Talk Real Shift

Your plant can track the temperature on a single bearing, so why are you still guessing who shows up to run the line? Learn how one text message gives frontline workers their balances, their answers, and a voice in any language, and gives your supervisors the first hour of the shift back.

Sheila Stafford returns to Talk Real Shift as the cofounder and CEO of TeamSense, the platform connecting manufacturers to their frontline workers by text. She started as a General Motors manufacturing engineer leading about 100 skilled trades on a $25M assembly line conversion, then directed North American refrigeration product development at Whirlpool and led supply chain integration for its $1B Indesit acquisition. She holds a mechanical engineering degree from Duke and an MBA from Notre Dame, and she knows the first hour of a shift because she's lived it.

Sheila explains:

🡒 Why 1 in 38 frontline workers is one point away from termination, and most of them have no idea.

🡒 Why the quality bulletin pinned to your board in English never really reaches your floor.

🡒 Why around 25% of frontline workers change their phone number every quarter, and what that does to your emergency alerts.

🡒 How one manufacturer accounted for every employee within four hours of Hurricane Idalia making landfall, after years of phone trees.

🡒 The Moneyball approach that finally gives credit to the crews hitting singles instead of the hero who fixes the breakdown.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:50 Why attendance came first

05:20 Workers have been making decisions blind

11:50 Phone numbers, hurricanes, and every language on the floor

19:25 HR answers in seconds, on any shift

24:30 One point away from termination

28:25 Catching problems before people quit

33:45 Everybody has a plan until somebody calls off

38:25 Safety by station and the Moneyball approach

47:25 Shipping every six weeks and what she'd tell 2021 Sheila

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

What would you do if 85% of your revenue disappeared one week after you moved your family across the country for the job?

Sheila Stafford is the CEO and co-founder of TeamSense, the text based platform that connects frontline workers to their companies, and a member of the Forbes Business Council. A Duke mechanical engineer with an MBA from Notre Dame, she launched vehicles at General Motors, led the supply chain integration for Whirlpool's $1B acquisition in Italy, ran product development for Whirlpool's North American refrigeration business, and ran the Industrial Imaging business at Fluke. She shares the hard lessons that taught her how to lead when she isn't the expert in the room and how to bet on herself when every instinct said no.

In this episode, she explains:

The Beginner's Advantage

🡒 How asking basic questions let her lead a room full of supply chain experts who knew more than she did.

The Perceived Risk Trap

🡒 The one question from her husband that got her to walk away from a steady salary and start a company.

The Premium Brand

🡒 Why the same dishwasher, off the same line, sells for $299 or $3,200.

The Competitor Play

🡒 Why your biggest rival will sell to you when your business is on fire, and the basic math that makes them say yes.

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:50 Cans, candy, and scalped tickets at the Bills stadium

07:38 Falling for the factory floor at Ford and GM

12:43 364 days a year on a pickup truck launch

16:21 The medical supply startup she built in business school

19:58 Same dishwasher, $299 or $3,200

22:06 Saying no to Italy, then saying yes

35:51 The call no new general manager wants

45:22 Starting TeamSense and betting on text over apps

50:38 The customer story that changed why she does this

Connect with Sheila

https://www.linkedin.com/in/sheila-stafford-451976b/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/teamsenseapp

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Manufacturing veteran Gary Krus reveals why more robots mean MORE jobs, why 9 out of 10 of his employees still don't use AI every day, and why AI is on pace to be halfway to designing the tools themselves by 2030.

Gary Krus is Vice President of Business Development at HIROTEC America, where he leads the research and development team that takes new products and processes from concept to commercialization. An electrical engineer from Lawrence Technological University, he joined HIROTEC in 1993 as a controls engineer, worked his way through engineering, operations, and business strategy, and served as President of HIROTEC Tooling de Mexico. Today he leads HIROTEC neXt, the company's push to take its automation expertise beyond automotive.

He explains:

🡒 Why putting more robots on the floor has led manufacturers to hire more people, not fewer

🡒 How a 30 second AI prompt replaced a week of work, and why a new intern still called it cheating

🡒 The 15 year kaizen path that got a 40 ton die change down to under a minute

🡒 How HIROTEC turned 28 assembly lines into 3 that can run every single model

🡒 The one part of managing people that none of the books prepared him for

Chapters

00:00 Intro

00:59 From controls engineer to leading R&D

04:25 Building a plant in Mexico from the ground up

08:00 Why the people on the floor know more than you

13:40 Putting AI to work in a real manufacturing business

18:30 The intern who thought AI was cheating

24:57 Do robots actually take jobs?

31:45 The 15 years behind Japan's fastest die change

43:30 Advice for new managers and your 25 year old self

50:55 HIROTEC neXt and the plan for 2035

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Ana Kraft spent years as a project engineer before founding Xena Workwear, and she's spent the last seven years learning what most PPE makers never bothered to figure out:

Since women's feet are wider at the ball, narrower at the heel, have higher arches, and have a lower ankle bone, a smaller men's boot in pink solves none of that.

Plus, most companies miss that fit is a safety issue. When PPE actually fits, compliance goes up: nobody runs to the shop floor without gear, and nobody skips the floor entirely because changing shoes takes too long.

She also brought a playbook for building the company itself:

→ How to de-risk the leap: She went hourly with no benefits and paid herself nothing for a year.

→ How to hire on values, and why a candidate needs three out of four before a degree even matters.

→ Why investor money adds pressure, and who should never take it.

→ The quarterly rule she uses now: pick 3 to 5 priorities, because if everything is a priority, nothing is.

Chapters

0:00 Intro to Ana Kraft

1:52 Five pairs of boots under her desk

9:34 Quitting in stages, hourly with no benefits

11:54 From buying the product to joining the company

18:35 Changing shoes, palazzo pants, and dress codes

24:00 The women's event that packed up her boots

26:30 Becoming a mom while running the company

36:45 Burnout and the hotel room meltdown

43:10 Hiring on values and letting people fail

55:41 Advice to 25 year old Ana and the 30 grand answer

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Marley Devergilio knows how to grow an account - twelve years in automotive sales, and the numbers back it up.

She's a sales strategy manager at FORVIA HELLA, a board director for the Automotive Women's Alliance Foundation, and the person who took one operating plan from $50 million to $200 million a year.

Her method isn't complicated:

1) Do the prep work.

2) Come with a recommendation, even an imperfect one.

3) Have uncomfortable conversations before they become expensive ones.

Here’s what else we covered:

→ Walking into cold rooms and advocating for yourself

→ Communicating across global teams and customers

→ Making deposits in people, and why relationships close deals

→ Advice for the quietest person in the room

Thank you, Marley, for opening your home to this industry long before you ever sat down at my table. This one meant a lot.

Chapters

0:00 Intro

1:00 The coat left behind on purpose

3:15 From selling candy to automotive

8:35 Thirty years of AWAF and a level playing field

13:30 Cold rooms and getting comfortable being uncomfortable

15:05 Growing $50M into $200M

20:55 The decision in Austria

22:40 Saying yes, saying no

32:30 The Miami trip

37:15 Making deposits in people

Connect with Marley

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marlanadevergilio/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/forviahella

https://www.instagram.com/forviahella/

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Vinh Tran spent 31 years in automotive, before he became the first employee for an autonomous robotics company.

Vinh shared his story about his boxing career. He trained two nights a week for 6 months, and fought in front of a sold out room at the Grand Hyatt in Tokyo. He learned the importance of being prepared.

That same mindset - prepare for the fight before you ever step in the ring - is what he leaned on when he left a stable executive career to start something from nothing at MyBull Intelligence Machinery, which builds outdoor autonomous mobile robots.

Here’s what we covered on the podcast:

→ Moving his family to Japan and learning the farmer mindset with customers

→ The six month lead up to a charity boxing match

→ Why his wife Liz has been the reason he could take every risk he's taken

→ Building the customer trust process from scratch as employee number one

→ What MyBull is solving with outdoor autonomous mobile robots

Thank you to Vinh for making the time between running MyBull's expansion across and everything else on his plate to come on the show!

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:00 From Wayne State to CRO of an autonomous robotics company

01:56 23 years at Continental, from project manager to VP

05:09 The calculated risk of moving his family to Japan

06:49 Learning the farmer mindset with customers

12:03 Signing up for Executive Fight Night

15:11 Meeting the kid his fight was for

21:17 Inside the fight night at the Grand Hyatt

33:26 A shoutout to his wife, Liz

38:34 Becoming employee number one at MyBull

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Lori Lancaster is currently the Vice Chairwoman of Emotiv Mobility. But before that, she was a critical care nurse in the surgical ICU at Mass General.

Twelve and a half years ago, her sister asked her to come help run the family business... Lori didn't know the industry, didn't know the language, and said yes anyway.

Then the whole industry pivoted hard toward electric vehicles, and her company didn't move. Instead of following the trend, she instead built transformers for the power grid, now in testing, aiming to be made right here in Michigan!

What we covered:

→ Leaving nursing for a family business she didn't understand yet

→ Why she held her company back from the EV rush everyone else was chasing

→ Building a new transformer manufacturing business from scratch

→ Learning automotive slang the hard way, code blue included

→ The advice she'd give her 25 year old self about perfectionism

Thank you Lori for making time between running two companies and sitting on four boards to sit down with me to Talk Real Shift!

Chapters

00:00 Welcome to Talk Real Shift

01:00 From critical care nurse to Vice Chair

03:00 The pivots that got her here

07:00 Choices, not sacrifices

09:00 The servant leaders who shaped her

12:00 Betting against the EV rush

22:00 Turning transformers into a new business

26:00 Her sister's White House moment

31:00 Advice to her 25 year old self

36:00 Code blue, and other lessons from the plant floor

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Joe Fadool is the President and CEO of BorgWarner, a company with 38,000 people and products riding on some of the toughest trucks and SUVs in the world.

His path wasn't a straight line… Joe took a role too early in his career. He missed deadlines on a launch and was ultimately pulled from the job. In a later role, he was missing his son's birthdays for two years because of the travel.

He went to his boss and said he had to get off the road, but he was instead offered a turnaround: a billion dollar unionized manufacturing plant in Huntsville.

Joe calls it the best thing that ever happened to him - it got him home for dinner, and it was the operational experience that opened the door to BorgWarner.

In this episode of Talk Real Shift, we covered:

→ Why operational experience is the price of entry for leadership at BorgWarner

→ The difference between one way and two way decisions

→ How to tell when someone is in the wrong role instead of the wrong company

→ What generative AI means for people who didn't start on the same line as everyone else

→ The moment he got pulled from a job, and what he did with it afterward

Thank you Joe for making the time to Talk Real Shift - running a company doesn't leave a lot of open time, and he still showed up ready to talk. Glad to have this conversation with you!

Chapters

00:00 Intro

01:00 Trivia, the pink hat, and a shoutout to the Livonia team

06:30 From a kid tearing down engines to an engineer at Ford

08:00 The leap from engineering into sales

19:41 The failure that got him pulled from a role

20:39 Choosing family over the road, and the plant that changed everything

22:09 Why the shipping doors are the most important doors in the company

33:08 Right person, wrong role: the nine box problem

37:18 One way doors and two way doors: how he makes big decisions

51:10 Advice to his younger self, and where generative AI fits in

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Dr. Tim Tenneriello started as the Principal of a low-performing charter school with teachers who'd been in classrooms longer than he'd been alive. He had no blueprint, just the weight of 55 people looking to him for answers he didn't have yet.

Four years later, they were the top-performing school in the network. Then he ran multiple schools. Then the whole network.

He bought the company with no family money and no connections, just seven months of obsessing over how to find $4 million he didn't have. He sold it and got into wealth management.

On this episode of Talk Real Shift, we covered:

→ How to survive the "temporary period of incompetence" every new role brings

→ Why imposter syndrome is just a signal that you're growing, and how to beat it back

→ The DISC profile that showed Tim he has zero natural tendency to care about people, and what he did about it

→ How to buy a business when you have no money and nobody in your life who's ever done it

→ Why letting your team fail on purpose is one of the most important things you can do as a leader

Thank you Tim for being as honest about the hard parts as with the wins!.

Chapters

0:00 - Intro

1:00 - Dr. Tim's background: from classroom discipline to charter school principal

5:15 - Getting the doctorate and MBA

6:19 - Imposter syndrome at every level

9:00 - Building a network by saying yes

10:36 - When saying no is the right call: priorities vs. ambition

13:08 - Buying a company with no money and no connections

18:20 - How to earn trust fast: start with the small, visible wins

20:05 - Leadership clarity: vision, focus, and avoiding shiny objects

23:14 - The generational wealth transfer and opportunity in M&A

27:46 - What it actually takes: work, luck, and the preparation that earns it

38:05 - Where it went wrong: the transactional years and the shift toward people

44:45 - The DISC profile, the "I have no S" moment, and learning to lead intentionally

52:39 - Building teams from scratch at every stop, and why that worked

58:45 - Advice to 25-year-old Tim

1:02:11 - On luck vs. preparation, and five graduate degrees

1:07:03 - Final advice: build great people and then get out of their way

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304

Joe LaRussa spent his career in automotive. Promotions, a patent, industry recognition.

He was winning at work but walking into chaos every night.

He talks about how the industry downturn swept up his position. He was a new dad with toddler at home and no plan.

On the drive home that day, with nothing left to schedule and no meetings to run, it hit him: Every system he used at work was usable.

He built a household balance sheet, a family mission statement, spending thresholds, and a calendar. Now he's a small-city mayor, and people trusted him with that office because of how his household runs.

In our episode we covered:

→ Why work-life balance is a myth and what work-life blending looks like in practice

→ The family mission statement that ended the dinner argument

→ Running your home like a balance sheet

→ The Japan trip that came after ten flopped blending attempts

→ Why your problem at home is almost always the system

Thank you, Joe, for Talking Real Shift!

-- PROMOS MENTIONED --

https://homegrownleadership.net/wmm

Use promo code REALSHIFT for $20 off (expires 8/31)

Use promo code REALSHIFT99 for $100 off Insight to Action workshop.

Chapters

0:00 Teaser

0:48 From automotive leadership to Homegrown Leadership

3:08 The drive home that changed everything

6:19 Running the household like an operating machine

7:34 Building a five-month reserve, the household balance sheet

11:08 Getting aligned, the family mission statement

15:11 The vulnerable moments behind the anger

19:48 Get hold of your time first

24:58 Work-life balance is a myth, try blending

35:25 Good leaders lift other leaders up

44:23 The sledgehammer and the velvet hammer

54:45 Course-correcting a broken culture at home

59:48 The one resource you can't make more of

1:00:00 What he'd tell his 25-year-old self

1:01:48 Where to start and the closing invite

~~~

This episode is powered by TeamSense

TeamSense is the AI-powered shift intelligence platform that automates attendance, connects every worker, and drives performance across your operation — all through text.

Ready to see how leading manufacturers and logistics teams keep every shift covered?

https://teamsense.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/1896826304