Manufacturing Culture Podcast

Roger Bassous has spent about a decade doing something most people would find deeply uncomfortable: walking into other people’s buildings and asking permission to watch. His software measures machines, which means it also, inevitably, measures the people running them, and Roger has watched more shops react to being watched than almost anyone alive.

He did not start in manufacturing. He and his brother Richard were software guys at CompuWare in Detroit when Android launched, and they built a phone backup app that spent years in the top five of the Play Store. When that market crowded out around 2013, Roger opened a bar and started hanging around the mold shop where his middle brother Ed had spent sixteen years. One day Ed showed him the machine monitoring software the shop was stuck with, and it was so bad, so wrong, so slow, that a light went on. The whole city was buying this. The three brothers, two coders and a toolmaker, decided they could do it better. They went to a big Windsor mold builder, asked if they would buy it before a line of code existed, got a yes, and built RER.

Roger learned once the software was running: machine monitoring is a people problem long before it is a technology problem. Roger and Jim get into the fear of Big Brother, the brother who made it personal, a story about eyebolts that shows how data changes a conversation, why your best machinist might be the one who looks like he is slacking, and why the owner who buys the bright shiny object without asking the floor ends up with a hundred-thousand-dollar paperweight under a dust tarp.

Key Takeaways

Monitoring is a people problem first. The hard part was never the software. It was earning the trust of people who fear being watched, which is why the brother with sixteen years on the floor was the key to the whole company.

The utilization gap is hidden capacity. Shops that believe they run at eighty or ninety percent often run at thirty. That gap is not a failure, it is room to take on more work, and it is how reshoring actually happens.

Data changes the conversation. A machinist complaining about missing eyebolts gets ignored. A machinist who logs the hours lost looking for them gets every bay restocked in a week. Numbers make the floor’s problems undeniable.

The report card cuts both ways. Monitoring lets the real top performers prove it, and it lets owners see that the guy who looks like he’s slacking may be the one whose machines never stop.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and who Roger is
03:01 Icebreaker: a sci-fi movie
05:34 What culture means to Roger
09:27 Before RER: CompuWare and a top-five app
12:19 From a backup app to a bar to a mold shop
13:19 The bad software that became the opportunity
14:40 What Ed brought from 16 years on the floor
15:20 Idle reasons, and the pop-up that changed everything
17:45 What the early product got wrong, and finding the small shops
21:47 AI, hype, and garbage in garbage out
27:27 A people problem before a technology problem
28:38 You think you’re running at 90 percent
29:14 Capacity, reshoring, and the hidden headroom
32:31 The eyebolts story: how data changes the conversation
36:19 Walking over dollars to pick up pennies
37:32 The report card: career paths and pay for performance
41:44 The machinist everyone misjudged
43:10 What’s next for machine monitoring
45:36 What makes Roger proud
47:13 Why shops resist, and the $150K paperweight
53:02 Close

Find Roger

LinkedIn: Roger Bassous
RER Software

We agree too much. We nod along at the same conferences, repeat the same narratives, and almost never say the uncomfortable thing out loud. So Jim grabbed a bottle of Fireball, a stack of NFL challenge flags, and the five-man team behind Covari, and borrowed the MakingChips booth to do the one thing manufacturing avoids: argue.

This is the first episode of Fireball & Challenge Flags, a new, unfiltered, occasionally profane segment where disagreement is the whole point. The rules are simple. Somebody makes a claim, and if you disagree, you throw your flag and fight it out. Over forty-odd minutes and a shot, Jim and the Covari crew, co-founders Jackson Zartman and Anthony Giampapa, VP of Operations Josh Parker, CDO Arnoldas Kemeklis, and go-to-market engineer Jimmy Miklos, go after the questions most people in this industry are too polite to touch.

They do not agree on much, and that is the point. Fair warning: there is cursing, there is Fireball, and there is a Lithuanian describing an AI-agent future so dystopian that Jim accuses him of writing for Black Mirror.

The Fights

What hollowed out American manufacturing. Jackson blames private equity rolling up and choking small shops. Jim throws the first flag and traces it to 1973 and the end of the gold standard, which turned offshoring into a tax play.

We didn't lose manufacturing, we lost the cheap stuff. We stopped making toasters and started making jets. The real question is how much of it we even want back, when we can't buy the steel cheaper than overseas and still pay a living wage.

The future of AI, and whether anyone asked for it. Arne paints an agent-run world where your phone and mine clink like Apple Pay and transact business on their own. Jim's response, roughly: this is not the future I want. The table lands on keeping AI away from the customer and pointing it at the repetitive work instead.

Is AI-generated art actually art? Jim says prompting a box takes zero skill, so no. Arne asks how that is different from a painter choosing a brush. Nobody wins, but the Packers memes get a shout-out.

No tech bros profiting off manufacturing by 2030. The hottest take came from the software company itself: Covari's belief that they should never make more than the people actually making the parts.

The hills they'll die on. Josh: you can't automate DFM, so talk to the crusty machinist who marks up your page. Jackson: the tariffs did more harm than good, and only US shops and consumers paid for it. Anthony: AI isn't coming to kill small shops, but they're already years behind and need to start learning now. Jimmy: representation is what moves the needle on women in manufacturing. Jim: we created the skills gap, and the powers that be don't actually want to solve it.

Chapters

00:00 Cracking the bottle: the premise and the rules
03:17 Meet the Covari team
04:00 What actually hollowed out American manufacturing
06:30 The gold standard, 1973, and the offshoring loophole
09:58 Toasters vs jets, and what we actually lost
12:08 The one-man-band shop as the rebuild path
13:40 Trade school vs college, and a round of debt stories
19:16 Hot take: the yellow pages are coming back
24:18 This is not the future I want
26:36 Tired of the slop
30:05 Black Mirror, Skynet, and guardrails for Arnie
31:10 Is AI-generated art actually art?
35:38 No tech bros profiting off manufacturing by 2030
38:39 Lightning round: the hills they'll die on
39:01 Jimmy on women in manufacturing
40:42 Josh on why you can't automate DFM
42:47 Jackson on the tariffs
43:21 Anthony on AI and small shops
44:20 Jim on who really created the skills gap
48:47 Wrap: thanks for letting us swear and drink

Recorded live at the MakingChips booth.

Find Covari

Covari on LinkedIn, and connect with the whole team there

Nick Popa learned his trade at the Henry Ford Trade School under Henry Ford, then ran a shop called Epic Machine. A teenager swept its floors, worked his way onto the machines, survived a motorcycle accident that put him in traction weeks before his daughter was born, and eventually bought the company on a twenty-year handshake buyout. That daughter is Melinda Keway, and today she owns the place.

Melinda never planned any of it. She studied journalism, wanted to be Barbara Walters, and was chasing a career on the police beat when her father called and said he needed a quality person right now, and did she know what ISO was. She did not. He told her not to worry about it. She got scammed, in her words, into manufacturing, earned her lead auditor certification, and was a few months into fixing the paperwork when her dad had a stroke and she became the glue that held the shop together. That was more than twenty years ago. Two years ago, she took it all over and told him she was taking Epic from five million to ten.

Epic makes precision tooling for the foundry industry and ships it to twenty-nine states and twelve countries, but the reason to listen is what Melinda built when the skilled people stopped showing up. Tired of waiting, the shop opened its own school inside the building, an intense eight-week course where a student picks mill or lathe and learns to program, set up, and run it for real, smells and fork trucks and broken taps included. She trains for the whole industry, not just her floor, and tells her people to go find the work that means something to them. She runs an open book where everybody has to know everything, and she credits it all to the team on the floor, because she has never machined a thing in her life. On the shop screen is a question she wants everyone to sit with. Do you ever wonder if what you do matters?

Key Takeaways

Interview where people are comfortable. Melinda runs every interview out on the shop floor, not across a desk, because machinists open up around the machines and tooling they know, and both sides learn fast whether it is a fit.

When the talent won't come, build it. Rather than wait for skilled people, Epic opened its own eight-week school that trains one thing well, mill or lathe, and sends graduates into the whole industry.

Train for the industry, not just your shop. She tells people to go find meaningful work wherever it is, because the industry's need for skilled people is bigger than any one company.

Open book beats top dog. Everybody at Epic learns to program, set up, and operate, and nobody hoards knowledge to stay indispensable. Independence makes the whole shop stronger.

Lead from your gaps. Melinda has never machined a part, and she treats that as an advantage, depending on and empowering the experts on her floor instead of overriding them.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and who Melinda is
02:46 Icebreaker: a Parks and Rec mockumentary
04:40 Culture is the vibe
05:26 Why she interviews out on the shop floor
09:16 Her dad, the janitor who bought the company
13:14 From summer jobs to journalism dreams
14:12 Scammed into a quality job
15:59 Taking over, and five to ten million
18:53 A reality show, and removing the gatekeeping
22:30 Do you ever wonder if what you do matters?
25:52 Why Epic built its own school
28:11 Inside the eight-week program
32:05 Building people for the whole industry, not just Epic
35:07 Open book: everybody has to know everything
38:22 What makes her proud
41:37 The legacy she wants to leave
43:26 Lean manufacturing and a shout-out to dad

Find Melinda

LinkedIn: Melinda Keway
Epic Machine (Fenton, Michigan)

Summary

Anna Falcon's parents left the Philippines with two little girls and started over in the United States. That is the opening scene of the movie she would cast, and she will tell you everything else is built on it. The persistence, the resilience, the hard work she watched up close became the base for a career she has spent noticing the dynamics between people in every room she has ever walked into.

She studied industrial engineering at Georgia Tech and took her first job on the shop floor of a Lockheed Martin plant, working operations and special projects on the P-3 and C-5 programs and helping carry a multi-year, enterprise-wide ERP conversion. It was there, early, that culture struck her, when leadership answered a program's performance problems not just with process and technology but with the biggest culture of accountability initiative the company had ever run, and she watched the trust and the motivation shift in real time. She has spent the twenty years since in enterprise transformation, a decade at Ernst & Young, a run as a principal, and now vice president of CX Transformation at MCA Connect, recently acquired by Grant Thornton.

This is a conversation about the thing under all of it. Anna and Jim get into why culture is core to how a business operates and not the soft stuff around the edges, why trust and accountability have to travel together, and why most digital transformations fail on change management rather than technology. She talks about leading without a blueprint, about being a data point for the women coming up behind her who did not have many, and about raising four daughters who watch her do hard things and love it. She closes on the line that is her whole operating system: humans at the center, culture first.

Key Takeaways

Culture is core, not soft. Anna argues culture is not the perks and team bonding around the edges. It is how an organization operates, delivers, and shows up, and it drives quality and output on a shop floor as much as anywhere.

Trust and accountability travel together. Accountability without trust breeds fear. The fun stuff without accountability breeds complacency. High performance needs both.

Nobody hands you a blueprint. A mentor told her there is no leadership blueprint, and it freed her to forge her own way and to leave more data points for the people coming up behind her.

Transformations fail on change, not tech. Roughly seventy percent of digital transformations fail, almost always on change management. Anna's teams treat change as end to end and business led from day one, not training bolted on at the end.

Acquisitions live or die on alignment. Her company's acquisition avoided the usual attrition because both sides shared a vision, and MCA's homegrown, high-trust culture believed in the leaders making the call.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and who Anna is
02:56 Icebreaker: an epic period drama
06:00 What culture means to Anna
09:07 Culture as the alignment of values
16:07 Leaving the Philippines and starting over
19:37 The culture of accountability that changed everything
22:13 Finding industrial engineering and Georgia Tech
23:50 The first job on the Lockheed shop floor
25:22 Stumbling into consulting
29:43 Learning to lead without a blueprint
31:54 The mentor who shaped her
36:37 Raising four daughters who watch her work
38:52 On the other side of an acquisition
42:54 What she wants different for the industry
48:26 Why 70% of digital transformations fail
51:21 What makes her proud
52:24 Humans at the center

Find Anna

LinkedIn: Anna Falcon

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