IndustrialSage

Well, you are in for a treat for today’s episode. We have Mathias Konne from EuroKera who’s going to be walking us through their story on branding and why it’s really important and how they came to be. So before we jump into this, Mathias, if you could introduce yourself to the audience, who you are, background, all that good stuff.

Sure, so my name is Mathias. I’ve been working with EuroKera now for about four years. I am French, which will explain my accent in English.

Oh, okay.

And I started working for them four years ago. Before that, I studied marketing in Europe. I came over to the US, and I’ve been working with the company for a while now. We manufacture glass-ceramic products. So for glass-ceramic cooking but also fireplaces and all that kind of high-temperature use. So it’s a highly technical glass. We have five factories, so two in France, one in the US, one in Thailand, and one in China. We supply customers all over the world. So that’s pretty much what we do. We have a French origin that we’re very proud of. I’ve been working in marketing since the very start. When I arrived at EuroKera, there was actually nothing there. So it’s been challenging, but we are building our brand, and we’re building pretty much everything from scratch.

Sure, yeah. And that never happens. Nobody who’s watching this, probably, or listening, if you’re listening on iTunes, I’m sure that nobody has ever run into that where, hey, we don’t have marketing all of a sudden, we are. But EuroKera’s interesting to me and definitely not an anomaly. It’s very common. When you guys– if I understand; correct me. Do you guys deal directly with distributors? Do you go straight to the other manufacturers? What does that look like, just to set the foundation?

So we deal directly with the manufacturers. So your big brands that you know, that manufacture appliances, for example. We deal directly with them. Our teams go and meet with them directly.

Okay, perfect. Alright, so in that sense, you guys did not have a marketing department for years. How old is EuroKera again?

It was born in 1990.

Okay, alright, so it’s got some history.

It’s got a decent history.

So all of a sudden, they said, hey, you know what? I think we need to do this marketing thing. And then, you came onboard. What did that look like? Why did that decision happen?

So why the decision happened is kind of unclear to me. I don’t know why, after 20 plus years, the company decides to do marketing. I think it’s because we have a great product. It’s very unique. And there’s only a few manufacturers of glass-ceramic in the world. So if you’re manufacturing glass-ceramic well, you’re going to sell it because there’s only so much supply.

Right.

And so it’s easy to find customers. They’re big; they’re easy to locate. And I think it’s been very engineering-based so far with just negotiations, of course, but pricing but also the technical side because it’s a very technical product. I think what changed is, now we realize that you have to also educate the consumers to create that demand from the other side, the push-pull strategies. And that really helps with your business as a whole because even if you’re not dealing with them directly, people now with social media, with internet, with all these tools that they can have right at the tip of their fingers, well, they are educated. And they have access to the information way sooner than they used to. So now you can, if you’re in marketing or in sales, you can play with that and use that to your advantage if you do some marketing and if you build your brand around that.

So push-pull, that makes a lot of sense. You bring up a really good point, too. Now, with the internet and all the other advances, you can argue home and box stores, the Home Depots and Lowe’s which have been around for a good while. If you really look at the history of your parent company you were talking about earlier, Saint-Gobain–did I pronounce that right?

Saint-Gobain, yeah.

Saint-Gobain, alright. Okay, I’ve got to get my inner French going there. Which I am half French-Canadian, just a side note.

[They converse briefly in French]

That’s pretty good. That’s all you need.

Perfect, I’m good. They’ve been around for 350 years, and so these big-box retail stores where you go to actually do the DIY was largely not there before. It’s the minority of the time. Now, things have changed, and it’s been expedited, like you said, with the internet. And it’s interesting, too. You’ve got a lot of consumers who otherwise might not care about the product. Now, presumably because they have access to it–the information, that is– they’re a little bit more informed, and they want to know all these different things. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense to me. So, interesting, how did you guys, when you came onboard, what were some of those first things that you guys did? You said, hey, we want to do marketing now. I’m assuming there was something that was done beforehand that was marketing-esque, right?

So there was some stuff that were already in place when I started. One of them was a website. So when I got onboard, it was in 2013, 14. It was already a very old website for that time. And so it was basically an online brochure, which I’m sure, it’s not uncommon in our business. I see a lot of companies that still have websites like these. But it was very simple. It was sort of marketing, but it was not going the extra mile. It was not even trying to connect to our customers– no need to say the end-users– no connection there. So this was already in place. We had all kinds of different collaterals, brochures and little spec sheets and all kinds of stuff. You name it, and they were all one thing that’s very, that really hurts your company and your brand. That thing is when you have all these things, and they all have a different visual aspect. We even had different logos. Some of the logos were in different colors. Some things that may sound crazy to some businesses, but I’m sure in the B2B world, it’s not that uncommon for companies to have that kind of issues. So one of the first things that we did was bring cohesion into that and bring a real corporate look, a visual identity. We’re still working on that. It’s taking a tremendous amount of time because when you have a small team and you have a big company, so many countries and so many collaterals, it takes a while to get there. But this is one of the first things that we started doing is create a new website that was matching the image that we wanted the company to convey and also make all the collaterals match the look of the website. So that was the first thing because web is very important. And I always remember, somebody told me that one time, and I thought it was the greatest quote I’ve ever heard for marketing. They said, “Do the basics, but do them brilliantly.”

I like that.

And I think that’s something that any B2B marketer should apply to his business because we all have limited resources. We all have a lot of challenges. We all have very specific targets, audiences, and challenges. But I think if you do the basics and you do them brilliantly, then that is the most efficient way that you can do things. So you really have to focus on a set of key things that you want to do.

No, I love that. That’s an awesome–we’re definitely going to be using that. That’s definitely a Tweet-able, quotable–I really love that.

It’s not from me, though. I won’t take the credit for it.

We’re going to give you all the credit; don’t worry. So one of the interesting questions that I would have with that is that, obviously brand identity is really important. But you mentioned before that you’re dealing with a lot of engineers. Let me ask you this: why is it important to do that? Why having cohesion across all the different marketing collateral and websites and all these different things, why do that? And why is that important?

Because that’s the only way, in my opinion, to build a strong brand. If you have different looks, if you have different colors, if you have different fonts, if you have different images or people using low-res images, at the end, even if you don’t do that intentionally, but you’re hurting the company’s image. Whereas if everybody speaks one voice and everything looks the same, where you build that brand, you build that strength, and then, you attach a message to this brand. You attach a feel to it. And that’s where, I think, the value is added to your products because nowadays there’s tons of brands in the world. There’s new companies setting up every day. And in glass-ceramic, it’s a little bit less true because it’s a very specific, highly technical product. But you still have more and more competition. You have new companies starting in Asia, for example. They may not be good enough today with their products. Their quality may not be the same. It is not the same. It’s not even–it’s not. But you never know what the future holds. And so for me, that’s where marketing, that’s the main mission of marketing is to protect your brand. And you want to protect it in the present, but you also want to protect it in the future. But you have to start that work early and mainly on your brand to build that brand to where your brand is strong enough to add a specific value to your product that is besides quality, pricing, innovation. You want to bring another feel to it. You want people to be able to connect to your brand because that’s going to be a huge difference-maker, I think, when people feel a certain way about buying your products which is one of the missions of marketing in general.

Right, yeah.

But I think that that’s very important. It’s just as true for B2B than B2C in a specialized product like glass-ceramic and less specialized products like Starbucks coffee. So I think that’s very important. You just add value to your products by building your brand.

Totally makes sense. I mean, really, it’s creating that perception. It’s interesting you mention; you got things that have different fonts and different colors, and everything’s just scattered. It really does have this idea of, man, there’s stuff all over the place. Things aren’t, I don’t know, not going this way. And I think a lot of manufacturers really focus on the quality of their products, as they should. That’s really important, making sure that performance and the function is a high quality there. But I think a lot of times, that branding gets left– well, that’s the frou-frou stuff, whatever over there. This is–we’re focusing on this. And I love how you say that really creates stronger products that image, that perception that these guys have got it going on. They’re high quality. So if you have five different versions of logos on there, it’s kind of like, eh– There is a feeling. It might not be necessarily right there, top of mind, but I guess maybe there’s a feeling, like hmm. And I think we’ve all experienced that before. You see, even just in logo and letterhead development or a website. And you look at it, and you’re like, oh, wow, that looks like they’ve got things put together, versus this looks like this is from 1998.

Yeah, on top of that, it adds a professional look to what you do. So if you’re a very professional, highly technical company, well, you want to show your products in a professional manner so that that adds to that too, definitely.

That makes a lot of sense.

To me, it’s just the same. You can take the example of, if you have a million people yelling a million words, different words, you’re not going to understand anything. But now, if you have a million people yelling one word, that’s going to be pretty loud. And then, you can ignore it. So that’s what I think a cohesive brand does. Then, you just have to pick the word you want to—

Pick the word, which can be the most difficult.

That is.

But I love all those different things. You also mentioned, too, protecting the band– your brand, not your band. But maybe if you have a band, and you need to–yeah, that’s important, too. But making sure that that is, it’s not diluted, especially with the competition coming in. That’s a big thing. I hear we’ve got a lot of manufacturers, they’re saying, hey look, we’re the biggest; we’re the baddest; we’ve always been around. And yet, you’ve got all these competitors that are popping up all over the place in different parts of the world and whatever. It’s important.

It’s very important, and that’s why you need that strong brand because, in the future, you don’t know what’s going to happen. And you need to build the foundations, the basics. You have to build them early to then be ready when you actually need to use them to differentiate yourself or your business from the others.

Absolutely. So I want to move on a little bit here. So we talked about, you came in, and the first thing, let’s put some cohesion to our brand. Let’s really start dialing it in. Still working on that; it takes time. It’s not something overnight, and you’re done.

No.

But what was next? What was that next thing? Okay, we’ve got this, and we’re working on the next thing. What was that?

So I think the next thing that you have to do once you get to the first stage which is getting things together, then you have to market your marketing department. And that, in the B2B world, is sometimes very complicated because marketing has sort of a bad image. You’re just an expense bucket where people just throw a ton of money, and they never see any return on it. So that’s one thing that you have to be cautious of early, too. And people in the B2B world are, I can talk for EuroKera, it’s very engineering-heavy, so people who actually love numbers, data, and graphics, charts. And that’s where you want to bring them. After a while, once you’re done setting up everything, your website, your social media if you have some, all your collaterals, that’s one thing that I think you then want to do is to bring the measurement. And I think we hear that a lot from everybody now because that’s the big thing. But it’s very important, I think especially more in B2B where people love numbers. And they’re right to love them because you want to see what you get for your money.

Right, yeah. It is a business.

It’s a business. After all, we’re all here to make money. So you definitely want to do that, and I think that’s where digital marketing, for me, has completely revolutionized marketing in general because now you can finally measure things that you’re doing. Like I was saying earlier, if you give a brochure, like a paper brochure to somebody, well, he may walk in the corner and put it in the trash. Whereas if you have a website, or if you have social media channels, or if you have a newsletter or a blog or anything like that, you can clearly measure how many visitors you get, how much traffic you get, how many of these convert, the quality of your traffic, the funnels, everything. You can really have a great picture of everything that’s happening, and that’s definitely what I think the executives and all that, that’s what they want to see, I think, after a while because that’s going to help build your reputation and then build the trust that they have in you. And that helps you keeping the momentum going.

That makes a lot of sense to me. So it’s just having–I’m, admittedly, I’m half numbers guy. I get it. I totally appreciate it, having that there. But there’s also bringing that element of, making sure you’re building that brand, but then, if you have different areas that you can be able to measure to be able to say, hey look, this is what this is doing. Even if it’s just, hey look, increase web traffic. Ooh, wow, this is great; we’re actually getting something out of that and then, building on that. What else have you guys, what was the next step after that?

After that, I guess it’s kind of a never-ending work. After that, you’ll find out that some things work, and some things don’t. And then, you have to also realize that you’re limited in what you can do and can’t do. And so I think that after that, you’re going to get to a phase to where now you’re mature enough to where you can identify and choose what you’re going to do because I feel like, at first, when I started–and when we start anything, we’re sort of running in every direction trying to do everything. And we thought we could do everything, and now we’ve learned a thing from this and seeing the measurements and everything, getting all the data. Now we’ve learned that there’s only so many things that we can do. And among these things, these work and these don’t. So then you really want to focus on what’s working and also what’s very efficient because I think a lot of companies like EuroKera have limited resources for marketing. And so you really want to focus the efforts of your team on what’s efficient. And also, now with these great tools like automation and all that, you have to also think, well, if you have customers all around the world and so many people to reach, what’s the most efficient way to do this? And how can softwares and automation help me to do this? So that’s also where you can definitely then, when you get to that stage, you can start thinking about all that.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. I really enjoyed our conversation on this. Is there anything else you want to add, throw in there? We’ve covered quite a few topics.

Yeah, I think we did. No, I’m fine; nothing to add. Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today.

Well, thanks for coming on. If anybody would have any questions, want to reach you afterwards, what’s the best way of getting in touch?

You can reach me through the website. So if you go on www.eurokera.com, there’s a contact form. And you can here put a title, and your name, SageIndustrial, to your contact form, put that as a title, and I’ll get in touch with you.

Awesome. That’d be great. And I really love the–what was the phrase you said? “Do…?”

Do the basics, but do them brilliantly.

“Do the basics, but do them brilliantly.”

I love this quote. Yeah, somebody–it’s a lady that I had the pleasure to work with who told me that once, and I thought that was the best quote I ever heard, especially when you apply it to B2B marketing.

Awesome. Thanks again. This was awesome.

No problem.

This was really great. So yeah, another really awesome and great episode here with Mathias here from EuroKera. So a lot of takeaways here. I think the biggest thing is really just, like Mathias mentioned, I’m going to quote, really focus on the basics, but do them brilliantly. I love, love, love that quote. So I think a big challenge we have as marketers is to be able to say, hey, look, we’ve got all of these things we can do, especially in digital marketing. You look at your marketing stack, you’re like, oh, we can do this. We can do this. Before you know it, you’ve got 30 different technologies, and they’re making you scattered all over the place. Focus on the basics, and really do that.

So a lot here, a lot to unpack. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I know I did. If you have any questions, we’d love to answer them. You can send them to us at IndustrialSage.com/questions, and be sure to share this and like this and put this all over the place on the social medias. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review, if you feel so compelled to do that. And until next time, I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage.

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All right, let’s jump in today’s episode, we have Eric Shumway from Circuitronix all the way from Mesa, Arizona. Eric, thank you so much for coming here, he’s the VP of Sales and Marketing if I didn’t say that. Thank you for joining us.

Welcome, happy to be here.

How is it in Arizona, probably a little bit warmer than it is here in Atlanta.

Right now it’s actually beautiful, I think we’re at the very end of what’s considered nice weather, and so we’re all getting ready for the typical Arizona summers.

Oh, that’s awesome, it sounds great. I know we’re excited for the warmth over here in Atlanta, ourselves. So, for those who aren’t familiar with Circuitronix, give us a little background about who you guys are and what you manufacture.

Okay, Circuitronix is a printed circuit board manufacturer, we have three primary factories in Asia and are in the process of bringing on a fourth, that build should be done by the end of the year or early next year in India. In addition, we have two sister companies in Mexico called Wattera and Chrom, and those factories produce injection-molded plastics and chrome-plated or PBD-plated plastics.

Gotcha, all right. So, let’s talk a little bit about sales and marketing, we were having a little bit of a conversation before, and you were telling me that, well I actually would just love for you to share your story on how, some of this pivot that you guys are making just in terms of going a little bit more digital, tell me, just share with me what that move is, and why you decided to do that.

Sure, no problem, let me kind of preface this a little bit, I’m an old-school guy, my degree was in sales and sales management, and I came up through a time where pretty much everyone was focused on that door-to-door, that business to business selling cycle, and you went and knocked on doors, and you sat in front of people, and that’s really how things were done. That kind of migrated through direct mail and other aspects, but really it was largely the same, until the advent of social media, the web explosion, all of these things, and for me, admittedly, I may have been a little bit slower on the uptake, and didn’t see the total value in digital marketing, but that has become really, really evident that the importance of the digital marketing, the platforms that, the efforts that are being made, cause in reality, we’re able to cast a much wider net, and capture people that we may have otherwise missed.

But there’s a whole other aspect to this that we’ve begun to tap into, and that is the realization that many of these next generation engineers, next generation purchasing people, they’re quite frankly from my children’s era, and they do things very differently. They don’t have the same mentality in the way of where they get their information for, for instance, engineering contacts, they’re probably not more likely to go onto a Thomas Guide, not to disparage Thomas Guide, it’s been a great tool, but what we’re finding is that many of these next generation engineers purchasing quality, they’re spending a lot more of their effort and their time on the internet, they find their information there, they can Google it, they can go to Alibaba if they’re in Asia, any number of those platforms, and so without having really tapped in, not just doing things like search engine optimization, but looking at other platforms like LinkedIn or, as I mentioned, Google and Alibaba, you’re really missing the point, and so for us, we’ve migrated pretty heavily to a digital marketing platform, and to the point where we’ve begun hiring young, fresh out of college marketing people because that’s their mindset, that’s what they’re thinking about.

Yeah, you’re 100% dead-on. I’m curious, you said you’ve migrated to a digital marketing platform, what specifically are you using?

We’re pretty heavily invested into LinkedIn, specifically we utilize their sales navigator platform, and then couple that with the more traditional search engine optimization, identify keywords, AdWords, things that people are going to be looking at on the internet, and marrying those two together so that we get the best play, the best coverage, people are seeing us where they need to see us but they can also interact and respond accordingly.

Yeah, absolutely, so I mean, when time-wise, when did you start doing that?

It’s really been primarily in the last five or six months. Recognition that we needed to do something, but really fully engaging in that has been relatively recent.

That’s great, so all right, what was the, was there a particular catalyst or something that basically said you know what, we’ve been thinking about this, we’ve been wanting to do it, and we just need to do it, was there a particular moment or event that happened?

Kind of, part of that was that we were looking at different ways of rebranding our company, we started in 2001, we’re in a very traditional business environment of printed circuit boards and plastics, these are not new, exciting, sexy products. And so we looked and said what can we do to set ourselves apart, what we kept coming back to was, we need to think younger, we need to act like this next generation, and so about that time, we started looking at new marketing people that we could bring into the organization, and the owner of our company, he was the one who said we ought to look at these fresh college graduates, it was not necessarily one aha moment, through various points as we looked at how do we maximize the web, that was part of that moment.

For me, though, it really came as I started talking with the younger generation, I have a son that’s in college, and was studying graphic design, he had friends, and we would talk, and then I started looking for additional marketing people to add to our company, and as we did that we looked at, do we add someone that’s got a lot of experience that knows our world, or maybe we want to look at this a little bit differently, and what we decided is, we wanted to look at this differently. We didn’t want to be just like everyone else, and doing that, the differently meant, instead of looking for old, seasoned people, we started looking at these young, fresh college graduates who were, they were used to things that were different, they didn’t view television the same way as I did, they didn’t watch their movies the same way, most of them were looking at their phones, and we started to think, although this is a very old, boring industry, not real sexy, plastics and printed circuit boards, our next generation of designers, our next generation of purchasing people and quality and engineers, these guys are young, these ladies are young, they’re getting their information differently than we’re accustomed to putting it out there. So that was really the impetus, that was the drive to find these younger, more innovative thinkers, and in doing that we’ve kind of shifted more of our moneys and our efforts into this digital marketing platform.

It’s great, so all right, big question, you’re about five to six months in I think you were saying, so how’s it going?

It’s going well, actually. One of the things that we’ve looked at to kind of identify if these metrics are working, is our LinkedIn engagement. And in just the last couple of months, we’ve seen the engagement on our LinkedIn pages increase by over 200%. We’re getting a lot more outreach or direct inreach, I should say, where people are responding to things as simple as little memes, we created a little contest within our company, because we wanted not only to have more content, but we wanted to engage more people in our company, and so such a simple little thing as this little one picture meme has generated a significant amount of interest by people that say that was funny or that was cute, I liked that, and all of a sudden they’re now looking at our page and then that drives them to our website, and before you know it you have a deeper and broader reach.

Yeah absolutely, you know it’s interesting, we talk about this on the show a good bit, there was a big study that came out in 2015, that Google did, actually, and it was talking about how the average B2B buyer was at that point, this was four years ago now, or three to four depending on when in 2015 it was taken, but that the, it was nearly at that point, nearly 50% of the buyers or influencers in a B2B purchase were millennial. Obviously that has changed, it’s going to only increase obviously, and we now can only assume that it’s more than 50%, but Caterpillar actually took that and kind of ran with it and changed their whole go-to marketing strategy where it was a little bit more human-driven, and I think the story you’re sharing there, the whole meme piece, that you weren’t, I haven’t seen it, but I’m assuming you weren’t selling Circuitronix, you weren’t saying hey come buy from us. It was something that was a little bit more of, we’re just going to share something from us, we think it’s funny, whatever. Create a little bit of a relationship, and then go that way, and I think that is where a lot of manufacturers have to start thinking about things differently, and I think, sounds like you guys are doing a great job with it, that it can’t always be, and it shouldn’t be, sell sell sell, buy here, feature function, here’s all these things, the content has to be, really, we’re selling, even though it’s B2B, we’re selling to another human being.

I think your point is spot-on. This was part of the discussion that we had within our senior management, is there were people that said “Look, that may work for a small company, but it’s not going to work for these big companies that we work with,” and my comment back was, “Why not?” Those big companies are made of people, and people respond to the same message whether it’s a small company or a big company, these are still people.

Yeah, 100%, so another follow-up question then with that, you mentioned something that a lot of companies run into is that change management or organizational buy-in, sounds like there’s a little bit of a push-back there. How have you navigated that?

I think like anything, you have to be able to show what your path looks like, this is what we’re going to do, this is the expectation of what that will yield, and there has to be an end line that says, at least based on this time period, we expected to get this kind of result, did we get it? Is there a return on that investment? I think best business practices still hold true, you can’t just throw good money after bad if it’s not working, but in this instance, in almost every way you have the ability to track it in some things on a daily basis, but certainly weekly, monthly, quarterly, you can look and see, have we seen an increase in the engagement, does that increase in the engagement then lead to further more leads, or the right kind of leads, are we closing more sales, all of these things interact, and you can see pretty quickly, are we seeing the success from this that we anticipated?

Totally makes sense, so in order to be able to sort of show that closed loop, are you guys tying everything into a CRM or is it, how are you looking to see, okay we generated this interest, they’re coming to the website, and so on and so forth?

We are, I wish that I could tell you that we had a phenomenal platform that was well-established before, this has kind of come hand in hand as we develop more of the digital platform, we’ve also been developing our CRM tie. But yes, with the new technologies that are available through almost all of the CRM platforms, you can literally tie your marketing efforts into the CRM, you can see what the response is, you can identify, are these now warm leads or are they just suspects that are tire kicking, and spend a lot less time trying to qualify these leads, as they’re coming in more qualified to start. We’ve done a few other things, like video outreach, your show’s a prime example of how we can utilize technology, but there are other ways, rather than just generating a quote, tossing it over a fence, and then a day or two later calling and hey let’s talk about this, we’ve been able to utilize some additional platforms that let us record a short little video and walk someone through a quotation or presentation, and send it to them and now we don’t have to wonder, did they get it or did they look at it, because the score actually, it links right back to us and we can say, hey they opened that at 11:33 and they spent 14 minutes looking at it and three of those were on page four. That’s the level of technology that’s available to us, and it’s all part of that digital marketing platform.

Yeah, and now I’m super geeking out, I’m curious, so what did you use for the video messaging?

We actually use a couple different things, one, there’s a technology called Loom that I think is excellent, you can get it in a free version, but with the paid version you get a little bit more functionality. Other things like Zoom, I think they’re all playing off each other, but Zoom is a web-based person-to-person teleconferencing with video, you can use that to record videos or give presentations, record it and then link that, and all of them can be linked with LinkedIn Sales Navigator where you can actually take your recordings, send them out in a PointDrive email, which then again does that linking. As they open the link you can identify who’s opened it, was it forwarded to someone else, now I’ve expanded that network, I’m identifying who’s important within an organization, and we’re able to drive deeper into each of these organizations, and quite frankly find the right people, so that we’re not spending a lot of time just hunting, we’re really working and nurturing and developing these relationships.

Absolutely, so all right, so Loom, you said, L-O-O-M instead of Zoom, that’s interesting, I’ve not heard of that one, I’m very familiar with, there’s a couple other ones, but I know that’s kind of growing, that’s awesome, that’s exciting, because yeah, and I imagine depending on how it’s delivered, that I imagine the response rate’s much higher, I’m guessing, that’s what we’ve seen on our side cause we use it a lot, but yeah.

For sure, and you know again, how have things been done in the past? Compare that to where we’re going in the future, and just the ability to take a simple presentation, I may decide that there’s, based on a conversation you and I had, there are three or four key elements in that presentation. If I just emailed it to you, you don’t know unless I’ve highlighted them and maybe then it still kind of just slips on by. But if we actually take a minute to create a three minute video, and I say “I just want to point out these three things, they’re the most important that we talked about.” Well now there’s no question, I’ve identified it, you’ve seen it, and I can see when you engaged with it. Those are the things that are kind of that next level digital marketing, but it’s not just marketing, I mean it’s really a total engagement.

Yeah absolutely, and I love it too, and the other piece, I think, too, with the video element, it’s definitely differentiated, but I think the other piece is, it’s back to that human element, cause you’re able to make a connection, instead of, versus I’m just going to send you this thing, and you get an email or whatever that’s whatever text, and okay, maybe there’s a picture there, but now it’s like oh wow, there’s Eric, oh, okay, this is what. It just creates a little bit more of a connection.

That may be bad, I’m not sure. Maybe you don’t want to see my face on there, but, I mean the reality is, you’re right, it is a very personal thing, it’s now taken it from some nebulous, I’ve got another email, and maybe I look at it or not, to oh, here’s someone that actually cares about me, they want to spend a little bit more time, we’re connecting at a different level.

No, I love it, that’s great. I love hearing these stories, and all the innovations and just hearing how you said hey, we want to start doing this, and just kind of trying out different things and seeing what works, that’s awesome.

And we did, I would tell you, it was a trial and error, tried a few different things, we identified what we shouldn’t do more than what we should initially, but in doing that it was, not only was it kind of fun, but we really did kind of create best practices for our company and, like everything that’s new, it will continue to evolve and enhance and we’ll figure out how to make it more effective.

Yeah, absolutely, that’s great, just, congratulations on that, because that can be, that’s a big challenge, a lot of people, a lot of other companies can have, whether it’s that change in management issue or just fear of I don’t know, I don’t understand how this works, going and doing video and recording that, that kind of takes another level, people are like, “Ah, I don’t want to see myself on camera.”

You know, I should get a royalty from all these companies, but I’m not. Another one that I thought was really cool was BrainShark, and it was one of the impetuses for the video, is that they had been pitching us on, “Hey, you need our platform to develop training modules,” and whatever these selling modules, and so we looked at it and then they sent back a video with what we had talked about, and showed us how easy it would be to create these modules in their platform, and they are, and each one of these that are out there have done a good job of identifying their strengths, but that idea, that was kind of the genesis, hey, maybe we can apply this, this is this technology company, but we’re a technology company in the print circuit board world, why aren’t we doing some of these next-gen ideas? And those were the things that kind of helped move us forward, and then as we would go to these younger marketing people in our company and say, “Hey, are you familiar with this?” They were like “Duh, yeah, we’ve been doing that for a long time.” It just all kind of made sense.

That’s funny, that’s awesome, that’s great. So what is the next, what’s the future look like for Circuitronix?

You know, it’s funny, as things become new they go old, we’re finding that by tapping into these newer ways of marketing, it’s driving our engagement with the customer, and so we’re spending a lot of time back in front of the customer, we’re doing things that most of us had decided was passe, trade shows. I had grown to the point where I hated trade shows, I couldn’t see any value in them because, here we spend all this money and time away from our actual effort, and hope that someone’s going to come and see us. But with this direct response marketing that we’re doing and these outreaches, what we’re finding is that we put the front-end effort in, and then we go to a trade show and we’re busy the entire time, and the right people are coming to see us, and here we are engaging face to face, like the old days, and so you ask what’s the real thing, well it’s marrying all of these, it’s not any one of them, it’s all of them. But how you interplay those, that’s the key.

I love what you just said there, so a couple big things there, we, it’s out of arm’s reach now, but we have, we did our insights report, we talk about a lot on the show, we talked to over 156 manufacturers about their sales and marketing trends for 2019, and what was working and what wasn’t, and an interesting fact was that trade shows was the number one lead gen tactic by far, everyone said yes, but they were also saying, 53% if not more were saying yeah, we’re having a decline in leads, and I think what you just said just hits the nail on the head, and I think a lot of companies can resonate with that saying, “Man, what are we getting out of trade shows,” and I think it’s… you’ve got to flip it around a little bit, and it’s a great opportunity, but I think what a lot of people, a lot of companies miss, is that you said there’s a lot of upfront work, so I think the idea, oh, trade show, we set up a booth, here’s our banner, maybe there’s a video, whatever, people are going to come to us and whatever. You actually got to work it ahead of time, you know? you’ve got to work ahead of time, during, and after, and we’ve got some great articles and stuff on that but I think that what you’re, you just totally hit the nail on the head, you’ve got to cultivate it and get people excited and get in there.

We did Electronica, I don’t know if you’re familiar with that show, it’s one of the largest trade shows in the world, it’s in Germany. And our organization in Germany and all throughout Europe prior to that show, spent probably six to eight weeks of doing very direct outreach and even to the point of setting up predetermined meetings, and the vice president of our European sales was literally every day in meetings, almost from the very beginning of the show to the end of the show, and we had more success as a result of that, than any show we’ve ever done.

Yeah, and I get it 100%, it makes sense, let’s unpack that for a second. We look at it, it’s really cultivating the land if you will, getting everything ready and then everyone’s there, and you know you go to a trade show, and you get there, you’re like “Oh my gosh, I’m overwhelmed, there’s so many things. Where should I go?” You’re creating that purpose, and you’re able to talk to so many different people within a finite time, and that makes 100% sense to me, why that would be very successful for you, that’s awesome, congratulations.

Thank you, we appreciate that.

So everyone else who’s listening or watching IndustrialSage, take note, we’ve talked about this time and time again, listen to what Circuitronix is doing, it just makes sense, utilizing this new technology paired with what we have done in the past, it doesn’t mean that what is done in the past you completely throw away, no, not at all.

There’s a reason it worked. All of these things will work, but much like any effort, if you’re not going to do it consistently, if you don’t continue to put the effort in, and figure out how they work together, then you’re like driving a car on two cylinders. Yeah, it’ll move, and you’ll get somewhere, but it’s not going to be in the most efficient way, you’re not going to get where you want to be as fast as you could, it’s when you couple all of these things together, you’re then running on eight cylinders, you’re going to move quickly, you’re going to get exactly where you want to be, but you have to do it all the time. you’ve got to keep putting gas in the car, you don’t just go forward for a little while and then stall, and then try to do it again, it’s got to be consistent, and when you start doing it in a consistent manner, and with all of the pieces together, that’s when you’re going to see the most bang for your buck and the best results.

Love it, I couldn’t have said it any better. There you go, that’s it right there, that consistency, you just got to do it, and you’ve got to keep doing it. Eric, I really appreciate this time here, this has been really valuable, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation, just learning about you guys, your story, and where you’re going with it, and I love it, I’m super pumped to hear that you guys are doing video messages and all that stuff, that’s next level, that’s awesome, congratulations. So thank you again, do you have any parting words for our audience, of encouragement or advice that you might give?

You know what, I will say, when we first started talking, I was not as familiar with IndustrialSage, and this is a little plug back with you guys, I’ve spent a lot of time on your website, and for professionals in the field like I am, I think that this is a great place to view and to look at, but also, just, you get a lot of, how would I say, value from other people that are trying to do what you’re doing. And if what I said can help someone, fantastic.

Absolutely, that’s the name of the game. Thank you, thank you very much for that validation and the kind words, that’s what we’re trying to do here. Well, Eric, we could probably go on and on for hours and hours, but for those, if they have any questions, like to learn more about you, what’s the best way, I don’t know if you’re on, well obviously you’re on LinkedIn, so we could probably start there.

Eric Shumway, also you can, if you’re into printed circuit boards or injection-molded plastics, you can email me at [email protected], and that’s Circuitronix with an X. Or, look at our website, Circuitronix.com. Love to have you visit.

Awesome, Eric, thank you again so much, we really appreciate it.

You’re welcome.

All right, okay, so look, another great episode, I love it, there are a lot of things I love about this, one is, I think just the whole story about saying, we need to make this change, and let’s try it, and let’s not do all the things super big, and let’s test some things, and I think Eric said, a really key thing for me was that he said “You know, we discovered a lot of things that we shouldn’t do, and we learned some best practices,” and what I love next is that they kept going. They didn’t say, “Ah, this didn’t work, let’s try this one thing, and this didn’t work, and oh, man, it works for everybody else but not for us.” But they kept at it, they made sure that they wanted to make, they wanted to look at what KPIs and different things they wanted to get out of it, so they could prove out that ROI, and they’re showing to be very successful, they’re showing to be innovative, they’re showing to not be fearful of things, the fact that they’re making videos and going on, I know that’s not super comfortable for everybody, but that is really where you need to be thinking, in the sense of being able to be differentiated and get your message out there. So, just take Eric’s words, put it to practice, I know you’re going to get a lot of value out of it, and that’s all I’ve got for you.

So if you have any questions, we’d love to answer them for you on IndustrialSage.com/questions, put them in there, we’ll answer them for you, if you are listening on iTunes or Stitch or any other podcast, we’d love a rating, social media, hey, share the love, and last but not least, if you’re not on our email list, you need to be, so go to IndustrialSage.com. And why do you want to do that, you want to be a subscriber, why do you want to get the email, cause there’s a lot of awesome content, just like Eric was talking about, we’re sending stuff to you all the time, not spammy, but it’s really valuable resources like this awesome interview with Eric here. And there’s a lot of other content that you don’t get, listening through iTunes and podcasts and seeing even on social media, so do that, do yourself a favor, you’re going to love it, and I’m done, I’m going to stop yapping, and I will catch you next week, I’m Danny with IndustrialSage, thanks for watching.

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Alright, so let’s jump into this episode. We have Brian Moseley from Databox who’s joining us today. Brian, hey, thank you so much for coming and joining us. For those who don’t know you, if you could just introduce yourself to the audience, tell us a little about your background, who you are, what you’re doing at Databox.

Sure, my name is Brian Moseley. I live in sunny Boston, Massachusetts. And I’ve been in Martech now for a little over five years. I started working at a marketing agency, and that led me to working for the marketing automation software company called HubSpot.

Small company– yeah, sorry.

Well, ironically, we were a small company when I started. That was back in 2013; we had about 500 employees. I went through the IPO with them. So I was on the agency side doing sales and onboarding new agency partners. Then, I had a sales manager role for a year, and that led me to follow a mentor of mine, Pete Caputa, over to become the CEO of Databox. So when Pete took over this last January in 2017, I came over as director of sales, and coming up on my two-year anniversary there. So it’s been a pretty good ride.

That’s awesome. That’s great. So actually, for those who aren’t familiar a little bit with Databox, what exactly do you guys do?

So we’re a data visualization tool. There’s a lot of us out there. There’s probably two dozen that I could recommend in good faith that are great tools. And the thing we do which is similar to every other tool is we take data from a lot of different places and consolidate it into a slick-looking, consistent dashboard.

Great. I’m curious about this. Are you guys exclusive to marketing or just all things data? Or is there a particular niche you’re trying to focus on?

That’s a great question. So every company should be focusing on some niche or vertical or ecosystem in some way, shape, or form. Otherwise–you can never be all things to all people. So I think a mistake that a lot of these data visualization companies in this space are making is that they try to go too wide. The playbook four or five years ago in this space was, let’s connect to everything that’s possible. And as we all know, the world has finite resources, and it’s impossible to invest in and support hundreds and hundreds of APIs. You can do it, but you won’t go deep into any one, and it leaves your customers wanting more complete integrations with fewer apps rather than trying to connect to hundreds of apps. So Databox does focus on marketing and sales technology stacks. Again, there’s other companies that focus on Martech and sales tech stacks as well. But that’s our ecosystem.

Perfect. No, great. I was just curious about that, yeah, because data obviously is a big thing across the board, and there’s a lot of data out there. So great to know. So when we were talking before a little bit, before we started here, on a call previously, a little bit about the Martech stack. And for those in our audience, it’s new, when we talk about Martech stacks, we’re talking about basically all the different marketing technologies that you might have, whether it’s a HubSpot or using Databox or using Zapier, whatever, the 800– I don’t know how many there are now. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of SaaS companies there are. Taking all of those and then putting them together to be able to say, okay, well we want to be able to do ads, and we want this to lead into email marketing, and we want that to– And we want to be able to do retargeting, all this good stuff. Sometimes there can be a little bit of a problem. And so one of those things was that we talked about what happens when your Martech stack just goes wild, Martech gone wild? We were joking around with some stories and things about that. But I think it really resonates. It’s a real thing. Tell me a little bit about your experience with Martech gone wild and what you’ve heard from other customers that, I’m sure, doesn’t happen to anybody else.

So 10 years ago, the only thing you had to check for digital marketing was Google Analytics. I cared about, how was I ranking? Did I get more people to my website this month than last month? So it was really easy. But Google Analytics has become really complex, and I mean that in a good way. But being complex, it also allows people to not focus as well on one thing. So now, 10 years later, now we’ve got Salesforce and HubSpot CRMs. You’ve got your email system, whether you’re using Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign or HubSpot. Now, you’ve got chatbots like Drift. Now, you’ve got conversational marketing. And then, you’re running Google ads and Facebook ads. The thing I learned at HubSpot was all marketers feel that 50% of their marketing isn’t working, but they don’t know which 50%. And now that there’s a lot more tools out there and a lot more channels out there, organic social media, paid social media, the list goes on and on. So just like I said, you can’t be all things to all people, you can’t do everything, especially if you’re a relatively smaller marketing team, six or less people. So you’ve got to stick to your guns, and you’ve got to stick to what’s working. Typically, a content strategy is really good. A promotional strategy around social is really good. And then, maybe one other thing that you’re taking a flyer on, like something that you’re testing. Maybe you’re testing video or chat or conversational marketing. My advice is, you can’t do everything, so focus on three things. Find what’s working, and try to really simplify your life because the more you make things complex, the less you’re able to prioritize. And that’ll really kill a marketing team’s resources.

Absolutely, and I love the stat about 50%, just trying to figure out what that is. It’s kind of paradoxical, if I’m using that word right, in the sense that you go from, maybe if you’re transitioning over from a traditional sense of marketing over to digital– we’re doing that because we can measure, and it’s amazing. But then, it’s almost like you go way overboard, and you’re like, there’s so much that we’re measuring that we’re not even measuring what we’re measuring. It’s next level. It’s Inception right there.

It is. Yeah, if you were just measuring lead form fills or goal completions in Google Analytics, life would be great. The nice thing about HubSpot, if you’re using it, is they do a great job of measuring three KPIs: visits, leads, customers. And if you want to add two more bonus KPIs, it’s the conversion rates between all those, so the visitor to lead conversion rate and the lead to customer conversion rate. If you’re a B2B company in manufacturing or industrial, really those are the five metrics you should be tracking, and everything else should be feeder metrics into those top five metrics. So there’s this concept that we didn’t invent, but it’s in our methodology. It was invented by Franklin Covey, actually, back in the ’90s. And it’s relevant now more than ever in the digital age. It’s called the Four Disciplines of Execution. And the methodology describes two different types of indicators or metrics: leading indicators and lagging indicators. The best example I can give is the simple sales one. In sales, you have to make 50 phone calls to book a meeting. And then, you have to have 10 meetings to book an appointment, and then, 10 appointments to sell a deal. Everybody understands that funnel. So the calls and the meetings and the appointments, those are all leading indicators, and the lagging indicator is– they call it a lagging indicator because once you see it, it’s already gone; you can’t change it. So that’s your monthly sales. But that applies to marketing also. So how many blog posts you create, that’s a leading indicator. How much traffic comes out the other end, that’s a lagging indicator. So what I think a lot of marketers are missing is this ability to think in that way that we’ve got these few, very critical activities that we can do that are going to lead to this outcome of more marketing-qualified leads for my sales team. So I challenge marketers all the time and say, what are your three things, what are the three levers you can pull to actually influence that MQL number? Is it the number of blog posts? Is it how long the blog posts are? Is it how many times you’ve posted on LinkedIn? What are your weapons, and what are your leading indicators that are going to help you tackle your lag?

Absolutely, and it makes sense. And I absolutely love that, especially with the analogy too with sales over to marketing because, again, a lot of our audience sometimes is very transactional, so that’s one thing. But then, the other piece is that sometimes it’s like, well, marketing over here, it’s just flyers and things. No, the reality of it is, if there’s a funnel and it’s a real deal, and you mentioned a great acronym, MQLs right there. So for those who might not be familiar with that, we’re talking about marketing qualified leads. So really, we’re marketing them, we’re building awareness about us and our services and how we can help solve those challenges. And once they’re ready, they become SQ, they would go to that sales qualified lead. Okay, we know that they’ve got the budget, the authority, the timing, the need. Not everybody that’s going to come to our website necessarily is qualified, and we want to sell to them. I love it. And actually, you said Franklin Covey. It was the four disciplines– can you say that again? Sorry.

Yeah, it’s the Four Disciplines of Execution. There’s a whole book on it, which I read, and I got a lot of value from. But all you really need to know is wrapped up in a five-minute YouTube clip just called The Four Disciplines of Execution. It’s a really great intro into the methodology.

Perfect, and that’s awesome. Alright, I’ll take a look at that. Thanks for sharing that. That’s great. So what would you–there’s a couple things in there you said that I think– not a couple; there’s a lot you said that was great. But one thing in particular that I was latching on is, I’ll ask you the same question but in two different ways, depending on where we see a lot of our audience that’ll come from. One, for those that are just starting– it’s funny; we hear the whole Google Analytics thing where, oh, we’re doing this, and we’re trying to figure out SEO, all that stuff. But for those that are saying, hey, we’re just starting, and we just want to go into the– what would you recommend from a Martech stack? You touched on it there. What are those big things that– concretely, what does that look like?

Yeah, so it depends on the size of your company. But there’s some really great free tools out there. SaaS companies have been forced to become far more generous in their free offering because there are so many options out there. So it’s this capitalist point of view that more options means more choice and a better product. So tools I love: Google Search Console is free. I don’t know how many people know about it, but if you are looking to get into basic SEO, and you don’t outsource that, and you really want to understand keyword rankings, Google Search Console is a great thing to read up on. There’s some awesome short YouTube videos. You can get certified and become an expert in a couple of weeks. Mailchimp is one probably everybody’s heard of. They’re an awesome way to send out email and communicate with your clients. And then, there’s two other ones that I would recommend. If you’re not already using a CRM, I would recommend HubSpot Free CRM. It’s a great way to close the loop. A really difficult thing for marketers is closing the loop and getting that back from sales of, hey, these three leads are awesome, but this one isn’t great. So let’s get more of these three because all three of those closed. We call that closing the loop, and if your sales team isn’t closing the loop, or if you’re not making it really easy for them to close the loop, a CRM, especially a free one like HubSpot, is a great way to start. And then I would recommend, if you’re looking to– I think everybody can benefit from conversational marketing these days, direct offers of a free plan which allows people to communicate with a bot on your site or communicate with one of your internal customer service people or salespeople. I get a ton of meetings every month booked from our pricing page. It’s one of our best sources of qualified leads. People are on your site; they have a question that you can answer now. Do you really want them filling out a form and then hoping that your sales rep gets back to them? Maybe not. What if they can help qualify that lead directly on the website? So that would be my top five free marketing stack.

Awesome, no, I love it. It’s funny because you mentioned chatbots on there. It was one of our things we put out for early 2018, the big things you’re going to see coming out here. And I think it’s absolutely awesome from multiple areas. But all those things, some great free tools, so thanks for that. Now, I’m going to ask that question a little bit differently now. Alright, for some of those– let’s go back to those who, they’re on this train. They love it, and they’re like, okay, we need all the things, and here’s our Martech stack, and here’s–and then, they’re like, wait a minute. What are we even doing? Is this even valuable? How do you diagnose that situation? What advice would you give to somebody to say, okay, how do we evaluate what is important and what isn’t?

Yeah, so I had a company say that exact thing to me, and what they did is they did a SaaS showdown where they literally took a whiteboard, and they had a bracket like NCAA college basketball. And they put these 17 different tools that they’re using. It was like SEMrush versus Drift, and they laid it all out. And they wrote down how much they were paying for it and how much it was saving them time. That’s a good way to figure out, evaluate your stack is just do a competition and invite your team and see who protests the most. The thing I’ll say about software, I have to educate people a lot on how to buy software. The way I think about buying software is more like you’re hiring a person. And you can hire software, and you can definitely fire software if it’s not doing the job. I think a lot of people expect software to come in and solve their problem, but that’s not how I look at it. If you have an existing process built out that you’re doing, and that process is tight, and it’s repeatable, then and only then should you be evaluating software to come in and automate it. But if you don’t really have a great process built out already, I wouldn’t look to software to solve your problem. The best example I can use is inbound marketing. If you’re creating blog posts, publishing them to WordPress, sending them out in Mailchimp, publishing landing pages in Leadpages, building forms in whatever you’re building forms in, if you’re doing all of those things already, then HubSpot makes a ton of sense. But if you’re not already doing inbound marketing or you haven’t already committed to it, it’s like a gym membership. It’s not going to solve all your problems. So I would, if you’re trying to figure out what in your tech stack makes the most sense, I would think, okay, what do we have good processes around, and which softwares are we using that are actually automated, and if we actually took those away, and we had to go back to doing things manually, would that be bad? Would it be really, really bad? If it’s not really, really bad, you can probably cut that tool.

Yeah. No, I love about the… how to go buy software, make sure we do this right because that is– you’re absolutely right, 100%. If there’s no process around there, I hear this all the time. Hey, we’ve got HubSpot, or we’ve got Pardot. We’ve got Marketo, whatever. Marketing automation, it’s automated. We just do it and then, all of a sudden our marketing is there. It’s done for us marketing because that’s what it is. It’s marketing automation. I go, not exactly. We hear the same thing with Salesforce, integrating CRM or anything like that. Those are some really great stuff.

You only get out of it what you put into it, and you’ve got to really plan out your attack. And that’s why sales people can be very helpful in that. I think salespeople get a bad rap a lot of the times in SaaS. They think that they’re trying to sell you the dream, but in all actuality, I think a really good sales person at Marketo or Pardot or HubSpot, I think what they’re trying to do is assess your current process, evaluate it, and then help you figure out how to fix your problem. And maybe it includes their tool, and maybe not. And hopefully they’re honest enough to tell you that and be transparent about it.

No, absolutely. That, again, totally makes a lot of sense. Okay, so wrapping up a little bit– actually, one of the things that we get asked quite a bit is, with so many different platforms out there, and there’s so many different technologies you may be using. It’s funny; it’s like you get this one. This is 80% of what we need is right here. But then, now it takes another 10 platforms to fill up that next 15%. And that five, you’re just like, ugh, we’re not quite there. But one of the really big challenges we see is, okay, great, we’ve got all these different things. Golly, how do we measure that and look at, is it really achieving the goals that we were trying to get after? How do we generate reports? Where I’m leading is, I’m seeing some data visualization tools might be a little valuable to do that. What does that look like on your end?

Yeah, so again, taking a step back from software, step one is: fix your process. I see a lot of reports, as you can imagine. People are sending me their reports. I probably see 50 a month. And they say, here’s my report; it’s a headache. It’s a bunch of PowerPoint; it’s 40 slides. I say, how do you build it? And they say, we go into Google Analytics, and we take three screen shots. And we go into this, we go into this, and we put all these screenshots into a PowerPoint, and we present it to our boss. And we’re really excited. The boss flips through it and says, okay. My eyes glaze over; and then, they hand it back to us and say, what am I looking at? The problem there is, the human brain is not built to analyze 40 to 50 to 100 metrics in a PowerPoint. That’s not right. And the question I ask people is, realistically, as the marketing team and the resources that you have, are you realistically able to influence all 100 metrics on that PowerPoint? And then, I’ll pause, and they’ll say, no. I’ll say, okay, then why are we– what does it matter, then? Let’s simplify; let’s cut. Let’s pick 5 to 10 key company goals or marketing objectives or initiatives that you’re trying to influence, and let’s put a number to it. The language is a SMART goal. It’s an acronym; it means specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-limited. What are your SMART goals? Maybe it’s traffic. Maybe it’s leads. Maybe it’s sales. That should probably be in your top three. But then, maybe it’s Facebook ad impressions. Maybe it’s Google ad reach. Maybe it’s the number of organic traffic coming to the blog. Pick those top 10 metrics, and really focus on those. Buy a $300 TV off of Amazon; put it up in your marketing office, and then, find some free dashboard solution that you can connect all your sources into, put those top 10 metrics up on the screen, and then, set goals around them for the year. And then, break those goals down quarterly. Break those goals down monthly, so if it’s 12,000 visits for the year, that’s 1,000 sessions or visits a month. That’s really easy. Now and only now can I start saying, okay, how do I get to 1,000 every, single month? That’s a much easier question to answer than, how do I get more sales or whatever.

Yeah, no, absolutely. It totally makes sense. Well, Brian, I really enjoyed our conversation. We talked about a lot of different things. Is there any other parting words you may have as we wrap this up?

Measure the metrics that matter so that you can do the things that you want to do like getting off work early and going and spending time with your family.

There you go. That’s awesome; that’s important. Brian, well, I really appreciate the time. For those who are watching this, we had a few technical difficulties before we started here, but we really appreciate your patience on this. If anybody has any questions, if they’d like to reach out and ask you any advice or questions or anything, what’s the best way of reaching you?

I’m on Twitter @bmose14 or just come to the Databox website and hit me up in the Drift chat. I’m there all day.

Awesome; that sounds great. So Brian, thanks again. We really appreciate it. And yeah, this has been awesome.

Sounds good, Danny.

Alright, thanks. Alright, so there we go. Another great episode with Brian Moseley from Databox and a lot of great takeaways. Listen, if you are just jumping into this and you’re trying to figure out your Martech stack, one of the big things that I took away was just keep it simple. And honestly, even if you’re already heavily invested in this and your Martech stack is huge, again, go back to the simple things. I can tell you, for 90% of you out there, you’re going to want to look at what Brian was talking about, looking at your traffic. Let’s look at your leads, your conversion. That’s really the big thing because it’s really, how are we going to fill up that pipeline, and what does that look like? More traffic to your website, and we can convert them better, and then, we can get them into leads. And let’s close the loop, like he said. Let’s figure out what our marketing activities are doing to actually really generate sales and really do that. So anyways, thanks again for watching. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a review. If you’re on social media, share, like, comment, all that great stuff. If you have any questions, reach out to us at IndustrialSage.com/questions. We’d love to answer them for you. And thanks again for watching. I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage.

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Hello, and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Tom Ryden. He is the executive director of MassRobotics all the way up in Massachusetts. Tom, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m very excited to learn more about your organization. I’ve heard a lot about it and what’s going on. We’ve had some previous guests here. So just thank you so much for joining me today.

Well, thanks for having me. Really excited to talk a little bit about MassRobotics and robotics in general.

So real quick, if you could just give me a quick synopsis, a high level of MassRobotics. What do you guys do?

Sure. So MassRobotics is an independent non-profit. Our mission is to support and grow the robotics, AI, IoT industry and really support it and see the adoption of this type of technology.

Excellent. Well, there’s those– we all know that’s huge, lots of digital transformation happening right now relative to all those spaces. So I’m excited to learn more about your organization, what you guys are doing, how you guys are helping companies. But before we jump into that, I just want to get in to learn a little bit more about you, about Tom. So Tom, tell me, how did you get into this space?

So I’ve actually been in robotics for a long time. I’ve been in automation, first with chemical automation, things like that, autosamplers, but got into robotics through an interesting story. A friend of mine had a small company doing ground robots and got an offer to be acquired by an up-and-coming young company at the time called ISR. So we chatted a little bit about it, and I was fascinated by this young company which turned out to be iRobot. And so they ended up acquiring his company. I ended up joining iRobot because I thought the mission, what they were trying to do was really fascinating. And I was there for a number of years and saw some great growth in that company and through the robotics that they developed and then, went on to start some other robotics companies. I sold my last company and was thinking about retiring, taking some time off, and a couple of folks from the industry came and said hey, we’re starting this new non-profit. Would you be interested in helping out? And that was five years ago, so I just have been doing it and loving it. It’s a great way to get exposed to so much different types of technology and really try to help these young companies get going.

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. How did you get into robotics before that? Was it something that you studied? Was it something as a kid that you were interested in? What was that aha moment for you?

Yeah, so my background is in engineering, electrical engineering initially. It was a unique way of– I love seeing things move and being able to make things move. And so I was not always in the kind of science fiction type of thing. One of the cofounders of iRobot, Helen, talks about her experiences when she was young and seeing the first robots coming out of some of the movies. That wasn’t really my background. I was just enjoying the mechanical… making things move… and then had an opportunity to do that and, from a young engineering, just enjoyed doing that type of robots. But when you actually get to make robots that physically move, and I ended up working on what are called bomb-disposal robots or robots that can go down-range and look at a device that might be a bomb or something and allow the operator to really stay far away and have the robot do that. When I learned, wow, that’s something that these robots can really do, it’s just a great way for this technology to be used.

Yeah, that’s so interesting. It’s funny that you say, you mention that the idea of, from the movie standpoint of robots, that wasn’t– it was more from a mechanical thing. It reminds me of a funny little– my son, he’s seven, almost eight. He loves robots, all things robots. I even found him reading some industry magazines that I’ll have. He’ll be going through those. I think it’s super fascinating, although he does like all the movie stuff. He came down last night terrified about robots who were chasing him or something like that.

One of the parts of our mission is STEM education because children genuinely love robots, and there’s so many great tools now that are available to get kids excited about a career in the sciences and engineering by using these robots and having them code them and make them move and make them do things, even starting down at a young age like your son, and we’re excited about that.

Yeah, that’s super cool. That stuff, I’ll have to learn more about that because I know he would, and I think my daughters too, would enjoy that as well. But he, in particular, has definitely got a very engineering mind, wants to know how things work and gets very frustrated if he doesn’t know, wants to get driving in deeper. Anyways, I digress. So throughout your career, you mentioned you had sold a business before. So tell me a little bit about that. You mentioned you were involved with iRobot. Somewhere down the line, you started a business, then you sold it. What did that look like?

Yeah, so I joined iRobot when they were fairly small, a bunch of engineers above a donut shop just outside of MIT, and stayed with them through the growth and then, through eventually the IPO. And then, after the IPO–I really enjoy the small company feeling. And it’s not that iRobot had changed. Colin Angle who is the CEO really did a good job of trying to keep that small culture, small business entrepreneurial culture. But I wanted to try something else, so I joined another friend from iRobot and another engineer from Polycom, and we started a company to design and build telepresence robots. And we ended up raising a significant amount of money from VCs. And that’s, in many respects, a blessing and a curse. I think it’s great to get that money. It allows you to design and develop the products. There’s also timelines, and one of the things that’s still a challenge with robots is the adoption, the rate of adoption. And so this was a robot that was meant to allow you to be in two places at once, allow you to have a physical presence and a robot be somewhere else, and you control it. And the adoption with that has been slow. It’s been growing over time, but not to the rate that a VC wanted to see. So they were encouraging us to find an exit. We sold to another robotics company, which was great, right in the area. And they continue to sell and manufacture that product. That was an interesting experience going through that.

Yeah, definitely VCs and all the funding, it changes it a little bit or a lot of bit. And like you mentioned, there are definitely pros and cons for that. So I would say, and this is a question that I didn’t send before. For those who are listening or watching, surprise, we send questions ahead of time. That’s a given. But over your career, what have been some defining moments? Or what have been some–if there was one or two things that you could think off the top of your head that has been a big, defining, shining moment in your career where maybe it was something where you hear these stories– oh, we were back against the wall, or it was something where you had a major technological breakthrough or that big aha moment. Did you have any of those?

Yeah, I think it was with the development of what was called the PackBot. That was the robot I was talking to you about before which was a ground-based robot that could do bomb disposal. We actually got into that through a contract with the UK Ministry of Defense. And the UK had had experiences with these types of roadside bombs with some of the challenges they had in Northern Ireland. And so they really had a great history and a knowledge. We came at it from the, hey, we’re smart engineers, and we can do this. And really, the aha moment was when we were spending some time in the UK on a range, and they said, “You don’t really understand what we do.” And we said, “Well, we kind of conceptually understand how you go and do this.” He goes, “No, you don’t really understand how this works.” And they took us and put us through some scenarios where we actually, one of our engineers actually had to go down-range to a car that had a bomb in it. And just really living through that experience gives you a different perspective of how to solve the problem. It was really around weight; we were trying to get– they had a requirement for a very low-weight robot so that it could be hand-carried, and we kept saying, no, this is as light as it’s going to get. This is truly as light as it’s going to get. We’ve done everything we can from an engineering perspective. And that’s when we went and one of the engineers put on a bomb suit which weighs a lot, grabbed the robot, carried it down to this car, walked back and said, we have to make this robot lighter because we can’t give that kind of weight to these guys to carry down. And so really just living through the end-user and his experience and understanding what they’re trying to do and what they’re trying to accomplish and how the technology can help really gave us a different perspective of how to approach that problem and how to solve that problem.

I love that; that’s a great story. I think that that can be applied towards anything in any industry. And you see that happening a lot in the manufacturing space, supply chain, certainly robotics, technology. You look at start-ups in general. I have a great idea, and this is amazing. But just because you can do it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a market or there’s a way and so, really, as you mentioned, getting in the shoes of that end-user, getting to experience what they’re experiencing, it creates more purpose. You’re like, okay, somehow we’ve got to figure out how to make this thing lighter because this is completely impractical. It’s just not going to work. I think it’s a great story.

I’ll give you another story. So I was on an assembly line recently. The company was looking to automate, and so we were on the floor looking at this process that an operator was doing. It was fairly repetitive, and we were talking about different ways. We were there for quite a while. And then, all of a sudden I noticed the operator did something different. And we had been watching him for at least an hour, and they were doing the same repetitive process. It caught me out of the corner of my eye, so I asked them. I said, what did he do? And we went over and talked to the operator, and they said, every so often one of these parts has a little bit of flashing or a burr in it, and we have to deburr it. And I have this little tool; I go psht, boom. So it went from a very simple automation process to something that, yes, robots could still do, but now we had to add a vision inspection, more degrees of freedom to be able to actually add that little step to take that piece out. And also, then, you look at the ROI because now we’ve had to add this additional equipment to do this one task that happens fairly infrequently. Does it still make sense to automate that? So really getting to understand the actual problem at a really fine detail is critical. And it’s one of the things we talk to our start-ups all the time about, how much have you spent with the customer, and by the way, go spend more time because nobody spends enough time.

Well, that’s awesome. What a perfect pivot point now as we go over to MassRobotics and what I think about what you do. And I love the fact that you say you’re talking with start-ups and that that’s something that you go look at. Tell me a little bit more about your organization, how you help. You said it’s a non-profit. You obviously have an incubator, or you’ve got space for companies to be able to develop. Tell me more about, why did that start?

Yeah, so really it was folks from the industry that came, and they recognized that a lot of technology was being developed in the Boston area. But those start-ups were going to different areas to start their company, and why were we losing them? There was a number of reasons, but part of it was having that strong ecosystem that allowed the start-ups to get all the resources they needed. At the time, Boston really wasn’t known for doing some of the hardware as much as they could, and so we formed this facility. It’s an innovation center. It’s not really an accelerator; it’s a shared workspace where our start-ups pay a fee to be there, but it’s a pretty nominal fee. So it’s less than if they went and rented space elsewhere. But in addition to space, we provide a lot of services and support that helps those companies. So everything from tools, software; just as joining, they get great software from Autodesk and SolidWorks and Altium and things like that. They get access to a number of different robots, machine tools, things like that. And then, they also, hopefully we can help them find investors, find customers, that type of thing. So really building a community where everybody can talk and work with each other and help each other I think is an important aspect of what we do.

No, that’s awesome. That’s exciting. You said it was started five years ago. Is that correct?

Yeah, so the idea came about 2015. We actually opened our first facility in 2017, and we expanded. We now house 56, I think we’re going on 57 companies in our facility. So it’s really taken off.

Excellent. Now, you’ve got an association side as well, so you’ve got that start-up piece but then, on the association side, what does that look like? How many members do you have in that side?

Yeah, so we’re not really a membership organization, but we support other robotics companies in the community that we work in. So we work with a little over 350 companies, and they are, as you can imagine, a broad range of robotics companies and IoT companies. But everything from large companies like an iRobot or Amazon Robotics down to the start-ups that we house, a lot of mid-size companies that are doing really fascinating things in factory automation, warehouse automation, things like that. And we are really just trying to get them together as a community, understand what resources they need, make connections for them. And then, we advocate at a state and a little bit at a federal level around rules and regulations to support the adoption of this technology.

Absolutely. Well, that sounds good; that makes sense. I’ve talked to a lot of different robotics companies, specifically in material handling, automation space, and specific to robotics, there’s been a lot of talk about interoperability and creating a little bit more standardization. Are you involved in any work in that?

Yeah, so we have working groups that do more of the technical or deeper-dive work. We have one on drones and autonomous vehicles. We had one on automated mobile robots, so think of the robots that run around a warehouse or a factory floor. There, we’re working on an interoperability standard. So early on, you would get one vendor in; you’d get one robot, and they would run through your factory. But now, you might have a pallet mover. You might have a floor cleaner. And you have all these different types of systems that are running. How do they interoperate? So you don’t want a robotic picker to go down an aisle when the floor cleaner’s going to be in that aisle because they’ll run into each other, or the forklift. So if there’s a way that all of these different systems can talk to each other and coexist on one location, I think that’s going to be a benefit to all of those suppliers of that type of equipment.

Yeah, absolutely, especially when you’ve got, it seems like a massive amount of new players, new companies coming in every day, solving these unique challenges that are a little bit more niche. But when you look at the grander scale, look at specifically about warehouse or some sort of plant operations. You’ve got a million different players. I know I’m speaking at a lower level here, but from a 30,000-foot view, that’s very difficult to be able to have all of– are you going to have 30 different systems? That’s certainly a big challenge. From your perspective, what are some of the biggest issues and the challenges that you’re seeing in the industry over the next, right now or over the next five years?

So I think in the warehouse and factory side, we talk a little bit about this, the number of disparate systems that are going to be out there and how to get them to interoperate. That’s an important part, and it’s more just the systems talking to each other, but also, just think about all the infrastructure. They’re going to need to be on the same network. Charging stations is a great example. Are there going to be multiple charging stations? Can everybody use the same charging station? Right now, everybody’s got their own, and they’re all different types, too. So I think there’s a lot that is going to need to be worked out as these systems– as you want to deploy them in large numbers in these different operations.

Yeah, that makes—

I don’t think there’s going to be one robot. There’s not going to be a one-solution-that-fits-all type of thing. You may look at a factory, and they’re moving a 6,000-pound pallet. And yet, they’re putting a couple of pound items on a shelf. The same robots aren’t going to do those two different tasks.

Right, right. Yeah, certainly big challenges ahead, that’s for sure. What are some of the great opportunities? I guess we can flip it a little bit. It’s a challenge; what are the big opportunities that you’re seeing?

I think really, two areas that we’re really excited about is the ability to pick. We talk about this; it’s such a challenge. There’s still human pickers in most of these warehouses and still on a lot of the manufacturing lines of things that humans can do. But of things that robots can do, the ability to have those two work together, almost side by side, I think is a great opportunity as that technology develops. So we talk about collaborative robots. They’ve been around for a number of years now. But their deployment is really starting to pick up as people figure out how these two types of things can work together, how humans can work right next to these robots. There’s great systems by companies like Veo and others that are making vision and other models that understand how the robot’s going to move to make sure that they don’t interfere with what the human’s going to do. And the human can operate in that same space. When you look back 10, 20 years ago, you saw factory automation caged in. So if you look at a traditional factory line, you’d see all the robots in cages. That’s going to go away. That’s slowly going away, and I think it’s going to continue on that pace. Then, we’re going to see these robots doing all sorts of different tasks in a very flexible way.

Yeah, I know that’s certainly a big challenge. You go to any of these large shows like a ProMat or a MODEX, and you’re seeing all the innovation and all the things that are happening. I remember, we had a client; they’re wholesale distributors in wine and liquor and beer. And you go into their distribution facility, and it’s definitely a very unique challenge. I remember specifically asking them, hey, what automation are you guys looking at to scale? I know it’s a big challenge for them. I was like, well, everything’s so varied, and now you’re not talking about moving a 6,000-pound piece and, then, something very small. It’s largely going to be somewhat within the same weight category-ish. But you’ve got, they’re very fragile, and the different shapes. It’s certainly, these are challenges that someone’s going to solve.

Right, and you highlight another, we talked about opportunity. It’s certainly the end effector gripper, coming up with a diverse set of grippers that can pick up the things that you talked about. And there’s interesting work going on with the software and all those different things that can conform around different products. But the human has a great ability. If you put an egg and a bowling ball next to each other, we could easily pick those up, from one to the other, and switch back and forth. To get a robot to do that’s still pretty challenging. It’ll crush the egg if it has the ability to pick up the bowling ball. I think that’s an area that we’ll see some neat development.

Yeah, excellent. Well, listen Tom, I think you guys are doing some amazing work. There’s a lot, it sounds like there’s some great innovations and some great things going on over there. So for those who would like to learn more about you, what’s the web address?

So it’s www.massrobotics.org.

Massrobotics.org, okay, great. So everyone can come check you guys out over there. Tom, thank you so much for your time today and letting us pick your brain a little bit.

No problem. Thanks for having me.

Alright, thanks. Well, there you go; that wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with Tom Ryden who is the executive director of MassRobotics. You can go check them out, massrobotics.org. So hey, listen, if you like these episodes, make sure that you are on our email list. You can go to IndustrialSage.com, and you can subscribe because we have a lot of great content like this. We have the Executive Series. We also have the Bright Ideas Series by Acuity Brands. We have manufacturing news; we’ve got webinars and all kinds of content coming out that you don’t want to miss. So thank you for watching or listening. I’m Danny Gonzales, and I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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Alright, so for today’s episode, I’ve got a really awesome story I’m going to share with you. I was on Facebook a couple weeks ago and came across this really cool video series called Artisan Series by Kobalt Tools. This is an amazing marketing tactic that they’re using to reach their customers by sharing their stories. And guess what? They’re not saying, “Hey, you need to buy from us because we’re the best and the most amazing thing.” They’re engaging their community, and they’re getting a lot of benefits out of it… So let’s go ahead and jump into today’s episode. We’ve got Jonathan Bradshaw who is the product manager at Kobalt Tools. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us remotely from Charlotte today.

Yeah, yeah, it’s beautiful here in Charlotte. I appreciate you having us.

Excellent. So for those who are not familiar with you in the audience, can you please introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about you and Kobalt Tools.

Sure, so I am the product manager for Kobalt Tools, so I’m responsible for a lot of the details that go into the products, designing stuff for our end-user, but also how to go to market with those products and making sure the messaging is what we need it to be to communicate that. Kobalt is a 20-year-old brand, but it’s also a private brand which belongs to Lowe’s, part of the store portfolio. We’re about to celebrate 20 years here in about two months. And we’re very much focused on user experience, so what makes Kobalt unique in the market is we’re building really tough tools, serious tools for serious jobs to get the job done. And we’re designing it in a valuable way, something that is very intentional for the customer, very comfortable to use, but at the same time a tremendous value. So Kobalt Tools really focused on the user experience from ergonomics to durability. Everything that it goes into the customer using the tool is what we’re focused on, that end-user to have a serious tool for doing serious work.

And that’s awesome. I just wanted to share with the audience a little bit about how we found you. You guys are dialed in on that user experience. I was very impressed; I came across the Artisan Series that you have. It’s a video series you guys have posted on Facebook. I came across it. I’m a newly-minted private pilot; I’m super excited about that. And so I’m in all these different Facebook groups like Private Pilots of America or whatever. And so somebody had posted one of the videos that you guys had done in the Artisan Series, and it was actually on a guy who was building a kit plane. And so, naturally, I was, oh, I’ve got to watch this; this is awesome. And then, I realized later, who’s doing this? This is brought on by Kobalt Tools, and I thought this is awesome. These guys are doing it right. And what was awesome to me was that you guys are talking all about your customer. And it was sharing their story, and there was nothing like, hey, get Kobalt tools today from Lowe’s or whatever. It was all about that customer, and it was telling a story. And I said, this is awesome, and so then I reached out to you guys on Facebook. It was like, we totally need to bring these guys on. I just want to hear about all of this, so for the audience, that’s how we found you guys, and it’s just awesome.

Well, what we like to think makes us unique at Kobalt is we start with the customer in mind. Our designers are intently focused on the customer experience. Our engineers, our quality folks, everyone–when we talk about our tools, we talk about the customer and then the tool that meets that customer’s need. And when we were discussing ways to go to market– we’re a large brand for Lowe’s, but we are a private brand. So we don’t have the large marketing dollars that everyone else has. We rely on some of the bigger brands to bring customers into the door, so we don’t have to worry about that. Now, it’s okay, how do we communicate to that customer? One of the things that we like to show is, alright, what is our customer doing with our tools? What are they using them for? And as we started to search out some artisans and stuff, we heard about Randy with the plane. We got people who build furniture out of reclaimed wood and all kinds of different things. But the goal of it was, if you noticed, there’s not a lot of product shots in there. We’re going to get our product in there; obviously, it is there to represent the brand. But out of a four-minute video, there’s maybe 20 seconds of total product shots. And it’s really about the user and how they’re using our tools to enrich their lives, how our tools are making their projects better. Building an airplane’s a serious thing. Once you go up, you’ve got to come back down.

Yes.

So you better have some real tools to put that together and make sure that you’re doing it the right way. Randy was already using our products. We found him through our social media. And that’s how we find all of our artisans.

I think there’s another great element of that. You found him through your social media, so you guys are obviously active on that channel. Now, I know a lot of our subscriber base, we’re focused on B2B, but there’s a lot of lessons to learn. I know this is B2C, but we’re seeing this transition. There’s a really great story that came out of a study that Google did back in 2015 when they found, back then, three years ago, or three and a half, depending on when in 2015, that nearly 50% of B2B buyers were millennial. Three years later, I’m guessing that it’s 50 or more at this point. And that’s a big lesson. So Caterpillar latched onto that, took their campaigns, and totally changed it. Now, Caterpillar, they’re not B2C; they’re going to be B2B. They’re selling these giant tractors and stuff. And they went to go tell more stories to bring in a more human element, and that’s exactly what you guys are doing there. So I don’t want to hear any of this, oh, B2C, B2B–it doesn’t matter. You’re selling to other humans. You’re having that transaction, that conversation.

Right. Yeah, so I guess the best way that we’ve approached it or thought about it is if your marketing is your blockbuster movie, you’re going to have your action shots, and you’re going to have all that stuff. We have a series called In Motion where it shows all of our tools in super slow-mo. It’s really cool; it’s really specialized. But it doesn’t tell a story. And for any movie, whether it’s a blockbuster or a drama, whatever, you’ve got to tell the story of the people who are using the tools. Candidly, you can only do so many slow-motion shots of a drill or of a lawn mower just slinging grass. It becomes disinteresting, but there are so many people out there using our product that are very interesting. Nobody shoots four-minute long-form commercials because you’re not going to hold a customer’s interest that long. But we can shoot videos because the stories are interesting. And we can tell a story of our customers. And if we happen to sell some more tools from it, cool. But this isn’t really designed to be a viral thing. It’s just really to connect with our customers and show them that we’re here for them and that we’re part of their story, and we get them, and we understand them. That’s what we’re trying to convey with the Artisan Series.

That’s awesome. And you guys are doing a fantastic job, so kudos on that. Talk to me a little bit about the inception. How did you guys come to that realization, saying hey, we need to do this. Did you just jump out? Hey, we’re going to do all these episodes. What did that look like?

So it starts with where we’re at with our marketing dollars in our company. We’re part of a large, Fortune 40 retailer. We’re a large part of what we do in the categories that we participate in, but we’re still overall a small company within it. We do have autonomy to operate, and so we had to look at ways to spend our limited advertising dollars, and connecting with the customers seemed like the most important part. So what we noticed in the tool world and across the board is that social media-wise, there’s not a lot of connection between what they’re putting up on the screen and what the customers are interacting with. So not getting a lot of likes, not having a lot of followers. And their customer response time’s also no good. So we’re less than a day in response to our customers. We have over 10,000 calls we’re answering. That’s not a ton, but in the tool world it is; it’s actually quite a bit. We’re really proud of that, so we’re engaging with our customers that way. We find we get a lot of really good product ideas or product improvement ideas. As someone who’s a product manager, I’d rather somebody who’s using this tool every day or every weekend doing their job or their hobby or their passion to tell me how to make it better. You’re the real-life engineer. We go with that, and we learn from it. Then, the decision was, okay, how do we in turn show our customers who else is using this tool and what else these tools are capable of doing? And so you start to get these submissions online of people like, hey, check out my garage; I have everything in the Kobalt series. I’ve got tool boxes and garage storage and lawn equipment and hand tools and power drills and all kinds of stuff. And so the customer starts to show you, here’s what I’m proud about with my Kobalt. Then, you start seeing people, they’ll tag Kobalt tools in a project that they used. That got it started. So you see someone, and they made this beautiful table, this beautiful reclaimed wood table, and they used a couple of different Kobalt tools. And they tag you in it, and you’re like, well, I didn’t make that table. Kobalt didn’t make that table. You did. But based on that, the brand was part of their project. We were along for the ride, whether we signed up for it or not. And we signed up for it by selling them a product. That was the manifestation, and we kept going with the idea of getting these artisans and seeing how people every day use our products.

That’s awesome. There’s so many lessons in there. There’s so many takeaways that I have anyways from that, that I think the first thing is, yes, you are engaged socially, and you are listening and being open to the ideas. I think it’s awesome that you are discovering all these different use cases and all these different, what people are doing with these tools. And I think that’s a huge takeaway for other companies to be able to think, hey, we may think– especially, I can imagine, as a product manager. It’s like, oh, well, we’re going to develop this product because over here, this is how it needs to be used. No, we really need to listen to what our customers actually, what they need and what they want. You see so many times that a product is developed because we think it’s a really cool idea, and it’s great, and it can do all these things. But the market, they don’t really want it. They want this over here. So I think that’s just an awesome lesson that you’re listening and then engaged in that community. You’re helping to build that, and if you didn’t have that, I don’t know that you would’ve been able to take this as far downstream as you have.

Right, and the customer or, for most of your audience, the other businesses– we’re in the B2B world–if you’re offering something nobody needs, you’re not going to move it. Let them tell you what they need first, and see if you have a solution or you can develop one for them. That’s definitely the approach we take when we’re developing. It’s extremely customer-centric.

That’s awesome. So what pieces of advice would you have to a brand that’s saying, you know what, we’re thinking we want to toy around with doing something like this; maybe we want to toe-dip. What piece of advice would you give?

Crawl first, and then walk, and then start sprinting. You used the term dip your toe into it. Allocate some money; spend a little bit of resources differently, and figure out how you want to talk to your customer and learning about what’s important to them. And then, when you start walking, you start realizing, okay, this is how the two-way conversation works between you and your customers. And then, from there, you learn how they’re using your products. You learn what they’re doing with your stuff, and if they’re modifying them or if they’re using them as designed, or if they’re holding them a different way you didn’t imagine they would ever do, but it happens to work. And then, you can run. And by run, I mean you create the content they’re interested in looking at. You create ways in which they can interact with you in their brand. The biggest challenge in retail, and I feel like it’s also in any business to business situation, is you’ve got to meet your customer where they are. It’s no longer about them coming to you and trying to find solutions. It’s no longer about them necessarily coming into the brick and mortar store or reaching out to you via your phone number or your email. You’ve got to go find them where they are. And so if they’re out on Instagram, I’ve got to go find them on Instagram. And if they’re out in “Facebook World,” then that’s where I’ve got to go. That’s the biggest thing is crawl, walk, run. Try something. Do something different. And then, continue to expound and learn and be willing to change. I wouldn’t jump into it with some huge grand strategy because a year ago, the Artisan Series wasn’t on our radar. It wasn’t something that anybody had thought to do or that we were really going to engage in. It was more, we were doing product shots and that kind of product-focused marketing. The Artisan Series was a departure for us, and it’s been really successful. We got a lot of engagement from it. Customers comment. We’ve been shared hundreds of thousands of times. And then, also the cool thing about the Artisan Series is the customer stays there. They watch the whole thing. They’re staying in there, and they’re watching the whole video. And so even if there’s not a whole lot of brand exposure to it, we’re engaging, and we’re getting their attention for a longer amount of time. And as anybody who markets knows, that’s one of the biggest challenges is how do I get my stuff in front of you long enough for you to learn about it?

Yeah.

And if you make something interesting that’s engaging, like you’re into aviation and you’ve got a video on aviation, and you stay and watch the video to the end to the point when you engage with us, that’s how you found us. That’s what we want to do with each one of our customers. And we’re going to continue the series into this year and work into different parts of the country and different fields of use. Now we’re running. So we crawled; we walked; and now we’re off to the races.

That is awesome. Such great feedback. You touched on a couple different elements that we’ve had in a couple different episodes recently, going to where your customer is at. And that’s such a big thing right now. You’re talking ecommerce or the brick-and-mortar, the retail, the omni-channel approach, that is changing constantly. And it’s interesting, the whole B2C buying experience. The way that people buy B2C, they want that same experience B2B. And you’re seeing those worlds really come together. So kudos, congratulations on what you guys are doing. You guys are doing fantastic listening to the customer, responding to it. You said a really big thing about engaging them. That’s a big thing on YouTube metrics, for example. It’s not about view counts and how many views you can get. It’s how long will people actually engage with that content. And that’s where it’s all going, SEO, all that stuff. It’s all about the content and engaging. So congratulations.

Absolutely. Thank you.

So we have, obviously we talked about this Artisan Series. We’ll put some links in the show notes. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’ll have those there. If you’re obviously looking at the website, we’ll have those there. You can take a look at that. If anybody has any questions for you, what’s the best way they might be able to reach out and contact you?

Social media, of course. You can reach us at, Instagram is @kobalttools. Twitter, also @kobalttools; Facebook, look up Kobalt Tools with a K not a C, and you’ll be able to engage with us. We try to respond as quickly as possible. So that’s where we’re at, and that’s where we live.

That is awesome. Okay, well Jonathan, thanks so much for joining us on IndustrialSage. I really enjoyed the conversation. And best of luck with the continued success that you guys have.

Thank you, and I appreciate you reaching out. And I hope you enjoy the next round of Artisan Series that comes out.

Yeah, we can’t wait to see it.

It looks awesome to me, so I hope you’ll watch it.

Absolutely. Alright, well that was another great episode. Listen, if you have not checked out the Artisan Series from Kobalt Tools, you totally need to do that. So all the links in the show notes; if you’re listening on iTunes, you can check it out there. On the website, you’ll have it there. Listen, a lot of major takeaways, so many. One big notable piece is being engaged in the community, building that community, being part of it, and listening, listening to what customers are saying, telling their stories, not so much yours. That’s a huge one. And Kobalt Tools is really reaping a lot of benefits by doing that. And don’t be like, oh, they’re B2C; we’re B2B. That’s coming together. Remember that study that Google did in 2015 and how Caterpillar found that. So take these tips; take that advice. If you’re thinking about doing this, which you should, remember, don’t sprint. We’re going to start crawling, then you’re going to walk, then you sprint. So thanks again for watching this episode. If you like it, we love that engagement on social media. Share it; like it. If you’re listening on iTunes, we’d love a rating. And if you have any questions, we’d love to answer them for you. You can reach out to us, IndustrialSage.com/questions. We’ll answer them on the show. And as always, I’m Danny Gonzales. Thanks for watching; this is IndustrialSage.

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Well hello, and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. Today I am interviewing Ethan Escowitz who is the CEO and founder of Arris Composites located all the way out in California. Ethan, thank you so much for joining me today on the Executive Series.

Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me, Danny.

Well, I’m looking forward to this and jumping into this episode. So for those who aren’t familiar with Arris Composites, we’ll start there. What do you guys do?

So we make products—

Okay, yes.

…broadly. So obviously composites are an important part of those products, and the continuous-fiber composites that we’re able to produce have the highest strength-to-weight ratios, which is why they’ve been used so broadly in aerospace. But we’ve really enabled mass production of these methods that really started in these very high-performance applications for use everywhere in all kinds of different applications. And in addition to that, we can make complex products that not only have continuous-fiber composites but also other materials like metals or plastics or whatever is required for the particular functional requirements of a product.

Okay, and just to set the scene here, how long have you guys been in business?

So we started in 2017, so we’re going into our fourth year.

Okay, excellent. So we’re going to jump into a little bit more about Arris, what you guys do, some of the problems and challenges that you guys solve. But before we do that, I want to do a deep-dive into Ethan, and I want to get to know you a little bit more and for our audience to get to know you a little bit more. Tell me, how did you get in the industry?

So I had been in the traditional manufacturing technologies that produce most of the products that surround us every day, the molding and casting and machining and stamping and things. And in around 2009, I started working with my first company that was involved in 3D printing, and that’s when I became enamored with the technology. And really, since then I’ve worked with plastic 3D printing companies, metal, composite, both private as well as working with commercializing 3D printing or additive molding technologies that developed at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and finding commercial applications for those. So really the broad additive manufacturing space is where I’ve spent the last 10 years. And that’s really, those two aspects of my background in manufacturing, the conventional technologies and then this new, advanced manufacturing really specifically additive manufacturing and 3D printing is where I’ve spent the last decade.

So how did you get into that before that? Was that something that you– were you predisposed to the industry in school or before that? Tell me that story.

So I had a geology degree, so the mechanical and materials world that I am in was not really specifically what my training was. I actually shifted from mechanical when I was in school to geology. And I ended up working at Ricoh, a printer manufacturer, and really through that was first exposed to biz dev and technical products. And then I got a lot more interested in the product design and manufacturing world and that’s where I started getting exposed to a lot of the different manufacturing technologies and the ways that you might make any product. And it was really through seeing the important interaction between product design and manufacturing technologies that I got really interested in how you can have a differentiated commercial product as a result of leveraging new manufacturing technologies.

And really, 3D printing was the space that, in the late 2000s, a lot of people were looking to, to unlock new potential. Medical, aerospace, consumer products, there were grand aspirations for where the 3D printing world might take many of these different industries. So it was the most exciting space to be in; it’s what I focused on. And some of those things have panned out; some of them haven’t panned out. The story of the last 10 years in 3D printing is a very interesting one. But that’s really how I found myself in this space between research and development and those killer applications for these new manufacturing technologies that comes out of these research and development efforts.

Excellent. So throughout your career journey, is there somebody or something that stands out in terms of, that’s been a big inspiration or has helped to shape a decision or influence your career? Does anything jump out to you?

Yeah, for sure, there’s a million credits, I’d say. I’m definitely an example of a lifelong learner, and I’m a big advocate of mentors. My Audible is filled up with books I’ve listened to and will listen to repeatedly. One specifically that has always stuck with me and is very important with my career journey is a lot of Malcolm Gladwell’s work, but specifically The Tipping Point was one that really intrigued me when you hear about the stories of these major industries that get to a point where there’s a significant shift that happens of some sort. One of the examples they give is the electronics, the computer industry, and how there was that major shift where you have Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and these individuals that happen to be very intelligent individuals that are at the right place in history at the right time and are important in shifting, in guiding these enterprises that come out of that. So I really took that narrative; I guess I read that probably around when it came out or around 2000 somewhere. This was always a narrative that I brought into the search for manufacturing technologies that enabled and unlocked commercial advantages in the product design world. So I would definitely point back to that as a very formative story, if you will, for informing what I was looking for in terms of a technology, an approach that could really make a difference, that could really make a major impact.

Yeah, no, excellent. That’s a great story. Yeah, I’m a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s work as well. And I would argue now, we’re at another tipping point. Obviously, this year has been a very interesting year, to say the least. And I think, obviously, there’s a big focus on the negative, on what’s happening, what’s going on. But I’d also say, I would look at the opportunities that have been presented. And I think that we are really at a massive tipping point right now, especially when you look at disruptive technology and the manufacturing–you can look at it across the board. Disruption is happening across all industries. But I think specifically, when you look at manufacturing, you look at supply chain, look at all these different areas where we are at a huge tipping point. What are some of those challenges that you are seeing in your space right now?

So yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there. First, the most important thing with supply chains and the manufacturing methods that are responsible for the majority of products that surround us in the world, you just can’t change that much that fast. So while I am absolutely a big advocate of a lot of the things that you’re saying, things are shifting. For the purchasing decision for a product that’s made 100 units a month, it’s very easy to shift it from one place to another. For the incredibly complex products that surround us in the world, whether it’s our automobiles where the bill of materials and the part count has gone up by tens of thousands over the last couple decades, and those become more complex, or if it’s our mobile devices where those are becoming even more complex, there is such a complex supply chain that flows into any one of those, it’s actually really challenging to make major product architecture shifts in those industries.

So that said, that is why for decades the fundamental way in which… take a car that’s made with stamped metal and tack-welded together on an assembly line: the basic architecture doesn’t change a whole lot. But there are those punctuated periods where you suddenly have a major shift. And that’s where things get really interesting today where you have, if we’re sticking with the automotive industry, very disruptive things happening. Electric, autonomous, new business models, incredibly important shifts in the businesses like fleets. And you can look at analogs for some very interesting indicators of what we might expect from an industry like that. Commercial aerospace was, in 1970, there was almost all metal in the planes. And between 1970 and today, it’s gone all the way up to almost 80% composites in the Boeing Dreamliner because, for every pound you remove out of the plane, it costs less for that plane’s operator to fly that plane. So total cost of ownership drives the buying decision of planes. Vehicles, completely different. Vehicles did not go through that evolution at all because, for the longest time, it’s just been, what’s the sticker price? How good do I look in it? Let’s kick the tires, and I’m going to buy it.

But with this major shift in ownership with fleets owning more, with total cost of ownership being more important, with autonomous needing these expensive assets to run as long as possible, then we’re actually shifting this major industry that consumed so many vehicles each year towards a business model that has a clear precedent to really considering total cost of ownership and not just, how good does it look when the buyer walks into a showroom? So it’s shifts like that, that driver from the commercial end, where the end-consumers’ buying patterns are changing. They actually provide us with some of the incredible leverage that these industries are seeing to change and do things differently and we can obviously see that with the valuation of Tesla and the way in which they’re doing a whole variety of things different from their predecessors. So I think your point is very powerful and very timely because, in some areas, we are completely limited by the legacy that’s come before us. And in others, there’s just these incredible shifts that have happened in a very short period of time and promise continued disruption ahead.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, like you mentioned, obviously, making these changes–you talked about earlier on, the supply chain where you’ve got a massive list of components, and you’re sourcing them from all over the place–but not just changing suppliers is a very easy thing. But you mentioned changing the infrastructure, the actual design applications of it makes it very difficult. I think it’s interesting, talking about automotive, for example, you mentioned aerospace there, too, for a little bit, that really that nexus of technology coming in, you’re talking about autonomous, and you’re having a lot of these cars, from maybe a buying criteria, and I’ll take my–personally, for example– I used to be not very excited about all the technology. It was cool stuff, but now that’s a big driver for me. It’s like yeah, yeah, cars, the performance is great and all that good stuff, but I’m really interested in all the different, how’s this thing connected, and I want it to interface with my iPhone and all these different things to a point where that’s actually going to be a motivating purchase decision. And it was, at least for me, specific, the whole CarPlay thing. I loved it.

Yeah.

That was like, I’ve got to have on my list. So looking at things like that, relative to how you’re actually going to go and design and manufacture that and say, well, okay, now we’ve got to bring in all this additional infrastructure and design into it. And you’re seeing that not just in automotive, but across the board where maybe we didn’t see this before. We’ve got a client that we work with in the lighting space. Okay, well, we have connected lights now. And look at the different kinds of data and the applications we can have there. So it’s kind of having to rethink not just the product design but also the application and the use cases which affect– you mentioned the business case and how to go to market and how to even educate market segments, whether it’s internal stake-holders from a sales standpoint to the consumers. And it gets very interesting and complex. I think it’s exciting.

Yeah, you get into user experience there, and I think that user experience– I’m actually in our factory adjacent to the train tracks, so—

Supply chain, that’s good.

Yeah, I’ll tell you, that’s the supply chain in the background. But user experience is incredibly important. And typically, when you think about the car that you’re talking about, as you put all of that functionality into the car, you imagine you’re getting more and more and more components. In general, as the user experience has gone up, the part count has gone up and gotten even more complex. We actually work in some interesting areas there where you take an example of a next-generation mobile phone that I can show you where we’re able to take–and take the device, but make the class-A consumer surface finish. It’s got to look very nice. But the important thing that really relates to what you were getting at is, if I look at the actual enclosure that we’re able to produce for these applications is putting this material that’s stronger than titanium into these incredibly small features enables us to make it thinner and lighter and more desirable for the user to help with those user experience things, but we’re also able to integrate–and you might not be able to see it very well–but you can see the wire leads that run into the electronics that are actually in the enclosure itself where these, before, were just machined pieces of metal or molded pieces of plastic.

So you’re actually getting smart structures that are removing components from the inside of the enclosure, putting it inside the device itself so it’s actually getting smarter. They perform better there; they’re more rugged. And your part count is going down. So this is a very simple version of that, but when you start imagining some of the larger structures that you might put into a vehicle where this is the highest strength-to-weight ratio, continuous fiber composites, running through that where within that structure, you can start adding some of those sensors and electronics–and you can actually see a cross-section of the truss with the wires that run through it–how you can actually not increase the part count. You can decrease the part count and get the better functionality and the better user experience.

And a great example of where we’re able to do this really fast is the drone industry. The drone industry doesn’t have these giant assembly lines and the long product development cycles and 30,000 parts that need to be designed in. So we have one customer that we took 17 parts in their drone and consolidated it into one, single part that doesn’t require all those separate, discrete manufacturing steps, doesn’t require all those assembly steps. And the outcome is higher performance, better looking than what they were able to produce before. But it’s because that industry has very low thresholds to make changes and has a lot of latitude, obviously less regulations, less qualification that has to happen. So that’s where you’ll see many of these disruptive approaches start to manifest themselves earlier and faster where some of the industries that have a longer product refresh cycle and a little bit longer design cycle will take a little bit longer for us to start seeing them on the street or in the stores.

But yeah, it’s funny you bring up the drone industry. We actually have an episode, I think it is yet to be released–I don’t think it’s been released yet–by the time this is released, it will have been– so I’ll put that caveat in there. But Ware, a company that basically, some of their big deployments have been in warehousing and using drones to be able to essentially take inventory. You mentioned you’re seeing a million different applications in there, certainly in that space. And aerospace in general, the lighter, the better. I’m a pilot geek; I’m a pilot, and I’m an aviation geek, so I love all that stuff. But yeah, the lighter the material, the more durable, the better. You mentioned in there with aircraft, or even the same thing with drones, you start getting metal out, then not only are you saving from a weight standpoint, but you’re also from a maintenance standpoint of having to worry about rust and different things will start going away. It’s interesting, too, when you look at, from a fulfillment standpoint, Amazon obviously is getting a lot of press about how they’re deploying all these different things between, from a battery manufacturing standpoint to get more efficiency, if we can reduce the components and decrease the drag, decrease the weight, all of this is driving towards actually making this a real reality that one day, we’ll have a drone that will be delivering whatever to us.

Yeah, a great example exactly to that point, this is a bracket that you might see in any plane. This is the classic-type brackets that the metal 3D printing industry has been working on developing using topology optimization which is software that, instead of taking what that bracket used to be which was simply two welded pieces of sheet metal with holes drilled through, it takes that essentially T-bracket, they would call them and then say, “Well if we have to transmit stress from up here down into these areas, let’s just run it more directly.” And that’s when the software does such an amazing job at making these elegant designs where the load literally follows the path. And traditionally, these weren’t done because making this out of metal would have been really expensive. So 3D printing opened up the possibility of shapes like this. But metal 3D printing is actually using much heavier materials than we work with. Continuous-fiber composites, you can look at it with a measure called specific strength and specific stiffness where you take into account, in the strength and stiffness, the weight of the material, and that’s where these continuous-fiber composites have the highest specific stiffness and specific strength and why they’re used so broadly in aerospace. So we’re able to use these ideal continuous materials in these shapes that have only been possible with 3D printing before. And the fibers actually wrap around the hole and then run all the way down the legs. And they can wrap around the bottom hole here, so you can imagine your fasteners that are connecting this assembly. The load is being directly transferred down.

We actually just published a paper with a top aerospace company where we were able to remove over 70% of the weight from these brackets that were made with titanium 3D printing using our methods. So that alone, for a component that might number in the hundreds or thousands in large aircraft, is a big deal when you’re talking about the future of aviation where they need to reduce their operating costs. And in addition to that, this represents one component that is connecting things together. When we think about a truss, that one bracket that I showed you is essentially like a unicell in a much larger structure that we can look at making. What if we’re not just bolting things together, but what if we’re making larger integrated structures like the large one that I was showing back here and using part consolidation to get further benefits in terms of manufacturing and weight savings? And to your point, these are corrosion-proof materials, so you don’t have the painting that you need to do and many of the post-treatments with a lot of metals.

That’s super exciting. What other industries are you guys doing a lot of work in?

So aerospace, obviously, has the most experience working with these materials. And the payoff in reducing the amount of jet fuel that’s used is extremely high. So because they are so expert in these materials and are really set up to digest a technology like ours, that has been an area that we have had a lot of work since very early on with the company. Drones are directly adjacent to it. Everything we’re doing with aerospace directly applies to drones and can happen a lot faster because you’re not flying people around, so you don’t have all of those qualification challenges. Really, the neat thing though is that all of these methods we’re talking about that are important for aerospace, they can apply to all of the terrestrial vehicles as well. And in fact, the reason that many of these aerospace methods haven’t made their way into cars and trucks and all the rest is because the aerospace methods are so expensive relative to the cost thresholds of automotive. Just a neat example, these are two brackets that look almost the same that I was showing earlier, and they are exactly the same shape, made on the same machine. But one is aerospace-grade PEEK carbon fiber, very high-performance material. The other is automotive-grade nylon carbon fiber, much lower cost, a little bit lower performance, but meets the thresholds of mass-market automotive.

So the nice thing is, we can apply these aerospace methods to these broader industries like automotive, industrial applications. Light-weight structures can be used all over industries. Then sometimes we’re looking at, how do we pack more strength into a smaller space? So we might work on applications like seals or different mechanical components. But when you’re packing more strength into a smaller space, that’s where we’ll do all kinds of things for consumer products as well. So you can actually see a bit of a sample part that we have, like a watch and some of the other parts that we’re able to put in an incredibly small package. The quickest elevator pitch for our technology is that we can, out of an automated molding system, get parts that have the strength of titanium, but they’re one third the weight. So really we’re able to hit the cost/performance thresholds you need for mass market, and then we have the weight savings and the strength. And those three concepts are why we’re really broadly applicable. So you were asking about industries; aerospace, industrial, consumer products, and a wide variety of vehicle applications are some of the primary focuses.

Excellent. Well, it makes a lot of sense to me. I imagine, especially in the vehicles and anything that’s going to be consuming a lot of energy, too, has a great sustainability story to go along with it as well, just in terms of lower emissions. Not only is it a cost savings benefit from reduction of fuel, but also from the emission piece as well, so it sounds like a triple-win.

Yeah, the sustainability– it is so important to look at the energy saved by the component that you’re making. We also look a lot at what are the material inputs, and then what is the end-of-life. So we can think about these three phases when we’re talking about the total energy embodied in a component. So we’re working, actually, with a new class of composites. So since the 1950s Corvette was one of the first composite success stories, so composites have been around for a while. But they’ve used this matrix material of super glue or epoxy that hasn’t been recyclable. We’re actually working with the next-generation of composites that use the recyclable resin systems. So we’re looking at, how do we get cleaner chemistries? How do we get lower-energy fibers? We can not only work with carbon fibers, but glass fibers. Then, to your point, in the middle when we look at the total lifetime energy savings of the part, you can factor that, and then end-of-life as well we’re working on some novel recycling technologies that can take the end-of-life products and give them another– taking this idea of cradle-to-cradle, how do you anticipate the end-of-life when you’re planning the beginning of the next generation?

Well, excellent. It sounds like you guys are really onto something. It sounds like there’s some cool stuff coming down the pike for you. My last question I want to ask before we wrap up this segment is, going back to what we were talking about before as far as some influences in your life, and you mentioned book reading and how your Audible account is very full, what are you reading right now, or listening to?

So I’m going to check my Audible, when you’re asking. I’ve got a bunch of the HBR’s Guide To; I’m always listening to those. What I’m actually excited about is, Malcolm Gladwell has the new Talking to Strangers book that I literally just downloaded, and I haven’t read yet, so that’s what’s cued up now. In terms of influences, I think that there is also no substitute for mentors. There have been, through our history, there’s a lot of credit that some really strong mentors have played for me personally and our management team. Carl Bass, former CEO of Autodesk who was an early advisor, angel investor, just continual sounding board over the years. Being able to have individuals like him help guide the ship and think through some of the hard decisions and give me the conviction, I owe a big debt of gratitude to him for that. There’s also, when we were raising our Series A, having a chance to meet Jeff Immelt, former CEO of GE, who is a partner at our now VC firm, NEA, who we’ve had a long-term, great relationship with. Having him share his background and starting his career in the composites industry in the 1980s when the chopped fiber version of composites were being adopted by the automotive industry and hearing his on-the-ground stories about what those major shifts in industry look like. There’s no substitute for great mentors, but the next best thing is listening to their book if you can.

That’s awesome. Yeah, no, that’s fantastic. Ethan, thank you so much for spending some time with me today on the Executive Series. For those who’d like to learn a little bit more, give us your website. What’s the best way?

Yeah, arriscomposites.com.

Arriscomposites.com, we’ll make sure to put that in the show notes for those who are listening to the podcast and in the notes for those who are watching the videos. Ethan, thanks so much for your time, and best of luck.

Yeah, thank you, Danny. Great to meet you.

Great meeting you. Alright, well that wraps today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series with Ethan Escowitz who is the CEO and founder of Arris Composites. Go to their website to check them out, to learn more about them. And before we wrap, if you are not subscribed onto our email list, I highly encourage you to do so. You’re missing out on some fantastic content that we’ve got other episodes of the Executive Series like this. We have the Bright Ideas Series by Acuity, which is very exciting, manufacturing news, and many other things that are going to be happening as we continue to move this train down the road. So thanks for watching and listening. I’m Danny Gonzales, and I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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