IndustrialSage

All right, hey, so for today’s episode listen, I’ve got a really awesome guest. I’ve got Chris Luecke here from Rockwell Automation and he’s going to talk to us about building your personal brand. Chris, thanks so much for coming on IndustrialSage.

No problem, thanks for having me, Danny.

Yeah, so I’ve been wanting to have you on here for a while because I came across you over the summer. It’s like July, this was like July. Funny story. It was like July or June, sometime in there.

Okay.

I was here at the studio super late, and I was, I was drinking a beer or two and I came across you on I think you were on a podcast. My gosh, I can’t remember the name of it. It was maybe CSIA organization with Tony…

Yeah, yeah, Tony Verhoeven, he does…

Tony Verhoeven, that’s it, yeah.

Yeah, he does an industrial automation show out of Madison, I think, is where he’s based.

That’s it, yes, and I totally came running out and I was like “wow This is awesome!” And I was just totally, I loved the whole episode. It basically talked about, what I want to talk about here is kind of like this whole thing you’re doing: this Manufacturing Happy Hour, which I think is really awesome. So before I get too far down the weeds maybe you can just explain, like, tell us a little bit about your background, and then what is this whole Manufacturing Happy Hour thing that you’re doing?

Sure, so I’ll give you a background, because at the end of the day, I’m just your average account manager, I work for Rockwell Automation. I serve equipment manufacturers out here in the Bay Area, where I’m based. I’m an engineer by degree, I got an engineering degree from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and once I got that I knew I wanted to do something that was a bit more people-facing. I’m an extrovert at the end of the day, and I stumbled upon sales engineering and account management as a career with Rockwell right out of school and just seemed something that allowed me to utilize my technical background and also get creative with how I would go about driving new business, building relationships with my customers, and after doing…

It was probably the six-year mark where I’d been doing account management for a while and I’d recently moved to the Bay Area and a couple of things were going through my mind. The first thing was, I love my job having a lot of fun, but I feel like something’s missing. I feel like I’m not necessarily taking advantage of my total skill set. I used to play in cover bands, and I’ve always enjoyed being on stage so there is that little personal creative element to it. At the same time, and maybe more importantly was, when looking at the market that I serve out here in the Bay Area, as you can imagine, you look at all the tech companies out there, it’s a lot of young folks in their 20s, early 30s that are these, they’re the decision makers at these businesses. And I was thinking to myself “How can I reach this audience more effectively?” because I had been working in Houston for four years prior to being out here, where you kind of had the opposite end of the spectrum. A lot of tried, true, senior folks that work in the industry for years and years where that personal face to face was the way they wanted to engage.

Right.

But I looked at it out here, younger generations, they want to consume information on video or podcast, or whatever it may be. So I had this crazy idea where I’m like, “You know what? I want to do something that’s fun and approachable.” So I was sitting in my apartment on a Saturday afternoon and I pour myself a little beer and I got on camera and I sent a little pilot video out to a bunch of my mentors within the company and like, “Hey, I’ve got this idea and it’s going to look really similar to this. I’ll be talking about tech.” I think I was actually sitting right here, when I recorded that video and I just said, “Hey, how about this idea where we talk about our technologies and issues that are impacting the manufacturing industry over a cold one?” And people loved it, and it started off as a video newsletter, then started sharing it over social media a bit more and more, over the past two years since I started it in October 2016, it’s really grown, not only from just a video series but into a manufacturing industry community that’s both virtual and physical as well. That was kind of a long answer to your question, but, that’s really kind of the history and my background and how it evolved into being Manufacturing Happy Hour.

No, that’s a great answer, and I love it. It’s Manufacturing Happy Hour, I love the fact you’re taking something and doing it differently. Especially that sort of, you were talking about how you were in Houston what were you doing in Houston? You said previously that you were working somewhere, or?

Yeah so I was still in Houston working for Rockwell Automation.

Okay, alright.

I was just serving primarily folks in the energy industries and mechanical industries at that point, but the real… but it was that kind of juxtaposition of the type of people I was working with out in Houston, then out here in San Francisco, where I’m like, “Wow, I really have a totally different customer base out here.” Not only out here, in terms of demographics, and whatnot, but as a result from that just how they consume information as well, which is really why I started gravitating towards video over the past few years as a medium to engage my customer base and quite frankly a broader audience from a different angle.

Yes, I know, totally makes sense, we talked about this all the time on IndustrialSage. As your B2B decision maker, I mean this is a, Google came out with a study in 2015 and they said that at that time this was three four years ago now, that nearly 50% of your B2B buyers are millennial. Well, let’s go forward now, we know that’s going to transition, and that’s, going to be the majority– I would probably argue that it is the majority now.

Sure, yeah.

And so, I think that it sort of behooves you, if you will, to say, “Hey, we have to figure out how to get our message out there.” Because, like that you were talking about before that the… the business isn’t relationships, because it very much is, but the traditional way of getting your message out there is different, the biggest and the best, it doesn’t necessarily cut it, anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah, so one of the things I’m curious about, this comes up a lot, and we’re hearing about it a lot more I was actually talking to the client the other day, and we we’re talking: “Listen, you guys really need to make sure, you need to have your sales force out there, like actually engage on LinkedIn, I mean maybe even doing videos whether that’s, like, public or even like, through your prospects and just using it as a medium to engage.”

Mm-hmm.

And they were like: “Yeah, I don’t… we’re a little nervous about that, to be honest with you.”

Yeah.

“Like, we’re nervous because what if someone says something crazy or I don’t know?” So what I’m curious is you kind of did that pilot and they obviously they were like, “Yeah go for it,” but was there any initial like, “We’re not sure about this,” or like how did that go?

Yeah, good question because I think, especially with a large corporation, that can be a concern, like how is that message going to be received? And do the folks in the field, are they going to be able to give that message appropriately? And the reality is, as sales folks, we’re tasked with understanding what our company’s messaging is and how that’s supposed to be translated. So, I guess the first thing I’d say is I was really taking that in, just kind of repackaging a little bit, a fun way that fit my personality. I think the other thing was, and this is probably the case we were with a large company like Rockwell, than a small company, where you can kind of try new things a little quicker.

Sure.

I had mentioned that for I think it was about nine months, I didn’t really share what I was doing on LinkedIn yet. I had the YouTube channel, but I was really just using it as a video newsletter to immediate customer base, so we’re talking like an email list two hundred something people large, and that was really like a testbed was to see was message resonating with a small audience. And since it was, at that point, after nine months or so, and after I had some momentum, that’s when I put it on LinkedIn and started saying: “Hey, what does the broader community think about this?” And the reality is you can step back a little bit, if you need to say I had my messaging was off by a little bit, if someone wanted to say: “Hey Chris, we’re with Rockwell’s marketing department and we’d like you to maybe rephrase it like this or take this off.” That’s something you can fix easily enough.

I will say on the flip side of that, the benefit – and you were talking about how you were talking to folks about doing LinkedIn and maybe doing video – the benefit of getting content like this out there, I think really outweighs the risk. Because when I put a video out from let’s say two years ago when I was shooting some of my first videos, those are videos that people can still find on the internet today, and that’s something that I did two years ago, that’s now evergreen content. And I’ll give an example since we’re on an industrial podcast, one of my most popular videos to this day is still how to select between a managed versus an unmanaged switch. It’s a topic people are Googling, comes up all the time, it’s on YouTube, so it’s one of my highest viewed videos because it solves a problem that customers are still facing today in the industry. So, again, kind of long answer that, but it really goes to show that there is- there are steps you can take to make sure you are getting the right message out there and get some feedback to make sure it’s resonating with the audience right. But once you’ve got that down, the benefits totally outweigh the risks.

Absolutely, I would agree 100%. I mean there’s some great things there, talk about creating content that’s evergreen, that’s awesome. Because instead of like maybe ad sales, or say a trade show for example. Not to say that they’re not valuable, they’re absolutely valuable…

Sure.

But you kind of make your mark there and then it moves, and we all know you come away from an event or something and you’re all excited and then the next day you’re like: “Wait what? What happened?” Because you’re into the next thing and you’ve got content and you’re able to build this library that people continue to search. And then the other thing you said which I think was awesome was that your highest traffic video was solving someone’s challenge. That’s like the foundation of a strong content marketing campaign, it’s just answer your prospect’s and client’s challenges. Be providing value to them instead of saying “Here’s everything that we do and I’m going to sell you this and this and we’re amazing,” and it’s like…

Yep.

That’s awesome, that’s awesome.

And yeah, to springboard off of that, even though I work for Rockwell Automation or certainly a Rockwell Automation Technology Spin to the series, at the end of the day I try to never to title one of my videos like “New Features of The PowerFlex 5.5” or something like that–

Because what does that mean to the viewer?

Exactly! It’s always something like “How to use a drive to increase your uptime,” or something along those lines, all about uptime, productivity, helping customers solve the challenges they have in their fields.

Yeah, no that’s awesome. Let’s talk about a little bit of the result. What have you seen as a result from that? More deals, more awareness, like what does that look like?

Yeah, I’m happy to talk to that, that’s a good question I’ve got another two part answer to because there is a short term element and there is a long term element to it as well. So, lets go I’ll start with the long term, I’ll start with the macro at the end of the day I’m 31 years old, I’m pretty still in the infancy of my career if you think about it. You kind of mentioned at the start in terms of personal branding, I wanted to create a lot of evergreen content that would benefit folks for years to come. Then I could build upon as I go along, so with any, let’s be honest any marketing effort it’s not this one to two month, even one year type thing. You’re really thinking, “What’s the three to five year plan?” So I’m really trying to grow this over a period of time.

Now that said, I have seen… it’s good to keep track of, what are those like short term victories that you see along the way. And a couple of the ones that I would bring up is the fact that we were able to bring this, this video series and turn into a manufacturing industry community. At the end of the day when you use the term “manufacturing happy hour,” that caters itself to doing an event at say a brewery, or a winery, and bringing a bunch of our forward thinking customers together and getting them to collaborate with one another. Because one of the things I saw in our industry is I didn’t see people taking advantage of referrals as I’ve seen in other spots like here in manufacturing it’s like, we’re so used to the account manager going in and pitching the product and whatnot. But what I wanted to do is help my like mutual customers help them, help solve each other’s problems because similar to Amazon, when you’re online and looking for that four and a half star review I wanted them to exchange best practices and really just be raw and real about what they were seeing from our solution so that way they could see, okay this has worked for this person maybe this’ll work for me too, then at the same time it has been a lead generator.

I can think back and this is one of the reasons as you mentioned that LinkedIn is such a powerful tool when I posted videos on LinkedIn anyone that like that likes that video or comments on that video all of a sudden everyone in their network even if I’m not immediately connected to them can see that video and there have been leads and just and not just leads, but really new opportunities like within, the sales cycle where you talk about in sales, the role of the sales person had changed people pretty much now everything about my product before I walk in the door to meet with them. Because they can go online, Google, product profile, whatever it might be. My job is to get in there early to be able to help them understand how our products apply to problems they are having. So in doing videos like this and just having a broad range of people encountered on LinkedIn there have been leads and opportunities and wins quite frankly that have popped up as a result of these videos being out on the internet. Is it still something that I would like to see grow and still be a bigger thing? Sure, but again these are some of the short term wins in what I look at as a long term strategy.

No that totally makes sense and I love it. You’re talking about playing the long game and that is when a lot of people can get very short sided, especially in our culture today. It’s very quick, fast food, I want it now. I mean God darn you can go to Amazon and order whatever in two days, or even in an hour. Depending on where you are, we have a very short attention span not just from consuming media but just a sense of, I want to see results and I want to see them now. I know you talked,a really key thing you said is that it was nine months that you’re slowly kind of building this thing out with your customer before you even went onto LinkedIn and even between then and now it’s been what? Two years? You said October 2018 or 16 that’s not a short term play And a lot of people, I think, struggle especially in marketing and especially even more in sales. That it’s very transactional and I have to see the ROI I have to see it now but the things that you’re talking about provide so much value evergreen content that’s going to live on there for years.

Mm-hmm.

You’re helping provide value, right? That is huge I mean your talking about building the manufacturing community so you can bring in customers that share best practices and solutions and bring innovative ideas to the table that kind of help each other and it’s just like, “Look I’m just providing this venue this community here.” That is awesome, that is really as you talk about that role that the change of the salesperson in sales to facilitate and really be that the solutions provider, the trusted advisor. And it all starts with providing value. And I think you’re doing a fantastic job of that.

Yeah there’s an individual that I met that I imagine some people watching this might know, and his name is Gary Vaynerchuk, and he has a book. Well he’s got to book out and you’re probably familiar with this too, it’s called “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook.”

Yeah.

And for those that might be watching this and are familiar with it, at the end of the day he’s basically saying provide 90%, just like giving value, give value with no expectation of return. And then 10% of the time you can ask for something in return as a result of that. And another thing he brings up is the idea when he’s talking career he’s talks about having macro-patience in the long run, but micro-speed in terms of being, in the case of “Manufacturing Happy Hour,” I’ve got to get a video out every week so I’m consistent and things stay fresh, but am I expecting a return or a new order on of those videos like the second I put it out; Absolutely not. It all adds up to be patient and seeing how this plays out over a like five year, 10 year period of time.

Sure yeah, absolutely yeah no I love it. Jab, jab, jab, jab. Provide value, provide value, Provide value, Provide value… I love it, I love a lot of the stuff that he said. So I’ve got another question then so for somebody who’s out here saying, “You know what? This guy Chris, I think he’s onto something. I’m kind of interested in doing something like this.” What things have you learned or what tips would you give that person saying, “Hey do this, don’t do this, run away…”

Yeah, great great tip and this is, I’ve been trying to maybe come up with a little bit of a structure and formula to some of the things I’ve done, I would say one of the biggest things is let’s say they work for a company like myself. You’re working for a large company and you’re trying to get information out to your customers in an innovative fashion. Just try it with your little customer base, first.

So one thing I say is whether you’re doing a video or whether you’re doing a vlog, or doing a podcast when I create a message on Manufacturing Happy Hour I really have like three elements to it. And that is one, I tell my customer up front what they’re going to learn. I say, “Hey in this video you’re going to learn x.” So that way the expectation is set up, right up front where, “Hey for the next three minutes this is what you’re going to be learning about.” SO that way the person knows, “Hey this applies to me,” or “I’m just going to move on to the next video.” Which is fine, I want to make sure I’m respecting their time and then we make sure we give three key pieces of information. Whether that be a success story related solution, whether it’s some features and benefits, some background and the problem it solves. I tell my guests, like, “You know what, this is a quick video all we have time for is three things tops. So I know your solution does 10 things really well but pick the top three and that’s what we’re going to focus on.” And then finally I end with a call to action. Where it’s like “Hey, check out this free tool, or if you want more information go here.”

So I really try to use that formula for my videos but you could do that with a blog post as well, and the reason I bring this up is everyone has the tools they need to do these things right away. Like the first time I did a video I had no microphone I literally set up my iPhone on like a selfie stick that I propped up with some books and I hit record Because I think people use the equipment as more often than not an excuse to never get started. And my biggest thing is like, “Hey just do something whether it’s recording that first three minute video, whether it’s taking a picture of what you’re doing on a daily basis and just posting it to LinkedIn with a story related to that.” Like if it’s related to your field people love seeing that content right now. Just getting a peek into what someone’s day to day is like, so just find… realize that you have the tools in front of you that you need to make great content my biggest piece of advice is to just get started. And if you can simplify it into a quick one-two-three formula. Like I presented I think that’s a way that people can get over that intimidation and get started today.

I love it I mean you hit the nail on the head just getting started and that intimidation can be nerve racking. There can be a lot of fear. “Oh people are going to laugh at me, or i don’t know what if I say something stupid. Or what if I don’t,” there’s a million and one excuses you can have Yeah I love your advice just kind of getting out there and do it, do it.

Yeah and to kind of summarize it what I’ve been telling people recently is like “Hey if you just get started you’re going to separate yourself from 99% of people that found a lot of excuses to never get started. And then on top of that if you stick with it for even three months, six months, whatever it is, you’ve just separated yourself from the 99% of people that go started but quit too early. So it’s, as far as personal branding goes, if you can start something and stay consistent with it, that is still a very rare thing out there. So I would challenge anyone listening to this if you’ve got an idea that you’re looking to, jump on and you think it might work give it a shot and see how it goes.

Yeah, I love it this is awesome Chris listen thanks so much for for coming on, for sharing your story how you did this, some tips here if anyone has any questions and want to reach out to you what’s the best way of getting in touch?

Sure, I would say right now LinkedIn is a great spot to find me I’m just Chris Luecke on LinkedIn but to connect with Manufacturing Happy Hour directly my first call to action would be subscribe on YouTube, subscribe on YouTube, and if you want to find us on social media where we’re also pretty engaged in conversation both at Twitter and Instagram we are @mfghappyhour so just an abbreviated version of Manufacturing @mfghappyhour that’s on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Perfect that’s awesome, so we’ll make sure that all that information is in the show notes so that people can find you.

Mm-hmm.

If they’re listening on iTunes, or watching the video we’ll have that there, that information as well, but Chris again thanks so much for coming on. This has really been awesome, I’ve learned a lot. You’ve kind of got me excited to keep doing these, this video thing.

Hey no, I’ve seen your work guys like you doing the same thing inspire me to keep rolling as well, and I really appreciate the conversation that you led today Danny it was an honor to be on the show.

Well thank we’ll keep rolling, both of us. So, thanks again man.

Sounds good, thanks Danny.

Take it easy! All right, so, man that was a really awesome episode. I can’t tell you how excited I was to have Chris come on I mean this has come up a million times we get people asking about this all the time I hope, hopefully you got a lot of value out of this from what Chris was talking about like the importance of really building your personal brand, and the importance about really think about the long game, not the short game. Let’s not be super transactional about it, things have changed the way that people buy, we talk about it all the time. It’s completely changed the role of the salesperson now has completely changed. You’ve got to be that trusted advisor you have to provide value, and really think about how to build your personal brand, how that’s so important and you have the tool to do that. Do something different, take one thing that you watch, you learn from this video, put it into action today, okay? So that’s your homework for today.

Thanks for watching and listening. If you listen on iTunes I would love a review you can do that if you have any questions. You can reach out to us at industrialsage.com/questions, we’ve got the answer there for you. We love to see shares, your likes, and your comments on social media, so until then I’m Danny Gonzales thanks for watching IndustrialSage.

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Welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. Today, I have the founder and CEO of Vecna Robotics, Daniel Theobald here. He’s also the president and co-founder of MassRobotics. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage.

My pleasure.

All right, did I get everything right? We’ll just start with that, all good, perfect pronunciations.

Perfect.

All right, cool.

Yeah, you nailed it.

So for those who aren’t familiar with Vecna, Vecna Robotics and MassRobotics, could you just give me sort of high level, like, who you guys are, what you do?

Yeah, so Vecna Robotics is the global leader for automated bulk handling. Think, moving pallets around, or large, what are called, non-conveyable items: kayaks, tires, carpets, those kinds of things that we ship more and more today than we have in the past because of E-commerce. And MassRobotics is an industry association focused on trying to bring innovators, customers, and investors together in effective ways to move the industry forward. Also focusing a lot on practical interoperability standards, it’s got a great coworking space to the Boston area. The whole goal is to help move the robotics industry as a whole forward.

Oh, that’s awesome, what’s obviously– it’s a huge space right now and obviously because of all the COVID situation, I think is propelling it a little bit more than… it already was high, and it was already moving. But I think even now it’s, you know, it’s being launched even forward that much faster. But before we get into all that, I want to get to know you a little bit, you know, and for our audience to get to know you a little bit more. So, take me back, like how, like, you know, how did you get into robotics? So was that like, did you go to, you know, did you get an undergrad in technology, hey, this is what I want to do. Like, tell me that story, how did you get into this?

Yeah, well that’s a, it’s a, been a long journey. I was very fortunate to grow up in Silicon Valley, in San Jose. And attended probably one of the first elementary schools in the world that had a computer lab. We had Commodore PET computers and Apple, believe it or not. And so I was just, yeah, it was very fortunate to have access to computers, in formative years. And you know, my father was very hands on, so I helped him with construction. I fixed cars, motorcycles, you know, built my own computers, built a number of robotics projects. And was very fortunate to get chosen as the top computer science student in all of California, and got to go to Lawrence Livermore National Lab and work on the Cray Computer, which was the fastest supercomputer in the world at the time, so that was a really exciting opportunity. Yeah, then when I went on to MIT and essentially built my own degree program around robotics because they didn’t have a robotics specific degree program. And you know, have just really focused on this idea of using automation, using robotics to empower humanity.

That’s awesome, all right. So you know, obviously from a very young age, you were introduced to computers and technology. That’s pretty cool to be able to, you have gone to that elementary school and have access to that at that point. So how, you know, what was your, you know, coming out of college and stuff like, what was your first job?

Well, my first job actually was working for a… and I think about– I had a lot of first jobs during college, programming, mostly software engineering focused. I did work for a couple of different robotics in machine vision companies. But that experience actually was really formative to me because it helped me to understand that the world was not quite ready for what I would call modern mobile robotics systems yet. Even at that time there was a lot of hype, a lot of excitement around robotics. But you know, not just, not a whole lot of practical applications, right. The technology wasn’t cost effective yet. The industry wasn’t excited about polling trying to pull robots. And so it helped me to understand that timing was everything.

So I actually started working out mostly on the software side of things, and developed a number of major accounts with different healthcare systems, deploying patient check in technology. Basically think of everything you see in the travel industry right now. You can buy your tickets online, you can check in online, you can check in at a kiosk at the airport. We did all that, but we did it for the healthcare industry. But during that whole time, we were investing heavily in robotics R&D research. And the approach we took was to pursue government grants, because that was one of the best ways to get robotics, research money at the time. And over the years we pulled in over $30 million in government research grants. But unlike a lot of companies, we were very disciplined about making sure that those research grants supported our product roadmap that got us to where we wanted to be.

And we had a very strong thesis, that we weren’t going to try and scale up. We weren’t going to try and push robots into the industry until we felt like the time was right. And so we tried to be very disciplined about that, where, you know, a lot of organizations where we’re trying to, we’re spending a lot of investor money trying to push robots onto the industry that wasn’t ready for it yet. We were instead, you know, really focusing on solving some of the hardest problems in automation and robotics. And I’m building up a great team and you know, waiting for the time to be right to start to scale. So, this idea of separation between hardware and software for instance, is an idea that really enabled the computer industry, ultimately the cell phone industry to move forward. We’re not there yet with the robotics industry, but that’s where we need to get.

So the same idea, the ability to find and run apps from different suppliers, on hardware from different suppliers. The ability for a customer to buy robots from company A and have them plug and play with robots from company B. Share maps if appropriate, share charging infrastructure if appropriate. Share safety configurations. You know, you shouldn’t have to create traffic patterns and no-go zones and all of that, for every new type of robot you bring in the facility. And, things like a task allocation, a robot, you should be able to just bring a new robot to your facility, connect it to the network, register it with the warehouse management system, let’s say. And then it should be able to receive tasks from that warehouse management system, report back its location, report back on progress of tasks. So it’s the idea of just building all this common infrastructure, so that automation suppliers can focus on specific applications rather than reinventing the wheel every time.

That makes sense, and I imagine from an onboarding standpoint and from an operating standpoint that it’s, you know, yeah. Instead of learning everyone’s wheel, a million times, don’t know what this one does differently in that way. Yeah, it’s just, it’s a more of a, in layman’s terms, plug and play.

Yeah, customers, exactly right. Customers don’t want to have to be roboticists. They want to be able to buy a product that solves their problem and it should be quick and easy. So, you know, I think we’ll eventually get to the point where you can buy a robot and you can turn it on and it’ll start working for you. Right now the industry has got a bit of work to do before we get there.

Yeah I can imagine, but it sounds like an exciting time.

Yeah, no, I think this is the infancy of the true mobile robotics, intelligent robotics industry. So, I think a lot of what we do now, is going to have a big impact on the future. I mean, you think of, you know, a lot of the standards, the internet protocol, for example, was something that was designed decades ago in a research project at, at DARPA. And, you know, it has evolved, but it is the way we communicate on the internet, and I think a lot of what we do right now is going to have that same level of impact for the robotics industry for, for decades to come.

Oh, absolutely, I agree a hundred percent. Actually, as you’re talking relative to the current situation with COVID and everything and the industry, you know, we’re coming out of MODEX, you know, pre-MODEX, post-MODEX, pre-COVID, post-COVID. You know, what are the big changes that you’re seeing in the industry relative to robotics? Like in the short term and then also in the long term because of the coronavirus.

Yeah, it has certainly shaken everything up. Clearly the enthusiasm for automation has only increased, we see this across the board. The message that you can be more resilient, more flexible, safer with appropriate use of automation I think is really resonating with people. There are– no questions– some slowdowns, for some customers. You know, a number of our customers have just moved full steam ahead and you know do this all as essential because they need it to get their work done. Others have had to focus more on coronavirus compliance with a lot of the new laws, you know. And just trying to stay on top of things and have us, you know temporarily pause some of their adoption efforts. But you know, I think it makes it clear to the world how important our supply chain is. You know, when people are in the grocery store fighting over toilet paper. You realize that you know, getting stuff where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, is fundamental to the operation of our society– civil operation of our society. So, you know, making sure that we’ve got a supply chain that can withstand these kinds of disruptions, I think is in everybody’s best interests.

So, yeah, the bottom line is that, when you use technology appropriately, you can take advantage of the best qualities of humans and robots, you know, humans and automation and really achieved not only, you know the best throughput, that you can get, but you can do it in a way that, is now more flexible than ever. It used to be that, you know, you would design a distribution facility or a warehouse, and it would operate largely unchanged from the way you designed it for 10 plus years. That world is gone now, that world no longer exists. Whether, you know, whether your distribution facility, a warehouse, a manufacturing facility, the only thing you can count on now is change, and change is happening more rapidly than ever. So you have to have automation technology that can roll with the punches.

You know, you can’t have a system that took two years to install and is so specific to a particular way of doing things that when things change you, you’ve lost that investment. You know, one example, FedEx had a number of our robots deployed in their facility. They thought that facility was going to continue to do the same thing for quite a while, but, you know, something happened and things changed and they needed to reallocate that facility to different tasks. Well, unlike traditional sort of fixed automation that would just have to be scrapped or left unused, they were able to put our robots on a truck and take them to a new facility, to get them back to work. So the investment they’re making in automation now, that flexibility, that ability to adapt and change, is really important.

Yeah, absolutely.

Because those dollars are precious, and if you spend them on something that you never see the return on invest, you know, you never have the time to see the return on investment, then you know, not a good investment.

Yeah, that’s a little bit of a problem as you mentioned, you know, change and having that flexibility is sort of the name of the game. And that’s something, you know, the only thing that we consistently, you know, that the only thing that’s going to be consistent is change, right. We know that’s especially now and so the ability to be able to adapt to that, is critical, absolutely critical.

Yeah, that’s right, and so I think one of the things that people don’t necessarily appreciate is how amazing humans are. You know, Elon Musk famously tweeted about this, when he was talking about you know, their effort on lights out automation. You know, they wanted to essentially build a hundred percent automated factory. And you know, he tweeted, he said, I messed up. I tried to over automate, humans are underrated. And, I think this is the key to success is understanding that point. That doesn’t mean automation isn’t incredibly valuable and necessary, it is, but you have to find the right balance. And you know, lights out automation, in most cases a hundred percent lights out doesn’t make sense. It’s not going to achieve that flexibility, that robustness, to exceptions that you need in the real world. So the best scenario is when you can achieve superior results through orchestrating humans and robots most effectively to work together, why? Because humans are great at exception handling, something unexpected happens. Human beings are amazing problem solvers, they’re creative, they’re innovative.

You know, we often don’t give people enough credit, you think, oh, that’s just a worker. No, that worker has figured out how to keep this line running. You know, and it’s interesting, I’ve visited numerous facilities. And you know, generally first I’ll meet with the executives and you know, the executives will say, “Oh, well this is how our system runs, this is how we operate. You know, these are the paths through which the material flows.” And then you go to the floor of the facility and you start talking to the workers like, “Oh, I thought they said, ‘Blah, blah, blah.’ ” They say, “Oh, no, no, no, we don’t do it that way. That’s not the way it actually happens, that doesn’t work. We actually do it this way.” So there tends to be this disconnect between what, you know, executives in these industrial companies think is happening on the floor and what’s actually happening on the floor. And yes, that’s a problem, but it also is an indication of how amazing human beings are, that they, you know, something’s going on and it’s not working, they just immediately adapt, they create local solutions to these problems. You don’t want to give that up, and you want to manage it effectively. But you don’t want to lose that, or you end up in a place like Elon Musk was, with having a failed project.

We believe that automation in some sense of, so last decade, this is really the decade for effective orchestration. And what we mean by that is you’ve got to use the best resource. You’ve got to have the right resource in the right place at the right time. And maybe that’s a piece of automation, maybe that’s a piece of manually operated equipment. Maybe that’s a human being, a supervisor who is great at dealing with certain types of problems. But it’s all about making sure that you are, using the most effective tool at the right time. So what our pivotal orchestration engine does, is it monitors where everybody, all the equipment, all the people, all the robots are in real time within a facility, it knows where they are. It knows what tasks they are working on. The workers and the robots, et cetera, are constantly reporting back to pivotal on their progress, on their tasks or completion of tasks.

And then pivotal is doing this very dynamic, real time, optimization of, okay, I know this needs to get done. What is the next best move I can make to ensure that this facility gets all of its work done, as quickly as possible, with the minimum number of resources necessary. And you know, a robot going down an aisle and a case is, has fallen off a pallet and is blocking the aisle. You know, the robot can try and deal with that, but maybe it can’t, you know, maybe it was a case of Coke and there’s Coke sprayed all over the place now. The orchestration engine is able to realize that there’s a problem and very quickly dispatch the right agent to solve that problem. And in this case, it’s probably a human being, not a robot, right. We’re not going to have a robot that’s got a mop, that can go in and wipe things down in a dynamic situation like that anytime soon. So it says, “Hey, we’ve got a problem,” I’m going to send a human being in to deal with this problem. And the benefit of this is that it allows humans to do what they’re good at. It makes their jobs more enjoyable because they’re not being treated like robots. They’re doing interesting work that’s really varied. We’re supercharging their productivity because they’re able to get a lot more work done with one person than they used to be. And it’s better for everybody.

One of the things that’s really interesting given the COVID situation is, we had the mandatory you know, at least strongly recommended social distancing, in these facilities. Well, how do you implement that effectively? Well, one of the great things about pivotal, you know, the idea of a real time orchestration is you can just give it constraints. You can say, okay, yep, you’ve got to get all the work done, but now I’m going to make it a little harder for you, pivot. I’m going to tell you that people can’t be within six feet of each other. Okay, now go out and solve that problem. And so, it’s kind of like a grandmaster chess player. It’s sitting up there, it’s looking at what needs to get done. It’s looking at the pieces it’s got on the board to get that work done. And it’s always forward simulating, trying to figure out which next move gets it the best chance of success.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I– it’s interesting, I like your, your analogy about, you know, just being able to, and we’ll call it real time problem solve or adjust to make that flexibility. And in a really like simplified version it reminded me of that movie. There’s a Disney movie- I’ve got a few young kids and they love watching this movie, A Bug’s Life. And there’s this scene where they’re working and you know, they’re moving the grain from one place to another and there’s a branch that just falls like right in the middle of the path. And then they all start freaking out, oh, there is a branch, what do we do? What do we do? You know and they say, just go around. And, you know, it’s just kind of funny. It reminded me of that explanation. And to your point, you don’t have to have that adaptability.

Yeah, exactly, right, to the level where we’ve gone to certain customers who are really excited about buying robots and after doing some analysis, some simulation, it’s clear that they don’t need robots. They just need better orchestration of their existing resources. Right, that, and that’s really, I think the key point is automation is great, but automation is not going to be good at every job. There are some jobs that just have too much variability and humans are great at that. And if you can orchestrate the humans’ work effectively, you can really make the job more enjoyable too. So it’s a win win for everybody.

Here’s some great points because obviously robotics and automation, you know, it gets a knock from the workforce development side and a lot of people are freaked out thinking, oh my gosh, this, you know, robots and you know, all this autonomy is going to come in and take over our jobs. I actually was on a webinar a couple of days ago and there was a staff that they came in and they were talking about how saying that robotics, I think in particular would only take up like maybe, actually solve like 10% of the problem. Whereas, you know, they’re not going to come in and have a huge dramatic effect to that point where it’s going to completely replace people. Is it going to replace some people? Sure, you know, and those people could probably be, you know, shifted into other areas, but it’s not this massive takeover.

Yeah, and you know, whenever people talk about robots replacing jobs, they’re thinking from a point of a zero sum game. It’s not a zero sum game. They’re thinking there’s this much work to do, and if robots start doing some percentage of this much work, then there’s that much less work for humans to do, and therefore humans are going to be without jobs. And it just doesn’t work that way. The robots are really, automation is really just supercharging human productivity so that our humans can get more done than ever before. Everything else is kind of outside of this equation. You know, how the economy is doing, demand for goods, international competition. Those are all the factors that determine how effective a particular business is. Businesses need to be able to compete, they need to be able to provide goods and services at a competitive price. That’s what automation allows them to do. And if they do it effectively, their business thrives. They grow, they employ more people, and those people are more productive than they ever were before.

I mean, back in the 1930s, 70% of the U.S population worked in agriculture, right. It took 70% of us to grow the food for us to survive. And you could say that automation, the tractor, replaced, made a bunch of people lose their jobs in agriculture. But that’s probably not, it’s probably not the appropriate analysis of that situation. The tractor made human workers far, far more productive, giving us the opportunity as the human race to do more than we ever could before. If 70% of our population was still working on growing our food and then, you know, what does that leave 30% for you know, banking and healthcare and these other things, would we have gotten to the moon? That’s a great question, you know, having resources to dream, to do art, to educate the world, these are all things made possible. Precisely because technology allows us to be more efficient as a species.

Exactly, and it creates, it brings in competition. And maybe you’re competing for that job or, or you know, you think about, you know, two competing businesses, but well, you know, if you’re competing for resources, what does that do? That creates innovation. And we’re seeing that right now, we’re seeing that right now with the whole coronavirus thing is that, okay, we have a series of challenges, you know, one way is looking at these challenges and other ways, looking at other opportunities. And because of these constraints that we have, there is a lot more visibility and clarity in other areas you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to see. And therefore new industries are born, new companies. So I think that’s yeah, I love that analogy.

Yeah, it allows us to move forward, you know, and really spend more time on the things that we value. And, you know, on the whole you know, there’s probably too much, Netflix going on these days and that kind of, you know, the fact that we have a choice in how we spend our time now is a gift given to us by technology.

Yeah, absolutely, so maybe

We’re not out in the fields.

I’m sorry, go ahead.

I was just saying yeah, we’re not out in the fields, you know, 15 hours a day and, you know, sitting behind a wash tub of dirty clothes all day long. That used to be the plight of humanity.

Exactly, I’ve just got to get food on the table and here is how we’re going to do that. So, in, to kind of wrap on that note, I’m curious, and I’ll ask this, what is your, you know, with the whole quarantine and everything, what has your daily routine been like? What are there new habits that you’ve picked up?

Yeah, well, I’m fortunate, I’m actually out here, at our family farm in the San Francisco Bay Area. So, you know, I get up on east coast time and have a full day of meetings on the phone and video conferencing and then come, you know, late afternoon I’m actually out working on the farm and planting and growing and, but yeah, it is interesting, you know, Vecna Robotics has been fortunate that we are able to continue to grow and thrive through this period. And we know that is uncommon, so we don’t take it for granted. We’re very grateful for that. But you know, we’ve continued to hire, through this crisis, and it’s interesting that I was reflecting the other day that we have, 10 to 15 new people on the team who I’ve never met, face to face. So, you know, this idea of working remotely has a lot of benefits, but you know, it does lack some of the social, I don’t know what I’m trying to say. You know it just lacks some of the fun interactions that we would normally have, I think in an office place. You know, getting to sit down with people, not getting to, you know, break bread with people, that kind of stuff. So we were definitely missing that.

It’s certainly missed. It will be a joyful party when this is all over, able to come back together again on that. But, well Daniel, I really appreciate the time that you’ve spent with me in IndustrialSage today. And just, you know, kind of talking about the industry changes, COVID, what you guys are doing, and you know, hypothesizing on what might come about of this in the future.

Well, and we are also continuing to deploy technology right through this. So we have been able to deploy our robots to customers without setting foot in their facilities. So, certainly if your customers are looking to expand their workforce and introduce some automation. And we can do that, without, traveling.

Absolutely, we go, you go check out vecnarobotics.com. Is that, correct?

Correct, yep.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Excellent, no problem. Well, thank you for joining me today and we’ll do it again sometime

Yeah, absolutely, I look forward to it.

All right, okay, well thank you for watching or listening to this episode that we had with, Daniel Theobald from Vecna Robotics. Really interesting, huge, a lot of big story we’re hearing right now. Thanks to all the COVID stuff. We’re hearing about it before the automation and the robotics, but certainly now, that has been accelerated. So if you’d like to check out more about them, you can go visit their website vecnarobotics.com. And we have some interviews, stuff in them, from MODEX and ProMat you can certainly check that off the site as well. So that’s it, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching or listening and I will catch you next week with another episode of IndustrialSage.

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All right, so let’s jump into today’s episode. We’ve got Andrew Dickson and Adam Bowling from ADP. So a small company, never heard of you guys. Total, totally blank. So thanks so much for joining and before we really jump into everything, if you guys could just kind of introduce yourselves to the audience, tell us a little bit about yourself and this small company called ADP.

Yeah, small, small company, ADP. Adam and I are really appreciative, thankful to be here and have a conversation with you today. So ADP, obviously we’ve been around for a while. Started the payroll industry over 60 years ago and payroll’s what a lot of organizations know us as. It’s come to be only about 20% of our annualized revenue and we’ve become transitioned more to a global leader in HCM, in Human Capital Management, both software and support. So I’m excited to share a little bit about that with you today but from a payroll standpoint, we do pay one in six Americans. We have over 650,000 clients, a seat at the IRS and we do the job support for the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics. So when it comes to data, employee and people records, we truly are the industry leader and I’m excited to share about how we work with manufacturing organizations as well.

Awesome, and Adam?

Yeah so like Andrew, District Manager with ADP and Andrew said it, our business has transformed as have many people in the marketplace. So today our focus is more on digital flows of information, how we can integrate our systems with other business business systems as well as third party applications out there. So, transitioning away from your traditional desktop computing environment and moving toward more of a digital, flexible workforce.

Perfect.

And Adam and I personally cover our major account, mid-market segment if you will, so we focus on organizations between 50 and 1,000 employees but we have partners that focus on organizations both up and downstream, so we can really focus on helping organizations of any size.

Thanks so much for coming on the show. One of the things that I want to talk about is we’re seeing this across the board, the changing workforce. There’s a lot of, we’re talking about digital transformation and all these things that are going on. The big bad scary millennials, we hear about about that a lot and really at the end of the day, the face of your new prospect, your customer, your new hire, your new supplier, it’s getting a lot younger and okay, fine, we’ve gone through that but the way that people want to be communicated to, are you guys seeing a change in what that looks like? And what has your experience been in that?

Yeah, we’ve definitely seen a shift in the marketplace from the old way of doing business to the new and really identified four primary factors that have been affecting this change. One, obviously, changing political and economic conditions. A new administration comes new legislation that affects compliance and business owners have to stay on top of that to ensure that they’re within compliance. The digital revolution. Everything is going digital.

Yes.

You mentioned millennials have not only a desire but an expectation for the ability to not only attract and go after a new job from a digital format, whether it be the application process, the onboarding process but also given the tools to do their job efficiently.

Right.

From a technological standpoint and the other two factors are the augmented workforce and then the changing talent demands. So an augmented workforce, that’s going to be robotics, artificial intelligence, a lot of leading leading technologies that businesses are looking to learn how to harness to continue to grow and achieve their organizational objectives and then last is that changing talent demand where this the first time we’ve ever had five generations in the same workforce at the same time and Gen Z is right there as well. So being able as an organization not only to address the very different expectations of those those generations around compensation and benefits but also to create a culture and an environment that welcomes those different generations and then helps them develop from within and ensure that they have a path to develop within the organization that could set them up for whatever their personal goals are.

Right, yeah, so it was interesting. So five generations under one roof, if you will. Obviously we’re seeing and we’re hearing too a lot of challenges between how to communicate and how to to manage all that stuff to everybody there. Maybe if you could give a little bit of a breakdown and a definition of the different generations. I think that’d be helpful, you have Gen Z and sometimes there’s a little bit of well, it’s from 1980 or whatever. What does that look like?

So you’ve got baby boomers retiring, 10,000 a day is the stat that we frequently go by. You still have some traditionalists in the workforce where we talk to companies quite often that say “Our 90 year old owner still likes to come in everyday “and check on things and make sure everything’s going well.” So you’ve got end to end varying opinions on different things. On culture, on engagement, on talent and there’s this shift in mindset toward now companies having to appeal to, end to end, your oldest and both youngest employee that’s an eligible hire. And the reason is that statistically, we’re at full employment. So as a company, I can’t only focus on appeasing the workforce that’s driven my business for the last 30 years.

Right.

It’s now more of a shift toward what are the type of employees that are going to help drive my business forward in the next 30 years?

Right.

Andrew said it as well. I’d be hard-pressed to say he and I aren’t millennials. Maybe all of us.

Yeah. I think we all fall in that category.

Yeah, so now we’re looking not just at millennials but Generation Z and the fact that, like my son for example, he’ll only know digital. He won’t know what a computer is and there was recently I think a commercial about that and somebody said, “Get off your computer” and the person said, “What’s a computer?” They’re sitting there on a tablet.

Yeah.

So there’s this big shift.

Absolutely.

We’re just trying to make sure that the companies that we provide solutions for have the ability to provide solutions across the board.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so, I saw an interesting stat. They were talking about the different sizes of the generations. So the baby boomers being, they’re retiring at 10,000 a day but Gen X after that is like half the size of the boomers and then underneath that, what is it, the millennials?

Next, yeah.

But they’re like twice the size. So what’s going on? Because of all that, because we’ve got these numbers that are like this, what’s the consequences of that?

I would say the biggest gap is that you’ve got employees now, or really we’ll call ’em workers, seeking different alternatives to traditional employment. Gone are the days of folks entering the workforce looking for a 9:00 to 5:00 that I can work until I retire at 65.

Right.

So now you’ve got so many options in the workforce, you have people opting out of traditional employment and looking to multiple sources of income as they can in various part-time roles.

Roll over to the gig economy.

Or as contractors, yeah. There’s, I mean I don’t need to go through ’em but 100 different ways that somebody can earn an income outside of being a W-2 employee. So with that, as that group of baby boomers is retiring and to your point, half again as many Gen X-ers back-filling those roles.

Right.

You’ve got this big area of opportunity in millennials and Gen Z who are choosing rather to enter those roles, to opt out and work nontraditional methods.

Right.

So that’s where we help companies really get strategic as far as aligning their business goals with their people goals and strategy behind them. We like to take a longer view when we sit down and talk to groups to really identify how they can target better candidates, onboard them faster and get them up to speed more quickly.

Right. As you’ve mentioned, there’s that big gap there. What are some of those key differences, I guess what we’re getting at essentially is that like we talked about maybe a little at the beginning, the face of your customer, your prospect, your next hire, your supplier basically is getting younger. All right, fine. But what does that mean in terms of messaging and how to communicate? What are some of those big differences that companies really should be looking at and saying “Hey, we need to be communicating this way versus that way?” Are you seeing any big differences?

Specifically within that digital revolution it is mobile. Everything has to be mobile. If you don’t have the ability for candidates to apply for a job within your organization via their mobile device, chances are you’re going to lose a lot of those candidates that aren’t willing to take that extra step and find a desktop and go or even companies that are a step further back than that with the paper application.

Sure.

Things that were the norm now can be a deal breaker for a millennial looking for an organization that’s going to provide them the tools not only to be efficient at their job but if you have millennials that have more power and technology in their pocket and at home than they do within their own employer, it says a lot and will result in them looking for those organizations that are trying to get ahead of the curve and create an atmosphere that can leverage the millennials’ ability to leverage technology. And again, a millennial speaking for millennials, we’re a wide group, so it’s tough to pinpoint something that’s going to affect all millennials just as it would with any other generation. But there are some non-negotiables that organizations have identified you have to have if you’re looking to attract top talent, especially with the unemployment all-time lows that we have right now.

Sure, yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. You had something to add there?

Well I was going to say to your early point about how it affects end-to-end the organization, this same group are also consumers.

Yeah.

So it may also change their perspective on that company that they once thought maybe hey, this is a great place where I would love to work.

Right.

And then they go through it from a candidate perspective to find out it’s not the same as it is when I am a consumer purchasing from them directly.

Right, yeah.

We’re looking at, you’ve probably heard of gamification.

Absolutely, yeah.

But ways to appeal to the candidate the same way they would as a consumer.

Right.

If I can shop online, can I apply for a job there? If the answer is no or there’s a big disconnect in their ability to do that, it might, to Andrew’s point, shift them away and make them look elsewhere for employment.

Right, so I would imagine we could take those same lessons and apply that on a sales and marketing front.

Absolutely.

In other words, you mentioned, we hear this a lot as you’re seeing a lot of e-commerce and stuff coming in is that the expectation, well, the way that we buy is dramatically different and that’s across the board. I don’t care whether you’re necessarily a boomer, gen X, millennial, Z. There’s a thing called Amazon out there. Everyone is a lot more accustomed to quickly getting the access to their information and being able to, in two days, boom, I’ve got products. So I imagine there’s that expectation saying we need to have that even in a B2B environment where, maybe not necessarily buying toilet paper but if we’re buying O-rings and gaskets, why don’t we have that same experience?

Right and it’s only, the expectation is that that end-to-end time from add to cart to that product or service being executed, it’s only getting shorter.

Exactly.

Companies only have less time to execute.

Walmart just rolled out that they’re going to offer two day delivering in an effort to compete with an Amazon. Otherwise if you don’t continue to evolve and compete, you’re going to get left behind.

Yeah.

And from the sales and marketing side too, we talk about it from a consumer perspective. Internally, the culture of that company ends up being externally the brand, right?

Yeah.

So if you’ve got a great brand but then you look internally and the culture of that organization because of gaps either in their workforce, maybe I’ve gotten top-heavy with a lot of older workers and I don’t have enough backfill there, that transition could really disrupt the culture which ultimately you get a bunch of disengaged folks that aren’t excited to show up to work with somebody that’s twice their age or for somebody else, working with somebody half their age.

Yeah.

It could be detrimental to the culture, which ultimately could impact the brand and sales marketing efforts as a result. It’s pretty important that companies really start now before it’s too late because the gap’s only growing between business potential and technology available and it’s overwhelming.

Yeah.

So we want to be there to be able to advise and present options so that companies can solve for it the way they want to.

Absolutely, Andrew, you had a great little worksheet or I guess a document there, a one pager that broke down the different generations there. I love it, could you maybe walk through that a little bit?

Yeah, and I don’t know if the camera will see it too well but it’s different strokes for different folks. It talks about the changing expectations around compensation and benefits. Both when you’re looking at a new job, compensation and benefits, it’s always the top two things that you focus on but it’s really interesting that as you go from baby boomers to gen X to millennials and now to gen Z, the compensation is becoming less important and the benefits is becoming more important. How much you get paid is still incredibly impactful in the decision to look at a new organization. But the younger the generation, the more that work-life balance, the more the benefits around things even as seemingly small as pet insurance can be such a big factor when a younger generation is looking for a company that meets their ideals and their values.

Yeah.

And so it is very interesting what the different generations weigh in terms of most important verse least important when they’re looking at new opportunities.

So I think the takeaway from the sales and marketing standpoint is that we’re seeing, and we’re seeing this in a lot of case studies too. Big Caterpillar had a great one based on a survey that Google put out some stats. This was back in 2015 and they came out and they said nearly, at that time, nearly 50% of your B2B buyers are millennial. Now that was three, four years ago depending on, we’re at the tail end of 2018 here. Imagine what that is now and Caterpillar took it and said “That’s really interesting. “Maybe we need to flip this a little bit more.” So even though I know we’re talking about compensation and benefits and all that, I think part of the big message is you’re talking about is a little bit more purpose. I think that maybe buying, the millennial is a little bit more buying into what’s in it for me, what’s the purpose? And it’s little bit more story-driven. A little bit more this feeling that I get. I think that that really needs to be translated and transmitted and communicated as such, versus dollars and cents. Does that make make any sense at all?

Yes it does, it does.

So let’s talk a little bit about this, we were talking a little bit about this earlier. I can’t talk now, it’s a Monday.

Right.

The transfer of knowledge. I know that’s a big thing that is affecting a lot of people where you’ve got people that have been in your organization for 30, 40 years and there’s a little bit of a labor gap. There’s an issue with with getting the right talent into your plan and into your organization and attracting them and then also again, to that marketing aspect, we talked about some solutions there a little bit. You had a prequel thing, maybe we can talk about that.

So one thing we talk to a lot of companies about is just that how did you get to where you are today? And out of a need over time, companies end up swapping out solutions, products, services, technology to help them get through their day to day and what we’ve found is that oftentimes they can get so wrapped up in what is going on right in front of them operationally that they don’t have the ability sometimes to step back and really look at it from an outside perspective. So when we discuss with groups things like this, how are we addressing addressing this gap in talent, We bring solutions to the table that they might not otherwise have thought of. Nothing new that’s not been done before but the example I have most recently is a group that’s looking to make their production-type work more attractive. How can we attract attract younger employees? How can we transfer knowledge from someone who is that 30 year old veteran who shows up and does this job in their sleep? And we provided a few examples. One of them being a career progression for that new hire to give them a next step in their career path and just knowing that they have something to work toward could be the thing that determines whether or not they stay another six months or another eight months. But then for that older employee that is nearing retirement, they’re probably closer to the end of their career and you’ve got these younger workers coming in. On the other side, structure it in a way that now they are the mentor and that there’s maybe an incentive for them compensation-wise or some other bonus to transfer that knowledge and to bring that employee up to speed faster. So there’s a way to it smartly on both ends to one, make the young worker feel like there’s progression here, this company cares about my development and by the way, I’m going to be learning from one of their top performers and at the same time that top performer gets the recognition and maybe gets the compensation or, I don’t want to speak for somebody making that decision but there’s an ability to do it and appeal to everyone and make everyone happy and really ultimately close that gap in skills.

Thanks a lot, excellent. I’m going to ask you, I did not prep this question to ask, I’m just curious.

No worries.

What advice would you give to somebody saying from a sales and marketing front, knowing millennials and what’s important to them, what would you say are the top let’s say three ways of communicating that manufacturers really need to be thinking? Whether that’s style or the way they transmit or what are you guys saying?

I mean we’ve probably all heard it, a picture’s worth 1,000 words.

Yeah.

Many a time I’ve looked to do research on a company to find one, a very antiquated website.

Right.

Maybe with some broken links or bad information. I would say that in an era where I can ask Alexa quickly to give me feedback or information, everything’s out there on the web for somebody to find and that millennial is going to be doing research. I would look at it from that perspective. Research your own company and see what you find and if you don’t like what you find, it’s worth a conversation with somebody like Andrew or myself to bring a new perspective and really to update you on what the rest of your industry or the rest of the marketplace is doing because whether that company chooses to make any changes or not, their peers are evaluating ways to lean into more of the new technology that manufacturers and really anybody in commercial and industrial wants to which would be our internet of things, robotics, machine learning.

Right.

Without a basis for just a general system of record, if everything is spreadsheets and paper and in somebody’s head, how do I report on that? How do I use that data to make business decisions?

Right.

For us, it’s really about I think probably establishing that flexible foundation first with a company. That’s the easiest way to really start evaluating ways to go forward and really to appeal to the next generation client, consumer. Buyer.

Yeah.

But also workers, sales force, who’s going to execute for them and who’s going to be a good enough brand ambassador externally and culturally a fit internally? So there’s a lot of things at play but I will say that the companies that are taking the longer view and that are putting things in place now for later are getting a competitive edge.

Just to give a tangible example, I would look at a company that has automated their onboarding process. So electronic onboarding where the employee accepts the job, they’re sent a link where they can go in and fill out all their new hire paperwork, look at a video on a company that shows a little bit about the culture, shows them their team, who’s going to be their manager, who are their direct reports. Gives them stuff to get them excited about the organization before you start versus a company who makes an offer, brings you in day one and gives you a big stack of paper to fill out your new hire paperwork and that’s your first day.

Yeah.

So when you’re looking at the onboarding experience of those companies that understand that that first experience is the brand, is the image of your company and then ensuring that your job board, your website and the process of bringing on new employees reflects that.

Right.

It’s a disconnect that some organizations are on top of and really making great strides while others don’t see it as impactful and they’re losing talented people.

Wow, that’s such great advice. Really at the end of the day, and that can go really across the board, I mean at the end of the day, if you really want to attract millennials and the younger workforce, this is where you need to be thinking. So I love your idea of saying look at your website, if it’s super antiquated and it looks like, that first starting point.

You want to ask yourself, would you buy? If you buy.

Right.

Right if, when you buy.

What are you seeing? Yeah.

Yeah. Who do you buy from? Do you buy the cheapest product with the lowest review or do you buy the most expensive product with the highest reviews?

Right.

Do you look for that option in the middle?

Yeah.

Or any combination. So where is the company default, right?

Yeah.

It’s a direct reflection of what your consumer says. Why is it any different than what your employees reflect? So we look to that data all the time, whether that’s, it could be from a variety of sources. Things we see on Indeed, Glassdoor, there’s tons of resources. A company’s Google Review.

Yeah.

Facebook. How many stars do you have?

Yeah.

I know that for me, if I’m a leader of an organization, my initiative should not be status quo if those rankings and ratings are any less than stellar. Otherwise I’ve just become complacent and I’ve recognized that despite knowing there’s an issue, I’m willing to do nothing to fix it. So the companies that are not okay with status quo that want to push that three star to a four or five star or better across whatever platform, those are the companies that are going to come out comparatively winners.

And even the ones that know there’s improvements that could be made but don’t really know where to start or think they’re on the right track but aren’t sure, you’ve got to find a way to benchmark your organization against those organizations you’re looking to compete with. Personally from an ADP standpoint, the data that we touched on at the beginning allows us to work with organizations and benchmark them against other similar organizations. Whether it be the size, the industry, the location and from that data, we can pull information on compensation to ensure that organizations are competitive when it comes to pay.

Sure.

When you’re looking to make a new hire and you want to make sure that your benefits package at least meets the industry standard or maybe you want to be the leader in the industry and you want to attract the best of the best. You have to find ways to use the data and the analytics to benchmark your organization against other organizations to confirm you’re on the right path or maybe to see the road on the path that you want to take.

Yeah absolutely, no, it totally makes sense. Jumping back actually to when you were talking about onboarding, I thought you kind of struck a cord with me on that as well. I think it’s great and super important to be able to have to create that experience there and again, that’s something that we should be thinking about even in the post-sales process. I mean you think about it, you’re still selling, even if you’re recruiting new talent to come internally, you are selling, right? If we’re selling a product or service to somebody, obviously it’s sales there and having that onboarding experience to create a good experience. Actually just last week, I stayed at a Ritz-Carlton with a client and I don’t stay there a whole lot and I was very wowed by the whole experience. They were very attentive and all these different things, the kinds of things you were talking about. Not necessarily super technology driven, some of ’em were but I just thought wow, that is a really great experience to continue on. That’s something we need to bring, I think I might actually even do a blog article about it.

You want to create a raving customer, right?

Yes, absolutely.

Because then that same message transcends down into employee and then you’ve got employees that are doing the same, bragging on their–

Exactly.

Their company. So.

I’m a firm believer that everybody, and it doesn’t matter what role you’re in, that everybody’s selling. Sales and marketing touches all these different areas. To your point, in your workforce, if your workforce is engaged and are excited and they have purpose and there’s a mission, then they’re going to be the best advocate. “Oh, you’ve got to buy from us. “We’ve got the best best products, we’ve got this.” And that goes downstream and upstream. It’s across the board, so it’s super important. Well, listen guys, thank you so much for coming on. There’s a lot of great insights that we were able to take away from this and I thank you for your time. If anybody has any questions on the show they’d love to reach out to you, what’s the best way of getting in touch?

Yes, the best way to get in touch with me, ultimately you can email me, [email protected] or my cellphone’s on my business card. I’ll give you a stack of those as well.

Okay.

Same. Adam.Bowling, so just our name @adp.com.

Perfect, all right, well great, thanks guys.

Thanks Danny, appreciate it.

Hey listen, another great episode here. A lot of key takeaways. Some of the keys things that I was thinking about is like Adam was mentioning ways to start, ways that you can be thinking about this is just doing a self-evaluation. Go look at your website, see what you find. Go look at how you buy products and measure that against the experience that your company has versus the experience that you’ve had with others. It’s a great starting point, you’ve got to be visual, you’ve got to bring in technology and a really big thing is that I kept hearing is that things are changing. It’s not working the way that it used to and we’re seeing that across the board. Same reason why you’re feeling maybe that trade shows aren’t effective as they used to be or that the marketing messaging tab, “We’re the best and the biggest,” it’s not working, why? Because that workforce is dramatically changing and now is the time to make that change. Anyways, so a couple great takeaways. Thanks again for listening. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We’d love to answer them on the show. IndustrialSage.com/questions. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. If you’re on social media, hey, share our stuff. We’d love the love. So thanks for watching and we’ll be back next week with another awesome episode of IndustrialSage.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Okay, welcome to today’s IndustrialSage episode. I have Ed Brown who is the CEO and founder of Topper Industrial, a manufacturer in Wisconsin. Ed, thank you so much for joining me today.

My pleasure. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon. So Ed, real quick, just wanted to sit down and have a chat with you just to get an understanding of how you guys are handling the whole COVID situation, what things look like on your end, but before we get into that, I kind of want to set the scene. For those who aren’t familiar with Topper, tell me what you guys do and where you guys are located specifically and all that good stuff.

Well, thank you. Topper Industrial is a full-service steel fabricating company that about 20 years ago got involved in building industrial parts, and it’s kind of taken over our life. Our company is decent sized. We have about a hundred employees right now. We’re located about 20 miles south of Milwaukee, and we are one of, we consider us fortunate during this very difficult time. Not only has Topper not experienced any of the Coronavirus cases at our shop particularly, but even in our home community of Racine County, there’s not been a major outbreak. So we’re actually pretty lucky, and we’re still up and running with some changes.

Sure. All right, for those that want to know, we had an interview with you, and that was released, I don’t know, probably a couple months ago, maybe January, February, so any viewers who’d like to go see that, we went in depth about, actually, a really interesting story about, was it your junior, your 11th grade or junior–

Senior high school teacher.

Senior high, yeah, so I don’t want to spoil the story. They’ll have to go watch that on the other episode, but I really enjoyed that. Okay, so you mentioned, you’ve obviously got some changes. What’s going on in your neck of the woods?

Well, to try to keep our operation as safe as possible, my son has taken the company, and we normally are a one shift operation, he’s divided it into two. So about half of our people are on the second shift, and fortunately, I have two sons. One runs the second shift, one runs the first shift. We did that to keep our employees very far apart, probably 35 or 24 feet between all of my people working. We’ve rearranged our lunch room. We took out a bunch of tables, we put it down to 30 tables with one chair per table. And we split breaks. We split lunch so people are 15, 20 feet apart at all times. All of our office staff, except for a couple, we bought computers. Everybody’s working at home. I’m working at home.

The day that the gang came into my office and handed me a new computer and said, “Go home. We don’t want you here.” I almost cried ’cause I’d never been kicked out of my company. But they said I’m 71 years old, and this corona stuff is bad on the older people. So they said, “We’d feel a lot better if you’d just go home.” I thought it was going to be easier. It’s harder. I don’t have six fabulous designers at my disposal. I’m doing everything myself, and I’m not as good with a computer, although the last two weeks have been a learning experience, and here I’m operating with the famous Danny Gonzales all by myself. So we’re making headway.

Oh, you’re making great headway. All that, you know. One of the things that people talk about, and we’ve talked to a lot of companies. You touched on a big thing there, that a lot of people said, “We’re kind of being forced to use new technology that we otherwise wouldn’t have done.” There is a learning curve. But what are some of those other learning curves that you’ve kind of had to go through from a technological standpoint?

The thing is, Danny, I think it might affect the overall operations of the company moving forward. I never thought this many people could be as productive and effective working at home. It’s not 20 feet down the hall, so I could go talk to ’em. I talk to all of our people multiple times a day. We’re working on a number of projects. While the world has experienced this mess with corona, many of our customers are pushing hard for things that are going to happen yet this year, installations of equipment in the Summer, in the Fall, and before Christmas so that we’re very, very active. Surprisingly, I actually was so naive I thought I could go home and goof off half the day after I accepted the fact they didn’t want me down there. But it’s been worse. I’m working to 11 o’clock almost every night, trying to keep up with engineering and quotes.

There’s a lot going on, and I feel bad sometimes saying that ’cause I know friends of mine, their businesses are shut down and struggling. We are operating at a disadvantage. I would say we’ve lost 20 percent of our people to a variety of corona related problems. A number of our employees, their wives are nurses, and they have no childcare. So the employees, those fabricators, those welders, those painters are at home, just like I am, taking care of their children. The president, I think rightly so, has issued some kind of an order that you still have to pay them 75 percent of their regular wage, which is not a problem. We’re glad to do it. Money’s not the problem at all. But productivity is, and we’re probably 70, 75 percent of what we’re normally getting out because of the crazy arrangement. It’s not been a problem from customer satisfaction. All of our customers are very understanding, and everybody knows a couple of projects got pushed back a month because of it. But we’re surviving, and we’re getting along. It’s just a different time.

Yeah, absolutely. That’s certainly, yeah. This is a familiar challenge I think a lot of companies are going through from a labor standpoint, that maybe they don’t have coronavirus, but as you mentioned, there is effects of that. Obviously, you guys are very fortunate to be able to continue in operations. I think you had mentioned, it was either before we started recording or during, that in the state of Wisconsin you guys are deemed essential. You guys are a key supplier to several different customers, that, you know, they’re essential, and they’re for it.

The interesting thing is some of the drawbacks. We recently bought a new tube laser. It’s a pretty expensive machine that about, oh, it’s been installed for probably two months, but about the time company was going to become connected, the corona thing broke out, and we have a piece of equipment we can’t even get up and running. We don’t know we’re going to get running. It’s affected some orders in that the equipment gives us capabilities we wouldn’t normally have without it. Up till now, only one customer has canceled on us. A fairly good order, but it’s canceled. I’m sure it’ll come back. Maybe for or five were put on hold, and we’ve got a number of them that we finished, but we have to warehouse them ’cause we’re not opening and receiving. So there are a variety of challenges you deal with. But in the scheme of things, Danny, it’s good. We’re surviving, and we’re looking forward to this mess being under control. Hopefully, we can find a vaccine so we can go back to whatever the new normal is, something better than this.

Yeah, absolutely. Certainly hope we have a much better new normal than this. What has been sort of the morale of the company?

Good. We’ve got a great group of people. There are a handful of people that are terribly more afraid of this than I am. Don’t get me wrong, I respect it. I’m doing my best. My wife and I are both senior citizens, and we don’t want to tempt the fact that our immune system can handle it or not. Some of the people just, they had to go home immediately. They had to quarantine. And that’s fine. We want them to feel safe. We all worry about the second phase of this mess, and I’m not sure where it’s going to go, but by and large, 80 percent of our people are happy, from my perspective. I go to the shop in the afternoons between shifts. I can visit my office and pick up on a few things they can’t take completely away. But I do wear a mask. I’m very careful. But I think, by and large, everybody’s pretty happy. Although, we’re all scared. I mean, you know. We’ve had in Racine, I know this sounds small compared to New York, I think we just had our ninth death over the weekend, a couple of our young people, 30, 35 years old. And it’s sickening, one of them, it’s so sad, he just got married and the darn virus has taken him away, and really disrupted a wonderful life. But I think the company’s adapting well.

You know, so what are some of the things that, you mentioned one, as far as what are the things that you’ve learned through this, that you’ve picked up on. And one, I think you’ve mentioned was the remote work aspect, which seems to be something that comes up a lot. What else have you kind of, what have you seen through this?

You know, the thing I found the most interesting in the first, well it’s been three weeks now, I used to do on average maybe one video conference call a day. I do four or five a day now. There’s a lot of things going on. We do ’em between ourselves. One of the new things that you may, this is probably so fundamental to people that are big on cellphones, smart phones, is that I never used to do video conferencing on my phones, and I do it all the time. I used to hate being on them. You know, I don’t have, I’m not a good looking guy like you, so–

Oh, come on!

It kind of bothered me. But I’ve adapted to that, and I actually enjoy it. From a technical end, I think that all of us, even my super IT people, have gotten well-versed on on doing Zoom. A month ago, I didn’t know what Zoom was, Danny. So the technical things have been awesome. I was talking to Donovan in your office earlier today, and we feel bad that I think the ol’ handshake might be disappearing. I’m going to miss that. I’ve always enjoyed shaking a man’s hand firmly, especially when you close a deal or you do a good job for ’em. It’s a term of like, affection or endearment that we may be losing. I think in general , I think we’re all going to be a cleaner nation. At our shop twice a day people disinfect doorknobs and bathroom knobs. I know this sounds a little bit risque, but our bathroom doors are now propped open to avoid people touching them. It’s not that horrible. I mean, we all know we have to go to the bathroom, but I’m surprised how we’ve learned to clean so much more carefully, and we’ve taken our immune system for granted, and I guess there’s things we really can’t handle.

But from a manufacturing end, we’re hoping that they will find a cure and that we can get back to where people can work five feet apart or 10 feet apart. It would be hard to run our company if we kept it, everybody right now’s 20, 30 feet apart, and it’s okay. But boy, it’s tough to be productive and be efficient when you have to work under those kind of conditions. I’m a little nervous of what the future’s going to be. I hope they don’t change it too much ’cause I liked the old one a lot. I don’t want it to get too different. I’m just blown away by the technical aspects of, you know, even today I’m in charge of a design, and the guys are having a problem with something, so they took their cellphone, they called me, and they showed me what the problem was so I could solve it from my kitchen table. I didn’t even have to get out of my chair and out of my desk and walk out.

Our plant isn’t huge. It’s a 100,000 square feet, but it can take you 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other. I think you’re going to see a little more of that utilized. Maybe we’re old-fashioned and not thinking in terms of being efficient, but I’m just blown away how the technology has, we’re still functioning, once the corona’s out of our hair, I think we’ll go back to actually a better normal in many respects, you know? I will tell you that I can’t imagine the people that have lost their lives to this mess when we were looking forward to a really special Summer, and now we don’t know what we’ve got.

Yeah, that’s a good point. You know, it’s funny that you mentioned about the handshake thing because I know you guys were at MODEX. I was at MODEX. Actually, I kept trying to, I came to your booth probably like, four times ’cause I wanted to say hello, and every time I made it over there it was too late or whatever. So anyways, but you know. I’m sorry about that. I wanted to say hello. And actually, I wanted it, well I guess we couldn’t shake hands then.

We were already fist bumping then.

Give you a little elbow.

It was, I don’t want you to feel bad, Danny, but I was looking forward to have a superstar in my booth, but maybe next year. We’ll see you in Chicago.

Next year for sure. But yeah, that was an interesting thing there because at MODEX, that was like, everyone was like, “Don’t shake hands.” I think for me anyways I think that was the first time that it was like, “Oh, we’ve got to actually do this,” and it felt really weird.

It did. And in fact, there are some times it’s impossible to not, it’s like, when you want to hug your wife or whatever. It’s an automatic response. The funny thing is a couple of the people in our booths were nervous, and I said to ’em, “If you want to go home, go to the airport, you do not have to stay here. This is not that important.” You know, if they really–

(loud barking)

My dog wants some food.

That’s okay. I get like that when I get hungry, too. It’s fine.

That’s my wife, that’s not my dog.

I have no responsibility.

I’m kidding!

I’m just–

She’s over there giving me a hand signal.

(both laugh)

That’s funny. No, but yeah. It was very, very interesting. But yeah, the whole no shaking hands thing and being freaked out about everything.

You know, I was actually pleased that we got it in. I was afraid they were going to shut it down and kick us out, and you know, we all spent a fair amount of money and time getting ready for that. We had a pretty productive show. So we were pleased with the outcome, and I’m glad they stuck it in ’cause our life changed the week after that. It was all over.

Yeah, exactly. One of the things that we heard from a lot of people there at the show, almost overwhelming, but yes, attendance was way low, but that the people that actually were there, a lot of the conversations were a lot more meaningful. There were a lot less tire kickers and more people that were, did you have that experience?

We had a half a dozen awesome meetings. We actually combined the opportunity, our major caster supplier is a company called Blickle, and they were able to do a hospitality night at their facility which was right outside. That worked out really well. A number of projects that were in the works, people came, so it was a productive show, not like we’d hoped, but we were pleased with it. We felt we got our money’s worth out of the money and the time we spent preparing for it. I’m just glad they pulled it off. If this corona thing had started a week or two earlier they would’ve canceled it, and you know, I don’t know what would have happened. There’s a lot of money goes in that show. Hate to see it wasted.

So do you guys typically do a lot of trade shows throughout the year or is MODEX–

Nope! Just the two major, we used to do about 10 a year and do local ones, but it’s a lot of work, and it didn’t deliver the results. You know, the truth is between the internet, the shows are kind of icing on the cake, and I think that social media and everything else we’re doing is really where 90 percent of efforts, the show is just a once a year deal that we do to kind of spearhead all those marketing efforts we’re doing. The world’s out there . All you do is just turn on your computer.

Yeah, exactly. That’s interesting there. Moving forward, crystal ball, all right? When we get out of this thing, and we’re looking at the new normal, whatever that is, what are some of the changes that you see in the industry? Maybe not just for, I mean, it could be for Topper specific, but just in the industry in general, do you see any changes that are going to happen because of this?

The business that we do was changing in terms of, our industrial carts are pulled primarily by a tugger. But there’s been a huge push to go with AGVs, and I have more projects now with AVGs than we do with tuggers. I don’t know if it was timing, but it just seems like that’s the way of the future across the board in terms of product and what we’ll be doing. We’ll still do the old, I mean, there are a lot of smaller operations that diversify and don’t need the AGV. But I can’t keep up with quotes, and the development of what we’re doing is really fun. Topper Industrial is looking for people, and I’m not talking, for maybe for the last year we couldn’t find welders to save our life. We were actually setting up a second operation in a second building, and we just had rented the building, and the corona thing broke out. Once they put a stay at home, it’s virtually impossible to find people.

We’re looking for a couple of engineers, electrical people, and so forth, and all that’s being done on a video conference like you and I are doing right now. It’s kind of nice because it wasn’t long before this that we would pay them to get on a plane and come to Topper, and I’m still more comfortable doing that, I won’t kid ya, to shake a man’s hand or a woman’s hand, to look ’em in the eye. There’s still a lot of value there for me. I think, you know, Topper was about to put an addition on the shop. Nothing big. About 25,000 square feet. We’ve kind of put that on the back burner just to be sure that things are going to be back to a busy normal not a slow normal. But Danny, I really can’t gauge what the new normal’s going to be for us as a business or a customer, but I can tell you this. We’re prepared, we’re confident, we think we have the ability no matter what it is, that we will be able to respond and provide good service, and hopefully get things back opened up and back to where we were. We liked the old normal.

Yeah, yeah. Well, on that note, I have one last question. Have there been any new things that you’ve picked up not work related? Maybe a new hobby, or I don’t know, reading? Is there something new that you’ve picked up?

Yeah. One of my granddaughters turned 13 about a month ago, and we bought her a horse.

Uh-oh. Okay.

And the horse is in my backyard.

(both laugh)

Okay, so you just got a new pet. All right. Okay.

Can you imagine all the kids are out of school for the rest of the year, I have three granddaughters that all love horses, one’s 11, two are 13, and they’re out there right now, and I’ll go out there and check on ’em, I mean, they’re very capable young people. I also am a car nut, and I’ve been restoring a car. I actually thought I could take advantage of my new norm where I’m kicked out of my own office to get something done on my car, although the car’s almost done. And I know this is going to sound silly, but I’m afraid to drive it around the block because I know that other people don’t have it as good as I do in that they’re experiencing real problems, and until the travel order is lifted and we can go back to the norm, I don’t want to drive the car and seem flamboyant or any kind of thing bad. Yeah, I’m looking forward to some, when things get poor I can, you know, quit working in this kitchen at four or five and go goof off a little bit. I’m looking forward to it. There’s plenty out there to do when you’re on a farm between the, we don’t have any animals except those horses, but there’s plenty to do.

Well, it sounds like you’ve been keeping yourself very busy. And you know what, Ed? You are a great man and a great leader. I just, you know, the fact that what you said there, your sentiments there about with the car thing I mean, that’s awesome. That shows that you really have a deep empathy, and I imagine that your company loves their leader. Thank you for sharing with me, and everyone else here at IndustrialSage, a little bit more about what you guys are doing, more about you. I think it’s valuable. I think it’s important to share what other people are doing so maybe we can learn from each other.

Well, I hope it helped. We’re just trying to adapt to whatever they throw at us. If you don’t, there’s no other options. You have to, I guess. We’re chugging along. Always good to talk to you, Danny, share what we’re doing. We’re proud of what we’re doing. We’ll be glad to share it any time we can.

Ed, I really appreciate it. Thank you again so much for the time. And for anyone who is interested and they want to check you guys out more, you can go to topperindustrial.com. Is that the website?

That is correct. Topperindustrial.com.

Perfect. All right. Well Ed, thank you so much. Have a great day. Enjoy the horses and the grandkids.

And you guys stay safe. Take care.

I sure will. Thanks. All right, bye.

Bye-bye.

There you go. That’s today’s episode of IndustrialSage with Ed Topper who is the CEO and founder of Topper Industrial, a manufacturing company in Wisconsin, just kind of sharing their experiences and what they’re going through and the things they’re learning through. If you haven’t, Ed has been a veteran here at IndustrialSage, so we interviewed him back in January or so, so you can go check out his episode and learn a little bit more about them, what they do. He has a pretty cool backstory. A great guy. Thank you so much for watching or listening to today’s episode. I’m Danny Gonzales. I’ll be back next week or next time. It might be sooner than that. I’ll be back with more content from IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

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Okay, so let’s jump in today’s episode. I’m here with Anise from LeanSwift. So Anise, if you could introduce yourself to the audience, those who aren’t familiar with you and Leanswift, what you guys do.

Okay. Thanks, Danny. My name is Anise Madh, I’m the CEO of LeanSwift. I’ve been with LeanSwift for over two and half years I joined as a COO and then took a role of CEO last year. Before that I had a background in operations, I was supply chain director. ERP support, that’s how I got introduced into the ERP implementations. So, Oldcastle, that’s where I worked for over eight years We have ERP systems that manages all the operations and that’s where I got involved into ERP implementations And that’s where really LeanSwift comes in in terms of what we do, is around ERP systems.

Around ERP, so maybe a little bit, I know there’s a couple specific areas and a couple things you guys do. What exactly is that?

Yeah, so we work mainly with Infor. Infor is a big software developer. They have 90,000 customers worldwide and they provide enterprise for companies to run their business. So, when the customer purchases a license of Infor product, mainly M3, which stands for Make, Move, and Maintain, around the manufacturing and distribution space, when they get those licenses, we come in and implement that system for them. So, we take the business processes and try to make sure that the system can support those business processes.

Right, and you know, there’s a lot– the big buzzword you’re hearing: digital transformation That’s a big thing going on right now in the manufacturing industrial space And as I understand it, that’s a lot of what you guys help to do there. But there’s also the digital transformation that we’re seeing, not just in operations, in ERP obviously, but marketing and sale and go-to market strategies. And that’s where, when we were talking before, talking about ecommerce, that being a really big thing that we’re starting to see and that’s something that you guys have a lot of experience helping with, with clients to be able to that. If you could share a little bit about your involvement on that side with these manufacturers?

Yeah, so ecommerce is one of the business segments of LeanSwift. We have been involved in ecommerce for over four years now, and we work mainly with the Magento platform because it provides a good platform for manufacturer-distributors, so we’ve seen a huge shift. Our focus has been, for the last seven years, manufacturing and distribution space and we’ve seen a lot of these companies vary in degree of what they want to invest, and how much they want to put into ecommerce. We’ve seen a lot of them go to ecommerce and establish presence, and that could vary from opening a portal for customers to come in and look at the invoices, look at the orders look at some of the products, to a full-blown ecommerce where people can come and order and transact on the system. And you know, what we’ve seen is a transition. What used to be B2C is going to B2B now. Which is, everybody that works and transacts in ecommerce, they expect the same thing that they see on the B2C site for B2B. And that’s, that’s what we see the change as.

No, it totally makes sense You know, we had, so we had Infor on a couple weeks ago, a couple episodes back and that was exactly one of the things we talked about is that, you know, really customer expectations on how we buy If we’re, the Amazon experience that everybody has You know, “I need to go buy this” or “I need to go buy that”, you know well, A, you go online, and then second of all, you go to Amazon, and just that experience of buying and purchasing there is an expectation we have regardless of whether it’s a B2C product or B2B. And I think that’s a huge thing that we’re seeing.

Yeah, and I think it’s not only the experience which, actually, we should be part of the customer experience and the upside of doing business but we’ve seen customers look at that from also from an operational standpoint where you offer this platform where people come in and transact on a 24 hour basis so that cuts the cost also for, instead of calling the office, and faxing you and believe it or not, people still fax or emailing you the orders, especially in certain industries, to go onto the website transaction, and following up on the orders instead of calling and tying up some of the resources needed there.

Right, and that’s a big thing just all across the board, so I guess one question that I would have is if you’ve got a company, and you guys have a lot of experience with this, working with companies to kind of make that transition, to say “Hey, we’re thinking about going into ecommerce, it’s a totally different thing.” What have you seen with those initial conversations or at least, from manufacturers, when they’re thinking about doing this, what does that process and that stage typically look like?

Yeah, and that’s one thing that I would say is we talked a lot about transformation and I think that is, you know, that should be part of the strategy of any company, is how do you get on the digital platform to be able to be, in some industries, relevant because you have to be there. But it… I would say it varies. I think everyone should be, every company that provides services and products in the manufacturing space should be looking at “How can I be on the ecommerce platform? How can I build a digital strategy that goes beyond just the ecommerce?” And it doesn’t have to be a full-blown ecommerce site, or for transactions, it could also be, as I said before, it could be a customer portal. It can provide product information allowing the customer to come in and get more information without having to, you know, have to talk to a resource, so they can have access to it 24 hours. When I would say we should be part of the strategy So, any company that builds a strategy every year or three years, they should look at “How can we be a presence on ecommerce and develop a digital strategy?” And some of it goes beyond that. It’s more of also providing some services to the customer. Like, we have customers that built on their digital strategy of cutting down the paperwork when customers get deliveries, they will have tablets, and they will sign signatures and customers will get invoices. It’s just more using the technology today to make the transaction easier and seamless with the customer.

Absolutely, you know, there’s a couple key things there that I’m latching onto. I guess that sometimes, and myself included, when you think of ecommerce, you always think okay, transaction, transaction, transaction But what you’re talking about here is saying you know, you don’t necessarily have to have the full-blown solution, we’re saying “Yeah, so you can buy, you’ve got a catalog on there and you can purchase, and we’re going to deliver through there” But maybe even just having access to some of that information, not necessarily all of it, or delivery, but you know, bringing some of that back online so you can have a little bit better experience. I think that’s interesting, and yeah, I said, I always kind of think maybe just transactionally. But it doesn’t have to be the full-blown thing, right?

Yeah, and I think, we have different customers. So, we have customers that… they are manufacturers and distributors, so they have the B2B process and some of, actually, those customers are putting a lot of those B2B transactions on the website. So there, other businesses work with them, they can transact on the website. They also do multi-channel, they pretty much sell to a lot of, directly to consumers on those channels. And we have customers that just have one portal that they can open to customers for information, I would say, and in the middle we have some companies that target specific segment of the customers that they want to kind of, push them toward the website So, because they are low volume, and stock product but low volume, they try to push them toward the website, which is a win-win for both the vendor and the customer.

Absolutely.

So, different varying degrees we think about digital transformation, it doesn’t have to be zero to sixty all at once, but you could take steps to get there.

Absolutely. And another key thing you mentioned there, even in the digital transformation piece, and maybe sometimes people might think “Well, you know, that’s not necessarily a function of sales and marketing per se,” but you’re talking about making that ease of not even the sale, but the ease of the process of being able to find information or you mentioned even going to a paperless type system, and going and making things easier for the customer. And I think, you know, I’m a big believer of always selling, and in your business, you’re always selling, and it doesn’t matter whether sales is in your job title or not because it’s really creating that experience and making things, because if you have got a great experience, and maybe it’s a customer that you’ve had for years and years and years but you’re making it easier, still continuing to solve those pains, those challenges. In my mind, that’s a big function you know, that customer service piece Just that, that flow, is really helping to sell to sell, continuously sell through that. So I think that’s just a critical component to look at it sort of holistically like that.

Yeah, and I think it’s also that the demographics of our customer base is changing, too. I think you see a new generation, the Millennials are used to certain platforms or technology not only from selling, but also from growing the workforce and making sure that you attract the right people. And we talked about digital transformation, again it goes beyond, you know, just the ecommerce. Also, you know, we’ve seen manufacturers look beyond the four walls, and look at tracking shipments, overseas products coming in so you can give better customer service by promising a product, you need to have visibility when your products are coming overseas. So we’ve seen them start to branch out, not just looking at what’s in your plant, but where’s that shipment coming in, also finding new vendors in that digital transformation to make sure that you’re using new technology to be able to service the customer better.

Absolutely, and I’m a big geek and a big fan when it comes to all that stuff. You’re taking ERP and using it as sort of, your central hub to really manage all those things and certainly sales and marketing is just one function of it, but to your point, the supply chain, just all of that looking at, there’s a ton of data, you know your IoT, you know, all this fun stuff to really help to manage better processes and you know, get better efficiencies. And so, but, kind of going back towards this sales and marketing thing, I’m very curious about, you know your experience in terms of clients or customers that have come in and said, “Hey, we want to roll out with an ecommerce solution.” Let’s say somebody who is being a little bit more transactional with it, have you seen where, have you had any customers or any experiences where you’ve had a manufacturer saying, “We have z– we’re not selling anything online we haven’t, and we’re going from zero to sixty,” but maybe not necessarily like you know, immediately, right out the gate but over a period of time, say, “We’ve never done this, we’re going to try this.” Have you had any experience with that?

Yes and we have a customer here in the state of Georgia that all they’ve done was B2B and they took the B2C approach. They have priced it to make sure they protect the distribution

Of course.

But they want from, from doing nothing on the B2C multi-channel, over two years that segment was growing, and they had to staff it, and that’s where we came in with our platform that allowed them to grow. But one thing with the ecommerce sales and marketing, what allows you the ecommerce platform is really reacting quickly to the customer. Especially if you’re looking for promotions, recommendation engine, having some catalogs so that they are dynamic, because, you know, the print days are gone. When you print the catalog, it’s outdated the moment it’s out of the press. So I think those are what allowed them to grow, is being able to dynamically change, recommend, price it based on what’s going on in the market, and also keep updating those product catalogs.

That’s a really good point,

But we do have, we do have yes, a case in point in one of our customers in Georgia went from zero in B2C, to growth over two years in the 200, 300 percent growth year over year.

Oh, that’s great.

And as I said, they did B2B and B2C and they kept both markets growing.

That’s great! Now, I would imagine, were there any particular challenges or any hurdles, I mean, cause that’s, in my mind it’s kind of a big and maybe scary shift saying, “We’re going to try this channel over here” and it’s a different ball game versus saying, if you’re going through distribution you know, working through your channel partners your distributors, saying “Hey,” versus saying, “Now we’re going direct, we’re going direct to the customer” and actually I’m curious, in this case, was it B2B or were they going B2C in that case?

Yeah, they had B2B established, which is the distributors, but then they want to–

So then, they were going direct. They’re going direct. Can you speak to any of the challenges, or you know, particularly from a sales and marketing standpoint, they kind of ran into, or lessons they had to figure out a little bit?

Well, I think the main thing was just their hesitation around, “How will the distribution channel react?” So, because it is, they were a manufacturer and they were selling to distribution. And then also, the skill set too. Because, if you’re doing B2B, the engine for the ecommerce is different than if you’re doing B2C. So, for B2C, the website itself is going to have to be different, because you’re dealing with different functions that you have to put in. So, those are really challenges more around how do you build a business model that will protect the distribution? And then sell directly when people want to buy from certain outlets?

Yeah.

And, two, how do you build the website to where it’s different from B2B because you need to figure out some of these engines. Recommendation engine, one of them. And three, the skill set in-house because now you’re developing retail, most B2C models. So those are challenges, but the end game is they were able to grow that segment of their business, so.

Now, yeah, it totally makes a lot of those challenges I’ll hear from distributors, and you read articles and stuff, you know, that they’re a little worried. They’re a little scared, saying, you know I think somebody I heard, I’m going to throw out a name, Ian Heller from MDM, you guys should check them out if you’re a distributor, they do some really cool stuff. Which, I can’t remember the name, the acronym, Modern Distributor… Management or Marketing, I can’t remember I’m sorry, I totally futzed that up but that’s okay, MDM, and if that’s not right we’ll correct it in the show notes. But anyways, he had this article on LinkedIn he was talking about the wholesale apocalypse you know, and worried distributors, you know you guys need to be looking and making a change here because, you know, with the whole ecomm thing coming in, it’s like, is there a question of relevance? And I think the answer to that is, absolutely. There’s still a lot of value but there will be some erosion and if they’ve got to kind of have to figure out what to do. And that, maybe, for sure they I imagine, the distributor, need to bring an ecomm solution, number one, needs to be something to bring in, but yeah, it’s a concern.

Yeah, and I think that’s a good point that you bring up, it’s the distribution channel has a value to add because what you’re doing selling products, you cannot just buy and go ahead and install, but you need some professional to help you.

Yeah, and some support.

Yeah, and the specs and certain ways to install it. So there is knowledge to be gained or shared through the distribution channel. But I think what people are looking for is just for the medium, how we get that and how we work with each other, transact is changing. A lot of people still want that value, that knowledge, but they want to do it through an ecommerce transaction. Or at least, have the option, so that people can go and do that. So I think it’s, there is a value in having a distribution channel, but also there is more value to having another option for consumers to be able to get, as I said before, the customer portal is great to get that, just that first interaction. And then, talking about sales and marketing, we know about SEOs, we know about ads and all that. If you have that platform, it will help you get more access to more consumers out there that they might now know about your product.

Yeah, and that’s something that we’ve seen too right, you know, you’re making that switch that work can be a little scary, It’s because the whole go-to market strategy from a marketing standpoint, and from a sales standpoint, is different. You know it’s, you mentioned, SEO and ads it’s like, “Okay, we’ve got this engine we can sell stuff, but now we need to build traffic,” and it’s kind of a little bit of a mind shift in terms of how to do that. But it sounds like, you know, you’ve got some customers that have had some real good success with that.

Yeah, and I think it’s, the more outlets that you have out there, the more your presence, in terms of online, the more recognition you’re going to get and the more people are going to know about you. So, the way I see it is, it’s really marketing it’s a new way of marketing, is to be able to show up on these search pages, make sure that you are there so people can find you easily.

That’s ultimately the biggest thing, is that we have the way that we buy, like you said, is completely changing, and essentially you just have to be found! And the amazing this is, what we think is cool, is people are searching for this stuff. You know, I don’t think that necessarily a full-blown ecommerce solution is going to work for every single manufacturer and OEM, you know I mean, if it’s very solutions side and technical, you can’t be, you can’t go buy an industrial automation solution with your click But you can get you down the line. But with some other things, if you have the ability to go direct to consumer, I mean, it’s, “People are searching for the stuff. Hey, guess what, we can be found, and we can help, you know, sell to you and reduce some of the costs,” and, you know, all that good stuff.

And then so, going back to the Amazon, it really, some folks decided to use the word “Amazonized”, pretty much because–

Okay, “Amazon…” wait, what is it again?

“Amazonized”, so you use Amazon, and so the industry is trying to say that they’re pretty much, whatever people are expecting in the B2C world is, being bleeding

Could be echoed.

Into B2B, so being Amazonized means they have to offer the same features. Uh, but we also, speaking of Amazon, there is also a lot of customers doing the efillment by Amazon, so that’s another way of ecommerce being out there, is being able to take orders and then get someone else to fulfill them, but you’re not doing the whole distribution–

All the logistics, and…

Yeah, so there are ways to be able to get on the ecommerce and start generating some sales and marketing.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, this has been absolutely fantastic, I’ve really enjoyed you know, just kind of talking, we could probably go on for hours talking about all these different things. Is there any last parting words you’d like to say to our audience?

Well, yeah, definitely, it’s that, as we talked about throughout this session, is the importance of ecommerce to the digital strategy. The way we advise our clients is just not one piece, you have to look at the whole picture, see where the trend is going, and the more you get on the ecommerce and, ecommerce is a broad term too as I said, it can vary in the degree but you have to start somewhere to be able to be accessible to your customers and make sure that you provide as much as you can on that platform so that customers, potential and prospect, can find you easily. And the process is not, it’s scary, but a there are lot tools out there today that were not there ten years ago

That’s very true.

Even for customers that want to invest in a platform, there are open-source platforms that you could use, you could link up through APIs to your, whatever ERP system you are using today. That can allow you to kind of start making that transition. So I believe the future’s bright in terms of ecommerce, you’ve just got to make it part of your digital strategy so that it can have an outlook for your products.

That’s awesome. So, what I’m hearing: strategy, don’t be afraid, and accessibility. That was a great word, be accessible you’ve got to be found.

Yes.

Absolutely, that makes a lot of sense. Well, thank you so much for coming on. If anybody has any questions that they would like to reach, what’s the best way of getting in contact?

Well, our web presence, leanswift.com

Perfect, a website, you guys have a website

The website, yeah, definitely check us out and you definitely can reach out through the website. We have contact information.

Perfect. Great. Well, thanks again!

You’re welcome, thank you, it was nice.

Excellent, yeah. So, well, we had another great episode. Thank you so much to LeanSwift for coming on here and showing that, you know, there were a lot of big key takeaways. Again, we echo this on this show all the time is really that the way that we buy, the way that your customers buy, the way that your future customer’s going to buy is changing, and it’s dramatically changing. And like we were talking about here, some real big key takeaways, is that ecommerce, something that I learned, was that not necessarily all the way transactional, but even just having the ability of having information online and having data, and really making things easier for people to be able to find is a big takeaway. Another one is really that availability or that accessibility of people are, the reality of it is, we’re all online. If your products and your services are not on there, not easily found, you’re doing yourself a major disservice. You need to change that. So, big big big takeaway to be thinking about as we start rolling into 2019.

So again, thanks for watching this episode. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them. You can reach out to industrialsage.com/questions. We answer them all the time for you, and we’ll answer them here on the show. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review, if you’re on social media please share our content, we’d love it. And that’s it, I’m done for today, thanks so much for watching, we’ll be back next week with another awesome episode of IndustrialSage.

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