but in your way, the way that works best for you.
00:04:10
Speaker
me posting quick little shop updates and saga pen updates and things like that has worked really, really well. And I'm getting super great feedback from that. But I'm not going to take some Instagram course and do what the gurus are telling me to do because that's that's not who we are. Like, you know, post at whatever time and post X many times per day and all that crap. Like, no, don't care. Yeah. Unsubscribe. Right. But I want to keep it. And maybe we'll
00:04:39
Speaker
To some extent, we may lose by making this decision, but I don't really care because I think in the long run, I think in the long run, I still win. But sometimes it's not always crazy to show, hey, I'm just having a hard time getting a high speed steel drill to break chips on steel on a not sexiest machine in the world. That's not some guy on some fancy channel running multi-axis B middle turn head thing. It's not clickbait. Yeah.
00:05:06
Speaker
So, but that's okay. It's real. I mean, that's an aspect to it that you and I have fed off of. And I hope we continue to feed off of and give is the reality of it. And, you know, honestly, there's a lot of stuff that happens here that I don't want to show. You know, like I'm really struggling with something and I'm like, Aaron, let's not film that because I just, you know, I know, I know. I totally agree. I should. But every now and then it's like, oh, I just not feeling it like this is a problem. I don't want to talk about it.
00:05:35
Speaker
But I should I should do it more well in the day. So so I will continue to supply that content That's who I am. But the day it's not demanded by that platform is is when i'm out So again, it goes back to some stuff on youtube in terms of we certainly sacrifice Our youtube success by doing what we do. We could do things differently. I know it and change that but um And that's tough because youtube, you know isn't something we can leave because we're kind of stuck with it for better or worse, but uh
00:06:04
Speaker
Um, I don't, I don't, uh, I think that's healthy in the long run. You're, you're, you're turning it into, I mean, effectively it's going to morph back to cable TV or some version of it where you've got highly funded, highly produced, highly influenced. You know, we've been joking about some of the quote unquote influencers who all of a sudden switched to a different brand of something and are all of a sudden, you know, this is amazing. Well, good grief. Um, no, no.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah, you just you become seen as a shill. And I see that in especially some of the YouTube channels that the kids watch, you know, they started very like this this guy Dude Perfect that just does like trick shots and all this cool stuff and Guinness Records and stuff like that. But they now have a cable TV show doing the same kind of stuff. And it's like, whoa, it really it can grow out of proportion. But if that's what you want, great. But for you and I, it's clearly not.
00:06:56
Speaker
Right. And that's where there's a struggle. I don't want any sympathy for that decision on my part. I'm not looking for a pity party, but it does become an issue where you get pushed down on the platform, right? Yeah.
00:07:12
Speaker
But okay. Oh, well, like that's kind of why you remind yourself, no, I do what I do because I love it. And for every dude perfect out there, there's a, you know, there's a hundred
Saunders' Podcast Experience and Influences
00:07:21
Speaker
thousand kids who just want to learn how to make parts or do simple machine or get started in this industry. And that's what I'm doing.
00:07:28
Speaker
And I think a big difference is since we're not doing clickbait videos, since we're not going for likes and views and not just going for the shallow relationships, we're trying to build a community of people who care, who like want to see what we're doing and want to try to benefit from
00:07:44
Speaker
the stuff we're trying to share, I think that is more valuable than having 100 million views on whatever. It is, it just is. You got to post that, and not that you've ever come off as disingenuous, but you got to show those
00:08:02
Speaker
Like Johan was joking in that video, yo, whatever his name is, is like, we, we basically have gone back to using our Harbor freight tumbler in a year ago. You were so excited for this three phase, quiet, isolated, you know, fancy pants, tumbler. That's frustrating, right? That's, but that's it is, but that's reality. That's like what's going on. Right. Right. Yeah. Why, why hide that? Why share that? I'm glad he got to say that. That's cool. Yeah.
00:08:32
Speaker
Got it. Keep it real. I like it. Yeah, that's good. Speaking of keeping it real, I had the chance to do a guest podcast with the Bantam folks, which is formerly known as Othermill, the little desktop PCB-style milling machine. And they are now owned by a fellow named Bree Pettis, who was probably best known as one of the founders of MakerBot, the 3D printing company.
00:09:03
Speaker
And so they're doing a podcast on folks in the manufacturing space and industry. In fact, you would probably be a great candidate for them. But what was fun about the podcast, selfishly, and I figured I would give them a shout out here mostly because if folks are listening to this podcast, they clearly listen to podcasts in general, is Brie was also one of the founders of a thing called New York City Resistor, NYC Resistor.
00:09:30
Speaker
And in 2006, part of my story was this graduated college, was trying to bring strike mark product to market, trying to learn something about manufacturing, some stuff about CAD, some stuff about Arduino and electronics. And I found NYC Resistor. And I think there's some conjecture that it was the first maker space in the country. It was this little, I think it was on the second floor, maybe third floor in Brooklyn,
00:09:55
Speaker
and it was this group of people and it was John, you would have loved it. They had an epilogue laser back then. They had classes. I took a class on Blender 3D. I took Arduino shield class on building custom ethernet interfaces. This guy who was a developer for HP broke down what happened to a HTTP call stack as you're building site. I'm just loving it.
00:10:22
Speaker
I would go there on the weekends after work and I met Brie who was publicly building MakerBot, again, tying into this new wave of manufacturing of doing stuff, not in a secret vacuum, but rather in the story that he told me when I was there and I spoke to him once was they had the MakerBot on the train going down to DC and they're trying to fix it on Amtrak. I think I may have told this story. You briefly mentioned it, but you're telling more details now.
00:10:52
Speaker
Yeah, also in he I forget fixing it trying to show it off to something and then ended up that he was going to DC there's some beautiful irony he was going to DC to meet somebody for a publicity kind of push it forward type of thing and it ends up that the best thing that came out of that trip was a
00:11:11
Speaker
reporter of significance on the train who saw it, who sat down. I think it was like incognito or not apparent. And that ended up being one of the biggest leads and things out of it. And Bre has gone on since then to become pretty public facing figure, covered a wire magazine on Colbert show. He's a pretty big deal in that space. And he never would have remembered, remembered to be my name, but it was super fun. He was on the podcast
00:11:39
Speaker
to have this one hour conversation, kind of reliving two paths that slightly overlapped, more so the impact being in New York City had in NYC Resistor and then coming back 10 years later, kind of full circle. That's awesome. And he didn't know this when he brought you on for the
Team Dynamics: Hiring and Firing
00:11:59
Speaker
show.
00:12:00
Speaker
Right when his podcast guy reached out, I just mentioned, I was like, too funny. Brie won't remember this, but I actually met him back in the NYC. Yeah, that's so perfect. Otherwise, no.
00:12:14
Speaker
And they're tooling up. They're building a shop. They're moving from California to upstate New York. So I like that they're trying to pull off this kind of rural manufacturing. They're buying machine centers. They're very much trying to build this entrepreneurial thing, which I think is pretty cool. That's awesome. So it's called The Edge from Bantam Tools. Awesome. Check it out, guys. Sweet.
00:12:43
Speaker
Okay. I have another story or unless you guys, sorry, I feel like now go for it. Talking to a fellow manufacturing entrepreneur and this was over email and he had a couple of phrases that really jumped out.
00:13:00
Speaker
They've had some growing pains, but are very much on track to have a much, much, much better 2019. Not that the past years were bad, but they've really changed their focus to realize what's important. And one of the things that he said, I'll just read it kind of verbatim, because I think it is better that way than me trying to explain it.
00:13:20
Speaker
is I hired too quickly and I fired too slowly. The problem with having a bottom performer on your team is that he or she gets all the attention when the second worst performer flies under the radar.
00:13:38
Speaker
Interesting. So it's never certainly fun to use the F word and think about that, but it goes back to the two extremes, the one of which I think there's some example of like Toyota or some company that's never fired somebody in 30 years. And then the extreme opposite, which is if someone's not a fit, doesn't mean they're a bad person. It doesn't mean they're
00:13:58
Speaker
They deserve to be publicly shamed, but if they're not a good fit, they need to be off your team for your sake, the company's sake, the employee's sake, stakeholder, everything. It needs to happen. It sinks in when you hear somebody that you look up to or that you know that's in a similar situation, sub 10 people, I think, shop where they admit, we had to grow, we hired, and then I wasn't willing to fire quick enough when it wasn't a good fit.
00:14:30
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard all kinds like hire quickly and fire quickly or this guy hired slowly or hired quickly, but fired slowly. I can see that. Yeah, I've.
00:14:42
Speaker
thankfully haven't been in the position of having to fire anybody yet. And our team is awesome. So I don't foresee that happening now. But as we hire more people and grow from here, it's going to happen someday, right? You know, right most likely. Yeah, well, I think what you just said is insightful, because I think
00:15:02
Speaker
if you don't fire somebody, it implies that you're a good person as if like it's kind of the Christmas story. I'm always that's what you want. Yeah. Right. And like, and if I fire somebody that needs, I failed, no, just you should tell yourself right now in the next 24 months, you are going to fire somebody.
00:15:19
Speaker
Again, not because I have to, but, but it's likely to happen or something. Yeah. Quit thinking that the act of having to say, I fired somebody makes you a bad person. Sure. No, I could see that kind of that subconscious like dirtiness. Right. Um, yeah. Hmm.
00:15:37
Speaker
It's tough, John. It is. Yeah, it is tough. That's the odd reality of running your own business and growing it and bringing in people is that there are very tough decisions to make, whether it's financially or people or customer facing or marketing.
00:15:56
Speaker
It's not easy. I was thinking, I was trying to formulate this phrase of entrepreneurship is so difficult, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, yet alone all my best friends are entrepreneurs. Yeah, yeah. I think one of the things that a quote that stands out to me as just being very, very elegant is from the Eagles video
00:16:22
Speaker
whatever you call it, videobiography. It's on Netflix. It's like a two or three part series. Yeah. Yeah. Who I love. I didn't really care about two or three years ago. I didn't really realize how many hits they had. And Don Headley was being interviewed and asked about when the band broke up, what it felt like, which is kind of the classic question of like the band breaking up. And his response
00:16:45
Speaker
wins on every level. It wins because it's just insightful, it's witty, it's short. His answer was how did it feel when the Eagles broke up was it was a terrible relief. Yeah. Interesting. I could see that. Yep.
00:17:05
Speaker
There's a good snippet from that top 10 list I keep next to my desk that came from the New York Times, but I love it.
Workplace Culture and Social Media
00:17:13
Speaker
Every one of those items is great, but one of them is make sure that every employee understands and works toward the mission.
00:17:20
Speaker
And we've talked about that here some in terms of little things like the balancing work life and little things like should you be on, I hate to even bring this up, but is it okay to send a text message or be on your phone or social media? And the answer is generally no, but I also don't
00:17:39
Speaker
We don't micromanage here. We extend a fair amount of leniency and so forth. But there's an element of hustle here. We don't just, we're not a shop where we're just chit chatting. I'm kind of a grinder in a way because I'm here to do what I love. We're here to make parts. We're here to do work, to do things, not in a stress inducing manner, but in a, we're here to work. If you don't like to work, it's not a good fit for you. I feel like you're the same way.
00:18:09
Speaker
I think we're a little bit more lenient than that. We certainly chit chat a lot usually about important things, but sometimes topics differ, but then we all have to like, you know, shake ourselves out of it and get back after it. Um, and we're, we're relatively lax on cell phone things, but I did bring it up in one of our meetings. Just, I don't ever want to look at somebody on their phone and wonder if they're just wasting time, you know? So I kind of said that to everybody like, uh,
00:18:34
Speaker
I understand more than anybody that we need our phones to look up research and do a quick Instagram post. I encourage everybody here to post more things like that, but I don't want to look and feel like you're just scrolling Instagram for 20 minutes or even three minutes while you're standing in front of a machine or something like that. So I brought that up with everybody and everybody was totally cool with it. I'm fine sending a quick text to your wife or whatever, but
00:19:02
Speaker
I don't ever want to be those shops that's like locks the phone at the door kind of thing. I want to instill a level of trust in the employees that they're here to work, yet we have some freedoms too. Yeah. I think you're also a much flatter org chart.
00:19:17
Speaker
a bunch of people who are, for better or worse, I think similar in age and similar in skill sets and responsibilities, we've got a little bit more of a tiered hierarchy where we've got some high school kids, some younger kids, some interns, some newer folks where there's an element of discipline and culture that matters.
00:19:36
Speaker
I see that for sure. Frankly, that's something I struggle with because I am on my phone sometimes two to three hours a day on voice calls or other stuff, but that's just how it is. I have no apologies about what I'm doing or how I'm working. It just has to happen that way. Exactly.
00:19:57
Speaker
But nevertheless, it's something I'm conscious of because you set that tone of, well, why is John always on his phone doing stuff? A lot of times I'm dealing with WhatsApp or questions or Instagram or work stuff. Yeah. I think you and I can honestly say that probably at least 80 plus percent of the time we spend on our phone or on our computer is legit work, like direct, if not 90 plus percent.
Innovative Work Solutions
00:20:23
Speaker
It just is. Unrelated but not. I don't even know. Like three or four months ago, I took Facebook off my phone. Don't even miss it. There was no withdrawal whatsoever. I don't even care. Nice. Which is nice because for better or worse, most of my Instagram stuff is quote unquote work related.
00:20:45
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. And as I was saying that to everybody, I'm like, I know that I'm a walking contradiction here because I'm probably going to be on my phone more this year. As the business grows, we create more connections. And as I step up my Instagram game and things like that, like, you're going to see me on my phone a lot, but I don't, you know, you guys have work to do.
00:21:04
Speaker
It is what it is. Speaking of that element of kind of balancing your role, I had a stress point, which is I moved my desk out to the shop floor.
00:21:19
Speaker
And that works almost all the time, but it doesn't work on things like right now, the bomb. And then sometimes when I've got to do voiceover work or video work or certain calls where I've got a long conversation, conference call type thing. And I have a computer behind me, which is now an older junkier computer. It has a glitch problem, which doesn't make it good for video recording. And I'm kind of stressed because this idea of having two offices doesn't feel right to me. I don't want two offices and I don't want to maintain two computers.
00:21:49
Speaker
And my desk out on the shop floor was just this U-line portable desk. It's relatively small. I like having a small desk. It's very modest, keeps it clean. It's on rollers. And so it's actually not the battery backup arrives today. So I need to make sure this works. But I have the whole desk set up so that it's one cord. It's one power cord. There's a power strip.
00:22:11
Speaker
I got it tidied in all the cables are zip
Cash Flow Management Challenges
00:22:14
Speaker
tied. So this whole mobile cart, which has like headphone, USB jacks, monitor, video camera, like everything, the iPhone charger, it's one cable, unclocked one thing and move it around. But what I didn't like doing was having to power the computer down. If you're, if you're rendering video, you don't want to have to, you just can't do that. So the battery backup comes today, but it's a small one from Amazon, like 30 or 40 bucks. Oh my goodness. And it should, it should have the power
00:22:39
Speaker
It should power the computer for 10 minutes. I need like 14 seconds to move it back out into the shop floor, plug it back in. So that's my new AirPod thing in terms of hacking life. Okay. Yep. I love it. So it's an actual computer. It's not a laptop. Yes, my HTCAD computer. That's pretty powerful. Yeah. Yeah. The Z2 Mini, whatever it is. Yeah. Sweet. So now I can move around wherever I need to with just zero stress. I love it. Yes. That is super cool.
00:23:09
Speaker
Yeah. Once we moved to bigger shop, I'm going to have to copy you on that one. Um, do exactly that. Yeah. It's freaking great though. Like when it comes, I can just imagine like I'm, I'm starting to call with somebody and then I'm like, Oh, sorry. I'm just wheeling my office into a computer into like a quieter area. Uh, but yeah, no, whatever. Mobile office station. I love it. Yeah.
00:23:33
Speaker
Yeah. It's funny how, how little things like that, I mean, you bought a table with wheels and an extension cord and like a $30 UPC and that's life changing. You know, like, like we bought another folding table from Costco, which just helps like super immensely. You know, it's like when we got more sinks installed, um, little things like that, that you don't put a lot of weight into upfront. You're like, I know we need it, but then it just increases quality of life. I love it.
00:24:01
Speaker
I was hesitant too because just to be honest, we are really tight on cash right now. Growth each cash for breakfast. Amen. It's those $30 APCs that not only do they add up, but when it's this wonderful idea that ends up not being as good of an idea or you never do it. This one I know is going to be a good one, but it's those $30 purchases that get you.
00:24:29
Speaker
Yep, and it's not that, I mean, you could probably always afford a $30 purchase, but when the cash overall gets tight, I totally understand, then you just start to question the necessary, the need for these kind of things. Like Aaron wants better headphones for editing videos. And I'm like, okay, pick some on Amazon, like some two different price brackets and we'll see. And one's like 50 bucks. And I'm like, okay, I'll add it to my cart, but I'm not gonna get it right away.
00:24:58
Speaker
Because again, cash is tight here, just like you. Because thankfully, last December, we paid off all of our debt, which I'm super duper happy about. Good for you. But it's like we're starting from scratch. We used all of our cash, and then we have enough to operate, but not much more. And then this year will be a matter of building up that cash reserve so that we can do things like get a shot, buy more machines, buy the headphones and computers that we need, et cetera, et cetera.
00:25:26
Speaker
I was thinking about that this morning. I haven't yet felt the benefits of running a profitable business. You personally haven't reaped the benefits? I don't feel flush with cash. I've never ever felt like I've had even a little bit of play money.
00:25:48
Speaker
yet we are running a profitable business, but all that profit was going to debt and bad decisions from before and et cetera. So it's like we're starting from scratch and this year is going to be really fascinating for us.
00:26:00
Speaker
And once things like the saga drop and we sell however many we can make, it's going to help cash flow immensely. Yeah. Well, so what you just said there is actually important, because you're a consumer-based business in the sense that you don't really extend credit to your customers, right? No one's allowed. Correct. So that's a really, and you, I don't think that'll change for you, really. No, no. I like having the product in my hand, receiving money for it, and shipping it immediately.
00:26:29
Speaker
So you are a little bit immune to this in a very good way because you can benefit from working capital, networking capital, meaning you get to collect money. Well, you can't get the money until the product is ready to ship, which means you've already paid for the raw materials. But you go read stories about people like Michael Dell and how they got to where they are. They really arbitrage working capital by, and I don't always agree with this, but
00:26:55
Speaker
demanding payment quicker than they had to pay their suppliers. And that same entrepreneur I was mentioning earlier about higher to quickly fire to slowly was talking about how they're having a real issue on paper from an accrual accounting standpoint. They are very profitable, but profit is not cash because
00:27:14
Speaker
Yeah. Accounting profit is when you have, quote unquote, earned the revenue. In other words, when you've sold the knife, but then if they don't pay you for it because they're paying you on net 30 or net 60 or net 90, then you have an asset called accounts payable. Well, an asset called accounts payable is not something you can use to pay your bills. Nope. I totally agree.
00:27:36
Speaker
And so this individual has accounts receivable, which is an asset, which should be a good thing, but it's actually a horrible thing that is now gone from five figures into six figures. And I think something I'm conscious of as an entrepreneur is,
00:27:54
Speaker
is the hypocrisy or the delusion of why you think you're going to be different. Oh, I'm not going to have a problem with this because I'm smart or I'm hungry or I know about it, so I'm going to avoid it. Well, we started saying
00:28:13
Speaker
We've had a lot more interest for fixture plates from companies and schools, both of whom are like, we'd like to buy one for our Haas, but do you take POs? Well, do you take POs really means do you take terms? Right. And so far, most of them have paid net 30, net 40 or so, which is great, but am I going to say no when we start having some bigger companies that are just like, hey, we'll buy a couple of plates, but it's net 60 or net 90. Do you say no to that or do you deal with that?
00:28:42
Speaker
That's tough. That's tough. That's tough. Yeah. Our tax accountant has the story of a construction firm that was small and then built up and built up and the guy borrowed money from all his family members. And then one of his big clients literally didn't pay like one or $2 million, uh, you know, bill and they just didn't pay it. They defaulted and this company crumbled and everybody went bankrupt and it's just like terrible stuff. So.
00:29:10
Speaker
It is the thing that Babson really emphasized, and I give them a lot of credit for it in their curriculum, is most businesses fail not because of lack of profitability, but because of cashflow.
00:29:22
Speaker
That's what Barry tells me that like once a week. So there are tools you can do. I mean, in that case, there may be reasonable ways to leverage a relationship with a bank for a working capital type of loan. I don't like it, but that's different than quote unquote living beyond your means. But managing that stuff is just so important. Yep. Yeah.
00:29:47
Speaker
understand the benefit of leveraging things like that and we do it a little bit like when we pay our suppliers like oh they gave us net 30 so we're not gonna rush or you know paying a credit card once a month on time not like the day you spend the money sure things like that like you know Barry's really good at slightly leveraging things like that but I don't ever want to like use that as a business strategy to you know
00:30:12
Speaker
save more money until later. I don't know. Yeah. It's, it's like all legal, but it's some of our suppliers we pay immediately and they love it. And they're like, Oh, you're the only customer that pays immediately. So we have this great working relationship with them. And then, you know, some of the bigger companies that might not care, we'll just be like, yeah, that's fine. They can wait. Right.
00:30:31
Speaker
From what I've heard talking to folks in the big boy world, if you pay net 30 within 30 and don't require a follow-up reminder, you're actually on pretty good terms. You're a good customer. Yeah, you're on the good list. Which is kind of sad that the world lives like that.
Saga Pen Production Insights
00:30:49
Speaker
It's the whole credit mentality, whether it be credit cards or abusing net 30 or net 60.
00:30:57
Speaker
anything like that. It is kind of sad. Well, it also speaks, I think it's actually proof of how important working capital is because you have large, large, large companies, defense companies, big contractors that would, a job shop would love to get to work for them. And they do that because it's how powerful a tool that is. They say, we'll give you X job, but it's net 90. And that stinks, but it also is proof of that. Yeah.
00:31:38
Speaker
It's like I've been saying. We're just cranking, making knife parts on the lathe, screws, and pivots, and all this stuff. And then get a couple months ahead per each part. And then we're like, OK, we've got a week. Nobody needs anything for a week. So let's finish the R&D on this saga pen. We're filming YouTube videos of each leg of the journey. So we've probably got two videos in the queue for the upcoming Saturdays. And it's good. Like we created yesterday, we did
00:31:45
Speaker
Just got to work around it. So what's been going on with the saga?
00:32:05
Speaker
We've got like three parts that have to fit together a certain amount. So we took our worst case scenario and our best case scenario, like all the mins and all the maxes in the way that is worst case for dimensioning. And we put them all together and we felt the difference and they're ever so slightly different. But we're like, if we can make every part within these two tolerance ranges, we know they're going to be good.
00:32:26
Speaker
So, you know, you have to give yourself this realistic working tolerance. As much as you want to make a part bang on every time, it's just you'd make so much scrap.
00:32:36
Speaker
know, maybe a Swiss lathe would be a lot tighter and things like that. But there's the realistic working, you know, tolerance range that is just makes sense. Tools wear and all that stuff. Yeah, so I think we've got our ranges, which is super exciting. And now it's just start making we want to make, you know, small batches of parts, maybe we'll make
00:32:56
Speaker
10 to 50 of each component and then move on to the next and then start getting these assemblies together and start organizing our makers choice list so that we can start collecting names and interest and see what the actual interest is, not just what the comments tend to say and then go from there. So Saga is makers choice? It will be at first.
00:33:20
Speaker
Yeah, I think we'll just make them how we want to make them and then offer them directly to the customers, just like how we're doing the knives. I don't see that working long term, because that implies that basically every pen requires a photograph on the website, like a unique photograph. And then every product is a one thing, whereas we could just have the silver pen as like a product quantity 20, etc. So I think long term will tweak that. But short term will just take the current system, apply it to the pens and
00:33:50
Speaker
You don't sell them. You don't have a sign up list yet though? Not yet, no. I just need to take the time to set it up. Yeah, you got it. Very soon. Lots of people are asking. Feedback has been phenomenal.
00:34:05
Speaker
I'm excited. I'm awkwardly debating, do I publicly ask you to reserve? I think I asked for a serial number, which I don't know if that is still available or not. I don't know. Yeah, we haven't passed that yet. I almost hesitate to ask to cut the line, but I feel like maybe I'm allowed to ask you that. You might have a little bit of leverage.
00:34:24
Speaker
And that's the beauty of makers choices. We don't owe anybody anything, so we can do whatever we want. Well, no, I want to, as much as I like you as a friend, I don't really expect, you know, I'm happy to just be another customer. You know what I mean? Yeah. I'm happy to wait my turn, but I want one. Yeah, exactly. I want one. Good. I'm super excited. It's awesome. So Lay's running good. You got your insert, you're the Kyoceras, right, on the titanium's working?
00:34:50
Speaker
Yep. Lower that SFM. Um, I was looking at another code and the SFM was fixed at three 50 and I'm like, uh, that's a little much. So, so we slowed it down. Actually just realized we slowed it down to 40, which was for, for Thai super conservative, but that was a stainless part. So we could probably get away with a lot faster, but either way, like at three 50, we were blowing inserts every third part. And that's just not,
00:35:16
Speaker
acceptable. So we'll tweak like as long as we're making good parts, we can speed it up from there. Yes, I love that. It's so like what you just said earlier about, well, wait, we have three parts that have to fit together. So we made min maxes of each, you know, we've put them all together, whatever nine different variations there are of those fits to make sure it works. That's so logical and simple, yet, frankly, easy to not do or overthink when you're
00:35:41
Speaker
Well, that's the Angelo side of things, which is amazing. That was his direction. And he actually did most of the work for that. He's been running the lathe relatively hands off, which is awesome. And yeah, it's good. We've been doing some videos together, getting him on board too. And it's such an asset to have him on board. It's awesome.
00:36:04
Speaker
But yeah, it's really cool to have the pens coming. Like we've all been itching for this since, I mean, for almost a frigging year. I think it was like last February that I was like, okay, we're going to make a pen. I'm going to sit down, design this and get started. And, you know, we made the first one like late April or something.
00:36:21
Speaker
So, yeah, it's a project. Yeah. Yeah. Well, because I came when I visited June, it was it was summer, wasn't it? Yeah. And I mean, we had finished. Oh, yeah. It wasn't even new then. I mean, it was you'd had it. Wow. Got it. Yeah. It's funny. Good for you. Yeah. Yeah. It's always a good, you know, when I run through my head, a conversation with somebody that I when I need help and I just have that fake conversation with them, usually the
00:36:49
Speaker
mentality that prevails is, okay, look, your goal is fast, perfect, reliable, et cetera, but you're better off just focusing on getting successful parts made accurately, even if it takes longer. And I know this sounds very simple, but it's not simple when you're stuck in the weeds and you're frustrated. And I know you were thinking, wait a minute here,
00:37:09
Speaker
cycle time went from three minutes to nine minutes. That's going to kill me. Well, guess what? There's probably better inserts or better coatings, but you don't have the time. It's not appropriate to bring in tooling reps and inserts and set up tests and longevity stuff. So we'll deal with that later. Let's, let's tackle the first thing first, which is to get parts of it, just like speeds and feeds.
00:37:28
Speaker
Chatter is never okay. And bad recipes are not okay. Slow it down, figure it out. And a lot of people don't grumble. They don't like that. I got to go faster. Something's wrong. Well, we'll figure that out later. Let's start getting parts made. And then we'll see. Yeah. Yeah.
00:37:44
Speaker
Yeah, I know I'm leaving profit on the table by being so slow with the saga and doing it so deliberately and so methodically. But I'm setting up for the future. I want to be able to make 1,000 pens and know that all the parts are going to be within tolerance and good because we have
Quality Control in Manufacturing
00:38:02
Speaker
these checks in place. We know what's critical. We know what's not. Whereas when we made the first batch of 30 back in May last year, we just kind of banged through them. And we're like, yeah, I think these are good. I think these are good.
00:38:11
Speaker
you know, this close enough nominal. And, you know, we start putting parts together and you're like, why isn't this working? This, this part, which part's bad? Which of the four parts here is bad? I don't know. Okay, just try something else. We got to get pens for blade. Right, right, right. And I mean, that that's not sustainable. It's fine and like, exciting for a little bit. But so that's why we kind of hit the brakes on that and, and restarted.
00:38:34
Speaker
It's been going through my head. We had a meeting with Zeiss on the CMM side of things. Very casual, but I've been thinking about what role a CMM plays. I'm not sure I'm going to explain this well, but is a CMM an insurance policy? Is it a branding thing where you're just saying, we've got a CMM, so our parts are great?
00:39:00
Speaker
Are you looking at big data sets over a year? That to me is really cool, being able to say, oh, that's interesting. We, the way we make our fixture plates, we tend to know that our bores are 50 million, it's a little big in this little spot. Well, maybe that has to do with the hard, the minorest amount of flex in the fixturing or something like that, right? Are you using it to catch legitimately big mistakes? Well, why are those, you know what I mean? Like I'm thinking about,
00:39:27
Speaker
Um, cause I don't think a CMM is necessarily just meant to be a tool to tell you where to do rework. You know what I mean? Um, so I'm very, I feel very, um, impressionable right now about trying to understand what that looks like if, and when, and why are you getting one, right? What's it trying to do? Um, yeah.
00:39:49
Speaker
Yeah, it might be a sanity check just to make sure that things that you can't measure otherwise are getting measured well. But I think the collection of data is super duper important. The more we start to do that, then the better information we have to make decisions, whether it's, you know, end mill life. I've been tracking that like crazy and actually have charts and spreadsheets now of like three months of end mill life and it's awesome. Right, right, right.
00:40:15
Speaker
Man, but that's what, and as, as we, as we run more Norseman pallets, I'm noticing, uh, I keep having problems with tool 49 and tool seven. And those are about the only two that always variably break at weird points, always in the same spot on the fixture, but like, why what's going on? How do I do it better? Um, you know, as we scale production, like these are just going to be worse problems. And then we've got to rework all the parts and, you know, the final product is still great, but the downtime is killer.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's what gives me pause is, okay, well, you've got this big data, but how good does it tell you, if your CMM is telling you when a bores are starting to get out of spec or toward, let's just say, we've got a range, there's a tolerance range. As you start to move towards that, is that
00:41:08
Speaker
How do you know that's because of insert where? Because by the time it's on the CMM, you don't have the memory in your head of where was the insert in it in terms of its life or time in the cut. Those datas aren't tracked together. Of course. Yeah. Fun stuff though. Super interesting. Like nerd central and I love it. Yeah.
00:41:36
Speaker
Yeah. Um, I can see it like if you had one set up right next to a grinding station for, if you're grinding cat 40 tapers, and then all of a sudden you can start to say, okay, either my RA is changing or my tolerance is changing. So I need to redress the wheel. That's a pretty, that's like a closed loop workflow, right? Where it's just, they're, they're talking to each other a lot. That is easy. The idea of, you know,
00:41:59
Speaker
CMM hitting the part hours later where you don't necessarily have, again, know what that was, the cutting conditions, the coolant, the machine, the tool, the insert, all that.
Climate Control Solutions for Workshops
00:42:08
Speaker
I got to think about that. Yep. Or days later even. I've been to a bunch of shops that have the dedicated CMM room and it seems like they're always backed up. There's just a line of parts waiting to be checked and that seems very poor workflow in a sense because there's waiting.
00:42:29
Speaker
you know, you got this bottleneck that has to be checked, and then the parts can flow back days later. And by then, you've already forgotten what you did and all this stuff. I mean, that's why they document everything. But but still, this instant workflow, like you make a part, you take your mic and you measure it and you know, you think it's good or you know where to do it. Right. I like the tie back.
00:42:47
Speaker
Right? Me too, a lot. Yeah. Because it's not... I'm less interested in it being an insurance policy or... I mean, that has value, don't get me wrong. And the data is good, but...
00:43:03
Speaker
But I'd rather have it be a tighter loop system. Actually, I was realizing yesterday that this is something I'm going to start using ProShop for as we make the saga pens. Because you can input tolerances for every part made or every fifth part or whatever and actually have documented things in ProShop based on that part number. Just gives it a place to put it, not some random spreadsheet. That's cool. Which I'm looking forward to playing with that. I haven't yet. Yeah, that's awesome.
00:43:33
Speaker
I actually had a question I wanted to throw out to our audience, which is I, one of my goals for 2019 is as spring turns to summer here later this year, I want to start spending time and money on climate controlling our shop.
00:43:49
Speaker
and that's basically a 4,000 square foot where we have our shop bay and a 2,500 square foot where we currently have our fab side. There's some news coming there, which I'll share maybe next week, but I think I'm going to want to climate control both those bays and
00:44:10
Speaker
Separately or together? I don't know. Probably separately though. I think separately. And I guess I don't have a friend that's like an HVAC tech or somebody that can tell me some good info without putting a sales hat on like the local guys have. They've been helpful, but they're just quoting systems.
00:44:31
Speaker
I've heard some really good info on mini splits and permanent systems and that's fine. But the question I have specifically, which is a little unconventional is they do make, they're not necessarily inexpensive, but they do make these portable air conditioners. So they're quite large, quite capable, and they're not cheap. There are three, four, $5,000 type systems.
00:44:52
Speaker
The thought is that now I don't have to get structural roof work done and I don't necessarily have to redo systems and ducting. I don't need it to be 68 degrees at all. I need to bring an 82 degree room down to 76, 75 or something like that and have it be constant. I guess if anyone's listening who is in the know as an HVAC tech or air conditioning type of guy,
00:45:18
Speaker
I wanted to sort of figure out more about how these portables could work because we could easily run, we could actually run our own quick ducting or some exhaust hoses. I think we could make that work. It's an appealing idea to me.
00:45:36
Speaker
That's all. When you have your big ass fan to circulate the air as well, right? Right. And that has been phenomenal for the perceived cooling effect. And it frankly does make it pretty tolerable, except for maybe three or four weeks. But I do care enough about it for my comfort, the employee's comfort, training students' comfort, and the machines. The tolerances, the humidity. I am interested. I would rather air condition the shop than buy myself something nice.
00:46:07
Speaker
That's the priority, but I want to do it smart and jumping, jumping, I don't know, 15 to 35 grand into a rooftop X ton, however many ton unit is, we could do it, but boy, the portable things just seem nice. Yeah.
00:46:27
Speaker
Yeah, we were super lucky that in this building, the tenant before us was an HVAC guy and he installed his own thing in the roof. And he just left it when we moved in. And I was like, so we keep the shop at 70 degrees all year round. And in the hottest summer days, it might get up to 76, 78 or something just because you can't quite keep up.
00:46:50
Speaker
It's great. Otherwise, I wish we had more air circulation because the heat definitely rises. Oh, so the upstairs are hot, but whatever. That's fine.
00:46:59
Speaker
that's the other thing that when I've talked to local contractors, they've kind of, I felt like haven't been, they're not interested in having a conversation
Collaborations and Learning Opportunities
00:47:07
Speaker
and that's fine. Their job is to quote stuff, but I've kind of been like, hey, this isn't a house in the sense of I don't necessarily, tell me how you would size it less expensively or smaller if I only need to go to 75 degrees.
00:47:21
Speaker
All they're saying, no, you need, and maybe they're right. I'm not trying to discredit them, but it seems like their only answer is no, you need to have this thing oversized, make sure it can comfortably get down to 68 degrees. And there may be, again, some good reasons how those systems are designed to work at duty cycles and efficiencies and so forth.
00:47:36
Speaker
But you want to have that conversation with some expert, not just the sales. I want to buy a beer for an HVAC nerd. Yes. That's what I want to do. Yes. Love it. Yeah. Sounds good. What do you got on tap for today? You ready for this?
00:47:53
Speaker
I can't remember whether I mentioned this, but this is why I do what I do is to build relationships. I wouldn't call it friendships because it's more business-y, but find people who love what you do and love what they do. Hermle is making a part for us for the Johnny Five.
00:48:13
Speaker
which in and of itself is flattering and humbling and awesome and amazing. But what's even cooler is they are taking the chance to publicly document this, which is something I don't think they can normally do because of the nature of so much of their end customers' work. So three people from Hermlay are flying down to Zanesville today from Wisconsin. They're sitting down, we're looking at the part, they're treating it as kind of a fake
00:48:40
Speaker
full blown, like as if we were a whatever defense contractor or medical company or aerospace company. And we were thinking about purchasing a, not just a machine, but a solution. So they're going to go through and we're going to talk about the part, the fix during the process, the tooling, the automation, the volume, like, I mean, I don't even know, but
00:48:59
Speaker
get the sense that's what they're doing. And they're going to kind of go through that. And then we're going to look at how we can the part and strategies there. And I am so excited for it. And it's also just, I am grateful that they, like, I like that I've gotten to know them that they were doing. And there's no, you know, they know I'm not actually someone who's
00:49:19
Speaker
able to justify or afford or use a Hermelet. It's not a sales thing. It's just a legitimate. They've been passionate about education and internship programs, and they are very passionate about their brand and their machines, and I am really excited. That sounds like an amazing relationship.
00:49:37
Speaker
I hope you're documenting every step of the way. I get to go up to Wisconsin sometime later this spring and we'll actually cut the part on their demo, one of their demo machines at the showroom. So it's going to be cool. It's cool. Are you going to cam it in fusion? I think ironically, I think their apps guy is a big power mill user.
00:49:57
Speaker
Um, so we'll do, we'll probably do it there. I may try to still program with it myself in fusion, but, um, um, I'm letting, uh, be a good chance for you to see, to see your part in power power mill and how they kind of program it and do it. Um, yeah. And I guess if the, if the rumors come true of power mill stuff merging into fusion over time, now that Autodesk owns both of them, then that could be exciting. But for now, power mill, I think is clearly a more complicated and more involved, but also more capable product.
00:50:28
Speaker
Sure. That's what I'm up to today. What about you? Sweet. We got to make our three pallets in Orson today. The two pallets I was running last night alarmed out at one custom code that I put in last night before I left. Actually, like a month or two ago, Lauren's helped me figure out this tool alarm error.
00:50:52
Speaker
And he helped me modify my posts to be able to do that. And that alarmed out last night, which was like epic. Thank you, Lawrence. Oh, in a good way. Sorry. It was like a safety. It was a safety put in. So when I fat finger the code and try to
00:51:10
Speaker
try to start running a tool without actually calling it first or something like that. I'm not sure what I did wrong. I haven't looked at the code yet, but yeah, it just creates a simple little alarm that says wrong tool in spindle. And the more I do with like custom macros and probing routines and things like that, there's a lot of hand code jumping around. So that's good.
00:51:30
Speaker
do that and then make, probably tackle one more saga part. See if we can make 10 or 10 or 20 or 30 of whatever part we choose next. And then yeah, I don't think I'm doing anything major today. Other than that, but shout out to Autodesk team for implementing the multi line larger window manual and see. I do like this. Oh, it's a frosty, huge, really nice.
00:52:00
Speaker
Yep. I don't think they realize how much I use manual NC. Yeah. Like I was going to go through and count every operation and even every line of code and all that, but it would have taken me like half an hour. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. All right. Well, I gotta go get ready for her life. Awesome. Well, post an Instagram story. Cause that sounds like it's going to be fun. Thanks, bud. I'll see you next Monday. Take care. Bye. Have an awesome day. Bye.