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Business of Machining - Episode 27
291 Plays8 years ago
Video: Q-Mark
STRESS, SOLUTIONS, and...SUSHI?
How long have you been in survival mode? If you're feeling under the weather, there's a good chance it isn't last night's dinner. When it comes to stress, be prepared to bring solutions to the table. If there isn't a solution, venting and validation can offer relief.
Saunders and Grimsmo mull over ways to avoid past pitfalls and new ideas to move their businesses forward. Often, the right decision isn't the easiest decision.
What gives? Saunders and Grimsmo share personal experiences and frustration about companies who refuse to give a ballpark when it comes to pricing.
No more guessing! Saunders reveals plans for the $11.82 teaser nugget.
On philosophical note, the guys talk about inspiration and legacy. The phrase, "You can't take it with you" takes on a new meaning.
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Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Good
Podcast Introduction and Weekly Catch-Up
00:00:00
Speaker
morning, folks. Welcome to The Business of Machining, Episode 27. My name is John Saunders. And my name is John Grimsmough. Good morning, bud. How are you? Good morning. Doing
Exhaustion vs. Perseverance
00:00:09
Speaker
pretty good. Yeah? Yeah. You sounded a little, you sounded a little coffee when we were getting the mic set up. You're doing OK, though? Yeah, I think I'm worn this week, worn out. Oh, really? Yeah. That's OK. You
Stress and Health: A Personal Story
00:00:25
Speaker
know, everything gets to you and just busy, busy, busy, busy, hustle, hustle, hustle.
00:00:30
Speaker
But there's a difference between being worn out and in denial, and worn out, and I'm gonna power through this, struggle through this, which just makes the crash harder. True, very true.
00:00:44
Speaker
A friend of mine is in the denial stage right now. And he's taken on a project. And the project is going very poorly. And I feel bad for him. But he chose to make some decisions that I think are going to be tough. And he's gotten incredibly stressed out about it. And then he just got sick. And
Business Stress and Deadline Strategies
00:01:03
Speaker
he thinks that he's sick because of a food bug. And I'm like, you've never been stressed sick before.
00:01:10
Speaker
Seriously, like yeah, it takes it out. I mean it takes its whole yeah, and it masks itself as Food sick because like all week. I'm felt kind of Nautious and I I don't know why Really and not all week, but past two or three days or so Yeah, just what's what's going on though? This what's the deal the stress of business? crunch time
00:01:38
Speaker
What's the crunch time on? I mean, I thought it was upward and upward on filling, finishing rasks, and then other stuff. It is. A
Photo Sharing and Instagram Strategy
00:01:47
Speaker
lot of it just tends to drag a lot longer than you anticipate it will, or at least for us. But no, we set some pretty hard deadlines for ourselves for the coming weeks, and super excited to fulfill those deadlines and crush them and get past all this.
00:02:06
Speaker
Yeah. The Instagram photos are looking solid. Holy cow. Yeah, it's funny because it's awesome. When I ship the knives, I send each customer like three or four pictures, usually with a goofy selfie of me on the knife as well. And I'm not posting most of these pictures on Instagram. I probably should, but I don't want to just flood my Instagram with the same sort of pictures over and over. But I do have a good pool of pictures to choose from now to post. So
Managing Pre-orders and Inventory Stress
00:02:34
Speaker
that's what I've been doing a little bit lately.
00:02:38
Speaker
That's awesome. Yeah, it feels really good. You get all these comments from super excited fans and people who just want to buy. It's depressing to not be able to take orders. You know what I mean? Because we're in this catch-up phase right now where we're fulfilling old pre-orders, we're too busy to take on new orders, and I don't want to just open the floodgates and be buried again for another two years.
00:03:06
Speaker
Right, and good for you. I know you know that's right, but good for you. Exactly. It would be tempting to do, but not the right choice. In my perfect dream, I want to get into this flow where if we do do custom orders, and I want to, because all the customers want it, I want to be able to turn them around in two weeks. Did you watch the video on Qmark? Yes.
00:03:31
Speaker
So I mean that's what's interesting is I know you do well first of all I think an MBA student and I'm not saying that that person is correct but they were good they would tell you to reduce the number of options of your knives and reduce the number of finishes of coatings of metals and all that now I'm not going to tell you to do that because you know how to run your business but
00:03:49
Speaker
What's interesting about Q-Mark is it's all custom, but everything has already been made. So there's time-askets handles on the shelf, there's damasteel clips, there's this blade, you know what I mean? Does that work for you? It could work, but especially with the fancy materials, there's a lot of investment to have on the shelf and a lot of pre-work to stock beer inventory. But yes, and then it's just a matter of assembly.
00:04:16
Speaker
Right, and it's not in any way less custom, period. Right, no. And when you put it like that, there are literally just a list of options that if we wanted to, we could stock time ask us handles in these patterns. We could stock pre-coded DLC parts. And that is just a matter of taking an order and assembling it in a day. How fantastic would that be?
00:04:40
Speaker
what and it doesn't even have to be uh... you know i and what i totally get it on the lean idea of not holding inventory uh... but you could have one or two sets and then you know i'm really so i bought this u s p barcode scanner it was expensive it cost eleven dollars and uh...
00:04:58
Speaker
And I have this idea of, and actually I'll take up our audience here. If somebody has any suggestions, john at nyccnc.com. I want to barcode our inventory. So if you walk up to something, we scan it. It can do the typical, I mean this has been around for 20 years or more probably in retail world.
00:05:19
Speaker
our order fulfillment.
Factory Insights and Manufacturing Efficiency
00:05:20
Speaker
But I wanted to both confirm that the order was filled correctly, so some sort of hopefully a reconciliation with the event at hand, which is usually fulfilling an order, but also to tie in with some sort of a trigger management so that, in your example, if you could think about this workflow. This is probably a pipe dream. But think about if you go through and scan all these parts at the end of the day or throughout the day to fill orders or assemble knives and then
00:05:47
Speaker
Fusion automatically updated the pallet cam or the order of things to run and just told you what needed machined next.
00:06:00
Speaker
Right? I mean, I don't think that's possible, but there's no reason why that couldn't happen. Well, that's the kind of, you know, hypothetical thinking that grows new ideas. Like, I don't think it's possible, but I want it. You know? Right. My wife and I toured a car factory on our honeymoon, which is a huge point, a victory point for me. And they had this laser that cut the cow hides for the leather seats.
00:06:24
Speaker
The laser machine, this is being translated from Italian, so there's a chance that this was lost in translation, but I don't think so. It looked ahead at the future orders it had to fill, like the future seats it had to make, so the different sizes, the headrest, armrest, the butt, whatever, all that parts. And it could then measure the cowhide leather size, and then it would scan the cowhide for defects,
00:06:50
Speaker
And then it would auto nest based on the greatest material yield while not triggering bottlenecks in the workflow. So in other words, if it's like, ah, I don't see a good headrest here, I'm gonna wait till the next one and then wait till the next one and then it's like, ah, you know what, we need this headrest, I just gotta cut it out even if it's inefficient. That's cool. And why not? Like, that's an idea that was implemented. And then, yeah, it probably took forever to program that and figure it out, but totally worth it.
00:07:18
Speaker
But it's smart, it's green, it's stress free. I mean, I know you've done all your orange vise tops with this idea of making a full knife, and I love that. But what if you had one of them that just did handles or just did clips? Yeah, it depends on how you're looking at it. If you want to make finished knives every cycle or if you want to stock inventory. If you had a minimum inventory so you're not stressed and you just need this pattern handles, then yeah, you could have a pallet that just did that.
00:07:49
Speaker
I think currently with our relatively low volume of inventory, it is super duper nice to make every part, every cycle.
00:07:59
Speaker
Well, here's the thing, though. Until you get a second mill and a second lathe, which there's real estate constraints, there's financial constraints, there's operational constraints, there's labor constraints. I mean, until you get that, I don't know that there's a scenario that you're doing just-in-time knife manufacturing and just-in-time order, basically order fulfillment, that's not a stressful job.
00:08:25
Speaker
Interesting. I was going to argue with you, but you finished it different than I thought you were going to finish it. How was I supposed to finish it? I didn't expect the that's not stressful quote. Interesting. Yeah, I'm not anticipating get an order, make the part, ship the knife that day. I am anticipating a small amount of rolling inventory. I think you were example-ing a bigger amount of rolling inventory than I was thinking of, but I think at the end of the day, we're kind of on the same page.
00:08:56
Speaker
But you are too giddy and proud of your product to build finished knives and let them sit. You know what I mean? That's not how you work. It's not the grimstone experience. So maybe it's a stopgap. Maybe it's temporary. Build five knife handles, five clips. I don't know. I mean, that's the point. And then you have not a huge amount of money, not a huge amount of options. Or heck, maybe for a
Balancing Production and Demand
00:09:19
Speaker
while you just built up inventory of
00:09:22
Speaker
don't do the damasteel or time ask us, do the parts that result in less working capital that's tied up in inventory. And look, you can generate cash flow from that business, John. Yeah, absolutely. And that's kind of what we have now as we're fulfilling the pre-orders. I can look and I can see almost 20 sets of handles that are machined and ready for Eric to do assembly. And if maybe that's our
00:09:48
Speaker
limit is having not much more than 20 parts on hand of the big intensive expensive handles, blades, et cetera. Because I don't want anything to slow down anybody. When I'm running low on parts, then Eric runs low on finished knives because he's waiting. It's that whole eight deadly sins thing. Waiting is one of the worst ones.
00:10:13
Speaker
Yeah, but it's just like the world that I used to know well, you know, is the high-end 1911 pistol world. And folks that were buying Nighthawk custom 1911s for two to five grand, they knew that the more custom you wanted it, the longer you weighed it. So if I'm buying a Rask that's pretty plain vanilla, I'm going to get it in hopefully two weeks. But if I want all those
00:10:37
Speaker
options, I have to wait. But here's the funny thing, is that not only does it work, and I hate to say this, but there's a little bit of a marketing going uphill to knowing that because it's, I mean, if I want this super custom, crazy, awesome knife, and I'm like, I'd spend weeks agonizing over it, and then I order it, and four hours later it ships. That's kind of like waiting here, that's not right. That's a good point, yeah.
00:11:03
Speaker
Yeah, so having tiers of availability, basically. Yeah. I think that works. And I've toyed with that idea in my head. See, I'm thinking a lot about what the direction is going to be once we're caught up with the pre-order, which is, I've been talking about this forever, being caught up. But yeah, we've got a hard deadline now, August 31st. Nice. There's 60 knives left.
00:11:29
Speaker
And Eric suggested we make this advent calendar on the wall that, at 60, cross it off. 59, you cross it off. So Barry did that yesterday, and he printed off basically a countdown from 60 to zero.
Tech Tools and Machining Updates
00:11:41
Speaker
And we'll cross it off every day during our little morning meeting, and it'll be good. But I mean, there's been so much stress and worry and time crunch and money crunch around this pre-order, because it's dragged on so long, that I'm just trying to plan what the future holds afterwards.
00:11:59
Speaker
But I think, yeah, look, as your friend, I've been kind of subsumed by this preorder as well. And my concern is that all you're going to do, to some extent, is open up micro preorder problems again. Right. Period. It's like, instead of doing a one or two year catch up, it's going to be a one month. But that stinks.
00:12:22
Speaker
You don't have a buffer. What if good grief, John? What if equipment has problems? What if your mori goes down for 10 days? Yeah. One thing I think we're going to pursue for the rest of the year, maybe not exclusively, but certainly, we have a lot of people that just want to buy a knife, any knife. They're all great. So we have these Maker's Choice ones, where we choose the colors, patterns.
00:12:45
Speaker
Oh, that's cool. So I think we could sell a lot of Maker's Choice knives. And it's much easier for us because then there's no management of order and customer and et cetera, et cetera. You lose that kind of custom ordered appeal. But as you said, that's special and that can come later, of course.
00:13:04
Speaker
You ever heard of Omakasi in Japan? No. In sushi restaurants? No. It's like somebody is going to correct me on this, but it's basically the chef's choice. It's like the idea that they can pick the best fish that's in stock and they may pair it up with you based on if you're a frequent customer, what you like. It's a very connoisseurs way to consume sushi. Very cool. Omakasi.
00:13:33
Speaker
I think so. I'll have to Google it and see if what they say matches what I just told you it is. Yeah, I could be totally wrong, but I get the point. Yeah, that's fascinating. So you were texting last night. What is the Renishaw Inspection Plus? Let me open it right now.
00:13:52
Speaker
Because I thought it was the, I'm gonna, you're gonna laugh. I thought it was just, well, this is dumb to comment now, but I thought it was just a PDF. It's clearly software that I'm not even aware of. I can find it on my computer. There it is. Set and inspect, FANUC? I think that's it. Yeah, so Amish brought up the question about getting a Renishaw set and inspect is at least the one that I have. I see two tabs, calibration,
00:14:19
Speaker
I can calibrate the probe for centering measurement. Are you at your lathe right now? No, I'm at my computer, my PC. It's on your PC software? It's a PC software and it connects to the machine. I forget if it's wireless or if you have to plug it in. But I see all these inspection cycles, bore, boss, pocket, web, plus, minus, whatever, and I can command it from the PC and it'll move the lathe or the mill
00:14:48
Speaker
and it'll feedback the numbers to the PC. Are you serious? Yeah. Oh, man. I had no idea. That's really cool. So maybe do a quick Google search. There might be a good video about it somewhere. So do you have it now or they're coming to install it? I have set and inspect all my PC. Almost said you have to pay for it, but I...
00:15:10
Speaker
They didn't even mention it. They're just like, yeah, let's try it out. Let's install it on your computer. Was that part of your lathe purchase or metal? When I got the probe for my lathe a few months ago, whatever it was, yeah, they came in. They were here for two days, I think. And we just did all kinds of stuff. And this was a small sub thing of what we did. And I literally haven't played with it at all.
00:15:38
Speaker
But it could be very cool and very handy turning your machine into a CMM.
00:15:45
Speaker
What would be nice would be kind of that idea of WYSIWAG or a visual way of building a probing routine visually with examples and then having it like this is how I learned to program in Visual Basic. I used to write a lot of macros for Excel or other Microsoft Office stuff to do stuff that was cool. And so you could record what you were doing on the screen
00:16:10
Speaker
go look at the code it created and then it would create a ton of extra code and you would just go delete out the stuff or edit it or cut and paste it or pass it around. Which I know you were saying you've been doing a lot of hacking on the ProBeat routine stuff, right? Yes. Yeah, just the way it works, the way it does this.
00:16:30
Speaker
Even on the lathe, it wouldn't turn off the probe if there was an error. So the probe would stay on and blinking all night. And then I'd be wearing all the batteries on the probe. So I changed that to like, and I even added some notes in the macro, like deep inside the layers of macro. And I'm like, turn off friggin' probe before error.
00:16:50
Speaker
And I've gotten into habit, too, when I make comments in stuff like I've been modifying our post processor and then Arduino stuff or whatever. I've always put in my initials, JWS, just because if I want to go search through something and look at all the stuff I did, it just makes it a quick way to figure out what was my comment versus. You can search for your initials, even, and find all your changes. And I find putting a date next to it, too, is always super nice. Oh, right. That is smart.
00:17:20
Speaker
We've got to figure out, I'm a little not excited about this, but we've got to figure out here at our shop how to get on Autodesk Fusion Team Hub, which is a way to kind of join our Fusion accounts together so that we can share, because I want to share our cloud posts because now that we have a VM3 and a VF2 and the Tormox, I want to do a better job of maintaining to a library continuity
00:17:47
Speaker
And the way to do that is master, and we talked about this ad nauseam, but master tool libraries that we keep, and you invest the time to update and keep updated and keep them clean, but those need to then be shared across Jared, Noah, Zach, et cetera. And right now, basically, I email one out or have the guys just manually update it every month or two.
00:18:07
Speaker
Actually, that's probably an exaggeration. I've probably done it twice. But I wanted to, there's no, like I just, I was working on the VF2 library last night, and I just emailed it to Jared, and I was like, hey, you know, take over this, renumber some of these tools, clean it up, and then let's share it back and forth again. Yeah, that seems manual. Yeah, right. So, work in progress. This team out of this just does such a poor job on some of the,
00:18:35
Speaker
For being cloud software, I love it. You and I aren't dumb people, and we're pretty hungry when it comes to learning new technology software, but the team hub stuff and their nomenclature and integration is frustrating to me. Is it new or is it undeveloped? I can't answer that with certainty. I don't believe it's that new.
00:19:01
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know.
Transparency in Machine Tool Pricing
00:19:02
Speaker
But here's another example. Like when Jared started here using Fusion two or three years ago, we didn't have a Saunders domain, an email server, so he just has his Fusion account under a non, like basically a personal email address. Well, I want to update that to bring his Fusion account to his Saunders email address, but I'm not sure
00:19:25
Speaker
Well, I'm not sure that's possible to like change your fusion, because that's kind of how your account exists, you know what I mean? Maybe it is. But then I also don't even know like, how do you get support? You know, I know a couple people at Autodesk, so sometimes I email them, but it's like, what's the real support model for getting someone to help you or ticket or a phone call?
00:19:47
Speaker
Have you ever formally reached out for support? I have actually. I forget how I did it. I called the support line or I forget where I found the phone number, but yeah, I legitimately talked to one of their support technicians. Super duper helpful guy and completely fixed my problem. I can't remember what it was at all anymore. Oh, that's awesome. But yeah, it was a very good experience. Okay.
00:20:11
Speaker
And maybe I shouldn't be too quick to judge. I should, I should, I guess here's what I'll say. I haven't heard about other people doing that, you know, enlisting support or calling support or those experiences, which makes you kind of wonder, which I guess is what gives me the uncertainty of what's next. How do I get this working? Right, right. I had another thing that I just, it frustrated me and I got a vent, which is,
00:20:36
Speaker
About a year ago, we'd been looking at a machine, and we're not looking at it anymore. We're not in the market. But I asked the machine tool salesman to give me a quote. Give me a quote, not just like, what does it cost? And this is one of the bajillions of machine sales models and vendors that don't give you pricing online or anywhere else. You have to formally go through a process. So he gave me a quote.
00:21:03
Speaker
and then they came out recently with some sort of a summer sale type thing and the price was like 30% less.
00:21:14
Speaker
And I'm not 100% sure it's apples to apples. I think so. But it's just, look, maybe that world won't change. Maybe there's no point in griping about it. But when I hear about an acquaintance of mine also just bought a really high-end Japanese machine for a price that's actually, he shared Ballpark with me, pretty shockingly good.
00:21:40
Speaker
And I'm like, it's frustrating because I feel like these machine tool companies are shortchanging themselves to the opportunities to break into new markets, break into new customers, make their wares available. But then as a business owner, like, yeah, I'm very happy with both of our Haas machines, or the one that we have. And so far, we're actually going to cut chips with a VF2 as soon as I hang up this podcast called. But on the flip side, darn it,
00:22:07
Speaker
I need to have the information to make the right decisions for my business. And when you make that information difficult to get or you misrepresent what that information is, it's frustrating. Yes, absolutely. Especially during the research phase.
00:22:24
Speaker
I don't even know what the price ranges are of all these machines because you need like a formal official quote. You can't just go browse around and be like, oh, a Haas is 70 grand and a Maury is, you know, whatever. And the OKK is whatever. And you just can't because they're not out there. You have to like reach out to the dealer. You have to form this relationship. They have to do this quote summary for you. And the quote has like every single option. So it's 300,000, but you start to strip it down and it takes time.
00:22:55
Speaker
Yeah, it is annoying. And then the deal thing. A different company, and I don't want to mention the company because I don't want to give them the publicity, but it's a household name in the high-end Japanese milling market. And they reached out to us. They're like, hey, we saw one of your videos. You mentioned our product. We'd love to help you out, answer questions. Basically, and this isn't super uncommon to get an email like this, basically saying, hey,
00:23:24
Speaker
We like what you're doing. If you're interested in a machine, good grief. Let's figure this out. So I wrote back, and I said, hey, thanks for reaching out. What's the pricing look like on XYZ model? If you're ever in Zanesville, please swing by, blah, blah, blah. He writes back.
00:23:39
Speaker
Good to hear from you, keep that in mind, blah, blah, blah. Regarding that series of machines, one thing we pride ourselves on is return on investment and lowest cost per part. With that, we don't like giving up pricing without first talking about your application and individual needs. That is why you do not see pricing on our website. I hope you don't mind me not answering your question, but I'm not in a position to give out machine pricing. I can connect you with the correct salesperson, however realize you just got another VMC.
00:24:04
Speaker
gone, unsubscribe. I asked you as an engaged customer, ballpark pricing. If your answer is some marketing spiel about we pride ourselves on this, this, this, we need to understand your specific needs before we could ever discuss pricing. It's not that you lost a customer, you just chose to disengage an engaged customer. So do you think their rationale is this old school thinking that
00:24:31
Speaker
that the salesman has to come in and handshake and take you out to lunch and like form a relationship before so that it appears that they're tailoring the pricing towards you as opposed to just saying this is our pricing. I've heard about things where like it's forbidden to put things in emails that can get forwarded.
00:24:53
Speaker
I don't know. The only answer clearly is at the end of the day it's all about performance. Whether it's a sales guy beating his numbers or a company meeting their overall profitability. And you are clearly making enough profit and money on overall where you can choose, basically if you are hungry, I don't want to say desperate because desperate implies
00:25:17
Speaker
failure or problems, but I just have no tolerance for it. I'm not asking for a deal. I'm not asking for your Brock bottom price. I'm saying ballpark is this a $90,000 machine is $125,000 machine.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah. Maybe, in their mind, it's the variability of all the options because it could theoretically double the base price of the machine with all this stuff. And oh, we don't know if you need the fourth axis or the fifth axis. And we don't know what tool changer you want. So we can't give you a ballpark pricing. Whereas some of the people will just give a price list with every single option ever, which is good. It's like the Haas website has everything. You just price it out. You build it on the website. It's fantastic. Right.
00:26:04
Speaker
And that's nowadays marketing. Yeah, I'm not asking for that. Well, when we buy end mills, I mostly buy from Lakeshore. I just go to the website, see what I have. I don't have to go to my IMCO dealer and be like, how much is this? And how much is this? And can you get it? And oh, it's a three-day lead time or whatever. It's visible. It's quick. It's easy. Information is fast.
00:26:28
Speaker
Well it goes back to that study in life that most people, this is mind blowing to me, most people would rather earn, the numbers are somewhat irrelevant, most people would rather earn $70,000 per year knowing their colleagues earned $50,000 a year.
Customer Service in Equipment Leasing
00:26:47
Speaker
than earn $130,000 a year knowing that their colleagues make $150,000. Nobody wants to get screwed. And I think that's one of the things that ticks me off here is, again, I'm not asking for, I'm not trying to negotiate, just give me some information. On the flip side,
00:27:04
Speaker
it's a reason I dislike so much dislike MSC is you guys gross up or jack up prices and then you try to show me how much I'm saving within the green font that's bigger and the real price is kind of smaller and you kind of just do that like oh my gosh this you could have paid way too much money but we're gonna reduce how much you're overpaying by a little bit whereas McMaster yeah McMaster is not the cheapest option they give me the price
00:27:31
Speaker
and they give me great, I have no problem ordering from McMaster, but MSC irks me. My air compressor went down. I've got a Kaiser air tower screw compressor. And last week, I think it was last week, the more it was running and the more it takes a little bit of air in the spindle to run and do tool changes and stuff. And all of a sudden there was just a low air pressure alarm. I see the air compressor and it's like 40 PSI, what's up?
00:27:59
Speaker
So I couldn't figure it out after poking around, checking all the fuses and everything. And then I called the support line on a Sunday at 1 PM. And I left a message. And at 2 PM, they called me back on a Sunday. I was like, yes, good for you guys. On a Sunday? Yeah.
00:28:14
Speaker
Dude, that's amazing. This is an air compressor company, local to me, and they service everybody around here, and they know how important their compressors are to everybody's shops, right? You can't run without a compressor. So yeah, they got really good service. So anyway, 8 a.m. next morning, Monday morning, the service guy is here before me.
00:28:35
Speaker
waiting for me. And he pokes around and he thought it was a transformer at first. And so he goes back to the showroom, takes one off with a demo machine on the lot, brings it back here, installs it, same problem. Turns out it was a loose wire. What? Yeah, like one of the power feed wires coming in was arcing and causing problems. And so he rerouted it and fixed it.
00:28:59
Speaker
In the Kaiser or in your electrical band? In the Kaiser itself. So that was kind of odd. But the point was I was asking him how much the transformer would be. And I'm like, just ballpark me. I need to know if it's going to be $100 or $1,000. Like, just guess. And he goes, I have no idea. I have no authority to give you a price at all. And I'm like, $100 or $1,000. I'm not going to hold you to it. I just want to know.
00:29:28
Speaker
I'll call my guy and get you a quote. And I'm like, eh. I wish there was a bit more leeway. Yeah. Hey, that's a good experience, good service. It sounds like that. Super good. Super good.
00:29:43
Speaker
that when they came to install our Atlas Copco, I was talking to the guy about, it's just like cool to nerd out on air compressors. And he was talking about how a lot of the big businesses have moved to, what do they call it? It's like, of course there's an acronym. It's like AAS or something, air as a service. I was like, wait, what? And it's cool. It makes total sense where companies don't buy air compressors anymore.
00:30:06
Speaker
What you do is you go call, this company actually owns aircompressors.com, which I think is kind of cool. I've always fascinated with people that got good URLs early on in the internet. Yeah, back in 1997 or something. Right. So I would instead of buying a $7,000 screw compressor, I would just say to Keith, I would say, hey, let's figure out a deal. It's going to be $300 a month.
00:30:30
Speaker
for you to give me air. And so then they size the air for your needs. They bring in the compressor. They service it. They're responsible for it. If it goes down, you can buy different triage windows of repair and uptime. And if you expand your needs, they can swap them out. And a lot of this is obviously for bigger places that may have
00:30:52
Speaker
you know, 700 horsepower screw compressors or something like that. But basically, you don't own the compressor anymore because you're not in that business. You buy the output of the compressor, which is awesome. So are
Evolving Stress Management Techniques
00:31:03
Speaker
you renting it essentially? Like permanently? Sort of, but yeah.
00:31:07
Speaker
Sort of, but again, it's funny because I'm obviously, you guys, I'm not a huge fan of debt, and I'm not a huge fan of living beyond your means, but that's not what this is. This is sort of saying, I'm not in the business of what needs to be done for us to get good air. I want you to just take care of all of that. It's just like electricity. We don't generate electricity. We buy it as a service. Yeah, that's a good point because all you want is air. You don't need the machine. You don't need to maintain it. That's a fascinating point.
00:31:37
Speaker
Anyways, I thought that was an interesting trend. And it could be good for them because obviously you're reducing that initial capital outlay. And as we've all seen with how the software world has moved to cloud, everybody wants recurring. They all want recurring money now. Right, right. On both sides, the customers want to pay $2 a month for an app instead of buying the thing. And the business owner wants the consistent revenue. Yep. Yep.
00:32:07
Speaker
It's funny that I had my notes today to talk about stress, which inadvertently came up right in the beginning, but I don't know, six, nine months ago? Yeah, I think it was from the winter time. I was really stressed on a pretty regular basis, and I used to get, I called it overwhelmed, or maybe it was anxiety, just too much, and I would kind of
00:32:27
Speaker
The only thing I could do would be kind of go take a shower or play tennis or something. And I actually went to the doctor, which is not really normal for me. I remember you telling me this back in the day. This must have been before the podcast. It's funny because I, for some reason, got kind of overwhelmed. I think it was this Monday. And I don't even know why. It wasn't really anything in particular that did it.
00:32:52
Speaker
It was just some extent than normal, just entrepreneurial, like a thousand things coming at you from different directions. But it was that happening that made me realize, wow, I am doing a much better job of managing it all because it's been so long since I even felt like this, which is good.
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah, I've heard other entrepreneur experts say things like, it doesn't get any easier, you just get better at it. Everything gets harder and bigger and more expensive and more important, and you have now employees and you have people that you're responsible for, and there's more stress and there's more hassle and there's more problems, but you just get better at dealing with it. It's like a scale. Your 10 is somebody else's 30.
00:33:39
Speaker
All relative, right. Yeah, I think about that too sometimes. I remember three or four years ago I was super
Confronting Business Fears and Growth
00:33:47
Speaker
stressed and super worried about the future of the business and I couldn't even keep up with emails and how am I gonna scale this and I can't make enough parts, et cetera, et cetera. And here I am four years later, way more expensive business, way more pressure, way more product out the door. And I'm managing just fine relatively.
00:34:10
Speaker
Yeah, I say this, I ask this in the sincerest, nicest form. What role does failure play in your daily or weekly thoughts about your business and life? How? Small failure or big failure? I don't know. Do you ever feel like...
00:34:29
Speaker
Look, I think we're both very optimistic people, and I'm not trying to turn this into a downer conversation, but I mean, do you ever think about what if Grimso nice fails? I don't even know why it would fail, but do you ever, does that thing occur to you anymore, or is it like total onward and upward?
00:34:44
Speaker
I'd say it's only really occurred to me recently. I've been super optimistic all these years. Oh. Yeah. It's new. It's relatively new. Because I've been so optimistic, I'm like, oh, it's never going to happen. Like, we're going to take care of this and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:35:01
Speaker
It's not going to happen, but I'm playing out in my mind the scenario, if this and this doesn't happen, we could be at serious risk in the future of actually losing this company. And it's like a humbling realization to actually play it out and say, wow, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. There are serious repercussions if we can't do certain things.
00:35:29
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of things to keep on. There's a lot of responsibility. Everything is getting so expensive. And it would be a cash flow problem that would cause the demise of the business. Not lack of sales, not lack of interest, not lack of marketing, whatever. We would have run out of money.
00:35:47
Speaker
And that would be a horrible loss of a business. Such a good potential. Every customer is super happy and everybody loves them. We got people knocking down the door kind of trying to get anything. And it would be an absolute failure to lose that because we mismanaged our money or ran out of money. You know what I mean?
00:36:09
Speaker
I went to college for entrepreneurship. I went to the number one entrepreneurship college in the country. And one of the first things they teach you freshman year is some statistic. 80% or something of businesses fail not because of lack of profitability, which is an accounting term, but lack of cash flow. Period.
00:36:31
Speaker
which actually makes you very normal, statistically. But that's why the number one question I would have if I was coming into a company like that to help consult or evaluate it is not the past, but it's the future, and the future results
00:36:46
Speaker
It focuses 100% on one thing and one thing only, which is what is your ability absent your current capital structure, absent your debt or obligations, or forget about all that stuff. What is your ability to generate cash? And that has 100% to do with contribution margin, which is what does a knife
00:37:07
Speaker
sell for, and what are the cash costs that go into that knife? You need to know that number so well. Yeah, and having Barry here, the accountant, he's run some pretty good numbers for us. You know, analyzing the cost of materials and the profitability and things like that, which has been quite helpful. Good. Yeah, it's just a matter of execution. Like, we know how to make a great knife. We just need to be able to make more and consistently. Right.
00:37:36
Speaker
And I can make excuses until the cows come home, but they're running out. What do you mean they're running out? Going home, talking to my wife, well, how many nights did you make this week? Well, the air compressor went down for a little bit. You know what I mean? It's stupid. It's not allowed anymore.
00:37:56
Speaker
we need to prove ourselves. Well look, I think we should talk about this more because I think there's a lot of merit to it. On the flip side, dude, what you need to remain incredibly proud and impressive. I mean, I wasn't joking when I sent you that blurb. Folks,
Legacy and Future Vision
00:38:11
Speaker
stay tuned. We've got something coming on our end, which is what this relates to. But I mean, John, you inspire me. You inspire hundreds if not thousands of other people. So don't
00:38:20
Speaker
And anyway, get down on yourself. On the flip side, yeah, don't ignore reality of, let's make sure this is not an extended hobby. You know what I mean? Right, right. That's the thing is, Meg brought up to me is, I'm tired of pretending that everything is always fantastic. There are problems, there are challenges.
00:38:40
Speaker
et cetera, et cetera, and it's really tough to just smile all the time and be like, oh yeah, things are great, you know, with family or friends or whatever. I've almost never talked to a job shop owner who's actually said, you know, we're slow now, I could really use some more work. Everyone's always like, oh, we're busy, we're doing great, you know, everyone puts on their game face, which is ridiculous. Right, right. I mean, yes, it's a bit of a marketing strategy. I can't exactly go up on YouTube and say how
00:39:07
Speaker
times are tough and blah, blah, blah, blah, and even on the podcast, I don't want to talk about it too much, but it's real and it's true and I don't want to hide from things like that. And it's an internal problem with internal solutions. It kind of has nothing to do with our external brand and marketing and awareness and all that. It's all in here in these four walls of the shop.
00:39:36
Speaker
Yeah, but if I got diagnosed with terminal cancer tomorrow, the thing I know that I would care the most about is what you did to make the world a little bit of a better place. And hopefully, we've both done a job of inspiring people to pursue something that not only is something they're passionate about, but also something that they can turn into
00:39:58
Speaker
a life and lifestyle that justifies the life they want to live. So whatever that is, whether you are, you know, that's my kind of thing. You, I don't care how much you earn as long as it justifies how you want to live your life. And hopefully people have seen the benefits of potentially pursuing solopreneurship or entrepreneurship or even a hobby of this. And so you don't, I think it would be a failure to misrepresent the struggles of this as well.
00:40:27
Speaker
It's actually funny you ring that up, because I don't think I've mentioned this on the podcast, but I think you know it. Personally, Barry, my father-in-law, who's worked with us now for six months or so, was diagnosed with terminal cancer last Christmas and prostate cancer. And it's a very emotional time for him. And that was a big reason for him coming to work here. It gives him purpose and happiness and helps him change the world in his own way.
00:40:52
Speaker
He's basically clear of the cancer now, which is excellent. They did some surgeries and he's recovered. Does that mean, is it still terminal then? No, I don't think so. There's a PSA test and he was at 30 at his worst and now he's at 0.3.
00:41:12
Speaker
So the contribution thing that you just talked about is him helping our business succeed because he wants that as his legacy. If he did die this year, which he won't, but he can go happy knowing that he made a big impact on our business and helped us grow.
00:41:32
Speaker
He helped us take that scary step of hiring the first person. Yes and no, maybe it wasn't the absolute best choice in the world, but it's worked out very well. We've learned a lot and it's been extremely useful and helpful around here. All good stuff.
00:41:51
Speaker
No, it's funny. I had often heard the phrase, you can't take it with you, which I always thought really meant to this idea of material possessions and carpe diem, live life to the fullest. But it's kind of changed. And I've been through a lot, which I haven't really shared with processing the death of my grandfather a year ago. But it takes a year for
00:42:17
Speaker
he was on the farm, so going through his stuff and my father's role in that and so forth, blah, blah, blah. But it's changed me massively in terms of what you realize matters to you and what you do and what legacy is and what ownership of, you know what I mean? You can't take it with you. That idea has changed a lot to me. Anyway, we should maybe say that for another, yeah, awesome. Dude.
00:42:47
Speaker
I'm really excited. I'm going to play with the VF2. Also, my Sandvik rep is coming to help us with that new boring bar, which I didn't even get to tell him talking about maybe next week. Yeah. All right. Crush it, bud. Let's go crush it. All right. Take care. See you. Bye.