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Business of Machining - Episode 56
194 Plays7 years ago
Today we're time traveling back to December 20th, 2017. This episode is the ultimate podcast throwback!
Saunders tiptoes around a sabotage situation. While success and influence are perceived as a threat to others, keep doing what you love with good intentions.
End of Year Reflection Teamwork makes the dream work. While certain employees may not generate direct revenue, long term, they increase market awareness and brand strength. For Saunders, money means you're doing things right. Plasti-Dip = True Happiness.
Grimsmo has a knack for going full bore on tasks even if they aren't the most important.
YouTube: Flop or Hit? The SMW team makes a hilarious Thanksgiving video that flopped while another simple, straight forward video is all the rage.
Thanksgiving At A Machine Shop
Saunders opens up about losing someone close and how it's impacted him.
Grimsmo stresses the importance of gaining an audience, while they both agree social media is worth their time, having a big audience isn't the end goal; rather, it's a by-product of doing what you love.
Is Oculus Rift compatible with Mac? Grimsmo’s got a guy! He's happy to answer this question for a friend. Connections will help Grimsmo maximize his company and Saunders thinks transparency will help both of them reach their goals.
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Transcript
Introduction & Purpose of Episode
00:00:00
Speaker
Good morning and welcome to the business of machining. My name is John Grimsmough. My name is John Saunders. This is kind of a backup episode. This is our emergency episode slash we are getting rid of the buffer.
Commitment to Podcasting
00:00:14
Speaker
We wanted to keep talking, but we've got to burn an episode. The episode that's going live is to get rid of our backlog.
00:00:22
Speaker
Yeah. So this episode could be in our back pocket for days, weeks, months, years. I don't know. So we'll try to keep it kind of non-time specific. But we've been talking for 18 months now and I don't think we've ever missed a Friday. I can't recall.
00:00:41
Speaker
even when we've been traveling, we've moved it around a few times, which is I think really cool because I've never certainly never, I guess I'll put it this way. If this ever feels like a chore for either of us, we should quit. Like it's not what it's about, right? Totally agree. Awesome.
00:00:55
Speaker
Yeah.
New Equipment & Gifts
00:00:56
Speaker
We are trying new microphones, shout out. So this is, it is currently December 20th, 2017. Maybe it makes sense to share the timeframe. And I got a package that showed up yesterday from my buddy, John Grim. So who hooked us up with, we each got blue Yeti, or sorry, what are they called? Yeah. Blue Yeti mics. Yep.
00:01:19
Speaker
for Christmas. Yeah. For the podcast, a gift to the podcast. Um, so there, okay. So hopefully it sounds different, better. Um, we've got a few little upgrades we're going to do over the next few weeks to, uh, clean it up even more, but you know, it's starting to feel legitimate.
Industry Sabotage Experience
00:01:38
Speaker
Speaking of legitimate, we we were talking a minute before we hit record, and I'm going to keep this super, super vague for some legitimate reasons. But we had one of us had a.
00:01:51
Speaker
industry person do some pretty uncool things. The short version is they are absolutely 100% threatened by what we are and represent. We've heard people that are jealous or people that are surprised or whatever, but this was closer to sabotage. I think it's pretty cool to think that they are industry... I know that we're keeping this generic, but
00:02:16
Speaker
It was 100% bad on them. We didn't do anything to them other than they're just threatened by what we represent. I guess you could say the influence that we apparently hold with having an audience base and fan base and a reach. There's no point to dwell on it, tying into the blue shift ocean strategy of focus on what makes you happy, what you do well at. Don't sit here and worry about your competitors.
00:02:40
Speaker
Yeah, there's a big difference between jealousy and threatened and being threatened by someone. And you know, you told me that story and I took it as like pride almost like whoa, you know, you and I don't often sit back and think about the impact that we can have on people and I want to grow that and make it more just impactful.
00:03:00
Speaker
What I love about it is it had nothing to do with my intent was not to gain an audience. My intent was to share the story of what we love. And the byproduct of that has been a pretty awesome audience. And that's cool. That's what makes me smile and happy. It's not for the sake of numbers of outreach or whatever. Yeah, of course. Yeah.
00:03:26
Speaker
No, I mean, you and I just need to sit back and do what we do best, do what we love, and have the utmost faith that it's the right thing. Yeah, exactly.
Plans for 2018
00:03:38
Speaker
I've been thinking about that a lot about making sure, and we get a lot of unsolicited advice, which is often great, and I solicit advice from friends and family and so forth about making sure you stay on path and making sure you do what you love. And you've had a very focused path on
00:03:56
Speaker
this sort of this Venn diagram that overlaps absolute precision manufacturing with absolute amazing knives. I've had a much more bouncing around story between the training and products and the YouTube channel and so forth. And it's now fun, especially right now as we've been thinking a lot about 2018 to know with conviction and with a sustainable business model that we can focus in on some of those things.
00:04:22
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you are education, entertainment, fun projects, and you've turned a lot of that into products, which is remarkable. Right. Which is how it has to work, I think. I always felt, excuse me, I always felt like if I did what I, I'm sorry, never happens to me at all now.
Importance of Industry Experience for Teachers
00:04:46
Speaker
The day we got the new sensitive microphones, I have a frog in my throat. I always felt like I could. I have to be I have to have skin in the game. I have to be a job shop or I have to be manufactured a product because I want to. It's who I am. And because I think there is some tinge of merit to the.
00:05:09
Speaker
the lack of skin in the game for teachers that don't have experience or aren't staying in it and with it. That's a very difficult thing to say because a lot of teachers are selfless people who are giving a lot out there, but I want to be a teacher that's also in industry that's staying with it, that's pushing myself. That's tough.
00:05:30
Speaker
It is easy to kind of, I don't ever want to bad mouth teachers, but to kind of look at them and be like, well, you don't own a big shop and you haven't even done it, you're teaching it. And it's super important. So it's a kind of a, it's a touchy subject, but your mentality wants to be the teacher that's done it. Exactly.
00:05:53
Speaker
And there's a good one of my many values. In fact, I think a lot of my 2017 was subtly or subconsciously influenced by having lost my grandfather the year before.
Influence of Grandfather's Teachings
00:06:08
Speaker
And one of the things that he had taught me growing up was a Native American poem he had in the kitchen, which was, do not criticize a man until you walked a mile in his moccasins.
00:06:21
Speaker
You can criticize a teacher if you put your time in teaching, but there's that saying, what is it? Those who can't make it teach or something, and that is total BS. That I don't believe in whatsoever. What I'm saying is just I want to make sure what we do, we do really, really well.
00:06:42
Speaker
There's a conflict there because I think I could do a better job at my YouTube channel if I quit making products. And I think I could do a better job at our products if I quit the YouTube channel. I don't want to do either one. And I think they also complement each other, but I've got to keep building out the teamwork. And we have done a really good job at it. We honestly have. We have
00:07:02
Speaker
you know, Zach, Noah, and Alex and Ed are four people who are basically full time focused on shop operations, but also R&D. So they get like Alex has spent probably six days straight.
00:07:18
Speaker
of eight hours a day or however long he's here, just working on a thread mill pitch
Investment in R&D & Skill Development
00:07:24
Speaker
diameter calculations, all referenced back to the Machinery's Handbook to give us Fusion 360 thread milling, the actual knowledge, none of these intermediate calculators, none of these wizards, none of this stuff where you don't know where the numbers came from, straight from Machinery's Handbook to thread milling that works on the first pass.
00:07:44
Speaker
I can't afford anymore to spend that time. So it's kind of like this little think tank or skunk works where I've got people just spending unprofitable amount of time. It makes sense? You go spend a week. You go spend a week
00:08:04
Speaker
becoming an expert at this, then bring it back to me. I'll go over it with you and I'll distill it down. And they only be a 10 minute video. But if we can get that content across, get that Excel file out there, that formula out there, that template, that's great. Yep. It makes the whole process worth it. And I can see from your point of view, like a lot of these employees, and especially the jobs that they do, don't directly bring in revenue.
00:08:27
Speaker
So you have to justify their expense, their cost, which is something I'm working with Erin now, too. She's been working basically on her computer almost nonstop. And it's not directly revenue generating, like making product, making knives, things like that. However, it plays to the whole bigger picture of what we're trying to do. And it increases market awareness and the brand strength and all this. And long term, it's a long term play. It will play out properly.
00:08:53
Speaker
Yep, and it goes back to, you're so much better at this stuff, but who's the guy? Is it Tim Ferriss? It's like, take your 10-year goal and do it in six months, right? I think that's Peter Thiel, actually.
00:09:05
Speaker
Okay, so one of my goals would be this tremendous, and it's funny, I love talking about money because it means so little to me other than as a sign that you're doing things right. I don't want, I was, do you ever use Plasti Dip?
00:09:25
Speaker
I don't think I ever have, but I know what you're talking about. Like you put on handles of hammers and stuff. Yeah. So we pull our fixture plates off the machine and we were always coming up with better ways to handle them, to be safe and keep them free of dings. And so Jared TIG welded a cap screw onto a little handle. We turned it down, we had some polish on it, and then we plasti-dipped it. And I was like, this is what makes me happy in life. I don't need
00:09:49
Speaker
Other material things like the fact that we can do this and it's part of a process for a product that we make and it looks good I'm sitting there plastic dipping it and that is it sounds silly that that to me was sincere happiness Now I want more money because it's just part of this part of the game and it lets me do more things it lets me keep giving back but also my dream would be to
00:10:14
Speaker
You know, if I ever, if someone were to write a book about me, it would be to say, hey, Saunders had this program where he had this shop where, you know, it was so cool if you could figure out a way to get a job there or an internship there because they just worked on the coolest stuff. And it wasn't fictitious. I mean, it was real work that came back in R&D, but I've got this little brain trust of people here. They're using machines that are making parts that are coming up with ideas. That is it, right?
00:10:43
Speaker
That's your dream. Yeah, but but it's not our dream because we're doing it now. Yeah, exactly. But you need.
00:10:50
Speaker
You need the money to leverage that 10X
Building a Supportive Community
00:10:53
Speaker
if you want to. Yeah. Well, and like last night, I was watching an awesome episode on YouTube of how it's made on making pasta noodle extrusion dies. Freaking amazing. So cool. And so at nine o'clock, I emailed Ed and I was like three minutes and five seconds. That's the hydraulic press that I want to build. Now,
00:11:15
Speaker
The funding payroll to design that press is one thing. It's another thing to be able to say, hey, let's go buy two grand in hydraulic fittings, pumps, valves, flow meters, and all that. And let's just figure it out. And you don't ever want to be wasteful. But that stuff adds up. I want to be able to afford that stuff, still have conviction about dedication. I'm guilty in the past of having bought stuff thinking if I buy it, that means you'll focus on it and do it. And I didn't. But now I've got the team in place.
00:11:43
Speaker
Exactly. I've done that too. You spend the money and you think once you have it, you'll work on it. But then it just kind of goes on the shelf. And then six months later, you're like, man, I spent a lot of money on that. Why is it still sitting there, right? Because I'm so busy. But yeah, now that you have the team in place, all those things become reality. And I'm starting to see that too with Aaron and our new guy coming on hopefully in February. And then all these projects will actually come to fruition. And then I'm thinking for the rest of 2018, we might be hiring more people. This might grow.
00:12:12
Speaker
Bigger and it's gonna be a lot fun. Yep. Yeah it is my I'm in such a good mood God We haven't we're having such a good week such a good end of the year I the one thing I'm frustrated about is we've been doing so many good little things here that I haven't gotten away But I need to go do like a little think session and I've got all my little Unfortunately, you can't see but I'm holding up all these printouts of all these products are projects I should say not products but um
Project Prioritization Method
00:12:39
Speaker
I have a hard time choosing, what do I want to focus on?" And so the easy way to do that is to lay them all out on a big table and then just look at what gets you the most excited or what you think other people are going to get, you know, also excited about. And then all of a sudden when you see them all at once, it's like you say, oh my gosh, we have to build that first. That's awesome. Or that's going to take six months. So let's start working on it now.
00:13:03
Speaker
Yeah, that kind of thing. Don't pick away at it. This is actually a topic I was just talking to my wife, Meg, about yesterday, I think. And I heard Andy Frisella has got that MFCEO podcast. And he said a line that I love. And he's like, dude, I have to be careful what I choose to do, what I focus on, because I will go full bore even if it's not important. And I'm like, I'm the exact same way.
00:13:27
Speaker
I designed a Christmas present for my daughter, which I 3D printed, but I designed the whole thing from scratch. It's a little toy game, but I spent hours on it, which could have been productive time.
Balancing Passion & Productivity
00:13:39
Speaker
These stories are endless of the time that I put hours and hours and hours into something that might have zero payoff and zero
00:13:45
Speaker
you know, possibility when I have these big audacious goals in life and I'm not, I'm not leveraging the right choice of, of action, the right decision. So like you said, being able to lay everything out in front of you and be like, Oh, that's obviously the big one that I need to tackle first. Um, as opposed to like just picking the first one on the list or the one you're excited about or whatever, and then going full bore on that. And then at the end you're like, well, that's done, but that's not, you know, important.
00:14:11
Speaker
But he's funny too. First of all, five days before Christmas, it's very difficult to criticize you for doing an awesome job building your daughter a toy or gift. That's really cool, dude. So don't ever beat yourself up over that. Yeah. And I don't regret that, but just in general. But sometimes it's so funny about life, about products, about YouTube videos. We've put
00:14:32
Speaker
all this effort into making that Thanksgiving parody video. And we had fun. And that's all that matters is that we had fun. But I'll be honest, I thought we had a pretty good shot at going viral. It was funny enough. It had enough energy. We kept it really short. And in our pumpkin video from last year, Halloween has like 700,000 views. So I thought this Thanksgiving video, I bet you it's going to be a big hit. And it's not. It's got like 15,000 views, which is sort of normal.
00:15:00
Speaker
Whereas I recorded in 20 minutes, I recorded a video for the Tormach blog on nine ways to crash your CNC machine. I had a list already going, so that's why I was able to do it so quickly. But literally, this was between
00:15:18
Speaker
Like just such a passing moment. I just went over really quick and recorded. And that video has got twice that many views already. Autodesk just included in an email out to people. Other people have ever been like, this is funny. This was, you know, almost an afterthought. Yeah. Sometimes you can't foresee what works and what, but hopefully you can learn from the formula, right? And try to optimize. But I also tell myself, I don't make what makes you happy. Like I don't, I don't sit here and think
00:15:47
Speaker
Uh, yeah. How do you say this? You, you, you obviously want to do, you got to be yourself like, and if people don't like it, that's fine. But, um, on the flip side, like I know we have a huge passion audience for Arduino and that's great. Cause that overlaps with me. Like, again, I got into all of this because I like this idea of being able to build. Electromechanical devices that did think that was the core of it. That was my first product strike mark. The target was that it was a.
00:16:12
Speaker
A pick chip with a sensor, with a battery, with a motor, with fabricated and machined products. That is everything I love. And we kind of went on this 10-year machining focused stint, but now we're bringing it back with more of the Arduino and automation stuff, which is so cool.
00:16:30
Speaker
The thing about losing my grandfather, which I think is only unique in that I feel like I'm a little bit blessed in a cursed way that I didn't lose anyone close to me in my family or friends until he passed at the age of, for me, of 34.
00:16:46
Speaker
So to not lose anybody until you're 34 is almost a bad thing. And he and I were, he was my hero. We were incredibly close. As most people know, he got pretty, we had a falling out mostly because honestly, he just got pretty cranky in his old age. There's no reason to chalk it up to more than that. Nevertheless, it was a big deal to me. And I think what it made me realize in a very happy way is how short life is.
00:17:15
Speaker
And he lived to 91 or 90. But I was reading in Tools of Titans last night, something like 6,000 working days in your life. What are you going to do in your career and in what you bring to the world in 6,000 days? That changes the timeframe of what you think about with Grimsman Ives and with where you're going with your business.
00:17:37
Speaker
Yeah, something Tim Ferriss mentioned before was, for a while, he did a, you know, when you open a new tab in Google Chrome or whatever, and the new tab screen is a countdown timer of your life, an estimated countdown. So like, what are you going to waste your time on next? This is how many days you have left to do it, right? So be super conscious of that.
00:18:00
Speaker
But something I wanted to mention before, which just came back to me was, I mean, essentially you and I have marketing companies. We don't always think of it like that from the business side of it, but we do have marketing companies where we have to do YouTube, we have to do Instagram, we have to do it well, we have to do it smart. And we do kind of have to leverage, like you said, you tried to make a viral video and you should try to make another one. You should try again and again and again and again.
00:18:24
Speaker
Not just to appease to the public to be big and all that, but to make an impact. The more eyeballs you get watching your stuff, the closer you'll get to having that 30 intern shop where you just get to play all day long. Right.
00:18:41
Speaker
On the flip side, I think I said this to somebody in an interview recently. I sometimes like to tell myself, what if, and I actually wonder if there's legal, if there would be legal ramifications to this, because I don't know that Google or YouTube has any legal obligation to be honest with the view
Happiness & Subscriber Impact
00:19:00
Speaker
count. In fact, I think Facebook got caught for kind of fudging the numbers on video view counts, but what if
00:19:06
Speaker
What if I have no subscribers, John? What if I have, instead of the 200,000 that we have, what if it's 1200 and Google, you know, it kind of makes you in this very philosophical meta sense, think like, well, what is happiness? Then what is like, I'm happy, you know,
00:19:22
Speaker
whether I was happy, it was 20,000 subscribers, I thought that was so cool. So that's why I try not to get too hung up on the relative comparison. I think I've said this before, you know, it kind of gets me that, you know, guys like AVE or this old Tony are smoking us on views and passion and comments. But so I'm not them. I'm not funny. I don't have that personality. It doesn't bother me. I wouldn't change it. I think nevertheless, sometimes you're like, darn, darn, I wish I was, you know, yeah,
00:19:52
Speaker
I might have, this morning, I might have looked up stats on Social Blade for your channel and my channel and done some comparisons. Hypothetically, I might have done that. And you're gaining, as of this morning, you're gaining like 150 to 200 subscribers a day, which is awesome. And then I'm gaining like five to 15 a day. And that just shows like my channel's been dead for like six months. And that's why. So it just kind of proves to me like an active channel does well.
00:20:19
Speaker
And that's what's funny, as much as this is a business, and I know you and I are friends, so of course I would help you. But like, I don't want to, it kind of goes back full circle to that very vague scenario we mentioned at the beginning of this podcast about the sort of industry jealousy and industry sabotage. Like, I'd rather help people. I'd rather push people and grow their channel than worry about people trampling us down.
00:20:48
Speaker
Ivan, I think Facebook just released some or somebody was allowed to do some official sort of research on consumption of social media. And Ivan was telling me last night that the punchline is that if you log into Facebook and you just scroll, you just look through it, you become sad or depressed or it's a it's a tax on your mood. Whereas if you log in
00:21:16
Speaker
and you participate, it's a pick me up. That's what's so funny and that's one reason why I was so happy was last night, there was this little funny thing where between Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, there were all these little different conversations and funny things going on. It made me so happy because it is my, I hate to say it, but it is my best friendships out there. It is my form of sense of belonging and I enjoy it.
00:21:39
Speaker
Yep. I am the same way. Yep. And when you can interact with it, like it was so funny. I think you were on this conversation with our friend, Rob, and I was at a school event with my daughter at her play and then some of our good parent friends. She wants to get these VR goggles, but she says, she's like, I want to get this Oculus Rift, but it doesn't work for Mac, I think.
00:22:02
Speaker
And then I'm like, oh, I got a guy. So I texted Rob immediately right in front of her. And she's like, wait, are you serious? Like, you've got a guy at Oculus. And I'm like, yeah, no big deal. And he gets immediately right back to me. And he goes, here's the official answer. And it was just like this super cool, like, wow, I am connected. That's our buddy. He's been our buddy for eight years. And Rob. Right. This is Rob. Sorry, Rob. But you're just you. Yeah, exactly.
00:22:29
Speaker
And it was just so cool and so funny and be like, wow. And that's just one example. Like I know a lot of people in a lot of places, but they're just buddies. Like it's just, it's this industry connection. And because you and I have gone out of our way to naturally integrate ourselves into this community. It's just super fun. About every other training class, somebody sheepishly is like, would you mind if I, if I saw your Norseman?
00:22:58
Speaker
I'm like, of course, like I just handed to the class and like leave it like I'm, you know, of course, like good grief. And and somebody else, I think I was playing tennis and a kid was like, I heard that you know, Tyson Lamb. Like, yeah, Tyson, like, of course, he's like, oh, my gosh. And I was like, oh, my God, this is too funny. I can't tell Tyson this. He'll let it go to his head. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, funny.
00:23:26
Speaker
Okay. So here's a question. Where do you want to take this? I mean, you and I have started something with momentum here. We're going to take this. So my 2018 goal is, um, I'm trying to think about the YouTube channel and the widgets and all that as
00:23:43
Speaker
But you have to put out regular content on YouTube. So continuing that, but every second widget or fourth widget or whatever, having a much bigger Wednesday widget project. And those are usually going to be the kind of electromechanical ones. They take a lot more lead time and a lot more work. And that recipe is now put together where we can send people the Fusion files, the Arduino files, the bill of materials over on the NYC CNC website.
00:24:12
Speaker
We've had an internal shift of thinking where we're pushing less of that NYC site. Less of that site is going to be behind a paywall for members and much more of it's going to be open for a couple of reasons. One, it makes me happy. And two, I think we can keep it as a business model for two ways. One will be through advertisers and two will be
00:24:34
Speaker
carefully choosing what they call affiliate programs. So we do get a cutback. It doesn't cost the buyer anything, but we get a kickback on things like Amazon products. That's really the only one we do a lot of is Amazon. So it's kind of like, wait a minute here. If I can make the numbers work through Amazon and through advertisers, let's keep the site open. Let's have it be my little chance to play, tie into the YouTube thing, change the world. And then let's do these projects. I want projects that
00:25:03
Speaker
people are talking about on their own about how cool that was. That's what I want. I want to walk into that. I want to be a fly on the wall at some high school robotics club and be like, did you see the Saunders or the NYC video on this? And some of the things we've gotten the works I think are that level good.
00:25:21
Speaker
Nice. And it's the concept of actually sharing a video. Like how often do you actually send someone a link to a video? Probably not as often as, not very often at all really, but like repost it on your page or something like that. But that's kind of the whole nature of this is to kind of go viral is you want a shareable video that's just like, you have to watch this.
00:25:42
Speaker
Exactly. Or like, again, I don't let it bother me. But like, when I see my friends here in Zanesville at lunch, and they joke about like, AVE's Skookum as frig, it's like, okay, I'm not AVE. I'm never going to be funny. I'm never going to be that silly or whatever. But nevertheless,
00:25:59
Speaker
I need a way for the people to be like, did you like I called a, uh, talking to a vendor the other day and he was like, your, your Thanksgiving video was so funny. Our whole office was watching it. Um, that that's the kind of stuff I want to be putting out content that gets that people that fire up.
Content Relevance Over Time
00:26:17
Speaker
Yep. And, and things like that, like next Thanksgiving, it'll be just as valid and it'll pick up steam again. It's like, you know, that, uh, Albrecht, Uber, Uber Chuck, Christmas video.
00:26:26
Speaker
That's like five years old and every Christmas it still comes up and I'm like, when I like that one. Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Right. That is good. I'm going to just a less.
00:26:36
Speaker
I'm in a happier place. I'm less stressed. I'm proud to be doing what I'm doing. I'm proud of the framework that we've built around here. And the same goes for you, dude. Look at this. Seeing Julie and Aaron talk to each other is so still trippy. You've got a machinist coming on board.
00:27:00
Speaker
It's super cool dude. Yep. And, uh, like you, I'm in a much, much happier place, much more comfortable place than I've ever been. Um, certainly had a rocky year with a lot of things. Um, but I think like we've got a strong footing, like Barry keeps telling me, there's almost no decision we can make that will.
00:27:20
Speaker
will hurt us significantly at this point. So we just have to be smart. It's how big we want to grow. It's how smart we want to be from here on out. That's going to make all the difference.
Transparency in Business Processes
00:27:30
Speaker
And I want to maximize everything with the machine that's coming on that can actually run products that give me the freedom to come up with new products, to optimize, to clean, like you said.
00:27:41
Speaker
in our last chat and to like organize. And not only that, he's a process engineer and super, you know, organized, meticulous kind of guy. So, but I told him, we met the other day and I'm like, I'm like, we're going to have to share some of this stuff just so you know, like publicly because that's, that's part of the job.
00:27:58
Speaker
But that's something I've been thinking more about too, is even being more open, more open about the processes we do, how we make our products, because yes, because the risk of what I lose is so infinitesimal compared to the good that we do by inspiring and sharing, period.
00:28:19
Speaker
Yes, absolutely. And that is, I think, one of the key factors of how you and I have grown our YouTube channel is because we've been less afraid in general to share our mistakes, to share our process. People always ask me, aren't you afraid of people ripping off your knife because you're sharing so much? I'm like, not really, because it's hard to do. But also, it's like, this has grown our user base.
00:28:43
Speaker
Um, just because we're sharing so much and nobody else is. There would be so much backlash if somebody like directly copied endorsement and otherwise, I mean, like, so our, some of our secret Mojo is, is how we make large quantities of holes for our fixture plates, how we hold them, um, how we do positional tolerancing. None of that stuff is secret. It's more work and process. And I've always thought I wouldn't share that. And now I'm thinking more about like, but.
00:29:09
Speaker
Who cares? Like, it's still no one's, first of all, the fixture plate is sexy. But I think it's just cool. It makes me want to I just want to show it off. And honestly, I'll probably learn a few things. You know, like when the Haas AE was here, I was showing him how we do it. He throws something back at me. I'm like, Oh, that's a really good idea. So it's kind of like, I haven't learned this in a vacuum either. Now I put a lot of hard work and testing into
00:29:35
Speaker
proving things out. But you and I have more unique... Well, the point I would also add is that I want to be a role model for other people and give other people the tools and the framework to succeed. And part of our recipe now relies on having some critical mass of fans and viewers. And that's not necessarily going to be replicable to folks that are just starting out, obviously. So I want to keep that sort of in the mix as we talk about stuff.
00:30:02
Speaker
But I think we should do this better on YouTube is to further show our questions and mistakes on YouTube because the feedback is irreplaceable. And to distill that down and to show the new guy coming up on YouTube starting his channel that it's not so scary to ask this question and see who replies. I've been doing that for eight years now, and it's been crazy helpful. Like, oh, I didn't even think about it like that.
00:30:31
Speaker
We put the widget last night, we showed adding an option stop to remove clamps and lots of people were like, no, no, no, no, no. It needs to be a hard stop, not an option stop, which is totally a fair point. But because I made that mistake, there is a lot more awareness being brought to it, which means
00:30:50
Speaker
The only thing that was harmed was my ego for ever so slight tinge, which I don't care about. Everyone else now is better off because we've had this conversation around the right way, the safe way, the lean way, the process-oriented way of adding in CAM program stops to adjust fixturing to avoid crashes. We're all better. Nothing was actually harmed in the process of learning this lesson.
00:31:13
Speaker
You elicited that conversation by doing it the industry standard air quotes wrong way, which is great. That's like a great thing. That's not a problem at all. It's a good thing. It's awesome. It's going to be a huge year. I'm so excited. What do you have? Talk to me about your 2018.
00:31:39
Speaker
To put it very bluntly, I want to make a lot of money. Yeah. But you're the same way. It's not because we're not going to see John Grimso rolling up in a Ferrari checking in on his machine shop once every two weeks. That's not you. No. Yes.
00:31:55
Speaker
I mean, long term personal goals, I want to own a house, my wife and I, something she especially has wanted forever. So I want to make that a reality, maybe not this year, but certainly in 19. And I want to do everything I can to put our finances in place, make us look good to the banks, everything we have to do. No, no, no, no.
00:32:18
Speaker
I don't care. You don't want to look good to the banks. You're going to pay for your house with cash. That's the other option. That's why I want to make a buttload of money. I hear you. I totally hear you. And I agree. I would seriously be more okay with you financing
00:32:38
Speaker
a third machine after you get these two paid off and you pay cash for your house. Because if you have a stable business with stable revenue, it can be appropriate to implement capital leasing or financing. Now, the problem is that the people start rationalizing that and doing it sooner than they're ready for it. But I'll leave it at that. I didn't mean to interrupt your flow there. Sorry. No, you're absolutely right. And these are battles that I have in my head of
00:33:04
Speaker
You hear some people talk about wealthy people, and they're like, oh, they lease to leverage their money. And big machine shops lease all their machines so that they don't have to outlay their cash and all that. And then you hear from actual wealthy people that are like, see that private jet? I own that private jet. I'm not leasing it. I own that thing. And that's why I'm wealthy.
00:33:24
Speaker
So you know a lot more about finance and wealth than I do, but just from your background. But it's something I'm learning a lot about. And I want to be a cash-based owned lifestyle. I want to own my house outright. I would love to be able to build it for cash. So that's why I want to make a...
00:33:41
Speaker
but load of money, but also for the business to put, I want the business itself to have a huge pool of money to leverage the business, to hire people, to get the machinery, to, as you said, to hire somebody to do prototyping and R&D for like six months and just go, just have fun.
00:33:57
Speaker
You have everything you need. Develop this new thing. I can be the idea person. I can help them. I can manage them and mold them and let them do great things. And the resources are there, right? And we have this framework, this business to do that. But John, you're already doing it. Yeah. So two things. One, I meant to mention this a second ago, but the best thing I've thought of all year was what I said to you last week, which is I'm quitting the company. I'm quitting
00:34:22
Speaker
every, I'm quitting all first role assignment. I'm being a little facetious or a little exaggerating, but I need to have somebody else primarily responsible for everything to let me think about the entrepreneurial stuff, the strategy stuff, the long-term stuff, and then to help oversee everything. But number two, I think
00:34:44
Speaker
Most people would say, yes, they would love to have $10 million added to their bank account today. And I think most people think that would be a good thing. I think most people, number one, have a hard time actually understanding how they would spend that money. Because everyone just all of a sudden freaks out, like, oh my god, oh my god. Really, seriously, what would you do if when we hung up this podcast, there was $10 million in your bank account?
00:35:11
Speaker
You know, I'd like to say even the responsible version of me would try to take it easy. I would pay off the building mortgage here and then I would buy a five axis machine. I would buy a drill mill. I would buy a lathe just to burn it. I'm kidding. But. You know, I think it would be you could grow too quickly and people do blow through lots of people blow through lots of sums of money. So my point is you don't need
00:35:40
Speaker
Yes, you need money to buy a house, you need money to buy another machine, but you don't need this insanely unimaginable amount of money to all of a sudden do this R&D stuff and to grow organically with the right framework.
00:35:53
Speaker
Totally agree. And I am already doing it to a point, like what you said, but I'm not leveraging anything because I'm doing it all myself. Like all this higher level stuff, even the product creation and execution, I'm doing it myself and I can't leverage myself by doing it like that. So once the machinist comes on, there might be two or three behind him, who knows, throughout the year, but then I can start to leverage. Then I can get these more products out the door. Then we can actually make
00:36:21
Speaker
the kind of impact that I want to make. And then we can do the podcast better, we can do better YouTube videos, we can just have more fun. I want this to just keep being fun forever. I don't want to make sure I keep it small. Everything, the type A entrepreneur side of me that focuses on executing what you just said, I think about
00:36:47
Speaker
Not as a Debbie downer or the glass is half empty, but rather as more the realist behind the execution Well, you're gonna hire all those people you've got to hire them or you've got to have an HR person and you've got to think more about company culture and you're gonna have some misfits which means you're gonna have to do some you know layoffs or firings or whatever and You're gonna have to put in safety measures and you're gonna have to do like all of a sudden and if you don't the whole idea was that you're gonna be this like
00:37:14
Speaker
this sort of like CTO of your own company. So you're not going to be the one burdened with all these administrative and operational hassles, which means you've got another layer of another person. And I may be exaggerating right now, but again, I don't want to be, I would
00:37:32
Speaker
I would politely decline the chance to go work for half a million dollars a year for some company that had a hundred billion dollars in venture funding to go build some crazy device because that's what the culture is going to be like. They're going to throw money at growing really, really quickly with all this resources and all this stuff. And it sounds super cool, but I get to do what I want already.
00:37:54
Speaker
Yeah, you wouldn't want to change what you have. So as I've hired these new people, and I'm doing exactly what you said, like I've got to hire these people, I've got to figure it out, I got to do all the paperwork and all that stuff. And although it's a bit of a drag, it's also kind of fun. Like this is kind of the boss's job. And if I can leverage myself and have work get done without me, then I can do that higher level stuff.
00:38:17
Speaker
better. And I can have the time to do it. Because right now when I do it, parts aren't getting made, basically. That's what makes me like you. It's why you're the kind of guy I'd like to get stuck in an airport with is maybe at some point you outsource payroll or whatever. But it's like I ran payroll myself for two years. I did all of the math every other Friday on withholdings. So yeah, I don't want to do it anymore. But I've done it. I paid my dues. Yeah, exactly, right?
00:38:46
Speaker
And now you get to find better ways that just make it easier. It's automation, right? Yeah. Dude, this is awesome. And thank you. Gosh, I remember why there was a text or email, but you were like, hey, we should talk. We should just share and talk. And I think we are both in. I know at the risk of being presumptuous, you were in a much more insecure place where your business was. And frankly,
00:39:12
Speaker
It was for me, back then, it would have just been Jared and we had no products. We weren't even in this shop. It was a very different place. Our revenue is probably five times what it was then. Yeah, ours certainly is, if not more. Right. So thank you, bud.
00:39:31
Speaker
Yeah. And thank you. This has been, I mean, I like to joke that it's our therapy session, but it is. Yeah. And yeah. And Merry Christmas to you too. Merry Christmas. This is going to be super weird because I think we sort of informally agree that if we don't need this as a emergency episode, we'll just release it as a bonus episode sometime within the next six months. So if it's like June 2nd and you're hearing Merry Christmas right now, please accept our sincere apologies. Yeah. But that's just how it is. It is.
00:40:00
Speaker
Shall we go crush it? I think we shall. Awesome. Thank you. Have a great day. You too. Bye.