Alex Gruebele sees cathedrals where the rest of us see trash. Hand him an aluminum can and he will tell you it is one of the most engineered objects on the planet, made by a company whose other, less profitable line is building satellites. That is the whole man: relentlessly curious, a little obsessive, and unable to walk past anything manufactured without wanting to know how it was made.

He grew up in Champaign-Urbana, studied mechanical engineering at Illinois, and earned a Stanford PhD building soft actuators and sensory skins for robots that work alongside humans. Then, almost by accident, a classmate's wild idea and a pandemic made him co-founder and CTO of Mesli, a fully autonomous restaurant he and two friends built and dropped onto a lot in San Francisco. It served about ten thousand grain bowls at better than ninety-nine percent uptime, with customers asking for a monthly meal plan. It also could not raise the money a hardware company needs in a software investor's world, and it closed while it was still winning.

That failure is the hinge of the conversation, and Alex is refreshingly honest about it. Today he is president and co-founder of Tau9 Labs, a semi-bootstrapped Bay Area company that builds custom, AI-accelerated software for manufacturers of every size. He and Jim get into why every factory is a snowflake, why he took the leap into a business he could control after swearing off investors, and the parallel he draws between mountaineering and building a company: calculated risk, exposure a little at a time, and a willingness to be in over your head because that is where you grow. He is also the guy painting Halo miniatures at his desk and bartering for rocks with strangers in Morocco, and he will tell you the hobbies are the point, not a distraction from it.

Key Takeaways

Curiosity is the throughline. From soft robotics to mineral collecting to the engineering of a soda can, Alex treats the whole made world as something worth understanding, and it fuels the work.

Being right isn't enough to survive. Mesli won on food, uptime, and repeat customers, but hardware economics and a software-hungry investor climate closed it anyway. Technical success and fundability are different games.

Every factory is a snowflake. Rather than force a one-size product, Tau9 builds custom software per shop, because AI-accelerated development finally makes bespoke work profitable for both sides.

Ask people about their hobbies. Alex screens for the person, not just the role. Someone who goes deep on things tends to do the same at work, and a shared hobby builds real trust with a customer.

Risk is a muscle, like heights. He beat a fear of heights by exposure, one climb at a time, and he runs a company the same way: calculated risk, a little more each time, comfortable being in over his head.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and the ask
02:34 Icebreaker: a Ryan Gosling action-comedy
04:39 Culture as The Office
07:11 From central Illinois to mechanical engineering
09:47 How the robot restaurant began
13:20 The shipping container that almost fell on him
14:37 Serving 10,000 meals with a robot
17:04 Why a successful restaurant still had to close
21:32 Soul searching, and the road to Tau9 Labs
25:35 The demo that became the first custom build
26:51 Who he builds software for now
29:45 Being in over your head, and missing flights
32:02 Why he asks everyone about their hobbies
34:44 Halo dioramas and collecting minerals
37:33 Overcoming a fear of heights
40:09 What mountaineering and startups share
43:33 Aluminum cans are cathedrals
45:28 What makes him proud

Find Alex

LinkedIn: Alex Gruebele
Tau9 Labs

Charlotte Allen did not set out to make the food in your kitchen. She trained as a respiratory therapist, watched healthcare turn toward managed care, and decided she wanted to affect people's lives in a more direct way. Food was the answer she did not see coming. Kraft recruited her out of school, and she spent sixteen years there leading innovation and technology strategy across more than ten brands you almost certainly have in your house right now.

What kept her at Kraft was the culture, a diverse group of people from all over the world who made each other better, the kind of team every other company tried to poach from. What eventually pushed her out was watching that culture change after the company was bought and merged. So she left, and after a stretch of consulting work that landed in her lap, she built Rebel Success for Leaders, the change leadership firm she has now run for a decade.

The reason to listen is the framework she has been sharpening ever since. Charlotte calls it the judgment gap, the widening distance between an organization's capabilities and its people's capacity to know when something is wrong. Experienced judgment is disappearing as companies retire, thin, and flatten their ranks, and AI is filling the space with polished, confident answers that carry no judgment at all. She and Jim get into why the machine is built to stroke your ego, why the friction of a colleague telling you your work is junk is the thing that builds judgment in the first place, and what a leader actually does about it: name it, track the behavior you want, and reward the friction instead of shutting it down. Her definition of culture doubles as the whole point. It is the reason a person shows up and gives their best work.

Key Takeaways

Culture is why people give their best. Charlotte's definition skips the metrics: culture is the reason you show up, give up time with family, and bring your best. It is also why people stay, or run for the hills.

The judgment gap is widening. As organizations retire, thin, and flatten, experienced judgment disappears, and with it the capacity to sense when something is quietly going wrong.

AI answers without judgment. Generative AI is built to please you and is only as good as what you feed it. If you never prompt it to challenge you or find the failure modes, it just polishes your blind spots.

Friction builds judgment. The colleague who says your work is junk is doing something AI will not. Leaders should reward that friction, not silence it.

People love change they can author. Explain the why so it means something to the individual, involve the front line early, and you stop having to push.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and the ask
01:40 Meet Charlotte Allen
02:27 Icebreaker: a Marvel movie
04:04 What culture means to Charlotte
05:15 Falling into food and beverage
07:03 From respiratory therapist to food science
08:36 Sixteen years at Kraft, and the culture that kept her
09:53 When the merger changed everything
13:10 Leaving corporate to start Rebel Success for Leaders
16:19 Why every mistake is the fast path
20:29 Making the change actually stick
22:47 People don't hate change, they hate change they can't author
25:12 The judgment gap, explained
28:30 AI gives you answers without judgment
34:23 The 51-point gap between belief and reality
40:06 Name it, track behavior, reward friction
44:37 What makes her proud

Find Charlotte

LinkedIn: Charlotte Allen, Ph.D.
Rebel Success for Leaders: rebelsuccessforleaders.com
Newsletter: World's Top STEM Leaders (on LinkedIn, every other week)
Book: Rebel Success for Leaders

Ask most people to picture the future of manufacturing and they will describe a slightly better factory. Ask Sunny Han and he will describe a self-replicating machine you launch into an asteroid belt, go to sleep for a thousand years, and wake up to find has built a communication network across the galaxy. That is the altitude this conversation runs at.

Sunny is the founder and CEO of Fulcrum, a manufacturing technology company that connects more than 700 manufacturers with the digital infrastructure they need to compete. He did not grow up on a shop floor. He was a kid writing code at seven, certain he would spend his life playing StarCraft, who drifted into building software for manufacturers and got quietly hooked on the depth of it. The more facilities he toured, the more intoxicating it got: the operator who can feel a microscopic burr with a fingertip, the single crystal of metal grown to survive supersonic speeds. He kept coming back to the well.

But the reason to listen is what Sunny has worked out about AI and trust. He is one of the clearest voices on where artificial intelligence fits on a shop floor and where it does not. He explains why classical computers are deterministic and the real world is not, why these new probabilistic machines are a gift and a hazard at once, and why the answer is deterministic guardrails and a human who stays in the loop, because in a medical device shop that last one percent is the entire world. Along the way he reframes change management, argues that people love change they get to author, and lands on the line that named this episode. The future isn't science fiction. It's manufacturing fiction, and his whole job is turning it into reality faster.

Key Takeaways

The real world is probabilistic. Classical computers give the same answer every time. CNC machines and AI models do not, and understanding that difference is the key to using AI safely on a shop floor.

Deterministic guardrails make AI trustworthy. Let the model generate options, but when the answer has to be exactly right, it looks up the feed and speed chart or the tool database. Creativity where you want it, certainty where you need it.

Keep a human in the loop. Even at ninety-nine percent, the last one percent can be a twenty thousand dollar mistake or worse, so Fulcrum builds evaluation and judgment frameworks that flag what still needs human eyes.

Infrastructure was the missing layer. Fulcrum set out to do cool things with compute and found the orchestration infrastructure under manufacturing barely existed. Build a good one and people plug everything into it.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and the ask
01:20 Meet Sunny Han and Fulcrum
02:42 Icebreaker: life as a sci-fi movie
03:28 Making parts in space, and von Neumann machines
09:40 What culture means to Sunny
12:20 Why a company needs a mission, not just values
14:52 What he thought his life would be
16:23 Stumbling into manufacturing
22:29 What problem Fulcrum set out to solve
26:40 Becoming the orchestration layer
30:43 Breaking into a skeptical industry
34:53 People don't hate change, they hate change they can't steer
37:22 Deterministic guardrails, explained
43:38 Why you still need a human in the loop
45:12 Where manufacturing is headed
47:45 Manufacturing fiction
48:10 What makes him proud: perseverance
49:47 Where to find Sunny

Find Sunny

LinkedIn: Sunny Han (Fulcrum)
Fulcrum: fulcrumpro.com
Email: [email protected]

Tiffany Bryson is one of Jim's oldest and closest friends in this industry, and she is also, as this episode reveals, the reason the Manufacturing Culture Podcast exists at all. Twenty drinks deep on a curb in Atlanta in 2022, she listened to Jim describe the handful of shops with great cultures who had written back to him, and told him he had to start telling those stories. Then she kept texting until he actually did it.

But this conversation is Tiffany's story, and it is a good one. A recently divorced single mom selling houses, she took a job with the creative title director of first impressions, which was really the receptionist, at a manufacturing association. The first time she walked onto a shop floor, she saw behind the curtain, realized none of it just appears at Target and Walmart, and caught a passion she has never shaken. From there she grew the NTMA national associate program into a real revenue stream, took a leap into selling five-axis machines at GROB with no technical background, and found her footing by leaning on the one thing she always did well: connecting people. Today she runs industrial partnerships across the Americas for Blaser Swisslube, the Swiss family company that has made metalworking fluid, the liquid tool, not just coolant, since 1936, and she says it is the first place she can imagine hanging her hat until retirement.

The heart of this one is what Tiffany does with the network she built. She mentors, especially women who were, like she once was, the only one in the room. She opens doors for people who do not yet know which door to knock on. And when Jim asks what she wants to be remembered for, she does not hesitate: she wants to be known for seeing people. This is a conversation about relationships as a career, about paying it forward, and about the friend who saw something in Jim before he saw it in himself.

Key Takeaways

Relationships are a career, not a tactic. Tiffany built every stage of her path on networking done with real intention, and it carried her from receptionist to program owner.

You can learn anything. She jumped into selling five-axis machines with no technical background, and beat the fear by realizing nobody knows as much as you assume, and that you can learn what you need to.

Ask for the tour. The easiest way into a shop relationship is to ask an owner to show you their shop. Nobody says no, and thirty minutes becomes two hours of history, pride, and pain points.

Mentorship is this phase of her life. Tiffany lifts up young people and women in the industry, opening doors so they climb faster than she did, and she says it costs her nothing.

Be known for seeing people. Life beats everyone up. Being the person who genuinely sees someone, personal or professional, is what she wants to be remembered for.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and why this guest is special
04:38 Icebreaker: a murder mystery starring Linda Cardellini
08:19 What culture means to Tiffany
09:56 From single mom selling houses to the shop floor
14:33 Where she and Jim first crossed paths at the NTMA
16:34 Building a career on networking and relationships
19:15 The moment she stopped feeling like a visitor
21:57 Taking the leap to sell five-axis machines at GROB
24:28 What the shops taught her about listening
30:23 This phase of her career at Blaser Swisslube
35:09 Mentoring the next generation
38:34 How Tiffany talked Jim into starting this show
49:05 What she would say to someone outside the industry
50:34 What she wants to be remembered for
53:00 Process in Pints at IMTS, and closing

Find Tiffany

LinkedIn: Tiffany Bryson
Blaser Swisslube: blaser.com

Every glass of water you pour, every jar of baby food, every energy drink you crack open ran through stainless steel pipe that somebody welded. And if that person did their job right, you will never once think about it. That is Steve Feamster's whole craft: being invisible in the best possible way. The weld that matters most is the one no one will ever see, on the inside of a pipe, so clean that nothing can hide.

Steve is the founder and owner of Sanitary Welding LLC in Novi, Michigan, where for more than sixteen years he has built the ultra-clean stainless steel systems that food, beverage, and pharmaceutical plants depend on. He came up the way he hopes the next kid will. He was an entrepreneur before he was a welder, hustling odd jobs as a teenager, and he tripped into welding under a teacher who told him something that stuck: with wood, cut it too short and it's scrap, but with metal, you can always weld it back together. You can always make it right.

This is a conversation about the pride in unseen work, about carrying the weight of knowing a single bad weld could mean contamination, and about a man from the middle who can talk to the shop floor and the boardroom in the same breath. Steve is honest about the hard parts, the apprenticeship red tape, the grind of scaling with too few hands, and the fine line between automation and craft. But the through-line is a message he wants the nineteen-year-old with a torch to hear: the door is open. Steve did it, and so can you.

Key Takeaways

The best weld is the one no one sees. Sanitary welding is judged on the inside of the pipe, purged clean and finished to food grade, so nothing can hide and nothing can contaminate.

You can always make it right. The lesson that pulled Steve into the trade is also his philosophy on mistakes: be proud of them, pass your inspection, and keep going.

The door from welder to owner is open. Steve bought his domain while still working under the hood and built his own shop. He wants the next kid to know the same path is there.

Culture is treating a welder like a thinker. His twenty-first century weld shop pays people to think and treats the place like a second home, which is how he competes for scarce, high-care talent.

Red tape is part of the skills gap. Steve is trying to hire and train through apprenticeships and keeps hitting bureaucratic roadblocks, a piece of the workforce problem that gets too little attention.

Chapters

00:02 The invisible weld, and what sanitary welding protects
01:01 Meet Steve Feamster and Sanitary Welding
02:33 Icebreaker: a boat and a sunset
04:13 What culture means to Steve
05:29 Finding welding: you can always make it right
06:34 The high school apprenticeship at a five-hour energy plant
07:22 An entrepreneur since thirteen
08:00 The road home from California and the new shop
11:05 What makes Sanitary Welding different
12:06 Be proud of your mistakes
13:34 Pride, grinding, and the line between craft and automation
17:55 What sanitary welding actually is
18:37 The weight of a bad weld
21:39 Building a twenty-first century weld shop
22:39 The red tape choking apprenticeships
28:02 What keeps him going
30:01 A Detroit point of view
32:01 Where to find Steve and who he's hiring
33:01 3D printing stainless and Project Diamond
34:08 The message to the kid with a torch

Find Steve

LinkedIn: Steve Feamster
Sanitary Welding LLC: sanitarywelding.com (careers: [email protected])
Novi, Michigan

Jim Goerges is an accountant who fell in love with a machine shop, and then fell in love with the one job in that shop nobody else wanted: keeping the coolant right. He was so obsessed with it that when he could not buy the tool he wanted, he built it himself, and that turned into a whole second company. His shop in Brainerd, Minnesota started with four products in 1993 and now has around six thousand, and odds are good it had a hand in the glasses on somebody's face right now.

The heart of this one is a simple idea Jim has spent thirty years proving out: the best robot you can buy is the machine that makes the part. Precision Tool Technologies runs lights-out, nearly around the clock on a single labor shift, because Jim chased unattended manufacturing back when the industry still thought a mill was a mill and a lathe was a lathe. When coolant became the weak link that stood between him and a true 168 hours, he invented a full-shop coolant sensing and top-off system, now running in shops around the country.

But the number that tells you who Jim is has nothing to do with spindles. He has never laid off a single person to a technology improvement, not once. He took hand deburring off his people because it hurt to do, not to cut heads. And for a crew of 23, the company 401k will clear five million this year. This is a conversation about automation done with a conscience, about a dad who came from Germany with nothing and instilled a work ethic in ten kids, and about why the unglamorous work, done with pride, is the work that builds something noble.

Key Takeaways

The best robot is the machine that makes the part. Jim's whole approach is to buy equipment that runs unattended rather than bolting automation onto old habits.

Automation without layoffs. In thirty years he never cut a person for a technology gain. He removed the jobs people dreaded, like hand deburring, not the people.

Necessity invented a product. Coolant was the weak link in running 168 hours, so he built a full-shop coolant sensing and top-off system that now sells nationwide.

Culture is telling people the truth. Good news or bad, Jim tells the whole group, so his people are part of the solution instead of blindsided by it.

Do more to get more. The accountant's logic underneath it all: every incremental part spreads your fixed costs thinner, and affordable automation is how you get there.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and meet Jim Goerges
02:36 Icebreakers: your life as a movie, and what culture means
05:05 The accountant who fell for a machine shop
07:30 The PettyEgg and inventing to help people
11:41 Four products in 1993, six thousand today
15:30 Learning lights-out before the industry figured it out
20:08 Why the company is named 168 Manufacturing
22:37 Changing your thinking to change your outcome
28:58 Automation without a single layoff
31:40 What he is most proud of, and his father's story
37:35 The sprint car and working hard the right way
39:26 The future of PTT and the coolant automation story
47:10 The future of American manufacturing
53:09 Say yes to a great idea, and closing thoughts

Find Jim

LinkedIn: Jim Goerges
Precision Tool Technologies: Brainerd, Minnesota
168 Manufacturing: 168mfg.com

This episode was recorded as part of a paid partnership with Structify.

Ronak Gandhi grew up in Fort Worth, where Memorial Day means fifty people in the backyard, dinner cooked by friends who brought their own coolers, and a clock that somehow reads midnight before anyone notices. He explains the difference between that and a New York Memorial Day, all brunch reservations and itineraries, and in doing so tells you most of what you need to know about why he built Structify the way he did.

His grandfather came to this country in the 1960s, took his first job at a fish processing plant, stayed thirty years, and retired there. That story, and the values under it, loyalty, integrity, and showing up in person, shaped Ronak's decision to leave an isolating skyscraper job and build a company for the people he calls the backbone of the country. Structify helps manufacturers find real ROI for AI, lays the foundation to implement it, and captures the institutional knowledge that walks out the door when a key person retires. The promise is blunt: a path to ROI in sixty days or your money back.

Recorded in person with Jim at ATD in Phoenix, Ronak and Jim get into why Silicon Valley gets manufacturing wrong, why you cannot serve this industry from a desk on the coast, why 65% of digital transformations fail, and why the problems on a shop floor are the most exciting part of the work, not the thing to hide. It closes on the line that could be Structify's whole reason for existing: he does not want the industries that built this country to get left behind in the next technological leap.

Key Takeaways

AI fails without a foundation. Most digital transformations fail because people rush to the solution. Structify maps the business first, then finds where AI actually drives ROI.

Capturing institutional knowledge is the real win. The workforce crisis bites hardest when a key person retires, and their knowledge leaves with them. Day one is about capturing it.

You cannot serve manufacturing from the coast. Ronak lives on the road, and he argues every shop is different, so no off-the-shelf solution works for everyone.

Change is not the enemy. People do not resist change; they choose it every day. Give operators the tools to build their own solutions and adoption follows.

Relationships beat transactions. The values he learned in Fort Worth, loyalty and integrity, are what he says the coast gets wrong and what manufacturing gets right.

Chapters

00:00 Meet Ronak: two Memorial Days, Fort Worth vs New York
01:47 The moment he knew manufacturing needed Structify
05:01 The isolating skyscraper and why he left
08:39 His grandfather's fish plant and the pride in making things
11:30 Why build for a physical industry Silicon Valley ignores
16:02 A hidden industry and what outsiders should know
19:28 What Silicon Valley gets wrong about manufacturing
22:45 The workforce crisis and two narrative battles
26:21 The shop that detonates bombs to fuse metal
28:03 Why 65% of digital transformations fail
31:50 What Structify actually does
33:05 How it differs from a consultant
36:20 Why people actually love change
38:22 Finding real ROI, not AI for its own sake
40:17 What day one looks like
43:56 The five-year vision: make manufacturing badass
45:36 What he's most proud of, and why Structify exists

Find Ronak

LinkedIn: Ronak Gandhi
Structify: structify.com

Bob Teska describes his life as an underdog movie, Rocky by way of 8 Mile, opening on a kid getting picked on, a dad who disappeared, and a mother who told him he would not make it through his first semester of college. He turned wrenches for ten years, went to school at 26 with a newborn at home and three jobs to pay for it, and walked out with a near-perfect GPA and a path to becoming a CPA. He spent fourteen years as an audit partner advising family businesses, and then did the thing most advisors only talk about. He took the operator's chair himself.

The company he chose is Dalen Products, a third-generation, 100% family-owned lawn and garden manufacturer in Knoxville that just crossed 51 years. It started when Neil Caldwell raided his kids' college funds and took a small business loan to build inflatable snakes and, later, the plastic great horned owl you have probably seen in a garden. Dalen has sold 9.3 million of them, and in 1995 NASA bought eighteen to guard a space shuttle from woodpeckers.

Bob's real work is the culture. He walked into a place that felt frozen in 1982, time cards written out by hand, morale low, a wall between the office and the floor. His answer was to learn every name, take a lap on the floor every single day, and lead by one rule he states plainly: he worked for a lot of assholes, and he tries hard not to be one. He hires out of halfway houses, has kept six of the seven people he has brought in that way, and is bringing production back from China, now 85% made in Knoxville. He calls the whole project Dalen 2.0, building the next fifty years without breaking the first fifty, and he frames it not as ownership but as stewardship. He did not build this. His job is to hand it back stronger.

Key Takeaways

• Stewardship over ownership. Bob did not build Dalen and does not treat it as his. The goal is to hand a stronger company back to the family and the next generation.
• Culture is what happens when leadership leaves the room. He rebuilt a broken one by learning names, walking the floor daily, and tearing down the wall between office and shop.
• Second chances are a hiring strategy. Building relationships with halfway houses gave him loyal, motivated workers and a six-of-seven retention rate.
• Reshoring is a decision, not a slogan. A new injection molder brought 15% of production back from China, moving Dalen to 85% made in the USA.
• Nobody wants to work is a myth. People want to work, they want to be treated like human beings, and they want to be told they belong.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and Bob's unconventional road
03:07 Icebreaker: the underdog movie
05:50 Success is the only option
06:53 What culture means to Bob
08:42 A hard start in Syracuse
10:03 College at 26 and the two teachers who believed in him
15:13 Becoming a CPA and learning to network
19:01 What ten years of turning wrenches taught him
21:02 From advisor to operator
23:02 Finding Dalen
26:13 Walking into a broken culture
30:47 Leadership is stewardship, not ownership
33:07 Dalen 2.0: building the next fifty years
33:50 Hiring out of halfway houses
42:23 The owl that saved a NASA launch
48:07 Bringing production back to Knoxville
49:25 On the front page of the New York Times
53:40 The next five to ten years
55:39 What he wants to leave the next steward
57:21 Dream big

Find Bob

LinkedIn: Bob Teska
Dalen Products: dalenproducts.com

Alex Huckstepp has spent his career where new technology meets the people who make things. A mechanical engineer out of USC who graduated into the wreckage of 2010, he spent the next decade running commercial strategy at four hardware startups in a row: 3D printing, metal additive, robotic forming, composites. All of them fundamentally new ways of making physical things.

Then he and his co-founder Benny got tired of begging investors for money to build complex hardware, and went looking for a problem they could solve with software. They found it inside the tens of thousands of small high-mix shops across the country. Before writing a line of code, they spent three months inside twenty to thirty machine shops, trying to be flies on the wall and failing, because curiosity got the better of them.

What they learned shapes the best part of this conversation. Shops don't dislike software because they're behind. They dislike it because software has never served them. And work doesn't leave the country over the labor rate anymore. It's energy and materials, it's tariffed machine tools, it's the two or three people in a nine-person shop tied to a desk doing paperwork, and it's the friction of getting a quote out of your local shop when someone overseas will answer the phone.

Alex and Jim don't agree on everything, and the episode is better for it. It ends where Alex's work lives: a barbecue and a cooler of beer in a square mile north of the San Jose airport that holds more than a hundred machine shops, most of which have never met each other.

Key Takeaways

• It isn't the labor rate anymore. The gap has narrowed to two or three times on skilled labor. The real drivers are energy, materials, equipment, and overhead.
• Speed is the product. Engineers source overseas because someone answers. Responsiveness and a firm lead time often beat a lower unit price.
• Overhead is the quiet killer. In a nine-person shop, two or three people sit at a desk doing paperwork, a ratio you do not see overseas.
• We should not be tariffing machine tools. If the goal is a domestic base, equipment should be incentivized, not taxed.
• Ecosystems beat isolation. A hundred shops sit within one square mile near San Jose and most have never met.
• You can't argue people into the trade. Kids follow visible, successful people in their own communities, not campaigns.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and who Alex is
02:19 Icebreaker: if your life were a movie
03:43 What culture means to Alex
06:30 Why culture is an alignment of values
08:22 Choosing mechanical engineering
10:03 Graduating into 2010 and the first job
12:43 Four hardware startups in a row
14:55 Why some people are wired for startups
17:49 How Uptool started
22:54 Three months inside thirty machine shops
25:35 Building software shops will actually use
26:20 Why US shops lose work to Asia
29:24 Energy, materials, and tariffed machine tools
30:52 The overhead nobody counts
33:42 Where the hollowing out really started
35:15 The workforce problem underneath it all
37:46 You can't convince people to care
40:42 Why Uptool shows up in person
42:57 A hundred shops in one square mile
45:11 The future: a lot of little SpaceXs
47:30 Where to find Alex

Find Alex

LinkedIn: Alex Huckstepp
Uptool: uptool.com
Shop map: usamachineshops.com
Catch Uptool at IMTS in September, their first show as a startup, in the software section

Most manufacturing conversations are about the machines. This one is about the building around them. In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, host Jim Mayer sits down with Todd Drouillard, licensed architect and principal at HED, one of the country's top science and technology design firms. For twenty-five years, Todd has designed the places where manufacturing actually happens: clean rooms, hydrogen test cells, semiconductor plants, robotics labs. A Detroit native whose father and grandfather worked the steel mills, he explains why lighting and daylight change a shop floor, why a warehouse is usually the wrong home for a production line, how architecture becomes a retention strategy, and why the best factories are buildings that work like machines themselves.

Key Takeaways

• The building is part of the process. Purpose-built factories, labs, and clean rooms are engineered around what happens inside them, and the best of them function like machines themselves.
• A warehouse is not a factory. Wide open space does not mean it's right for production. The first question is always the process, then the power, the slab, and the steel.
• Small moves change a shop floor. Lighting, color temperature, painted white structure for light reflectance, and any daylight you can introduce cost little and change how a place feels to work in.
• Architecture is a retention strategy: safe design, a clean, quiet place to step off the floor, a cafeteria, closer parking. Small things signal that the people inside matter.
• The building tells the story. A well-made facility gives employees a reason to say I work there and I build things there, and pride follows.

Chapters

• 00:00 Welcome and who Todd is
• 01:59 Icebreaker: If your life were a movie
• 4:36 What culture means to Todd
• 06:43 Wanting to be an architect at ten years old
• 10:12 The road to HED
• 12:14 Detroit roots, steel mills, and the draw to manufacturing
• 17:04 Buildings as machines
• 17:41 The first thing he looks for on a plant floor
• 18:52 When the building is wrong for the work
• 21:57 What a building does to the people inside it
• 24:07 Detroit, the middle class, and what a factory builds
• 27:27 Architecture as a retention strategy
• 30:12 Doubts, waste, and the things that drive him crazy
• 33:20 The future: robotics, AI, and keeping the human connection
• 36:55 What makes him proud
• 38:04 Defense tech, drones, and R&D spaces
• 40:40 Where to find Todd

Find Todd

LinkedIn: Todd Drouillard, AIA
HED: hed.co