00:00:00:00 – 00:00:43:18
Unknown
Well, I love my friends. And welcome to another episode of the Manufacturing Transformed podcast. I’m your host, Paul Van Meter. And, today we are releasing, just a really wonderful and warm, and insightful conversation with James Vasiliev, Brazilian machine, a great shop in Boston. James has been our Jamie, as I call him, as his friends call him, has been a client for a number of years now and truly had a significant transformation when he, he brought, pro shop, you know, he had run a shop for, I think, about eight years before, he got pro shop.
00:00:43:20 – 00:01:08:02
Unknown
He and his wife had, and, you know, doing the best they can. He was a machinist for years before that. So he knew the industry, but didn’t quite honestly know a lot about running a machine shop, running the business. And, although his wife has, you know, Li has really strong business skills. The actual nuts and bolts of the machine shop itself were were somewhat somewhat new to them, even though they tried for years.
00:01:08:02 – 00:01:33:03
Unknown
And his description of having pro shop be like taking a college level course on how to actually run a pro, machine shop properly was the first I’d heard of that kind of term. but a really interesting way to frame it. And he goes on to describe, just lots of, really interesting things about what he thinks about building process and teams and continuous improvement and just going for things.
00:01:33:03 – 00:02:03:22
Unknown
And, and, it’s been really fun to watch his shop flourish and grow over the last several years. And he’s about to move into a significantly larger facility. so very excited. So anyway, please enjoy this great, in-person, episode of Manufacturing Transformed. Jamie, so glad you’re here with me. Pleasure to be here. Well, so, you are, guest number two on the Manufacturing Transform podcast, which, as I was saying, is similar in some ways to when you were on Machine Shop Mastery.
00:02:03:22 – 00:02:26:24
Unknown
But this is truly about pro shop. Okay. So we don’t need to have any, any topics sort of off limits and keeping that arm’s length, that we do with Machine Shop Mastery. So I’d love to have you share a little bit about the background of Marcella machine. and then we’ll get into, why you needed the new system, how you chose Pro shop, and sort of what it’s been like since.
00:02:27:04 – 00:02:53:08
Unknown
Sure. Start with the story of the shop. So I’ve been a machinist since I was 15 years old. 43 now. I went to trade school for it, was very good at it. Always made a good living doing it. And, you know, like a lot of machines out there, a lot of frustration, you know, especially as things were changing and dynamic milling was taking place and we were moving from the slow way of doing things to the fast way, you know, there was a lot of resistance from the old guard.
00:02:53:10 – 00:03:12:17
Unknown
And I was banging my head against that a lot. Sure. And, my wife kind of challenged me to start my own business. And so I did. yeah, I, I love her, and it is awesome. She is. And we run our business together. Yeah. and she’s good. She’s got a master’s in business, and she takes care of all the admin side.
00:03:12:19 – 00:03:34:05
Unknown
And, and I take care of production and everything that has to happen on that side. I build out the systems. It’s a good partnership. It is. It works. Well, I’m very lucky. now that I’ve, kind of be getting out in the world and traveling and meeting of the shop owners, I realize now how lucky I really am that I don’t really have to worry about that side of the business.
00:03:34:05 – 00:03:58:18
Unknown
And, you know, she’s just as deep into it as I am. So she’s got just as much to lose if if she’s not very competent at her job as as if I wasn’t at mine right. And how long has it been in the we 13 years of show. Okay. 13 years. And, you implemented another system years earlier than you came to pro shop?
00:03:58:20 – 00:04:24:01
Unknown
Yes. Just share a little bit about that and why, ultimately, you decided that wasn’t the right system for the rest of your future. Sure. so we, one of the places that I worked at right before I started my own shop, they had job loss and that they were using that. And, you know, I was in my late 20s, early 30s, and I had been on a lot of other shops and didn’t even have right, you know, what they were doing.
00:04:24:03 – 00:04:40:01
Unknown
And when I started my own, I said, you know, I want to do it better and I want to do it right, and I want to have good systems. And so I got into job loss. And we you know, we didn’t know any better. So, you know, we thought we were doing it well. And we used it to make travelers and, you know, data collection and that kind of stuff.
00:04:41:17 – 00:05:10:01
Unknown
but truth, we needed something new because we just couldn’t make profits. We we were making money, okay? But we could not make we could not make consistent profitability. Okay. And what do you attribute that to? Inefficiency. And poor time management. and not my personal time. But I’m a big believer that, manufacturing companies turned time into money, and we just choose metal and plastic as the medium to do so.
00:05:10:03 – 00:05:33:12
Unknown
And so if you’re bad at managing time, hence then bad at managing money. And so if you’re constantly late, you know, you talk about this a lot about, you know, expedite fees and stuff, right. Sure. And that’s a very tangible way of being of being like, oh, hey, you know, we’re not going to we’re not efficient right now because we’re paying a lot of expedite fees and shipping fees and things like that.
00:05:33:12 – 00:05:57:14
Unknown
And that’s just bleeding off your profits. Right. But that’s because you see those real easily. You know, those are easy line items on your PNL. But what you have a lot of trouble seeing is hardware wasn’t here when it was supposed to be. And so this job didn’t ship on time. So we didn’t make our number for the month because this job got pushed the next month and next month is a completely different thing than this month.
00:05:57:14 – 00:06:28:15
Unknown
And, you know, you only get one chance to make it right. And you got a there’s an infinite number of ways of making it wrong. And being bad with managing logistics and logistics of time are why most shops have a lot of trouble making money, including them, including us. We just didn’t know. So, you know, in the In the Morning Machine Shop article, the the thing that people really picked up on, you know, was that you really have no idea how much waste you have until you start pointing at it and addressing it, and then you realize it’s it’s so much more than what you think when.
00:06:28:17 – 00:06:47:04
Unknown
And so you were living in that, that call that job boss world not realizing quite how much inefficiency or waste you were doing every day because you’re just in the thick of it. Yeah, it would, you know. Yeah. You know, and then we got, we got hit really hard when the tariffs got put in place. And then we got hit pretty hard when Covid hit too.
00:06:47:09 – 00:07:05:15
Unknown
Right. And so, you know, honestly I was thinking that I had that it was time to do something else. That’s what I was thinking and that we had been at it, you know, 8 or 9 years at that point. And it was not what I imagined when I got that first loan and started my business, none of it had gone that way.
00:07:05:17 – 00:07:23:08
Unknown
And, I mean, my wife and I, we talked about it and we decided we were going to take one more crack at it, but we needed to figure out a way to do everything, just do it differently because it just we had nothing left to lose. So let’s just do it differently, right? And so then I started kind of doing research as to, well, what else was out there.
00:07:23:10 – 00:07:46:00
Unknown
And I happened to stumble across, an article that you had submitted and I believe, about another customer switching to, paperless. Okay. You know, the holy grail of manufacturing, you know, no paper inside your shop. And, I have a I showed it to my wife, and I was like, this is different. And I’ve people have been talking about this for ten years and no one has done it.
00:07:47:09 – 00:08:11:22
Unknown
the heavy lift at the beginning, like automation. Right. So it’s hard to get it to go. Yeah. And I said, we have nothing to lose. We might as well give it a shot. And that was when you and I met, and I was not easily convinced, but as you shouldn’t know, and I mean, every everything that we had, we had put into that shop everything, you know, our, our we signed our house on the line.
00:08:11:24 – 00:08:27:16
Unknown
I gave up my all of my 30s to build that company. Right. And so we did not do it lightly, you know. And the devil, you know, was better than the adult. So even though it wasn’t good and it wasn’t running well, we had no idea what was going to happen if we just ripped it up and tried something new.
00:08:27:19 – 00:08:48:24
Unknown
Right. But I think we were in that perfect position where we were tired of the old and we were ready for change. Right? We were open minded and we were ready for change. And so we embraced it wholeheartedly. Like all the way we went all the way in. Yeah. You know, instead of just being like, well, let’s try it a little bit and let’s see how it goes, I just took a completely different mentality.
00:08:48:24 – 00:09:08:08
Unknown
I told you the story about how I started threatening to fire people, for questioning the decision and that because once I started to understand what we had done, I, what I really understood was how much I didn’t know that was that became unbelievably clear to me, was that I knew almost nothing, and that I had been doing this for a decade.
00:09:08:10 – 00:09:29:06
Unknown
Right. And at other shops before that. Well, you work in other shops. No one teaches you how to how to run the shop, how it works. So it sounds like sort of the classic e-myth, story. You know, I talk about the E-Myth book all the time, people that are masters at their craft and think the myth is that if they’re masters at the craft, they’ll be good at running a business that does that.
00:09:29:08 – 00:09:50:06
Unknown
Yes. So you were probably the classic example. All I was was the poster child for that. And, I ran my company poorly because I ran up like a machinist. And so how what does that mean? Well, I took jobs, and because I thought they were cool, I took jobs. And because I enjoyed the challenge, and I wanted to be able to prove that I could make it.
00:09:50:18 – 00:10:12:07
Unknown
and that’s not the criteria that I take jobs in for now. I had to learn how to become a businessman. Right. I was a machinist who had to learn how to become a businessman. and now I’m a businessman, and I’m an awful machinist. Now, I, I doubt that’s true. it’s I’m still very good at problem solving and programing and logistics and all this stuff that made me a good machinist.
00:10:12:07 – 00:10:26:15
Unknown
But when I go downstairs now and I try to help and I try to cut, it’s a problem because there’s so much going on and I can’t just let go of everything and focus on the job like I’d like to share and and who’s going to come in and take over a machine that I’m working on. Right, right.
00:10:26:19 – 00:10:51:10
Unknown
The boss is setting something up, and then I get, you know, somebody shows up and I have to go take a meeting. I’m missing for three hours. There’s no money in that machine. Sure, nobody’s coming to take that over. They’re all going, well, that’s Jamie’s machine. Don’t just leave that be. He’ll come back eventually. That’s funny. So, do you attribute your implementation of Pro Shop as to for learning how to be a business man?
00:10:51:12 – 00:11:22:11
Unknown
Or. There must have been no, I think I think my I think my failures. I think my failures are what made me a better businessman. I think my implementation of pro shop is what made me a better machine shop owner. There are no books on how to do this, and everybody’s situation is a little bit different. You know, you go and you ask somebody for advice and if their second or third generation owner, their experience is very non relevant to what I had done.
00:11:22:16 – 00:11:43:04
Unknown
And and you know, my shop is very unique because I’m an machinist owner but you don’t see a lot. And that’s getting to be less and less and less a lot of, a lot of our competitors and our allies are being bought up by venture capital. They’re second or third generation. They’re, you know, people who are in banking with deciding they want to get into manufacturing.
00:11:44:19 – 00:12:05:04
Unknown
there are not a lot of machine shops that are kind of popping up organically, you know, where, you know, guy just said, and I’m not saying it doesn’t happen. It definitely happens. But, it should be happening more. And that’s something I actually think that I might be able to make a difference in my experience of coming up, learning it the hard way and how to become a businessman.
00:12:05:04 – 00:12:29:00
Unknown
I think it’s something I might be able to share and help other younger entrepreneurs to get there faster and not make the same mistakes. Is that, just an aside, is that one of the reasons you’re one of the Titans shops? Yes. Yeah, yeah. That’s why we and we we brought that the titans of CNC Academy in to help us to grow our own people organically because it’s a curriculum that it’s a curriculum they can do at home.
00:12:29:02 – 00:12:56:04
Unknown
And, you know, one of the things I that makes me successful at this is my tenacity, you know, and my confidence that I can get myself out of trouble and that is something unique to my personality. So we have to find that. And other people like you need tough people, you know, if you if you if you can’t be a tough person and then I need you to hold something plus or minus four and you’ve got one piece of material, right.
00:12:56:07 – 00:13:11:08
Unknown
You know, that’s, you know, you can have a panic attack over that if you if you really understand the consequence of it and the dollar value is attached to it. So you got to be able to take those kinds of punches. So what we do in our shop with that is we we just make it available to everyone.
00:13:11:08 – 00:13:28:18
Unknown
We make those opportunities available. We don’t force anyone and we have them do some of it at home on their own time. You know what? If they don’t have a computer, if they don’t have the ability, we let them do it at the shop at their own time. But it’s important for me that they invest a little bit in themselves.
00:13:28:20 – 00:13:46:07
Unknown
Sure. Because the ones who invest a little bit in themselves, then I come over the top and I invest tons of time. My time training material, tooling money, everything into those people, and they end up becoming really, really great machinists where I’ve learned that the ones that I try to force them to do it right, you know, even if they’re asking before it, sure.
00:13:46:08 – 00:14:02:13
Unknown
They’re saying, you know, hey, I want to learn, I want to grow, I want to advance, and I just give it to them. They don’t appreciate it. And so they don’t understand the value of what it is. I’ve just taught them. Sure. And and then they end up going and chasing dollars and not chasing talent. And they end up getting pigeonholed into into a job.
00:14:02:13 – 00:14:16:12
Unknown
Maybe they like you, maybe they don’t. But, you know, and a lot of other shop owners, I’m sure, can attest to this. They get a guy who shows up for an interview, and the guy’s been doing it ten, 15 years, and he can’t even explain true position to you. Right? And you wonder, how did this guy, you know, who’s paying this guy 30 bucks an hour?
00:14:16:12 – 00:14:32:23
Unknown
He doesn’t know how to drill a hole, you know? And you that’s how that happens. You know, he just was like, yeah, I’m doing good. I’m making good money. And then that place closes up or slows down, and he ends up out in the labor market and realizes that he doesn’t have the talent to compete in today’s labor market, because it’s not the way it used to be.
00:14:33:00 – 00:14:56:10
Unknown
And, you know, it’s good insights. so I want to get back to employees and, and, it’s your show, Paul. Let’s do it your way. How they, you know, how they adopted a pro shop. But I do want to go back and talk just about, selecting pro shop and the implementation process. I know that you’re candid with people.
00:14:56:10 – 00:15:15:06
Unknown
Sucks. Well, I’ll. Yeah. Yes. well, I’ll start with the first question. which is something that, you know, I think you should be incredibly proud of. not that I need to to on at all, but, I bought pro shop because of you, so I talked to three other people before you called me. Not from other companies.
00:15:15:06 – 00:15:36:13
Unknown
From your company. Okay? Who were telling me, you know, selling it to me. And I’m just not that kind of a buyer. I’m a I need technical answers to technical questions. You’re talking about blowing up my business and rebuilding it. And so I want to know how it works. And so I got a phone call from you, a zoom call, and I think we spent three hours.
00:15:36:23 – 00:16:02:12
Unknown
and now that I’m, you know, bigger and I employ, like, 25 people now, and, you know, three hours of your time, I understand today how valuable that really is. Where then I was like, this guy’s trying to sell me something. He’d better spent his time explaining it to me. but after after I had talked about it with you and you had the ability to answer my questions, like, no matter how deep I went, you understood your product.
00:16:02:14 – 00:16:21:23
Unknown
So I felt comfortable that if I got stuck, somebody would be able to help me. and, and, and what I was doing wasn’t working. So, you know, sometimes I don’t need everything. I just needed to feel comfortable. Right. And that was why I bought it. You know, I knew going digital and getting rid of the paper was the answer.
00:16:22:04 – 00:16:46:24
Unknown
Right? And then I felt, these are this is a group of people who will help me, you know, and and that’s and honestly and again, you know, this I buy a lot of softwares. We we added it up. We’re well over $60,000 a year in software fees and maintenance fees and all this sort of stuff. because we’re pretty far ahead in industry 4.0 from a lot of shops.
00:16:46:24 – 00:17:10:01
Unknown
So I have 3 or 4 could even be up to five now of different softwares that manage different things inside the shop. Sure. And out of all of them, the customer service at Pro Shop is a different experience. In fact, that sets the bar at unrealistic level. So then you’re very upset with other companies when they don’t just handle it for you the way that it gets handled.
00:17:10:04 – 00:17:29:00
Unknown
Pro shop. And I think you guys have done a good job of scaling that, because I understand that when you when you first onboarded me, you know, you guys were a lot smaller than where you are now in client count. And so you could give me that really personal. Hey, Paul, this is broken. You know, and as you guys began to grow, you built a good system with the ticket system.
00:17:29:00 – 00:17:45:10
Unknown
So I still feel like I’m being taken care of. And I never text you about technical problems anymore, and everything just keeps rolling. And that’s how come I always volunteer for the beta? this because you need people to give you good, honest feedback. And I feel really good that if something goes wrong, you guys respond very quickly, right?
00:17:45:10 – 00:18:08:23
Unknown
And it’s it’s like pick yourself up some about how you fold out software. So that’s why I that’s why I pulled the trigger. Okay. tomorrow’s the second part of a question. the crew, the implementation part. So the implementation, I mean, it’s awful, right? You take an it’s a spinal cord replacement. Perfect. It’s a spinal cord replacement with trillions of connections.
00:18:08:23 – 00:18:32:19
Unknown
And and we were a baby of a company, so a lot of things were not built. And some of those things weren’t even in my imaginations that we were going to build them. And as we were getting, little did our onboarding. Yeah. And we kept running into, like, he would train us, this is how this is going to work and this is how these things attach.
00:18:32:19 – 00:18:48:24
Unknown
Right? So everything’s digital. Everything can link together. So everything’s at your fingertips. And I’d be like, well, I don’t I don’t have this. And he’s like, yeah, but look at how cool it would be if it did it like this. You could put it all together, right. Sure. And I’m like, yeah, well, you know, it sounds like a lot of work and I don’t know.
00:18:49:02 – 00:19:09:13
Unknown
So I, you know, I think of the tool crib. I love that story with illustrations. Sure, sure. So, he was teaching me about planning and how planning and making your setup sheets digitally, how that goes. And he kept saying about all of the cool things that you could do and how you link everything together back to the tools in the corporate.
00:19:09:15 – 00:19:38:18
Unknown
Yeah. And I kept saying, we don’t have a tool because we were very small. We’re five machines, you know, maybe there was 12 people working now. Yeah. which is interesting to think of now because now we, we were almost doubled, almost tripled in size, right, since we had put pro shop in place. Sure. So finally I just said, you know, send me some pictures of what, what it is you’re describing about how the tool should two groups should get put together and like by the third time he was like, this thing links to the tool crib.
00:19:38:18 – 00:19:58:16
Unknown
And I’m like, I don’t have the tool crib. Finally I said, you know what I’m doing? I am, I am being the problem. I am the problem in my company. I have to tell myself that all the time. Okay, it’s me. I’m I’m being stubborn. Right. And then so that was on, when I did my onboarding, I took it, like a college level course.
00:19:58:16 – 00:20:14:19
Unknown
So me and Luke did, I, I don’t know if I have the record, but I’m close. So I did my onboarding in six weeks. You know, I did three times a week, two hours a class, plus two hours of homework and two hours a week. And I took it very seriously. And I always showed up with my homework done.
00:20:14:24 – 00:20:30:13
Unknown
Yeah. And that Friday, he was like, you know, we’re going to miss out on a lot of stuff, you know, can’t you just go get like ten tools and put it together so we can pretend you have a toolkit? Yeah. And I said, all right, let me, let me, let me think about it. And I’m like, man, he’s right.
00:20:30:13 – 00:20:48:13
Unknown
And I should I should just stop resisting altogether. I should just let it happen. And then I came in on Saturday morning and I picked up the shipping department, with Paul Jackson stuff, and I moved it to a, I moved it outside, and then I went and grabbed everyone’s toolboxes, and I, we, I took a couple of our old list of cabinets we had.
00:20:48:15 – 00:21:06:18
Unknown
Yeah. And I started making them look like the pictures that he sent me. And we came up with our own system for numbering. We didn’t use the organic system. Yeah. And our so like when you pick up a tool in my, in my shop, it tells you what it is and where it belongs by its tool number. So you know, the it’s a five digit code with a letter in the front.
00:21:06:18 – 00:21:27:17
Unknown
So that tells you if it’s a shop end mill, what cabinet goes into and then what bin location it’s in. Just by looking at the tool number. so when I came, I put that whole thing together and I got like one drawer done. There was thousands of tools. And so I took a picture of it and I texted it to Luke, and I was like, all right, let’s go back to Wednesday’s notes.
00:21:27:23 – 00:21:43:09
Unknown
And how did these things work? How did that work? And then that set the precedent of me just going, I gotta just let go. You know, I’ve already paid the money. I mean, I’m putting all my time into this. I got to let go. And as soon as I made that commitment to letting go, it began to flow real fast.
00:21:43:09 – 00:22:08:13
Unknown
And I just stopped fighting it. And what I realized was, I had been complaining for years that no one wrote a book on how to build and start a machine shop, and Luke was literally teaching me how to do it right. And so we began moving so quickly that most of our conversations that we had were about how to build a machine shop strategically, because the modules are all very similar.
00:22:08:14 – 00:22:27:18
Unknown
So if you learn how to make an estimate, you learn how to make a quote. You you know how to build a part. It’s almost it’s identical. Right. And work orders are just demand based off of the part levels. Yeah. So how how you go to find everything and how you put everything together is very intuitive. So I didn’t need a lot of hand-holding with the software itself.
00:22:27:20 – 00:22:46:15
Unknown
And I was significantly more fascinated by how did you guys do this process and see how did you handle this? Bought a box. Like I learned a lot, you know, and I whatever, you know, we were very space confined, so I took what I could and implemented it right away and whatever else, I kept a notebook, which I still have.
00:22:46:15 – 00:23:07:11
Unknown
And we’re actually we I don’t agree with thought box. That’s that. That’s just because I don’t agree with, the bar part. Everything else though, which I really liked the one piece flow concept. Correct. And when, so we’re moving. Yeah. where we got a space about four times the size of our current space. I just put brand new concrete floors.
00:23:07:11 – 00:23:28:09
Unknown
Congrats. because the floor is the. I’ve always wanted a nice, clean, smooth floor. Yeah. And nice, clean painted walls at my shop is right, like an oversize garage. I. When I started the company by myself, I never imagined we’d get to where we are. And I had to come up with a new dream. Right. And so my dream, I had to change it from, I figured when I made $1 million.
00:23:28:11 – 00:23:49:09
Unknown
Right. You know, when I made $1 million in gross profit, I made it, and then that came and went, sir. And I’m not even. I’m not even close to making it, you know, because the. I move the goalposts as I learned more. Yeah. As I learned what? Like real success means. And to me now, real success is building a company that can survive without me, that I’m proud to hand down to my kids.
00:23:49:11 – 00:24:08:03
Unknown
And I’m not giving them a mess. That’s that’s what I’m worried about. I don’t want to, you know, this is my legacy. This is going to become my family’s legacy. And the people who work there, they’re a part of this, too, and we treat them that way. And and I truly believe in that, that it’s as much their company now as it is mine.
00:24:08:03 – 00:24:27:16
Unknown
I’m never going to get to our goal is to get to 20 million and to have 100 people. I’m not going to get there by myself, and they’ll be more money than I could ever spent. And so it’s all of us together. We’re all pushing in the same direction, trying to make this happen. And so to get back, you know, to how dare this, how this one for them as we were implementing.
00:24:27:17 – 00:24:48:18
Unknown
Sure, there was a lot of resistance, right? A lot of resistance. because I was doing it so fast, you know, in six, six weeks. Yeah. but I, I felt like we had to rip the Band-Aid off, and and that was March of 2020, so they were, like, closing down the country. And we got a grant from the government.
00:24:48:18 – 00:25:05:20
Unknown
And so I had this unique opportunity in time where I had like two months that we could breathe. And I was like, now’s that. It’s now. We’re never you know, I have these people working here. We didn’t have a lot to do. And I was like, okay, you, there’s 3000 tools. I need you to take a picture of everyone.
00:25:05:22 – 00:25:19:02
Unknown
You have to fill out all this information and you need to make a little bit. Yeah. And then I and I just kept going. You. This is how shipping works. It needs to be organized. You have to go into every customer level and fill in all of the, you know, you made this cool video about all these post-it notes.
00:25:19:07 – 00:25:46:07
Unknown
We had that right. It was just they were everywhere. And so we had to gather them all. We had to gather them all and, and and pass through them what was pertinent? What was garbage. Yeah. And and just kind of rebuild, you know, smarter. But as we started trying to look at, you know, do we rebuild what we currently have and make it better and ended up being obvious that the best thing to do was just kind of start from scratch.
00:25:46:09 – 00:26:06:06
Unknown
And so, so that was March, April, May. So by the end of May, I took, I took every active, they call travelers in job. And I made I just made dummy work orders in pro shop. Okay. And then we went around the shop and we just threw away everything. All of the paper. Right. And we just.
00:26:06:06 – 00:26:35:05
Unknown
And then as those kind of bled out, we got into the real estimates that had the real data. And then we never looked back. And then the following year, which we just got to print up in Water Machine Shop magazine, again, we put out 64% more gross product with the same equipment with the same people. Right? Right. So that’s what I mean by you have no idea, no idea how much inefficiency you really have until you start to address it and you start to open your minds and see what else you know.
00:26:35:05 – 00:26:56:23
Unknown
And so at that point, I’d made a decision that, it was time for me to become a learn at all and, you know, not a know it all, but to learn it all and start kind of. Now, I go on a lot of anytime I get invited to another shop or to, a trade show or. Yeah, I go, I and my wife comes with me and we go together and we go to learn what’s coming out, what’s new, and we take that stuff and we bring it back to the crew, and we teach it to them.
00:26:57:03 – 00:27:11:03
Unknown
Hey, this is what we see coming. You know, this is where this is the direction we want to move in. And we’ve made we’ve put a lot of new technology on the floor, you know, based on the feedback of the guys that are working there. Because what I ask them is, how can I make your job better? Right?
00:27:11:05 – 00:27:29:12
Unknown
Right. And now they’re all now they’re all pro shop. And so most of the like the logistical problems that we have whenever talking about that kind of stuff anymore, you know, we’re talking about, I just bought a blue light scanning machine. No. Nice. Because highly complicated, geometries take too long to measure in the up. Right.
00:27:29:13 – 00:27:46:06
Unknown
And so if it, if I, if I need a CMM program with, like, you know, a couple of hundred different dimensions in it, for sure, for an in process check, it just takes too long, you know, I’ll make 4 or 5 more parts out of the machine before I get an answer back, because this one’s good and we can scan it, scan thousands of dimensions in like five minutes.
00:27:46:08 – 00:28:18:16
Unknown
So it takes the computer longer to process it than it does to scan it. So we have to get a really, really jacked up gaming computer. It will take it forever. That’s fantastic. So one of the things you said, which I think is really fundamentally important, and we have clients hitting up against this philosophy is having the humility, and lack of ego to say, I’m just going to sort of let it go and follow the process and stop resisting.
00:28:19:09 – 00:28:56:02
Unknown
because I think there’s, you know, when people start a business, they feel like they’re an expert in their own business and they know how they’ve done things. It’s hard to say. Well, maybe I shouldn’t throw away the way I’ve been doing things and try something different. like. Yeah, what? What would be the having done that and having, gone through the process of just going with the flow or however you know how to describe it, how would you what kind of feedback or would you advice would you give to someone that’s in that same position?
00:28:56:04 – 00:29:03:14
Unknown
Other than to trust the process?
00:29:03:16 – 00:29:23:05
Unknown
It’s tough because you’re dealing with a lot of different personalities. You know, where, you know, I’m a lot younger than a lot of my peers who have made it this far in this space. I’m still one of the youngest guys, you know, even in my 40s. Now that in most of the meetings that I go into,
00:29:25:05 – 00:29:43:05
Unknown
if you, when you hire a lawyer, do you go there and give the lawyer advice, or do you do what he tells you to do? Right, right. So if you’ve spent, you know, a sizable amount of money, to onboard with pro shop and then you these are experts in their field, just like a lawyer would be in his field.
00:29:43:17 – 00:30:07:09
Unknown
it doesn’t make a lot of sense from a business perspective to not take the advice of the experts. Sure. You know, and I can. What I can attest to is that just in the four years since we’ve onboarded, I suspect that you guys have done the same thing. So now from you’ve gone from like 50 to hundreds of clients, and now you get into these all these other companies and you get to learn how they tick and what’s making them run better.
00:30:07:14 – 00:30:27:10
Unknown
And now you’re catching the attention of OEMs. Right. And, you know, and they’re they’re giving you feedback saying, hey, pro shop companies outperform. You know, their their consistent, they’re predictable and that’s what they want. And so you just go with it. You know, if you if you took one step, you jump. Just just let it happen. Yeah.
00:30:27:18 – 00:30:48:03
Unknown
it it’ll hurt the influence. The implementation can hurt a little bit, but there are ways to mitigate it. You know, who you pick as your pro shop champion is, is very important. Yeah. I got lucky. That’s me. So, like, I didn’t have to negotiate with me. Yeah. I’m also very lucky to that. Like, my company is structured in a way where once I made the decision, it was done right.
00:30:48:03 – 00:31:06:10
Unknown
And not everybody has that. You know, some people have a lot of explaining to do. and I had no explaining to do. In fact, I told you that funny story out, as I was implementing it and we were changing so many different things and people in my company were starting to resist. I started threatening to fire people.
00:31:06:12 – 00:31:26:16
Unknown
Right? Because I didn’t want to have to, I shouldn’t. I’ve taken these guys so far, right. You know, and they were just scared. That’s what they were. Just scared. Scared of the unknown. They didn’t know, you know, what was going to happen. in the in the example of the, of the, you know, the guy that I told him that if he didn’t just trust me, that he should go find a new job.
00:31:26:18 – 00:31:52:18
Unknown
What he was arguing about was that I had moved with the majority of the tools were from one place in the shop to the other. Okay. Right. And he was very upset that he was going to. And we have a 4000 square foot building. I’ve worked at places that took me longer to walk from my car to the front door than if you made a complete lap around my shop, and he was complaining that we had moved the tools to the other side of the company, and not where they were next to his machines.
00:31:52:20 – 00:32:10:19
Unknown
And by the third time he had mentioned that I had had enough and, and the, the part of it that made me react in such a way was that what he couldn’t understand was that he’s never he’s never going to have to go get his tools that they get delivered now. Right. And so I thought about that and I’m like, this is going to be everybody’s going to have this.
00:32:10:21 – 00:32:26:04
Unknown
They’re all going to have all these questions. I don’t want to come across as if like, you know, I was running it like a, like a monarchy or anything. But what I said to them, wait until I’m done. Right. Wait until I’m done. I’ll teach you guys how it works. And then I want to hear what you guys think about it like that approach.
00:32:26:04 – 00:32:43:06
Unknown
But there’s no reason in coming and complaining to me. The decisions been made. The money’s been spent, right? You know? And if you guys think I’m here taking college courses from what? For me, I’m doing it for us. So stop fighting me and get on board because this is where we’re going. And I have a saying that we’ve said at the company since the day I started it.
00:32:43:06 – 00:33:02:00
Unknown
Be careful not to let the company outgrow you, because we move at an at a ridiculous pace, because I want to grow a multi-generational machine shop in my lifetime. And so to do that, you have to be moving much faster than everybody else, and you have to be able to take, you know, reasonable risk, which is my wife is really good at this.
00:33:02:00 – 00:33:18:01
Unknown
I’m a dreamer. Yeah. You know, and she’s a realist. And so I’m like, look at all these crazy ideas. I want to try all this stuff. And she’ll make sure that they add up. So that way I don’t just drive us off a cliff, you know, chasing something that’s never going to come together. Yeah. so she makes she makes me a better owner.
00:33:18:01 – 00:33:38:20
Unknown
So I’m really glad that I have her, you know, and she and we’re owners together, so. Yeah. Yeah, I don’t want to misconstrue that in any way, but after I. After it was implemented, and, like, a year goes by, right? I take, like a, I take everybody out to dinner and we start talking about the change.
00:33:38:22 – 00:34:02:17
Unknown
Yeah. What do you guys think? And everybody’s like, we have no idea how we did anything before we did this. How did any of this stuff work? And I was like, it didn’t. That was that was the point. That was why I had to do it. None of it worked. That’s why we weren’t making any money. Right. And I can tell you that in 2021 and 2022, I made more profit than the previous nine years combined.
00:34:02:19 – 00:34:20:08
Unknown
And and it gave my wife and I most years would break even years, you know, and I’m not a lot of people who are going to listen to this. They’re going to go, yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Oh, I remember those years, you know, that break even. You’re like, yeah, oh, that’s not too bad. Right. But in 2021 in 2022.
00:34:20:09 – 00:34:45:06
Unknown
So that’s the year, the year after we kind of like we knew about pro shop. I would say that it’s 2021 is the year that everyone talking about the 64%. But then in 2022, we didn’t grow. We just kind of, you know, did normal growth, like, I think it was 20% in gross product and we added a couple of machines, but the profitability was huge.
00:34:45:06 – 00:35:06:13
Unknown
What a what a big difference. And finally, my wife and I were like, okay, this is a real business. Like, you can really make money at this if you can do it right. but I don’t want to give anybody any false ideas. It is even with Pro shop, it is still like an engine. And so if you take one component out of the engine, it will sputter.
00:35:06:15 – 00:35:28:06
Unknown
It won’t. You’ll get no performance out of it. So it’s still a a battle of making sure it’s fine tuned, making sure our people are well trained. now we’re on a lot of like, EOS type of stuff that we’re kind of focusing on, getting rid of bad actors, you know? culture, morale, that kind of thing.
00:35:28:06 – 00:35:48:03
Unknown
Systems. I’m still even from the we did that for that, podcast, like two years ago. Yeah. I’m still writing down systems constantly. I feel like I feel like we’ll never stop. It’s just something. My poor assistant, that’s all he does. He just writes out. So. Yeah. Describe your what you do with your system. So I hired an assistant on your advice.
00:35:48:22 – 00:36:06:11
Unknown
and you were right. I definitely needed help. And, I hired this young man. His name is Cody. He’s an amazing, very bright young man and very eager to learn about our world. And so I said, well, if you really want to learn about it, I need somebody to write down the instructions. And he’s like the instructions for what?
00:36:06:13 – 00:36:22:16
Unknown
Say everything. Every single thing. Every single thing that happens in here. Right. If you if you do anything in this place and you’re like, oh gosh, Jamie, how this works, when I explain it to you, write it down. I don’t want to have to explain it to you again. Right. And then what we do is we take all of those SOP.
00:36:22:16 – 00:36:42:21
Unknown
So the first SOP I wrote was how to write an SOP. So that way they would all come out the same. So I made an SOP for SOP. He’s. And then what we’ll do is we’ll have meetings with department heads who are doing things, you know, per our ISO standards. But not in a really formalized, documented way, because things are constantly evolving and changing.
00:36:42:21 – 00:36:56:22
Unknown
So we would just get together and I’d be like, hey, how does receiving work, you know, I can’t I can’t find the tracking numbers. You know, when I need to, somebody calls me, you know, I’m way up here. You guys are doing tracking numbers down here. How do I find them? Why do I have to come down and ask you?
00:36:57:23 – 00:37:19:19
Unknown
And so the the trick to writing a good sop is to come together and agreement on what is the very first thing that happens. What? When somebody says, okay, give me this info, what’s the first thing you do? The absolute first thing you do. And then how do you know when you’re done? Okay. And then you just you get everybody together and you just kind of let them fill in all the middle.
00:37:19:19 – 00:37:36:02
Unknown
And what you find out is that everybody has their own opinion on what the middle should look like. And some people have a different opinion on what the beginning looks like. Okay. Most people agree on when it’s older. but I give you a good example. What the we did have do CMM programing because we do a MDI in my company.
00:37:36:02 – 00:37:59:00
Unknown
So that stands for automatic Machine Data input. So when we take our CMM programs, we do not manually type the data over into the collection software. Right. It just sends a file. It dumps the file on the server. And every three minutes I think it searches for new files, automatically fills in all of our metrology information. Sure. And the trace?
00:37:59:00 – 00:38:17:14
Unknown
No, the trace fields at the beginning of the program, crucial to whether or not that works because it sends it over as a CSV file. So if you are if your columns are wrong, right, you get complete garbage out of the other end. And so what was the what’s the process for that? What did the trace fields look like?
00:38:17:14 – 00:38:32:10
Unknown
What’s the first step. So when we got together and we asked everybody, we said, you know, what do you guys think the first step is to writing a proper CMM program? And we got answers that were like, well, you want to go get the model and you want to, you know, make just make sure we have the reports and we have to do this.
00:38:32:10 – 00:38:50:16
Unknown
And I just raised my hand and I went, should we check to see if we have a program already. And everybody was like, That’s that’s probably a pretty good place to start. And so then from there in the SOPs, once you structure that out, it is very, very easy to see where the problems are, right? Once you have the pieces in front of you.
00:38:50:21 – 00:39:12:17
Unknown
Yeah. So and you can add like little edits as time goes by. So for that in that same example we put a date marker. And so any programs that were written before June of 2023 have to be reprogramed. Okay. Because we because all of the changes that we made and the new software’s that we use and how MDI, the translation files, you know, that was when the latest one got put in.
00:39:12:19 – 00:39:28:14
Unknown
So anything before then is suspect. And so you don’t have to reprogram it from scratch. But we set a date in the SOP that anything prior to this date, you have to take a look at it like it’s like a rep change seriously and bring it up to today’s standards. We do the same thing with master cam programs as well.
00:39:28:16 – 00:39:42:24
Unknown
And then you you, outline that with links and pictures and stuff, and you put it in the task module or the training module. Both. Well, depending on what it is, if it’s a standalone or if it’s a task driven module. Yes. Got it. Yeah. And then we go in and we are assigned to does all that. He does all of it.
00:39:43:03 – 00:39:48:07
Unknown
Right. and then he also does,
00:39:48:09 – 00:40:08:01
Unknown
In pro shop you have a training matrix. And you can go down and assign the trainings by job position. And so he went in and redefined all the job positions and reattached all the SOPs as trainings. Yeah. So when I hire a new CMM programmer, we put them through the pro shop driven training. And what I get all the other ran is exactly what I’m expecting.
00:40:08:18 – 00:40:30:03
Unknown
but it yeah, I mean, that’s the, the, the but, come back to the EMF. You know, the idea of building this franchise prototype of exactly how you run your business. So if you duplicate it, another branch of it, you know, 100 miles away, right? They can look at how to do it and do it the same way you do it without you having to be there explaining it to them.
00:40:30:03 – 00:40:48:04
Unknown
Right? Right. Well, and that’s 100% on the notes. my, my thinking behind this was much simpler. How do I scale? I’m trying to scale. I’m trying to figure out why I have a goal. How do I scale the human component here? If you’re sitting around waiting for top notch level three machinists to walk in through your door, those are unicorns, right?
00:40:48:07 – 00:41:07:12
Unknown
You know, and they’re not walking through your door. Their head hunters are finding them, and they’re they don’t move jobs. They get paid handsomely. Sure. And so if you want to grow to a hundred people, you have to grow 100 people. and so you need a good system. So that way, what you are putting in, you’re going to get a consistent result coming out.
00:41:07:14 – 00:41:27:02
Unknown
Yeah. So I’m already teaching these things to people. Sure. So let’s document it so we can have a repeatable process. So I’m not the guy that has to teach it for forever. Sure. So and we hold organized classes at the new facility. We built a classroom I don’t know if it doubles as a break room. So Thursdays at 3:00 we mostly mostly what we do is you know, problems that happen on the floor.
00:41:27:02 – 00:41:46:19
Unknown
So like, one guy runs into a problem, he’s having trouble holding a part flat. Well, there’s techniques for holding a part flat and Cody port. Cody. Cody makes my visual aids for me. Like content creation, right? And then I do like PowerPoint presentations up in the break room, and I’ll cover 2 or 3 subjects every Thursday. So now everybody knows how to fold apart flat or how to keep apart room.
00:41:46:19 – 00:42:09:24
Unknown
That’s brilliant. Yeah, yeah, I know, I know that you said that, if your name came up in, like, you know, as part of the process. Yeah, it’s a bad. It’s a bad process. Yes. I have two rules for making a process. It can’t have a person’s name in it, especially mine. But if you are developing a process and you come to a point in the process where it says, well, when you get to this point, Jamie, me what to do, that’s a bad process.
00:42:10:01 – 00:42:26:15
Unknown
And most process all processes. Eventually we’re like that, right? As Jamie went to start Jamie what to do. Right. Jamie for the solution. Right. And now I’ve gotten those down to this is what you do. This is what you do. If you run into trouble. And anytime that we get to where it says, you know, we’ll ask Jamie for a solution.
00:42:26:15 – 00:42:51:02
Unknown
We’ve started changing Jamie to I prefer the solution. Like, even if it’s a little bit more will like work. Put the solution that so people can get right to the answer. But if it is something where like somebody has to make a call like a judgment call, job titles go there now because job titles are always there, you know, but the people may change, but it still says go to the quality assurance manager for the answer to the direction on what to do here.
00:42:51:07 – 00:43:16:15
Unknown
So that’s a and that’s the second rule. The second rule is any system you build has to be able to scale. Right. And so does it scale and does it have a person’s name. And if it passes those two it’s probably a decent enough system for a ref. Right? That’s awesome. I would love to dig a little bit into the nuance if you’re willing, about that 64% additional revenue that second year.
00:43:16:17 – 00:43:46:23
Unknown
Like, what were the things that helped you presumably keep the spindles turning more often or making less scrap parts, or all the things that went into same people, same machines? Yep, that much more work. Well, the easiest one is what you and I talked about at the top shops conference, which was us drawing a line in the sand between online time and offline time, and how many things in the process could be moved from online, which the line in the sand was when you are actively engaged on the job and you’re in front of the machine, right?
00:43:47:03 – 00:44:09:21
Unknown
Right. How many of things could you do offline in preparation? Yeah, and that was part of kind of what Luke was teaching me was how much of this stuff you can do before. Right? So if you have a machine, you know, we’re scheduling out 6 to 8 weeks. We should have programing planning, inspection planning and CMM programing because we have an line seat for that now.
00:44:10:00 – 00:44:27:24
Unknown
Yeah, we should basically be cleaning up the tools from our new tool crib and all of that in the fixed string. All of that stuff gets gathered. It all gets done within two weeks of us getting a pillow faster. If there’s an expedite on it. But that’s usually the rule that we’d like to see. So now when we have a guy take on a job, he hits the floor running.
00:44:27:24 – 00:44:41:11
Unknown
You know, his tools are there. He puts him in the machine, he probes them all his fixed string. If we’ve made it before or if, you know, if it was raw, everything will be supplied to him, like his blanks for his jaws. And sure. So it all gets delivered right to his machine and he’s ready to go.
00:44:41:13 – 00:45:09:15
Unknown
So it used to be that I’d give the guy a traveler and tell him, hey, go make this. And so he would do all of that and tooling was all over the place. So I got one guy who loves to collect call tools. And so all of the all of the useful tooling was in his toolbox. Right? And there was no reason to fight it because I used to give all of those type of jobs to him anyway, you know, we’re actually moving him to, a newly made prototyping department that he’s going to get to run, you know, almost like an independent contractor.
00:45:09:15 – 00:45:23:10
Unknown
I yeah, you can. I want to give him the ability. He’s been good to me. So his name is Joe. I want to give him the ability to, see what he’s made out of and, like, give it a go and start our prototyping department. So we took some of the extra machines that we had, and we put them in a corner.
00:45:23:15 – 00:45:41:04
Unknown
Right. And he’s going to have a new system built around him that’s kind of like outside of the system, where he doesn’t go to the tool crib for his tools. It would just be over there where he’s working right now. We call him a cowboy. He’ll just cowboy everything and get it out the door. Yeah, that is a wise thing to do.
00:45:41:04 – 00:46:06:17
Unknown
We, at our shop, we had, ultimately about 5 or 6 people and a dedicated prototype department. They, they got those jobs that ultimately turn into production, but they the way they did things was incredible. Like they’d receive a model, they program the roughing pass, stick a piece of material in and start cutting. Yeah. While they’re programing this the finish and the semi roughing.
00:46:06:21 – 00:46:23:20
Unknown
Yeah. We do that sometimes too like drip feeding the program. Right. So just poking out one section at a time. Yeah. Right. Yeah we’ll do that sometimes. And they use pro Photoshop but they didn’t. They used it differently. Yeah. They didn’t go to the same level of detail. They may take one picture of a set up just so they kind of knew what it looked like.
00:46:23:20 – 00:46:38:23
Unknown
So we put him as a resource. So the schedule the schedule looks at him like he’s a machine because he could use any one of well, because we don’t care. So the machine, his machines are not on the schedule at all. I don’t care what he does with them. Right. They’re his. And so what’s the bottleneck? What’s the bottleneck on how fast the production is going to come out?
00:46:38:23 – 00:46:53:02
Unknown
It’s whatever he can work on. Right. So we just put him as the resource and then we schedule it to him. He’s got his own line on the schedule. Yeah. And so we’re like, well, how quickly can we get this out? Well when’s Joe going to be free? Right, right. Oh he’s not going to be free for two weeks.
00:46:53:02 – 00:47:16:17
Unknown
Well that’s when we can get it out. Right. And it doesn’t matter how many resources he uses. And that’s actually a new mentality that I learned from you from your pro CNC days that bought a box thing. Yeah. So in the new shop when I did the layout I did the layout. So that way one person can use as many resources as they want to like it doesn’t matter anymore.
00:47:16:19 – 00:47:34:08
Unknown
Just you want three machines up, one up, two up three instead of flowing in machine. Right. I put the machines in a way where, two different people get six machines and you can flow as however you would like. And one of those extra machines. I don’t care if that’s what you got to do, right? You know it.
00:47:34:09 – 00:47:52:00
Unknown
Stop chasing them. We’ve learned that, we get more done with less. And that when when we start to really slow down and production starts to kind of sputter, it’s usually because we’re trying to do too much, right? Right. We’re trying to get we’re behind schedule. We’re trying to get caught up. We’re moving jobs around in ways that we shouldn’t be doing.
00:47:52:00 – 00:48:09:15
Unknown
And, I listened very well when when Luke was explaining how it worked and that, because my first instinct was that we would put out less product. Right. And he’s like, well, at a minimum, you would put out the same product. You would just when you start something, you would finish it faster and then, yeah, faster. And then you would start something else and also finish it.
00:48:09:21 – 00:48:32:07
Unknown
Right. And I’m very excited to see what this is going to do to cash flow. Right. So that’s cool. so this idea of online offline that’s not unique to pro Shop, obviously. That’s a it’s more of a lean concept than anything. obviously we have things like the pre-processing checklist and some functions that help support that.
00:48:32:09 – 00:48:52:02
Unknown
Is that what just I mean, you could have been doing that for years ago with your boss. I could have had a tool crib. Yeah, we could have had, quality control documentation because there’s a lot of things we could have done. Right. I think the thing that goes forgotten is that everyone starts their journey based on where they’ve previously been.
00:48:52:04 – 00:49:14:06
Unknown
Right? So if you worked at an aerospace shop and then, yeah, of course you’re going to start a shop like an aerospace shop. That is not where I came from. I came from a down and dirty shop where we took machines apart and rebuilt them and put them back together. And, you know, I remember I thought the guy I used to work for back then was not, but he took in, like one of those claws that has the magnet in it that they use, like scrap things.
00:49:14:08 – 00:49:30:01
Unknown
And we took that thing apart in the backyard, and one finger at a time brought it in with a fork truck, put it on the boring mill and reborn and pushed it and put it back into service. And they had to, like, bring it back piece by piece on a tow truck. Wow. Right. And so I liked that guy.
00:49:30:01 – 00:49:49:01
Unknown
He taught me that you can literally do anything right. You know, you just have to believe you can do it. And if you can do it and somebody is willing to pay you to get it done, you can do anything. So I wanted to be very brave, which at the beginning of my career was a detriment. But now that I’ve kind of learned how to control it, I find it to be an asset, because now I’m looking at aerospace parts, right?
00:49:49:01 – 00:50:01:01
Unknown
And they’re like this big and they’re literally crazy. And I’m like, I think we can make it. We have the ability. We can, we can. We have the programing and we have the inspection equipment. Right? If they’re willing to pay the right money for it. And I think we can make a profit on it and we’ll take it.
00:50:01:09 – 00:50:21:13
Unknown
sure. So how I guess that’s a good segue. How has your usage of Pro shop, changed the way you sell or the types of clients you’re able to get into or anything in that sort of realm? Well, it.
00:50:21:15 – 00:50:41:10
Unknown
Well, I’ve used it to show people like how we manage our shop. Right. And so from a guy that came from a place that really wasn’t the shop wasn’t being managed at all, and realizing just how many shops there really are like that out there. And then there’s everything in between tours. So you, you walk into a customer and I pull my phone out and I show them like, here’s our schedule.
00:50:41:10 – 00:50:54:10
Unknown
And, you know, this is what our work orders look like. And this is why when you call, you know, I just need a little bit of info from you. What are we talking about? What part are we talking about? And I can tell you everything you need to know about that part where it’s, when I’m expecting it back.
00:50:54:12 – 00:51:26:02
Unknown
And buyers and managers and planners really appreciate the level of understanding that you have about your business and, that they really like that. Yeah. I’ve, I’ve long, been of the opinion that, fancy machines are great and all, but an OEM that’s going to trust you with, you know, $100,000 orders or just, you know, lots of they want to know that you have the systems in place to deliver or not put their production line at risk.
00:51:26:02 – 00:51:39:22
Unknown
Correct. So when you show them you have really good digital systems that you have access to, no matter where you are, you know, you know, they it builds that level of confidence or at least, you know, good enough for them to take a lead. Sure. So that we can give you one order to order so you can show what you’re made of.
00:51:40:00 – 00:52:01:09
Unknown
Yeah. So it’s been a really good tool for selling, and not only that, but then we know how much we can take. Sure. Right. So now we have, we’re doing a much better job of scheduling and, and, we just hired our first. We’re building out our sales department right now. Thanks. We have we have room at the new building, and we made an office, and, we just hired our first VP of sales, and thank you.
00:52:01:10 – 00:52:18:20
Unknown
He started March 1st, and he’s remote a couple days and in office a couple days. We gave him a seat to the software, and he’s. And we showed him how to get around and from home. He has unbelievable visibility as to what’s going on in the company. And and he goes, hey, we’re going to be late on these things, you know?
00:52:18:20 – 00:52:34:24
Unknown
And he’s not waiting for anybody to answer, you know, is there anything I need to know about this? Yeah. It’s my fault. You know. He goes okay, good. And then he just goes and he handles it. Sure. You know, over overcommunicate. And that’s what we’re a quality control. I put a lot of time and effort into building that system.
00:52:35:01 – 00:52:55:24
Unknown
And now it works very well. Yeah. And so now I’m working on sales and he he the VP sales I’ve never seen the system. You know, no one really appreciates the system is that, potential employees. Oh, yeah. Yeah. when you, when you finally do get a high level unicorn type employee to come in, you know, and, for example, I just hired a new ops manager, okay?
00:52:56:01 – 00:53:15:22
Unknown
And he came on board, and during the interview, you know, I’m just showing him, you know, hey, how’s here’s how things work here. And, you know, our expectations and what I think will be your responsibilities and stuff. And he’s he’s a his jaws on the floor. He goes, you know how long I want to take. And all of the different things you just pulled up and showed me how long I would have taken in my last job would have been a week.
00:53:15:24 – 00:53:32:07
Unknown
Right. You know, and no, and nobody would have found any of that data. But I was like, oh, it’s right here. It’s right on my computer, right click it. This is what you did. Okay. So, yeah. Yeah, that’s that’s the most boring for you. And it really has. And and I’m serious about it. Like when we, when I get together with some of my old guard, I get some guys.
00:53:32:07 – 00:53:51:22
Unknown
I have a guy that’s been with me for ten years, and we talk about the changes that, you know, we’ve seen in the last ten years. You know, he goes, I have no, I can’t remember how it worked before this. Right. You know, and because you as humans, we tend to forget chaotic and negative things. So yeah, you just put that in the past because it was it was bad.
00:53:52:03 – 00:54:18:20
Unknown
Sure. It really was. But we just didn’t know any better. Right. You know, and we got really, really good at responding. So now we use that you know. So we’re good at responding. We’re good at we’re clutch. And we just have much better systems now so we don’t have to use it as often does it? I know that when you were talking about the 2022 and more profitability, I know that you, you, bought an RV and went on vacation more than you would ever been done before.
00:54:18:20 – 00:54:38:00
Unknown
And until, like, we saw that you had five weeks off. Yep. And so you were really kind of feeling the impact on a personal family level. Yes. And it was it was really great, you know, and and I can work from the camper. Sure. So I got with the phone company and I go on throttle data. So. Right.
00:54:38:00 – 00:54:56:09
Unknown
You know it’s unlimited and they can’t turn me down. And I just tether into my laptop and I, I’m like, I’m there. I got a VPN right? And the system can’t tell that I’m not there. So I just I’m like, oh, fixing the schedule. How’s this run and how’s that running? You know, moving things around, making sure things are getting ordered, you know, and my, my wife is the same thing.
00:54:56:09 – 00:55:14:22
Unknown
Right. So she’s doing a lot of material purchasing communications back and forth with the customers and with the people who are at the shop running. So that’s made that really, really nice. So they, you know, we we get to enjoy the RV. Right? now 2023 was a humbling year. Yeah. and so 2022, we were like, yeah, we made it.
00:55:14:22 – 00:55:37:23
Unknown
It’s amazing. You know? So for like, why now in 2023 was like, you’re not there yet. Just remember to keep it humble. Right? So, you know, everything happens for a reason. So. Sure, the little, little slap of reality. Yeah, yeah. 2024 is off to a better start. 2024 looks like it’s going to be a record year. So and I think the only thing that’s going to hold back the, the the numbers of it being a record year is the move.
00:55:38:00 – 00:56:01:08
Unknown
Because we’re going to be down for a couple of weeks. And you know, and that’s unpredictable. This sure as good as I am at logistics, as soon as we unplug anything could happen. Yeah. So so as we kind of start to wrap up here, you know, the name of this podcast and our team went back and forth with names for a long time, but it’s called Manufacturing Transformed Real Shops, real stories.
00:56:02:08 – 00:56:23:15
Unknown
you’ve been talking about a lot of transformation, I guess, if you had to. We’re not even the same company. Paul. Yeah, yeah. And and it was a it created a new mindset of like, if we didn’t know this much, then. Right. Imagine what we still don’t know. Right? So it became part of who we are now is we don’t know anything.
00:56:23:17 – 00:56:43:03
Unknown
And we just approach everything that way now. And we just don’t we maybe we don’t know. So we go into all of these things open minded. And so I would actually say that we’re three new companies from 2020, you know, the transformation of pro shop, the and then a lot of the other changes that we’ve made as we now we had a new infrastructure.
00:56:43:05 – 00:57:03:10
Unknown
And so now you start going back around and kind of reevaluating all of the systems and fixing them. Yep. You know, using like if you were a coder, you know, you’re using a new language now, a more robust programing language. And so you can do so much more than you could do before because you were so limited by your language and how things would have been built.
00:57:04:00 – 00:57:29:09
Unknown
so I would say we’re probably three different companies than we were in 2020. And I think after the move and the expansion, it’ll it’s going to be completely different as well. Yeah. Awesome. anything I haven’t asked that you think is pertinent to share and just kind of talk about the journey or the last four years with us.
00:57:29:11 – 00:57:53:06
Unknown
I’ve never met a group of people who were, I really felt, especially at the very beginning. I really felt like the people who worked at Pro Shop worked at marginally machine. And I said Luke was like, yeah. And you know, as well, I mean, I’ve never had you not answer to answer my phone. Right. And I, I call less and less and less.
00:57:53:06 – 00:58:11:07
Unknown
Now I know how busy that you are. but yeah, like, especially then at the beginning when, like, everything was on the line, I felt like you guys were in our corner. And yeah, I complain a lot of other software companies now because they just they don’t they don’t come with the same bag of tricks, you know, like that.
00:58:11:09 – 00:58:34:00
Unknown
And I think that that’s a reflection of the, the ownership team at this company. you know, you’re like one of the nicest humans I’ve ever met. You know, I’m from New England. We’re all we’re all jerks. And I’m from new Jersey, so. Well, maybe you’ve been out here on the specific air for too long. I don’t know, but, you and Kelsey and Luke, some of the nicest people I’ve ever met.
00:58:34:02 – 00:59:00:01
Unknown
Super smart, super deep technical understanding of this world. Because your machine has built a software to solve a problem. Everybody going at this is the opposite. They have a software and they’re looking for a place to apply it. Right? Right. So they build these. Sky blotting softwares that no one understands and you call them and they like I don’t know, I got to talk to nine of the people.
00:59:00:06 – 00:59:19:06
Unknown
It’s $300 an hour to get you an answer, you know. And what they don’t understand is that I’m bleeding to death while I’m waiting for this answer. You know, what do we say in Topshop? Death by a thousand papercuts. Yeah, right. Well, you’re bleeding, though, you know, and I’m just waiting for somebody to help. And I never felt not one time that I was on my own.
00:59:19:09 – 00:59:40:20
Unknown
And that if there was a problem with the system or even a lot of the things I called and I talked to Luke about back then were just like problems with, like, best practice. What is the best practice to do this? How when you guys built this, how did you what was going on. Right. You know, and he would give me really good answers and good descriptions of like how the flow worked.
00:59:41:00 – 01:00:06:22
Unknown
Right. And it changed my mentality of like what was possible for us as a company. So I would say that the transformation really here was not a transformation of Marcella machine, but the transformation of Jamie as the president of Marcella machine to become more open minded and to and to be able to learn more about, you know, I’m a really, really good machinist.
01:00:06:24 – 01:00:24:09
Unknown
And so I had to learn how to become that same level as a business owner. And so I had to just open my mind up and just let it happen. Right. So I don’t know how to convince other business owners to do that. I’ve met all types and some a part of me suspects that the ones who are going to do that right, we’ll just do it.
01:00:24:09 – 01:00:46:10
Unknown
And you don’t have to help them. Sure. So, you know, how do you help the unhelpful. Yeah. you kind of have to wait till they hit rock bottom, I think. And then. And that’s because that’s where I was. That’s what led to that change, was that I was like, well, this can’t get any worse. And I’m thinking I might just go back to work, you know, and just get out of the rat race of this when I after the change, I would never go back.
01:00:46:10 – 01:01:10:13
Unknown
Now, you know it. It runs well. Like, I can see what’s happening when it doesn’t run well, I can see what’s happening. So I know how to make the changes. I understand it now so that that’s the real transformation that the implementation made. Was it change me? Well, to go from thinking you might just go get a machining job somewhere to having, you know, a goal to have 100 people and 20 million in revenue.
01:01:10:13 – 01:01:29:01
Unknown
That’s, that’s a it’s it’s incredible. And it’s humbling to be able to be a partner in your journey of getting there. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate you being here I’m really glad to be here. Yeah I’m very happy for your success as well, Paul, you and Kelsey and the whole pro shop team. And, that’s why I, I come and I participate.
01:01:29:01 – 01:01:50:01
Unknown
I think everybody should know about this. It’s it could change their lives. It changed my life personally. You know, those five weeks of vacation, anybody who’s in this mess, you know, running a shop to be able to take that kind of time off and actually enjoy it? Yeah, it’s worth more than money. Yeah. You know. Well, thank you for coming out.
01:01:50:01 – 01:02:12:14
Unknown
Appreciate you playing out here. Yeah. Yeah. yeah. Here’s to the next, four and plus years of your journey. Thank you. All right. From saying thanks box. Hey there, buddy, how’s it going? Oh, man. I’m excited to talk to you. I love hearing about your meetings with clients. Your exploits? yeah. I’m excited. Yeah. So when we had our client advisory board.
01:02:12:14 – 01:02:42:18
Unknown
Jamie, Marcella was here on site, and we decided to shoot the The Manufacturing Transformed episode together, so it was super fun. We sat right here where I normally set, we had our director’s chairs actually used for the TCA video that we made. Yeah, right. The director’s chair is really fun. but, man, you know, you know, I, I knew that when we created this podcast and called it Manufacturing Transformed, it was truly going to be about stories of transformation.
01:02:42:24 – 01:03:05:17
Unknown
And, you know, you know Jamie well enough and you know Marcella machine well enough at this point that that is what the story is about, right? When he not only, you know, his usage of pro shop. but like when he was he talking about how pro shop was really, like taking a college level course and how to run a machine shop, right?
01:03:05:19 – 01:03:34:09
Unknown
He felt like he knew it beforehand. And he’s like, I didn’t know crap. Like I, you know, it was it was such an education. And it wasn’t just the software, it was the business processes that the software is built on. And, you know, Luke was his trainer and he, he talks about, you know, even just the concepts of doing one piece flow and how to do that in pro shop, like how to structure the part level and how to, you know, structure work orders.
01:03:34:09 – 01:03:53:03
Unknown
So things like flow, you know, start to finish in one flow. And he’s like, I decided to start doing that. And I shipped way more parts faster, you know? So that’s just amazing. And even just, just, there’s, you know, the tooling crib, this is a common story with many shops is like, their tooling is just a mess.
01:03:53:10 – 01:04:14:12
Unknown
they have tools all over the whole company and then, you know, but he was pretty decisive after after hearing it a few times from Luke, he was like, all right, fine, I’m just going to build a tool crib. So he went on the weekend like tore the whole place apart, but told all the tools from everyone’s boxes, brought it into one spot, and then had one person go through and like, catalog it and photo it and get it in the system.
01:04:14:14 – 01:04:35:03
Unknown
And, and it’s amazing how much better things got, you know, once tooling was under control. So just so many stories like that. Oh yeah. And he’s very decisive. He’s a he’s a go getter. He’s a man of action for sure. So it’s, it was just a really fun conversation. And, yeah. Just reinforces that, the impact can be huge.
01:04:35:03 – 01:05:01:10
Unknown
And it’s just so great to support people like this that are good, good human beings doing their best, doing great. But still, it was better tools. They can do even better, right? Yeah, yeah. And, you know, having talked with Jamie over the years, he’s, you know, the you said a man of decisive action. And he’s done that over and over again, you know, and with various different processes and various things that, you know, he’s really learned and chosen to do well.
01:05:01:12 – 01:05:22:07
Unknown
And I think that, you know, the tooling module’s a good example. And then I think he’s even, you know, diving in really deep on making sure that trainings and tasks are all super well documented. You’d mentioned. Yes. About that. Yeah. He, he hired an assistant, I think is the only like, you know, the only machine shop owner I know that has, like, an E.
01:05:22:09 – 01:05:43:02
Unknown
Oh, nice. Maybe. But, he, you know, and that was also something he learned from us. and. Yeah, that person is going through and documenting in the tasks module and the training module, step by step photographic pictures and arrows and really deep on every SOP in the whole company. So they can hire someone and get them up to speed incredibly quickly.
01:05:43:17 – 01:06:03:13
Unknown
yeah. Which which I think is super. Why it’s an investment, clearly. You know, it’s a it’s a longer term pay off, but, every company out there is having a hard time finding talented. Not maybe not talented, but skilled experienced people in the industry. So if they can hire someone with that’s eager and has some grit and determination to learn and do great.
01:06:03:15 – 01:06:21:12
Unknown
Yeah. And, to the SOPs and they can be up and running fast, right. And I think that, you know, the way that it’s set up and the way that, I’ve heard Jamie doing it, those very same people, you know, six months later are the ones rewriting the next version. That’s even better than the version they walked into 100%.
01:06:21:23 – 01:06:45:00
Unknown
so that’s like the that’s like that flywheel of things just continually improving. You know, once you set a baseline, it doesn’t it doesn’t disappear. It keeps getting better for everyone. Yeah. And then the one last thing I want to share, he said, you know, he works with many different software vendors. And he said pro shops customer support sets the bar like unrealistically high.
01:06:45:00 – 01:07:03:07
Unknown
And it’s not fair to all the other all the other software companies. So not fair. Be there so we can be proud of our team for doing such an incredible job. Yeah. that is that’s awesome. And and I know Jamie well enough to know that he, he doesn’t give that kind of praise lightly. It’s. Oh, no, you’ve actually earned it.
01:07:03:07 – 01:07:21:03
Unknown
So that’s that’s big praise coming from him. Wow. Cool, buddy. That sounds like a good one. I sorry I wasn’t there in person. I that, I know you’re on vacation, so. Yeah. Yeah, well, that wasn’t so bad. We’ll get you on one of these interviews soon enough. So awesome. Well, anyway, great catching up, and thanks for sharing the success.
01:07:21:03 – 01:07:29:04
Unknown
Yeah, thanks for joining with Jamie. That’s awesome. You bet. Cheers, man.
