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

Anoosheh Oskouian came to the United States alone at fourteen years old. She had convinced her father to let her leave Iran before she finished high school, the same way she had once convinced her parents to change her birth certificate so she could start school early. She landed in Denver, finished high school at George Washington High, and then the revolution back home turned Iranians into targets overnight. So she did what she has done at every hard moment since: she set her own rules, kept her focus, and moved forward.

Decades later, that same resolve is the foundation of Ship & Shore Environmental, the Long Beach company she has built and grown organically for more than twenty-five years. Today, the firm designs and fabricates custom air pollution control systems for manufacturers across the country and around the world, and Anoosheh sits on the South Coast Air Quality Management District committee that helps write the very rules her machines are built to meet.

This is a conversation about grit, reinvention, and what it costs to be the only woman CEO in a room full of men. Anoosheh talks about the people who underestimated her, the young engineers she now mentors, the planet she is trying to leave cleaner than she found it, and why, after everything, she still believes the American dream is real. Challenging, of course. Difficult, of course. Impossible, never.

Key Takeaways

• Resilience is a discipline, not a moment. From arriving alone at fourteen to building a business overnight, Anoosheh's story is about deciding to move forward and refusing to be derailed.
• She bet everything on herself. Draining her 401 (k) to cover payroll and rent for two months, she insisted on doing it on her own, and 25 years of organic growth followed.
• She writes the rules and builds the solution. Sitting on the SCAQMD committee, Anoosheh helps shape air quality regulations and then engineers custom systems that enable manufacturers to meet them.
• Clean air has no borders. Her work spans the US and China because pollution migrates, and the goal is a cleaner planet, not a cleaner zip code.
• Representation changes the room. As the only woman CEO she knows in her field, Anoosheh mentors young women, opens her shop to interns, and proves what is possible by standing in the room and speaking her mind.

Chapters

• 00:00 Welcome and what this show is about
• 00:59 Meet Anoosheh Oskouian and Ship & Shore Environmental
• 03:30 Icebreaker: if your life were a movie
• 05:47 What culture means to Anoosheh
• 08:59 Leaving Iran alone at 14
• 11:31 The revolution, being a target, and going it alone
• 14:25 University of Colorado and a love of chemistry
• 15:49 Fluor Daniel and the road to Long Beach
• 18:30 The overnight bet that started the company
• 20:33 Growing the team and opening in China
• 22:32 What Ship & Shore designs and builds
• 26:58 Inside the process, from assessment to clean air
• 30:39 Writing the rules and building the technology
• 34:57 Being the only woman CEO in the room
• 38:13 Mentoring the next generation
• 41:23 A tour of the shop floor
• 44:03 The future of American manufacturing
• 49:38 Where to find Anoosheh

Find Anoosheh

LinkedIn: Anoosheh Oskouian
Ship & Shore Environmental: shipandshore.com

The Shop Floor Social came to Dallas, and the room was full of people who run the floors. Hosted by Jim Mayer and brought to the community by Hexagon, this live session of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast put three local leaders on the panel: Chase Auker, a quality metrologist at Firefly Aerospace who measures everything from rocket engines to lunar landers; Andy Mears, who leads intelligent factory integration at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Grand Prairie; and Fernando Castaneda, the quality leader at SPM Oil & Gas.

The night started where every honest manufacturing conversation starts: what keeps you up at night. The answers came back fast. People. Speed and scale. Schedule. From there, the room worked through the question on everyone's mind: what AI really does on a shop floor today, and the panel was refreshingly grounded in it. AI is a sharp assistant and a strong learning tool, but it's only as good as the data and the people behind it. Garbage in, garbage out. The real skill, they agreed, is knowing how to ask.

What makes this session worth the listen is where it lands. Under all the pressure of cost, supply chain, cybersecurity, and a shrinking talent pipeline, every panelist circled back to the same answer. You cannot buy your way out with the bright shiny object. You invest in your people, you fix your process, and you let the technology amplify both. Then the conversation turns to the pipeline itself: why the fix starts in high school rather than the want ads, and why the best recruiter you have is already standing on your floor. This is session one, recorded live in Dallas.

Key Takeaways

• People are still the answer. Across speed, scale, cost, and AI, every panelist came back to the same conclusion: you invest in your people and your process, not just the next machine.
• AI is only as good as the data behind it. The heavy lifting is structuring the data and learning to prompt well; prompt engineering is the real skill.
• Cybersecurity shapes everything. From CMMC 2.0 to a buried chip caught in incoming hardware, aerospace and defense shops run their own internal tools and vet every device before it touches the network.
• The bright, shiny object is a trap. Buying a machine feels safer than betting on a person, but technology without skilled, empowered people never delivers the return.
• The pipeline starts before college. The fix is to reach kids in high school and middle school, partner with community colleges, and lean on referrals, because your best recruiters already work for you.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome to the Shop Floor Social
02:00 Meet the panel: Firefly, Lockheed Martin, and SPM
04:00 What keeps you up at night: people
05:00 Speed and scale, and a 41-month build cycle
08:00 AI as the assistant that remembers everything
11:00 Garbage in, garbage out: the data behind the answer
12:30 Ignorance is a choice: AI as a learning tool
14:00 Building agents that think like you
18:00 Why prompt engineering is the real skill
20:00 Please, thank you, and the drone that fought back
22:00 Capturing the silver tsunami before it leaves
24:00 Cybersecurity, CMMC, and the black box problem
30:00 Good, fast, cheap, and the cost squeeze
32:00 The supply chain is squeezed from both sides
37:00 Bright shiny object syndrome
39:00 People and technology, together
41:00 The leg nobody talks about: process
43:00 The skills gap and fixing the pipeline

The Panel

Chase Auker, Quality Metrologist, Firefly Aerospace
Andy Mears, Intelligent Factory Integration, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control
Fernando Castaneda, Quality Leader, SPM Oil & Gas
Presented by Hexagon

Becca Wolfinger did not set out to run a machine shop. She figured she would cheer her husband on from the sidelines after he left the military, went to school to become a machinist, and got tired of working for people whose only answer was "we've done it this way for twenty years." Then the website needed building, and the LLC, and the logo, and one by one, Becca did all of it herself. Before long, she was scooping chips, breaking down setups, and learning to make parts on the floor of a renovated 1970s garage in North Carolina.

What makes Becca different is not that she built Mill Spec Manufacturing. It's that she refuses to hide any part of how she did it. In a trade built on protecting what you know, she writes and films the mistakes, the crashed sensors, the four o'clock mornings, and the fear of signing a first industrial lease, because she believes the only way to rebuild American manufacturing is to stop gatekeeping and hand the next person a map.

This is the North Carolina stop in the fifty-state shop series, and it's a conversation about culture in the truest sense: an environment where people feel free to be themselves without judgment. Becca and Jim get into why she started, why she shares, the community she's building shop by shop and meeting by meeting, what it felt like to be trusted with work that matters, and the one thing she wants to be remembered for.

Key Takeaways

• Anti-gatekeeping is the strategy. Becca shares her failures publicly because the fastest way to rebuild American manufacturing is to help the next shop owner go further and faster than she did.
• Authenticity is a competitive advantage. Showing the crashes and the hard mornings validates every machinist who has made a mistake and makes the trade feel reachable.
• Community is infrastructure. From the Machining Summit to her own monthly manufacturing meetings, Becca builds third spaces where shop owners trade work, tooling, and support rather than competing in isolation.
• Small shops rebuild capacity. The mom-and-pop shops with fewer than ten employees are where offshored capacity comes back, one garage and one Tormach at a time.
• Education is the next chapter. Becca wants to spotlight schools, bring manual machines back, and teach the basics the curriculum skips, because everyone starts somewhere.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and what this show is about
00:57 Meet Becca Wolfinger and Mill Spec Manufacturing
02:54 Icebreaker: if your life were a movie
05:38 What culture means to Becca
06:18 Why she started a machine shop
09:30 Why she shows the mistakes, not just the wins
11:03 Saving people headaches and heartaches
12:18 Her most memorable failure
13:43 Why rebuilding American manufacturing matters
16:24 How do we get more people to start shops
19:33 The power of community
23:39 What made the Machining Summit different
26:47 Building community in North Carolina
28:11 Being a mom and "balancing" it all
29:11 The win she's most proud of
31:16 The future of Mill Spec and Becca
35:35 The mark she wants to leave
36:25 Where to find Becca

Find Becca

LinkedIn: Rebecca Wolfinger
Instagram: @rebecca.wolfinger
Mill Spec Manufacturing: mil-spec-manufacturing.com

Erich Baur could have gone a hundred different directions. Engineering degree from UC Davis. Peace Corps in Guatemala. Fluent in Spanish. Music minor. Instead he swept floors at a Fortune 100 aerospace shop, fell in love with precision machining, and spent the next several years going deeper into every corner of the industry: process engineering, sales, programming, supervision, consulting. Six months ago he opened Nordstrand Precision in Colorado Springs, named after the Norwegian cabinet makers in his family lineage who built the ship they sailed on. In this conversation, Erich and Jim cover what the Peace Corps taught him about manufacturing leadership, why good culture looks boring from the outside, and why he'd rather unclog a river than compete for the same jobs as everybody else.

Key Takeaways

• You can tell the culture of a shop within five minutes of walking on the floor. Watch the faces, not the framed values on the wall.
• Good culture looks boring. Spindles turning, pallets full, no fires. That's the goal.
• The best thing Erich learned from the Peace Corps wasn't engineering. It was how to find common ground with people you have nothing in common with.
• If a shop with a full staff and multiple machines is competing with a guy who just started with one mill and a harbor freight saw, the problem isn't the new guy.
• You don't need to spend money to improve your margins. Most shops can go from three percent to thirty percent just by cleaning up the processes they already have.
• Don't guard your knowledge so close. The supply of shops is going to start dwindling and connection is going to matter more than competition.
  
  Chapters
• 00:00:01 — Introduction to Erich Baur
• 00:04:10 — Icebreaker: Deadpool, film noir, and a montage of conversations
• 00:07:10 — Defining culture: the vibe doesn't lie
• 00:08:29 — What to look for when you walk into a shop
• 00:11:25 — What kept pulling him back to precision manufacturing
• 00:13:40 — Starting at a Fortune 100 shop sweeping floors
• 00:16:08 — Engineers Without Borders and the Peace Corps in Guatemala
• 00:21:36 — How networking set the stage for starting Nordstrand
• 00:35:01 — Where the name Nordstrand comes from
• 00:38:40 — What Nordstrand actually does: machining and consulting
• 00:43:06 — Why he's not a competitor, he's the guy with the shovel
• 00:46:38 — How to scale Nordstrand without settling
• 00:50:36 — Investing in people and building a home for talent
• 00:50:43 — What makes him proud
• 00:52:15 — Legacy: handing it off the right way
• 00:54:08 — Final thoughts: become part of the conversation

Chris Hutson spent 30 years in manufacturing as an industrial engineer, maintenance manager, field service leader, and now VP at MaintainX. He's seen the inside of Fortune 500 operations and developed over 25 people who are now directors or above. In this conversation, Chris and Jim go deep on what drives reliability in manufacturing. It's not the technology. It's the people side: coaching, development, knowledge transfer, and the culture gap that no software can close for you.

Key Takeaways

• Culture is alignment around shared values, goals, and behaviors, and the behaviors tell you more than anything else.
• 79% of industrial teams haven't reduced unplanned downtime despite massive advances in technology. That's a people problem, not a tech problem.
• People don't leave for fifty cents more an hour. They leave because something opened the door, and that something is usually a lack of development.
• You can't buy your way out of a culture gap. Ben Horowitz said it, and Chris has lived it.
• The greatest leadership accomplishment isn't the P&L story. It's the 25-plus people you developed who are now leading organizations of their own.
• Don't push your vendors away. The best ones are subject matter experts and deserve a seat at the table.

Chapters

• 00:00:26 — Podcast Introduction
• 00:01:05 — Guest Introduction: Chris Hutson
• 00:02:01 — Icebreaker: Jack Nicholson, mystery, and a compelling saga
• 00:03:14 — Defining culture: values, goals, and behaviors
• 00:05:08 — The importance of coaching and leadership development
• 00:06:56 — Why employees leave, and it's not the money
• 00:07:36 — 79% of teams still haven't reduced unplanned downtime
• 00:09:23 — Chris's path into manufacturing
• 00:12:53 — Readiness for leadership: prepared technically, not always for people
• 00:15:06 — Lessons from vendors as subject matter experts
• 00:16:23 — The division president with the two-inch binder
• 00:20:14 — What causes the people, process, and technology alignment to break down
• 00:22:39 — The silver tsunami and the knowledge transfer crisis
• 00:24:07 — Why Chris joined MaintainX
• 00:25:16 — Career pride: developing people into leaders
• 00:30:55 — Final thoughts: you can't buy your way out of a culture gap

Johnny Goode spent a decade as a patrol officer, narcotics detective, and SWAT team member in Bloomington, Indiana. When his dad offered him a seat at the family machine shop six years ago, it made zero sense on paper. Today, MSP is having its best quarter in 83 years. In this conversation, Johnny and Jim cover what law enforcement actually teaches you about leadership, how to dismantle a toxic culture from the inside, why bonus structures aren't the answer, and what it means to build a shop where people look forward to Mondays.

Key Takeaways

• Good culture is a supportive environment where accountability is investigative, not finger-pointing. How you treat people is everything.
• Don't confuse good luck with good tactics. Just because something hasn't been a problem doesn't mean it isn't one.
• Bonus structures don't motivate everyone. Find out what actually matters to your people and build around that.
• Putting a poor performer next to your best performer destroys culture faster than almost anything else.
• The best months at MSP have sometimes been the ones when Johnny was out of the office. That's the goal.
• You can do 10 small things in a year and be in a completely different league than where you started.

Chapters

• 00:00:23 — Introduction to Johnny Goode
• 00:02:15 — Icebreaker: Chris Pine, drama, and starting the movie at the best moment
• 00:04:18 — Defining culture: respect, accountability, and talking to people straight
• 00:06:02 — From San Diego to the police academy to the National Guard
• 00:11:58 — Joining the family business during one of the hardest seasons of his life
• 00:14:45 — What it's like to work with your dad and build something together
• 00:18:32 — Succession planning and raising sons who find their own passion first
• 00:21:57 — What SWAT and the military actually taught him about leadership
• 00:25:27 — Dismantling a toxic culture from the inside
• 00:30:25 — Developing young talent and getting people into the right seats
• 00:32:04 — Bringing his sons into the shop and exposing them to manufacturing early
• 00:34:27 — The future of MSP: expansion, talent pipelines, and never being satisfied
• 00:38:12 — Career pathing and why stagnation is the real reason people leave
• 00:40:32 — Final thoughts: the team gets all the credit

Adam Crandall almost became a pediatrician. One afternoon in an OR changed everything. Twenty years later, he's the CRO of Addtronics, a private equity-backed automation platform that's doing something the industry rarely sees: actually protecting the culture of the companies it acquires. In this conversation, Adam's second time on the show, Jim and Adam go deeper than their first episode. They talk about the non-linear path into manufacturing, what it means to lead with people first inside a PE firm, and why Adam got emotional talking about the thank-you messages that still find their way to him years after he's moved on.

Key Takeaways

• Culture is the feeling you have on Sunday night before Monday morning. You know immediately whether you've got it or not.
• Manufacturing isn't usually the plan. It's the destination people stumble into and never want to leave.
• There's private equity, and then there's private equity. Addtronics' investors don't just ask about EBITDA, they ask how the families are doing.
• The numbers mean nothing without the people. You don't have EBITDA without people who feel valued enough to show up.
• Career pivots aren't failures. They're signals. Adam's OR experience wasn't a dead end.
• The legacy isn't the last deal you closed. It's the messages people send years later saying you changed how they lead.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Pride in Manufacturing: the orange juice container speech
• 00:19 — Podcast Introduction
• 02:51 — Icebreaker: Matthew McConaughey, action movies, and club sodas
• 04:53 — What culture means to Adam Crandall
• 08:05 — From Pre-Med to Sales: the OR story
• 12:31 — Embracing the pivot: man plans, God laughs
• 15:04 — Non-linear paths into manufacturing
• 18:19 — Why manufacturing is the unplanned destination people never leave
• 20:30 — Addressing private equity misconceptions
• 26:36 — Addtronics' diverse portfolio: six companies, one mission
• 32:41 — Protecting company culture during rapid growth
• 37:08 — What makes Adam proud
• 40:14 — The emotional weight of mentorship
• 42:35 — A call for talent: Addtronics is hiring

Steven Gao grew up in a small town in China, taught himself computers, then made a snap decision at 18 to study mechanical engineering instead — a choice that took him from a Chinese university to Germany, to a GM joint venture, and eventually to Tesla's first gigafactory outside the US. Now he's building what he calls an AI manufacturing engineer: software that can do everything from reading customer requirements to troubleshooting a production line. In this conversation, Steven and Jim dig into what transformation actually looks like across three countries, why manufacturing is facing an engineering capacity crisis, and why Steven still feels like the technology he's building is magic.

Key Takeaways

• Culture is an unspoken language — it's not what you say, it's how you move, decide, and live.
• Transformation has three levels: changing how people do things, how they collaborate, and ultimately how they think. The hardest one is the last.
• Germany plans everything. China executes fast. The US is proactive. Same technology, completely different playbook in each country.
• For every 10 transformation initiatives, you will fail more than you succeed — and that's okay. The modules you build from those failures become your foundation.
• The engineering capacity crisis is real: the best engineers in the world are aging out, and not enough are coming in behind them.
• Steven left Tesla not because something was wrong, but because he knew a 10X opportunity doesn't come twice — and he saw the window.

Chapters

• Introduction to the Podcast (00:00:28)
• Icebreaker: Life as a Movie (00:01:26)
• Defining Culture (00:02:42)
• Early Life in China (00:03:14)
• Choosing Mechanical Engineering (00:04:11)
• Education in China and Germany (00:05:49)
• Early Career and Internships (00:06:59)
• Working for General Motors in China (00:10:25)
• Joining Tesla's Gigafactory (00:11:37)
• Solving Problems at Tesla (00:14:16)
• Cultural Differences in Transformation (00:16:24)
• Challenges of Data-Driven Manufacturing (00:18:33)
• Leaving Tesla to Co-Found a Company (00:22:56)
• Building an AI Manufacturing Engineer (00:26:54)
• Pride in Engineering (00:30:28)
• Leaving a Legacy (00:32:35)
• The Future of AI in Engineering (00:34:06)

Dustin Bowe grew up in the Bahamas dreaming of becoming a pilot, stumbled into a P&G plant tour in college, and never looked back. Now a manufacturing software founder, Dustin brings a rare combination of electrical engineering, cybersecurity, and frontline leadership experience to one of the industry's oldest problems: we ask people to run faster without giving them the tools to actually do it. In this conversation, Jim and Dustin go deep on what culture actually means, why trust has to come before credibility, and why the human on your shop floor is still the most important variable in any equation — AI, automation, or otherwise.

Key Takeaways

• Culture eats strategy for breakfast — and Dustin heard it from the most strategic person he'd ever met, which made it land harder.
• People don't show up to work wanting to do a bad job. When someone is struggling, something else is going on. Take ten minutes to find out what.
• You could be right all day and it won't matter if trust hasn't been earned first.
• Faster isn't always better. If you don't take care of your equipment, it breaks. Same goes for your people.
• The real problem in most shops isn't output — it's that leaders are asking people to change lagging indicators instead of giving them control over the input measures that actually drive results.
• No heroes. One team, one dream.

Chapters

• 00:00 — Introduction
• 01:06 — How Jim and Dustin met at MD&M South
• 03:27 — Icebreaker: If your life were a movie
• 07:39 — What does culture actually mean?
• 10:10 — Is there such a thing as bad culture?
• 14:26 — When people stop rowing — and what leadership owes them
• 19:45 — Have we lost sight of the humanness of our employees?
• 24:15 — Dustin's origin story: The Bahamas, a pilot's dream, and a P&G plant tour
• 31:18 — The hardest lesson from his first leadership role: trust before credibility
• 38:32 — No heroes: why Superman culture kills teams
• 40:16 — The hire that changed how he sees people
• 44:35 — Why he walked away from stability to start a software company
• 49:45 — What the software actually does and the problem it solves
• 55:43 — What legacy Dustin wants to leave on this industry