Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. Our guest today is Rich Morin. Rich spent 20 years helping companies recruit, interview, hire, and retain employees that fit their culture. In addition, he spent eight years in the US managing the sales of Fortune 500 companies selling Boeing, Sikorsky, General Dynamics, General Motors, Ford, Mack truck, and many others. He also trained many managers in leadership and coaching skills, including helping sales forces become more competent and confident in sales skills. Rich, welcome to the show.Rich Morin: Well, I appreciate it, and thank you very much for the opportunity.Lisa Ryan: Absolutely. Would you please share with us about your background and what led you to do what you're doing?Rich Morin: It's a short story. Twenty-one years ago, I was involved with a training company that also dealers for international hiring assessments. Although that company met its demise, I'm still a very active dealer with Profiles International, which puts me in front and center with companies looking to recruit, interview, hire, coach, and retain the kinds of people that fit their company and culture.I have spent a reasonable amount of time interviewing my clients, providing the objective tools for the hiring process. We all have been guilty of hiring somebody on a gut feeling, and a short while later, we regretted that gut feeling because the good feeling is gone. Then you have to terminate the person without objective data. Unfortunately, that still happens too often. Lisa Ryan: I'm sure well, let's go with the thinking about the hold on. Thinking about those profiles of people you've talked about, a certain gut feeling went with it that could sometimes lead us to hire wrong. In today's workplace, where it's so difficult to find people, it makes it more critical than ever to make sure you're bringing on the right people. How do profiles help you to do that, knowing about that person before they ever come on board?Rich Morin: Well, there are two answers to your question. First, and speaking of what profiles has an example, a pattern is made of the position, so the company takes a hard look at what they expect from this position in person. The applicant then completes a series of questions, and these cover the gamut from mathematics to general knowledge to verbal skills and so on. It becomes a match against the company's pattern, so now, you have the job call it manufacturing manager or sales manager doesn't matter. There's a pattern, and then you see the fit, that is, the level of fit between the applicant and the position.I'm coming out of that where the applicant fell out of the grading. So, if you can imagine, and I can send sample reports, of course, but on a scale of one through 10, if the position requires a 6, 7, 8 and if the applicant is weak, of course, it will generate interview questions to help examine that. Two things happen. The company then realizes maybe they don't need that higher level of skill, or the person is flat out not going to make it. So they're probably going to struggle if you do hire them for that position. But the good news is you can match them against a different position using the same data. Perhaps there's a better fit, so what comes out of this, you're right. You've got an applicant in a very thin field these days. There's not a lot of them applying, but now, if they don't fit the first position they applied for, they're offered a second position to which they fit. They go, wow, I'll take that job because they fit. Part of this has got to do with their cerebral ability, verbal reasoning, numerical skill, and numerical reasoning.  We are the only critters that use numbers and words. Some people are good at numbers, and some are not. If the job requires a lot of numbers, it's nice to know that upfront. They might interview well and look great, but if they can't do numbers, they're going to struggle, hate it, and leave. They're going to affect your company's culture because it will be moaning and groaning about how tough it is because they never fit in the first place.Lisa Ryan: One, it sounds like this is something to know each job description; to understand what is entailed, to take a look at people who have been successful in that so that you're not doing just an overall profile for your company, but as for that specific situation, how does a company figure out how to build those profiles for each position that they're interviewing for?Rich Morin: Well, it's straightforward. Within the system, there's a library, and they can scroll through and pick the exact title, if you will, or something that's very, very, very similar. They take it, of course, they rename it to make it the same company, write their name and so on. That's one way. The other way is they can do a job assessment survey. It's a bunch of questions that ask what does this job requires. Here's the problem: we'll say that you have somebody who has been doing a job for 20 years or 30 years.Well, their interpretation of what the job requires is changed. They're still doing it, and everybody accepts that, but the new people coming in there are new to it. Communications requirements, new software requirements - so in actuality, the job is not the one the person who is leaving has been doing; it's a very different job. So to your point, the companies have to be very aware of the changes happening so rapidly. Back to the assessment, they want to hire somebody with the capacity, verbal skill, verbal reasoning, and a library. Some people can speak well, but they don't understand a lot of the words. They can fool you because they have a nice rhythm to their delivery, but they're not competent in the language. Especially if you're in a multi-lingual situation where you have people dealing with different languages or language skills, verbal skills and reasoning are critical.Without repeating the numbers aspect, those things are essential. So now you have a profile of the current position requirements, and then you can do a match that makes sense.Lisa Ryan: It also seems that it's essential to keep up to date with people. Because, as you said, somebody's been in a position for 20 years they had a job description they're doing it. But, looking at not what the position was, but what the position needs to be going forward, mainly we're just coming out of this pandemic. Technology has changed just about every part of business, and so looking at, starting with today and looking into the future, would be a critical part for people as they're starting to look at who they need to hire and what kind of positions they need to fill the talent that goes along with that.Rich Morin: Well, yes, and so, then brings me up to a different solution if you will. Fit first tech.com is a company that has been in business for 20 years. They do a lot of business throughout North America, but what they do is unique. Companies are coming out now; they're starting to hire. However, the job boards are not full of applicants. However, the job boards exist, whether it's Monster or Indeed, or all these different job boards. So this system creates some questions. The applicants answer the questions, and automatically they're funneled. So instead of reading through 50 resumes, I'll elaborate in a resume in a minute, but instead of reading 50 resumes, the top three or five candidates are at the very top. Job descriptions are not based on what they've done because often, what they've done is not crucial versus what they're required to do.Now they've got the top applicants at the top. They can read the resume, and they can read the resultant questions. Their replies to those questions now have a real sense of who this person is, and there's a speed element required here. You want to answer these applications rapidly because you can still get them if they apply to multiple companies. So you've got a job as a forklift operator, and so 50 people apply. Do they want to be a forklift operator? Well, not really. They want a job. Now, they will tell you they always wanted to be a forklift operator. That was a dream job - well, that's probably not true. These assessments help you see through them. The forklift operator has got so much capacity. You're from a warehouse manager position because it happens to be a vacancy, and the guy goes, yeah, I'd like that. The reason he would like that is that he matches the requirements and the questions. It shows what he is capable of, not what he has done or she has done. The funneling helps deal with it if you're not getting a flood of applicants but getting many applicants. It funnels them and gives you questions. Then it goes further and helps you coach them, which helps retain them and helps to onboard them. You have more objective data about these applicants.One more element, now it doesn't preclude you, the employer, from contacting referrals. What it does is help you create questions. When the applicant submits his five referrals questions, the employer can go to the referrals and ask very pertinent questions about this person.Not, "Oh, he's a great guy. She's a nice girl who's been here five years; who cares. We want to know specifics about how they operate, what their good points are. What are their bad points? What kind of conflicts? You can ask those kinds of questions, so now you know the whole story. It can take the referral information to still speak with the referrals, but now you've got some objective criteria they responded to. You're not trying to reach people on the phone. You're not trying to call them and get ahold of them. There's no time, you got to hire them, and you haven't spoken to the referrals.Lisa Ryan: Right and speaking to referrals is a critical part of that because people can come across well in an interview that can come across great on paper. But then, when you take the time to ask the question to those referrals, you might find out things like, ooh, that person won't work a single minute of overtime, or that person will never pitch into something that's not specifically on their job description. So we find out these little personality quirks that may not show up necessarily in the interview process.Rich Morin: That is correct. Especially if you think about the challenge of being a leader these days, now, I take exception to the word manager, and I'll explain. I don't like to be managed, but you can coach and lead me. I not really don't know too many people that want to be managed.To stay on that for a moment, you look at a winning team of any kind baseball, football, soccer, it doesn't matter. Those teams are not managed to greatness, no, no they're coached and led to excellence. These assessments provide the "managers" now; if I had it my way, I promote them to coach and leader. But it gives them objective data to help coach and lead these people; some will be better equipped than their leader.They have more knowledge, more wisdom, or experience, and more education. That's a good thing, so these assessments help hire better people than the person interviewing. You don't want to hire people smaller than yourself.Lisa Ryan: So let's think about that for a minute. We've used the assessment. We found the person we're going to hire. They're a good match for the position and the company. We've checked out their referrals. What are some ways you have seen your clients successfully onboarding these people, so the offer is made, but there may be a week or a couple of weeks before that person starts?And then, once they start, you want to hit the ground running. What's like that t-minus two weeks, until the first month or two that that person's onboarding. That would be an excellent way to onboard them.Rich Morin: Well, there are a few different aspects to my reply. The first is that a company's culture is so fragile. Everybody you bring in can either support it or undermine it. So you've decided to hire somebody within your ranks who is a great person, a hard worker, focused, and loyal to the company. So those are the kinds of people you want to team up with that new entrant into your company. Those first few days will set the course. Too often, companies hire somebody, and everybody's busy, so the person stumbles around, will you know go to this department go to that department. Still, they're kind of on their own, and they're forming wrong opinions about what's going on and about the helter-skelter ways things are happening. Maybe it's because of a flood of orders, who knows, but they don't know that, so you want to invest a reasonable amount of time planning.It's the four p's: you plan, you prepare, you practice, and then, you perform well. You want your people to have a planned entrance.  You want to prepare them for them. You want them to practice, so now they're with people with seniority and experience. They see the attitude. They see a safe environment. So these people are taking the time to explain how to do the work safely. That includes ergonomics - how to get up from your chair and move your arms and wrists so you don't develop carpal tunnel syndrome. A lot goes into onboarding, but picking the people you want to team them up with goes a long way and helps establish what is required, especially if it's multi-dimensional.So the one person introduces the new applicant to the next person that says, well, sometimes you'll be doing this person's job. So there's a transfer of knowledge, and it's smooth, and the person understands clearly what they've stepped into.Lisa Ryan: Exactly. Figuring out that first-day work buddy is also essential, but it helps in a couple of different ways. Number one, that person who is your good employee, who's been with you, who has the right attitude, feels that they are valued. They are empowered to be that person's leader or guide for their first couple of weeks on the job.It makes the person that's starting feel more connected because they're not sitting in a basement filling out paperwork for the first day of their job, and nobody even knows they were supposed to be there. You're also allowing a relationship to happen. We've probably all been there, where that very first person that we meet our first day on the job or the first person that invites us out to lunch. That person is our friend for the rest of the time that we're there. So making sure that you start those relationships right off the bat with something like that gives everybody involved a much better onboarding experience.Rich Morin: Absolutely. I use sports as an example. I love sports, and I think it's a great example of coaching and leading. What do they do with a rookie? They give them the locker right beside the veteran. Why is that not any veteran but the right veteran? Because they see how they prepare, they think, they see how they act, and that person takes them under the wing. They team them up with these people for why, well, they want them to be good.In the case of sports, you're paying them a lot of money. That doesn't mean they're going to be good. You must coach and lead them. By teaming them up with somebody like a mentor, the word mentor applies here. That goes on, and it establishes a bond. They will link with that person for a long time because they were matched correctly. Their personalities meld, and the position strengths, perhaps yeah, it's powerful.Lisa Ryan: Look at the amount of investment that we have in that employee. We spent time going through the interview process and the screening process, and then we're paying for the profile assessments to come through. So by the time we have that person come on board, we could have invested thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars in the process unless we are very structured about how we're bringing that person on and how we're welcoming them to the organization. We're making sure that on day one, that their workspace is set up, maybe their business cards have been ordered, their password is ready, their desk is clean, and their truck is clean, whatever it is. People know that they are showing up for the job. You spend all of this kind of money upfront, so you must keep that in mind. Once that person starts - and for the first 2, 3, 6 months that they're on board - they probably have interviewed with other companies and are just as likely to say, "hmm, this company isn't what I thought it was. I'm out of here." So all of that money you invested in them walks out the door.Rich Morin: Absolutely, the two words that come to mind to support when you said, our cost and price, so it costs a lot to bring somebody on board. It costs a lot if they do come on board. When they harm and scare away your customers. They'd cause issues in the road. The absolute fragile culture you tried so hard to create is cost versus the price of an objective assessment, so now, the person, the applicant has completed. You've taken the time, your HR people, whoever's interviewing takes the time to read the results. They look at the questions and interview the person using objective data. Suddenly, for the price of two or $300, they have a very clear view of the person and, by the way, the applicant is impressed because now they've been asked to do something that other employers are not. They're going, wow, this company put me through this assessment. They get a personal copy, not one that matches, but one that tells them about them. They go, wow, I didn't know that I was good at this or that. This is a fit; this doesn't fit - so it's a win/win. Cost versus price, let me assure you, the price of an assessment is enormously lower than the cost of not using them, and let's face it, we've all made hires in haste. We've all made hires based on gut feeling, and it doesn't work out very well too often.Lisa Ryan: It makes me think of this past year. My husband was part of the great resignation. He was with a company for 13 years, and his priorities shifted. He realized that as he started to get to the end of his career, he wanted more. He didn't feel valued and appreciated all these things that I talked about in my programs. So finally, a company on LinkedIn found him. They told him it was going to be a long process. It was about a two-month interviewing process which included about six hours of personality assessments. The company wanted to make sure that they got the right person in. I will tell you. It was a match made in heaven. But, of course, I could have told them that Scott would be the most excellent employee that they had. I thought the funniest thing was that he scored the lowest areas were things like creativity and innovation. Well, he's a cost accountant, so those are the areas that you don't want people to be innovative and creative. So I thought it was funny. When I look at the last couple of months of him being with this company, how much of a difference and how valued he felt right off the bat, I know that what he went through that process that company had 10s of thousands of dollars invested in him in that whole two-month process. I don't know how many other people they were interviewing; I'm just happy they chose Scott.Rich Morin: And that's a great...

Connect with Chip HautalaLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chiphautala/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/motionsource-international-llc/Website: www.MotionSource1.com. Phone: 888-963-moto or 888-963-6686.Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm here today with Chip Hautala. Chip is CEO at MotionSource international. He's an experienced business owner and C-level executive with a demonstrated history of working in the machinery and manufacturing industry. In addition, he has business development skills, working with startups, sales development, budgeting, business planning, and team building. Chip, welcome to the show.Chip Hautala: Thank you, Lisa, glad to be here.Lisa Ryan: Chip, please share with us a bit about your background and what led you to MotionSource?Chip Hautala: I founded MotionSource in 2012. We're in our tenth year. Before that, I was involved in industrial distribution lubrication and hydraulics with another company. I was a CIO and CFO there. After they let me go, a number of our suppliers contacted me and asked me if I had was if I was going to start my own company. I said, well, I hadn't thought about it. After five or six of them came to me and said, you really should start your own company, I did that. That's how MotionSource began.Lisa Ryan: So you were doing something right if you have vendors and suppliers coming to you and wanting you to start your own company. What do you think are some of the things that you were doing right? You have a pretty cool culture over there. For ten years, you've been doing it. What do you think it was that made those people reach out to you?Chip Hautala: I think it's because I had hired every person who works there in the former business I was in. I take a team concept as I'm an old ballplayer. People say a small business is a family. I say no. Families can be dysfunctional, but teams work together. Teams always have each other's back. So I developed a team mentality, and I carry that over into MotionSource. My word is my bond. I've never gone back on my word in business, and I think that counts for something.Lisa Ryan: And how have you incorporated that team concept into MotionSource? What does that look like for your employees?Chip Hautala: Everyone works together. JFK had a saying that a rising tide lifts all ships. We have profit sharing. Some benefits that make it possible for everyone to work together. We have split commissions. If you were one of our salespeople and you didn't quite know enough about this. There was somebody else in a building and did they can work with you on that. They're going to receive a commission too. You're going to receive a commission, so everybody wins in the end. I'm big on quotes, but there's a Bruce Springsteen quote that says nobody wins unless everybody wins. That's the way I run the business.Lisa Ryan: That's a unique outlook when it comes to sales. Often you have one salesperson, and they go in, close the account, and get all the commission, even though a lot of other people potentially help them do that. It sounds like you created something that allows everybody on that team to win.Chip Hautala: Exactly. It's a team mentality because everybody wins when we win. It's a matter of making sure that everyone is taken care of; everybody does their job. So it lends to a more cooperative environment. When the company makes a profit, which we've been making for many years now, at the end of the year, we sit down, and we say, okay, we're going to divvy this up among everyone. Everybody gets an equal share of what the profit is. I don't need to be a multi-millionaire. But everybody and I always tell everyone here. You know what? This is how I feed my family, but this is how you feed your family. Let's stick together on this. Let's work together. It's led to an incredibly high employee retention level.Lisa Ryan: What are some specific stories or incidents or somebody who came from another company and got involved with the profit sharing. What things are you doing that they have shared with you? What are the reasons that they stay with you?Chip Hautala: One of the excellent examples I have is our national sales manager, Heather Pucci. She was working for a recruiting firm. I was looking to hire another salesperson, and she kept saying sending applicants over to us. I was interviewing them, and I said they were missing something. Finally, she came into the office, and she told Chip I'm sick and tired of sending you quality people, and you're rejecting them. What are you looking for? I said I'm looking for you. I'm looking for somebody like you, that's what I'm looking for.She said, are you offering me a job? I said, yeah, I think I am. She had zero experience in industrial sales, but she was doing industrial recruiting for a long time. She came in, and I said, it's going to be tough because you're going to have to learn all this stuff. You're going to learn everything that we know. If you're willing to do that, you're going to make a hell of a lot more money than you're making in recruiting. She committed to it. She was a salesperson for several years, and now she's our national sales manager. All of our salesmen report to her. That's a success story that we have.Lisa Ryan: It says something about you, especially in an industry where it's so hard to find people to begin with, with industry experience. What did you look for beyond that in finding somebody who had the personality, had the drive, and was willing to commit to the industry? You were taking a chance on them, and that it worked out well for you.Chip Hautala: I always say this as long as you don't quit on me, I'll never quit on you. You're never a loser until you quit trying. As long as you keep trying, I will keep working with you. She had a rough first year. I'll be honest with you. She didn't do very well on sales, and I lost money on her the first year, but she kept trying and got better. She evolved to the point where she was one of our top salespeople. She had some management skills, and she became a sales manager.Everyone responded very well, which is interesting because we're in a male-dominated industry, and she's a female sales manager. It worked out well.Lisa Ryan: You're sending a message to the rest of your employees, too, when you're not giving up on someone. When companies lose money on a sales rep in the first year, they're gone. But the fact that you continue not to give up on her and allow her to fail forward has paid off. That leads to a level of commitment and loyalty when employees see that you have their back and you're not going to let them go with the first sign of things not going well.Chip Hautala: Definitely. You learn a lot more in defeat than you learn in victory. As long as a person is learning and going forward and keeps trying, that's a winner. That's somebody that I want to be associated with going forward. That's how we have populated or our company here. I don't call anyone.Lisa Ryan: Right. Some of the other unique aspects of your business that we've talked about are that you offer more flexible hours and unlimited vacation time. Please tell us a bit about that because we hear all of these things with Netflix and these other companies offering unlimited vacation times. People are curious as to how they do that. Do people take advantage of it? How do you get any work done when you're just out basically allowing your employees to do whatever they want to do so? How has that worked for you?Chip Hautala: it's worked out well. One of the reasons is that this is your business, whether you're an employee or a business owner. We succeed when everyone succeeds. We do have an unlimited vacation here, but the rule is, you have to have somebody to cover for you. There's never a time when everyone's on vacation when a customer is not served. There's never a time when somebody is on vacation when their emails are not monitored.It's incumbent upon you. If you want the privilege of unlimited vacation, you are responsible for making sure that everyone's covered. It's worked out excellent. In our society, we tend to value work too much. Compared to European societies, Americans work far more. That's not what life's all about. A gentleman I worked for many years ago told me that nothing that happens inside these walls is as important as what happens outside these walls. I've carried that philosophy forward. Your work needs to be done. You need to hit your numbers, but you also need to have a life outside of here. That's what you're working for.Lisa Ryan: Right. You have the communication in place that people are responsible for filling their slots to ensure they're covered. But you're also empowering them and treating them like the adult human beings that they are. They can have that work-life flexibility that is so important, especially in these last 19 months, 20 months, however long it's been with COVID. People have changed their priorities. It sounds like you've been doing that all along, and it's helping you keep the people you have.Chip Hautala: It's funny that you mentioned that, Lisa. The funny part about it was in 2012 when I started MotionSource. I'm an old it guy. I thought that I would set up the system where everything is in the cloud or phone systems in the cloud. Our networks are in the cloud; our business systems are in the cloud. I thought to myself. If we ever have a snow day, everybody could still work from home. Never did I imagine there'd be a pandemic, where we'd be closed for how long.Last year, during the pandemic, we worked remotely for 15 months. Everybody worked from home. Nobody skipped a beat. There was never a phone call that was missed. Everybody worked a lot harder. They considered it a privilege to be able to work from home. We never laid anybody off. We never had any shut down as far as that goes. It worked a lot better than it was a perfect Union of technology and communication with our employees.Lisa Ryan: And how are you handling that now? They were working exclusively from home for 15 months. Do they have to come back to the plant? Is there even more flexibility in working versus coming to the office? How is that working out now?Chip Hautala: We have flexible hours, so some employees have to come in a little bit later during the school year because they're taking their children to school. They come in earlier in the summertime. If you want to take time off, you can take it; it's one way the pandemic helped. It validated our business model of allowing people to work remotely. There's never a time where you have to come into the company. If you want to go into the office, you're welcome to go into the office. If not, you can work from home. You're an adult, so you're responsible for completing everything you need to complete.Lisa Ryan: Right, and I think they are just empowering your employees, letting them know that you trust them. I can't tell you how many horror stories I hear about companies monitoring people's minutes on the phone; they're tracking people's keystrokes on the computer to make sure that they are not ripping you off by working from home. You've seen it, I've seen it. We've all seen it who trust employees. Given the trust to do the work they need to do on their own, without the distractions at home, the chances are good that they will work even harder for you while they're at home.Because you've trusted them with that flexibility, they're also going to stay with your company instead of looking for that next company that's going to give them that flexibility that they're looking for.Chip Hautala: Exactly. One of the best compliments I've ever received, and one of the things that make me smile, is when I've had people tell me, you know, this is the best place I've ever worked. I'm never leaving here. So that means a lot to me.Lisa Ryan: If you were looking at all the things that you do within MotionSource, what are the things that are working best for you?Chip Hautala: Communication. Whenever a customer calls in, I've worked for companies, and we still deal with some suppliers, where when a customer calls in for a quote, it takes a week to get back to them. We have a rule here that will get back to you within 20 minutes with a price. People are waiting on that price so that they can place their order. They may be resellers where they need to get back to their customer on that, so that's one of the rules that we have. You have to get back to somebody within 20 minutes with pricing and availability.Also, we never sell parts. We sell value. There are many times when I empower the employees to do this. It's better to lose the sale unless you have is the perfect solution for it. We work with it, and here's how you want to tweak it to get it to work better, rather than trying to sell them something new. Those people always come back. They know that you have their back. Our job here is to make you as a customer looks like a rock star, whether it's to your customer or whether it's to your boss.Lisa Ryan: Your 20-minute rule has got to lead to a lot more closed business. When people wait a week for a quote, the first person who receives the quote back is the one who wins the business. So the 20-minute rule, I'm sure that that leads to a lot more sales than letting those quotes fall through the cracks too.Chip Hautala: The company I used to work for before I came here was in a similar industry, and it was not unusual for it to be a week, a week and a half, two weeks to get back to a customer with a quote. Nobody wants to wait that long. What if you went to the store and wanted to buy a pair of shoes and they said, you want those shoes? Come back next week, and we'll give you a price on those. Would you ever go back there again?It's the same thing in the industry. It's essential to get back to people. It shows that you care. It shows that you're invested in them, and that's the best way to do business. That's how I would want to be treated, so that's how we treat our customers.Lisa Ryan: It also prevents a lot of those from falling through the cracks. Oh no, I was supposed to get back to this person, and I never did. By that time, they've already chosen another supplier anyway. From a networking standpoint, if you were to think about something that you would like to learn from other manufacturers or distributors, what would that be? By the same token, what are some of the insights that you would be willing to share if somebody reached out to you?Chip Hautala: What I would like to learn from other manufacturers and other businesses in your practices as a closing business? What are your practices as far as pricing, things like that? I want to share that the most important thing is communication. Communication is key. It would help if you remained in contact with your customers, team members, and everyone else. If you have excellent communication, you have a great culture, and you have a great business.Lisa Ryan: You've shared some great ideas with us today. When it comes to MotionSource, who are the type of businesses that you reach out to? What would be good contacts or good connections for you?Chip Hautala: Anybody in the rubber industry. We're very big in the rubber industry. We have a lot of products for the food processing, food servicing, and packaging industry. We have several customers in the packaging industry, the auto industry, in the steel industry. Anybody in those sectors, we can help. We've also added a couple of line items where we're more of a green business. We offer green solutions for everything, where there's no electricity involved. A lot of our pumps are solar pumps. We can provide you with that. As we advance, there are things to do, so we've jumped into that right away.Lisa Ryan: Absolutely, and if somebody did want to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?Chip Hautala: I'm on Linkedin. You can find me as Chip Hautala. You can look up MotionSource on LinkedIn. Our website is MotionSource1.com. Everything that we sell there's manual for online. You can give us a call at 888-963-moto or 888-963-6686.Lisa Ryan: Chip, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. Thanks so much for joining me.Chip Hautala: Thank you, Lisa. Thank you for inviting me to be on.Lisa Ryan: I'm Lisa Ryan, and this is the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. We'll see you next time.

Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast, the Thanksgiving week edition. Yes, it is Thanksgiving week in the United States, and doing something special today, I thought we'd talk about the THANKS process.This concept is what I talk about in the programs that I do. It's about creating a culture of appreciation in the workplace, so you can keep your top talent from becoming someone else's.Engagement is essential in manufacturing because it is difficult to find people who want to come into manufacturing and stay in manufacturing. We also want to create the type of culture that makes people want to stay with us. By looking at the six steps of the THANKS process. by the end of our time together, hopefully, you'll have some ideas that you can start implementing not only throughout the holidays but all year long.When we look at the acronym THANKS, the T stands for trust. So what are you doing with your team to establish trust? There are too many times that you're thinking about, oh let's try this new product, let's try this new program, let's do this new engagement initiative. Your employees are thinking, oh no one more thing; they're going to try to bring us in to get more productivity to try to squeeze more effort out of us.After a couple of weeks, you drop that and go right back to doing something else when it doesn't work. Find one thing that works, find something that works for you and make a commitment to doing that. Listen to your employees, ask them for the things that they want to see. Now, sometimes that can be scary because you're thinking they're going to say, well, I want $10 more an hour, and I want to work, three days a week, Or I want to work remote. You're working manufacturing gotta show up and run the equipment can't be working remotely.Look for ways to build those relationships by consistency by transparency. Too many times, managers believe that employees are only out for there's. Too often, managers believe that employees are only out to serve their self-interests. But, unfortunately, employees believe that management is also out to say and have their self-interests. When we create the type of culture where both sides can see that we're working together for the benefit of each other, then we can establish trust.Your employees aren't necessarily going to like everything you tell them. But, when they know that you're coming from a place of transparency, you're coming from a place of their good. You're looking out for the organization and what you're trying to create there. Then, over time, things will start to change. Your culture took a long time to build. It is certainly not going to change overnight. That's the thing with building trust. It takes a long time to establish, and it can evaporate with an eye roll.Think of some of the things you're doing that can establish that trust. For example, how have you built trust with some of your top team members?The H in thanks is how you help your employees. How do you help them be better tomorrow than they are today? This means investing in your team members. Too often, managers will say, if I spend all that money on training, those employees will take all that investment and go somewhere else. So let me ask you, what if you don't invest in them and they stay? No employee ever quit because of too much training. As we're having millennials and gen Z in the workplace and gen alpha following them, these people are looking for professional and personal investment. That's just that skills training in the plant, as far as what they're going to use, it's personal development. So looking at that employee holistically, what can you do for them that will make them better in every aspect of their life.I spoke at an HR conference, and I asked the question now, how do you invest in your employees? A woman raised her hand, and she said that they give every employee 1500 dollars a year to invest in whatever personal or professional development they want. You could almost see the heads of the accounting managers exploding. They were trying to figure it out. We have 500 employees. Here we don't have that kind of money laying around. I asked them what percentage of your employees take advantage of that, so think for yourself you're giving your employees 1500 dollars, they can invest it. However they want, what is the percentage of employees that you believe would take advantage of that.The actual number when I asked her was three to 5%, so you're giving a benefit to all of your team members, and yet only a small percentage of them are going to take you upon it. Do you know who those people are? Those are your future leaders. Those are the people you keep an eye out for. There are lots of different ways that you can incorporate training in your facility. You can offer lunch and learns. There are tens of thousands of hours of video uploaded to YouTube daily. Find a topic that your employees want to talk about that they want to learn about, and having that same conversation with each other to grow and develop together is inexpensive. It'll cost you lunch, and that's about to have that kind of in-house training providing resources to your employees and teaching them how to use those resources in case they haven't picked up a book since junior high or high school nonfiction book. I should say. You can have you and do training in house and create a learning culture. You can also bring in somebody from the outside. Yes, that is a shameless plug. But if you think that when you get somebody in that, your employees aren't used to seeing daily, the chances are good that they will hear things differently from that person.Think about sending your employees to your industry's trade show. Not only is it a great recruiting tool because there and we talking about it to their friends when they got the bar next Friday. They'll be talking about this great event that their company just invested in them to do and their friends, going to be like, wow, how do I work for a company like that. It also allows your employees to see what's going on in the market and what's going on with the competition. What's going on with their customers? So they will become even more committed to your company and to your industry - and they will stay in it.We're building trust; we're helping our employees to be better tomorrow than they are today. So next, we go on to acknowledge, applaud, and appreciate our employees - catching them in the act of doing things well and recognizing them immediately for their actions. I'm not saying that you have to go around and give trophies. It's about acknowledging them for their work instead of saying, hey, great job. What's so great about it?You're paying attention. I appreciate that you stayed after your shift and helped us get that order out. The customer was delighted, and we appreciate you very much. You're letting your employees know that you are paying attention to the things that they're doing. There are all kinds of things that you can do, but one of the most effective is to come up with your own all about me sheet. This can be a survey that you can find out from your employees as far as your favorite candy bar, your favorite gift card, your hobby, and your favorite restaurant. That way, it allows you to personalize your recognition of them because it's really easy to go to your local coffee shop and get a couple of hundred dollars worth of $10 gift cards so that you can get past those out your employees. But what if they don't like that brand of coffee? What if they don't like coffee? Some people don't, so you're finding ways to recognize them and also specifically. It's not about the money. It's not making some big grand gesture because if you're giving away too much money in these prizes or whatever they are giving, it actually can be a demotivator.Because the rest of the employees will be like, how come he got that, how come she got that? I work just as hard, but nobody will begrudge that employee's $25 gas card because they went above and beyond.Look for ways to incorporate peer-to-peer recognition as well, because what that does is also gives accountability throughout the whole shop throughout the entire department. For example, sometimes you may have employees performing at their peak when you are around as their manager. Then, the second the manager walks out, they are going back right back to their slacker ways. If you have some peer-to-peer recognition going on - catching people in the act of doing things well and acknowledging each other. You have not only more accountability built-in, but you're also helping your employees to build stronger relationships with each other.Think about some of the ways you can start to recognize your employees and do that consistently. For example, using the all about me sheet, maybe putting together an employee experience team, that team has the power to go and interview employees and find out how they like to be recognized. If you're doing company functions, put a committee in charge of employees because they get to. Take accountability, take responsibility for it, and they also get to see how many details go into planning these types of events, so we're building trust, we're helping our employees, and we're acknowledging applauding their efforts.Next, we're going to navigate the work-life integration face that these last 1920 months that we have been in this worldwide pandemic. Our priorities have changed. Maybe you had some of your team that was working remotely. Perhaps they are still dealing with the issues of their kids in school, having an immunocompromised person in the house, all of these different fears that are going on. Time is the most valuable asset that you have to share with your employees. So having some flexibility in your scheduling these days is key. Finding out what would make their lives a little bit easier if they're coming in and half-hour early or leaving or coming in a half-hour late. Whatever it is so that you have that communication going. People know what to expect when it comes that you can have lots of flexibility. It just comes down to making sure that you know from a communication standpoint. Realize that if you have employees working remotely, taking that away from them and demanding them to return to the shop full time will probably not play out well for you. People want to have that flexibility and know that you trust them. Empower them to make their own decisions; to keep their schedule. As long as the work is getting done, does it matter when, where, or how it gets done? It's getting done and, in most cases, when you empower your employees with that type of flexibility.You're considering that there is more in their life than just the job. So you're looking for ways to give them tools. Work-life integration is how you're going to have a much more committed, loyal team.Trust, help, applaud, navigate - now we get to know our employees. Of course, some of your employees will not want you to know anything about them. They want to keep their work in their personal life separate. Those people seem to be fewer and far between. Your employees want to know that you care about them as a person. You've heard the saying before that people don't quit their jobs; they quit their bosses. If they have a boss who is indifferent to them, it doesn't take the time to get to know them, get to know a bit of them, even greet them by name find out how they're doing, the chance of keeping them is much smaller.You can use that all about me sheet. First, you can find out things about your employees. Then, you can have them share in your meetings. Starting the meeting by sharing good news, for example, kicks the meeting off on a much more positive note. But it also allows your employees to know things about each other, because it doesn't have to be all plant-related. The good news that they're sharing is that they can share what's going on with their kids with their family with their vacation, whatever they have and then we're allowing these.Other relationships to form Gallup organization when they take a look at what constitutes a highly engaged employee is that that person has a best friend at work, not a good friend, not people they tolerate but a best friend so when you create those types of opportunities for people to get to know each other during work hours after work hours, it makes it much harder for them to quit because they don't want to leave their best friend behind.We've built trust. We've helped our employees. We've acknowledged their efforts. We've navigated work-life integration. As a result, we get to know our employees, and we serve a greater mission.You're just not making pieces, parts, or components at your plant. You are contributing to something, whether it is the life-saving equipment in a hospital or working on airplanes, the grocery stores, whatever it is. We break it down into that greater good. Employees want to feel that they are contributing to a mission that is greater than them. Think about things that you can do to share that with your employees. They had one of my clients. They are a spring manufacturer. They had it every week. They would take one spring, and it would be a part of the week, and they would hang that up on the wall. They would show the spring they were making, and then they would show a picture of where that spring went. The people on the line are seeing that I'm not making just a spring I'm contributing to this bigger piece of equipment I'm contributing to building the so you're getting that immediate gratification.What are you doing to give back? Are you allowing your employees to get involved in charitable opportunities? Are there organizations that your company contributes to? There are Apps for that that you can have your employees? Choose a charity they want to support, build a team, and go off, whether it be once a quarter, twice a year, or whatever it is. They're giving the opportunity to give back. When you look at the research surrounding volunteerism, for example, there forms a different type of connection employees feel good about doing that, which makes them feel even better about working for your organization. Get your employees involved in the process, maybe having people submit their favorite charities to their favorite organizations and then voting on which ones your company will support during this particular time. There are so many things that you can do, and these are all, of course, done over the long term.In this week of thanksgiving, think about what you can do to thank your employees—building that trust—helping them to be better tomorrow than they are today—acknowledging their efforts by catching them in the act of doing things well—navigating work-life integration building flexibility as much as you can to give that precious commodity of time to your employees—getting to know them as people getting to know their likes. What lights them up? Finally, serving a greater mission.I'm Lisa Ryan. I appreciate you and wish you and yours the happiest of thanksgiving this week and an upcoming holiday season. See you next week.

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm here today with Jon Franco. Jon Franco is the thinker and co-founder of Gorilla 76, an industrial marketing agency in St Louis, Missouri. Jon's day-to-day activities are focused on growing and developing a great team rooted in great relationships and creating an award-winning culture. Jon's mission is to create the best workplace in town. Jon, welcome to the show.Jon Franko: Thanks for having me. It's nice to be here.Lisa Ryan: Jon, please share with us a bit about your background and what led you to do what you're doing now with Gorilla.Jon Franko: I'm a 2005 graduate of the University of Missouri, Columbia journalism school. I went to school and initially thought I wanted to be a long-form news writer. I quickly found out that probably wasn't my thing. I had an aunt in the marketing space that opened my eyes to what an agency looks like and how to use a journalism background in a more business environment, so I became a copywriter.I worked a couple of years of a small agency, a small good-sized agency here in St Louis. At the same time, I was building Gorilla 76, which I'm a Co-founder of on the side. In 2008, my business partner and I turned in our notice and started Gorilla full-time. We haven't looked back.In terms of specifically focusing on the manufacturing space, it just happened. We got some early opportunities in the industrial world. We did well with those. It matched our design and creative style. Using word of mouth naturally and different things, you continue to get more opportunities in that space. Finally, in 2011 or 2012, we thought, what if we just hang our hat on this industrial thing altogether. It's a fascinating space - great clients, great people. They genuinely look at working with us as partnerships, whereas sometimes, you work with some big household name brands. So I feel like sometimes you're the punching bag when you're the Agency partners. So it's been great, and that's how I've gotten to where I am today.Lisa Ryan: So when it comes to working with these manufacturers, it's probably one of the reasons. They want a manufacturer. They don't want to spend all of their time marketing, so they leave that to the professionals. What are some ways you have found that having a good copy and a marketing presence has helped these manufacturers? What are small to medium manufacturers? Is it medium to large? Give us a little bit of an idea to recap what you do for them.Jon Franko: We describe it as in terms of the size, the middle market on the low end might be 15 to 20 million. They're doing a year in business on the high end. They might be 250 to 300, will even extend beyond that. It depends on their internal setup. In terms of what we're doing, it's very much like we know in the manufacturing space. It's typically a very consultative sales process. You're not calling overnight, most of the time.I'm going to switch and start working with a different manufacturer, different provider. It's much more of an educational process that needs to be baked into the selling process. That's where we help people, and that's where long-form content, not a promotional copy. We're not saying we're the best at doing this, but here's why we do it the way we do it. Here's one way you can do it. Oh, by the way, that's how we do it.It's creating opportunities. It knows that there's a consultative sales process and helping our clients. They can fill their pipeline with people who are yearning for that, that are doing information searching. They are looking online to try to find answers to questions. So we're helping put our clients in that position where they're answering those questions.Lisa Ryan: What are some of the best practices you're seeing regarding how manufacturers promote themselves in the marketplace?Jon Franko: It's a variety of things. Anytime you can have transparency and just brutal honesty. Don't promote, don't sell. You always want to position yourself in the best light, but don't say we're the best, blah blah blah, unparalleled customer service, or whatever. Everybody says that. We see results. We see results in content marketing. We see results in the demand side of the world where we're doing some more paid social. We don't see a huge payoff on organic social. We still do it for a couple of clients, but we don't know a ton there.It's not about having the flashiest website or anything. I could get this point. A decent website is a barrier to entry, so that needs to be in place. It's about helping. If you can provide content that helps your potential buyer, you can only give that content by understanding your potential buyer. That's a huge part of it. We need to be able to understand our customer's customer.If you can understand those things and provide valuable content, that will set you up for business success now. Sometimes that's written content; sometimes it's podcast content; sometimes it's video content; sometimes it's old-school print content. It's a set of sale sheets that you need to mail to somebody. There are different applications, but I think that's step one if you're providing helpful content.Lisa Ryan: How are you diving into that when you're working with your clients? Is it an interview process? You walk through the plants. Do you see what they're doing? You're putting into words things that they can't.Jon Franko: I think it's all of the above. I'd be lying if I said we are great about walking the floors of our clients. I think that's something we need to do a better job at. For the past few years, we have had the excuse that we're in a pandemic. What we have done is hire journalists like true journalists, not fake journalists. I wasn't an advertising copywriter, but your journalists are good at taking something they know minimal to nothing about. Learning about it in writing - about it at a level that other people can understand. We were always going to have access when we work with a client to the subject matter experts within a company.We need access to the customers. We need access to the sales team. It's interviewing and early on in our process. We have a knowledge extraction day, where we will go up and set up on-site at a client. We videotape the whole thing and pepper them with questions all day long. We pepper different players that they've identified as stakeholders that you need to talk to. Having access to the right people is incredibly important. Five years ago, we weren't getting that buy-off from companies. Many times, we would work directly with just the marketing manager.There's nothing wrong with being a marketing manager, but unless that C-suite is bought in, a lot of times, those key stakeholder interviews aren't going to happen. Because it's different if the marketing manager says to an engineer, hey, I need to get some of your time. At the same time, the engineer will push it off, whatever that they have more important things to do. You get the CEO, saying I need you to make time for this interview with our marketing agency. It's going to happen. That was a long way to answer your question, but yes. Then, of course, the interviewing, there's the secondary research, just the online reading, etc. But a lot of our clients were writing about things that haven't been written about that much. We are pioneers in some of these and some of these categories.Lisa Ryan: Some of the other things you and I discussed before is just the workplace culture you've developed at Gorilla. It's nice with your background in manufacturing and that you're not on the plant floor. You're not a manufacturer. There are still many transferable skills that people listening to this can pay attention to because of the great resignation going on right now.It's hard enough to find new talent, so to at the speaking event that I was at earlier this week, I talked to one of the participants in my program, and he said you need to cherish the employees you have. That's not usually a word that you hear in the manufacturing or the trades. But taking care of, focusing on, and cherishing the employees - the good employees you have now. Because keeping them is going to be much more important than finding new ones. What are some of the things you're doing with your culture over there because it sounds like it is a pretty cool place to work?Jon Franko: To give more importance, I recently did the math and the LinkedIn posts on what it looks like for us to hire for any role. In looking at the time for interviewing, the time to write the job description, all those things, onboarding, etc., my math came out about $32,000 per hire. So it's relatively significant to keep these people. Once you get on, it's just essential for creating a cohesive team. You don't want to see turnover constantly.In terms of what we're doing, ten years ago, it was, hey, we have a beer fridge and a ping pong table, and we wear T-shirts to work, and we listen to music. So it was all that stuff. Don't get me wrong, I think that's still part of being a marketing agency and a good culture, but I have learned that it's all about the core values. If you truly believe in your core values, and they're genuinely core to who you are, and you live by them, the excellent culture will result.Our core values result in improved relationships, kindness, and inclusion, and I think we do an excellent job of adhering to those. Everything we do, from the interviewing questions we have to our company manifesto about conducting quarterly reviews. If the mail person comes in, and there is a hot day or hey, can I get you a glass of water? That's the type that is core to us. That has been ultimately what has made our culture great now. We are still seeing turnover. I'm losing somebody in a week. It's brutal right now. We're competing for a lot of our talent. We're competing a lot less with other marketing agencies.When we lose people, many times, it's to a software company. These companies have massive amounts of funding. They can come. They can make ridiculous offers and have benefits. We can't touch it if we lose people. The Agency world can be just a grind in general.It's not an easy space. It's a lot of hard work. If you have that core culture or those core values in place, then your culture is a byproduct of that. If everything's up to you, you make it a lot harder for people to live. If there's still going to happen, you make it more difficult.Lisa Ryan: How did you come up with your core values? How did you get them?Jon Franko: They are all in the core values. I hear them talking about them constantly, which is great. In terms of how we came up with them, we came up with them. The core values were one of those things like I will be the first thing that I used to roll my eyes, I was like, this is stupid. These are just things that people put up in a boardroom, and they have some sort of motivational poster, and no one believes. When we went through the exercise, we were working with a strategic planning partner. So it was less like what you want to be, and it was more uncovering what we were.We were a results-driven company. When Joe and I started this business, we were two guys obsessed over reading everything we could about marketing. We started this business because we've worked on our portfolios together outside of work. We did like fake cat campaigns together, so that was the improvement piece. We knew that the best clients he had had had come from great relationships that we built worked our whole lives to make whether as family, friends, whatever that then connected as people.Kindness, nobody wants to work with a jerk. That was a massive part of it as well. Admittedly, this was something that we opened our eyes to. Civil unrest has been going on in the past year and a half, and we started looking around the office. We're like, wow, many of us all look like, and probably need to be more aware of that. Think about how we can start to be more inclusive. Not only different races and religions, and things like that, but now that we're in a remote setting, like if somebody works in California, and somebody works in DC, well, we have to think about what time we're going to have our happy hour. You don't want to make the person in California feel like she needs to have a beer at three o'clock, so I mean, we want to be inclusive of just how we're working.Our values were core to us. We thought they were aspirational, but when we start digging in, we're like, wow, this is who we are. That was the light bulb that went off. Employees were involved in the strategic planning committee, but the person directing this exercise was like, this is when you've nailed it. They are already part of who you are. So many companies say we want to be this, and we want to do this. That's fine, but if you're going to be aspirational, you better plan how you're going to achieve those core values.Lisa Ryan: Right. I know. It's funny because when you were going through that whole thing about the turnover and losing it to other more prominent software companies and those types of things. Many manufacturers listening to this podcast can substitute those words with well, we're competing with people who are leaving because they're going to Amazon, which has deep pockets. We're all in the same boat. We're all looking at the same type of issues as far as finding. People keep finding and keeping people. There's always going to be the big monster corporation with deep pockets who'd like to suck everybody into their realm. But it focuses on the core values. I like the fact of it being aspirational or not being aspirational of being where you're at.I was working with a foundry, and what they did is they used one of those word cloud things. They had all the employees put in the top three words they attributed to their company. As a casting plan, of course, you had words like hot, and hard, and that type of thing but the biggest one for the most part. So when you do a word cloud, the more somebody puts in one word, the larger that word gets in the cloud, and what they were happy to find is that the most prominent word that came up for them is family.People thought it was like it was a family. That's such a great point because people listening to this figure out how to get started. It's like don't put that those high goals of what you aspire to be, who are you now, and how can you make that just a little bit better going forward.Jon Franko: I also think, just the key to getting started. I have not mastered this. I'm not even close. I am much better than I used to be, but the whole idea of like you have two ears, and one mouth like listen to your people. There are some tools we have in place. In an office setting, they work great. I think they could work in a manufacturing setting. You need an environment where everybody has email. There's a tool called Office Vibe. I was just on a call with them today. It's weekly employee surveys that are very simple. They're fun to take, and it creates a massive data set. We always have access to measure happiness and different things, so if we see numbers starting to trend a certain way, it's time to listen and find out what's going on. Then address it, and get it fixed before it becomes a problem before it results in a turnover.That has been probably my most significant area of development. In the past couple of years, I think I've gotten to be a better listener. I have a long way to go, as any of my employees will tell you, but I have learned the importance of that. It's regular feedback. It's weekly. Because it's weekly, it's also short and fun, so people aren't getting burned out in the process.Lisa Ryan: But you also have that immediate gratification of noticing when something starts to go a little bit awry. You can take steps to fix that. The other thing that we mentioned from our conversation is, you have a buddy system there.Jon Franko: Whenever somebody first starts to grow up. This was something that came up before the pandemic. I can remember it. It became very relevant during the pandemic when we were all working in separate locations. When somebody new starts at Gorilla, we pair them up with somebody who's been there longer. It's typically somebody not in their department; it's somebody that maybe they wouldn't cross paths with the time. It's nothing more than that person welcomes them with a typically handwritten note at the beginning.Set some scheduled check-ins, the first several weeks every week. Just to be like, hey, I'm here for you. You can ask there. We believe in subscribing that there are no stupid questions. When you walk into a company, and all you see are a bunch of names in a slack channel or whatever, an email with server whatever, and you're like, all right, I have to ask. I'm just going to ask everybody this question that I might think is dumb or whatever.Well, it's much easier if you're the person they told me to talk to you for stupid questions. I think this is a silly question. Where do wherein dropbox do I save this type of file.So that buddy system is I it's turned out to be a positive addition, it's that person is in no means a manager of the new employee. It's more just a spiritual leader if you will, or even appear like, hey, I'm here for you. We'll get coffee. We'll do a weekly zoom call, and I want to be here to check-in. I was going to add like I do those as well, but new employees aren't gonna tell me if something's broken. They're going to be like, yeah, everything's great, I love it. I'm happy, but they will tell another employee if something's broken.Lisa Ryan: When you're setting them up from day one because I think that's what the problem is. Often, new employees show up, their business cards aren't ready, or their computers are not set up, or there's an inch full of dust on their desk. If they're in the trades, their truck is filthy. It's not set up versus just being prepared to rock out that first day. Let that new person know that we're all expecting you. Have a welcoming committee, and, by the way, here's your buddy. This is your one source for everything. In jobs that we've had in our careers, we all know the very first person that we connect with, the first person we have lunch with, and our best friend for life.Using that buddy system, forming that connection from the first day sets people up for success.Jon Franko: I agree. It's something we have revisited our entire onboarding process. The minute that the offer letter is signed, our process kicks off. There are numerous touchpoints before that person even starts different people emailing different things. They begin to meet the entire cast of characters. It's your first day. This is where you'll park. Then someone else will send a note, hey, we always like people to get lunch on us the first day. Here's a gift card for postmates for 20 bucks. Small stuff adds up and makes that initial experience big. The minute they start, it's like driving a car off the lot. The minute you drive that car off the lot, it's getting colder, and things can start falling apart. The minute somebody starts, they can start having a bad...

Connect with Todd Carroll:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/todd-carroll-65b11914/Website: https://www.bbman.com/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm here today with Todd Carroll. Todd is the Vice President of sales at B&B Manufacturing, serving the United States and Canada. B&B is a manufacturer of timing pulleys, synchronous belts, and power transmission products. Todd, welcome to the show.Todd Carroll: Good morning, Lisa. Thanks for having me.Lisa Ryan: Absolutely! Todd, please share a bit about your background and what led you to manufacturing and with B&B.Todd Carroll: Great. I've was born and raised around this industry. I grew up in Indiana and went to Purdue University. When I graduated, my dad had an independent distributorship here in Indianapolis. I was able to get familiar with the different manufacturers that he represented. As I graduated from Purdue, I got into manufacturing with one of his tier-one manufacturers. My journey started there down in Dallas, Texas, Arlington, Texas.It then took me to Portland, Oregon, and then Minnesota - all with that one manufacturer. I like to see how things are made from the raw form into finished form and where it goes in the marketplace. Manufacturing is unique from a pair of power transmission standpoints because there's not anything you didn't get up this morning that manufacturing and our products didn't have some role in making, whether it's making toothpaste or coffee or whatever.I've also spent a little time on the distribution side with some different distributors, national distributors in the United States. But I've always found my way back to manufacturing. It's my comfort zone and my happy place. I like to connect people with products, solve problems, and come up with solutions for manufacturers for the customer.Lisa Ryan: One of the things that we talked about in our initial conversation is that we want to change the conversation to bring more people into manufacturing and in today's competitive workplace where everybody's fighting for the same people. You must create the type of culture that people want to work for, and there are just so many things that you were doing there at B&B to make that happen.Was this something that was kind of always part of your DNA, as far as building those relationships, or was there something with B&B that you just decided to start changing things and connecting with employees? What are some of the things you're doing and some of the thoughts behind it?Todd Carroll: If you talk to anybody who knows me, they will tell you that I'm in sales and I like to talk a lot, so I connect pretty well with people. At B&B, one of the nice things is that we've got a privately owned company. Bob Hamilton is our owner and CEO. I've known him for probably about 20 years. So when we talked about my coming on board to set up the sales and marketing aspects of B&B, I started to get to know Bob well as the leadership team that he's put into place. I began to understand what kind of culture he was creating there.In today's workplace, you're fighting for talent, and it's hard to find it. How do you keep it? How do you bring it in the door? One of the things that we do is a standard benefits package. You've got your 401 k's contributions, but we also have profit sharing. If we hit a specific goal for the company, then the company kicks in a bit more percentage for its overall profit sharing side. We've also got a gym onsite, and Bob pays the employees to work out. If you have a certain group within the organization - let's say that because we're a manufacturer, we've got primaries out in the shop. We've got secondaries. We've got shipping, receiving, packing, etc. If your team does all the workouts during the month and there's 100% participation, you get to take off a Friday, about two o'clock, and you get paid the rest of the day for it.Bob also pays you to meet the goal throughout the month. One of the nice things about being me is that we're a 100,000 square foot manufacturing facility on 52 acres. We've got walking trails; we've got ponds; the ponds are stocked with fish, so you can take a break at 11 o'clock in the day and do your walk around the pond. It's about a mile - that counts. Then, if you want to come back on the weekends and go fishing, you're able to do that as well. It's a nice opportunity to take a break from the day-to-day grind.Let's face it today, and in the current environment, it's tough to please customers. You've got supply chain issues, manufacturing delays, and different things like that. So you need a little brain break from the overall grind of things.Lisa Ryan: Please share a bit about the gym. I know you said that it's 30 minutes every other day. What kind of equipment do you have in the gym? People may think that they have to spend all this money and put together all of this. What have you seen from the employees taking advantage of that as far as health, happiness, and retention?Todd Carroll: Before COVID, everybody was pretty much utilizing the gym. We've got treadmills, ellipticals, free weights, and an entire matt area that you can do stretches. You can do different videos on the TV screen as well. It's pretty nice. If you want to take a quick shower before you head back to work, you can do that as well. It's a fully operational, functional gym. From my perspective, it's not just a couple of pieces of equipment. You could probably get a good 15 to 20 people in there one time if it were full. But throughout people's different shifts, different breaks, and stuff like that, it doesn't get that heavily utilized at one time.Many people don't use the gym; they come out, and they do the walks around. It's mainly in the summertime, so it works out well.Lisa Ryan: Okay. Was that always part of B&B, or is that something you put in since you've been there?Todd Carroll: Well, this is our fourth building. We started in the garage of Bob's parents' house. We moved out from the garage to another facility. We were over on Genesis Drive, and then we moved into the current building. Our existing structure was built in 2014/2015. The gym was part of it at that time. Bob likes to have healthy employees. He wants to make sure that they're healthy and not only physically but mentally. From an insurance standpoint, we have a local facility called WellPort that will come over and give flu shots free of charge. So if our employees have minor things laceration on their hand or need to get immunizations, they're able to go to that local facility free of charge.Those are just some of the nice things that are in place. When we have a milestone, say that we record sales, booking, or whatnot, we do an employee lunch. Everybody gets to partake in that. We also have an event where throughout the quarter, if an employee goes above and beyond the call of duty, somebody can recognize it. Leadership says okay and goes to HR and says, XYZ employee did something well. I want to extend them a ticket. They'll get these tickets throughout the month. Then they'll spin the wheel. Every ticket equals a spin on the wheel. They can get a $50 gift card to a local restaurant or Home Depot or a $100 gift card. It depends on what slots are on that wheel. Those are nice little things to pick up, so when they get home, and they want to take the family out to grab a bite to eat or take the significant other or spouse out for a date night, those are just nice simple little gestures to say thanks for the efforts of taking care of the customers.Lisa Ryan: right when it sounds that you are making a significant investment in your people. People who may be listening to this or are thinking, yeah, well that's a lot of money, I don't have that. But if those same people were to take a pen to paper and add up the cost of turnover, add up the cost of people ghosting you at lunch, or not showing up for interviews, or you're getting bad reviews on glassdoor.com.Any of these things that keep people away from the shop - the investment that you are making in your people is you're probably saving 10s of thousands of dollars in retention costs because people aren't leaving.Todd Carroll: You're right. Where we are located up Laporte, other manufacturers are all competing for the talent. Rick Talbert is our President, and he's a metrics guy. He likes to track those different types of things about turnover and many other metrics as well, so when you say investing in your people, they are our number one asset. If we take care of our people, our people are going to take care of our customers. That's something Bob has always been pretty adamant about - making sure that everybody's got a voice everybody and can give input.We're still kind of in the pandemic, and I'm checking in with employees to see how they're doing. I want to find out if everything is going well, what's stressing them out, those types of things. It's nice to see that people are not just a number. People matter at B&B, and we try to take care of them so that they're there for a long time. We've got a lot of folks that have a lot of longevity for many years.Lisa Ryan: Right. We also talked about what you do over there, which takes just a little bit of time costs, no money at all. You're starting your meetings off on a positive focus. How did that get started? What do people share in the discussions when you're starting?Todd Carroll: Sure, this is something that I started at B&B because an old boss of mine would do it. The premise behind it is that you get so wrapped up working with your co-workers, and you know them at work. Whenever I have a sales meeting, or I'm leading the charge of whatever discussion we're having, I pause and say, all right, we're going to have a positive focus. Everybody understands it now. It's kind of funny because I'll say all right, we're going to start the positive focus. If somebody sitting to the left or me or somebody said to the right, they're like go that way because they don't want to go first. It entails that anybody can just talk about something positive going on in their life - personally or professionally. It allows us to hear the personal side of life. The positive focus is to understand that person for more than, "Oh hey, I go to Angel for all our quotes and pricing availabilities. It's now Angel's time – she's got a family, they went to Michigan this weekend. This is the first time I've been able to get away for a while. Somebody else may share that their kid won the local baseball tournament. It's nice to see the co-workers as people who have families.Sometimes we have issues, and we get to share that as well. So you'll get some that sprinkling of some professional positive focuses, but again it's just kind of like a cleansing of the palette. It's not a complete business focus. It's just like all right. We're all people. We all got families, and we're all trying to do our job so that we can provide for our families. We also want to move the business forward in a positive professional way. It's been nice, and everybody understands. We're leading the charge or having meetings. We typically start that way, and I think others are picking up on it we well. The first time we did it, it was a little rough. It was challenging because nobody was used to it. It's easier now.As you go through the day, lots of things happen to folks. If you can't sit there and figure out the positive side of something, you've got to change your mindset from constantly looking at the negative. We're trying to focus on that positive side because it keeps the spirits are up, and it just cleanses the palette for the meeting. You start fresh.Lisa Ryan: When you're looking at people holistically instead of just workers in the plant, you're looking at people with families and lives, which leads to more compassion, which leads to more empathy, and better relationships. Gallup polls have found that people who have a best friend at work are more engaged than those that don't. Giving people the opportunity to share the victories in their lives and build those connections with people allows those relationships to happen. People get to know each other. It's also more challenging for them to leave because they know they're going to go to another manufacturing plant where they're not going to know the people where they're just an employee ID number.So, taking into that consideration and spending just the first couple minutes kicking off with that positive focus, I'm sure your employees now look forward to that.Todd Carroll: We're very fortunate to have a very active owner in the business, and before COVID, we would have Easter egg hunts for the families. All the employees bring their families and kids, and the Hamilton's are great folks. They sit at home, and they bundle up all the Easter bags with eggs and different things. The eggs would have candy and some money or coupons or gift cards. We're fortunate to have the Hamilton family leading the ship. They're all involved, from Bob to Helena and the kids. They're good people.Lisa Ryan: It's essential to have that type of connection again with the employees. As the leadership team or the ownership level of a company, you are seen differently by your employees. When Bob is walking through the plant, and he calls an employee by name or asks him about his wife or kids or what's going on in his life, there's a different level of connection. It's unfortunate, but in most cases, they are not going to have that kind of relationship at many other facilities that either they had worked in the past or potentially would work for in the future.Todd Carroll: Let's call a spade a spade. We're pretty good at many things that we do, but we still have a lot of things we need to work on. We're not perfect, by all means, but what's nice is if we've got an issue, we typically put it on the table and have a conversation about it. I'll call that the here's the adult conversation where you don't make it personal, and you don't get your emotions involved with it. If you do that, you can pretty much say anything to anybody at any time. You get through the issues, and some of them are tough conversations, but again it's about a group of team members coming together to move the business forward. If you don't have issues, you're living in La-la land.In this time, you've got to work together with the supply chain issues, labor issues, all those types of things. Things can get a little stressful at times, and you gotta remember, "Hey, we're all here for the same boat. We're all in the same storm." We're all working, trying to figure out how to get out of that. In time, we lean on each other quite a bit. All of us bring a little bit different skill sets and experiences to the table. We recognize who carries one, and we lean on them if there's an issue that pertains to what they're good at.Lisa Ryan: Your number one focus is on your employees, but you also take good care of your customers with things like customer appreciation week. There are lots of ways that you go out of your way to connect with your customers. Please share a bit about what you're doing along those lines.Todd Carroll: In this marketplace, the power transmission industry has a lot of manufacturers. We're growing. We're coming up higher on the radar screen for most folks, but we're not your traditional recognized tier one manufacturer. The name brand guys are out there, so we have to work harder from the standpoint of getting a job done faster - following up on that quote, making sure that we try to anticipate what the customer needs. We ask a lot of questions.I'll give you an example. Last night, we had a group that we do a lot of business with. They send orders through the web, and I noticed that they were ordering a couple of pulleys and belts, but they didn't match. I called and asked if they were running these together. They were, and I let them know that they were using the wrong belt. We were drop-shipping it to a customer, looking out for the customer from the standpoint of making sure that all the parts go together.When you get into synchronous, it can get a little tricky at times but ask them the questions on a drive system - what's your horsepower? What's your rpm? Why are you doing this?We had another customer that called us up for a belt probably four months ago that a competitor makes. The belt had a three-month lead time on it. I asked him for the drive information, and we redesigned it into something on the shelf. Their customer was down, and we shipped it out the same day. They got it the next day, and they were up and running. They were pretty pleased with it.Lisa Ryan: So, in these difficult times, what are some of the things right now that are working?Todd Carroll: We've hired a customer advocate manager that we haven't had this role before. This person, Marissa, is looking into the backlog, looking at orders, and trying to be proactive about looking at okay this customer we got an order in. The delivery date is coming up, and we're not going to make that. So we're trying to invest in being proactive and picking up the phone and calling the customer and saying hey, "This order you had it in here for X amount of days or weeks, I should say, and it's not going to be on time. We're going to be in need another two weeks. I want to give you a heads up."We're trying to do with that way because we didn't use to do it that way. Sometimes we would get a call, and the customer would say, "where's my stuff?" And we're like, "Let me check on that." You never want the customer to call you when you're late.Lisa Ryan: When it's evident that's not news that they want to hear, however, the fact that you are being proactive and letting them know builds a certain level of trust that now they know that you are on top of things that you are paying attention to them and it's not something that fell through the cracks. With everything that we're going through right now with the supply chain, the customers are probably more used to not getting calls and guessing where their product is versus when they're working with B&B, they know what the status is.Todd Carroll: We're getting more proactive today. Are we 100% bulletproof? No. We've got a long way to go. But it's something that we've put in place. We've got different ways of quoting customers from the standpoint of a quick turnaround. We're a big believer that the company that receives the quote back first usually wins. We carry extensive inventories as well. Being a salesman at heart, Bob knows that you can't sell from an empty wagon, so we've got a significant amount of inventory. We have over $10 million of finished goods inventory in stock that we can ship. It's come down a bit, but that's what's carried us during the pandemic. So we can continue to increase that stock level and keep it at that level.In a company of our site, you won't see that amount of stock on the shelf from other people. We're pretty fortunate to have the leader of the company with that mindset. A lot of our business is made from the manufacturing side. People know us for custom-making...

Contact Will Healy, IIILinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/willhealyiii/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm here today with Will Healy, III. Will is enthusiastic about manufacturing technology and workforce development. A Purdue University mechanical engineer who loves to share his passion for automation, Will is a leader with Baluff Worldwide and the Advanced Manufacturing Industry Partnership or AMIP. He speaks from personal experience about the industrial revolution, managing culture change, and organizations bridging the manufacturing skills gap and creating value through automation.Be sure to follow Will on YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit with a handle #willautomate. Will, welcome to the show.Will Healy III: So glad to be here. Thank you for having me, Lisa.Lisa Ryan: Absolutely. Would you please share with us a bit of your background? One of the things, because people can't see you on this podcast, but you are a younger generation coming into manufacturing, so tell us a bit of your background and again as a younger person than what we're used to seeing in manufacturing how your path led here.Will Healy III: I'm right on the border of gen X and millennials, so I have some gen X tendencies, but I have plenty of millennial tendencies like I'm looking at my phone right now. I went to military school when I was a kid and learned a lot about discipline. I was good at physics and math and chemistry in high school, and so people said, well, you should be an engineer. I didn't know any better, so I went to mechanical engineering school.I will say about mechanical engineering school is you don't want me to design anything, and the second thing is they make minimum requirements for a reason. So, Lisa, do you know what they call someone in engineering school who gets the minimum requirements?Lisa Ryan: I have no idea.Will Healy III: They call them an engineer. You get an engineering degree. You just met the minimum requirements. I have a mechanical engineering degree and but I was a people person all through school. I was building groups around me and studying those kinds of things, so I knew I didn't want to design and started technical sales. So I started looking into technical sales as an option, and I think many students don't even know that that's a thing. They believe they have to be a design engineer if they go to engineering school. There are so many career paths that have nothing to do with designing. You still need to understand the technical background. So I went into technical sales with Baluff. I spent many years doing industries like welding and stamping, food and beverage. I've worked in the wind industry - all working on automation and how we use technology, and we use automation to improve the output of our factories and improve the lives of our workers. I spent the last 15-16 years doing automation with Baluff in a variety of roles. I have been in product management, and now I know I do marketing strategy and work on where the company should be going and what we should discuss.Lisa Ryan: I know that you are active on YouTube, Twitter, Reddit - all of that. That's one of the things to kind of change the conversation when it comes to introducing people to manufacturing - letting people know what's out there, what kind of career paths are there. What are some of the things you're sharing, and where are you getting the most responses or questions? How's your social media journey been?Will Healy III: I loved LinkedIn from the beginning. I thought it was a neat place to connect with people, and I call it my digital Rolodex, so getting a business card now is a reminder to find someone on LinkedIn. But I see it as such a powerful tool to connect with people uniquely. I've had a lot of success with LinkedIn, but I've also had a lot of success in person. So we can talk about the skills gap and hiring and everything that everyone's talking about, but these things are solved locally. You announced AMIP in my bio. This is a local industry sector partnership. That means we are manufacturers, working with local tech schools, working with local institutions, working with local nonprofits, working with second chance citizens like people coming out of prison, and working with legal immigrants coming into the country looking for work. So we're pairing manufacturers with tech schools and universities and these not-for-profit organizations to create genuine connections and solutions to the skills gap problem. For me, social media is amazing, and I've made lots of connections through that.But what's been most worth my time investing is in the local community. I was one of the first proponents of Manufacturing Day. Many years ago, I made Baluff have a Manufacturing Day event. We were the only company in Cincinnati in that first year doing a Manufacturing Day event. We've done it for many years. We didn't do it this year and last year because of coronavirus, but we did virtual tours. Engaging with the community, real people, and real organizations has had the most value and has had the most impact. People contact me still like, hey, I went on a tour five years ago, and now I'm in school, to be in manufacturing. Those kinds of things are just amazing.Lisa Ryan: That's such a good point because we can often use social media and all the other ways that we connect. But social media by itself is a little bit taking the lazy way out. If you're looking for people, you can post stuff on social media all day long. But until your company gets involved with local tech schools, guidance counselors, and people who can make those relationships, everybody's competing for the same people.But suppose they have a relationship with you, with Baluff. In that case, they're more likely to come to work with you and to stay with you because they've done your tour. They know who you are, and they've already built a relationship. So the personal connection is a massive part of that as well.Will Healy III: You're not the only manufacturer in your community struggling to hire people. You may see them as competitors, but working together to get a program started at the local tech school, you both need machinists. Still, the local tech school doesn't know machines. So the program works together with other manufacturers, talks about common problems, and then engages with organizations around you that want to provide that support. I had an Aha moment about two two and a half years ago that they're not my competitors. They're my colleagues. We have to work together to solve this. It's much too big a problem for me to solve. Lisa Ryan: Going back to those trade and technical schools where you can get together with your "competitors" to see what skills we need for machinists coming in. What kind of curriculum do you need? I work with a lot of workforce development departments of JVS's and community colleges. They will design a program for you. So you can have ready-made students coming out. It's just it's paying attention and some time investment. As you know, you're not just competing with other manufacturers now; you're competing with Amazon. You're competing with every other big-box distribution center that's coming in who's looking for the same people.Will Healy III: Really, the only market that has a bigger labor problem than manufacturing is the retail, hospitality, and food service space. They're struggling for workers as bad as we are, so we have to provide an experience. Then we have to engage at a different level if we want to have the workers we want, so we're going to have the highest quality workers.Lisa Ryan: Providing an environment where it's just fantastic to work. If you have people from another setting, we pretty much know what a waiter or waitress does at a restaurant. The job is fast-paced, so if those people are looking for the next step in their career, and they come into your manufacturing company, and it's all equipment from the 70s, and there isn't a robot or automation to be found, you're going to be like I can't do this.What are some of the things you're seeing with technology and how it's impacting the strategy? Not only for attracting employees, but retaining the ones that you have?Will Healy III: The biggest thing is your technology strategy is impacting your HR strategy. That's the heart of the question to me. If you want to hire and retain and attract the best workers, you have to be investing in your company. You have to show them that you care about the company and that you're investing in technology.How are you investing in the workers? How are you investing in technology to make the workers' lives better? How are you making a lot of workers' life safer? How are you making the workers' lives easier to do the jobs? How are you having them do more - using their brains instead of their brawn. I like to talk about discovering your technology strategy and how it is positively or negatively impacting the HR strategy. For example, some ideas are faster onboarding. For example, if you have a position that's churning all the time, why is it churning? It's not because you have bad workers. If you have a good job, they're gonna want that job. So if you're having a lot of churn, you may have bad training. We need to work on the training. Do we have a bad process? When you work on the process, it helps us invest in and make that job better. Let's make it less dull, less dirty, less dangerous. Let's make it a job that will work or wants to do so. We have a place where we have a lot of churn. We have to look at ourselves, not at the workers. We're fine, but we're not finding the right workers.Do you have the right job is a question we have to look at. Do we have the right technology to support the job? If it's training, I've seen some awesome things like augmented reality. I know that sounds crazy, but real people are implementing this real right now. I've seen some great applications of glasses, where the work instructions are projected right at the person's eye so they can see a video of the steps while they're working. I was at a trade show where I put on one of these glasses and put together an assembly I'd never done before with 20 seconds of training on how the headset works. After that, I was able to do an assembly.Other companies use projection so they can predict what happens on the workbench. For example, they show videos on where the parts go and how the parts assemble. While you're working, they're turning on and off the cameras and ensuring you're doing all the proper steps. Someone can walk into the work cell and do the task even if they've never done it before. There are onboarding technologies where automation is guiding the technology and making it easier to onboard people. It adds flexibility. If suddenly, you need to create a new product and you're going to go and spend weeks training the operator on changing all the fixtures, and you have a new program for it or a new display for the headset, the operator can do the new assembly. So it gives you more flexibility when you involve technology in the processes.Lisa Ryan: You're also coming in from a gamification standpoint. You have so many kids coming in who are playing video games, and they're used to having that for entertainment purposes. So if you could bring that level of entertainment to show them how to do their job and that's implemented, number one will make training them a lot easier because they're used to playing their video games. But it's also a super cool way to learn something new that will make them money and give them a career.Will Healy III: Whenever we can invest in technology to make it more engaging for the worker, we're using our brains, making it more interesting and less repetitive. Those are good opportunities. How do we make the work easier for people? I've seen exoskeletons - that sounds crazy and like science fiction - but I'm not talking about Avatar battling robots. I'm talking about assisted lifting. If someone's job is lifting stuff all day, every day, or their job is to use a drill above their head every day. There are exoskeletons that they can wear so that it isn't holding up the way to their arms all day the arm. The tool is holding their arms, so they're able to do the job better. You have better outcomes. You don't have as many workman's comp claims that come from repetitive injuries. There are so many different technology options to make the work-life of that worker better. Think about if you're lifting all day you get home. You're going to be cranky and tired. Your family's going to get tired of you yelling at them, and you're not going to want to do anything at home or exercise or anything. But if you've got technology assisting you with your work, your work is better, and your home life is better because you're way less exhausted at the end of the day. Investments like that are what attract people. This is how technology choices impact our HR strategy, our hiring, retention, and attraction.Lisa Ryan: Looking at it from a cost standpoint. I'm sure that people who are listening to this podcast are thinking, "exoskeletons, do you know how crazy expensive those things are?" Number one, they're probably not nearly as expensive as you think. But number two, if you look at the cost of one worker's comp claim, look at the expense of turnover of that one employee because he's not happy at work, then he goes home, and he's miserable at home. So we look at that employee holistically - not only the person who shows up at the plant every day, but who that person is for the rest of their life. So you can make that a little bit easier for employees to know that, hey, this is an employer that cares about me and is investing in me to make my life my job a little bit easier. Then you're going to retain them.The other thing that we talked about before the show is getting extended career life out of our baby boomers. We know that the silver tsunami is happening - it was happening before the pandemic, and now you just had 19 months of people at home playing with their grandkids, and they're thinking, I don't want to work anymore. So what are some of the ways that you can use automation as a retention tool?Will Healy III: Definitely. We think about boomers. Most of the boomers I know still want to work. They don't want to retire, maybe there are some, but they're tired. Or they want to quit because there are a lot of physical demands in the job they have. When we look at the physical demands, how can we use automation to eliminate the physical demands but keep the mental parts. They have so much knowledge. These are people, maybe who have been at their company for 25 years. How do we keep that tribal knowledge in our company for a few more years?How can we get rid of the negative parts of the job, like the physical demands that they can't do anymore? Things like collaborative robots - or cobots. One of the most extensive applications for cobots is machine tending. That means the loading and unloading of the machine. Someone still has to put that in that CNC machine. What is the program or what is the project we're working on? Someone still has to put that in there. But the robot does the loading and unloading - the terrible part, the heavy part, the dirty part of the job.We're solving not only our skills gap problem, but I also can't find any machinists. You keep that machine guy around, but instead of him just running one machine, they can be running three or four or five machines. The robots are doing the tending, and they're just doing the setup and the changeover.They're more valuable to you because now not they're not just making one part. They're making five parts. They're making you more productive. They're making you more money. So you invest in technology, and it makes the work more valuable to you.Lisa Ryan: So, when you say cobots or collaborative robots, please explain what you mean by that if somebody listening has never heard of a cobot.Will Healy III: A collaborative robot is a little bit different. This is a six-axis robot - the one that looks like a big arm is what I'm talking about. It looks like an arm mounted on a pedestal. The reason it's called a six-axis because there are six degrees of motion, but that doesn't matter. It looks like a big arm. Typically, a traditional robot has to be inside a cage because it's hazardous, strong, and fast-moving. Recent developments have allowed what's called collaborative robots. They operate a little bit differently. They usually have less payload. They move slower, but they allow humans to work very closely and interactively with them, so there's still safety.Lisa Ryan: It allows for much closer robot and human collaboration.Will Healy III: This reduces the idle time of the human and the robot's idle time by allowing both of them to work together in this way. So, a cobot is nothing more than a six-axis robot that can work closely with people. It allows people to be more efficient and effective and the robot honestly to be more efficient and effective.Lisa Ryan: If somebody was thinking about adding automation, maybe they have an older plant, and they're starting to think about adding that, or they have some automation they wanted to take to the next step, what is a good place to start? How should you determine what kind of automation you're bringing into your facility?Will Healy III: If you have older equipment and no automation, you probably should go and rent a bulldozer and bulldoze the whole factory. No, that's not realistic. It would be great to buy all brand new automated IoT smart factories. Let me think of twelve more buzzwords. It'd be great to buy all those, but it would be great, but that's not realistic for the vast majority of small to mid-sized manufacturers. That's not a realistic expectation. It's not a realistic expectation for large manufacturers either. What we can do is solve problems. To spend money, we need to know where the issues are so what are causing us the most significant pains. Is it machine downtime? Many people have machine utilization under 25%, which means your machine is not running 75% of the time. Right or wrong, that's just the state of the way it is. So, machine uptime is a lot of times the biggest problem that I encounter. When people are trying to automate, they want to know things like how we get more uptime; how do we get more productivity.It depends on the goals. What are your roadblocks? Where are your blockages? I see machine uptime putting automation around it. Either automation or monitoring of the machine to better understand the machine's condition and prevent unplanned downtime. Do maintenance during lunch breaks if you can. If you can say, hey, something's vibrating too much, let's take a look at it while the machines are on a break. Or we can look at automation. We have a lot of quality defects. Let's add some automated checkpoints so the operators are manually putting things together. Let's use automation to validate that they do it properly, so we're not sending out bad quality products. Are we trying to see more into our...

Connect with Charlie Carter:Website: https://aisc.org/Email: carter@aisc.org Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today. Charlie Carter. Charlie, a structural engineer by education and for most of his career, is now the President of the American Institute of Steel Construction, the AISC.The AISC is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit technical institute and trade association that serves the structural steel design community and construction industry in the United States. Charlie, welcome to the show.Charlie Carter: Thanks, Lisa. I appreciate you having me.Lisa Ryan: Please share with us a bit of your background. I know that you spent most of it as an engineer, so what led you to do what you're doing now?Charlie Carter: Yes, well, I graduated with an engineering degree in structural engineering 30 years ago. It was a time where it was difficult to find a job. But there was this job at ASIC, which I knew from my education. I was taught steel design, and I took that job not knowing what it would be. But 30 years later, here I still am. I thought I was in my forever until retirement job. In my previous role, I was Vice President and chief structural engineer running all the technical activities of AISC on behalf of our industry members and serving the design Community traction industry.But as fate sometimes has it, there's one other thing you might not have expected. So I became interested interviewed and was selected to be a is each President, my current role.Lisa Ryan: The AISC is a credentialing organization, so please share with us what you do for the steel construction industry.Charlie Carter: You mentioned in the introduction that we're a technical Institute and a trade association. Those are two very different functions. Usually, they are separate, but the AISC has existed for 100 years. So we're 100 years old this year.Lisa Ryan: So, happy anniversary.Charlie Carter: Thank you very much. It's been strange here to have an anniversary, but you can celebrate everything virtual. If you look at our founding, we were founded by some very smart people who saw a need to have things like the basis for design, the basis for contracting, and resources that would be useful. So in the 1920s, they created standards that engineers could follow in the design process and contracting standards, where you didn't have to invent the wheel every time you wanted to buy and sell structural steel. These are resources that people could refer to know what was acceptable and, more importantly, acceptable. The AISC, in its technical institute function, has been serving that role of documents. The building code references every jurisdiction in the United States that uses the international building code design, and construction is done according to the standards we write. The key role that AISC provides as a technical Institute is creating that information and all the information that supports it. There are somewhere north of 300 volunteers - experts in design and construction - who give their time, expertise, and wisdom to create all that information. It's been maintained by the succession of those volunteers for 100 years.In 100 years, somebody will say that it's been done for 200 years. There will always be buildings and bridges made out of steel and a need for information. The trade association part serves the industry that we exist in. They are the businesses that make the steel in a mill where it has a service Center where it's cut it to length, put holes in it, fittings on it, and prepare to ship to the field to be erected into buildings and bridges and those are steel fabricators.Those are the primary Members that we serve. Interestingly, we help them most by providing all that information to the design community to pick steel and designs. Then they have work to do, and that's what their businesses are based on. So the technical information feeds the purpose of the trade association, and we do both in parallel.Lisa Ryan: Well, and it makes the industry stronger when you have it on both sides. People have access to technical information, but then they can also network with each other and see what's going on in the market. And make friends with people who they would have considered their competitors. So this makes the referral basis stronger and makes the industry as a whole stronger.Charlie Carter: that's exactly right, and what you have in these committees, you have a mixed group of people that designed and people that construct they have some educators, you have some researchers, you have some code officials. You have a lot of different perspectives in the room, and the more they talk to each other, the better the results that we get. They tend to know each other, and they're going to work on that building or bridge together in the design and construction process. So the benefit is to them in some respects, as well.Lisa Ryan: We think about steel in the United States like way back when we were all about steel, and we were this massive producer. We have this idea that the steel is not made here. It's going everywhere else. You and I had a conversation that we do a lot of steel here. Tell us how that's changed the industry, and what impact steel has had on the United States economy.Charlie Carter: That's an excellent point. People hear about steel in the news today, and it's pretty common for people to think that steel is made elsewhere. However, in buildings and bridges, that's not the case. The vast majority of steel you see going up on a building or to make a bridge is produced here in the United States. If you go back 40 years, you had companies like Bethlehem steel located in Pittsburgh, Bethlehem, and Gary, Indiana, and places like that - high population centers because there were many people employed in the processes of mills. They also were fairly dirty because they were doing basic oxygen production techniques, which involved down raw materials and a lot of stuff coming out of smokestacks.About 40 years ago, a transition started that mainly was an economic change was then called mini-mill. They were smaller than those big integrated Mills that I named before. They were led primarily by Nucor and other companies today. Companies like Steel Dynamics aren't located in population centers. They use production techniques based on recycling scrap steel and melting it using electric car processes. A carbon rod is pushed into the recycled steel, and a ladle and the electricity run through it to melt it. That's a very different production technique. It's lower cost, and it's also significantly clean, so not only has the industry reinvented itself many times over, they've reinvented where they're located. The production techniques and the cost structure production are much lower. The carbon footprint is different, so when you mostly hear comments about steel being dirty, we're talking about production techniques still used in other countries. In the US, we lead the world in the cleanness of our production and the sustainability of construction using steel made in the US.It's a great story, and I wish more people knew how much steel is produced here and how green it is based on how we produce it here.Lisa Ryan: I'm sure that that will surprise people because we don't necessarily think about sustainability and a green industry when you're talking about steel. What are some of the things when we talk about attracting people to the steel industry is because we talked about the fact that they're locating it where energy is inexpensive because so many of the processes are automated. If somebody is considering a career and looking at steel, what are some of the career opportunities? Why would they want to join the steel industry?Charlie Carter: Everybody's looking for people these days. We hear that on the news. It doesn't matter what industry you're in, every store you pass on your way to work is looking for somebody to work with, and the steel industry is no different.The great thing about jobs in the steel industry is they're great jobs. This is an industry that builds things. When you drive to work, you pass all these things, and you point to, and you tell your kids, "I built that." It's an industry that makes things and builds things, and that's what this country has been all about - the making and the building of things. That is what has driven us as a society and as a country.When I look at how all those changes that I described the production have happened, the shift from population centers to low energy cost centers in the United States, the mill today. If you had gone into one of those old integrated mills, you would see people everywhere - and shoulder to shoulder in some cases, doing the processes. It was very labor-intensive. Today, if you were in a mill and you had to talk to someone, you probably have to walk to find them.Suppose people are running equipment that's highly automated and computerized. In that case, mechanized and people drive the production techniques at a higher skill level. It's the same thing in our warehouses - the Home Depot's of steel are called service centers. The mill sells to service centers, and they warehouse products until somebody needs them. Then, they'll buy it if there's enough. After that, they'll buy it from a mill direct.But more often today, probably 70% of the steel bought and sold in the US goes through service Center. That makes for a lot of efficiencies. You're not warehousing a lot of steel in your yard and needed someone else's doing that well. Those are also excellent jobs. We're in a trade with a product with a very high value and a very high impact. And the people that are buying, that the fabricators there the bulk of AISC members, we have about 1000 fabricators in the US, who are members of AISC. They're the ones that cut those shapes the length and put the holes in them where they're supposed to go so that the parts that come together and get bolted together. The holes are in the right place, or welding components get attached in the shop or the field.All of the jobs in a steel fabrication shop are kinds of jobs where you learn a skill, enter that workforce, and grow in your skill. You're able to grow a career at having that skill welding or any of the jobs in a fabrication shop have the potential to progress. We also see a lot of automation and fabrication shops, including today's robotics making a huge difference where a lot of parts can now be automated entirely for how they would be fabricated makes a difference there. That way, the fabricator can make more tonnage on a given day. Thanks to automation, they can say that they can play the same number of people and produce more tons of steel. Robotics is only adding a home flavor to that. That's very exciting to see is what keeps the industry vibrant and keeps those jobs rolling, and keeps them as attractive for a place to work.Lisa Ryan: So it's not only from a technology standpoint that you get to deal with robots and automation. You also get the immediate gratification of seeing the building and the bridges you helped construct. From a more significant mission standpoint, we were talking before the show about the percentage of recycled steel, so you're making a difference in that you're making something that you're able to use repeatedly.Talk about that a little bit - more on that sustainability and the recycling part of it.Charlie Carter: That's a huge benefit of steel. It's something that developed quite organically, for a pardon the pun, but this is not something that nobody talked about. Sustainability, in the terms that we're talking about it today, 40 years ago. Those mini-mills are now the largest producers in the country.They started with the idea that there's a better, faster, more efficient, and less costly way to make steel. That drove the recycling of steel scraps deal in the US. We recycle a lot, right. Everybody puts their recycling out, and it gets picked up, and the steel components of that get separated and probably find their way to some reuse 98% of steel across the board. 98% of what's made of steel in the US is your car, dishwasher, refrigerator, cans, old beams from buildings, and railroad car wheels. Think about everything that magnets stick to, and 98% of that finds its way back as recycled steel at the end of its life.About 2% is lost somewhere in the process; it doesn't get separated, or there's corrosion that happens, and all these things add up to about 2% loss but 98% recoveries.Lisa Ryan: I had no idea it was that high.Charlie Carter: Seeing those beams that get rolled today or 93% recycled. Stuff winds up at a mill in the yard, where they pick it upcharge the ladle, bring it in the shop, and melt it down. It's just as good and then many times better because of the mix that they put together. You get better chemistry and more refined steel due to everything that comes along with that recycling process.Lisa Ryan: Right now, technology keeps making it better and better too.Charlie Carter: Interestingly, it was all driven by economics. This was a faster and less costly way to make it, but it also turns out that it's earth-friendly. Thirty years later, we go, wow, that this was good. In the US, we enjoy a status. The rest of the world is catching on to their recycling now. One advantage we have is our power grid. What drives the carbon footprint of steel since the steel is recycled. That's the energy you're putting in, and the US power grid is also one of the best in the nation for execution - the best in the world for sourcing that power. If you look at other countries, they're primarily generating electricity where they're using it in steel production with coal plants. That's the opposite. For example, in the US and China, the carbon footprint of US production is one-third or say it the other way. Chinese production is three times the carbon footprint of what we produce in the US.Lisa Ryan: What are some of the things that you're seeing your members doing that are going well, that they're doing well, that are making a difference in the industry and their work environments? Charlie Carter: The marketplace right now is pretty hot. It's incredible to me how things evolve them the marketplace will slow down. You went through that period after 2008, and again just a few years ago, and the market heats up, and you can't make steel fast enough. That's the period of the market that we're in right now. It's being driven by many factors - warehouse construction, distribution centers, the Amazon economy is creating a lot of construction and a very high steel demand. It's a really good time to be in a position to make that steel and make the components from that steel and sell those in the marketplace. That drives a lot of innovation. We're always looking for ways to advance how we design and construct.One of the things we're working on today is seeing right now is called the need for speed. That's a little play on the old Tom Cruise movie. I feel the need for speed. We realized that we could work all day to make everything cheaper and just cut class, but anyone can do that. What you really could do to serve the construction industry and the needs of owners and developers and anyone who would pick steel make it easier and faster. To pick steel easier for them to design and systems that would make projects go faster at the end of you can cut time out of a construction project.When people are paying interest on loans, if the project opens sooner, they get rents faster. One good example of this is Magnus Associates in Seattle, that a project folder in your square tower where they were collaborating with us. One of those innovative ideas that need for speed projects well speedcore. This was a new way to do the Center of a building which is more traditional methods would have been a concrete core with steel framing around it. They said we think we could go four months faster in construction if we did the whole building at a steel rate. So they innovated this idea called speedcore. When they tried it, first project, first practical use of the technology - they saved eight months in the construction.The owner or the general contractor on that project estimated was about a $20 million savings versus what it would have been in the old system. So this interest in this opportunity to use steel and the market driving it right now allows us to look at things like that. It's super exciting to deliver something practical and meaningful. We played a small role in that AISC, everybody could come together, and now we're looking at other projects using that same approach.The second project is going up whether there's a third, fourth, fifth that is soon to be. We hope that's something that we see going to revolutionizes the whole marketplace throughout the country, but we'll see where it goes.Lisa Ryan: If you were to think about the best tip that you've seen either coming through AISC or technology workplace, what would that be to share with our listening audience today?Charlie Carter: The most important thing that I have observed in my 30 years is the power of the group that comes together. Everything we do, I mentioned earlier, is by committee. We have 300-some volunteers. They're the people who have built the tallest buildings globally and the longest bridges in the world - either by designing them or constructing them. They're all sitting there, and they're all talking to each other in these meetings. They're the most accomplished people I could find.They sit there and say, well, I didn't think that that's a good point, and nobody knows everything. Then, the right group comes together, and they create information that's useful to them and useful to everyone else.There is value in that combined knowledge and the quality of smart people talking to each other. That same thing happens on a project when the designers and the constructors speak to each other. Too often, they're driven into adversarial modes, where you have to beat the designer down and get as much out of them as you can. I got to beat the fabricator down and get as much out of them that usually doesn't work out. In the grand scheme of things, if everybody came together and said, how will we work on this together and make this a great project.It works for standards. They write the standard, and it becomes an excellent standard that everyone can follow and make building bridges safe for the general public. Efficient, economical design and build and in work on an individual project to advocate for that.We love it when we see our member fabricators being involved early in a project pick their brains. Because earlier in a project, you can have the most impact that that tower in Seattle went the way it did because people talked about the process early and said, what can we do here. It will build that in their minds before they ever started designing it. They made the most of it, and it was that collaboration. That, to me, would be the most important thing. There's...

Contact Sunny HanEmail: Sunny@fulcrumpro.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yusunnyhan/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited today to introduce you to Sunny Han. Sunny is the CEO and founder of Fulcrum Manufacturing, an ERP platform dedicated to helping manufacturers build a better future. He led Fulcrum to raise a $3.1 million seed round of venture capital in 2020. Sunny is dedicated to delivering a connected future where frictionless manufacturing production and supply chains lead to faster and better product innovation. Sunny, welcome to the show.Sunny Han: Thanks for having me, Lisa.Lisa Ryan: So, please share with us a bit about your background. Where you started, and what led you to do what you're doing today?Sunny Han: There's no magical story. My entire childhood was spent playing with computers and writing software and making friends with people that played video games with me and things like that. So I have a deep-seated past in technology. How I got into manufacturing was having no direction after college and working in the consulting industry. Because of that, I was exposed to many manufacturers, and I spent almost a decade working with midsize and small manufacturers. Between five to 10 employees, all the way up to hundreds or thousands of employees, and the flavor of that work was mainly in organizing them, helping them communicate better internally implementing technologies to assist with implementing earpiece systems, customizing them, writing custom software on top of them, helping them position themselves in the market correctly, and doing all sorts of different things.Through that experience of learning about all different types of manufacturing, I started to get this hunch that a new operating system for manufacturing could drive a very different future of how manufacturers work with technology. It wasn't as if I was born on a shop floor with a tool in my hand or something like that. It was a very circuitous path that led me here. But it's something that I've fallen in love with over time.Lisa Ryan: That's what we need. Not only do you bring more youth to manufacturing than what we're seeing, but for the most part, the silver tsunami is going. People are retiring in record numbers. So that easy adaptation you bring to technology and your love of manufacturing all woven together is precisely the type that we need to change the conversation. I mean, there's so much focus on er P and technology and everything in manufacturing. However, as you and I spoke a couple of minutes before the show, we still need to focus on humans. So how do you look at that? As far as that ideal mix of making sure we're taking care of our employees, attracting them into manufacturing, retaining them, and bringing in the technology, we need to move forward.Sunny Han: I think there's this weird tension that exists right now, and I think most people don't understand it. I didn't understand it for an extended time. I don't think I still fully understand it. Still, manufacturing has been the origin of many business concepts, six Sigma, lean, agile, Kanban, kaizen - all of these concepts that have been ported over to software development and other businesses. They were developed primarily to make manufacturing more efficient and have these processes available to improve continuously. So I think there's a statistic that over half of all the software programmers in the world were CNC machine programmers. So writing software for manufacturers has a rich history of manufacturing - both supporting, sponsoring, and ultimately spreading the word of technology out into the world. So that's where they started. And yet, when you ask them about manufacturing, most people ask a 20-year-old or a 25-year-old or even a 30-year-old, and the impression is that it's an old backward industry. It's dirty and a little less technologically advanced. This tension is weird and strange, but the fact of the matter is that manufacturing is not a commodities thing. Operating a laser cutter takes skill and knowledge, and programming takes skill and expertise to understand what different gauges of metal and how they react and different EDM Ratings on rubber, how it melts, and how it extremes through an aperture, and things like that. I think there's a lot of craft that goes into it. I think what we see right now from the newer generation is that there is a little bit more of a risk aversion, but there's a lot more of a desire to know something that's deeper know something that is a craft. So I'm very, very bullish on a return of a younger generation into manufacturing that's going to happen very soon, in my opinion. But that's also going to be human-focused. A lot of times, people ask me about the future of manufacturing. It has to be automated. It has been primarily machine-driven. I think that's the case. I believe that we're moving into a future where there will be more and more machines doing things that otherwise humans would do out of necessity because of the Labor force. Still, I don't think that transition will happen over two years; I think it's going to take 30 years to transition. In the interim, we're going to need a group of wonderful humans that can both programming the machines to create them. Still, we ultimately do the work that humans are meant to do, which is creative communication. You know roles and responsibilities that are far more about what humans want than just the execution of making a component or apart. Hence, a long-winded answer, but hopefully, That gives you some context of where my head's at on that subject.Lisa Ryan: Well, and it's something that I think many manufacturers have been doing for a long time; it's like they're in the "we've always done it this way, there's no need to fix things that aren't broken" mode. They're afraid of technology because they think that technology and automation are going to replace jobs And. In some cases, it will, but if we could replace the grunt work if we could replace that, like you said, the noncreative. Just the things on the line and have a machine do that and then allow the humans to be creative and work with the technology. I know I was just at the FAB tech show and walking around. I love watching robotics. I love watching technology because it's fascinating, so if I'm fascinated by it. Imagine somebody walking into a manufacturing plant and seeing the robot seeing the automation. It becomes a recruiting tool like, hey, I want to work there. This is the coolest thing ever.Sunny Han: Sure. A big draw is about to happen because the software will get a lot better and easier to use. It's going to be a lot fewer clipboards and pencil and paper and whiteboards. It's going to be a lot less manually moving things around. It's going to be a lot more robotic automation augmenting you as a human. Technology and software automation is going to augment you in your brain as a human as well. We're moving towards a future in construction and manufacturing specifically. People who work as operators will start to feel superhuman because of all these tools and automation around them. I think that will be exciting and not just a recruiting tool, but just kind of as a change in the paradigm about how people think about manufacturing in general.Lisa Ryan: Right, I mean back in the days when I was selling into manufacturing, it was everything your mother ever warn warns you about. Dark, dirty, and dangerous, and now again, you have the fun technology and, I think, one of the most significant gifts of code. What came out of this whole thing was how it's sped up technology, because where people were afraid to use it before they realized that number one, they had to use it. It's so much easier. There's so much technology that is just intuitive that it's not nearly as scary as it used to be, so I think that we've had in these last 19 months or so more of this transition that we would have never had had it not be for this pandemic.Sunny Han: Yeah, I think everybody is on zoom. We're on zoom right now, and I think it's just a lot less scary for most people. People are consuming media online. They're doing a lot of things online. They're storing items online and subscribing to different services that shift was already happening and accelerated almost to completion. So just in the last year and a half, many of our customers or prospects would be maybe a little queasy about having their software beyond the cloud. We don't have anybody care about that, so I think that's some a component inside there, but I also think that, too. Thinking about how things work and how you work as a human being has also changed. It's not just with remote work, but what is gratifying about work has changed as well. So all of those things are leaving us in a market with an open mind and as an excellent opportunity to steer the market in the right way. To make the ecosystem go in a way that's positively reinforcing instead of more insular and to touch back on one of the points you just made implementing European systems; implementing machines, pallet systems, warehouse systems. These are harrowing experiences for many manufacturers 10, 20, 30 years ago, so it makes sense that they're hesitant to do it again. Still, I think they'll start to discover that it's just a very different process now that we've advanced quite a bit as an entire industry.Lisa Ryan: Now, if you were to bring out your crystal ball, what are you, seeing as far as US manufacturing in the future. Sunny Han: I see things that are coming back. I see automotive manufacturers missing a bolt or a break press piece of sheet metal that otherwise was made in bulk overseas that's coming back and being done here locally. I see many companies struggling to meet the demand of quickly quoting things to get something out the door. I see orders increasing in popularity and releases being more dynamic.  I see order quantity is going lower, and I see relationships getting a little bit deeper.  I believe that a lot of things that we did to gain efficiencies 10, 15, 20 years ago by outsourcing to Asia or other places in the world, some of that will start getting done. There are concerns about climate change,  supply chain, flexibility, and agility. I think the cat's out of the bag - we rode that rocket of growth based on ordering large volumes from overseas, taking advantage of economic disparity. That economic disparity is shrinking. The ability to say that the future is not going to be volatile is going away, and I think we're going to see a larger than expected amount of reshoring work very soon. I believe the intelligent smart manufacturing business owners and business leaders are pre-planning and preparing as much as possible. They are making sure that they're ready to take advantage of it as it happens.Lisa Ryan: So, and along those lines, you know what is some of the advice that you would have, as these manufacturers are planning the can help them to win business going forward. Sunny Han: I think speed is essential. I think, in the past, where you might have been able to go back and forth for two or three months and try to establish a relationship, most people are trying to get an answer quickly. I think this concept of building a relationship first before vetting out whether the connections will happen that's flipped a bit where a buyer from a large manufacturing company is not going to be as tolerant of having a long relationship before buying from you. They're going to want to know your quality, what your pricing is like, and how you operate? Where are you geographically? And What's your capacity? much sooner because they're now starting to talk to more vendors. They want more stability. That is a change that the market needs to react to by getting answers faster, potentially taking a little more risk.  Manufacturers need to understand that price is no longer the primary factor in different fields.It's the ability to react quickly, to have excess capacity, to build a little more. I think these larger manufacturers realize that the component vendors they're buying from are tier-two, tier-three, tier ones, so we work with these suppliers a lot. They need them to increase their supply by 30% or decrease it by 10%. That relationship is worth a lot of money because they understand what it means to have a bunch of AC units sitting out in their warehouse, not able to be shipped out because it's missing a rubber gasket. Or they have a bunch of RVs sitting out that can't be bought because it's missing a particular bolt. I think that was just not included in these large spreadsheets of these people make decisions with before. Now that it's made into the model, you can deliver more value by being flexible fast.Lisa Ryan: And it sounds like a lot of communication goes along with building those relationships to set yourself apart from just being the cheapest manufacturer on the market. What are some of the things you've seen from the companies you work with as far as you know how they're communicating? How often they're communicating, you understand how they are building those relationships for the long term.Sunny Han: I think a lot of it is still up in the air. It's still being developed right now. I think it's just a new dance that everybody's playing. I wouldn't say that there's any magical recipe, I think, just being open-minded. There's a certain amount of intuition that we all have that's based on experiences, right. That's where our intuition comes from.We're learning that the future is very different than the past. We're taking a few risks in a very strategic way. That's probably the best way for you to learn a new dance with a new dance partner. You otherwise would have immediately said no to smaller production runs; maybe try it out see if you can make it happen. With the people you have, some complexity will arise from that, and there's a cost to that complexity. But the increased margins and the increased revenue you might get from these activities could more than offset that complexity and that cost and that burden. I think being more open-minded and willing to stomach a little bit more volatility in the short term is probably the best advice in terms of how to make sure that you're going to benefit and reap some benefit from this volatility.Lisa Ryan: Looking long-term instead of the short-term pain you may be going through to get there. So, as we think about the changes again with the generations - millennials and Gen Z starting to come into the workplace and attracting them into manufacturing, we were looking at succession planning. Unfortunately, there are not many owners there with sons and daughters who are in line to take it over. So, hence, as people start the process, maybe they're not thinking about selling their business tomorrow, but at some point, it would be nice to retire and have that next person have those following people ready to take over the ship.So, when we're looking at introducing these new generations into the workforce and that kind of succession planning to prepare your business either for succession or for sale, what are some of the things that you see that work along those lines.Sunny Han: I think that the market out there is active a piece of context. A lot of manufacturers might be missing that because the stock markets are doing so well. Because there's so much liquidity and capital out there, private equity companies are traditionally buying manufacturers as their bread and butter acquisition targets. They have a lot more money, and they have a lot more pressure to deploy that money and to buy businesses. That isn't to say that every business has value is going to go up, but it does mean that the availability of buyers is high and there's probably a lot of folks that are being inundated with emails from companies that are looking to buy them. Some of them with names that they can't recognize whatsoever. There is a need to vet them out and make sure that they're legitimate and confident that they will do the things you want to do with the business long term. If your employees are essential to you, make sure that you're able to carve a deal out that will serve you correctly. Most people miss that you feel that you are getting rid of the business on the worst day of your business life. Selling it will be easy, and just finding someone to provide you with enough money for it is the only thing that's difficult. But the moment it comes to walk away and the business is still functioning, the machines are still working, the people are still busy doing things, and the customers are still getting product ships. Removing yourself and your ego from a business is incredibly difficult, so the company is where the owner has already done that, and step back. The business is self-sufficient and has management in place.They have the tools in place. They have the processes in place. Those companies are significantly more attractive to outside investors.  If I were to advise a family member who owned a manufacturing facility, I would tell them that you have to be honest with yourself, you might not be the person who wants to sell, and that's okay. But trying to be both, I think, is where the danger comes in.Lisa Ryan: So if you're doing that assessment, and you know that you're probably too tied into your business and not as able to walk away, what are some of the baby steps to kind of put those processes in place to gradually start that process of moving out to make your business more sellable or marketable. If so, if you have an owner of a company, after they do their self-assessment, they realize that they are two tied into the business.What are some baby steps they can take to start that process to make their business more marketable and hand it off to that next donor when the time has come?Sunny Han: Yeah, I think a lot of times for business owners, the truth about their business rests in their brain and their brain only. There's a process called due diligence where anybody who's going to buy you will try to know the truth about your business. It's not like they're trying to poke holes in your story; it's not adversarial. It can feel adversarial for sure, but just like if you're going to buy a car, you're going to want to go check it out, take it for a test drive, things like that. The easier you can make that process, the more that the truth about the business is written down on paper is what you want. It isn't things that can easily be reproduced and also verified the better. I think a clean shop is a much more intangible aspect of things as possible. Most of these investors will not come in and operate the business and make sure that there's a good working environment that people would want to work in. It makes recruiting other folks to come work at your company and has a calm demeanor about everything.  That has a substantial intangible value because it tells the investor that acquiring this company is going to be just fine without either the owner or without me having to step in. Now some smaller private equity companies are called search funds, where they put an operator into the business to manage it and run it....

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. Our guest today is Todd Miller. Todd is President of Isaiah Industries, based near Dayton, Ohio. Their company is a manufacturer of specialty metal roofing. They ship their products throughout North America and Japan, Hawaii, and the Caribbean. A young baby Boomer, Todd's entire career has been in manufacturing and marketing with Isaiah. He co-owns the business with his college roommate. Todd, welcome to the show.Todd Miller: Thanks so much, Lisa. I'm delighted to be here - I love what you do.Lisa Ryan: Well, thank you. Todd, please share with us a bit of your background. It sounds like you've been with Isaiah pretty much your entire career, but you still had to make that choice at some point to join Isaiah, so what got you there?Todd Miller: Yeah, that's an interesting concept. My father had started the business when I was in high school, so I worked here in the summers and things like that during high school and college. I went to college for a degree in communications which, when I graduated, I realized prepared me to do almost nothing. It was about as meaningful as had I gotten an English degree. I discovered it at the end, but it was fascinating.I was going out, doing a typical interviewing thing, and realized that everyone was trying to put me in an entry-level position, which would have been great you got to start someplace. But I had something already with my father's business and based upon my years of experience there and summers and even doing some part-time writing and design work. I just was able to step into a role there that had me at a little bit more than just an entry-level position in terms of an industry that I somewhat knew something about. That started 40 years of more learning.Lisa Ryan: When it comes to staying in your father's business, in our ideal perfect world, that's the succession planning. But we also hear of people that want something better for their kids and not the hard work that I've done. I want you to go to college and get that communication degree. But what was that experience like? Was it good that you decided to stay with your father, or was there any disappointment that you didn't go out into the world and find something of your own?Todd Miller: You always wonder, well what if, or what could have been but, again I kind of look at it, that has been in one industry one general position my entire career. I want to think that that's helped me develop a certain level of mastery. Don't get me wrong, I'm always learning, and that's what I love the most about it. The thing is if you're not if you're always learning from where you are, and you're always going higher up, you're never going back to an entry-level position and having to rebuild. I've liked that.We had a fantastic relationship for many years in the business. My father was the engineer, so he was the one that kept things going from a manufacturing standpoint. I was the silly marketing and sales guy, and then a couple of years after I was here, my college roommate came into the business, and he was our finance numbers-purchasing person. That was great because the three of us each knew our roles. We respected each other, and we were good still love to have input from each other. It just functioned well.My father, unfortunately, had a stroke at a relatively young age, which took him out of the picture from a day-to-day standpoint. However, we had great team members who stepped into that engineering and manufacturing and maintenance for all. We hardly missed a beat as a company, although we saw him regularly, he has passed away.Lisa Ryan: So what is it that you love about the metal roofing business.Todd Miller: I enjoy the people. I've been heavily involved over the years, with a couple of significant trade associations in our industry - the Metal Construction Association, which is a very technical research building codes oriented organization, and then also the Metal Roofing Alliance, which is a market development association. I've loved that ability to work with my competitors and work for the betterment of the industry. We've had an ideal industry for doing that because, as a part of the market share of the overall roofing industry was pretty small. I mean, 15 years ago it was around 2%. We've grown it to 15%. That's only happened because the various players didn't see each other as competitors. But, of course, all the different types there's the competition, so our goal was to grow this for all of us, and it's interesting, we're still doing that. We still get along well. Our annual trade show is coming up next week for our industry, and I'm looking forward to it because we didn't have it last year. It's been a while since I've seen all my colleagues, so I'm looking forward to next week in Tampa.Lisa Ryan: I'm so glad that you shared that with the trade association that you're a member of because, as many of these that I speak to, people think that they're going to give away all their trade secrets, or they don't want to hobnob with their competitors. That is the wrong assumption because when you're going to your trade association, you're making friends and building relationships. You're meeting the families and all of that, which keeps you in the industry and builds a referral source.If another contractor can't handle a job, they're much more likely to refer it to somebody that they know, like, and trust versus some schmo down the street that they don't know at all.It sounds like you are pretty active with both of those associations. So that says a lot about you, but it's also showing the growth in the industry from 2% to 15% just because of the efforts you've put behind it.Todd Miller: It has been good, too, because as I've gotten to know our competitors, there have been a lot of opportunities, where I'm like, I need this a piece of equipment, and I don't have it, but they do so maybe they can do this work, for me, and vice versa.Just a couple of weeks ago, we did some embossing work for one of our competitors. This has built some solid relationships, and always fun to go out and see how other people approach things in their manufacturing environments.That's undoubtedly, one of my greatest pleasures is getting the opportunity to tour other plants. People always say, well, they're gonna steal my ideas, and that doesn't happen. Maybe in some minimal areas but generally speaking, plants grow and they're built holistically. You can't just go someplace else and steal there.I did completely redesign my entire planet Florida batch there, which would be silly, but it's still fun to visit and see other operations.Lisa Ryan: You're very passionate about your company and your industry, and I believe that that's one of the things that have helped you create the workplace culture you have over there at Isaiah. When it comes from the ownership, that level of commitment, and involvement in the industry, I know that you do lots of things with an average tenure of 17 and a half years on your team. What are some of the things that you feel have enabled you to create that culture? What do you do to keep your employees when they could go down the street and maybe even make more money.Todd Miller: Sure, I think a big part of it is early on in business, someone told me never to hire one of my friends. I'm always like, okay, I understand that, but I honestly didn't understand it. So I started hiring friends and people that I knew and referrals. I found out that I ended up hiring people who had similar work ethics, culture, and core values as the rest of our organization, so we only hire off of referrals now.I'm not like some of my manufacturing friends here in my local town, who tell me, Todd, if I can hire 40 people tomorrow, I would. I don't have those kinds of needs. I have found that we're able to always hire off of referrals from friends and people currently working here, and we've hired about 12 people in the past year. Some of those were temporary seasonal, but we got them all off of a referral.That also goes back to our faith life. One of my daily prayers is, Lord, bring me the people we need when we need them and give me the wisdom to recognize them. We frequently hire people without fully knowing what they're going to do, just because we feel like this is a great cultural fit for our organization. In terms of what we get our whole company to strive for, that is customer service. What we find is that when you get some good people together, and they're all committed to meeting customer needs, that's when great things happen. You do meet those needs. Regularly, you're very different from other manufacturers out there. Again, it goes back to our team and their commitment.One of the things that I often tell our team here is that, as a product manufacturer that gets resold, I tell them we don't sell anything. It's our customers who ultimately sell it. So our goal has to be to make our customers successful. If they're not successful, we're not successful.Lisa Ryan: And I know that you see a lot of social media on your company out there. There's a lot of things that your team does as a team. They're friends outside the office. So please share some of those things that you're seeing that are helping to promote Isaiah as a pretty cool place to work.Todd Miller: Sure, we see that, especially on the plant floor. Guys are getting together outside of work—folks helping each other with projects at their homes and that type of stuff. Most of our families are from the same community, so you get a little bit of where their kids may be going to school or playing ball together, that type of thing.We did an enjoyable thing this past summer, and I know other companies were doing this, too, but we had food trucks come in. Six times over the summer, they came in to provide lunch for everybody. That was just a really fun time. I'll hear people say I still like that the best. Someone else will say I like that food truck the best. It was just a lot of fun, and it gave people a chance to relax and have something different for lunch.Lisa Ryan: Now, when you bring in food trucks, is that something that you supply the truck and people pick out and pay for their own lunch, or are you picking up the tab for lunch for the day?Todd Miller: We pick up the tab for it. We enjoyed it a couple of times we found out Oh, we had a customer stop by, and the food truck was here, so we got to buy them lunch. Sometimes a person went beyond just our team, which was a lot of fun, and the food trucks loved it. It was a great way to support some local entrepreneurs. People who are out there working hard to do something unique. We liked that aspect of it too.Lisa Ryan: One of the other things that have made Isaiah successful is your focus on customer service. That's one of the things that you excel at. What are some things you're doing to take care of your customers that differentiate you from others in the industry?Todd Miller: Sure, a lot of it is the company's entire culture, revolves around that customer. We had a situation recently where we were trying to learn some new things. We had brought on a new product line a couple of years ago. It hadn't taken off like gangbusters, but it had been growing. One of the things I was picking up on was that certain things we're doing with this product line are not necessarily helpful to our customers. I found that folks in operations, who were developing our processes, really weren't aware of exactly who the customer was for that product line. So I spent a lot of time educating them on that customer and what their particular needs were. It was very eye-opening.It boiled down to they're accustomed to thinking that okay, we're selling roofing products. It's going to a distributor. It's going to a contractor who knows how to unload products and knows how to deal with them. In this case, this product line is being sold to is sometimes a do-it-yourselfer. Sometimes it's to a very small contractor. But folks who didn't have that level of expertise on how to unload the product, properly transport it, and so forth. Once they got that picture, I saw some great things happening. Then, finally, they were starting to say, well, what if we did this. That would make it easier for them. I'm like, right on, that's exactly what we need to do: make it as easy and as safe for our customers as possible.Lisa Ryan: And how did you find out exactly what those customers needed? Was it based on your education of the product? Did you talk to the customers? Did you reach out to the customers? Where did that education start?Todd Miller: Sure. That can be a challenge for many manufacturing companies, especially ones that are getting closer to their consumer. It seemed like we went through a period in our country where a lot of manufacturing was you're making OEM products that we're just going to somebody else. They were the assembler, but now this is hurting more and more manufacturers, even, in some cases, selling direct to consumers. What happens there is sometimes you end up with your sales, and your operations folks don't talk enough. So sales are out here, pushing hard and doing these unique things changing industry being disruptors, and yet, the problem is that operations folks aren't aware of what those changes are that are happening.That's a key for us - making sure that we bring that closeness in between sales and operations to make sure that everyone's on the same page and operations knows as much as they possibly can about that and customer in the product's end-use.Lisa Ryan: Right, so what are some of the things that are still keeping you up at night?Todd Miller: I suppose it's like a lot of manufacturers, right now, it is the supply chain issues. That's probably starting to become a broken record amongst most manufacturers. I spent most of this year saying it, listening to my suppliers, and saying it will be better now. My mind, I'm thinking what's going to be magical about 2020. Here we are, fourth-quarter 2022 is almost upon us, and I'm saying least it's not going to start much different than 2021. Some of these challenges will be here long term, one of the things that we're starting to hear more and more. I hear from other manufacturers as well. Now it's coming down to not so much major supply chain disruptions as individual chemicals, individual small components, that now are just throwing a monkey wrench into everything.It's boiling down, that narrowly. So that certainly is a concern. The other thing that keeps me awake is the cost of freight and transportation. I see more and more orders, where the freight is more expensive than the product itself. That's troubling, and I'm sure that that has to be happening in other industries as well.Lisa Ryan: When you're dealing with the supply chain and dealing with the freight charges, how what are some of the things you're doing to handle that? Is it communication? Is it passing on some of those costs to the customers? How are you getting through this?Todd Miller: Well, certainly a lot of them do end up getting passed on. How can you have more efficiencies internally to help offset some of those costs? I know that it's put a huge onus on our traffic management folks, the ones who arranged for shipping and things. Still, we're just plain happy to get more creative in looking for lower freight rates and not necessarily just always believing. Wow, companies have been the best on price in the past. They will be in the future. So instead, we're looking for other options as well.What we see more and more often is mainly a manufacturer trying to serve the whole country that those freight costs. I remember the days when I could get a truckload of material from here to California for $2,000, sometimes even a little bit less. Now you're talking $6500 minimum. So it's just a significant change that embeds a lot of cost in our products, so just having to be creative automatically. It may force a lot of manufacturers to look at more regional locations or regional breakpoints.A couple of years ago, we put a warehouse facility in Dallas that serves as a distribution facility for us. So I can ship full truckloads there and then use that as a breakpoint, rather than having to ship smaller orders, where the freight adds up to be quite costly.Lisa Ryan: And as you think of everything that you're doing at Isaiah for with your culture and with all of that of keeping your employees, for somebody listening today, what would be your number one tip? Something they can start to implement, or at least begin to think about to help them change that culture over time?Todd Miller: I sound like a broken record, but it really would be to get your entire organization as close to the customer as you possibly can. We're just living in a culture where it's all about online ratings. It's all about what that customer thinks of you, and what their experience has been, and how they share that experience with others. So that would be the big thing. Don't think that you can be a manufacturer that's off by itself and on an island just crunching pieces of metal or making pieces of plastic or whatever. You've got to get your entire organization close to the customer.Lisa Ryan: Wonderful, and from a networking standpoint, what would be one thing that you would like to learn from other industry colleagues about the way that they do their business and what is something that if somebody wanted to connect with you that you'd be willing to share with them?Todd Miller: One of the big things right now is learning more about how other companies address this freight and shipping issue. Maybe there are ways in our own area that I don't know that regularly ship half truckloads to Dallas and perhaps another company here and pick what our hometown ships half truckloads to Dallas. Why couldn't we combine those things? That learning more about that would be important to us.I'm an open book. I love to talk about one of the things, though, and believe me. I'm not as good at this. I'm not as religious as I used to be, but I'm a big believer in building systems in your business. Too often, something goes wrong, and we start to point fingers at a person instead of looking at the process and the systems in place. One of the things I love talking to other companies about is ways to build those systems and processes and document them to be followed by their entire organization.Lisa Ryan: Wonderful. Todd, if people did want to reach out and connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?Todd Miller: Sure, actually, I've got my websites. Probably the easiest one to remember; it's just Todd@ToddMiller.com. It's an educational website we have on metal roofing. Todd@ToddMiller.com is the perfect email to reach me. Folks are always welcome to call me as well, and they can pick that information up off our website,...

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. My guest today is Bryce Austin. Bryce started his technology career on a Commodore 64 computer and a cassette tape drive. Today, he is a leading voice on technology and cyber security. Bryce holds a CSM certification and is an internationally recognized professional speaker. In addition, Bryce has first-hand experience of what happens during a cyber security crisis, as it did to Target due to their 2013-2014 data breach.In his free time, Bryce is a high-speed car driver and coach. He's driven cars from a 65 horsepower mini Cooper to a 650 horsepower Porsche 911 turbo. He has had over 100 students, none of whom have died while under his instruction. So, Bryce, welcome to the show.Bryce Austin: Thank you so much, Lisa.Lisa Ryan: Please share with us a bit about your background. You went from car racing and coaching to cybersecurity.Bryce Austin: There are many twists and turns that a career takes. I thought I would be a Ph.D. chemist, and after a couple of years of Grad school, I decided I didn't want to be a Ph.D. chemist. I went into technology for fun. I had done consulting for years and ended up in the payroll space. Payroll is the right target for cybercriminals. Think about what payroll does for free for your company. You take a big pot of money, and you move it into a bunch of small pots. If a criminal can get in there, make up a janitor. See how long it takes someone to notice.Wait till one of these law firms runs their quarterly bonus. They run it for eight bazillion dollars and change all of the bank accounts to yours and never be seen from again. These were not theoretical issues we were dealing with. This was the real world. I did that for a small company for a few years, and then for Wells Fargo, I was the CIO of their payroll division for eight years.I went over to Target, just in time for the breach. That was a significant transition in my career, so I decided to go off and start my own company, helping others understand these cyber security risks so that they can make good conscious decisions about them.Lisa Ryan: Well, and 2013-2014 is when we started hearing a lot about these breaches, wasn't it? Why did it all of a sudden become such a forefront topic?Bryce Austin: Well, it started hitting people like you. Before that, there was the Stuxnet attack where the US and the Israelis allegedly went after the Iranian nuclear centrifuges. That was 2010 - it's been going on for a long time. I think Target was the first large-scale breach that most of the world knew about, and a large section of the US was impacted by it. We had Home Depot, and then we had a whole bunch of others that went down. A few years later, we had Equifax, and essentially every American taxpayer had most of their sensitive information siphoned off. Now it's being used to trick us into doing things that we shouldn't be doing.Lisa Ryan: It sounds like to back in the day, it was the cybercrime, where they got all of the information so that they could attack, but now, it seems that they're taking it, the next step further with this ransomware. Now, they are not only stealing your information, but they are also shutting you down. With this crime hitting companies left and right, what happened?Bryce Austin: Sure, well, some companies have valuable data on the black market on the dark Web. If you are an Equifax, they don't need to shut you down to profit from you if you're a healthcare company. They can steal that data and resell it the same thing. That happened with the manufacturers' network podcast, Target, and the credit card numbers. For most of us, though, particularly in the manufacturing industry, there isn't a treasure trove of easily sellable data that we have. The cybercriminal figured out that they don't have to steal your data and sell it to someone else. They can steal it from you and block your access to it, and you will pay to get it back. That's the very tenet of ransomware. That's how it works.They will get into your systems; they will encrypt your data using some ridiculously long decryption key that no one would ever be able to guess. And unless you pay up, you don't have access to your data which typically means you can't run your company, and it's a very profitable business model for them. You've heard about the colonial pipeline, where they shut down the eastern seaboard the ability to transfer fuel.JBS foods is the number one meatpacker on the planet. They have 20% of the market. They got popped. Then, CSN financial is one of the ultimate ironies in that they are a large insurance company that offers cyber security liability insurance, including ransomware payouts. Well, their payout set records. They paid $40 million to the cybercriminals to get their data back. To the manufacturing industry, this has become a more and more serious issue because, to be honest, manufacturers hadn't had to worry about this until recently until the last few years. It was a small enough risk to where you can ignore it, and now I'm guessing most people in the audience either have dealt with some cybercrime or know a company that has, so now, we do need to worry about it.The second part of your question was what we do about it well. We could write books on that. But the short-term takeaways are as follows multifactor authentication or MFA. This is something that keeps 95% of the bad guys out of your systems because if they get your username and your password, there is another step they have to take to get into your systems, and it's called MFA.If you shop online, Google MFA space, Gmail APP, even your personal, social media accounts with your business social media accounts MFA space Facebook, MFA space LinkedIn. All of these platforms support MFA. It takes you five minutes to set it up, and it makes you and your company a porcupine in the land of squirrels. When it comes to cybercriminals, they're going to go after the squirrels you want to be a porcupine, and the thing is huge.Many companies aren't patching their computers; to be honest, I recommend they set them to autopatch, and walking through doing that isn't that difficult for most of my clients. It's something that you can also Google and figure out how to do. But as soon as someone finds a vulnerability in a piece of software, typically, the software manufacturer makes a new version of it. That's great, assuming you patch it and put in that new version; otherwise, the vulnerability sits out there, so patching is critical.We have a lot of technology out there that wasn't designed for today's Internet, where the world's been trunk to the head of a pin. We can have bad guys halfway around the world trying to get into our systems. That old technology, if it needs to be hooked up to a network, typically those networks are hooked up to the Internet. They have to be ready to have a reasonable level of cyber defense, and if you can't put antivirus software on that new CNC lathe that you put in, this new Internet of Things is a heating and cooling system that you put in. If you can't defend it against the Internet, it shouldn't be on the Internet.Many of these companies that got hit are putting this antiquated technology out on the Internet, and then they're so surprised when someone takes advantage of it.Lisa Ryan: Wow. Well, there's one question. It seems with ransomware that if a cybercriminal comes in, and they shut down your system until you pay in that one case, you said $40 million. What is the integrity of the criminals? What do they have to then turn on your systems? I mean, they got the money. Are we talking about criminals with integrity when it comes to ransomware? When that does happen, do you know where the vulnerability was, or does that take somebody coming in and finding out so that it doesn't happen again?Bryce Austin: Lisa, great questions. First and foremost, integrity is far too strong a term.Lisa Ryan: Right. I realized that.Bryce Austin: Categorically. These are business people, they are criminals, but they are criminals looking to make money. If they do not often. Usually, most of the time, give up that decryption key, and the decryption key works to at least get back most of your data. If word gets out that no one will pay the ransom, their business model will fall apart. Typically, they give up the key to massive caveat to that, though, is – one, if they find that you have sellable data or could just be damaging to you, there are several instances where first you pay for it the decryption key. Then they try to extort more money from you, saying, well, we've made a copy of your data, and we're going to leak it unless you pay again. That can go on forever.So, integrity? Absolutely not. Right business -makes sense.Lisa Ryan: Looking at it from a business standpoint, now that does make sense. The whole blackmail scheme again takes it to a whole other level.Bryce Austin: It does, most of the ransomware cases that my company's work, regrettably, we don't get back all the data and the reason is twofold. Criminals are not known for their rigorous error checking and thorough scrutiny of their code. So, yes, it encrypts it, and usually, it gets it back, but have we hit times where their software made a mistake, and it's not retrievable anymore. One tip I give to my clients is to have at least 30% of their hard drives empty. They need to have 30% free space on them.When you encrypt data, in theory, it doesn't get any bigger, but in practice, it does, and in almost every ransomware case that we've worked, there's some big network share where they were running low on space that had 5% space free. So then the bad guys hit, and the encryption starts, and it runs the drive out of space. So the ransomware keeps on going, and everything after that point gets turned into hamburger; you can never get it back.So yeah, so that's the other part of your question, do you get the key typically yes, does the critical work for a lot of your data? It works, but for all of it, I've never gotten 100% of it back, not once.Lisa Ryan: Well, and it sounds like just that one tip that you said, as far as keeping 30% empty on your disk, I mean that can save that's not only something that you can do right now to check that you have that. But it's easy enough to implement. Maybe not cheap, but easy enough to implement as that insurance against cybercrime.Bryce Austin: Well, it's like being healthy or driving safely; there's not any one thing you can do, but there are some small tips that can make a huge difference. Having that drive space helps multifactor authentication absolute silver bullet in this industry offline backups this is huge. If you get hit having a copy of your data sitting in a drawer somewhere now, if it's up in the cloud, it's a virtual or not a literal door, but if it's on-premise, I mean a literal drawer. Go out and buy a large hard drive, or if you're a larger company, a set of hard drives and something called a NAS device or network-attached storage. You can make a copy of your data doesn't have to be every day, once a week, even once a month, yes, you might have month-old data, but it beats no data. Having that in a drawer makes it much harder to hack. It needs to be off of your network. If it's on the network, the bad guys will often try to find your backups and delete them before they begin the ransomware attack again and again and again.Lisa Ryan: Wow. This is all fine and dandy for businesses to protect themselves, but I knew a couple of weeks ago that I had a friend who got the quote email from apple about the $4,000 system they were sending him. And he is a consumer. I said Dick, you didn't answer that, did you? And he said yeah, I called them. Well, 1500 dollars later, he had to pay to get his own computer system back. That's the scary part; this is not just companies. This is hits of computers of family members.As individuals, what are some of the things that we can do to protect ourselves?Bryce Austin: That's a great question. I wish I hadn't lived examples of what you just talked about but absolutely. I'm a family as I've had clients that are business owners or executives. They're pretty easy to look up on LinkedIn, so they know who to go after. The bad guys are very bright. If only we could get them to use their power for the light side of the force. So what can you do as an individual? I want to reiterate that multi-factor authentication or MFA, all of your essential systems should affect your local computer. It needs a password, and it needs to be a reasonably strong one. Using the same password everywhere is a big problem.Yahoo was breached in 2013, and they got all the passwords. Linkedin was breached in 2016. They got all the passwords. Well, if you're using those passwords everywhere, if you have the same password pretty much everywhere, think of it like your housekeeper. If every single door that you walk through in your life has the same key and you lose one copy of that key that you use that a grocery store that you use to some retailer. Well, now, they have your whole life. So a password keeper is a program designed to randomize your passwords everywhere, and then you have one master password to unlock the password keeper.I'm a giant fan. There are lots of them, and they all work well. There's the last pass; there's one password -that's the number one—the word password. There's dash lane; there's key pass- any of these are fine. But a password keeper lets you use different passwords all across the Internet, so if one of the websites you visit gets hacked, one website gets hacked, not everything in your life. Having conversations with your loved ones about how cybercrime works and how these schemes work that you will get fake emails or fake phone calls, or I've even had to fake letters in the snail mail in our old school mail. They try to get you to do something you shouldn't do, or they claim to have video of you cheating on your spouse, or they claim to know about your business misdealing. Suppose you don't pay up this that and the other. Education about that is critical.The last thing that you can do is to encrypt your devices at rest. That means that if your smartphone or laptop is lost or stolen, you're only out the equipment; the information on it is protected by that password we talked about initially. For windows computers, it is called bit locker. It's easy to turn on for MAC computers. It's called file vault on your iPhone will automatically do it unless you disable it, so don't do that.For android devices, it varies all across the board. Having these devices encrypted at rest means that your data is safe. Even if your device isn't with you, that's a big positive.Lisa Ryan: So when it comes to this, these are just scary things. I know every time I'm at a program and a cyber security person is talking there, I know that I'm just going to be terrified by the end of the program. We spoke about password lockers. What about companies like LifeLock? Is locking your credit cards, freezing your credit score - are those other types of things that are out there worth it?Bryce Austin: I have mixed feelings about those. Let's start with credit freezes - I'm a fan. Because of Equifax, you can lock your credit for free, and you can unlock it for free. They used to charge for that, which I think was criminal. I'm glad it's free now, but unless you need to take out a new credit card and take out a car loan to take out a home loan, freezing your credit with all three of the major creditors - Experient, Trans Union, and Equifax - you have to do all three of them separately.It makes it hard for someone to pretend to be you and take out a loan in your name or try to buy a car and your neighbor that kind of thing, so I'm a big fan. However, if you happen to own rental properties or change cell phone plans a lot, I want to warn your listeners. If you need to transfer the utilities for your rental property into your name between different renters, they will need to check your credit for that. You'd have to unfreeze it, and if you want to move from T mobile, Verizon, or Verizon to Tmobile - they'll probably check your credit.I still think it's a good idea. I believe there is some utility there. Someone spending a little bit of time to shore up their own defenses is far more powerful than a tool or a service like LifeLock. You can't pay someone else to do the work you need to do to be healthy, and if you want to be cyber healthy, there's some work that you, you should do yourself. For example, getting rid of that old Windows 7 computer that you can't patch anymore because it's been out of service for a year and a half, but you don't want quite to get rid of it. I'd rather see people put the money into buying a new Windows 10 device fully patched with good antivirus on it than I would see them subscribe to something like LifeLock.Lisa Ryan: OK, so we've talked about the main things like having an MFA for all of your personal and business accounts. Having a password keeper freezing your credit, what would be some of your other best tips for protecting yourself from Cybercriminals?Bryce Austin: Educating you and your workforce on cybercrime is a very good idea. There are lots of programs you can use. For example, sending fake malicious emails so phishing. That's where the pH fishing your employees with emails that look like they could have been from a cybercriminal but there you trying to teach them. Spotting those so they don't click on a link that they shouldn't is a big step forward. I have a lot of my clients doing that every month, and it pays over actual dividends.Bryce Austin: The last thing you can do, it almost turns us on its head, where it can be more of competitive advantage for your company. There are some certifications that your company can get to show you have a good cybersecurity program. Things like a sock to soc and the number to a sock to certification or for those of manufacturing apply familiar with ISO ISO 27,001 is the ISO cyber security certification. These can take some time. It's not the right thing for everybody, but if your company's product or service is providing. Others could be given a competitive advantage if your salespeople could go into a meeting saying, well, we are ISO 27,001 certified. Here's how that keeps our customers safer than our competitors.That's a good, positive conversation. That's what Volvo did 40 years ago, saying our cars are safer than the others, and here's why you should buy them. It's the same sort of thing is just in the cyber world now.Lisa Ryan: Bryce, you have given us so much information to keep us safe. How is it that you work with your clients? If people did want to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that.Bryce Austin: Well, short, my company is called TCE strategy, which stands for technology and cybersecurity education. We act as a company's "attorney on retainer" in the cyber security advisory space. We're not attorneys. But we try to give good unfettered fiduciary style advice about what makes up a secure enough cyber security posture for you as a business owner, as an executive...