IndustrialSage

All right, so let’s get started. In today’s episode, I have Sonita Lontoh here, who is from HP. She’s actually the VP of Global Marketing for HP under their 3D Printing and Digital Manufacturing Division. Sonita, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you very much for having me.

So, long title, there’s a lot going on there. So, maybe tell me a little bit about what your role is there at HP with the 3D printing and digital manufacturing.

All right, so I joined HP about a year ago doing global marketing for this new business, and actually, I’ve always been interested in the intersection of new technology, the business model, and policies, and my experience has been really diverse, from the entrepreneurial, to venture-backed Silicon Valley companies, to Fortune Global 100 companies, and my role and responsibilities here really is to position HP as that trusted solutions leader that helps our industrial customers, industrial manufacturing customers, succeed in their digital manufacturing journey, and when you think about it, that’s actually quite a departure from the core historical of who HP is, ’cause I think most people know HP mainly as a consumer and commercial human technology company, but this new foray, this new business into 3D printing and digital manufacturing is slightly different than the traditional HP, right? As probably your audience knows in the world of industrial manufacturing, it is not enough, I would say, for a technology company to only be viewed as a hardware technology vendor, but it more important for the company to be viewed as that trusted solutions leader that actually has the expertise in the end-to-end solutions, namely hardware technology, software, and services, to help the industrial customer succeed in their journey.

Because, at the end of the day, when you think about it, customers want to apply new technologies such as 3D printing or digital manufacturing to really achieve benefits. And, there are many benefits of 3D printing, but, in general, I would summarize them into three things. The first is to help our industrial customers achieve operational efficiencies for their own manufacturing operations internally. Second, to help our industrial customers to be able to provide superior customer experience for their end consumers, externally. And, last, which is usually the hardest, especially for big, incumbent manufacturers, is to create new business models and new revenue streams that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. And so, a lot of my marketing activities here at HP really focus on developing the strategies and executing on a multi-problem, multi-channel marketing plan, then position HP as that trusted solutions leader.

Excellent, yeah, and this whole digital transformation piece that’s happening is just rapidly evolving. The manufacturers, industrial companies as we know it, and I think the whole 3D printing aspect in particular is very fascinating. We’re seeing a lot of manufacturers that are very excited about it, for many, many reasons. So, on that note, maybe we can jump into a little bit of, maybe some interesting innovations, or the different applications that you’re seeing that you’re rolling out with your solutions.

Great, and I’m glad you’re asking about applications, because, I think in this world of 3D printing and digital manufacturing, hey, great to have technology, but at the end of the day, what kind of applications that eventually deliver benefits that you can enable? So, there are many applications, Danny, that can be enabled by 3D printing, ranging from automotive, to aerospace, to medical, to consumer products. You name it, it’s really endless. When you look at 3D printing, it’s really being used for three things. The first is for functional prototyping, the second is for manufacturing aids, and the third, which is the most important, is actually for final parts productions. And, for those in the audience who may not be familiar, 3D printing has actually been around for 30 years, but in the past, it had been primarily been used only for prototyping. But, in the past few years, with the advancement of the technology and also the knowledge, we have seen more and more use of 3D printings for industrial manufacturing applications.

So 3D printing, in the role of industrial manufacturing, enables three cool things. The first, it enables new geometries that wouldn’t be possible. The second, it enabled new part properties, that also wouldn’t be possible otherwise. And, the third thing, it also enabled new mass customizations that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. So, here, I would actually like to share with the audience this Apple, and probably you cannot see the whole thing, but this is a 3D-printed iPhone case right here, as you can see, the whole thing was 3D printed. It was a lattice structure, and it has actually my name embossed on it. And, another interesting application of 3D printing that leverage mass customization is eyewear that can be 3D printed to best fit your head and your face. And then, dental liners can be 3D printed, as well to best fit your teeth and your mouth. Like Invisalign, and Smile Direct, and all those dental liner companies. And, last but not least, orthotics and prosthetics that can be 3D printed and personalized to best fit your body.

And so, while a lot of these more consumer-oriented and medical products are interesting, HP is also focusing on industrial applications, especially in automotive. And, with the advent of new automotive platforms, especially for electric vehicles and for autonomous vehicles, there will be many automotive parts that will be 3D printed, and why is that? And, the reason is because when you start going to electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles, it’s actually a big advantage for parts to be 3D printed, because one, it reduces the weight of the car, and then, second, because of that, it increases the car efficiencies, and then, last but not least, if you have customized, 3D-printed interiors inside the car, it provides superior customer experience for the end consumer. So, in this particular area, we’re working with many ecosystem partners, including leading companies like Volkswagen. They’re actually the largest auto company in the world, and we’re working with these ecosystem partners and customers who look to leverage our technology to help them, within their digital manufacturing journey.

Absolutely, that’s fantastic. So many different applications. I can see how that, it’s kind of endless. I know one area in particular I’m curious about, as far as the different materials that you’re able to do. I’m hearing a lot that metal is starting to be a big area. Do you have anything like that in the future coming down?

Oh, actually, we at HP, we did launch this business three years ago, primarily with polymer, with plastics. However, last year, Danny, we actually launched our metals business, so the metals technology. The printer itself is not ready yet, but it will be ready by the end of next year. However, we are, today, already enabling those customers who are interested to actually 3D print metals, for production, through some of our production partners. So, to answer your question, material’s actually one of these most important factors to enable industrial 3D printing, and again, I don’t want to bore the audience with regard to all the different technical materials, but even when you say plastic, there is PA12, PA12 glass beads, PA11, there’s all types of plastics materials depending on the applications. And, the same thing with metals. So, materials, it’s really one of the enabler, actually, to make 3D printing more industrial.

That’s super exciting, and I love that, I could geek out this all day, but let’s move a little bit into the sales and marketing aspect in terms of rolling out this new solution which is a little bit of a newer approach for HP. How are you guys building that demand, and really go about it from an awareness standpoint?

Yeah, great question, and actually, the way I would view it is really a journey, so it is new to HP, definitely, this whole industrial approach to marketing, but 3D printing and digital manufacturing itself is still an emerging new technology, as well, to industrial manufacturers. So, it’s like new, new, everything is new, and everything is evolving, everything is emerging. And, so the approach to marketing, I would say, is very different from the marketing approaches for an established category, because this category is not established yet, in the mainstream, at least. Even for industrial manufacturers. So, really, a lot of our marketing strategies and activities are focusing on three pillars, Danny.

So, the first pillar is what I would call building the market, and creating awareness. So, building the market is actually important, because, again, the market is emerging, right? And so, for that, a lot of our activities are focusing on building these multi-channel, multi-touch marketing plans that really showcased all the possibilities and all the benefits that 3D printing can deliver. And then, in addition to that, we also showcase our thought leadership, because, again, it’s an emerging area, so a leader such as HP has to have a point of view, of what does digital manufacturing mean, and what kind of benefits, and how does it fit in with all of the other advanced technologies in manufacturing, but we also showcase our thought leadership with industry analysts, industry influencers, and the ecosystem partners and customers.

And then, the second pillar is what I would call showcase our customer successes. This is like customer advocacy, as I would say, the audience probably understands, in the industrial world, nothing speaks louder than the customer’s success. As a technology provider, you can say all you want, but until a customer that I think his or her peers respect, shares something, probably shares their best practices, lessons learned, how they’re leveraging our technology to deliver benefits for them and to achieve their business objectives, I just don’t think… I cannot say enough about the importance, really, about customer advocacy. So, in marketing, we work hard to document and also showcase all of these customer successes, be it through our videos, our case studies. We let our customers present at industry events. We do webinars together. We do a lot of things to really let the customer shine, because, at the end of the day, that’s how you showcase that you’re actually delivering value.

And then, the last thing, the last pillar, is what I would call the educating market and creating demand. So, again, because 3D printing is still relatively new, but, actually, for manufacturers, to truly benefit from 3D printing, they have to know how to design the product for 3D printing. So if they are only 3D printing a product that was traditionally designed for traditional manufacturing, they wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the full value. So, because of that, we do a lot of workshops. It’s called Design for Additive Manufacturing. We also have digital minds consulting services where we try to change people’s minds, work with potential customers and partners to teach them which applications would be a good fit for them. To adopt 3D printing, helping them to build the business case, the technical case, and so on, and so forth. So that’s what a lot of that we do in terms of creating demand in the market.

That’s fantastic, that’s great. You know, I love the approach there. Especially, you talked about, at the very beginning, in terms of building that market. Big word, we throw it around a lot, omni channel, but really at the end of the day, it so important, I think, with a lot of our audience members, too, just to think the way that we buy has changed, and it’s very different, and it’s important to make sure that’s it’s not necessarily one channel, that it’s across the board. And, you had to have that message, but it’s packaged in different ways across how the different type of content and that media is best communicated. So, and then I love the customer success pieces. Testimonials, obviously, case studies in the advocacy piece are important, but one thing that I thought was interesting that I think that a lot of, some of our audience sometimes, we tend to forget a little bit, is the best practices piece. Here, let’s share that story, here’s the ROI, great thing, but hey, here’s the lessons learned. Here’s how you might want to be set up for success over here, and I think that’s very, very valuable.

Yeah, and actually, just to pound on that a little bit, Danny, because again, as I said, digital manufacturing is actually a journey, because it’s still not mainstream, and each customer is different, because they have a different sets of challenges and opportunities, and some customers might start in one way, and they want to focus on certain applications, others may want to start other ways, and other sets of applications, but the point is, I think, for HP, is no matter where the customer starts his or her journey, that we have the comprehensive and integrated solutions and expertise and also other customers that can share their best practices and their lessons learned to help the other customers succeed in their own journey.

Absolutely, and I think that’s part of that enablement piece, I think, to be able to, because the reality of it is, making some of these transitions, it can be fearful. Is this going to work? Is it not? And so, just to help to be able to minimize those barriers.

Yeah, so in a way, this is actually a form of digital transformation for the manufacturing process. I know digital transformation is this word that everyone throws out there, right? But, truly, for me, this is an example of a digital transformation for the manufacturing sector.

Absolutely, and a lot going on there. So, it sounds like there’s a lot of things that you guys have on the horizon. What’s next, what’s that big, next exciting thing that’s coming down the road for HP?

Man, there are so many things. This business moves so fast. I think we, of course, we keep improving our systems, and right now, as I’ve mentioned to you, we understand that it’s not all just about the hardware technology. We understand it’s about the end-to-end solutions, which means, the hardware, the materials, the software, the services. And, I think what is really big for us right now, we also understand that you cannot do it all by yourself. I think each ecosystem partner has a role in it, and that’s why we have, I’m not going to mention each one, but we have a set of ecosystem partners that we really work with closely, in order to be able to deliver, at the end of the day, that end to end solution.

So, for an example, actually, about three weeks ago, I think we announced the expansion of our alliance with Siemens. Of course, as you know, Siemens is one of the leading digital industrial companies. And, what we did is, we expanded our alliance to make sure that our additive manufacturing systems are actually integrated within the Siemens end-to-end factory solutions. Because they have it from the design to the engineering, to the manufacturing, to the production, all the way to connecting to the digital twin and their MindSphere industrial IOT platform. And so, I think for HP, we’re realizing that in order to truly transform digital manufacturing, deliver benefits to our customers, we have to make sure that our system can be integrated within an end-to-end factory workflow. So, many things coming, of course, more materials, more applications, but also ensuring that our system can integrate within the larger digital factory environment.

Exactly, yeah. It’s a big team approach, it’s not just one and done. Not just one. You are stronger together, and it takes all the different partners to do this, yeah, absolutely.

Yep, yep.

Excellent. Well, Sonita, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really am very thankful for you for coming on IndustrialSage. If anybody would love to learn more about your solutions or have any questions for you, what’s the best way to get in touch?

Yeah, I would say the best way is to actually, to get in touch with me, I have a LinkedIn profile, which is my name, Sonita Lontoh, and I have a Twitter, @slontoh. But, if you’re interested to learn more about HP Solutions, go to hp.com and click on 3D Printing.

Excellent, a lot of ways to get a hold of you guys. So, you got the omnichannel thing going on, that’s great. Sonita, thank you again, so much, for coming on, and sharing this information with us.

Thank you very much, and hopefully, it’s useful.

I think it’ll be very useful, thanks so much. So, there you go. Great episode here with IndustrialSage, again, with Sonita Lontoh from HP. There’s a lot of great things, at least for me, that I feel like we were able to unpack on here, and one thing that I mentioned, she mentioned three pillars from the market, and there’s some subsets there, and one being building that market, the next piece is showcasing success, and that customer advocacy piece. In particular in that, I loved the aspect of not just sharing those stories and that ROI and that case study. We know that’s really important, but also helping to share some of those best practices, and those learnings. So, particularly in a market where we are looking to, it’s an emerging market. Where, maybe not everyone is used to it, there’s a lot of fear, and maybe a little bit of trepidation that we can go, and say, “Look, here’s some ways that we can enable you “to really roll out with this, “successfully, as much as we can.” I think that was fantastic. And then, obviously, educating the market, and really helping to create that demand, and really being those thought leaders and putting out that content.

So, a lot of great things to unpack here. Hopefully, you have one or two key takeaways that you can implement, as you think about this today. And, that’s all I’ve got for you today on this episode. Thanks for watching, if you have any questions, you can reach out to us at industrialsage.com/questions. We’d love to answer them for you. If you’re listening on any of the podcasting stations, we’d love a review. Social media, share our stuff, we’d love it. Share the love. So, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks so much for watching, or listening, depending on how you’re consuming this. I’ll catch you next week, I’m Danny Gonzales, and this is IndustrialSage.

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Hello, and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by the CEO and founder of Vecna Robotics, and also the co-founder and president of Mass Robotics, Daniel Theobald. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today on IndustrialSage.

My pleasure.

So before we jump into everything here, I would love for you, if you could just give me a little introduction about who Vecna Robotics is and Mass Robotics. What do you guys do? Two organizations that’s got, some pretty cool stuff you got going on there. But what do you guys do?

Well, Vecna Robotics is the world leader in what I would call high-capacity AMRs, so autonomous mobile robots that move large items, pallets, what are often referred to as non-conveyables, so kayaks, tires, mattresses, exercise machines, all these type of things that our modern ecommerce society has going through shipping that used to be handled differently. So we are able to fully automate the movement of materials in a facility, taking them from point A to point B safely, reliably. And really exciting, the focus of the company is not just around these types of robots but also around the idea of, how do we really optimize the overall end-to-end workflow? One of the key learnings we had early on is that robots are just as capable of wasting time as human workers if not tasked effectively. So just trying to insert a robot into an existing process might not achieve the kind of return on investment a customer is looking for. So a big focus of ours through our pivotal software is around this idea of making sure that you’ve got the right resource in the right place at the right time and really optimizing the entire workflow through a facility rather than just trying to insert a robot into a particular spot. So that’s sort of the headlines of Vecna Robotics.

One of the unique things about Vecna Robotics is that we are very active in the area of social responsibility. From the very beginning, we have paid our employees to spend approximately 10% of their workweek contributing to community service in our local and international communities. Well, several years ago, myself and a number of colleagues here realized that there was a need for an organization to really help move forward the adoption of autonomous systems in the industry in a more practical way. And there are a number of obstacles that were preventing effective adoption of these types of autonomous solutions. So we used our community service time at Vecna to band together with others in the industry and co-found this organization called Mass Robotics. Mass Robotics is one of the largest, fastest-growing industry associations for robotics, IoT-connected devices, and their mission is, essentially, to facilitate the adoption of this technology by connecting innovators and end-users and investors and equipment providers, sensor providers, in more effective conversations and also through working to establish practical interoperability standards that can help ease the adoption of these type of solutions, as well. I think the short version of that is that the robotics industry is really where the computer industry was several decades ago, where the mobile industry was a couple of decades ago. There’s a lot of fragmentation, a lot of different people out there trying to build robotics solutions, but the standards and the interoperability aren’t quite there yet to support easy adoption, plug-and-play adoption of this. And so those are some of the things that we’re really focusing on.

Yeah, absolutely, and I can only imagine that, because of recent events, just really the demand, the increase in demand for efficiency and technology solutions and innovation across the board but specifically in supply chain and material handling has just gone through the roof.

Yeah, and I would suggest that really what we’re seeing as a big impact of this pandemic and some of the changes happening worldwide is that there’s an increased appetite for flexibility. Automation can take many, many forms, and there’s what I would classify as very rigid and fixed automation and, then, there is flexible automation which is the next generation of rapidly adaptable automation. And the point of that is that customers realize that planning for the future is harder than ever now. They don’t know what’s going to happen. It used to be that you could design a warehouse or a factory and expect it to operate essentially as designed for about a decade. That world is long gone now. And many of our customers have trouble predicting what’s going to be happening six months from now, much less five or ten years from now. So this has caused a real tectonic shift in terms of the type of automation people are looking for. They don’t want big, built-in solutions that lock them into a particular process or throughput forever. They want to adopt solutions that can evolve and change rapidly with them as their business needs evolve and change.

Yeah, and I think that’s a very interesting point. Do you think that, as far as the need for flexibility, do you think that was something that was already happening that was on the horizon before the pandemic? Or do you think that, is that something completely new, or has it just been accelerated?

I think it’s been accelerated. Certainly, this has been our thesis from the beginning. And I think that thesis has just been strengthened significantly by this. The trend in technology is always towards flexibility. Modern computer technology, modern sensors, et cetera have really allowed this to happen. It used to be, you’d go all the way back to the loom workers, the Luddites, and some of the first automation that came into the human consciousness in terms of humans, jobs, technology, how does this all work? It was really very specifically-built automation. You would build a machine that was capable of doing one thing and doing that repeatedly again and again and again and again. That’s what led us to the industrial revolution. That’s what led us to mass production.

Sale, yeah.

The idea that we could efficiently build something. Everything didn’t have to be an individual human being with their hands building each individual item. It was great; it brought tremendous prosperity to the human race as a whole. But we did lose something. We lost that flexibility. You go to the store to buy clothes, and you have to choose from a set of discrete sizes. Someone had built a machine to make this jacket that isn’t made specifically for you. It’s made for somebody sort of like you. The exciting, new opportunity we have with flexibility is we can regain some of that custom-made for you. It will fit you perfectly. It will perfectly address the needs of your operation or business because everything doesn’t have to be the same. So that’s really where this idea of flexibility is something that has been evolving for a long time. I think the understanding of how valuable it is in modern industry is really just being underscored now with this pandemic.

Yeah, absolutely agree 100%. We started definitely jumping in ahead here a little bit, which I’m getting excited about. But I want to take it back. I want to take a step back for a second because I want to get to know you a little bit more. I want to get to know Daniel and how you got into this space. Take me back. Was this something that, as a kid, you were involved in technology? Or was it just something that you picked up later down the road or you went to school for? Where did that start?

I have been really fortunate, and I realize this more and more as time goes by. I was born in Silicon Valley before it was called Silicon Valley and had some really great opportunities that, at the time, I didn’t realize were so special. For example, I had the opportunity to attend probably one of the first ten elementary schools in the world that had a computer lab and was able to use their Commodore PET computers, Apple One computers, and, to me, it was perfectly normal, like oh yeah, I’m going to go to school, and I’m going to go to the computer lab. This is back in the early ’80s. Then the same thing: in middle school, I got to learn programming as a young person and always just had an incredible interest in technology. My parents were incredibly frustrated by the fact that they couldn’t bring something home that didn’t end up taken all apart, sometimes successfully put back together. But more often than not, parts were lost along the way. Then, in high school, incredible opportunities to study programming, electronics, et cetera. And I was really fortunate that I was chosen as the top computer science student in all of California…

Oh, wow.

…and was able to attend a program at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab where I got to program, work on AI projects on, at the time, the world’s fastest supercomputer and there met some very influential people like Edward Teller who had a big impact on the way I think about technology and humanity and our responsibilities.

That’s pretty awesome. So obviously you’ve been steeped in it since day one. You said you were in elementary school, and you had access to– I think it’s hilarious, you’re talking about how stuff would come home and you would try to disassemble it and reassemble it, sometimes successfully. I remember getting, we got a– I don’t know what we had, some early computer back in the, this was early ’90s, maybe late ’80s. I remember messing around on MS-DOS and just completely jacking up the computer doing all kind of– I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. I’m just pressing; I’m learning little things. It’s very– definitely didn’t take it to the level that you did. That’s for sure. Somewhere down the line, has there been somebody that’s been a big influence on you or has had something that has triggered a pivotal moment in your journey?

Yeah, there are a number. Certainly, first I would credit my father for instilling in me the values of humanity and our responsibility to help those around us. That has been a foundation of my life from the beginning, and I have to say that that’s certainly where I’ve found the most joy in life is when you know that you’re doing something that is making the lives of other people better.

Absolutely. How did he do that? What’s a concrete way that you remember that he instilled this?

Yeah, so he was very active in Boy Scouts and so pulled me along through the Boy Scout thing. Service, community service is a really big aspect of that program. Not so popular anymore for a variety of reasons, but I certainly appreciated having that opportunity growing up. He would drag me to the house of widows who– I remember going to this mobile home park pretty regularly to do maintenance on an elderly woman’s trailer. I hated it, quite frankly, at first. It smelled—

How old were you?

Oh, it was over the years, so probably starting as young as five or six and, then, going all the way up through my teenage years until I left for MIT. It really was a great experience for me, not just in the fact that we have a responsibility to help people, but also we were solving problems. I had to go in there at a very young age. He expected me to go and look at something, figure out what’s wrong with it and come up with a solution. I really appreciate that because as I got to MIT, I have to say one of the things that surprised me, and I was so excited to get to this school where I felt like it would be a mecca of like-minded people who were just fascinated with engineering and technology, et cetera. And it was, but I was a little bit surprised how many people there just chose engineering as a major and didn’t really eat it and breathe it and sleep it like I did. So I was surprised when I got there and people didn’t know how a car engine worked. They didn’t know how to rebuild an engine. They didn’t know how to build a robot. So the fact that I had a very hands-on childhood was very important in developing, at least the way my brain works which is, boy, if I don’t understand how that thing actually works, I’m not going to be satisfied until I do. I think that broad exposure to a very wide range of different disciplines has been one of the key strengths that I’ve been able to bring to bear at a lot of these things. The innovation, the exciting opportunities, I think, tends to occur at the interfaces between different disciplines. I’m very grateful for that.

That’s an awesome story, and it obviously is a testament to, like you mentioned, opening up, talking about your vision on how you dedicate 10% of the time, your employees’ time, the company time, towards non-profits and charities and helping over there. Obviously, I just think that’s such a fascinating story on how, obviously, that has shaped you from the technology standpoint from a figuring things out mode and also that greater aspect of humanity. I think that’s, actually, a very beautiful story.

Well, and I think that one of the things I’ve learned over the years is that focusing on the greater good is good business. And early on, I took a lot of heat for that. I took a lot of heat for people suggesting that, “You couldn’t really run a company, a socially responsible company, and be a real company.” It was, maybe, a lifestyle company or something like that. I wholly rejected that premise. I believed that from…and I think that the other aspect is, a lot of times people feel like, “Well first, we have to achieve massive economic success. Then, once we’ve done that, maybe we’ll think about giving back.” I think it’s important and incumbent on each of us to figure out how to give back immediately, every day, starting day one. So the 10% community service policy opportunity that we’ve created for our employees has been incredibly successful from a business perspective. Attracting and retaining the world’s best talent, attracting and retaining people who are team players, who are uniquely capable of working within a team effectively and solving problems together, we believe we’ve really benefited from that over the years.

Absolutely, sounds like it. I love it. I think that’s fantastic. Let’s jump into– we talked about this a little bit at the beginning. But this is industry challenges or, as I like to sometimes phrase it, as opportunities. Obviously, there are a tremendous amount out there right now. We talked about– flexibility, obviously, was a huge piece as we look at supply chain resiliency. I loved your analogy talking about the industrial revolution, for example, which, I think, is fascinating. When you look at history and just how quickly, over the last 120 years or so, how much we’ve evolved technologically. Look at manufacturing. Look at the speed of travel. Man, the fastest we could travel at the turn of the century was what, 30 miles an hour or so? Then, when we had the Apollo missions, we’re doing 17,000 miles per hour, something crazy like that.

Yeah, it is a really interesting evolution. And I think part of what makes it both simultaneously incredibly exciting and somewhat scary is the fact that the pace only accelerates. Technology creates the opportunity for more technology faster. And this move from purpose-built machines to general-purpose machines has really been driving that. So the fact that it used to be that a cell phone was to communicate remotely with somebody and now it is the basis of our society, in a sense, and you can use your cell phone for just about any task. Not something that anyone really would have predicted, but the impact that technology has only accelerates. And so that’s really why I feel like it’s important for engineers to take responsibility to think about– not necessarily completely own, but to at least think about– the impact of the technology we create. This was really made clear to me when I had the opportunity to talk to Edward Teller at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, had a big impact on me, not necessarily anything specific he said, but just thinking about the gravity of the implications of the hydrogen bomb and all of the factors that would come into that. You can have a variety of opinions about it. I don’t think there’s any right or wrong opinions, but the fact of the matter is, we need to be thoughtful about the impact the technology we build will have on the human race. I don’t think it’s sufficient anymore to just say, yeah, we’ll build this stuff, and we’ll let other people figure out what’s right and wrong. The technology in some sense is shaping what’s right now. You think about social media. It’s just a fascinating issue. It goes back to this idea, we’re not going to be able to, we just simply cannot predict the future at this point. What is going to be happening five years from now? Who knows.

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s interesting, and I think that’s fantastic. Do you have a methodology or anything on how you, even inside Vecna, of how you think about… we’ll call it purpose-driven engineering or R&D. Is there a certain phase you go through to say, hey, let’s really think about the implications of this?

Yeah, I think that it’s a team effort in the sense that we are very driven by the idea of empowering humanity. Any products that we get involved with can’t be about just making money for somebody as much as it is how do we improve productivity allowing the human race to accomplish more than ever before? How do we make sure that that benefit is accessible and available to everybody? Our goal is to improve life for everybody on the planet. Sometimes that takes a little bit of time for the benefits to get there. But again, you think about something like the internet. The massive impact it has had on people’s ability to achieve security, safety, equality, access to capital, micro-loans, to end abuse and those types of things, far, far, far reaching. That wasn’t what the people who were working on connecting two universities over, connecting the computers at two universities: they weren’t thinking about any of that. They were thinking about science and building rockets and collaborating. But then this vast, positive social impact– and there’s negative, too. But on the whole, I think we agree the best positive social impact comes out as a side-effect. That’s the key thing is that the side effects tend to be far more impactful than the original reason that we were building the technology.

Yeah, I’d say it’s probably next, near to impossible to– well, it is 100% impossible, I think, to actually predict, hey, what’s the good or the bad or whatever for this. But I do like the idea of thinking about it. Certainly, as we get into technology and how rapidly accelerated it continues to be that there’s a lot of, specifically around AI and machine learning, and obviously robotics is being thrown in there. There’s a lot of, well, it’s really interesting. Is it one day going to be Terminator where machines are going to take over? A lot of interesting debate and conversation about that. I think that– I’m totally blanking on his name right now– Tesla

Elon Musk.

Elon Musk, thank you. I can’t believe I just totally blanked on that– has some interesting thoughts, and I’d be curious on yours.

Well, it’s interesting that you brought up Elon because he said something that I really respect not too long ago. When the Model 3 was languishing, production wasn’t happening at the rate it was supposed to, he Tweeted about how he, Tesla, was owning a mistake that they made. He said, “I made a mistake. We tried to over-automate.” Then he said that people are vastly underrated. This has been the thesis with which we’ve built our automation approach is that it’s really about empowering the human worker, not replacing the human worker. If you’re focused on trying to replace humans and go straight to this lights-out automation where humans aren’t involved, you’re not going to achieve the kind of results, the kind of value creation that you could otherwise, the kind of resilience. There are always problems. There are exceptions. This is exacerbated by the fact that the world is changing more rapidly. The types of products that need to get to consumers are changing rapidly. And so things are going to go wrong. Technology isn’t good at handling things going wrong. People are good at things, handling things going wrong.

That’s very true.

And so achieving that ultimate, that optimal pairing of humans and the technology is really where the key to success is. And so I was really grateful that Elon acknowledged that. Humans are incredible, and until you’ve built a robot to try and do something that humans do, it’s really easy to just believe Hollywood. I’ll give you one brief example. Early on– you mentioned the Terminator. We were working on a military research project, a robot to rescue a soldier from the battlefield. It was called the BEAR Robot. I was on an interview with the BBC, and of course the very first thing they said is, “Now you’ve built the Terminator.” I said, “Well, no, we haven’t built the Terminator. First of all, the robot’s objective is to help. Second of all, that’s Hollywood, and it’s important to understand the difference between Hollywood and a lot of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that surrounds these things compared to actual concrete information.” I was meeting with one of our program sponsors on this BEAR Robot project just to draw out this point. He said, “And I’d also like you to have the robot pick up this bottle.” It wasn’t part of the project, and I said, “Well, that’s not really part of the project, and to boot, that’s– ” and this was a decade ago– “that’s a completely unsolved academic problem, an incredibly hard problem to solve.” And he says, “Well, why? We paid for cameras for the robot, so it can see it. Just tell it to pick it up.”

“Oh, hang on, real quick. Let me just–” yeah.

Well, and so that’s the thing. We take an incredible amount for granted as human beings because we are amazing.

Yeah, the amount of autonomy that we have, yes.

It’s amazing. The computer doesn’t see things. The computer gets a series of zeroes and ones. And somehow, a programmer has to take those zeroes and ones and turn them into some kind of useful information to then make the robot take some actions. We are so, so far away from the Terminator or AI becoming alive and threatening the human race. Now, humans can use technology to hurt people. That’s what we really need to be careful of. But I would say, in general, my feeling is that we don’t need to fear technology for technology, the technology itself. What we need to do is go back to my original premise. We need to be thoughtful about how technology is used and applied and make sure that we’re not leaving people behind and make sure we’re not hurting people and make sure that the technology is helping to empower humanity, not create more problems.

Oh, great. Daniel, listen, I’ve really enjoyed our conversation. This has been fascinating. We’ve talked about a lot of different things. We talked about Terminator; we talked about having that human experience and really being thoughtful around design, around products there. But also, I love your stories about growing up with your father and just learning to help people and really building a company that can really be focused on, or part of a mission of doing good for people. I think that’s fantastic. Then, obviously, talking about Mass Robotics and what you’re doing. I think you guys are doing some pretty amazing work and some stuff there. So for anybody who would love to come check you guys out, I guess go to, what, vecnarobotics.com? Is that the right URL? And then, Mass Robotics, what’s the website there?

Yeah, massrobotics.org.

Perfect, dot org, so couldn’t be any easier. So Daniel, thank you again so much for your time, and– yeah. Anybody wants to—

My pleasure as always.

Awesome. Well, that wraps us up today. Thank you so much for watching or listening to today’s episode on the Executive Series here with Daniel Theobald with Vecna Robotics and Mass Robotics. Obviously very, very interesting stuff we talked about today. So thank you for watching or listening. Listen, if you are not on our email list, you need to go to IndustrialSage.com right now, and you need to subscribe. Why? Because you’re missing out on fabulous content like this where we talk to other executives in the manufacturing and industrial space, technology, and supply chain; because there’s amazing things that are going on right now that you need to know about. We have manufacturing news and a whole lot of other content that you’re missing out on if you’re not on right now. So that’s all I got for you today. Thanks so much for watching. I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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Hey, what’s up? Danny Gonzales here with IndustrialSage. Hey, listen. Today we’re going to talk about a little bit more around transactional ease and that customer experience and being customer-obsessed.

So if you have been following IndustrialSage recently, we’ve launched with the Bright Ideas Series. It’s by Acuity Brands®, so Bright Ideas by Acuity Brands on IndustrialSage is very exciting. A lot of great topics that are coming out on a weekly basis. This was launched back in August, and so it’s been fantastic. So one of the episodes that was released, maybe a couple weeks ago was around transactional ease. So we had Acuity’s, some of their website team on. Another one, we had– I think the episode was called “Transactional Ease” with their CTO and other people. And they were talking about just really the importance of having website– not just website design, but just the overall sense of making it very easy for your customer to work with you, to be able to buy from you. And that’s such a big, big thing, especially now, with Covid times right now, it’s been, obviously, very challenging.

But this is really something that, ultimately, is something that really was super important before. There was a lot of conversation around being customer-obsessed, being customer-focused. and looking at how we sell all throughout, really that whole process. Whether that’s we have no idea who you are through we’re courting the relationship, and you’re a sales-qualified lead and we’re getting you to the sale to we’ve made the sale and, then, afterwards, how do we actually facilitate that, that post-sale close? And it moves into customer service, and then hopefully they buy more and more and more and more and really looking at how we help to make things a lot easier.

I know in that episode, specifically, that we were talking about looking at the user experience on websites. So looking at ecommerce is a really big thing for manufacturers right now, especially with COVID. It was a big deal, again, before, even bigger now because trade shows and in-person events, all these things, have been greatly reduced or completely eliminated or canceled. And so everyone’s been making this switch to how do we sell virtually? How do we create this experience? How do we make it easy for people? And so what we have to do is really get into the minds of our customer and get an understanding of what their pain is, what they’re going through, how can we make working with us very easy so it’s, man, that was awesome. It’s like a click of a button, and boom. Let’s eliminate the amount of clicks.

So one thing that I wanted to show, a little show and tell today. This is a catalog. It’s very exciting. I got this a couple weeks ago, or maybe a week or two ago. And this is from, believe it or not, Amazon. Now, I’m not sure if they’ve done this in previous years. I haven’t seen it. That doesn’t mean they haven’t done it, but this caught my eye, and I wanted to share with you what this is. This is, basically, a product catalog. You may think to yourself, “Hey, wait a minute. We’re talking– you just mentioned, Danny, about ecommerce and how companies need to make that pivot in the– ” Well, yeah, but there’s also a thing where, we’ve also got an interesting thing going on right now which, again, was happening before, but we’re seeing it now, is the digital channels have, there’s been a massive rush to it. How many virtual events have you seen? How many webinars? How many Zoom conferences? You’re probably going through Zoom fatigue like everybody else. But even before that, let’s think of email marketing and all these different things. Those channels were getting really clogged. And so brands really needed another way to be able to get in front of their audience and think about this transactional ease thing.

Think about the audience who Amazon is targeting. What this is, is this is a toy catalog for kids. I’ve got a couple kids, and let me tell you, here’s what happened– and I know you know, and you can guess exactly what happened when they saw this. We got this sent to our office because we buy Amazon stuff like everybody else. But also, at my house we got that as well. The second the kids found this, it was nuts. I mean, they were tearing through it, and they were marking up everything that they were going to get. And it was amazing; it was so exciting. They’re, “Mom, Dad, we’re marking up our list, and we’re going to show you what we want so we can go through it.” Wow, that’s a $400 thing. Okay, I don’t know about this. It’s exciting. And so I thought it was interesting because, again, to my knowledge, I don’t think that Amazon has done this in the past. Again, maybe they have; correct me. Anyone out there who’s watched this on social media, let me know when they started doing this because I’d be very curious.

But I think it’s interesting to go back to ecomm, from an ecomm standpoint that they’re delivering through direct mail. They sent this to our mailbox. And they understand the audience. The audience is kids. Well, the kids might not, probably don’t have access to Amazon, so how do we get in front of them? How do we create demand? Then, how do we make that sale? Genius. So I want to unpack what they’re doing in here. I think there’s a lot of lessons that we can learn, even when we’re selling B2B in here.

So I want to jump in. We’re doing the document cam, camera one over here, I’m going to grab my phone real quick, alright. This is going to be a little bit of fun show and tell. Okay, so here we go, catalog super exciting. Let’s open it up, alright. First thing we’ve got, transactional ease, make it easy for your customer. Look, we can write a list right here. We already know that we’re coming up with stuff. Let’s make a list so we can get it out to our, to Santa or parents so they can send it to Santa or whatever is going on there. We’ve got recipes here for hot cocoa because, you know, that makes sense. Alright, let’s go more– some fun games. Here we go; alright, cool. Here are the games, everything, alright, and toys. First thing that you will notice is that there are– well, there’s first of all, what jumped out at me, is there’s no prices on here. That was like, hey, how much is– all that stuff. That’s number one, which is interesting. Number two is that there’s very few words. Well, our audience, not all of them can read yet. Some of them can, but still, I thought it was– It’s all very visual. It’s very simple. And it’s all image-based.

So how do you actually find out the prices and all that good stuff? Well, two ways: one, see this little thing up here? This is a QR code, if you don’t know what this is. I’m sure you’ve seen it before. Here’s a cool thing about QR codes, and this is something that can be really valuable for everybody. You can open this; you need a QR code reader. Well, iPhones, for example– I’m not sure about Androids– but iPhones, I can just swipe up, go to my camera like I’m going to take a picture and then, guess what? I go there: boop! It creates a little link. Look what pops up– Amazon, dah-da. There we are; there’s the toy section. We love toys. Alright, that’s pretty cool. I bet you’re really collecting some data on that. There may be some retargeting. Alright, so that’s number one. You can go to that; it’s on the main page. But what if I wanted to know– this truck here is really cool. I want to know what this is. So what you’re going to do is inside the Amazon app, you are going to come up to the, you go to the camera, so let me go here. Here you go to the little camera icon, and there’s the truck. And then, guess what? I’m going to press Start. Ooh, look. There’s magic things going on. And bam, there’s the truck that we were just looking at, $120– really, $120? Can a kid ride in that? I guess they can. Free delivery, wow.

Okay, so pretty cool. What do you guys think about that? I think it’s pretty neat. So we’ve got a bunch of other toys and other cool things. That’s essentially– there’s some games and some different things in here, dolls and all kinds of fun things. So we can go back to the main camera. I’m done with the document cam. So that, essentially, is it, a little bit in a nutshell. Simple, but a couple really, really cool things and a couple applications that I see very, very concretely for you. It doesn’t matter what space that you’re in. But a couple different things is, think about, wow, they’re going to print. And it’s direct mail. A lot of people thought, well, direct mail’s dead, and all this stuff. Well, no, it isn’t. It’s just, everyone has shifted over to digital. And digital’s still, yes, it’s super important. It’s really, it’s the merging– see my IndustrialSage things, stickers. It’s merging these two technologies. We’ve got digital, and we’ve got traditional print. And this is still super relevant, but it’s really powerful when you bring these two together, and we’re starting to see a lot more of that. You’re starting to see a lot more omni-channel campaigns. And when you have a channel that gets very clogged, email, electronic mail has been very cluttered lately, for the last several years. Have you noticed, maybe your actual mail, the snail mail… I would bet you that you’ve probably experienced a lot of what I have, and others: where that’s actually gotten dramatically reduced. How much junk mail do you get? You get way more junk mail in your actual email versus your snail mail. So that’s a really interesting opportunity.

The other thing that I thought was very, very valuable and interesting that works really, really well for you is the idea of using QR codes and visual scanning apps to be able to take you to product information. Obviously the natural thought process is saying, well, if you’ve got, you’re a large distributor or you’re a manufacturer and you actually have a product catalog, that’s the natural thing is okay, how can we merge these two worlds together where I’ve got this here, and I need to be able to buy it. How could I interact with these two so that I could help make that faster versus let me look at this here; now that I’ve got to go on my phone. I’ve got to look up the web address, and then I’ve got to figure out– what’s the product name on here? No, we’re making it very, very quick. Couple little swipes and camera snapshots and boom, I’ve got– you’ve got me right where you want me. So I can get that product information, and I can make an informed decision based off there. So I think that is really, really cool.

Another really great use case I think is actually post-sales. So imagine where you’ve already sold– let’s say you’re an equipment manufacturer and you’ve got this big, multi-million- dollar, hundred thousand-dollar machine. And you go, and you sell it to whatever company. And you go install it, and you’ve got to do all this training. You’ve got to do all this stuff. Then, you leave, and then, what happens? You’ve got to turn the keys over and manuals and whatever to the plant ops and then, they take it over from there. Well, what happens when somebody else comes in? Maybe somebody is using this, and there is a lot of turnover in that role. Or maybe you have a lot of 1099 labor, contract labor that comes in and uses that, and you need to be able to onboard them a little bit better. Well, instead of saying, “Hey, here’s a manual,” what if maybe there was a manual with QR codes that could take you back to some of these training videos that you could learn on how to do that? Or what if there were frequently asked questions with issues, technical issues that might happen, whether it’s maintenance or just troubleshooting areas that are pretty frequent that you can create very, very easily and very quickly content to make them happy, to make that transactional ease even better so that they’re like, “Wow, this is awesome. They thought of me. This is very cool. It’s going to keep our downtime a lot lower.” I’m happy because we’re making it a lot easier.

So I just thought it was great. I wanted to share this magazine with you. If you haven’t gotten it and you have kids, and you do get it, quickly throw it away. No, I’m just playing. But yeah, great way, great thing. I love it. I thought it was super cool, so I wanted to add that on to the episode that we saw on transactional ease with Acuity on the Bright Ideas by Acuity Brands. Anyways, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thank you so much for watching or listening. Like I mentioned, if you haven’t checked out the Bright Ideas by Acuity series, I highly recommend it. Check it out, especially if you work in any construction or industrial environments. They’ve got a lot of really cool solutions and stuff there and some great topics on that series as well. So, anyways, that’s all I’ve got for you, and I’ll be back next week with another episode on IndustrialSage.

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Hey, thank you for joining me today on today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series. I am joined by Ian Smith who is the CEO at Ware. Ian, thank you so much for joining me today.

Pleasure to be here virtually. Thank you for having me.

I’m excited to talk more and learn more about you. Thanks for coming on. So for those who are not familiar, we’ll start with this. Ware, what do you guys do?

Yeah, so at Ware, the easy way to explain it is we deploy self-flying drones inside of warehouses to automate the tracking of our customers’ inventory. So all the stuff on the pallets in the warehouses that the lay-people, you and I as consumers never see or even think about when we click Add to Cart, Checkout, and it shows up at our door, there’s an entire, obviously, massive industry that manages all of our stuff. So we at Ware tell them where their stuff is.

I like it. I think I see where you’re going with this. This is cool. Well, I’m excited to jump into that and get into the back story on everything. But before we do that, I really want to get to know a little bit more about you, about Ian. So take me back. How did you get into this space in this industry?

Well, it’s a saga. So I grew up in Houston, Texas. My dad is an engineer at NASA, and so I grew up always fiddling around with machinery, cars, and building things and just working in his shop with him. Eventually, we settled on building a model aircraft. So if anyone’s built model aircraft before, today you can buy a fully-assembled one. It’s really easy. But there used to be the hard way of doing it, which is the way we did. It was thin balsa wood. It was glue that you have to set overnight. I was 10, 12 years old.

Wow, so we’re not talking an RV-10 or an 8 or anything like that. We’re talking Ficaro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these– well, small, radio-controlled model aircraft.

Okay, okay.

So you had the heat shrink. You had to use heat shrink and a heat gun. And it was really, it was really difficult. And it was a huge test of patience, but that was my first taste of aviation. And, of course, in between that I would be going into the space shuttle mock-ups where the astronauts trained. So I was really lucky to be able to do that since my dad ran that building at JSC in Houston. And eventually I became a helicopter pilot. That was my first profession, commercial helicopter pilot, flight instructor. I was a new flight instructor in 2008 which, as everybody knows, was a pretty bad economic recession. I used to hold, I guess, the honor of having that on my list of experiences, and it was the worst time to be a new flight instructor. But unfortunately with Covid-19, I’m pouring one out, proverbially, for all the new flight instructors now because it’s got to be pretty tough for those folks.

Oh, yeah.

So in 2008, I pivoted. I spent a lot of time in aviation brokering jet fuel to corporate flight departments, the Gulf Streams and the Hawkers and all those things that the big companies fly. And I just remember, very vividly, in 2013 I was going to the grocery store. I parked my car. I was listening to NPR. I heard this story about drones and how they were a thing and that there were people out there using small drones that they built to make money. But unfortunately, it was illegal. And so that piqued my interest, and I didn’t realize that the model aircraft I was building that were so basic and used little, tiny gas engines and all the heat shrink in the wood were now plastic with PCBs in them and flight controllers and auto-pilots and all that stuff thrown in there, GPS. And they could fly themselves. And so I made a very, in that moment, I made it my goal to be in the drone industry as a career. Since then, I’ve worked at multiple drone start-ups on the software side, the hardware side, in the US, in Europe. I have a podcast about drones called Commercial Drones FM. And now, I’m the CEO and cofounder of a company that deploys drones, flying robots, inside of warehouses for inventory tracking. So it’s been a journey through many different types of aviation and aerospace, but there’s always been that element of something flying has always captured my interest.

Oh, that’s awesome. That’s super exciting. You’re speaking my language. I’m a pilot, but I’m not a– I’m a private pilot, so not an instructor or anything like that, or commercial. But love all things aviation, so your whole story, completely resonating with me. I’m not going to lie; I’m a little jealous that… you said your dad ran the JCS building, and you got to go on all the– so I’m up to here with jealousy.

That part was crazy. Yeah, that’s the one thing that I think is the coolest thing because you can’t just do that as a guest, going in. I would be playing around on all the equipment the astronauts use to train. There’s these zero-gravity– I probably shouldn’t even be saying this. But there’s these things you could use, and I would look up, and the normal visitors to JSC to visit would be watching this glass chamber. Then, there’s this little 6-year-old playing with all this stuff.

That’s awesome. That’s cool. So obviously, from a young age, you were highly impressionable with that, with your father– I’m guessing, is he a rocket scientist? I would just say, yes, he’s a rocket scientist.

Just a mechanical engineer. He’s really good, though.

Obviously, that shaped you. That helped influence you. Has there been any other areas or somebody that– maybe it’s your dad– throughout that have really had a big impact on your career, helped maybe shape that trajectory or just really inspired you?

The thing that comes to mind when shaping it is, when I was trying to determine, I think I was in high school, still. We had some family friends who actually worked in aviation, and I was considering becoming a pilot. I went over to meet some of them at their hangar. They had a big– it’s a big, public company, so they had beautiful corporate jets. I came in there just to get some advice, talk to all these old-salt pilots. They’re the guys that are flying around the executives of this company. I said I was interested in helicopters, and they all told me not to do it. So I did it. I was like, you know what? No. Helicopters are way cooler than airplanes. And so, yeah, in terms of that, I wouldn’t call it, I wouldn’t really say a specific person. I think I’ve always been intrinsically motivated. This probably stems from my dad who was always down in the shop tinkering around. I always have to be tinkering on something, building something, feeling like I’m doing something and keeping myself busy with my hands or my mind. And so I think it’s that kind of stuff that really drove me towards this and always wanting a challenge. And yeah, aviation is challenging. It’s risky.

Yeah, just a little bit. That’s awesome. So do you still fly?

I don’t, no. No, it’s really expensive, prohibitively expensive to fly a helicopter which is a bummer. Some people ask me sometimes, “Hey, I want to become a… get a private pilot rating in a helicopter.” I’m like, “Okay, well be advised that you can’t just get it and, then, fly at your leisure.” You literally have to keep flying in increments. If you stop flying, you can lose your license, and you have to go through the whole thing over again. So it’s really expensive to have it as just a hobby. $250 or more per flight hour, that’s after you’ve got 40, 50, 60 hours to get your license. So fortunately, I do have my commercial rating which is good for life, which is some weird loophole that for some reason, I don’t have to keep up with my flying. I can just get in any time. But unfortunately, no, I don’t fly still.

Well, I’m assuming you still have to do, I don’t know, some sort of biennial flight review or something for that. I don’t know, for the commercial rating, for efficiency—

No.

No, really, interesting.

If I wanted to fly, the only scenario is if I wanted to fly a passenger and get in the aircraft with me, I would have to undergo I think– it’s been a while.

Yeah, yeah.

I’d have to undergo something, and so I know that for a fact. I would probably feel okay getting in the cockpit with just myself, but I would still be nervous to take any passengers. So I’d definitely want to get a few hours of instruction and get all signed off again just to brush up on things.

Yeah, no, I hear you. No, I think that’s super cool. That’s exciting. So, well, let’s jump in a little bit more. I got a little bit of background in how you started. Tell me, what made you want to start a company? What was that thought, or was there a moment that you said, “Hey, you know what? I see this opportunity. Let’s go.”

I think I’ve always wanted– I’ve always been, didn’t know what I wanted to do. So before, I told you my glorified version of my career. Of course, you don’t talk about the things that were tough and difficult. In college, I didn’t know what the heck I wanted to study. You’re supposed to pick your degree, and you have no work experience.

What did you study? What did you end up doing?

At first, it was architecture.

Okay.

Which actually… I kick myself today because I just love architecture. I think it’s amazing in being creative and designing things and seeing it come to life. And people using it… it’s just so cool. Then, I pivoted to art, and I hated art because it was just, who painted this? Who painted this? What style is it? And, then, I just wasn’t into it. This is in college. Then, I left college to go back home because I wasn’t feeling it. Then, my buddy was like, “Hey, do you want to fly helicopters?” I was like, “Yeah, let’s do that.” So I did that, and I was thinking about doing cooking school, culinary school, getting a degree there. So I’ve always wanted to build stuff and create things. Flying helicopters just seemed really cool at the time. So that, combining my curiosity to build things and fascination with technology, it really motivated me, I think, to try to join– I wanted to be where all the technology was. So right now I’m saying this today, but because of all the Covid-19 and this exodus, a lot of folks are leaving San Francisco and the Bay Area. But still, it’s Silicon Valley here. So this is where tech is.

So this dream of mine, ever since I lived in Houston, was to work at a company in San Francisco. So finding the niche with drones and having that come up at the same time my career was starting, being able to pivot to that was fantastic. Then, being around start-ups, being around entrepreneurs and highly motivated people rubbed off on me as well. And one of my goals was, okay, start a venture-funded start-up in San Francisco. Raise over a million dollars. Say that you’ve done it and experienced that. You learn so much. So being a part of start-ups and helping build them was amazing. But also, with my podcast that I started, it’s also a business. It generates revenue. I’ve had public company sponsors. That scratched my itch. But, then, finally now with where I’ve got my co-founder of a venture-funded start-up, we’ve raised over a million bucks at this point, so that’s cool.

That’s awesome. When did the venture start?

We started Ware, technically, the company was started in January, 2019. But we’ve been working on this problem in earnest for over a year and a half, so 20 months or so, give or take, not that it matters, those four months. But in our relatively young life of the company, I think, yeah, every month does matter.

Absolutely. Did you start off– obviously, to go to the material handling space, supply chain, inventory management, did you start off that way, or was it something that you, through discovery, found your way there? What did that look like?

So one super cool thing that I’ve always loved about working in the drone industry is that– I wouldn’t even call it the drone industry anymore because it’s an industry that exists to help other industries solve problems. So there’s no drone industry unless you’re making parts and pieces and components of drones to build the drone. There’s drone services and things like that, but you’re always applying these flying robots and the software, the data, and the results that they can provide to an industry. So it was fascinating to learn, in my early days with drones, about agriculture, about construction, oil and gas, utilities, linear infrastructure, mining, everything. All those industries can benefit from the power that drones bring. And that was so fun for me, the variety of learning of those industries and finding and connecting the dots from the drone to the data to the industry and, then, figuring out what deliverables they needed to call it a success as a customer. So my fascination and my motivation with drones is that they’re applicable in so many scenarios and industries.

So with supply chain, logistics, warehousing, I had basically no experience with that. I did have a stint for a year as the general manager of an ecommerce company that focused on smart home technology. It was a company called Tink in Germany, and I was the general manager in the US for the expansion. That was my first taste of understanding drop shipping and of understanding logistics and fulfillment and the distribution centers. And that was the last thing, or the thing I did right before starting Ware. So it was understanding and knowing of this industry, understanding the need that they need better cycle counting. They need more automation. The need to– cycle counting and tracking inventory in warehouses has not changed for hundreds of years, materially, maybe even thousands. It’s still the same thing. The world’s biggest companies are having humans strap themselves into a piece of machinery, go up 30 feet and, then, use their fingers to count their products, just like this: one, two, three, four, five. Then, they count the bottom row. Then, you do the multiplication. Then, you know– it’s shocking.

I’ve watched one of the world’s largest companies have their inventory counted like that. It’s slow; it’s error-prone. These people who do it probably don’t like doing the same thing monotonous all day. So applying drones to it is a no-brainer. So to answer your question, I had almost no experience in it. But I love to learn about these new industries and finding out the ways to help solve their problems. And build the product and the service to meet the needs is one of the most exhilarating parts of this. Learning and talking to the people that work in those warehouses has been awesome.

Yeah, I think it’s super interesting, and it’s exciting. Call it manufacturing, supply chain, warehousing is really going through a huge disruption right now. It was going through it before Covid. Obviously, now, I think we’re accelerated by five years, if not more. But the need for that disruption has been happening. You’re seeing all kinds of really cool innovations and things that are happening. And I remember, when I first started hearing about the ability of deploying drones, UAVs, whatever you want to call them, to do inventory management and tracking, I thought it was awesome. I think it was really amazing. What are some of the challenges that you see in the industry relative to inventory and even Covid, maybe stuff coming out that you think that are going to be pretty relevant?

Yeah, so humans have become this liability in a post-Covid world or a mid-Covid world. They’ve always been, let’s face it, a liability. What if a human, one of your human workforce, your employees, falls and hurts themselves? Nobody wants that. Plus, when you tag onto the cost of that, then there’s the insurance to mitigate the risk and all that, workers comp, et cetera. So they’ve always been a liability, whether– every employee, as an employer, knows that themselves. With Covid-19, we’ve talked to some of our earliest users and customers of our product. There were scenarios– normally in a warehouse, it’s full of people. People are walking around. They’ve got lunch areas and break rooms. They’ve got all these– they’re all over the place. It’s not just stuff on shelves. In these big warehouses, there’s people everywhere. They were in close proximity, like normal, like any office, probably a little less close proximity than a normal sit-down office. There were scenarios where I’m talking to a company that, anyone listening to this would know if I named them, they have stores all over the United States, everywhere, thousands of them. And they had a breakout of Covid-19 in one of their facilities. So they had to shut down the whole facility. And it was not a breakout, actually; it was probably two people that tested positive, but you’ve got to take all the precautions. Shut down the full facility. Sanitize everything everywhere. A few days later, they’re back up and running. That probably cost them millions of dollars in lost everything, lost revenue, everything.

So the fact that humans can carry viruses that can shut down business is difficult. So that is a challenge that the industry faces that, I think, our technology helps a lot with. Keeping humans from doing all these manual tasks– humans are so much better at thinking with our brains and making decisions and deducing. And there’s so many other more– operating the machinery to physically move things, not just counting things and observing and looking at stuff. Counting, really? We’re so much more capable than that. So those same humans are being reallocated to different jobs in the facility. So, in some cases, it requires less humans to do that same job, but they can do other things. Now, I’m not even going to get into the fact that, of course, there’s automation coming for everyone’s job in the warehouse. That’s a tough pill to swallow. We’re not the arbiters of truth on that. We are not trendsetting on that or anything. We’re merely fulfilling the needs for the customers and what they’re asking for. So you might be, just listening to this, surprised that the vast majority of the customers we do talk to, their number one goal is not to reduce headcount, even though that is part of the liability concern with viruses that can spread so quickly now. But it is, actually, increasing accuracy, increasing frequency. The robots are faster, et cetera and so on. So the big challenges related to Covid and with robots, it’s so deep and vast I could go and snake around in any of these areas here. But those, I think, are the big ones that are easiest to talk about and understand right now.

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s interesting, you mentioned, too, that a lot of people that are not necessarily saying, hey, it’s a primary motivator or it’s the number one reason why we’re looking to implement more technology solutions because we want to reduce headcount. I think that, especially, if anything that Covid-19 has taught us, especially with supply chain and all the issues, is really that resiliency piece. So if it wasn’t better, faster, cheaper before– I mean, it was– now it’s even more so. So how can we add things into the supply chain that are going to increase that resiliency by increasing the efficiency? So certainly I imagine that running inventory the old school way would be done once a month, once a week, whatever. Now, I imagine you can just run that out on a, consistently kind of thing.

Exactly, yeah. Just to touch on another one of the big benefits, because it is interesting, is that the pace at which humans, and a team of humans– okay, so taking a few steps back– is that, if you think about ecommerce growth, warehouses have grown to these giga-structures, one million plus square feet, two million square feet in some cases, these gigantic structures that are a mile long. It takes you 10 minutes to walk from one side to the next. People drive golf carts and stuff like that in the warehouses. They’re massive. So imagine your job is to cover and count everything in that warehouse manually. Well, the only way to also achieve, how do you do it faster? You hire more humans, and you throw more humans at the problem. And it’s just really inefficient. So the speed at which robots, in this case, flying drones, can fly around and take pictures, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, up and down the racking, looking at everything and just be really quick about it is 20 plus times faster than humans can do it. So it gives, in terms of resiliency, it gives the customer unprecedented access, visual audit log history of their inventory, images of every piece of inventory in their facility, something they’ve never had before, at a pace and a rate and a frequency of which they never thought fiscally possible. So it’s changing the way that they can view understanding their inventory when it’s in a warehouse or a distribution center.

That’s interesting. I was curious; I was going to ask about what the pick-up on efficiency was, and you said it was 20 plus X, which is, that’s a good improvement, saying that facetiously. You mentioned that the way and the how that you’re doing it, in terms of imaging technology or taking snapshots and different things. So I would imagine, I’m just thinking out loud here, other benefits would be, too, if you’ve got inventory shrink issues or you’ve got damage, maybe there’s a shipment issue or something and everyone’s trying to pin it on, we all know it was the shipper, it was whatever. No, here it is in our facility, and it was not damaged before– I don’t know. I could see all kinds of use cases and stuff like that. It’s very interesting.

Absolutely. Some might think, oh, just slap a barcode scanner on a drone and fly it around. But we don’t believe that. There’s the old saying, a picture is worth a thousand words. So we want to take pictures and images. And we can tell so much from imagery. There’s so many ways to process an image. There’s very cool ways where you can generate depth from 2D images. So you can start seeing in 3D around what would normally be 2D. So when you look at that and compare, okay, just scan a barcode and tell me where it is, that’s– you’re delivering the status quo. While it still would be faster and, likely, cheaper as a solution, we take it multiple steps further. So now, like I mentioned, visual audit history, looking at inventory on a given date, understanding where it was, not having to rely on someone, maybe thumbing the wrong button when they type it on the scanner when they do the cycle count. Maybe they swapped the 5 with the 9 or whatever, the button below it. Then, all of a sudden, you’ve got an incorrect count, and you can’t verify it. So now, you have a visual audit history. So many different things you could do with images, and it’s much more of a rich data source than just scanning these barcodes that’s out there. So that’s what we really, really focus on. We talked a lot about drones and stuff, and that’s cool, but drones don’t excite me. They’re a means to an end. They’re a tool in the toolbox. They might as well be as exciting as a hammer. If you go in any one of our—

They’re a little bit more exciting, but yeah, I hear you.

A little bit, yeah, a few more moving parts. But if you go into any one of our deployments, day one, day two, folks working on the warehouse floor, and everyone’s just looking at the drone. Cell phones come out, taking videos. This is pretty cool stuff. It’s exciting, right? Week two, no one is looking at that drone. It is merely an appliance inside the warehouse doing its job and getting it done. So the big thing just to drive home, the point here is, the data is what matters. The drone’s not what we’re selling here. We’re selling the service, and the service involves inventory reports, accurate, timely, better than you’ve ever had them before.

That’s awesome. That is fantastic. So, Ian, I think I could probably go on and on and on about the aviation and inventory and drones and the whole nine yards. But for those who would like to learn more about you guys because it sounds like you guys have some pretty cool solutions, what’s the best way for them to get to learn more about you?

Yeah, just pop up on a web browser, getware.com, G-E-T-W-A-R-E dot com. We’re building products at the intersection of machine learning, AI, and robotics in this trillion-dollar supply chain industry. So, of course, we’re hiring. We’re growing; there’s interest. So if you’re an engineer on the software or robotics side, definitely look that up. But if maybe you’re an end-user, customer, or partner, also get on there. There’s ways to contact us, learn about the technology, check out some case studies, and just see if it would be a good fit to move forward.

Awesome. Well, Ian, I really appreciate the time. Thank you so much for spending some time with us here over at IndustrialSage.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a nice little break from my normal duties. So really nice setup you guys got, and happy to have been a guest.

Great, well thanks so much.

Thank you.

Alright, well there you go. That wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with Ian Smith who is the CEO of Ware. Pretty cool technology they’ve got. So go to getware.com. Hopefully I got that right. It’ll be in the show notes. If you’re listening on our podcast, all of the information will be down there. Hey, listen, we’d love a review. If you are not on our email list, you need to go to IndustrialSage.com, and you need to subscribe. Why? Because you’re missing out. You’re missing out on all kinds of great content like this interview that we had here with Ian. We have manufacturing news. We’ve got more series where we talk to CEOs of innovative companies large and small, all across the US and globally so you can stay abreast of what is happening in the industry especially as things are just constantly changing. So anyways, that’s all I got for you today. Thank you so much 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 we are here with Eric Rojek, who is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Thrush Aviation. Eric, thank you so much for joining us remotely all the way from Albany, Georgia. How are you today?

Glad to be here, thanks for having us.

Now we’re super excited. Now, for those who aren’t familiar this is what I was told. So, since I’ve been, you know, I’m from Atlanta and I’ve been down to Albany a couple times. I’m told the proper way of pronouncing, if you’re from Albany, is “Albenny,” not “Albany.” Is this correct? Or have I been totally misguided?

You are 100 percent correct so you’re welcome to come back to Albany now because you know how the locals handle it, so well done, good research!

I’d totally come back. So, all right, so for maybe… Well, first of all I’m going to say I’m super excited for this episode because I think a couple IndustrialSage people know that I’m a pilot. I got my private pilot license last year and I’m super excited. So, super excited to have an aviation company, especially here in our backyard, that will talk about all things sales and marketing for manufacturers. But for those who aren’t familiar with Thrush, Eric, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you guys manufacture. You do some cool stuff.

So we’re Thrush Aircraft, we’re, mentioned earlier, based here in Albany, Georgia. And we are one of the world-wide leaders that manufacture an agricultural aircraft. So, one of the cool things that we do here is not only do we build aircraft, but we’re part of a bigger purpose, that our aircraft helps feed the world. So, agricultural aviation provides pulp and fiber to various crops, around the world. Currently, 70 percent of our business right now, is international. So we’re a global exporter of our product. And the big thing about ag aviation that we’re dealing with right now, with the growing population, it’s a demand to grow more and more yields. We got to produce more yields, to the same amount of acres. Agricultural aircraft, help perform that mission.

Excellent, yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. I apologize, I said, Thrush Aviation, not Thrush Aircraft. I keep seeing the logo behind you there and it was like throwing me. But, Thrush Aircraft everyone, okay? Thrush Aircraft. This is great. Tell me a little about, we were talking a little bit, before we started, just a little bit about the history. And how you guys were kind of set up, and I’m just really curious about, to share with our audience a little bit about, sort of, your manufacturing process. Not, we don’t typically cover this, but I’m just excited about hearing the story and I wanted to share that with our audience.

So, the factory was originally built in 1965. So, for any business to be 50 plus years still in business, is a success. Besides dealing in manufacturing, besides dealing aviation. We must be doing something right. Really we got two things right, it’s our people that manufacture and also our product. But the big thing really unique to Thrush is, we have full manufacturing capabilities, in house. We literally take raw material one door, weld it, fabricate it, form it and produce the Thrush line out the back. So when I say full capabilities, this is from machining, the fiberglass, the paint to electrical. Riveting through the aviation parts, so it’s a full capacity, that is all built in house.

I think that’s one thing very unique that you see now, that we have at Thrush. There’s all these capabilities in house, that’s what’s so unique about the Thrush aircraft. Is one by having these capabilities in house you get to dictate the quality and the control. But really in the after market, we’ll talk about this a little later on but really to support sales, sales guy sells the first airplane, the support guy sells the next three. But the fact that we can control the supply chain, control the after markets on part and availability; is really what really makes this process all work. Because they have all that in house, be able to produce and support the Thrush line.

That’s awesome. And it makes a lot of sense obviously, with this type of sales, not just hey we’re selling this product and we’re done, you’ve got to support it. you’ve got maintenance, all the stuff you said, so that the supply chain’s obviously super important. Okay so, lets jump into the sales and marketing piece a little bit. So, I imagine, we were talking a little bit before we were saying one of the challenges is that– with the product that you’re selling– it’s really a it’s kind of like an experience that you need to have. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Yeah I mentioned earlier that really the best thing that we have is our product; it stands alone and it speaks for itself. But one of the challenges we have now selling products, a lot of our business is to new and emerging markets. You know, we’re heavily digital heavy communication there. But I think one of the biggest things that we lose in that process, is just the emotion of it all when you get to touch the aircraft, smell it. First of all, we are very fortunate to be dealing with airplanes: the smell of the jet fuel, to hear the engines swell up. It’s a magical experience, and I think the big thing that we try to do is get more and more of our customers to experience the aircraft, fly the aircraft.

We do a lot of training classes, free of charge, you know. Training is one of the best sales tools you can have. Because all you’re doing is talking about the aircraft, talking about the product. How it can make your… And then more importantly, if we can teach you on the front end, how to make the aircraft more successful and beneficial, we both win. But you know, you brought up a good point, we’re losing the touch point in regards to a lot of our aircraft, a lot of our sales and marketing techniques. How do we use a lot of the cooler stuff that’s out there, to be able to get them to the point where they can experience the product for themselves.

You know, one of the things, well I guess a follow up question from a sales and marketing standpoint. Are you selling is it primarily direct or are you working with channel partners, or what does that look like?

We got a little hybrid approach. So a lot of our larger markets that we have established, we sell through a dealer network. And that’s really big, because being an international provider, with duties, with customs, import regulations. So our challenges are not only are we selling a product to a foreign market, but we’re also dealing with their civil authorities from a regulatory point of view, through customs. So it’s something to solve our larger markets, we have local representation. We also have a hybrid where we sell directly to various markets. So we actually do both, and the big thing for us is that when you’re investing heavily in the emerging markets, you need to get established, have infrastructure there. Then we look to bring on a partner to basically maintain it and take it to the next level.

Yeah, and on that note, relative to some of the emerging markets I’ve heard from agriculture, quite a bit. It seems like Africa seems to be a pretty big emerging market. I’ve heard that, I don’t know if it’s true. But I definitely can see a lot of unique opportunities there, is that a market that’s emerging for you guys?

A lot of our recent success right now is in South America, that’s a lot of our emerging markets. It’s a great market for us, we got a lot of airplanes there but there’s quite a few challenges dealing with the market over there. So, a lot of our recent growth has been Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay. We’re doing some work in some other firefighting segments also. The tremendous amount, each market is really individually different, but the big thing for us is more and more… Like I mentioned earlier we’ve got the U.S has basically been the breadbasket for the world for all these years. Exporting our corn, our soy, we’re a leader exporter. But now more and more countries are realizing that if they want to feed their population, they’ve got to grow, invest locally to be able to put the food on the table. That’s where we’re chasing a lot of those markets for us. Particularly, I think that the next wave for us will probably be that Eastern Europe block. That’s where there’s a lot of opportunity there, a lot of wheat, a lot of crops being grown. That’s something when we talk about three to five years out, I think that’s going to be a lot of our growth.

Gotcha, okay. So, relative to that I mean what are you finding to be some of your successful tactics, you know, for those maybe other manufactures that are sort of in a similar boat. Where they’re like, you know what, we just need to get people to try out our product. We just need to get them to an innovation center, or to a dealer, or what have you. I know a lot of heavy equipment manufactures, sort of have a similar challenge. What have you seen that works well to do that?

The big thing for us, is once we’ve established a market and understand the opportunities there. It’s really that local infrastructure, in-country, and market. It’s just not necessarily the product itself that’s the people behind it for support, the people behind it for training, that’s on the same time zone, that can speak the same language; is absolutely crucial for it. The people element, nationality, that they can trust that someone in the market is absolutely huge for us. However, before you do that major investment there’s a tremendous amount of work you’ve got to do on the front end. Really your market intelligence, understand the market, understand there’s a long term growth, with the potential to buy it. But really to have to local presence, is one of the big things that we really nail, that really spurred a lot of our growth and success.

I imagine that’s a very difficult thing to kind of navigate without having that. Obviously, you’ve got language barriers, you mentioned regulatory issues, and I think also the other piece, I think it’s a challenge from a messaging standpoint. What we are marketing here in the United States might not necessarily work in Brazil, very well. Or Argentina or what have you.

Oh, you’ve nailed it. You know, so basically when you come up with campaigns. You’ve got to think of, how does it translate to multi different language, multi different cultures? Each market is different, each customer is different, each one with what they need. We basically have broken down our sales into two different buckets, really to keep things simple. We have mature markets, those are individuals who have been using our products for let’s say ten, fifteen, twenty years. Or replacement. And then we have our emerging markets, where basically, this is the first time being exposed to our product.

So we really try to have global campaigns towards those regions of the market, that depend upon who they are within the cycle. Is the lingo that we use to a mature customer you know, these emerging markets would be like whoa Eric, what are you talking about, slow down for a little bit. So it’s really from the language barrier, to your communication, how to interact with them. You really got to break up each different market, and segment as its own little campaign, to be able to really penetrate those as a whole. Because you can’t just blast it out. That’s one of our challenges right? It’s so easy now, the digital age, you can have one thing and blast it out, and it can be there tomorrow, it can be there in the afternoon. But really having the best system message that you really need for that market, for that region.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And it’s a challenge too I think, to your point, that yes because digitally we can do this, doesn’t necessarily mean that you should. Especially when you get into the whole messaging piece and international, it’s kind of a whole other ball game, like what’s going to work and what isn’t. So you’re saying, basically having a strong dealer network in those markets, has really been that best way of getting those clients, or customers rather, to experience their product firsthand.

Yeah and that’s been really good for us because in our industry, I don’t know if any other industry is probably as heavily regulated as aviation. From the requirements, from the export, to the import. To have someone on the ground that can push, from a regulatory point of view, and everything you need. And also, we’re in ag aviation. We work within a delivery window, we have to deliver our aircraft. More importantly when our aircraft is working in this season, they have to get back to work quickly. There are no down times for days, there are no times to let’s just get to it tomorrow, when we have a mission that has to be done. Where vegetation is breaking out with the bugs, or things of that nature, we got to go back to work. Without having boots on the ground, or really people that drive it, the system sometimes… the bureaucracy and the layers of it, just get bogged down, particularly in these foreign markets. Our dealer network’s been very crucial to us, like I said, so all of our major markets, we have infrastructure and people there. That can get things done, have the parts that they need, have a relationship with the civil authorities. To be able to handle anything, that could come about.

Yeah. So, I guess my last question would be; relative to the dealer network that you have here. A lot of manufactures are working through dealers or distributors or channel partners, or what have you. You know, sort of a similar set up. You mentioned education being something that was a really great means of marketing, earlier on. What else do you do to help to provide your dealers to kind of, from a marketing standpoint or sales, to be able to help sort of facilitate that a little bit more easier?

Yeah, so you know. The training technique of it is… Whatever reason we kind of got lost in that, where we’re so used to just delivering a product and giving everybody the thumbs up and just going along. Where if we can do more front end training on the front end, it’s going to be a win for everybody. I think the big thing too, that we try to do too, is have as much interaction as we can with our dealers. Even though we’re in a foreign market, we try to have as many Thrush days as possible. Factory representatives visiting there, they really have their breach of they’re not a dealer, they’re a Thrush partner. They’re kind of within the Thrush family, under our umbrella.

So many times I think we think of a dealer just kind of out there on their own, and it’s hard all OEMs have to make this decision right. Do you go all direct, do you go through dealers? I think the big thing for us and everyone in our family, our network, it’s really more under the Thrush umbrella from the signage, from the communication, from the literature, from the interaction with the factory. We try to have it as more seamless as a factory-direct type, to the customer model then necessarily as a dealer’s independent entity. They really have from the branding, we try to have them look the same, the proposals the same, the marketing material is the same, across the board. Whether we’re selling aircraft to Canada or to the Philippines, you have the same kind of Thrush flair to it.

Yeah, no that’s awesome. Yeah, that totally makes sense. So well Eric listen, I really appreciate the time that we’ve had. Just kind of sharing with you the Thrush story, and honestly appreciate you sharing some of your challenges and what different ways you’re overcoming that. I love the education piece. Is there anything else you’d like to leave with our audience, before we wrap up?

Yeah, I think the big thing for our audience is really agricultural aviation really makes the world a better place, you know. You see these airplanes, whether we’re spraying bananas in Costa Rica, or peanuts in South Georgia, or some of those famous mosquitoes that you see across the country. Our aircraft make the world a better place so, you see it, appreciate what they’re doing and how better it is. And more importantly out there, from many pilots out there, we think we got the coolest form of flying there is. We’re flying fast and low, stick and rudder, with the latest technology. So, it’s an awesome industry, it’s great people, and for the greater good too. There’s nothing more important than putting food on the table. We help do that every day.

That’s awesome. Eric, thanks again for your time and the opportunity. I’m definitely going to come down, I’m going to fly down and come check you guys out. It’s a great excuse to go down there, build some more hours. If anyone would love some more information about you, what’s the best way of getting in touch? Website? Or are you on LinkedIn?

Yeah, you can reach us on the website. It’s Thrushaircraft.com. All of my contact information is there, all of our full product line, some various videos there, of what makes the Thrush a Thrush. You’re welcome to come see it. Reach out to us anytime.

Awesome. Eric, thanks again we really appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right well, there you go. Thrush, I’m going to say Aircraft and not Aviation this time. So Thrush Aircraft, we really appreciate with Eric coming on. You know, a couple key takeaways, that I took. You know, one was hey listen there definitely is a potential, that just because we can do something digitally, there is a temptation and a real danger that sometimes we kind of pull out that human element, that human connection to it. So, we’ve got to be really careful to not do that. And then the other piece is really around the sense of maybe using some education, from a sales standpoint. And you know, a lot of us are dealing with distributors or a dealer network of some sort. And so, really being able to provide them from a branding standpoint, from a material standpoint, from an education piece to provide more value. And to be able to facilitate that sale a little bit more, because like Eric was mentioning; for their product, when they can really get a customer, or a prospect, or a lead, whatever you want to call them, into one of their products, into their aircraft and get the feel for it and have that experience that it’s like ‘ah’ they make this connection. So be thinking of those ways of how to use digital means to help facilitate that and be able to create that. But not completely replace that.

So anyways, that’s all I’ve got for you today. Thanks for watching. If you have any questions, we can answer them for you on industrialsage.com/questions. If you’re listening to us on iTunes or Stitcher or any of those podcasting apps, we’d love a review. Social media, hey! Share the love. If you’re not on our email list, you need to get on there. We have a lot of great content that you’re not going to hear on the podcast, that you’re not going to see on the website. You have to be in the email list to get it. So do that. Go to industrialsage.com. There’s ample places for you to subscribe. And, man I’m tired. This has been great. Another awesome episode. I’ll see you next week. I’m Danny with IndustrialSage. Thanks for watching.

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