all right welcome everyone so my name is
paul with proshop and i’m
real pleased to be talking today with
chris townsend of eagle manufacturing
and mitch olsen from olson custom
designs
um they are both in near indianapolis
and mitch is a customer of ours chris
townsend is a customer of ours as well
um i’d love for you guys to introduce
yourself in a minute but
we’re on this call because mitch you
reached out to say hey we’re looking for
new
for new employees and chris is training
students in cnc machining and
programming
and you’re hoping to possibly recruit
them so mitch if you could start by
uh introducing yourself yeah i’m mitch
olsen with olson custom designs
we’re a cnc machining and fabrication
shop located in
we like to kind of brag about which uh
helps recruit uh
what we like to think of as the younger
workforce and um
we got about 14 machines on the floor
right now
and roughly 35 to 40 employees over
third
three shifts and um we’re always
continually looking to recruit new
talent
and i got the idea of pro shops
marketing with uh
eagle manufacturing through their uh
through their website and i thought i’d
reach out to paul and see if we could
make a connection and uh
start maybe a new pipeline of recruiting
from
the uh towns the high school down
just south of us that’s i love that so
much when i got that email it just
totally made my day
so i immediately yeah put you in touch
with chris so chris why don’t you tell
us a little bit about your program
yeah my name is chris townsend i’m one
of the advisors for eagle manufacturing
here at
brown county high school in nashville
indiana we have a student-run
manufacturing business housed here in
the high school
that it we have about 27 students
involved this year and we
offer services in cnc machining
programming engineering design and also
in graphics technology so we do
promotional materials for businesses you
know banners signs things like that
and our business is completely run by
students uh the only adults involved in
the program are
myself and another advisor for the
program
all of our positions from sales to
marketing to
our graphics and manufacturing manager
and all of our production roles
shipping and receiving and invoicing are
all
filled by students so they complete all
of that work and get a little bit of
real world experience at the high school
level before they graduate and
move on to their post-secondary
education or the workforce
awesome um and yeah shameless plug for
eagle you know you guys make
all of our all of our gear our hoodies
our shirts
i think you even have a keychain there
in front of you don’t you that you guys
came for us yeah we are
working on those right now so yeah so
not only do they use proshot but we’re
one of their machining customers and
graphics customers and you guys have
been amazing at that
so any companies watching if you need
promotional gear
chris chris and his students are
definitely uh can definitely hook you up
um well i just i i think this is so
great you guys i know
mitch i imagine like most machine shops
recruiting is kind of hard there’s not
enough
people with the talent and the skills
and the interests that are into the
industry so
i imagine you know any student that’s
coming out of a program like this
that has some practical experience
actually programming and setting up jobs
and running parts
they gotta start as a more valuable
employee for you imagine yeah
absolutely and we’ve had a lot of
success with a lot of kids coming out of
the vocational schools
and um you know our company like i
mentioned before being
kind of technology heavy has helped
recruit younger
the younger the younger generation of
worker
so um yeah just a lot of success and um
i would imagine any any student that
took the initiative to join chris’s
chris’s class down at eagle is going to
have that uh
good work ethic and all the basic check
marks that somebody would need to
be a good employee and then just uh
polish it off with any any training and
any head start that they could have gave
them
i think we’d be we could really utilize
their skill sets here
that’s fantastic um well i know you guys
will connect and start
some visits and some discussions but i
just wanted to thank you both so much
for uh
the roles that you’re doing um i think
it’s great to
make these connections and for any other
shop owners or managers listening
definitely get involved in your local
programs like this
i know personally for proshop we’d love
to work with more schools
we’ve been pushing that on social media
so if you have a local you know tech
college
that uh that we can help support donate
our software to
we’d love to do that as well so anyway
thank you guys both so much for today
and uh
look forward to you guys hearing some
good stories about students coming over
to ocd
absolutely all right take care guys
bye-bye
