The Manufacturers' Network

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

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

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

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

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

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