The Industrial Side

Ryan Kirby, Partner at Alderman & Company, on What It Actually Takes to Sell an Aerospace & Defense Business

Ryan Kirby is a Partner at Alderman & Company, an investment bank focused exclusively on aerospace and defense M&A. He's spent his career on the sell side, helping owner operators position their companies, find the right buyer, and walk away with the best outcome, not just the highest number.

In this episode, Ryan and Brian get into the real mechanics of selling a business in A&D, and most of it applies well beyond that industry.

What we cover:

• Why customer concentration scares buyers, and how to reframe it (program-level diversification within one large customer can change the story)
• The succession planning problem: why "retiring before you sell" is the cleanest path, and why rolling equity changes the calculus entirely
• The buyer landscape, broken down plainly: independent sponsors, private equity, strategic buyers, and public strategics, and who tends to pay the most (and why)
• Why private equity gets a bad rap from some owners, and the real pros and cons of selling to a buyer who plans to sell again
• The uncomfortable truth about creating "fear" in a buyer to drive up price
• Why some bankers will tell you what you want to hear, and what that actually costs you over a 1-2 year engagement
• Why aerospace and defense M&A is having its busiest stretch on record, and what's driving it across space, defense, commercial, and business aviation
• The folder of inbound buyer emails most owners have sitting in a drawer, and why you should never delete them

Notable stat: One recently public A&D-focused platform reported a pipeline of 1,500 potential deals on their earnings call.

Connect with Ryan: Email: [email protected] Phone: 386-866-4864 Website: aldermanco.com Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-kirby-880875174/

In the third installment of our Metric Marine series, Brian sits down with Jessica Stahl, COO of Metric Marine, for a deep dive into the operational engine behind one of South Florida's leading marine supply distributors. If the first two episodes covered vision and marketing, this one gets into the gritty day-to-day of how a distribution business actually wins or loses.

In this episode:

• How Metric Marine handles 1,500–3,000 RFQs per month and what it takes to turn them around within the hour
• Why speed matters more than price — and when price is simply out of your control
• The Punch Out model explained: what it is, how Metric lost business by not being ready for it, and how they got that business back
• The sales-to-operations handoff and why treating a quote like a document instead of a promise can sink a company
• What Jessica learned sitting on the procurement side of the table — and how that shapes how Metric operates today
• Why consistency, not charm, is what keeps you in a customer's historical data and drives repeat orders
• Seatrade, golf tournaments, and the case for showing up without an agenda

Key quote: "Sometimes we learn the most from when something doesn't go right — and that's what customers remember the most too."

Connect with Jessica Stall on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-stahl-6b815a8a/) or reach Metric Marine at metricmarine.com.

Brian sits down with Patrick Dichter, owner of Apple Tree Business Services, to break down what small business owners — especially those in manufacturing, distribution, and home services — actually need to understand about their financials. Patrick works with companies ranging from $250K to $20M in revenue and shares the accounting blind spots that cost owners real money.

Topics covered:

• P&L vs. balance sheet — which one matters more, and why inventory-heavy businesses can't ignore the balance sheet
• "Checkbook Charlie" — the most common stage new business owners get stuck in
• The right amount of cash to keep on hand, and how to think about gross profit margins by industry
• Why accounts receivable is a full contact sport and how slow invoicing silently kills cash flow
• The strategic case for paying your bills slowly — and when to break that rule
• Cash vs. accrual accounting: what the purists get wrong for small businesses
• Common QuickBooks mistakes that quietly wreck your financials (CRM integrations, unmatched deposits, proposal invoices)
• Why commingling personal and business expenses is a serious problem — especially at sale
• What accounting team you actually need at $2M, $5M, and $10M in revenue
• How to think about gross margin as your highest-leverage financial lever
• Exit planning: the real reason high margins can be a red flag for buyers

Connect with Patrick:

• Website: appletreebusiness.com
• Twitter/LinkedIn: @PatrickDichter

Dan Verboski didn't grow up dreaming about signs. He left the State Department in 2017, looked for a business to buy, and ended up in Tyler, Texas taking over a 72-year-old sign company he knew nothing about. Leon Signs is now 80 years old and Dan runs a 26-person operation making custom, large-format lighted signs for banks, churches, restaurants, and national rollouts across East Texas.

In this episode:

• Why 87% of Dan's revenue comes from repeat customers and what that says about how to protect a geographic moat
• The "blessing and curse" of being a specialty trade business — high inbound, but nearly impossible to scale fast because every hire takes years to develop
• How Leon Signs tells customers their confirmed install date within days of signing and hits it 95% of the time
• The 4-year, 9-month warranty call — a simple touchpoint that keeps customers close right before the relationship would go quiet
• Why Dan almost lost people he shouldn't have when he bought the company, and what he would do differently
• EOS and how a 10-year vision connects to a 90-day sprint for an 80-year-old trade business
• What people get wrong about manufacturing and the trades — and why "you'll be poor" is the wrong assumption

Connect with Dan on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/danverboski/) & check out Leon's Signs here (https://www.leonssignsinc.com/)

Brian sits down with JD Beck, owner of Mountain Valley Plumbing and HVAC, to talk about what it actually takes to go from employee to business owner in the trades.

JD's path wasn't a straight line. After four years as an Army engineer officer building runways and forward operating bases, he spent five years climbing the ladder in commercial elevators — field supervisor, department manager, covering Colorado and Wyoming. Good career, good trajectory. But the ceiling was closing in and nothing on the table felt right.

So he bought a plumbing and HVAC company instead.

Getting there was messier than expected. Deals fell through. A mechanical contractor he had under LOI unraveled in due diligence. A company he thought was locked up sold to someone else. He kept working his day job the whole time, visiting sellers at night when they didn't want him around their employees, grinding through the process until something finally stuck.

This episode is for anyone who's ever thought about trading a paycheck for ownership — especially in the trades.

In this episode:

• Why a successful corporate career isn't enough if the ceiling is closing in
• What the deal process actually looks like before you get to yes
• Why keeping your job during the search is one of the smartest moves you can make
• The deals JD almost did — and why he's glad they fell apart
• What drew him to plumbing and HVAC over other industries

Follow JD on X at x.com/dirtyhandsops?s=20

What do screws, ship supplies, and mouthwash have in common? They're all "boring", and yet, they can all be marketed brilliantly.

This week, Brian sits down with Jochebed Zakrzeswki, Director of Marketing at Metric Marine and brand strategist for B2B & ecommerce businesses, to talk about how businesses in dull industries can find their voice, attract the right customers, and grow without losing what makes them human.

In this episode:

• Sell the emotion, not the product — Why Metric Marine doesn't call itself a ship chandler, and what they sell instead (hint: it's trust and peace of mind).
• The messaging-first framework — Before you can get loud, you have to know what you're saying. Jochebed breaks down how to find your differentiator and make it stick.
• Being human is your competitive advantage — Why AI-polished content is making everyone sound the same, and the cold email that finally broke through by saying "God damn it, Jochebed."
• Marketing is math, not just creativity — The myth that marketing is purely a creative field, and why the best marketers live in the balance between analytics and ideas.
• Master two channels before touching a third — Jochebed's minimalist marketing framework: find where your audience actually lives online (and offline) and own that space first.
• Stop rushing the sales cycle — Why understanding your realistic conversion timeline is the antidote to pushy sales, and how patience builds lasting customers.
• Why Reddit is the new Google Ads circa 2005 — The underpriced B2B opportunity hiding in subreddits, and how AI tools are already mining Reddit for brand signals.

Connect with Josh at www.imjochebed.com or LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/in/imjochebed

Bear with us on this one — Brian was running on cough medicine and not much else when we recorded this. The content is worth it.

In this episode, Brian sits down with Guillermo Ochoa of Merseyshell LLC — a manufacturing veteran with 15 years across the auto industry and Bimbo Bakeries (the largest bread manufacturer in the world) — who is now on a self-funded search to acquire and operate a small industrial business.

Guillermo walks through his career arc from R&D engineer to warehouse automation lead, with stints in Mexico, Colombia, Spain, and the UK. He breaks down how large-scale food manufacturing actually works — the machinery, the sourcing contracts, the labor economics, and how brands like Arnold's and Sara Lee compete against Walmart's Great Value on grocery shelves.

Then the conversation shifts to where Guillermo is headed next: acquiring a company in the $8M–$30M revenue range (roughly $1.5M–$5M EBITDA) in manufacturing or industrial services, specifically targeting control system integrators that serve food manufacturing customers. He talks about what he looks for in a target, how he plans to grow through both organic expansion and bolt-on acquisitions, and why service contracts are one of the most underutilized levers in the businesses he's looking at.

Topics covered:

• How Bimbo Bakeries operates across four continents and competes across grocery store tiers
• The role of futures contracts in managing commodity ingredient costs
• Why labor cost — not ingredients — is increasingly the defining cost equation in food manufacturing
• The growing shelf space dedicated to specialty and organic bread products
• What makes a company worth acquiring vs. passing on
• How to convert a one-time installation customer into a recurring service contract
• The Camino de Santiago and the River Mersey — and what they have to do with a holding company name

Connect with Guillermo: [email protected]

In industrial distribution, customer experience is rarely treated as a competitive advantage. Most companies assume the product and the price are all that matter. Shelly Chandler has spent her career proving that wrong.

Note: This is a replay of a 2021 interview with Shelly recorded during her previous role. The lessons she shares on customer experience strategy are arguably more relevant today than when they were first recorded.

Shelly was the VP of Customer Experience at American Tire Distributors, one of the largest distributors in North America. In this episode she breaks down how a large scale B2B distribution business builds a customer centric culture, uses data and analytics to anticipate customer needs before they become problems, and deploys technology to improve the experience at every point in the customer journey.

This is not a conversation about theory. It is a practical look at what customer experience leadership actually looks like inside a complex logistics and distribution operation — and what operators in manufacturing and distribution can take from it regardless of their size.

What we cover in this episode:

How to build a customer experience strategy inside a B2B distribution business where relationships and reliability matter more than brand. Using data and voice of customer programs to identify friction points before they cost you accounts. The organizational and leadership challenges of making customer experience a company wide priority rather than a marketing function. How digital tools and voice technology are starting to change the B2B buying experience in distribution and logistics. Where to start if you have never formally audited your customer experience and what that process actually looks like.

About Shelley Chandler:

Shelly Chandler leads strategy, data analytics, and organizational culture initiatives focused on delivering differentiated B2B customer experiences across large scale operations.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelly-chandler-cxleader/

Resources mentioned:

Customer Experience Professionals Association: https://www.cxpa.org

About The Industrial Side:

The Industrial Side is a podcast built for operators running real economy businesses in manufacturing, distribution, and home services. Every episode goes inside the tactical decisions that determine whether an industrial business wins or fails.

Most people have never thought about the chemistry behind a printed page. Rachel McGrath has spent her career mastering it.

Rachel is the CEO of Tower Products, a manufacturer of technical chemicals for the printing industry — fountain solutions, dust control innovations, and specialty products that determine whether a print run succeeds or fails. In this episode she pulls back the curtain on what it actually takes to operate in a highly specialized manufacturing niche — from product development and SKU management to pricing strategy in the face of supply chain shocks.

This is a conversation about the unglamorous, technical, and genuinely fascinating work of running a niche industrial business — and the strategic decisions that drive real growth in a complex sector.

What we cover:

• How technical chemicals determine printing quality and why most people in the industry don't fully understand the products they're using
• Tower Products' distribution channels and OEM partnerships — how they go to market in a fragmented industry
• Product development and innovation in printing chemicals, including dust control as an emerging area
• How Rachel thinks about pricing strategy — including the real-time tools and ERP systems that make dynamic pricing manageable
• Communicating price changes to customers without losing the relationship
• Managing SKU proliferation and controlling product sprawl as the business scales
• Growth through acquisition — how Tower Products has expanded its market position strategically
• Balancing deep technical expertise with business strategy at the CEO level

Resources mentioned:

Tower Products — towerproducts.com

DataCore ERP System — datacore.com

Connect with Rachel:

LinkedIn — www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-mcgrath-78114625/

Email — [email protected]

In this episode, Jonas shares his journey from the factory floor to private equity — covering the real challenges of managing manufacturing operations, lessons learned in the automotive industry, and what drew him to search funds as a path to ownership.

Whether you're a plant manager, an aspiring entrepreneur, or an investor, Jonas delivers grounded insights on lean principles, cultural fit, and what it takes to create lasting value in manufacturing businesses.

Key takeaways

• The automotive industry's supply chain pressures force manufacturing leaders to develop resilience and problem-solving skills that transfer directly to business ownership.
• Lean principles aren't just tools — they're a mindset. Jonas explains how operational discipline drives growth when applied consistently across teams.
• Search funds offer a unique path for operators who want ownership aligned with their values — Jonas breaks down why this model fits manufacturing veterans especially well.
• When acquiring a business, cultural fit and trust with the exiting owner matter as much as the financials — "stay humble and listen to the business owner."
• U.S. manufacturing has a strong future — but it requires leaders who understand both the shop floor and the balance sheet.

Connect with Jonas via Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonas-linke-1a48a0132/