Connect with Carolyn StraussWebsite: www.CarolynStrauss.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carolynstrauss/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. My guest today is Carolyn Strauss. Carolyn is an expert on leadership sales persuasion and execution. She works with companies who want to increase their dollars per minute. Carolyn grew up in the manufacturing business; her father owned and operated the oldest leather tannery in North America.Carolyn spent 18 years on-air at the Home Shopping Network designing and selling her own clothing line - the Carolyn Strauss collection. While she was there, she created a dollars-per-minute formula that led to her consistently selling over $500 per minute and ultimately exceed over $1 million of product in one day. Carolyn, welcome to the show.Carolyn Strauss: Thanks, Lisa, it's so good to be here with you.Lisa Ryan: Carolyn, share with us a bit of your journey and what led you to do what you're doing.Carolyn Strauss: Well, the speaking and consulting that I do came out of decades of learning how to work with companies in my own business. I love this podcast. I love your show. I've listened to it many times, and I love it because I think manufacturing is the basis of everything on the planet. If it's not made, we can't buy it.I love that all of your listeners are creating something. I love working with companies that produce things. Like you said in my intro, I had my own clothing company for 18 years on the home shopping network. We had one client. We had one source of selling our goods. I wouldn't recommend that, but if it. That's how you structure your business; that's how we structured our business.We manufactured in the United States when I started my company in 1997. We manufactured in the US until 2007. What happened in 2007 is we got an order for today's special. For anybody who hasn't watched the home shopping network, I highly recommend you guys watch that and have your salespeople watch it all the time. Nobody does sales and persuasion better than HSN. In 2007, we got an order for it today's special. We had 36,000 sets: three-piece sets. It was a tank, a jacket, and pants—36,000 of them - seven sizes: extra small through three x and petite average and tall.Lisa Ryan: Wow, that's a lot of SKUs.Carolyn Strauss: It was like 144 SKUs. We did the math because of the different and three or four different colors. It was like 144 skews for one item. Not only that, but we had four collections around it that had pants and jackets and prints and all of this. At that moment, no factory in the US could handle an order that big. We got the order in February. We weren't going to be selling it until November. But there still were no manufacturing capabilities in the US to handle it. That broke my heart. It broke my heart because my dad lost his business. We closed the tannery in 1987 because of overseas competition. The chemicals that he needed in the leather industry and because of the pay structure, he had to close. My dad ran a Union shop, and he lost his business in 1987 and had to go overseas.So when I had to take my clothing manufacturing to China, my heart broke. I stepped away from my company for six months at the beginning of 2008 because I was heartbroken. I was like, if I can't manufacture in the US, I'm not doing this anymore. It's not fair. It's not right. And then 2008 happened, the recession occurred, my retirement vanished. That's a whole separate story that I can tell on another disaster podcast on financial disasters. So I went back to it, and the Chinese manufacturing did an incredible job for us; I hate to say it, but they did. So we did a combination of us and overseas manufacturing for the next eight years of my line.Lisa Ryan: So tell us because I'm sure that the fascinating part of the intro and what you've developed is this dollar per minute because we think about manufacturing so many times. It's the revenue coming in through the month. It's the price, the cost of everything that we look at these hard things, but we don't narrow necessarily break it down into those tiny increments like that.Would you please share with us a bit of that mentality? I know you work with manufacturing clients today, but what are some ways they can start to change their thinking to focus on those smaller increments to become more profitable.Carolyn Strauss: I love that question. Dollars per minute is how I think so when you're on the home shopping network. When you get on air right, I a million dollars worth of merch that I needed to sell for the day. I would have to break that up on each show when I would get on. I'd have a 50-minute hour to sell my goods. An hour is only 50 minutes because you have 10 minutes of breaks and stuff, so I'd have 50 minutes. When I got there, I would get what's called a flow sheet showing what items would be in the show and how much time each of them got. At the top of the flowsheet was a little number that would show how many dollars in that 50 minutes they expected me to sell. The number was anywhere between 120,5000. I would see several $380,000 worth of 29 and $39 retail price goods that I would need to sell, and so what I would have to do is take that number divide, whatever the number on the top of the page was by 50 and know how many dollars per minute I needed to sell to be successful. The home shopping network is that if you don't sell at least 20 $500 per minute, you're a failure. So I knew exactly my metric of what was successful and what was not.Lisa Ryan: wow.Carolyn Strauss: So after doing that for 18 years. After doing it for three years, I started to see every activity in my business and in the businesses of the people I work with. This creates the dollars per minute that I need this person's activity to generate. I'm not saying to micromanage - that is not how I work with my clients at all. We're not talking about micromanaging, but it's like it's productivity. It is productivity, but its value and productivity. Where are your people putting their time and attention so that each person is as valuable and productive to the organization as they can be. Each manufacturing piece is as effective as it can be. I was designing my collection, and I had a business partner who bought the fabric and the pricing because of the details that I couldn't handle. But what I realized is I would let's say it's September, now I would be designing a collection in September that I would be showing on air in March, so I had seven or eight months to get from a concept in my head into the hands of my customers in seven or eight months. So I realized that there was an eight-step process in executing that I would have to do, and if I missed a step, I failed, and something went wrong.I created the eight steps of execution, which is one of the things I work with my clients to help them optimize their dollars per minute. What I love about this formula is that it works for every single business. Executing gets getting stuff done. It's getting stuff done.Lisa Ryan: Right, and so going through that process with the short time we have together, we can't go into tons of detail, but what are the steps - the cliff notes version.Carolyn Strauss: I am happy to tell you what the steps are. The steps are first is imagining and inventing what it's gonna look like when it's done. I believe in doing that, like leadership, figuring out what we are making and what it will look like, and creating a time frame for it right. But in that, you've got to get input from your team. You've got to get in production in conversation with the production people, salespeople, and marketing people. What I found with a lot of companies that I've worked with lately, I don't know if you've seen this Lisa, I know you work with companies all over the place., Have you found that they tend to be siloed in the bigger companies where they're at least 100 employees or more?Lisa Ryan: Absolutely, that's one of the biggest complaints of departments don't talk to each other. Everybody's got so much on their plate right now that they don't even think about going into a different department to talk to people.Carolyn Strauss: I spoke in a marketing association, and I asked the marketing people at this big conference I was speaking at how often you meet with your sales teams, and most of them said never. How do you know what your customers are asking for if you? How are you marketing something that you don't know is going to help your salespeople sell it.It makes me crazy. Silo is a big problem. I believe, when you come up with the concept of what you're going to design or what you're creating or manufacturing, you've got to talk to the whole team.The second step that most people miss, and this is, I think this is the most important step. Most people don't realize that when you go to add something to your manufacturing line or add something to your business or shift something, resources will need to be allocated. So there are three kinds of resources: your human resources, your tangible resources, which are essential to give in manufacturing, and your intangible resources, which people don't tend to think about, like your credit line. Do you have money? Do you have the credit to go to the bank?Then there's the conversation of getting everybody on the same page is talking about here's what we're making here's what it's going to look like when we're done then there's getting the commitment. Because if you have people on your team who aren't committed to working on what you're working on don't see why they matter in the process, it's not going to get done.When you write, and then you've got to work in action and get all the pieces together, I call it to work in action. Because it's what action is everybody taking, and that's really where dollars per minute come in. What action is everybody in every department taking to make this work? There's assessing what's happening, where you stop and go. Okay, are we benchmarking the ROI. Are we where we're supposed to be by this time frame.Then there's completing it. How many projects does your company start? That doesn't get finished so you've spent all of this time, all of these resources, all of these this human capital, getting something done, and it's not going to go to market. I have a funny story about that. Remind me of that in a second.Then, you complete it and deliver it. Then you have to go to the assessment about it, to see this worth it did this make us money. Did this improve our reputation and move us forward as a company to where we want to go next. Those are questions that a lot of manufacturers and a lot of people don't look at. Then we go back to reinventing and starting again. Okay, what comes next? So many of these cycles happen simultaneously. I found that there's almost always one piece that people are missing in every organization. That's where they get hung up on, so when I go in and work with them, we look at all the pieces and see if how it can work. I realized that that was the process I went through in my company. I did that every time.Lisa Ryan: When you're getting rid of the silos, as you said very early in the conversation, everybody in different departments sees things differently and gets that feedback. Unfortunately, it may not be feedback that you like, but you're getting lots of other thoughts from people, and I had a guest on my podcast a couple of weeks ago. He said they have all-hands meetings where they have the office and the plant people get together. Think about a silo and us versus them. They have a great life versus the people in the plant and all of that. Having those conversations is such a little thing that anybody can do—looking at where those conversations are happening and making sure that you're looking for ways for people in the plant in all departments to have regular contact with each other and then take it to the end.Sometimes we get done with a project. So, for example, we get done with a product line, and we're ready to go on to the next. But then, like you said, taking that step back to assess did we make money was this worth the effort, and again being okay with whatever answer comes out of that.Carolyn Strauss: That's right. I can't tell you how many times we did a collection and didn't make money on it. Because the printing costs more than we thought it would, we gave them a price and the printing costs more than we thought it would result in the cutting costs more than we thought it would, and something happened. I mean, now what's happening with the supply chain. I have friends who are still on HSN, and, by the way, my line lasted from 1997 until the middle of 2015, so I was there for 18 years. Every four to six weeks with three, four or five, probably seven or eight times a year, I was on air with my stuff. We were constantly manufacturing. I have friends who are on air now who are having the most challenging time getting their goods. I have a friend who had today's special last week, and it's still on backorder because it's on a container ship somewhere off the coast of Los Angeles right now.I can't imagine right now. My heart breaks for you because the supply chain is so challenged right now, given the past 18 months of COVID. Okay, so the quick story, because I hate to leave a short story. I had an uncle who was Vice President of an advertising agency in New York City. It was when I was living back in New York. I lived in New York for 20 years and, while I was living in New York every once in a while, I'd take a weekend and go up to their house upstate because they had a pool, and it was good to get out of the city. So my uncle and I were sitting on the train on the way from the city up to the white plains area where they live, and he said yeah he said well we're launching a new mustard type product, and I said, really that's very exciting he's like yeah, this company has been a client of ours for 20 years. So I said, " Well, what's the product, and he said the product is "dip and spread."I swear I stopped, and I waited. What. The product is called dip and spread. I said, are you going to call the product? Because it's just how my brain goes. So inappropriate to me. He said no, no, no, why. I told jack, dip and spread, really. He said he'd been working on it for probably a year, and he had had no outside feedback. Nobody had said anything, and I was the first outside person he had had a conversation with. I'm like are you kidding? Then I said, let me tell you what I'm seeing, and he went, "Oh, my God, we never thought of that." I said, well, half of your potential buying audience will, and I would rename the product, and they did.Lisa Ryan: Well, and we go, so we get so married to an idea. We fall in love with our thoughts. I can't tell you how many speech titles are.Carolyn Strauss: Many years, and I'll give you one of mine that was a failure.Lisa Ryan: I'm trying to think, but one of them was I thought that turn off turnover would be good because I thought that this way you can eliminate employee turnover.Carolyn Strauss: Yes, but then, when you looked at the turnover of product production is good.Lisa Ryan: So yeah, I was just. I thought it was catchy ahead of alliteration, and I bought the URL.Carolyn Strauss: I had one called, "take a nap with your clients and vendors." I had a new attitude and perspective right now to look at them in a new way. There's a flaw in the plan; nobody wants your people to take a nap with anyone. I spent a year on that being married to that, so yeah, take a nap.com. That was f. You're right; everybody gets so married to their ideas, which is why it's so important to have outside eyes, which is why I love the consulting that I do.I can go in, be completely neutral, understand their end goal after having a conversation with them, and then we start talking about what you are working on. I can go. We may want to rethink this.Lisa Ryan: It's getting the outside feedback but being ready to let go of something even if it's something that you're madly in love with too many times that we've seen it that we come up with this great idea. You see it on shark tank all the time that people come up with this fantastic idea. They never think they develop the item before they decide to discover if there's even a market need for it by getting that outside feedback, even if you're talking to some friends. Any honest feedback is getting the real story from people, and that that feedback hurts sometimes.Carolyn Strauss: I recommend a mastermind group. I think every leader of an organization should have a mastermind group, a group of peers, not in your industry, even necessary to bring your ideas and challenges to. They then look at it and say, where that might not be the best idea, I think it's brilliant. That's why you do what you do, Lisa. That's why this podcast is so valuable because people can listen to it and hear the mistakes that other people have made.Lisa Ryan: Right exactly. Well, boy, time does fly, so I know that you do a lot of consulting work but share how you work with your clients, what you exactly do, and then, what would be the best way to get in touch with you if somebody wants to learn more.Carolyn Strauss: So thank you well. My website, making it simple, is CarolynStraussa.com, so almost everything there is to know about me is there. How I work with my companies is I work with however they need. Suppose it's consulting with the management team and getting everybody on the same page. One of my sweet spots lately has been family-owned businesses. I just worked with a software development company that had three brothers running it. And the older brother wanted to get out within two years. The middle brother wanted to keep working. The younger brother was the salesman who tried to expand. How do you get anything done when you have leadership on three such different tracks? So that was a consulting job where I worked with an electronics company and electric and electric service company in Ohio. How I work with them is I go in once every once in a while and do those full team meetings like you were talking about, Lisa, where the installer people and the salespeople and the Office people all get together. We have a conversation about where the company is going in the next year. Whatever will serve people.Lisa Ryan: Carolyn, it has been an absolute pleasure to have him on the show and a whole lot of fun, too, so thank you so much for being here.Carolyn Strauss: Thanks, Lisa.Lisa Ryan: I'm Lisa Ryan, and this is the Manufacturers Network Podcast. See you next time.

Contact Rick Winter:Email: rwinter@SNCMfg.comWebsite: SNCMFG.comLisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers Network Podcast. My guest today is Rick Winter. Rick is VP of sales and marketing at SNC manufacturing. Rick began his manufacturing career at a very early age. During summers after high school, Rick worked in a paper mill to pay for college, and after graduating college with a BBA in marketing, Rick worked for polaroid. Then, he moved on to a company that specialized in custom extruded aluminum components for the telecom industry. He now works for SNC manufacturing, a leading custom transformer manufacturer of single-phase and three-phase industrial control transformers, with manufacturing facilities in Oshkosh, Mexico, and China. Rick, welcome to the show.Rick Winter: Thanks, Lisa.Lisa Ryan: Share with us a bit of your background. What attracted you to manufacturing, and what's kept you here.Rick Winter: I grew up in a blue-collar area, mainly the paper industry. My father worked in the paper mill his whole life, and I worked in that paper mill in the summertime to pay for my school, so I was exposed to it early on. It was the lifeblood of my upbringing. That's what pretty much everybody did in the area.As I moved through my career, I worked for companies that manufactured products. So I started in the different side of it, and then, as I moved into, I've always enjoyed being in the factory and seeing the production being done.It's always had a hands-on feel, so it's enabled me to be better at the front-end of the business and better understand what goes on behind the scenes in the plant.Lisa Ryan: I know that you like being in the plant. What are some things you've done with your workplace culture in connecting with your employees and engaging them? What helps you keep them?Rick Winter: That was a challenge. I've been at SNC for five years now. One of the things that I took on pretty early on was changing the culture at SNC. This is our 75th year of being in business. We have many long-term employees, and with that comes a lot of the traditional, historical, cultural things that may be outdated in many ways. So we are trying to get the culture to be more interactive and break down that barrier of the front office versus the factory—that and getting everybody to understand that we're more of a team.One of the first things I did was to set up quarterly all-hands meetings. During these sessions, we talk to the employees, just like everybody else. We tell them how things are going, how we're doing against our revenue goals, our bottom-line goals, and then the other initiatives we're doing.We're getting them to feel a little more ownership and understanding of their stake and making them understand that they're an important cog in this whole system. Without them, we can't deliver on our end. So that was one of the things we started doing was getting more employee events. Recently, we took the entire factory to a local minor league baseball game. We do that once a summer, and they bring their families. We do stuff like that throughout the year. We have events on-site and host dinners or barbecues where the staff grills out for the employees.We try to get our employees to realize that we appreciate what they do by doing small things with more interaction.Lisa Ryan: So you say it's an all-hands meeting that you're having - the office staff, along with the leadership team and the people in the plant?Rick Winter: Correct. It's everybody from the owner of the company on down. The management team will do the presentation. We have a template that we use. We do it during the lunch hour, and we'll usually bring in lunch that day for the employees - whether it's food trucks or we have a catered. We go through 15-20 minute quick updates on what's going on with business and making sure they're informed.Lisa Ryan: Many times, you see that there's this kind of us versus them mentality, with the people in the office versus the plant. I'm assuming that this has helped in developing more of those relationships. Do you have any before and after stories? What was it like before you started doing these meetings with the office and the plant people now that they're getting together like that regularly?Rick Winter: During last year, we couldn't have in-person meetings. We heard a lot of people say that they missed them and they enjoyed having them. One of the things we always stress in the meeting is a customer highlight because, for all they know, they're just handling all these components and putting together parts, and they have no idea what they're going to do. So we tell employees what the part is, what it does, what it goes in, and connect it. As a result, we've seen improvement in our quality. We're trying to show the bottom line and how being more efficient improves the bottom line. We can do more things with benefits and raises. We stress, for example, in Wisconsin, we make a lot of military parts. We can tell them, "Hey, this part is going on to the new navy destroyer," and they take a little pride in that. They understand that. They're paying a little bit more attention to what they're doing, knowing the importance of what that thing is that they're making and where it's going. Those are some of the benefits of it.Lisa Ryan: And it gives them that feeling that they're part of something bigger than themselves, no pun intended. They see the pride of this piece. So when you're saying it's going on a destroyer, they're going to make darn sure that it's not their point that their product that fails on that, so it's just these little things. A couple of years ago, when I spoke for the Industrial Fastener Association, one of the guys said they had a part of the week. So they took a particular fastener, and they showed what the part was and showed where it went. So it's these little things that you're doing that's building that connection that, like you said it improves quality and improves pride. You're getting the conversation going by being transparent and letting all the employees know what's happening - the good, the bad, and the ugly, particularly this last year.Rick Winter: yeah yeah, exactly.Lisa Ryan: So what are some of the things that keep you up at night?Rick Winter: We're challenged like I'm sure everybody else out there with Labor issues. We've had to increase wages to compete with everybody else, fighting for the limited worker out there. That's nothing new.The other thing is the supply chain. Logistics are significant problems and have become a daily battle where we're spending excessive time.Just communicating with customers and often not giving good news, A part typically has a two-week lead time. It's now six to eight weeks. Sometimes we can't even provide a lead time or commit to a ship date because we're not getting committed ship dates from our suppliers, which makes me responsible for our customers.I'm extra vigilant in ensuring that if they need something, they will look to see if they can get it somewhere else. We are trying to make sure that we can secure the parts. We value those relationships with those customers and keep them updated monthly. I send out customer updates with a newsletter of what's going on. We update our customers on the challenges we're facing with our supply chain and logistics. We're doing the best we can to meet their commit dates. But, again, it's about keeping those lines of communication open. We let them know that we didn't suddenly lose the recipe and couldn't make parts in a timely fashion. It's been a challenge maintaining customers. These are some of the things we're doing.Lisa Ryan: The newsletter is an exciting idea because it does give a bit of communication and transparency. Also, it's probably not something that your competitors are doing. So at least customers know where they stand with you. They might not necessarily like it, but the point is that they know.So what are some of the things that you communicate? For example, you're communicating timelines, and what are some of the other things you're putting in that? Have you gotten any feedback from your customers after sending that out?Rick Winter: We let customers know if we get a new piece of equipment. For instance, we got an automated welding system which we put into our Mexico plant. I talk about how we use it and the benefits to our plant efficiency and quality. Also, if we launch a new product line or introduce a new product, we let them know. We do a lot of custom work and have some standard offerings, but I'll talk about that in the newsletter if we bring on some new stuff. Also, if we qualify for a new mil-spec or any of those product lines, we will inform them that the product line is now updated with this certificate.Lisa Ryan: It also gets your customers saying, I didn't know you did that. You're letting them know all the different ways that you can help them instead of just the one product that they had been ordering from you before they knew the other things that you offer.Rick Winter: One of the benefits we've seen is where somebody has come back because we may have been making one or two custom parts for them, and also they come back. Oh, I didn't know you guys did this. So it's helped, and that's an essential piece during the pandemic. The ability to meet and see customers were restricted. I don't know whether that business is ever going to come back.It's been increasingly more challenging over the last decade or so, using the Internet. You can't walk in and cold call people. With COVID, it makes it even more challenging. We use the newsletter, and we're also using a lot of email communications to customers. We communicate with them as a primary lead generation tool. We let them know what we're doing and see if we can do anything for them.Lisa Ryan: How often does that go out?Rick Winter: we're just we just started it about three-four months ago. We're starting monthly at this point, and it varies. We have different programs, so we have certain target accounts or other market sectors that will go after, and depending on those, sometimes they may be, every couple weeks. So it's that delicate balance of being an irritant and informative and so for our general customers is monthly.Lisa Ryan: It sounds like a great idea, mainly if along the way you started highlighting different customers or customers of the month or product of the month. If people or companies are mentioned there, we all like to see our name up in lights.Rick Winter: We'll do a similar one. We'll do a quarterly newsletter with the contract reps. I'll do the same thing. I'll feature a new sales success with a person because all the sales guys want to see their name in print. I'll list all the new customers and new reps, or if they've done anything that stands out as well, we'll talk about that in there. You're right; people always want to see their name and in print or some media.Lisa Ryan: If you're looking for ways to engage employees using different tools, like having an intracompany newsletter. You're highlighting successes and highlighting the company's mission and the other products that you have. It is a great tool to keep in touch with your customers. It's also a great tool to share information, along with the meetings that you're doing. Looking for ways to create those relationships to happen because, as you mentioned, we're all fighting for the same people to come and join our firm. When you have good employees, they create a culture that they don't want to leave. They're not going to go down the street for 50 cents more an hour because they feel connected and enjoy what they're doing. They think they're part of something bigger.So if you were to think about from a networking standpoint, what would be some of the things that you would potentially like to learn from other manufacturers, and what would you be willing to share with your expertise with other manufacturing colleagues?Rick Winter: Well, I read a lot about automating and everybody they talk about automating; to get over the labor challenges that we're all facing and replacing it with automation which, deep down, nobody wants to do. You don't want to replace all these jobs with machines, but you may inevitably have to be a viable organization at the end of the day.I'm interested to know what other manufacturers are doing in long-term automation lines. Have they been aggressively going after it? For example, there's a big show coming up in Chicago in a couple of weeks called FABTECH where it's just you go there, and it's like a playground of automated equipment.Lisa Ryan: yep, I love it. I'm speaking there, so I'm very excited about going there.Rick Winter: We go every year. We'll go, and we'll walk the floor. I'll go down there with our VP of operations. We go through and look at all the different types of equipment that are there. The last time we went, we bought some equipment that helped streamline some of our molded capabilities by automating them. We didn't replace any employees with it. Still, it significantly contributed to the bottom line because we allowed those to automate that area, which took four employees. We were able to repurpose those employees into other roles.I'd be curious to see what other manufacturers are doing along those lines and then what they are doing in their marketing and sales activities. The challenge is getting in front of customers and the lack of trade shows. We cannot get in to see people. What other tactics may they are they employing that are successful.Lisa Ryan: The funny thing is with automation is it does become a recruiting tool, because when you have employees come in and see some big fancy robot or some automation, it's like, wow, that's cool, I want to work on that, so it does have some other positive benefits from a recruiting standpoint.Rick Winter: Even though we have automated a few different things for the welding line and this molded line, we didn't reduce staff. It's just increased efficiency and allowed us to focus on those people in other areas. So in our industry, not a lot has changed in the transformer world. Of course, there are automated multi-spindle machines and all that. They are a little bit sexy, but all at all, it's not that sexy of an industry.Lisa Ryan: And what would be some of the things that you would be willing to share if people wanted to reach out to you.Rick Winter: I would be willing to talk about what we're doing and in our customer outreach or are programs that we're doing to keep customers updated and try to get new customers. I'd be happy to talk about any of those activities and what we're doing internally to make our place of employment more desirable for people to work and want to be here.Lisa Ryan: So, and as we're getting to the end of our time together, if you had one tip for manufacturers today as far as working on that culture, the thing you feel would be the easiest for somebody to start implementing what would be your best tip.Rick Winter:Talk to people.Talk to your employees.Talk to other people in your industry as well as other people in the manufacturing field.See what they're doing and see what's practical.The most important thing you can do is ask questions and ask what they like or, more importantly, what they would like to see. That can steer you in many different directions and answer a lot of those questions and help at least get you going in some direction.Lisa Ryan: Thank you so much for being on the show today. If somebody did want to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?Rick Winter: Shoot me an email at Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers Network Podcast. My guest today is Rick Winter. Rick is VP of sales and marketing at SNC manufacturing. Rick began his manufacturing career at a very early age. During summers after high school, Rick worked in a paper mill to pay for college, and after graduating college with a BBA in marketing, Rick worked for polaroid. Then, he moved on to a company that specialized in custom extruded aluminum components for the telecom industry. He now works for SNC manufacturing, a leading custom transformer manufacturer of single-phase and three-phase industrial control transformers, with manufacturing facilities in Oshkosh, Mexico, and China. Rick, welcome to the show.Rick Winter: Thanks, Lisa.Lisa Ryan: Share with us a bit of your background. What attracted you to manufacturing, and what's kept you here.Rick Winter: I grew up in a blue-collar area, mainly the paper industry. My father worked in the paper mill his whole life, and I worked in that paper mill in the summertime to pay for my school, so I was exposed to it early on. It was the lifeblood of my upbringing. That's what pretty much everybody did in the area.As I moved through my career, I worked for companies that manufactured products. So I started in the different side of it, and then, as I moved into, I've always enjoyed being in the factory and seeing the production being done.It's always had a hands-on feel, so it's enabled me to be better at the front-end of the business and better understand what goes on behind the scenes in the plant.Lisa Ryan: I know that you like being in the plant. What are some things you've done with your workplace culture in connecting with your employees and engaging them? What helps you keep them?Rick Winter: That was a challenge. I've been at SNC for five years now. One of the things that I took on pretty early on was changing the culture at SNC. This is our 75th year of being in business. We have many long-term employees, and with that comes a lot of the traditional, historical, cultural things that may be outdated in many ways. So we are trying to get the culture to be more interactive and break down that barrier of the front office versus the factory—that and getting everybody to understand that we're more of a team.One of the first things I did was to set up quarterly all-hands meetings. During these sessions, we talk to the employees, just like everybody else. We tell them how things are going, how we're doing against our revenue goals, our bottom-line goals, and then the other initiatives we're doing.We're getting them to feel a little more ownership and understanding of their stake and making them understand that they're an important cog in this whole system. Without them, we can't deliver on our end. So that was one of the things we started doing was getting more employee events. Recently, we took the entire factory to a local minor league baseball game. We do that once a summer, and they bring their...

Connect with Rosemary Coates:Email: rcoates@ReshoringInstitute.orgWebsite: rcoates@ReshoringInstitute.orgLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosemarycoates/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. My guest today is Rosemary Coates. Rosemary is the founder and executive director of the Reshoring Institute, a 501 C three nonprofit and nonpartisan organization focusing on expanding US manufacturing. She's also the President of Blue Silk Consulting, a supply chain management consulting firm.Ms. Coates has been a management consultant for 30 plus years, helping global supply chain clients worldwide. In the early 2000s, she assisted many companies source products from China and set up operations there. But now helps companies with their global operation strategy by determining what products to manufacture in each market, including what can be manufactured in America. Rosemary, welcome to the show.Rosemary Coates: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.Lisa Ryan: Absolutely. Would you please share with us a bit of your background and journey that I alluded to in your bio?Rosemary Coates: I've had a long history of being in manufacturing firms. After I graduated college, working at solar turbans and San Diego all the way to graduate school. I got recruited out of Grad school to Hewlett Packard in Silicon Valley - that's where I live, now. After that, I went into management consulting at KPMG, a partner in another firm. So I'd been doing management consulting and software implementations in the supply chain sectors for many years. I worked for SAP for five years as manager of their business consulting group in the West. At one point, I was so interested in China, and, of course, you may know that in the early 2000s, everyone was going to China because the market was opening after trying to send it there. It was a low-cost environment, and everyone's competitors were going. I was very interested had always been interested in China and have done a few projects there. I decided to break out on my own, and I started a consulting firm, and that was focused on helping companies and global supply chains, particularly in Chinese manufacturing.I did that for about 15 years, helping lots of companies shift their operations to China and did many global expansion projects and so forth, which was fun to do. Then along came the 2014 presidential election when Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were China-bashing like crazy, and I'm thinking, "Holy cow, I can't tell anybody what I do for a living. This is awful."That plus, I'm shutting down so many factories in America. I did a lot of that, and it just really started to get to me. I began to feel like this is just not the right direction to go. We shouldn't be shipping all of our capability and manufacturing overseas. It just started weighing heavily on me. At the same time, because of the presidential election and all the China-bashing that was going on, some of my clients started talking to me about the potential for bringing some manufacturing back. That sparked this whole idea of reshoring.I gathered some of the people, the top managers that worked for me together, and we designed a process and approach for determining where in the world you should manufacture. We started helping companies understand if they could move to manufacture back to the US or add additional countries, and you know all kinds of decision points. It was evident that reshoring was going to become a trend. I felt strongly that clients were interested in moving back to America to make an economic case. Out of that grew the Reshoring Institute. We incubated under the University of San Diego. They have an extensive supply chain program there. I'm on the board at USD. That's also my Alma mater from graduate school. I asked them if they would help us get started, and they were accommodating. For three years, we incubated the Reshoring institute at the University of San Diego and took graduate student interns to help us do the research and get our sea legs. Then we went nationwide, and today, the Reshoring Institute is where I spend most of my time. We're nonprofit, so we do all kinds of global supply chain strategy work and consulting work - small consulting projects and big international projects.We're working on a giant project for the State of New York in manufacturing, and we help analyze, determine, and implement manufacturing projects to expand manufacturing in America. That's where we are today. We're associated with about 15 universities across the nation. We take graduate student interns that are very often scary smart and teach them about manufacturing. They're going to be the leaders of the future, and they help us with our research.Lisa Ryan: What would you say the things that you've seen? We've heard so much about manufacturing coming back to America, and China is certainly not as cheap as it used to be when it came to any of their manufacturing processes. So it's not like they're saving as much money as they used to, but besides the cost savings, what are some of the most significant benefits that you've been able to show manufacturers about coming back to the United States.Rosemary Coates: Well, you're right about cost increase, although that is not the primary driver. Wages in China are maybe a quarter of what they would be in the Western world, and in today's environment, we saw some financial incentives. For example, the tax reform act of 2017 was helpful to manufacturers. They got a big tax break, but it didn't drive much manufacturing back. It was just a tax break.Then, the trade war intended that it would drive manufacturing back to the US. Instead of just cause, manufacturers absorb more costs because they were paying the tariffs on imported parts and finished goods coming back into the US. That didn't drive any manufacturing back, although there was certainly talk. We were moving along, getting projects here and there, and doing our research. Then the pandemic made a big difference because it introduced risk.The economic incentives were there all along, but the risk is a whole other aspect, and many companies recognize that. It's time to think about their strategies more in-depth and potentially bring manufacturing back to America. The risk is certainly top of mind, with most executives potentially mitigating that risk through manufacturing close in the US or either in Mexico, sometimes Canada, so that's one aspect. But, of course, the economics have changed pretty significantly, and logistics costs are high.We're working on a project with the State of New York and are interviewing 50 companies in manufacturing. One after another, after another, they tell us that logistics costs are just choking them. For example, getting a container from Shanghai to LA used to be 1000 bucks now. It's as high as $15,000. The costs are exponential - most companies are paying at least three or four times more.That's a big issue that will eventually straighten out because it's based on the imbalance of containers around the world, and once that gets straightened out, we'll probably see some reduction in those costs, although not back to 2019 rates. So we should see some calming of that. So that's undoubtedly one of the factors.Another factor has short cycle times. If you have to wait six weeks to get the product from China, it's tough to fill your orders fast. Amazon has taught us all - whether industrial or personal consumers - that we want our stuff overnight. We're not going to wait six weeks. We want it in two days maximum. That's driven this whole attitude of shortening of cycle times in general across the industry. So having local manufacturing is helpful in that regard.Another aspect is engineering changes. It's tough to do those when you're at a distance. You've got an engineering problem. You get an engineer to hop on a plane, and tomorrow, they can be at a factory in Indiana or Alabama or somewhere. That makes a big difference in how quickly we respond to the marketplace.Lisa Ryan: Not only that, but you have your suppliers local, whether the United States, Canada, or Mexico, so it's not the slow boat from China. There's also something about buying products that are made in the United States. I know that you did some research through the Reshoring institute that talked about Americans' preferences for that made in the USA label. Would you mind telling us about that study and what you have found?Rosemary Coates: That was interesting. Since I'm working in that sector, there wasn't anything too surprising to me, but we surveyed 500 people across America and asked them some simple questions. These were all age groups from 18 to about 85, all education levels high school graduates, all the way to PhDs. The group included men, women in all regions of the US. We asked them some simple questions – "do you prefer to buy products made in the US? If so, would you pay more for them? If so, how much more?" The responses came back affirmatively. Somewhere around 60 or 70% said, yes, they prefer products made in the US. Yes, they would pay more for them, and the amount is between 10 and 20% more. If you get an exact product from China and one made in the US side by side, consumers are willing to pay 10 to 20% more for the product made in the USA. They indicated to us why there is a perceived better quality of products made in the US now.We didn't qualify that in any way. We didn't say good, bad, and indifferent. We didn't say any of that - we just said, "Do you think that products made in the US are better quality? And the answer was resounding yes. There's a perception and now why that's very important because, if we can manufacture in the US, for no more than, say, 10 to 15% more cost is 10 to 15% more. Americans perceive the quality is higher and are willing to pay more for it, so we use that number when calculating the cost of manufacturing in the US versus manufacturing in China or other low-cost countries. We know if we can get that cost within 10 or 15%, we got a winner.Manufacturing here has got a lot of advantages. It's a faster turnaround time. It's perceived higher quality. Whether it is or it isn't, it's perceived as higher quality. It's a speedier engineering change order. It's better logistics. It reduces your carbon footprint and on and on and on. So there are a million reasons why you would want to do it based on that economic factor.Lisa Ryan: When I think about it, there's also the softer side of it. It makes it easier for employees who want to work for a company that is made in America. A company that is keeping jobs here. There's that certain aplomb that comes with that. When you're looking at Millennials and Gen Z - the newer generations coming into the workforce, they want a company with a mission. If that manufacturer can say our mission is to bring you the highest quality products made right here, it will be even easier for them to attract talent. We all know that there is not enough talent to go around right now.Rosemary Coates: There's a huge shortage across the board and workers. We call that economic patriotism. It's based on the value of what you're willing to pay and how you perceive companies. There's a general preference among Americans to buy products manufactured here and to work for companies that manufacture in the US. I think it's awesome.Lisa Ryan: I had a guest a couple of weeks ago on the podcast who talked about this. I knew the numbers were similar, but I didn't realize they were that expansive. China has the number one GDP percentage of the GDP, like a 20% of manufacturing, the US is at 18%, and these numbers may be slightly different and going off the top of my head. But where they do it with 200 million people, we do it with 20 million. The opportunity to showcase what we do in the technology and the efficiency of American manufacturing puts every other company on the country on the planet to shame.Rosemary Coates: So you know that's a critical point - we don't want the 23 cent an hour T-shirt production back. Bangladesh or Myanmar - some of these low-cost countries. We want to have come back to the more sophisticated, more skillful requirements and environment for manufacturing. We want to put people back to work that makes a living wage and because, if we don't, we have to supplement their income with welfare. We don't want to create a bigger welfare state. What we want to do is bring in higher-skilled manufacturing jobs. Instead of putting pegs in holes, you run the robot that puts the pegs in holes. The robot technician is different from an unskilled Laborer. That's what we want. We want to focus on those higher-tech higher-skilled jobs, to bring them back because they pay a better wage, which creates better productivity for us.We sometimes hear politicians saying, Oh, we want to bring all the jobs back from China, and I'm like, that's not what we want. We don't want all that low-skilled stuff coming back. We want a more sophisticated environment and to move up the maturity curve for industry 4.0.Lisa Ryan: We've heard that trying to leave China can be troublesome. What have you experienced when companies are trying their best to bring manufacturing home?Rosemary Coates: That's a big one. Because I spent so much time in China, I'm very familiar with the craziness that can go on there. I've had clients who said, "okay, let's pull everything out of China and move back. We think we can make a case for it. We're going to build a new plant somewhere in the Midwest and bring everything back. At that point, I know I have to have a little tough conversation with the CFO.First of all, most of the employees in China are on employment contracts. That means that when they go to work for a company, they sign up for one or two years and have an employment contract. If you close your plant, you must pay out all those employment contracts. Surprise! That's a big surprise for a lot of companies. So even if you're sourcing there and you have a dedicated production line, you may be caught in that situation.Another thing is tools, dies, and molds. Once you establish that kind of thing in China, even if you think you own them, you believe they are written into your contract appropriately. You're probably never getting them back. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, there's a general culture that they become part of the infrastructure. So to take apart the infrastructure is just not allowed. And secondly, if it's any technology, the Chinese government won't allow it to be exported.You're probably going to have to write off all your machine tools, molds, everything, especially if you've had molds made in China, which many companies do because they're maybe a 10th of the cost of a mold made in the US. You gotta leave those behind. In terms of IP, here you are shutting down production, and the Chinese factory is learned how to make your goods. They have your IP instructions on manufacturing. They have your molds. They have your tools. So to say okay, we're going to stop making products there and move away, you've got to understand that the Chinese factory will continue to make your product. They're going to sell it under a slightly different name worldwide, and you're going to find yourself competing with your former factory in China. That's a problem.Sometimes you have to apply for permits to leave China. It's complicated and expensive, and you should go into this decision with your eyes open. We help a lot of companies in that regard, even though it's bad news. You need to know about it. You need to know what your costs are and your risks and leave an environment like that.Lisa Ryan: This brings us to exactly what you do at the Reshoring Institute. How can you help people listening to the podcast and may want to start considering bringing their business back to the States? Would you please share how you help your clients? Also, what's the best way to get in touch with you?Rosemary Coates: One of the first things I would recommend is to go to our website, www.ReshoringInstitute.org. We publish all of our research there. It's a complete website, full of all kinds of goodies that you can look at and determine that we also provide low-cost consulting work. Because we're a nonprofit, we have world-class consultants that have been in the business for 20-30 years. I've got a spectacular team. We do consulting projects at roughly half price of what you would get anywhere else. We help you find sources, supplier substitutions for foreign suppliers. For US suppliers, we do factory location, all kinds of design work.We can certainly help in that regard. Again, you can contact us through the website, or you can contact me directly, and my email is rcoates@ReshoringInstitute.org.Lisa Ryan: Wonderful. Rosemary, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. Thanks so much for joining me.Rosemary Coates: Oh, thank youLisa Ryan: I'm Lisa Ryan, and this is the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. We'll see you next time.

Connect with Susan:Email: susan@raincatcher.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/susancoaches/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today Susan Frew. As the daughter of a carpenter and the wife of a master plumber, Susan used her business coaching experience, having coached over 10,000 hours, 18 different trades, and 150 companies.  The Frews grew Sunshine Plumbing Heating and Air 535% in one year and made the elusive Inc 5000 list in 2019 along with 43 other awards and accolades. Susan has made it her life's work to help other businesses thrive and avoid catastrophe Susan is a certified business coach, a Fix this next advisor, and a profit-first professional. Susan, welcome to the show.Susan Frew: Thank you, Lisa. I'm honored to be here. Thanks for having me on.Lisa Ryan: Absolutely! Susan, please share with us a bit about your background and really what led you to what you're doing today.Susan Frew: Well, it was a sort of a roundabout way. I started in Telecom. I grew up on the east coast, and I was in New York City working for AT&T wireless, and I got transferred to Denver. I ultimately got transferred to the Caribbean for two years, and when that assignment ended, I decided to come back to Colorado. I bought a business coaching franchise. I started my business coaching franchise up in the mountains of Colorado, and beautiful Breckenridge, where many people listening would know where that is - so beautiful places ski with your family.During that journey, I met my husband. He was a plumber, and I don't know if this was because I was born the daughter of a carpenter or not, but I ended up coaching all these tradespeople. I'm up to 19 different trades that I've coached. I met my husband through that experience, and then we moved down to Denver shortly after the recession and started sunshine plumbing heating air.We went into service because we felt it was recession-proof. No matter what happens in the economy, you're not going to live without heat, hot water, and a working toilet. So we thought we had a good niche. We went into business against 950 competitors.Lisa Ryan: You and I had a conversation about employees. Many times on the Manufacturers' Network Podcast, we're talking about workplace culture and keeping your top talent from becoming someone else's because it is so difficult to find people. But from your tale of finding the wrong person, you do have to be careful to make sure that you're spending the time you're spending the effort to get the right person on board.Susan Frew: Here's our story. I consider myself a speaker and a business coach, and here we were running the company. We grew it extremely fast. We went from zero to $3 million in no time flat and had a lot of interest. During that time, I felt that I needed to hire a full-time bookkeeper/office manager to go out and do more speeches on how we grew our company.In a very disorganized way, I dumped all of my responsibilities on my office manager. I went out and fulfilled my ego dream of speaking all over the country. Meanwhile, my employee back home was not doing the right and ethical thing by our company. Part of it was a little fraud, mixed in with a bit of con, mixed in with a little larceny, and ended up with our company in a million dollars in debt.Lisa Ryan: How did she get away with it?Susan Frew: Well, I thought I had a good handle on this because I know how to read financial reports. I was a business coach. I've taught "Financials for dummies," which was one of my programs. I would ask questions about certain things, and she would give me some off-the-cuff answers. What I had done is I set up this program for her where she would get a bonus if she could stay on budget every single month. The bonus was significant - it could be up to 1500 dollars a month.She kept asking me for a raise, and I said, I can't afford it, but we can afford to do this if you can stay on budget. There were some red flags in there - there were quite a few. If you're listening to this, here's one sign: if your employee is visibly living above their means, you need to question that. This employee took a family of five to Cancun for a week at an all-inclusive resort. That is a costly vacation, and they were making pretty much minimum wages for the rest of her family. She was doing pretty well, but they had all kinds of debt they were carrying around.The way she spent money – especially the way she spent our money. That's why I was trying to keep her on budget. What she did was she would short our bills. So not pay them. Instead, she would pay a portion of them so that red flags wouldn't be waived. She did that with our payroll taxes, primarily.If we had 5000 due on Friday, she paid 4000. If the bill was for $4000, she pays three. So her budget numbers would look right, and I would sign the form, and we'd send in the check.In my mind, everything's copasetic. What she didn't realize was at the end of the year, when the w2's would true-up, the IRS would catch her. It was about an 18-month cycle by the time the letter started coming to my home. I was here on a Saturday doing housework, just hanging out on a Saturday. The doorbell rings, and it was the mailman. I opened the letter from the IRS. Nobody likes getting a certified letter from the IRS, but it was for $498,000.Lisa Ryan: Oh, that does not make your day.Susan Frew: I am still convinced, Lisa, that the IRS sends those letters on Saturday to ruin your weekend. There's nothing you can do. You can't call anyone. You have to wait until Monday, and of course, that's their busiest day, so getting through to anyone is difficult. There were penalties and interest for all of those quarters that she had shorted the payroll. Then, come to find out that we owed our vendors $175,000 on top of that.Then, there was what's known as a trust fund penalty for not being a good steward of those payroll taxes and allowing my employee not to submit appropriately. Now in my mind, the bills were correct - that's why my signature was on there. The IRS doesn't care what your story is; it's your problem if your signatures are on there. That's how we got a million dollars in debt. It was a painful couple of years.Lisa Ryan: What were some of the lessons that you learn throughout this? I'm sure that there were plenty. What do you share about things that they can look for something to do so that this doesn't happen to them?Susan Frew: Well, first thing, don't buy into your own media and your own PR. I was so high that we were becoming these big celebrities for growing our company and winning all these awards. I'm traveling all over the country, giving these big keynotes that I wasn't watching what I was doing. It turned into a horrible situation for me. I was up there, telling stories of how successful we were, and once I found out what happened, I became a fraud in my mind. I couldn't deliver those keynotes anymore. I would get down off the stage, and I would feel terrible. So that's number one - don't buy your own PR because you need to pay attention to what's going on, no matter how big your britches get.Secondly, get your own mail. I don't care how important you are or how busy. You need to get your own mail because there is information in there. That goes for your electronic mail too. I have an email address called accounting@sunshineplumbingheating.com, that only I have access to that. If I'm on the road, wherever I am, I can see it concerning the mail it goes to a P O box, I can have it, so I'm going to be gone for longer than a couple of days.They will scan it and send it to me, but I usually go there on the weekend to pick it up, and I see what's happening. So you learn a lot from your mail in a business.The third thing, Lisa, is to do two different kinds of background checks. There's a regular background check, which will check the motor vehicle, background, felonies, that type of thing. But there's a second layer that most people are not aware of. It's called civil penalties. An attorney can run that there are services out there that you can buy. I use a service that's $29 a month. It shows you non-criminal things that will give you a clue that this may not be a good hire for you, especially if you're putting him in charge of finances.Because I found once, I did pull those records. She had filed for bankruptcy three times. She had liens, garnishments, judgments - like judgments from my competitors. They were suing her because she stole money from them. Because of all those liens and garnishments, she and her husband weren't taking home very much money, which prompted them to do a lot of the things they did. They would do something like go down to the tire store and buy a set of tires for all their cars and charge them to our truck account. We have ten trucks on the road. They stole a gas card, and they would fill up all of their cars on a Friday afternoon for two years. It was her job to review the gas bill, so that's how she got away with that one. Now, I have checks and balances in every area of our company, but I was asleep at the wheel. I take responsibility for what happened.Lisa Ryan: Well, such a good, such a good lesson to learn. The other thing that we were also talking about is the difficulty it is in finding people. You must check out the people you have working for you, particularly if they're in charge of your finances. Share with us some of the things you have done to woo people to work for sunshine plumbing. What are some of the things that have worked or that aren't working? What are you finding out there?Susan Frew: Well, in the beginning, one of the things that we did is a lot of advertising using Facebook. We were creative and funny with our ads. We used all those awards I was talking about. We've won best workplaces from Inc. magazine and some local places, so we used all of that. We've always had a sign-on bonus, and we always broke it out in quarters. So, if you stay with us for 90 days, six months, nine months, 12 months, you get a bonus from us.We would try to make your experience here unique and different. We celebrated birthdays. We don't do on-call. We do not do nights and weekends - weird for a plumbing and heating company, but our employees were that important. If we had clients who had a problem, we would put them in a hotel rather than call one of our guys out in the middle of the night. We thought that was unique.We paid vacation and offered unlimited personal time off. You can win points for getting reviews and the grand prize for getting good reviews from clients trip to Mexico for two. We did all kinds of things -great creative things. Then this market started getting harder and harder and harder. As I said earlier, our top competitor in the market has 950 competitors in this space in Colorado. They were offering a $10,000 signing bonus, which I thought was outrageous. I even did a Ted talk about why can't we get women in the trades - which we've always been looking for. We need more women in the trades. We never seem to find that many of them, so we thought that $10,000 was crazy. So we are now offering a $10,000 sign-on bonus. Lisa, no one is applying. Nobody. I don't know what our future is. What we just did is we are merging with one of our subcontractors. We've joined forces. They're struggling because they don't have good back-end administration. We're struggling because we don't have workers. So we will come together, and we formed a partnership agreement to work out of the same shop. We are sharing resources, and they're coming aboard with a group of employees.That's been my solution. I've been trying to buy other companies or find strategic partnerships like that. I believe this market is going to turn around this fall. That is my hope. I think that that's, we have to be creative.Lisa Ryan: Well, that is $10,000 is one thing, but so are the people. People were working before, so have they just left the industry because of the pandemic, and they just totally got burned out? Or are there not enough new people coming into the industry?Susan Frew: it's all of it. The baby boomers are aging out. There's over a million person work shortage. They call it a blue-collar phrase. So that it's probably much more than that, all of the parents over the last 20 years pushed everybody to go to college, whether you were college material or not. So what we see actually in the trade schools now is people that are a little older. They tried the College route, but that didn't work for them. They're hands-on folks, and they want to go and get jobs with their hands. So we're seeing people in their 30's going to trade school now, which is great, right. But it's been faltering for 20 years. We have this giant gap. That's one of the things that's happening.The pandemic and the stipends for unemployment. Those jobs in that 22 probably $30 per hour range, which is where a lot of manufacturing jobs and trades jobs. If you do the math on the unemployment, you can get pretty close to what your salary was, and in plumbing, you can do side work. I can put in water heaters all day long in my neighborhood and make some money in my pocket that nobody needs to know about. I can go to Home Depot and buy the stuff and, am I licensed? No, probably not - but my neighbor's happy, I made a few blocks, and then, of course, there are childcare issues.When the kids were in school, someone needs to stay home with them. How do we manage that so it's a perfect storm of things happening in the trades and manufacturing? In factories all over the country, so many industries have been touched by this. It's also that our guys go into your house. How do I know you're not telling me a story that you're healthy?Lisa Ryan: Hopefully, as all the extended unemployment finally ends this fall, we will start seeing more people going back to work. Let's go back to the happier side of business things. What are some of the things that caused you to be the best place to work? How did you grow your company – it sounds like you did some super cool things for your employees.If somebody's listening to this today is thinking about ideas or needing ideas and suggestions to keep their employees, what are some of the creative things that you did there.Susan Frew: I didn't elaborate on the unlimited personal time off now that's not paid. That would be cost-prohibitive for mostly all of us. So we said, with proper notice, if you want to take an extended period off, you can.We had an employee who always had a dream to go hunting in Canada with his son. He was getting a little older, the son was starting to have children, and he's like, if we don't do this now, we're probably never going to do it. So we gave him a month off, and he never forgot that we did that. If you need a day to go, whatever you need to do, we will work with you with unlimited personal time off. You would think that people would take advantage of what they don't. It's something that they liked. We offered a gym membership now. Everyone thinks that's a great thing. Does everybody use it? No, but it was something. We always make sure we recognize people's birthdays and anniversaries, so that's something that we do.We have in the past and, from time to time, sent flowers home to someone's spouse, or we've sent people out to dinner we've sent employees on a trip. We sent one employee to see his friend, whose son was passing away, and he wanted to say goodbye to him before he went. We used some of our points and miles and sent them on a trip. That's many things that we have done, just really trying to be outside the box.Lisa Ryan: As we're getting to the end of our time, please share a bit of what you do and how you work with your clients. Then, if somebody would like to connect with you, what's the best way for them to do that?Susan Frew: Well, in the middle of our drama, and I need to, I need not leave everyone hanging. This is how we got out of the debt. We did a little Dave Ramsey, along with Profit First. If you've not read profit first, you should probably pick up a copy or download it. It's a great premise. We started doing those two things now. We also had this giant shop on the highway with the light-up sign. It's fabulous -5000 square feet - in this huge building. It costs a fortune, so we shut down the big building we moved the offices into the basement of my house. How humiliating is that for the big lady on the keynote stage talking about how great they were, we got a little shop down closer to the city? For the last two years, we dug and dug and dug and dug and dug, and last weekend, they moved out of the basement into another shop with an office.We have effectively paid off over $600,000. Some of the debt we have is for our trucks, so I'm not counting that as too much debt. We will be completely debt-free by the middle of 2022. It took a lot of sacrifices, a lot of hard work, a lot of elbow grease by all of us.What I do know from all those years of coaching about how great we were and how you could get there, you know what so what who cares, lady. What people want to hear is, hey, how can you help me get out of my predicament? So that's what I do now.I've partnered with a business brokerage firm called Raincatcher. I'm on staff with them as their professional speaker. I run their business coaching division. We work with business owners who want to sell their companies. They might not want to sell for three to five years, but we start to help them to get prepared. There's my division which is coaching, and then we have brokerage. If a company's not ready to sell but needs some structural changes or an increase in profits to get to the correct number, they send them over to my department, and then I work with them until they're ready. Then they go to brokerage, sell, and off they go into the sunset with their retirement funds. That's what I do now. It's really fun, and I know my story on stage is a lot different.It is a hey. Anybody can get in this predicament. There's a way out. Let's breathe. I know sleeping is difficult when you don't see how you will make payroll next week. I've been there many times, and I get it, and I think that I'm a lot more helpful now than I've ever been. The best way to reach me is on LinkedIn, and my moniker on there is Susan coaches. It's been like that for a long time. My last name is Frew in Commerce City, Colorado. You'll see me out there.Hit me up or if you're going to be at FABTECH. Come and see me because I will be there. I'm speaking in two sessions. We have a booth for Raincatcher, so I love to see you there.Lisa Ryan: Yes, and I will be speaking there too, so it'll be fun to hang out together.Susan Frew: Yes, absolutely.Lisa Ryan: Well, Susan, it has been a pleasure to have a conversation with you. Thanks so much for being on the show.Susan Frew: Thank you. It's been my honor Lisa, and I look forward to spending time with you in...

Contact Kevin Powell:Email: KSNTPowell2me.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinpowellecho/Telephone: 970-485-9069.Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturer's Network Podcast. I'm here today with Kevin Powell. Kevin has created success throughout the supply chain from manufacturing to sales and distribution with over 20 years of business and community leadership, including management and board roles. In addition, as an engineer with an MBA, his career encompasses engineer sales and leadership roles. Kevin, welcome to the show.Kevin Powell: Thanks, Lisa. I'm looking forward to our discussion today.Lisa Ryan: You have a background that if I told everybody what you've done in your career, we would be here for 20 minutes just talking about that. What is the Cliff notes version of your career when and how did it lead you to do what you're doing.Kevin Powell: At 32 years old, I was in a position of being named President of my first company, and, quite frankly, it was because I was the only choice they had. I was the one that was prepared, I was the one that was affordable, I was the one that they were willing to take a chance on, and I was excited about the business and my career. I was fortunate enough to have a couple of great mentors and made the most of it. I became CEO of four different businesses, each of which had different challenges or states of concern, and created success in each case. We've been blessed with the fact that we got to take a lot of people along. We created a lot of success along the way.Lisa Ryan: Before we started the podcast, we talked about lots of topics that we were going to cover today in our conversation, and the subject of diversity came up. The fact that you are a white male talking about diversity is such an interesting angle because it's not one that we normally see or relate to. Still, in your working with leaders in traditional companies and traditional roles, it sounds like you've made some strides in helping people to understand the need for diversity and how that impacts company culture and overall productivity. Would you please share what you're doing and what's working when it comes to that changing of culture?Kevin Powell: One of the things I learned through wholesale distribution was that it's pretty clear that people are your product. If you're buying somebody else's product and reselling it for a profit, adding value along the way, the value that's added is from the people that you have. If the people are all identical, you limit the value you can add and sell to a diverse community.You're often singularly looking at it from your lens instead of the lens of the variety of people that exist in the country in the world today. So that combined with our manufacturers, who were fortune 500 companies because of their publicly traded positions, they wanted to do the right thing.They looked at some of the smaller family-owned privately held distributors and said this doesn't look like we want it to add the value we always wanted to. How can we improve? I partnered with a couple of major manufacturers to help work on changing the Channel. You talked about it from a white male perspective. One of the things I learned along the way, as if you want to change the culture of any organization, you've got to first start with a change in the current cultural leadership of that organization and not have them be drugged along. So I worked within myself to become a leader and treat people as individuals, not as groups.Lisa Ryan: So what do you think are some of the mistakes that leaders are making when it comes to understanding diversity in their culture: What are the things that they believe they may be a little bit off course on?Kevin Powell: I think the biggest one is that that if you're leading an organization. That everybody within the organization in your customer base feels like you, and it's easy to get caught up in little progress and miss the big picture. For example, you and I talked earlier about the story of diversity that was one of my eye-openers. I had a young lady who was in a relationship with another lady, and we became friends. My wife and I and the two of them would go out with them. I thought that I was doing excellent. I thought that I was so open-minded. I thought that I was this worldly leader of diversity and acceptance and everything else and that I had created this utopia within the office I was leading.I had somebody pointed out to me one time to go back to her desk and see if she has a picture of her significant other on her desk. And sure as heck, she didn't. So I went back the next day and looked around, and everybody else had pictures of vacations, family, everything else, and she had a photo of her horse on her desk. So what I learned at that moment was that, even though she knew that I was personally accepting, I hadn't created a culture around the office that made her feel comfortable enough to share that personal side of her life with everybody else around her. So even though her situation may have been publicly understood around the office shooting, I feel comfortable talking about it.Lisa Ryan: When you are paying attention to those types of details, pictures on the desk, and some of the steps that you would recommend for leaders to pay attention to and little by little to start making those changes.Kevin Powell: People genuinely want to be listened to, not talk to. It's practicing the adage of the leadership of listening twice as much as you speak and look around twice as much as more twice as much as you command. If people feel like you're listening to them, they feel valued, whatever the topic is. I see so many leaders walk into a room and instantly command the attention of others. The best leaders are often the quietest in the room.Lisa Ryan: You've done a lot with manufacturers, turning them around and seeing the value of having lots of diverse ideas, where not everybody is thinking alike. What are some of the things that that you've seen? Some of the productivity increases due to companies that focus on people's diversity and thought within their organizations?Kevin Powell: It understands that if you're in the electric business like I was for a long time, or the swimming pool business that I was in for a while, or today, working with some startups that are doing Internet marketing and others, knowing that your customer base is not you and creating a workforce that understands what their customer base is and caters to them is a lot of the key to success.If you're trying to create a situation where your business is only focused on who traditionally is bought from you, as opposed to being buying from you, you're missing a huge market.Lisa Ryan: Right, and you and I had talked about that of just the opportunity for salespeople to make sure that they're getting it. If there are two parties involved a husband-wife that they're not just focusing on the person that looks like them, the other male in the room that they're making sure to figure out who's the decision-maker and pay attention to that many to that person, because how many sales have been made, because that salesman talked directly to the husband, knowing that the wife was the person who was going to be making that buying decision. These are just some of the little things you mentioned - the photos on the desk and the attention that we're giving to people and just going outside of maybe our comfort zone.Kevin Powell: We always tend to stereotype around groups, and it is human nature, and it's the self-awareness that breaks of that and even within the white male population, we do that, for example, I look at another white male and my assumption tends to go towards an upbringing very similar to mine, and I was raised in a farm community by parents who had gone through the depression and didn't have much money. I could be looking at somebody who led a life with two professional parents and had more than enough resources to do anything they wanted. You assume that people have gone through the same things you have. What you learn is that we're all individuals. As a leader, you need to lead the individual, not any one group.Lisa Ryan: When a person listening to this podcast is thinking about things that maybe they can do in their plan to make it a people-first environment to focus on people attending, of course, it is one thing. With some of the turnarounds you've been involved in, what have those leaders done to engage their employees better to bring them in and make them feel valued and appreciated, so that they are more productive to the organization?Kevin Powell: I think the biggest mistake people make is that it's a money game and having worked with many turnarounds. I've learned there is the power of your words is far, far greater than the power of your budget and that a great example would be if you want to show appreciation to somebody, you can get them an Amazon gift card for 200 bucks, but if you get to know that person and find out that they have a passion for knitting or a passion for fishing. So you get them a knitting kit or a fishing kit that every time they use, they think about you. You've now taken your words and made them more important than your budget.Lisa Ryan: That's one of the things that I talk about in some of my programs. It's through something simple like a survey, call it the all about me sheet, where you're finding out your favorite gift card, favorite hobby, sports team, candy bar, whatever it is so that you can personalize that recognition. Many times, that employee is not going to remember filling out that form six months ago. If they knock it out of the park and you paid enough attention to realize that they like knitting, it's like, wow, he's paying attention to me versus, you know, throwing another generic gift - though you can buy a gazillion things on Amazon. In the scheme of things, it's not as personalized as your knitting kit would be.Kevin Powell: If you're not building lasting relationships, and financial success you have will be short-lived. You don't make those through grouping people together. You build those by getting to know people individually, and it's harder with covid. People aren't sitting across the desk from you. They are in a collaborative situation there zooming, or they're on conference calls or otherwise. I think leadership requires outrageously more effort in the days of covid than in the past. The companies that will be successful in this are the ones that did treat people as individuals, as opposed to groups, even in this environment of electronic communication versus in person.Lisa Ryan: Communication is such a big thing right now because we think people are fine and fine on their own with all the technology. It's that that personal connection that picking up the phone or sending a text or going and seeing that person in their office personally. Whatever it is, but even in this game in this age of remote workers, that attention to not only connecting with them from the aspect of how's the business going but how's your job going? How are you doing? You're making a lot more of those personal connections.Kevin Powell: You can't create more time. Our success is defined in how we spend the time we have. One of the mistakes I've seen in the remote work environment is people hunker down and do their work. You miss that communication. That interaction creates a collaboration that grows a business, as opposed to just getting some paperwork done. The success and leadership in both the remote work environment and a diverse work environment all come down to making sure as a leader you genuinely know your people and that they feel valued, and that doesn't happen by accident. It occurs by an intended purpose in getting to know what creates a situation where somebody will do something they otherwise wouldn't.Lisa Ryan: Exactly. In one of our previous conversations, you told me a bit of the first company when you were President of that the company was pretty much going bankrupt, and by utilizing some of these things of building relationships, building that culture, and getting employees engaged and excited, that you were able to turn that business around four years later. Please share with us again a bit of the journey. What did it look like from an employee engagement standpoint? What are some of the things that you did to change that environment? You're in manufacturing, you're in distribution – whatever - we all want to make money, and we all have to figure out how to do that. Sometimes we're so focused on the widgets that we're making and making those better that we don't look at the product, which is the people, which seems to be your specialty.Kevin Powell: Making sure that people feel valued, you know the company that I took over had a gang in the warehouse. They had a Unionized environment and were almost bankrupt. The bank forced the sale of the business. Four years into our journey, we became one of Minnesota's best places to work.That didn't happen by accident. It happened by working, not as an individual, but with a team of leaders that understood that our goal was to create something that created a future for everybody involved, not just the leaders, not just the owners.We created a future and showed people a path to what that future looks like, to the point where our Union, which in the upper Midwest to decertify a union, doesn't just happen. We ended up decertifying the Union because they looked at their contract and said, why should we have a union? We have confidence that the client is looking after our best interest. We don't need to work against each other. We can work with leadership directly as a group and make that happen. There's a place in every work environment for those organizations, and where they apply, God bless them. But, in our case, we created enough individual relationships that they felt trust that we were looking after everybody's interest, not just our own.Lisa Ryan: It sounds like it was a pretty toxic environment when you came in there, so things like getting the gang out. Did you put together inter-departmental meetings, putting together teams of employees together? What was your process that started that turnaround and then ended up snowballing into decentralizing the Union?Kevin Powell: It created a situation where people felt that they could win and had a path to win. When people understand that their work translates to good for them and support each other, the biggest thing for me was hiring the right people. If you're looking to hire somebody, I'd ask what community activities they are involved in? Suppose they're interested in building a habitat for humanity home, and they're willing to give up a Saturday of their time to pound nails for a family to move in. In that case, they're never going even to meet. Imagine how they treat the person next to them at work. They'll have a relationship with that person. So starting to find the right people and then creating a work environment of engagement is different from a work environment of satisfaction.Kevin Powell: When employees are satisfied, it could mean that they're shopping on Amazon all day. They may be satisfied with that work environment, but it doesn't create a situation where the company wins, and the individual wins. It creates a situation where people are just happy. I don't believe that they're genuinely happy because they're not fulfilled. Engagement means they are supporting each other, and they are keeping the company. They are supporting the cause. Do they understand the link between their success in that?Lisa Ryan: What are some of how you allowed people to showcase those personal successes so that they felt a part of that company mission. It was everything from the vocabulary we used to the cadence of our work, for example, on vocabulary. We used to have a monthly meeting. We changed that to a celebration meeting. When we change that to a celebration meeting, we also had people showcase their successes each month, a different person or group got to do so, and we'd also celebrate some support that we provide outside the four walls of work. For example, at habitat for humanity, we would showcase the work that a group did at the habitat for humanity house the month before.It's the vocabulary and then the cadence that the leadership is commanding versus the leadership by collaborating. It wasn't unusual for us as a group of leaders to change the jeans and go pick orders at three o'clock in the afternoon because we wanted to make sure that a warehouse person knew that we would do it. We were lousy pickers. Occasionally, if I had a driver that would call in sick and route needed to get run, we had a choice between contracting out, or if I had a lighter day, sometimes I'd go in and drive the truck that that morning and then come in and do get caught up on the work in the afternoon. It was a great way to know people then knew that you weren't above them and that you were genuinely there to help them. You were there to help them be successful at their job, and their job was essential.One of the stories that I tell is that if I had a warehouse person call in sick or a counter salesperson or a customer service person call in sick, what happened, what happened is is that every ten other people were affected, customers might not have their product delivered. Others had to work overtime. There's all this chaos that happened when one team member on the front line called in sick. As the business leader, if I went to a conference that lasted a month, sometimes people wouldn't even know. So whose job is more important? Just understanding that a person who is that frontline worker is the one adding value. As a leader, your job is to organize that value in a most effective way to the customer. Making the customer competitively better than doing business with somebody other than your business is important.The other thing I'd tell you is that feedback is outrageously critical and delivering it in a way that can be received well is important. Another story that I suggest is that I've got two kids, and they mean more to me than anything in the world. As a parent, I'm the one that's there cheerleading for them the most. I cheerlead for them 100 times more than I ever give them critical feedback. But, I do give them critical feedback, and I do so because I care about them. I want them to succeed and taking that type of attitude to your employee base and making sure that, through your everyday actions through your listening, through your caring through your behaviors, they understand that you're there to help them succeed as opposed to telling them what they did wrong. It is so essential, and that breakthrough comes from listening to a few times in this podcast, but it's listening and genuinely feeling, genuinely knowing; having an employee know that what they say matters that neither one of you are always right and that we're in this together for mutual success. It doesn't happen by sitting behind your desk.Lisa Ryan: There were so many good tips. I love changing meetings to celebration meetings because

Connect with Alan DavisEmail: alan.davis@i5services.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alandavissolutiondevelopment/Website: https://i5services.com/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today, Alan Davis. Alan is the founding member and CEO of I5 Services. He started i5 services to change industries through creative technical solutions to complex business problems. His background is in technology and years of experience, leadership, and the transformation process. For the last eight years, he has been working tirelessly to connect the U.S. manufacturing supply chain. Alan, welcome to the show.Alan Davis: Thanks for having me today, Lisa. Great to be with you.Lisa Ryan: Alan, please share with us some of your background. What led you to focus on manufacturing and then the founding of i5 services?Alan Davis: Great question. In 2001, I was involved in another industry. We came up with an innovative solution for the airline industry when 9/11 happened, and the airline industry was somewhat devastated at that point and having a hard time recovering. Our solution had a huge impact on the client that we were working for - about 40 million dollars a year. That solution opened our eyes. That technology is still being used today; almost all the world's major airlines use it. But it helped the airline industry at a time when it needed it. That opened my eyes to the fact that there was this great need for some very innovative technical solutions that would solve very complex business problems. These solutions would have a direct impact on the bottom line for our clients. They would also have a dramatic impact positively on the entire industry or ecosystem that they serve.Fast forward a few years. The downturn of the economy happened. I got a nice severance package from my former employer, and we started i5 Services. Here at i5 services, we focus on manufacturing. A couple of years after we had started the company, an economic development study was done in the state of Utah to determine how to improve the various economic sectors. Part of that study was that in manufacturing, they decided that they needed a virtual industrial park.It was this ability to connect manufacturers with each other. The idea was that if a prominent manufacturer could buy local first, it would keep more jobs, more dollars in the state, and therefore boost the economy overall in manufacturing. We were selected to build the solution for that, along with Utah Manufacturers Association. We brought together manufacturers from around the state. We probably had 30 or 40 manufacturers participate, and over four months, we held workshops every other Friday for four hours.We got in the conference room, and we dug deep into why the solution was needed? Why weren't the existing solutions out there solving the problem? What were the benefits of doing this? It was a very informative and enlightening process because we truly understood that our manufacturing ecosystem is not connected well as we went through this. In fact, not well at all to the point where we have a hard time finding manufacturing capabilities. Anyone who had their eyes open during the pandemic will certainly understand challenges and problems in the supply chain. As we were looking at the problem, the manufacturers said this to me - and I thought this was eye-opening - they said, go to any solution that's out there today, any search engine, and try to search and find all the women-owned plastic injection molding companies in the state of Utah and tell me what you see. You cannot get a comprehensive set of results in any solution out there other than the one that we built at that time for the state of Utah.We put a prototype together while we were going through the workshops. One of the large manufacturers came to us at the end of those workshops and said, look, we have a $70 million contract. We're going to award it outside of the state because our buyers have scoured the state, and they cannot find anyone here that can deliver this. So we said this is perfect. We have the prototype ready, and we searched.Sure enough, two miles from their facility was the exact company they were looking for. They didn't know they were there, and that was when we decided as a company that number one, we needed to solve this for our country because it was a massive need. But number two, that it had huge value to the industry. If we could solve this, not for the state, but our country, imagine the economic impact that it would have. At that time, we decided this is our journey, this is our path. This is where we're going, and we've been all-in every sense, trying to make sure that we built the right solution for our country. We built the first U.S. manufacturing supply chain connection solution that connects us to the manufacturing capabilities of the United States.Lisa Ryan: That's what it's all about. You look at what I'm trying to create here with the Manufacturers' Network Podcast – it's connecting manufacturers. Sometimes you get so focused on your business, what you're doing, and your products. Either you don't think about other manufacturers in the area, or unfortunately, you look at them as the competition. I don't want anything to do with them versus building this connection - this group of people – and knowing who you can give the business if, for whatever reason. You're not the right company for it, or you don't have what you need to fulfill that order, and partnering with other manufacturers, it's it seems so easy that it's something that we should have been doing all along.But putting that focus on keeping it local to have the jobs and everything else, and building those relationships.Alan Davis: It's amazing if you start looking local first. Then, you can expand your search beyond your local community to your state, and into your country, and then international. That helps - no matter which ecosystem you're in. That helps your ecosystem because starting local first is always going to be the most economical solution. Well, not always, but almost always will be the most economical solution if you can find the right kind of provider.Now, if you can't find the right kind of provider, you have to expand that search, and sometimes that does take you internationally. But there are definite advantages to everyone. If you start with that local search, first one, especially when you look at things like the contribution to the local community, of standing out there, of letting people in your community, in your area know what you're about, know what your mission is, how you're contributing, because then also in a market where it's so difficult to find the correct skilled labor force that you need, that makes your plant somewhere where people want to work. They want to be a part of that because they see what you're doing locally.That was right after the Supply-Chain workforce was the next area the manufacturing asked us to start working on, so we have a workforce module. The solution is the Connex marketplace. You can find at Connexmarketplace.com. But that was the next piece that they came forward with and said, look, it's great if we solve the supply chain problem, but that introduces the next problem right behind it: do we have the workforce to sustain that business?That’s been an ongoing problem for several years. It seems to be exacerbated in the current climate, so there's a lot that we need to do in that area as well, and R&D or innovation is right there with it. We are working on all three of those problems and trying to help solve the challenges associated with them in manufacturing.Lisa Ryan: We think about the workplace. I mean, back in the day, you went into manufacturing because you could make great money with great benefits, and all this, and now you're not only competing with other manufacturers, but you're competing with Amazon. You're competing with these other tech companies that have money to play with. We're getting away from having that conversation. Looking at the things that differentiate a career in manufacturing and knowing that we need to have that conversation to attract people into the labor force that we're so desperately looking for.I know that there is no easy button to have potential workers show up at your door. But what are some of the things that you have found that are working to attract the workforce that we need?Alan Davis: That's a big question because many things contribute to it. One of the first things is manufacturing struggles to compete for the workforce, particularly in the U.S., mainly because of some perception problems we have a perception that manufacturing is this old, dirty industry that no one wants to work in, and it's hard work and low pay.And it couldn't that perception could not be further from the truth. Today's manufacturing is very much high-tech and has tremendous jobs. In fact, on average, they pay about a quarter percent more than any other industry. It is a fantastic industry to be involved in. But getting past that perception problem is part of what we're trying to help within the application and better connecting industry and education institutions. There's a better exchange of knowledge, understanding, and information between them.If kids are attending grade school through university, they don't always have an understanding of what some of those pathways are. They don’t know the opportunities of these high-paying jobs, and incredible careers that are available in manufacturing. When they begin learning about the workplace, and learning about jobs, and starting to think about what those jobs might be for their future, and then obtaining the right skills to be able to enter into those jobs. We haven't solved the problem because it has to come through that process for the next generation of the workforce to understand what the opportunities are, and to take advantage of them.There's the issue of helping the existing workforce transition to manufacturing jobs and be able to find a pathway that takes them from their current place of employment or direction of career to be able to make an amendment, a change, or a pivot to come back over into manufacturing and take advantage of some of those amazing jobs. So those are a couple of the things. There are also some challenges associated with training the existing workforce.There's a concern occasionally about automation, robotics, and things like that taking over all the jobs. That's not the case. When you implement automation and robotics, the reality has been that it almost always creates more jobs and increases production. An interesting statistic that I think helps here is that with one-tenth of the labor force, we produce almost the same output as China in manufacturing. So China has about 20 percent of the world's goods. We produce about 18 percent. They do it with about two hundred million whereas opposed to our 20 million, so it is a stark contrast. But what it means is we've been very innovative in our ability to manufacture goods in the United States. That level of innovation has to continue. Part of being in manufacturing is the opportunity to innovate and find ways to take those leaps and bounds forward in producing new goods, producing all goods in new ways, and so many things. It is such an exciting place to be, and right now, with so much focus on the problems that we have with our supply chain, and being able to fix those problems, and making sure that we're resilient in our supply chain in the future, all of that tends to hopefully help people understand that this is a long term, wonderful industry, and it's not going anywhere. The jobs there are going to grow and get better. I think if we can begin to combat some of those perceptions or misperceptions, then I believe we have a much better shot at addressing some of the workforces challenges that exist today.Lisa Ryan: Right, and even thinking about automation for years, it was expensive and scary, and, oh, this is going to take away everybody's job where instead, as you said, it's creating jobs. But now what it's doing is getting rid of that drab, that manual labor, that repetitive motion, basically the grunt work. So why not have automation take care of that so that you can leave the innovation, and you need people to program those robots? When I was in the welding industry, it was all dark, dirty, and dangerous.And now, as you said, it's opening up those channels to introduce kids coming through schools to see what it's like to see that it's bright, and high tech, and a fantastic place to work where you have that immediate gratification of something that you helped to build, you helped to create. So lots and lots tied up in there. You are using things like Manufacturing Day to open up to the local schools, to come in to see what you're doing. You're not going to get all of those kids. But if you get one or you get a couple, that puts you ahead of everybody else.Alan Davis: One of the things we've been working on is this opportunity within the solution for teachers, academic advisors, and others booking plant tours and downloading materials, videos, about the manufacturing processes from the industry to connect better. We're a part of a group in defense manufacturing community partnerships in the United States where we're holding these workshops to try to understand better what some of those needs are in the workforce, and R&D, and in additive manufacturing, and advanced manufacturing, and all these areas so that we're able to step in, and better help solve those problems. Lisa Ryan: Where are those resources available? Because I think that if a teacher or a guidance counselor or people are working in the schools that knew that that was available, that maybe that would open some channels that they didn't know. What would be some good resources for people listening to check out and find some of those videos and resources?Alan Davis: We are in the process of compiling that. It'll be coming out and available to the academic organizations sometime in the fall. But in the meantime, to reach out to any of their manufacturing organizations in their state. So who is a great resource, by the way, the MEP system that we have in the United States is beneficial to manufacturing and certainly acts as a liaison to help in some of those communications between academia, and industry, manufacturing associations, the Chambers of Commerce.There are so many wonderful organizations that are there to help support manufacturing in the state. Right now, they're the ones who do their very best to try to make some of those resources available and to make those connections, and so the solution that we're putting forward is to help support that communication and all that interchange back, and forth.Lisa Ryan: I talk to my clients about partnering with your local tech schools, and getting involved in those because then you're basically getting students right off the line that are coming into your plants. You’re building those relationships. When students see that you're involved with that trade or technical school, you're a known entity, and they feel comfortable working for you. So, and when it comes to additional resources, if somebody is not familiar with what an MEP is, can you tell us a little bit more about that?Alan Davis: Yeah, absolutely, and I will make one more comment on what you said because working with those tech colleges, one of the things that we learned early from them was they want to help more students get trained and be ready to come into the workforce. But they were limited or constrained by the access that they had to equipment into materials that they needed to train the students better. So that was one of the problems or challenges brought forward to us some years ago.We put an exchange center together for the exchange of surplus material where our large manufacturers were so gracious and stepped forward, and said, look, we have the equipment, we have materials, and we're happy to donate that or provide it at a very low cost to schools so that they can have better access to those things to help with the workforce problems. So that exchange has been amazing, and so those organizations come back to us frequently and say, this has been one of the best values we've ever gotten out of the application is this ability to exchange.So in our country, MEP goes back about 30 years. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIS) was asked to create the MEP program, which is a manufacturing extension partnership, and what that is, is an organization. There is one MEP who is a partner to NIST in every single state. They have federal funding to help manufacturers, particularly with challenges and issues that they face, such as being certified or finding some training that they might need to help the manufacturers with their operations better. Their mission has continued to expand grow, and I know they are very much involved in helping with issues like cybersecurity and making sure that your plant is safe and secure. There are loads of resources that are available through the MEP network and your state.Lisa Ryan: OK, so they can do a Google search on their state and MEP, and that should be able to come up easily findable. Absolutely, and then finally, let's get to the issues with the supply chain. Some of the things that you're seeing are the issues and what is working right now. What are some of the good things that manufacturers are doing in an area that the supply chain is struggling with, and they can turn it around?Alan Davis: I think almost everyone now sees the problems, and the struggles, and supply chain, and everything from ships being stuck, and not being able to goods into the port, to not being able to get goods manufactured, and shipped soon enough, to not having enough ships, and all kinds of things. That is impacting various aspects of the supply chain but in a very positive way. When these challenges arise, it opens a door and an opportunity for innovation and positive change.I tend to gravitate toward what I see is happening to address the issues. In addition to trying to work through the problems to get the supply chain flowing again, there's also a lot of innovation. There is a lot of focus and effort around trying to change the supply chain, maybe a little bit, see if you can't find a closer supplier to your facility or provide something to you in the United States that maybe you were getting overseas.Now, that's not always possible. It's not always feasible, and it's not always the best course of action. But we're seeing it often right now, and then we're seeing companies starting to innovate. So I'll show you quickly. I am holding a pen here. This is the first promotional pen produced in the United States in many, many years. This is a 3D printed pen and one of the first pens made in the United States, which is because there have been these problems in the supply chain. So manufacturers are stepping forward, and I know I'm using a straightforward example of a pen. But, still, I use that to illustrate that this is happening all over the United States. When manufacturers see the problem, they're stepping up, and

Connect with Damon PistulkaEmail: damon@exityourway.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damonpistulka/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers Network podcast. I'm here today with Damon Pistulka. Damon is co-founder of Exit Your Way, where he focuses on identifying and executing opportunities for business owners to increase their business value. Damon worked his way through college and earned a mechanical engineering degree. He started working in an injection molding company where he worked in technical and managerial roles, including designing, building, and operating facilities. Damon managed businesses to design and produce retail store fixtures, custom fabricated metal products, advanced aerospace components, and high-tech devices.Damon, welcome to the show.Damon Pistulka:  Thank you, Lisa. And that is quite a mouthful. And it makes me realize I have to rewrite that because it's too much, too much to come on. It shows I'm old. That's all it does.Lisa Ryan: But it shows that you've been in and around the manufacturing business. So you've been working in that area, and that's who listens to the podcast.Damon Pistulka: When I was in college, I worked my way through college, sweeping the floor in a tool room until they finally started letting me draft and do other things. I was closer to getting out of school. So, I've been in manufacturing for a long time. Lisa Ryan: Yeah. So please share with us a bit about your journey. As a young man, what initially brought you into manufacturing, and then what kept you there?Damon Pistulka: I grew up on a big farm. It was in the Dakotas, out in the middle of nowhere, where it was miles and miles from the nearest Wal-Mart - which was about 70 miles away. We had thousands of acres. We're farming. You have to understand how to fix things. It's assumed that you're going to do that. You're going to work with your hands. So I get to college, and I didn't know what to do. I ended up having a roommate that was in engineering.And I thought that's pretty cool. I started doing engineering. And the next thing, I was in a mechanical engineering program. Then I worked for a manufacturer. And here I am many years later now. And it's been it was fun. I enjoyed the technical part of it and learning how things are done.And I still to this day am enthralled by when I can walk through a manufacturing facility and see products being made and touch them when they're done and feel them because it's so much fun to do that. And it doesn't matter. I've been able to do injection molding. We made all kinds of medical products and business products and things that go on doors and all this stuff that you get involved in so many different places.And then being able to help those companies do that. I was able to go into plants where television plants and automotive plants and tools like Black and Decker type tools were made. Plants where they're making air compressors and hand tools and all this stuff that you go, wow, that's how it drills made. I see all that stuff. And it was so much fun to do that. I was running companies for people. I was taking the knowledge of how things get done and then applying that in the business setting. It's always been fun for me because when you can get a company working together, everyone who is designing or the people in the office and the people working on the product or handling the product all know what they're supposed to do.And they're all working together. And it's not we and them and all that kind of B.S. that goes on. You can achieve so much with not a lot of money. And because of the ingenuity that you get when people work together. Diversity brings people together to solve problems. It's so much fun. Lisa Ryan: That's one of the things I loved about manufacturing in the welding industry. Same thing. You get to see how everything's made because when you look around you, man, everything's been manufactured. And when we think about manufacturing and these younger generations coming into the workplace because they haven't had that same level of exposure, they don't necessarily know how cool and passionate people can get about it. I mean, my manufacturing audiences are some of the most passionate people on the planet about what they do.But when it comes to changing that conversation, many manufacturers have been doing it the same way for 40 years, the same equipment that they've had in the plant. And this is not how we attract the new generation. So you and I will talk about ways that you've seen your clients and how you've helped people as far as little things that we can do to modernize manufacturing for today and the future.So, start there, kind of what are you seeing and how are you helping your clients progress and change things?Damon Pistulka: When I talk about modernizing manufacturing, I don't even pretend to know how to do it on the manufacturing floor anymore. I think that is something that manufacturers are very good at. If you're in business today, you're not a sloppy manufacturer anymore. You've been in business for a long time. Even if you're an OEM manufacturer, you've got to get good at least producing that product efficiently enough to support yourself.So when it comes to the manufacturing floor, I think there are two things we're selling ourselves short on. So let's back up to the beginning of the question. Modernizing manufacturing to me is about digital transformation. It's not because I think everyone should be doing digital marketing. I think you should be to some extent. But it's not only that. It's the fact that is understanding the generational transformation that we were going through. So we're getting into this quite a ways down the road and understanding that.What does it mean for our workforce? What does it mean for our customer base? And that's where I talk with more of the clients I'm working with: understanding your customer base and how it's changed over the last ten years because manufacturing and some of the other industries we work with are closely related. It traditionally was Damon's going a salesperson for a manufacturer; he's out meeting with customers. That's what we do.That's how we sell. Yeah, we got a website. You can contact our phone number that might have been all it was, or it's an equipment list or something like that. We got some pictures of the product, whatever it is. And that's the length of the breadth of the way the digital format was. And that's the sales process. Right, to have x many salespeople or manufacturer's reps or distributors or whoever the heck I'm selling my product the way I did it.Well, fast forward to today. We've been going through the last how many years we've been talking about baby boomers retiring. I mean, heck, it started ten years ago already. And we're rolling through that. And now it's hitting. When you look at manufacturing, we've got the double whammy in 2021. We got the big jobs to shift that people are talking about; people leaving because it's such an employer's market. They can go wherever they want.And you've got people retiring at a faster rate than ever before because they sat through the 2008-9 crash when the real estate went to hell. And then they stayed through that. And then we had it covid in 2020, and some people hung on. And now, when people are getting past this, we're going to have even more. But the underlying change that people don't focus on a lot in manufacturing is that the average age of the buying population is not going up anymore.It's going down significantly. The buying population and the employees all grew up with Google. Most of them grew up with a cell phone in their hand. How are they going to know if they want to come and work for your company? They're going to look up your website, and they're going to be concerned about things that people in my generation never cared about. We didn't focus on your community involvement; what's your larger purpose?How do you treat your employees? What kind of things are you going to do for me that help me as a person? Think about how you were working in manufacturing. How much time you spent on your cell phone. It's like not only are we looking at ways to add apps because the guys are out in the field or they're on the shop floor, and they can look up a short video, but even they're checking you out on YouTube.Lisa Ryan: So who do you have that you took your phone and said, hey, what do you like about working here? I love LinkedIn and YouTube, where you have these little short videos on how things are made. Because if I'm a prospective candidate thinking about going into manufacturing, I'm like, wow, I can do that because you're making it look exciting. You're showing them what they can be a part of versus the old website with the phone number and equipment list.Damon Pistulka: I think the real change happening now in manufacturing that we all need to be aware of and be changing to accommodate people coming to work for us now is cell phone generation. So they want to know what the company's going to do for them. And they also want to know what you expect from them as a company. So they know I don't think that millennials or the next generation, Gen Z know what they want, but they want a sense of involvement and enjoy things. And I don't necessarily think that they don't want to work. I think they want to need to know that, hey, I'm going to get this if I do that. And that's not different. I mean, it's no different than when we grew up. We needed to know.We weren't as concerned about the environment or the community. So that's a bit more now. But we have to be clear on that. And you have to know that you're competitive because now people can go check out different companies much easier again because of information at their fingertips. In the 80s, when looking to find a job or the 90s, you're looking to find a job.How the heck did what the benefits were at a company before? We didn't have a place like Glassdoor where people can get on Glassdoor, and most manufacturers are listening, probably only know what it is. But, still, I'll tell you, look at your company, look at Glassdoor, because if you had bad employee experiences, it's probably on there, and you don't even know about it. And your Gen Z and Millennials, they're looking at that before they come to work with you.Lisa Ryan: I mean, like you say, like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I know you may be driving listening to this or something. So write that down glassdoor.com.Damon Pistulka: Yeah, it is. It is the place because I've gone to clients that I've started to work with them. I look at their glass stories. What's the last story? It doesn't matter. And it's that. And they said, well, you got a couple of bad reviews on Glassdoor, some negative comments here. Well, years ago, it wouldn't matter.It wouldn't matter because that wasn't we don't understand those things. But like when you're trying to sell something today, we have to put ourselves in the shoes of that person and make ourselves attractive to that person. That person is different from we are.Lisa Ryan: Well, and those negative reviews, they can be offset if that company comments and says, we understand what we're seeing and you're showing that you're paying attention to those bad reviews, not going to kill you because we all know that grumpy people leave companies. It's not that big of a deal, but it's in conveying that. Are you a company that people want to work for? Because I agree with you, millennials and Gen Z want to work.What we need to do is give them opportunities so that they want to work for you.Damon Pistulka: One hundred percent. You said it much better than I could, and that's the point when you look at modernizing your manufacturing, and again, we're not talking about all in the shop or whatever you're making and that kind of stuff. This is about modernizing for you to be attractive to employees. Modernizing so you can be appealing to customers. So when we look at the customer side of it, to look at these customers that we're selling to, I don't care if you're selling, you're a tier-one supplier, and you're trying to win contracts with a big company.The average age of the person you're selling to is probably thirty-five to forty-five, right? Those people grew up with a cell phone in their hand. They're using Amazon way more than the 50 plus-year-old person is. And they expect to do business kind of that way. They hope that your business is doing a lot more than the old OK. The system's going to send you the POs. It'll show up when it's supposed to. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.They want to be able to look you up online. They want to be able to see what's going on with you. They want to feel a part of your business and understand how you are a part of their business and how you are a part of helping them. And that takes a different approach. It's not a salesman talking to them once every quarter or whatever it is to check-in or them having a good account rep at the other end that's taken that order.You're sending them some valuable information on the products you use or ways to improve in some other area of their business or how you can make their life better with your solutions or keep them informed on industry news. And like you said, the same kind of approach for people buying from you now or going to buy from you in the future, you have to be producing stuff on YouTube.You have to be putting some sort of content out in a blog or once in a while. Maybe periodically sending an email of good information out to your customer base or potential customer base. It's not an option anymore.Lisa Ryan: Right. And when you're doing things for the community, you mentioned earlier how you are showing up, giving back to the community? What is your mission? How are you making a difference that's important to today's buyers, too? So if you're doing something, some people are like, well, I don't want to toot my own horn. I want to be anonymous. I want to do good. But it's in sharing what you're doing in a genuine, authentic way that this is how we're making a difference. You're going to make that buyer proud that they're doing business with you.Damon Pistulka: Yeah. And you make it the point you make about not wanting to toot your own horn. There are ways to do this and be very subdued about sponsoring a charity event, or you can your workforce can go out and work for a week on some great project. But, again, it's about helping the community focus on what you're helping, not on you.And it won't look like you're tooting your own horn. It looks like you are so grateful that your customers allow you because we do good work and have great customers. It will enable us to do this for our community. And then you're not too in your own horn. You're showing people how you want to use the benefits of the business relationship to help more people. And like you said, the buyers want to see that because they feel a part of it.Right. If your customer can feel a part of you helping the community, that's even better.Lisa Ryan: Yeah, because what differentiates you? You're competing with somebody down the street who's making the same thing. You are. OK, well, maybe I know it's a different quality, blah, blah, blah. However, it's still what differentiates you and having those roles being seen in the community, taking into account who's buying from you instead of that product that you've purchased. What? We've always sold it this way.Damon Pistulka: Yeah. Look at the difference in retail, right? You have the behemoths like Wal-Mart or Kroger or the big store chains. Right. It could be that the Albertsons or whatever the grocery stores. Why is Trader Joe's or Whole Foods popular? It's a much different market that we're working in. That's a younger market that shops in those. And they're very loyal to those brands because they have maybe a little more community feel to them. You can see it all over, in what you're doing and what you're buying.People want to know that they're buying from somebody that is not in it for the buck. They're in it to help more than helping the community of the world at large as well.Lisa Ryan: Right. And I think that's such a good point. So often on this podcast, we talk about the employees and the younger generations and attract and retain the employees. You have a different mindset with younger people who grew up with the cell phone. They think differently. So this adds such a different perspective. So we're taking it even further into the whole atmosphere of our business. So we're not only considering those same technology challenges and apps and videos, but we're also looking to attract and retain employees but also looking at that world of people who are buying from you.So, such a great way of looking at it.Damon Pistulka: Yeah, it's you have to put your customers and your employees in your story with you, because if they're not in it with you, then you're competing for air time. But when you can show your customers how they're helping you to do good in the world, and, yes, you're going to make that quality on-time delivery pricing, all that stuff is old news. If you're sitting there on your website and you say, hey, we produce the highest quality at the lowest prices possible, blah, blah, blah, there are 14 million other sites to do the same damn thing.So, listen, it's, it's not worth your time to put that on there. Put why you're different. We treat people this way. We do this in our community. I was talking to Matt Goosy from Memoir's Machining on a business podcast. Matt does something where he shares 40 percent of his profits back with his employees every year. How many places do that, and how much of a community impact is that?If I was trying to recruit employees, that shows that he cares about the employees? It's things like this that are amazing. Of course, you still have to make great parts on time and all that. But those differentiators you have are probably not inside the manufacturing floor anymore as they are about how you do business.Lisa Ryan: If it came down to your best tip for modernizing the whole feel of manufacturing and the buyers and the employees, what would you say would be a step for somebody to get started?Damon Pistulka: I think it's putting themselves in place in the place of an employee. And looking at your company from that perspective, have a 20 something-year-old person look at your company and that you and you say, what do you think when you look at our website if you are coming to work here? Or have them look at or have someone that's a bit old or look at the same thing from buying from you look at your website, look at all of your social media, look at all your marketing materials, whatever you've got put together, and say what does and how does it make you feel?Because that is the real, those are the real people that matter. It doesn't matter if you're branding people or your salespeople think this is the coolest flier ever or I'm the best salesperson ever. It's what you're...

Contact Andrea DallanEmail: Andrea.Dallan@dallan.comWebsite: www.dallan.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreadallan/Get "The Revolution of Efficiency" book hereLisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today Andrea Dallan. Andrea is an engineer entrepreneur and CEO of Dallan Spa, an Italian family business producing systems for the processing sheet metal since 1978.With 160 employees, including engineers, technicians, and operations, he is the author of the books "The Revolution of Efficiency," which came out in 2020, and "Think Thin," which is coming this summer. With a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering at the University of Padua. During more than 20 years spent in sales, Andrea Dallan has visited hundreds of companies analyzing production processes and helping entrepreneurs and managers to make their operations more efficient. He's also the father of Mateo Vittorio and Beatrice. Andrea, welcome to the show.Andrea Dallan: Thank you, Lisa, for inviting me. I'm excited to be here. Thank you for the introduction.Lisa Ryan: You're very welcome! Andrea, please share with us a bit about your background. What led you to what you're doing now?Andrea Dallan: I started to work in our family company back in 2000. My father established the company in 1978. He was an engineer, which led me to choose my studies at the University. I was starting to work during high school here in the company. I went through many jobs in the company and eventually found out that working around sales and speaking foreign languages was my favorite. It was in line with my attitude, which gave me the possibility to meet many engineers. That's the beauty of my job - meeting people and getting to know their problems. I also enjoy helping them find solutions to their challenges, challenges in production.Lisa Ryan: Now, we talked about a lot of different topics. We landed on the fact that digitalization changes the conversation in manufacturing from that dark, dirty, and dangerous to something cool as we move into industry 4.0.So when it comes to recruiting people into manufacturing, what are some of the things you've done? What are some of the companies you've worked doing?Andrea Dallan: This is a hot topic right now. We are based in Italy, but 90% of our customers are in Europe and the US. We see the challenges in recruiting. It is a real challenge for many of our customers. Companies used to support their lines for their manufacturing in the high schools. Without professional schools, there are a lot fewer students to choose this professional career. It's a problem for companies in Italy, but this is a general trend in Europe. I see that it's becoming a problem in the United States as well. So the problem is that working in a factory in manufacturing in sheet metal fabrication. It seems not to be sexy anymore. Students tend to look for other types of jobs that are more into office jobs. They are looking into marketing and all this kind of stuff. The significant point about digitalization is that it is an effort that we are also making as a company with the high school in our hometown.There are opportunities in manufacturing and choosing a professional school because the environment inside companies has changed completely. Going into manufacturing means we look for people who assemble our automatic systems. Then we deliver to our customers for doing their manufacturing. They can go to one company and become responsible for a whole line with a high level of automation. The kind of skill that will require from these guys is a lot more towards digital. The knowledge they need is to know how to operate the line and connect with HMI with a human-machine interface. The environment and the level of safety have increased dramatically in the past 20 years or so. Getting to explain this to students is helping to build that. How can we say to let them know that there is a career and the possibility of growing professionally in the manufacturing and the operation area? It's not about being in the office. These manufacturing jobs are going to pay more office jobs. That's what we need to explain to young people right now.Lisa Ryan: Well, you also mentioned that you look for these kids, these 16 and 17-year-olds and younger, who have the right attitude for working in the company. What does that right attitude look like? And when you find somebody with that attitude, how do you continue the conversation and get them excited about working for you?Andrea Dallan: Our human resources has an excellent connection with the professors in the technical high schools here in our town. We offer students the possibility to spend time in our production during the summer and the school year. They can spend one week here in the company and then three weeks at school. So we start to observe these kids when they are 17, 18, 19-years old - right before they finish high school. We try to find people who have the right attitude are curious. They are brilliant in what they do. They want to learn more. Once we spot this, it is very encouraging for us. We tend to call them again for the following summer for another period until they graduate. We end up adding two or three of them every year to our workforce. The students train on the assembly or the automatic lines. First, they will make one installation for one of our customers. Then, they will arrive to do service to our lines at the customers' facility. This is the kind of path which starts from the high school and then, once we have found that people persons with the right attitude we train them to give good value to our customers.Lisa Ryan: Introducing them to your company while they're still in high school and getting them to come in for those couple of weeks over the summer, and meeting the people and seeing the processes and starting to build those relationships, particularly if you have them back through their high school career where maybe they're spending two or three summers with you. By the time they graduate high school, it seems like a no-brainer that they would go to work for you because they've already seen the culture. They know it so that investing in time and building those relationships with these kids coming out of high school seems to set you apart.Many people are looking to hire the same people. From what you're doing, it sounds like for a lot of your competitors and maybe a little bit too late, because you already have them.Andrea Dallan: You have to find the people that will do very well in our company as an environment, that will be good team members. We have 12 students that are doing this stage inside our company, but we will not hire all of them. We also have to be because they may choose something different, but we have to choose one another, so we want to start a long-lasting relationship when it goes on.They start to work, or we need to train them for two or three years before they are ready to do one installation alone. So there is a lot of investment of time for us. We try to retain them as much as possible. It means investing in teaching them a lot and then doing our best to retain them. So they can be productive and entirely onboard with our company.Lisa Ryan: It sounds like making that extra effort to establish those relationships with the professors and working with the schools and talking to the parents and getting all of those other people involved in the process to change that conversation that manufacturing is a great career. You're working with automation and cool technologies, and you're getting involved in making things that have never been made before. You're conveying that excitement and passion that you have.Andrea Dallan: We hear a lot of the IoT industrial Internet of Things and the advanced sensors. There are many changes in our industry, from the electrical point of view on the automation and on the mechanical side. All of these elements interact with one another in our machines, and so if someone has the right attitude, if they are curious, if they are willing to learn. They keep that humble attitude of learning from the older and more skilled technicians. Over time, we understand that we can also learn a lot from them because younger people were born in the digital age. They can give us a lot of added value, and they can keep our minds fresh and open for for for novelties.Lisa Ryan: Whenever I talk to my manufacturing clients, the people problem is always number one. How do you find workers? Then, how do you retain those workers? Coming in at number two or number three are the supply chain issues we're all experiencing today. After the pandemic, we've seen prices of raw materials go through the roof.I know you've just written a book on being more efficient. In what ways do you see that manufacturing companies can stay healthy and profitable amid all these raw material costs and supply chain issues?Andrea Dallan: The rise in raw materials prices puts the spotlight on every company's number one problem. We have to figure out how to keep the cost of their production under control. Today, the influence of the cost of raw material on the price of the final product has grown exponentially. So a lot more people are contacting us to understand how they can make the same amount of production using, for example, less raw material or thinner gauge material. This is one of the reasons why I started to collect my articles in this new book in the first book I wrote. The central theme was efficiency because, in one company, efficiency means producing using fewer resources. For example, one of those sources of raw material, so if we can do the same amount of production using less raw material to reduce the scrap or use a thinner gauge, that is huge savings. That turns out to be a considerable saving at the end of the year. We have customers who are through the redesign of one product or the redesign of the one process, they have gone from saving hundreds of thousands of US dollars to millions of US dollars, so that's what changes from market to market. What was a big advantage before the rising prices of raw materials, and right now, it's an even more enormous advantage? Companies that have started this process are rethinking their production lines. Their operation in the direction of efficiency has the benefit right now in this condition of price increases.Lisa Ryan: The people factor and the production factors still go hand in hand because you're looking at efficiency and the opportunity to use fewer raw materials or thinner gauge materials. But still keeping connected with the employees, ensuring that they're engaged, that they like what they do, you're investing in them. So it's going to be the employees and seeing things differently. If they feel valued, if they feel appreciated, they're more likely to come up to you and say, hey, I think that we can save a little bit over here we can save a little bit of time we can save a little bit of money. If the employees don't feel that they're a part of the team, it will not happen, so it sounds like those to go hand in hand together.Andrea Dallan: We have this mindset throughout the team. Look for inefficiencies because inefficiencies can be a problem. It starts from the raw material or the lack of flexibility or one process or the lack of automation in one process. So if the whole team comes together and analyzes this one process, maybe even together with external experts, sometimes it's essential to have external eyes to help us find the solution to become one. That creates a considerable value for our support for each company. I see in our customers' companies all the time.Lisa Ryan: When I think about what happened in the future, employees were afraid of automation because they believed that that was a way for companies to eliminate their jobs. Employees are such a massive part of automation because somebody's got to know how to run it. Somebody's got to know how to program it. So now you're allowing those employees, instead of doing, I don't want to call them menial tasks, but basic labor - they can use their skills, knowledge, expertise, and machines, do they, don't have to do the "grunt work." What do you think will be the role of automation in the production process in the future?Andrea Dallan: We are taking out through automation many manual tasks, but these are also the tasks that are so uncomfortable for the operators to work on. Whenever we have introduced automation to our customers' facilities, we have seen that the operators were a little bit suspicious. When they understand that the equipment is designed to relieve them from that part of the manual labor is repetitive and tiring, they rise to a different role. The supervisor can dedicate time to quality control. The whole structure of our customers benefits from their change of mindset. We have seen so that some customers, for example, move some of the operators to the logistics because it became so productive that it was more important to keep the machine fed with the raw materials and to take out the ready production, or rather than just doing the manual packaging. So we had worked to get automation. We also a more significant result of the added productivity and the wellness of the whole workforce. When you don't have labor to do production, everything is taken care of by automation. So you can expect much better productivity over the eight hours over the shift. We are sure that we obtain a lot more effectiveness from the equipment. There is also another important point that has come out during this pandemic. We hope are these crazy times are over, but we have heard a lot about social distancing over this time. We have also understood that the more automated the systems or, the more so, social distancing is also guaranteed. We have seen our customers with higher degrees of automation in their processes, producing more continuity and without any stop. People aren't working too much together. Someone has called this pandemic proof processes, but let's keep let's get the pandemic board out much safer procedures. They are more automated than we are making even the production a lot safer, even for these cases.Lisa Ryan: Your company has opened a branch in the United States. What are some of the perspectives that you've seen - comparing your European operations to the US market for these automated systems.Andrea Dallan: Yes, so there are some differences between European facilities and US facilities. We opened our facility in 2018. We are working in the US since the 90s. My father always pushed the company to work more outside of Italy rather than in Italy. This is the reason why he pushed me to study foreign languages. For him, that was the future. He turned out to be perfectly correct.The one thing that we have seen is they said that the need for automation is very similar. There is a lot of room for expansion for us in the United States. Many companies have equipment in the field that is sometimes 30-40 years old. The older style of equipment lacks automation, which is the highlight. The strong point for our equipment is that they also understood that services in the United States are critical for most companies.This is the main reason for opening a branch and opening one facility that will be specialized. But he specialized in the service of spare parts. We have many of our customers in a driving range of five to eight hours from Dayton, where we have our facility. That is one difference. The level of service requested in the States and the requests from the companies are very similar. The demand for productivity, automation, flexibility, and increasing the efficiency in the use of raw material.I can also add that we have seen that in the states, so the market dimension for our customers is much larger than it is in Europe. So, therefore, our machines are oriented to very high productivity. It is very much in line with what our customers in the US expect, so it was in the right place at the right time, I think.Lisa Ryan: It all comes down to efficiency, which you have written the book on. Tell us about your book, the revolution of efficiency, that came out last year. Then, Think Thin, which is coming out. Talk about the books and if somebody would like to get that how they would do it? Andrea Dallan: Okay, thank you very much. I always liked writing articles. I started very early in the first years were when I was working. These were articles that analyzed how to calculate the cost per hour of one production line or calculate the price of one sheet metal product outside the one line. Over time, I had a lot of articles, and I thought it was time to to to bring them together and to give them the shape of a book, but I didn't know where to start.At the same time, it was also the age when my children started to ask me about how I began to work in the company. So I brought the two things together and started writing this story for them. Given the problems that our customers are facing, I put all of these elements together. I think the nice thing is that I have asked many of my customers to give me some case studies to make the reading more fun and more practical. We are bringing actual case histories or stories. So I was writing these four elements of efficiency. So that was the reason for the title of the book. So and efficiency, so the problems that our customers face and typically are efficient in sustainability are producing with the last raw materials or optimizing the raw materials.They are increasing the flexibility of their processes to produce smaller batches according to the lean production methodology. Automation is not about reducing the workforce but of improving the quality of the people's work and the quality of the production. The productivity has to be more competitive, so each time we work on that efficiency, we generated the same result. We used fewer resources which tuned into higher profits for the company. The first book was a collection of case studies and focused on the processes I have listed. It will be available in kindle unlimited for another two months, so it's just a subscription, and you can get it for free. So if you put the link down, there will be a lot of essential information.The second book is on a different topic. It is on product design. It means that we can build a lot of efficiencies, looking at the process. If we start earlier on and we designed the product to be manufactured more efficiently, using less raw material. There are some chapters on that. The characteristics of raw materials, how to form the water, what we need to take care of bringing us even more efficiency,...

Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today Fran Brunelle. Fran is the President and founder of Accelerated Manufacturing Brokers. She specializes in the sale of small and mid-sized manufacturing firms. To ensure the continuity of US manufacturing, Fran and her team help transition ownership to the next generation of entrepreneurs.Recently Fran was named to the 2020 most influential women in mid-market mergers and acquisitions. Fran is also the host of WAM - Women and Manufacturing podcast. She writes on topics that helped manufacturing business owners prepare their companies for sale and navigate the sales process to ensure positive financial results supporting their retirement. So, Fran, welcome to the show.Fran Brunelle: Thank you so much for having me. It's good to be with you today.Lisa Ryan: Fran, please share a bit about your background and what path led you to work with manufacturers and get into the selling of manufacturing businesses.Fran Brunelle: Sure, So, we just passed in April, our 27th anniversary. So, we started my career serving the manufacturing community as an industrial auctioneer selling the manufacturing equipment that the businesses use that I currently sell. Often, a manufacturer who needed an auction had some need for speed, usually because they were in financial trouble. But the companies that were buying equipment from us were growing thriving, constantly rotating out their equipment for newer pieces or better brands. Eventually, at their behest, we started our journey as M&A professionals. Those buyers said to us, "Hey, I need to retire. I was hoping you could sell my business or help me find a company to acquire to facilitate my growth. For a while, we ran both divisions, and we started to hit our stride in manufacturing M&A, and, at the point where we grew over 400% three years running, we said goodbye to auctions. Like the M&A practice, you're helping to transition ownership of manufacturing to a different generation of entrepreneurs, ensuring that the company goes on and the jobs go on.So, it's a much different gig than auctioning. I remember very early in my career. I used to say, God, this cannot be my purpose in life; I'm the grim reaper. Over time, the skills that I learned in the auction industry and learning about manufacturers and machine tools. It was a process. I would never be able to do what I do today to help manufacturers retire in wealth if I had did not have that basis to understand manufacturing.Lisa Ryan: From the standpoint of succession planning, there's a lot of my clients that don't have their children, or their children may have no interest in the business. There isn't a succession plan. In this podcast, we talk about employee retention, engagement, finding employees, and all these steps. As we were talking before the show, when you set your business up for sale in the future, now or in the future, you're going to have all those processes in place where you're going to have happy staff, and you've done workforce development. So, what you can do now to sell your company in the future, perhaps, or what you need right now, is attracting and retaining good employees. Would you please share a bit about the good things these companies do for their workforce development and create that culture?Fran Brunelle: One of the things I enjoy talking about, and just an observation from traveling the entire country selling manufacturing companies, is that everybody talks about a skills gap. A lot of people complain about it, but not a lot of people do something about it. Manufacturing companies that are proactive in their communities, engaging with the high schools, and engaging with the trade schools are not having the same types of problems as others.You have to be involved if you're waiting as a manufacturer for somebody else to do it, for the government to do it, it ain't gonna happen, sweetie. So we have to take action. We've just seen some wonderful things company that we sold down in Carolina. The owner was very involved with the local high school. They had a work-study program where the students could go and try out a career they thought they might be interested in. He would hire them, and the owner would start them doing some menial tasks. If they showed work ethic, he would move them to shadow a machinist, a setup guy, someone doing solid works depending on where the students' interests lie, and if they determined that this was a career path that they wanted, he would take them down to the local trade school. He would help them. The trade school would assist the student and applying for any grants that might exist. If there were no grants available for the student, my client would pay for their education to promise that they would stay with him for a short time.I remember saying to him, "So, you're paying for these students' education. Aren't you afraid that they're going to leave and go to a competitor?" His response to me was, "Well, shame on me if they do because I've not created a culture that they want to stay in." He had a delightful program staff. It was such a wonderful mix of middle-aged guys, but some very young firecrackers came up through the process.Things like this workforce engagement, not just doing things to address the skills gap and pulling them in but then creating an environment where they want to stay in those companies. I've been doing this for 27 years. As a result, those companies sell faster and at better prices. Suppose a buyer walks into a manufacturing company and sees everyone has gray hair, and half are walking around with a cane because they're about to croak. In that case, your buyers and acquisition lenders see danger in that.You cannot wait as a manufacturer until you are right up at that point to start to address it. It takes years to handle these things.Lisa Ryan: It's interesting. Many manufacturers don't know that you can work with the workforce development sections of your local community college or tech schools and design the exact employees you want to put together the programs to customize those employees. Building those relationships, you're going to have a one-up on the competition because they're already there. But the fact that he's paying for the education, he's creating that culture. He's taking any of the competitors out of the market right there because this employee has shadowed. They have followed the management. He's already invested in them. He's showing them that he sees something in them that maybe nobody else has ever seen before.There's that fear of, "Well, I'm going to spend all this money to train these people, and then they're going to leave." Good for him for realizing the fact that it's still up to you. You still create the type of culture that keeps them there, but this is not something that happens overnight for the people listening. This is something he's invested in that time. He's invested in those relationships. I'm sure that whenever he is ready or was rated to sell, that company probably went rather quickly and at a reasonable price.Fran Brunelle: We had four different offers - all over list price. That man got to choose who he wanted to sell to. The company that bought them is fabulous. It was to individual buyers leaving corporate America. One had been CEO of a publicly-traded company. These staff members are now exposed to educational opportunities that they would never have otherwise been exposed to. Fabulous company.Lisa Ryan: When you look through when you talk about what these buyers and lenders are seeing as they're walking through an organization. Do you have a wide range of people? Do you have a diverse staff? Do you have a diverse team of all different ages? Those young kids are coming up and bringing that energy to it. You can feel culture. You can walk into a plant, and you can feel if people want to be there or not versus the people that are just about to retire. Who would want to buy that? You have people in that retirement mode who might be thinking, well, why should I make friends with these young kids? They're just going to be gone in six weeks anyway.What have you made friends with them, and built those relationships, and like that owner connected with them, and made them feel valued that's what keeps them there.Fran Brunelle: One other thing I would say about involvement with schools in your community. Everyone thinks it's difficult to do this. Schools are struggling. I've had clients that have donated machine tools to the trade school. As a result of that, one particular client got to have his banner placed upon the wall of the machine tool school. Who do you think students are going to call? He gets the cream of the crop because he shows the Community school that they care about this student's development. I'm sure he gets the best employees before his competitors.Now you do strategic planning in every other area manufacturers. So I'd like you to have.Lisa Ryan: Exactly. What are some of the biggest mistakes that you see companies making?Fran Brunelle: It is an interesting subject, because what makes a manufacturer successful also makes them incredibly easy to sell, and they sell it at a higher price. There's any number of things. We talked about workforce development.Another topic would be modernizing your equipment. Manufacturing had a bad reputation for several decades for a reason. Hopefully, we can get the message out that it's not a dirty old machine shop. Some of the places we visit are like cleanroom hospitals. They have modern work environments, and I just took a deal under contract in the Midwest. They have done fabulous things with continually modernizing their equipment and bringing robotics in. Everybody is afraid that robotics is going to take away jobs. In this particular instance, a job was the least favorite job in this machine shop. It had to do with the weight of the metal piece that had to be put into the CNC machine. My clients said, "Okay, let's see what technology we can apply to this." So we don't have this issue of anybody wanting to do this job when you walk into their facility.It's funny you talk about atmosphere, how you can sniff a good atmosphere instantly. Well, that was this place. They instituted robotic cells, and that's the first thing you see when you come in. My client said that it was the best recruiting tool they have. Young people come in, and they're like, wow, this is amazing. I didn't expect this. It's a wonderful clean environment. They have documented procedures. Everyone knows what to expect. There are bonuses relative to performance, and they treat their people right. Those are all things that make a difference.Beyond that, we have blog articles. A recent blog article I did had 15 different points that help a manufacturing company to sell well. There are things like customer concentration and sector concentration. In some industries, that's very hard to avoid. For instance, if you're in the aerospace sector, you will have a customer concentration if you're doing anything of relevance because there are only so many big players in the industry.In other areas, buyers and lenders will look for less customer concentration. There's a whole host of things that matter, but the workforce development and the skills gap are among the largest.Lisa Ryan: When you're seeing these companies investing in that workforce development, what are some of the best ideas or the best tips that you would give to somebody listening today as far as focusing on that area?Fran Brunelle: I think one of the things that I would say is exposing someone coming in a student say do it on a Work Program. Expose them to any number of things. I had two different clients in the past, would start workers out in high school, as I described earlier, but they would rotate them around the entire shop. Then, once they were trained on everything, the person could gravitate to what they most were interested in and where they had a fit. The manufacturer ends up with a whole team of people who are cross-trained. If people are going out sick, you're not afraid of that because you have a fully trained team that skill did in every type of machining. That's probably the most important thing, I would say.Lisa Ryan: Not only from a cross-training standpoint, but there you're also giving your employees opportunities to find the job that light them up. They may have applied for one particular job that they thought would be okay, and that job might have kept them there for a little while, but by having the opportunity to go around the shop, and having a say in what they do, because that is not a common practice. So when you can differentiate yourself over what everybody else is doing - when you're all competing for these same employees in a lot of cases - all of these little things that you can do, and cross-training is such a win, win.Fran Brunelle: it's funny you just said you reminded me of an interview that I did for the women and manufacturing podcast with a woman from Koch industries. She told me a story about what of their workers whose job was loading tractor-trailers every day with paper products toilet paper shipped all over the country. This gentleman had an interest in technology, and today, he designed the computer programs that the entire process in that plant is now automated. That man wrote the program to accomplish all of that. They gave him the autonomy to work towards what he was most interested in. I just found that touching in a great story and a good example for other companies. Sometimes you have talent, and you hire a person for one thing, and they end up being fabulous in something else. You've got to give them the room to discover that.Lisa Ryan: Exactly! Well, that is such a great tip. As we're coming to the end of our time together, tell us a bit about how you work with your clients and what's the best way to get in touch with you.Fran Brunelle: Sure. In the M&A sale process, we represent the seller. We don't represent buyers. We get that request a lot, but our goal is to help with the manufacturer. Often the buyers are private equities, much larger corporations. Sometimes they have teams of attorneys. My interest is in assisting the manufacturer in protecting them through the process and ensuring that the jobs stay in the community. So that's how we work.We will run a potential client through an evaluation process. So before we ask them for a listing, they will know we will have provided them with an opinion of the value of their company, and we will do that without charge. Now some people come into the process, and they are perhaps smaller than I have an audience for, and I'll tell them that up front. But again, my industry is interesting in that many work where you're paying 10s of thousands of dollars upfront to find out what is my manufacturing company worth, and how long is it going to take you to sell it, and what are you going to do to sell it, and what is the whole process like.We will work with you to understand these things upfront and walk you through an educational process. So you are completely prepared for anything that's going to happen in the M&A process.Lisa Ryan: Wonderful, and what's the best way for people to get in touch with you?Fran Brunelle: best way you can visit our website acceleratedmfgbrokers.com, or you can call us 908-387-1000.Lisa Ryan: Well, Fran, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show with me today thanks for being here.Fran Brunelle: thanks for having me. It was a joy.Lisa Ryan: I'm Lisa Ryan, and this is the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. We'll see you next time.

Contact Jake Hall:  Email: Jake@themanufacturingmillennial.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacobrhall/Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm excited to introduce you to our guest today, Jake Hall. Jake is the manufacturing millennial. He talks about the latest technology in the automation and manufacturing industry while being a business development manager at Feyen Zylstra, an electrical contractor system integrated company.I found Jake because he also posts cool manufacturing videos on LinkedIn, so make sure to check him out. Jake, welcome to the show.Jake Hall: Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.Lisa Ryan: Well, you are the manufacturing millennial, and I know that that's one of the things that the listeners to this podcast have issues with: how do you find the younger generations? How do you create that type of passion that you bring every day to manufacturing? So please share a bit about your background and what got you to where you're doing now.Jake Hall: The Labor force and manufacturing is absolutely the hot topic, so for me, as a millennial and a younger person, manufacturing goes back to after graduating from college. I had the opportunity to go into automation distribution. So entering that field brought many options quickly where I'm not working at one specific company. I'm traveling around visiting machine builders, manufacturers and end-users, and all different industries. I had a unique experience seeing the diversity that manufacturing offers. It's exciting as my career developed, I started attending more professional conferences. I attend these conferences, and I'm walking around and say, man, people my age are underrepresented in the manufacturing industry. I never really looked at the statistics until one day after a conference. I said, man, I'm one of like two millennials in this room. What are the odds of that? I looked it up and said, holy cow, millennials and Gen Z are entirely underrepresented in manufacturing.I said, what can I do to create more conversation and awareness around what can manufacturers working companies and automation and distribution and the warehouse in the street do better to attract the future workforce, which in this case is the millennials and then the generation behind me, the Gen Z's. So I think that goes back to the fact that I need to share the diversity that manufacturing offers and dispel the myths around manufacturing that it's this dark, dirty, dangerous environment with no opportunity for growth. So that's kind of how the thing kicked off.Lisa Ryan: I speak at a lot of conferences, and you are right. People aren't sure. Do millennials not enjoy conferences? Do they don't get it? They don't like to be in person. What are some of the things that you're hearing? Going back to what made you go to those conferences and get involved in your industry, trade associations because, again, that's the conversation that we need to start having.Jake Hall: I think, for a long time it was when you go to these conferences, it was always this idea of right in the upper management, kind of the old boys club, in a sense, right you go there, everyone knows each other, you go there your network. The handshakes are there, but I think what he's starting to realize is to say, hey, we need to inspire the next generation to get involved directly. They need to begin networking. They need to be getting tied into the Industry more in-depth. I think that's what a lot of companies have failed to do in the past was see that there's so much value in payback when you can not only attract the young workforce but retain the existing young workforce that's there. And when you can show the potential that the industry has to offer at a much larger scale when you visit these conferences or trade shows or events. That's where you can say, hey, we're investing in you, and we want you to see the value that this Industry can offer us, professional growth.Lisa Ryan: And when it comes to these associations, are there things that they do better than others, as far as to be attractive to a millennial? Is it shorter programs? Is it more interesting speakers? Is it Industry related? Is it soft skills? Is it networking topics? What were some of the things that light you up that you think that an association professional can use to change their conferences up?Jake Hall: I think a few things, and there's no one fix all of us. I believe there are multiple things. I think a couple of them is that when you look at millennials, we're not necessarily working just for a paycheck. A lot of the younger generation also looks for purpose within their position. Purpose within their job and if they can impact or contribute to something higher than just what their task is. Doing from an eight to five job, they see more value in it. When you're looking at conferences organizations, what can you do to show that this is impactful to your current job or the industry as a whole?When you're looking at the event, if it's just something that's where you need to go, they're going to talk about stuff, but you're not going to walk away with anything you can use to either impact your business or business Industry. What value is that bringing that younger generation, and I think the other big thing is how your event is being planned out. Younger generations like to have fun. They like to socialize. We're on up. We're in a social media frenzy within the communication. Are you leveraging what people enjoy doing as part of the event? It's not so much that it's this newer generation has a shorter attention span. It's just that we process and look at information differently because we have so much information at our fingertips. Where before, you go to a conference and you were listening to an industry expert. That's where you learned.Nowadays, I can go on YouTube and listen to that same expert on YouTube at my convenience or hop on a podcast and listen to that speaker whenever I want. What value are you contributing? Past just what education can learn, I think a lot of that has to do with networking, so how much networking is leveraged out events. It is more important than they come and listen to this 90-minute speech on topic X, Y Z to learn from a systems expert. That is not necessarily the same and more because of the power of Information available at our fingertips. That's how we get information these days. We get information from Wikipedia and other sources that didn't exist 15-20 years ago.Lisa Ryan: Right, which also from a speaking standpoint, you can be fact-checked like right there.Jake Hall: Oh, I'll have that I've done speakers either they throw out a statistic I'm like no way, and I'll Google right there, and I'm like okay so he's either making that one up, or he's wrong, or other sources are wrong. It's just one of those things where information is now literally in the palm of our hand that we would typically be consuming at a conference.Lisa Ryan: Well, the other thing that I like about speaking at manufacturing conferences is that it feels like a family. These people have known each other forever. They know each other's families and compete against each other, but they still provide resources and sometimes a new person coming in, where you're not quite part of that family yet. So you might feel like an outsider. Unless that association planning committee does something to bring people like you, bringing the newer members into the fold, you get that same level of connectedness.Jake Hall: Absolutely. That's that power that networking can leverage. I think some of my favorite conferences I've been to are the ones where you can bring your spouse in as well. So your spouse can be a part of the spouses' group, and they can go off and do their things, then everyone gets together that night because it is about relationships, it is about feeling connected.And having those connections at the end of the day, it's not what, it's who. It's the Industry that contributes to growth and opportunity. So I think organizations that can leverage that - not only the business side but also the personal and relationship aspect, tend to have the most success.Lisa Ryan: You think about the association member's content, but those spouses are getting together, and they're building relationships. It makes it extra hard for you not to go to that association if your spouse is like, "Oh no, I need to see my friends this year. We're going."Jake Hall: That's when the successes happen - when they do events at these nice resorts or conferences. I know my wife's excited when I say, "Hey, let's go to Florida for four days." I think we can go there for four days, and especially in the middle of December or January when it's snowing here in Michigan. I think companies and conferences that can leverage beyond just having all these keynote speakers. They need to go beyond that because I like the conference, but my favorite part is simply the networking. To see people face to face, have those handshakes, and have those introductions right because you're conversing with a person. Everyone's having a beer. You're sitting around a table, and someone walks up to say, "Oh hey Jake, I want to introduce you to such and such. They do this. You never have that opportunity anywhere else. That's where I think the biggest value comes from in conferences.Going back to the whole millennial thing, if you were to go out there and say, "Hey, this is my new person working within the company, or you introduce them and say, "Hey, go talk to this person and listen to their story. As younger people, they see the value. They feel like they're being invested outside of, "Hey, we just want you to do this job the whole time."Lisa Ryan: Let's take it away from the association conferences and go into the manufacturing plants. We don't have enough skilled Labor force. So parents have not been having that conversation about going into manufacturing or going into the trades as a viable career.What do you see from the companies that you've worked with? What are they doing to engage, attract, and, most importantly, keep the people they have?Jake Hall: I love your comment, Lisa. Let's backtrack a bit. For so long, the educational system, the parents, the guidance counselors, the teachers, and organizations said, "Hey, your next step in your career after you graduate high school is to get a four-year degree from somewhere. Then, that was necessary. It was then. There was value in getting a four-year education degree. It did advance your career to a point. I think we're past that now. I believe we are to the point where that was saturated. The educational system has focused too much on the need for a four-year degree to be successful. This isn't the case anymore. I think companies as a whole have begun to recognize it. Going back to this comment of investing in your current employees is just as valuable as finding new ones. To fit what your demand is, I think that goes back to the idea of having more conversations around employee retention rather than new employee attraction.If I can take my existing worker, who's been working here for a long time, and enjoy working there, or they see some value in it, invest in them. Nowadays, there are so many programs where I can send my workers to get robot training, or vision training, or automation training. They can take a CNC program and create their common manually assembled tasks and invest in them. Companies are automating to fit that demand they need, and companies are automating to be more profit-centric. Companies are automating because either they can't get enough reliable workers consistently. Maybe they have machines and experience.I'm working with companies that can't run all the machines they have on the floor because they don't have the operators to run them. So you have all these companies that have just ginormous backflow and orders that are going out 6-12 months - this is in aerospace. These are basic consumer products that normally should have a couple of week lead times out months. That's just because they can't get Labor in there.When you talk about companies, I think, "How is your company leveraging retention within the company? How are you creating purpose and drive within that company with your younger workers? If that young worker doesn't feel connected to your company as soon as another company offers him $1 more, he's going to leave. He feels that in the company's eyes, that's all he's viewed as from a company perspective. He's an eight to five task Labor person.But as soon as you go and say, "Hey, we're going to put you through an educational program. We're going to invest in you. We want to give you extra tasks so you can gain experience, not to overwork them, but to say, "This is going to add value to your career. The other person is saying, "Well, I'm getting invested in, and they're more likely to stay. Companies are taking multiple approaches. You hear stories about manufacturing places that when you work 40 hours a week, you can put your name in a drawing and win a yeti cooler from the bass pro shop.There are other companies out there who are sending in semi-trailers of medical staff. At the end of each month, if you work 40 hours each week for that month, they offer free medical. Manufacturers are doing crazy things right now to compete against the other industries.There's a significant Labor demand right now between manufacturers and distributors. Just this week, which will be the first week of June, if people are listening to this podcast, later on, Amazon announced that they are no longer doing marijuana and drug testing as part of their hiring process. So that's an extensive conversation right now, especially within the manufacturing industry where there's a risk if a person is operating heavy industrial equipment or running a high-lo. So there's a risk within the manufacturers. How do you attract people when a person can go over to Amazon now and not have to worry about getting screening or getting testing for stuff? Whereas with the manufacturer, you have that insurance risk. Manufacturers are not just battling the idea of overseas competition or the other manufacturing facility down the street or across the state. It's now all of these new industries that are popping and attracting that common Labor force. That's not moving to the distribution warehouse, and that's not going to go anyway time soon. By 2030, there will be 22,000 new warehouses built in the US - strictly for warehouse and distribution. Those facilities are going to have to be run by someone. It's a difficult task. When you look at attracting and retaining the workforce, we can do a couple of things.The whole idea of my role as a business development manager for Feyen Zylstra is working with companies to help modernize their existing manufacturing processes. I help them make their processes more robust, more efficient, add more ROI, and integrate Industry 4.0 solutions. The idea of data and traceability with other machines is perceived as the industry leader and an innovative company. If a person walks into that facility and sees these manufacturing processes that are 20-30 years old and extremely manual intensive, she's going to move somewhere else. You need to come into manufacturing companies with automation.To be more efficient have to take processes and make your manufacturing company more attractive to the future workforce because we are tech-savvy people. We love the idea of digital data. We love the idea of interacting on our phones. If I can go on my phone or an iPad and get my work instructions. Or if I can do a machine setup or changeover through digital tools or through virtual reality goggles or something like that versus just on a piece of paper or on an attack board where my job's down, rather than through an earpiece system or something like that. It's just what other companies are doing. We're in the world of the app and the dot without necessarily.com. The app industry and all these new technologies mean that the manufacturing industry needs to adapt quickly to new technologies or simply be left behind.We're going to continue to battle the Labor demand seriously. We already are - even pre-pandemic - but current and post-pandemic. That's the biggest thing manufacturers are facing right now.Lisa Ryan: There are so many topics that you just brought up. First of all with training. It's one thing to introduce people to the cool things out there - all of the robotics and 3D printing – and looking at employees holistically. Why not send them for financial training? Is there a way to send them to presentation skills training? Looking at the employees holistically is critical because, as I say in my programs, "Nobody ever quit because of too much training."It's the money that you're investing in those people that keeps them there.But then, when we talked about the whole marijuana thing going on, of course, you don't want your workers to come to work stoned. If a company like Amazon, who's paying a great hourly wage and not drug testing, that just takes a whole bunch of other people. How many people have you and I both talked to and found that they can't find workers because nobody can pass a drug test?We look at these policies that we've had been in business for 40 years, and we have to start looking at our businesses differently. So every single area of that and marijuana falls right in there, which continues to be an interesting conversation.The automation. What you said about not having the workers to do the job. Instead of a couple of week delay, now you have several month delays. What can we do to look at our business differently? I think you made some stellar points of giving people ideas to do that.Jake Hall: Absolutely. You mentioned the holistic view. The one thing that stood out to me is that you can schedule an appointment with a financial advisor to give financial advice. I would have never thought about that, and I've been in the Industry for maybe ten years now. You scheduled an appointment for your employee to sit with a financial advisor go through the whole plan. Talk about value add. When you feel invested, and it makes sense.As soon as the person stops worrying about financial stuff, they can worry about their job. They can focus more on their job, creating less stress within a person's life. They feel a lot less struggle when they're at work. It's amazing to see how companies invest in value-added propositions beyond just the eight to five paycheck. That did work for a long time, but times are changing. You look at the Industry; look at the Googles and the Amazons of the world - where I can go to Google and get my sushi. I'm not saying that's going to be the key success - for manufacturers is to open up a sushi bar at your work - it's that approach you're looking at.You've got to realize that the Industry is you're competing against now. It's how millennials will be, and Gen Z's are high demand Labor force for future manufacturing. You need to realize that the Labor force is never