In this episode of the MFGMonkey Podcast, we explore the vast opportunities within Ohio’s manufacturing sector with industry expert Aaron Patrick. As a key player in the manufacturing landscape, Ohio is poised for significant growth and innovation. Aaron shares his insights on how to harness this potential, offering strategic guidance for industry leaders and stakeholders. Whether you’re involved in manufacturing or interested in regional development, this discussion provides valuable perspectives on driving success in Ohio’s manufacturing industry.
How to Get in Touch with Aaron Patrick
If you’re interested in learning more about Ohio MEP or connecting with Aaron Patrick, you can reach him via the Ohio MEP website:
- Website: Ohio Manufacturing Extension Partnership (Ohio MEP)
- Contact Through Website: Fill out the contact form on the Ohio MEP website, and Aaron or a member of his team will follow up.
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-patrick-776685ba/
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Unlocking Ohio’s Manufacturing Potential with Aaron Patrick
In this week’s episode, Dustin interviews Aaron Patrick, State Director for Manufacturing Assistance Programs at the Ohio Department of Development. Aaron discusses the role of the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) program in supporting small and medium-sized manufacturers in Ohio, emphasizing company culture, workforce retention, and community engagement. He provides insights into changing employee motivators, MEP initiatives like supply chain management and reshoring, and manufacturing topics including automation, cybersecurity, and ISO certification. The conversation underscores the importance of continuous process improvement and partnership.
Aaron, welcome man. How are you?
Doing good, Dustin. How are you?
I am doing awesome. I appreciate you joining me on the monkey. We’ve talked about this for well over a year and we finally got our schedules together, even though we’re not in the same room, but we’re doing it over the web. I think we will still have fun with it. Where are you located right now?
Absolutely. I have been looking forward to it. Physically I am in downtown Columbus. Looking out my window, I can see the State House right across the street from me. I work for the Ohio Department of Development, and we are located at the Rife building in downtown Columbus. We are right next to the Huntington building and right across from the State House.
That’s awesome. I haven’t been to your office; I need to come check it out sometime. I didn’t realize you had a nice view of the State House. That’s super cool. Well, tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background, and what you’re doing.
My name is Aaron Patrick. I am the state director for manufacturing assistance programs. I’m employed by the Ohio Department of Development. I’m a state employee, so don’t hold that against me. What I do is, oversee a program that we receive federal and state dollars to operate a program called MEP for short, which stands for Manufacturing Extension Partnership. It is a unique program that all 50 states plus Puerto Rico have. It is a national network of manufacturing experts across the country who are here to support small and medium-sized manufacturers. In Ohio, Where I sit at the Department of Development, I administer this program to six regional partners. I have three universities and three 5013Cs that I essentially fund to do outreach and client engagement work with small to medium-sized manufacturers. We are an organization that is here to help, to identify the pain points of small medium-sized manufacturers and then help them with what their needs are. I’ve been with this program now for nine years, and I’ve been the state director for a little over two years now. That’s my current role. Before, I was in the automotive industry for about 18 years. I worked for a large Honda tier-one supplier with a facility in London, Ohio, but they are based in Japan. It was a Japanese transplant. I had several roles there, including project management, and new model development projects for several years. Then I transitioned into a purchasing manager role, I did a lot of work around logistics and supplier development-related activities. After doing that for about 18 years, now I’m trying my hand at state government. I am passionate about manufacturing and I’m passionate about doing things to help the small-medium sized guys. Dustin, we’ve worked with you, and we’ve done some work through Columbus State with you. It’s just a passion of mine to let people know we’re here and we’re here to help.
You guys have certainly helped us. We were at a very tender point in our company and you guys were vital. I mean, you were a lifeline to us, we were hanging on by a thread after COVID. What you guys were able to do for us was amazing. We have a piece of business now that otherwise we did not have the staffing to figure out. I don’t know that we could have done it without you guys. You were able to step in and help, not only to advise us as to what to do but do a lot of the engineering work. You were able to help us figure out the logistics of it, the rates of what we were making, and how to get the product from raw state to finished state. Quite honestly, I’d never done anything like that before and I’ve been in manufacturing for a long time. There are a lot of things that I have seen, and I do know how to do, but with this product, I was lost. Somehow Brent and I started talking about it and he said they could help with that. Then Matt stepped in as the engineer and it was just like you guys were an extension of our team. You guys came out to our facility, and we brought in a gentleman who teaches at Ohio State. I know you know who I’m talking about but I’m drawing a blank, but he did our whole facility layout. He came out and measured the whole thing. Did a right-now layout and then did a five-year layout. That was instrumental and that was a cool project because a lot of times I complicate things and he came with poster board and thumbtacks and some little cut-out squares. I said “What the hell are you doing? An art project?” We just sat down and placed everything on the board and put little pins in. Ashley was there with us, and we laid the whole thing out. Still to this day, it’s in our office and we still use it. We got to a certain point and then Matt drew it up for us. I could keep going on and on but thank you, guys.
Well, you know, Dustin, for someone in a position like you’re in, you’re getting a facility, you’re wearing many hats. You have bills to pay, you have receivables, payables, you have a lot of stuff going on. When it comes to laying out a shop floor, you’re doing what you can do at the current time. To have an outside perspective, when you say that we were almost like an extension of your business, that’s exactly what I want to hear. That’s exactly what I want from your perspective, to be that we’re a resource. We’re a trusted advisor. We use a lot of different terms, but we’re an extension of your staff and we’re here to make things better for you. That’s really the simple way of putting it.
Brent and I just had lunch on Monday. It’s like when you and I talk, we are talking over each other almost and we’re jumping in like we’re a BB and a pop can. Talking about seven different subjects all at one time. It is cool because when people are passionate about what they do, it is like that. Then you get done and there’s 13 more ideas and we have 15 more things to do. It’s just like sitting down with a buddy and sitting down with Brent is like that, you’re like that. You guys are going to help us complete our ISO certification this year, which is huge for us. We’ve wanted to do it for several years, but without the MEP, we don’t have the capacity. The brain capacity, the hours, or the employees to tackle this. You guys are helping and stepping in and doing it. Matt came out when we had a problem with the machine. Matt’s out there and he’s out there fixing the machine, fixing the wire. He was like, “Oh, the circuit boards burnt out.” I would have never known that we were able to buy a new circuit board, put it in and it works again. That is so vital.
How many employees are you at right now, Dustin, for your operation?
We have five full-time, and we have another five part-time.
When I mentioned our client base for the MEP program is small and medium-sized manufacturers, just throwing a few stats out. There are over 13,000 manufacturers in the state of Ohio, with about 690,000 employees. Manufacturing is the largest sector just behind healthcare in the state of Ohio. In terms of employment, it’s a huge part of the state of Ohio, the DNA of the state. And when we say small and medium-sized manufacturers, out of the 13,000 plus manufacturers in the state of Ohio, 89% of those have 100 or fewer employees. Out of that 89%, I would say 90% of those are 20 employees or fewer. So, you’re the norm, your manufacturing facility for the state of Ohio is the norm. Small and medium-sized clients are the ones who we’re here to support. We’re not here for corporate welfare. We’re not here for the big guys. They’ve got staff to do all the stuff that they need. It’s someone like you, Dustin, who is wearing multiple hats and doesn’t have time to think about the shop floor layout, how to automate a process, or how to not be lifting all of these extremely heavy bags of material that you’re trying to process. All that stuff, that’s really what we’re designed for and what we are here to do.
Outside of that, it gives us confidence to tackle projects that otherwise we would have to turn down. That project that we’re talking about brought just under a million dollars of revenue to the state of Ohio from another state. So that was a win, right? We added a couple of employees. It was profitable for us. But outside of that, we wouldn’t have had the confidence to go after that. I didn’t even know where to begin, I just would have moved on for self-preservation and risk reasons. Now we have this whole team. We can take it to them and say, “Here is what we must do. How do we do it?” We figured it out together and that was the fun part. Brent and I just talked about a project that we are looking at. It’s a huge project for us, we will take down another 120,000-square-foot building for the EV industry. We just sat down and figured it out. The warehousing piece of it, the fulfillment, then all the moving pieces and parts. It is a big project, figuring out how everything must be laid out so we can get it in and out. Then there was the fire suppression, the insurance. The component of having 16 trucks come in and out a day, my mind starts spinning and I don’t sleep a whole lot.
I was just talking to someone yesterday who said, “Boy, I don’t know that I’d want to own a small manufacturing company right now with all the workforce challenges, with all the uncertainty across a bunch of different realms. I’m not even going to go into the politics of stuff, but man, there’s just a lot that you must consider right now, you know?”
Fortunately, in West Liberty, we are blessed, we don’t have employee issues. We always have challenges, but when we get somebody, we keep them. When we need to recruit new people, it is not hard because we’re out in the country. We have got some good old boys that are used to working. It is not downtown Columbus where people want to work in restaurants and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. However, it’s a different mentality of someone out on a farm that’s used to working hard and they bust their ass. They seem to enjoy it. We have kids, 17 years old, working in our shops that we can leave, and we do not have to supervise them. We don’t have to micromanage these kids. He came from a local church and his parents are awesome and the dude just works. You know, I’ve had 40-year-old men in there and they’re whining, telling me that they can’t do stuff. Then I have a 17-year-old kid just working circles around this dude. We are very fortunate with the workforce that we can get our hands on.
I think you’re probably being a little bit modest in that. I would venture to guess that you’ve created a culture within your facility, within your shop that allows you to retain the workforce that you have. We talked a lot with manufacturers today. It used to be recruitment was always a big challenge for manufacturers. Now, it’s the retention component. Retaining the folks that have tribal knowledge, the experience. retention right now boils down to what’s your culture. What’s the culture of your company? Are you promoting continued learning? Are you offering opportunities? Are you providing some level of flexibility to allow a better work-life balance? Some manufacturers struggle with that I think, if you’re not having turnover challenges, that means your culture is strong and I would keep doing what you’re doing, Dustin.
Thank you. That means a lot. I do like to think that we have a very strong culture. Number one is the culture of our team and how people treat people, we are not going to hire an asshole. I do not want that in my shop, I don’t want the drama. I don’t want toxicity and we can figure out quickly with somebody if they’re going to be toxic or not. We just won’t hire them. I don’t want to speak for my team, but I would be willing to guess they would rather work shorthanded than with somebody who’s just going to make the day awful. So yeah, we have that. We are in a position where we have Honda right down the road. We are not competing with Honda on a monetary level, we don’t have the dollars. So, culture is everything and we’re going to get somebody willing to work for a little bit less but enjoy being here. It is more family-oriented. Everyone refers to it as, the McMillan Co. family. It’s rewarding.
I’ve always been a firm believer that money is a short-term motivator. Money only goes so far in terms of longevity within a manufacturing facility. It’s the culture and do people feel like they’re a part of something bigger? Kudos on the fact that you’re not seeing the turnover that a lot of other manufacturers across the state are.
We’d be in trouble if we had turnover. Being a small team it would hurt and cost too much at the end of the day to have turnover. I’ve talked about this on a couple of different podcasts, I forget who said it and I can’t remember what book it is in. Something like there’s a couple hiring masses and kicking them in the asses and that always is a revolving door. The other one that I heard in our Vistage group a couple of weeks ago was, hire four, pay them like eight, work them like 10. I don’t know if that works in the long term either. People are going to like that they are making more money than they could be but they’re not going to enjoy working like 10 people.
In my past life, I have been promoted, and I have given raises. At the time, the logic was, I’m going to get a better product. I’m going to get a better cert rate. I’m going to get a better output. That only lasts for a very short period. And it’s going to go right back to “A job’s a job.” Either you like doing what you’re doing, and you like the people that you’re doing it with or you’re just not going to be happy. Money is just such a short-term motivator. In this younger generation, I think money isn’t necessarily as important. I’m going to be 50 this year so money is important to me, it’s always been an important thing to me. I think this younger generation is coming in, it’s being a part of something bigger and money’s a little bit secondary. So culture right now is so key for someone your size.
Being fully transparent, with being in sales almost my entire life within the manufacturing industry, I am wired that money is a motivator. That’s my scorecard. As a salesperson, that was number one. I would work seven days a week, 10-hour days. It was crazy. The older I get, it’s less important, but flexibility and all those things are so much more important. I have people on my team that don’t care about money at all. I give them a raise because they deserve it, they’ve earned it, and they don’t get excited. It kind of takes the wind out of my sales because I was excited to give it and expected a little excitement. Now we must figure out what motivates this person outside of money because it is not a motivator for that person. You learn that culture, whatever they are involved in, is a motivator. Ashley Spriggs, I call her my velvet chainsaw. She is our operations manager. She’s, prior military, she’s amazing. She has a program called Blessing Bags, and they pack breakfast, lunch, and dinners for hundreds of kids in Logan and Champaign County. She absolutely loves that. When she first started working, she came to me and asked if she could cut out early on a Friday. “You have whatever time you have off; I don’t care.” In conversation, I asked what she was going to do with her extra time off. She explained how she was going to pack these bags for the kids. I think it is so cool. It’s just an awesome program that she absolutely loves. She feeds so many mouths in Logan and Champaign County. It’s so cool to see that it is a huge motivator for her.
On that topic, I’ve talked to some manufacturers across the state. A lot of times as a state employee, people come to me and say, “Hey, what are you doing about this? What are you doing to provide more qualified work for you? What are you doing?” I’ll talk about our internship program. I’ll talk about how we’re doing things around the workforce and trying to get younger age children interested in future careers in manufacturing. We are doing several things, but I also come back to folks and say, “What are you doing to embed yourself in your community? What are you doing to let people know what it is that you do, what it is that you have available?” You are then creating this community, this culture of, I am a part of this community, to get people to want to be interested to work for you. We can do program after program, and we can throw dollars into an internship program to make these connections. All of which are important, and we’ll always continue to do those things. If there’s one thing I would recommend to a manufacturer, get embedded with your… local schools, and your local career techs, get on advisory boards and let people know what skillsets you need, and let them train those people for you. Right there you’ve got your future workforce. I think being a part of the community, especially for a small manufacturer, is a huge thing that folks need to consider.
I can’t agree more. Growing up in Piqua, Ohio, it’s a very small community, less than 20,000 people, maybe less than 30. Somebody is going to correct me. There are a couple of key manufacturers in that town that just do it right. They’ve been there for years Tayte French Lutz with French Oil Mill Machinery Co., her family crushes that. They have kids coming in there all the time from the JVS, they have elementary schools coming in there to walk the facility. They do cool stuff in there. Jackson Tube does a great job with that as well. There are probably others, but those are two I am friends with and close with.
I just talked to one there. Forre Sports Accessories, Inc., in Piqua, Ohio. They do all the rosin bags for Major League Baseball. We had about a 30-minute discussion on how cool it is that every time you see a pitcher reach down to pick up a rosin bag, you know that it came from Piqua, Ohio. I’m like, that’s friggin’ awesome!
I did not know that. That is awesome.
We had a guy from our federal grant office who is going to do a little write-up on them because opening day is a couple of weeks away. He said he asked an interesting question asking how they got their name out there. How did Major League Baseball know this small little company was in Pickle, Ohio? The first-generation owner decided to put the phone number on the rosin bag. Someone in the major league office saw that phone number and just called them and the rest is history. Now they provide all the rosin bags.
That is freaking cool. I don’t know how I lived there my entire life, and I didn’t know that. How long have they been supplying rosin bags to Major League Baseball?
Since the 60s, I think. A long ass time.
Who wouldn’t want to make a bag that goes into the major league baseball league? So very cool. It is interesting, isn’t there something to do with the mud on baseballs in Ohio too?
I should know. I know outside of Ada, where Ohio Northern is located all the footballs for the Super Bowl or NFL are made. So there’s a lot of sports ties to the state of Ohio and manufacturing. So it’s a cool story.
I think there is something else like that made here in Ohio too. I wish I had someone to do all the googling like that kid on Joe Rogan’s podcast. There is something cool about baseball, I think with Ohio. If anyone knows, shoot us an email. Maybe it’s not even Ohio, I don’t know, but I thought that something stuck in my head like that.
What would somebody need to do to get involved with the MEP program that’s listening to this?
I mentioned to you Dustin that we’re regionally based. I’ve got six partners across the state. We do that not to confuse everybody because we have six different names. I oversee everything from the state’s perspective. We do that to make sure to get full coverage of all 88 counties in the state. We’ve got our website, go to the Ohio Department of Development, search small business and you’re going to see manufacturing extension partnership. Within that, you can find our map and you’ll be able to find our partners. Everybody can reach out directly to me and I will make a connection to your regional partner. I’m always happy to give an overview of our program, kind of how we’re set up, how we work, and what we’re designed to do, I will drop my email address for you to put on the notes. But if you search us, Department of Development, and go to small business and look for a manufacturing extension partnership, you’ll be able to find information on us and you’ll get to where you need to get to. So absolutely, we’re here to support small medium-sized manufacturers. That’s what we do.
There is quite a breadth of the types of manufacturing that you have helped with. You have helped with everything from cookies and cake companies to rosin bags, to us with logistics and blending, die cutting, and kiss cutting. You guys have helped us with our machine. It was cool because Brent brought us a project that he felt fit one of our machines well, which was freaking awesome. The network, that’s something else that you guys have been good with us about. If we’re having trouble with the supply chain and where we need a partner, we’ve been able to reach out to you guys and say, “Hey, we’re looking for this” and you guys will research that in your database and help find a partner for us. It doesn’t even have to be in Ohio, it could be across the United States.
That’s the kind of power that this program brings to the manufacturers of Ohio. We can help with anything within the state, but if we can’t find it in the state, we go to this vast national network we have. It’s a program at the federal level that we’re a part of and that we can work with any manufacturer on. It’s called supplier scouting. If you have a need and you can’t find it, we can’t help you find it within the state, we’ll go through this program, and it’ll get put out to every state plus Puerto Rico. If we don’t find it, then we have a problem. So we’ve got this vast network that we can draw from. Several universities are a part of this that are doing a ton of research and just are very knowledgeable. This vast network to help manufacturers with is a very powerful thing.
Now, if I could plug in one other thing related to the supply chain, we are working on a supply chain statewide and national initiative right now. We’re focused on chips, EVs, aerospace, plastics. We’re looking at supplier mapping. So we’re trying to get an idea of what’s here now, where are the voids that we need to fill in certain areas. You’ve already mentioned EVs with the Honda LG plant going into Fayette County. That’s a new sector for us. How do we map who’s already here? How do we make connections? How do we help with whatever their company’s needs are? We’re doing a lot of research, a lot of mapping, but the other thing that we’re doing, and we’re not the only state doing this, some surrounding states are joining a platform called sustainment.com. It is a national platform that allows the manufacturer to create a profile. What we want to do is draw large OEMs to this site to be able to put opportunities out to folks. For folks that have some equipment capacity available or are looking at getting another facility. Maybe you’re not going to utilize the entire facility, but you find an opportunity that maybe you could work with a large OEM within the state. We’re looking to reshore things, looking to nearshore. We’re looking to let the large OEMs know what’s already here, and what’s already in Ohio. When I was in the automotive industry, we sourced a lot of things from overseas and it was a company strategy. It is what it is and it’s what we did. What we’re trying to do is to promote buying it here first and within our borders. We don’t have any large OEMs yet since we are just starting this initiative. but we want to let them know what’s already here and what potential suppliers they have just within the state. Sustainment.com is what we’re looking at. If you’re a small manufacturer, go create a profile. It’s free. As we get things up and running, we’re going to recruit OEMs to come in. You are going to be able to see these opportunities right on this platform. Hopefully, you’re going to get a heck of a lot of new business and buy a whole bunch of new facilities.
Well, I just pulled this up because I think we’re registered on here, but I couldn’t remember that. It’s a great website.
It started with the Department of Defense. It was a federal government initiative around defense. Now it’s designed for any manufacturing. For us, we want it to be Ohio-centric, but if someone is looking for something very specific that can’t be found, we’ve got access to neighboring states as well. When I was in purchasing, and we were looking for new suppliers, people said, “What’s your process? What do you do?” And I said, “Have you ever heard of this thing called Google? I’m looking for this on Google, the Google machine would tell me, well, here are a couple of options.” There is another platform called Thomas Net. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Thomas Net.
I am familiar with Thomas Net, and it’s not cheap to be on Thomas Net, However, they do a good job with things. I like it, it’s homegrown, and it looks super clean. All those things are great. It is great to have that confidence in you guys. I know that if you or Brent hear from someone needing die cutting, kiss cutting, warehousing services, or co-packing we are probably the first company out of your mouth. Growing up in sales, you have bird dogs out there, trying to flush birds back to you and it’s good to have that. Yep. What are some of the initiatives that you guys are working on? You mentioned workforce supply chain management, and reshoring the industries. You said EV, what were the other ones?
Yeah. EV chips, aerospace, just trying to do some research, map out what’s currently in the state, and those types of things.
There are a lot of companies in the state of Ohio that are AS 9100 certified that do an unbelievable number of things for aerospace that you wouldn’t even know. There’s a place in Troy, Ohio and I can’t think about what their name is, but they do like a little cylinder that goes into every plane, like a brake cylinder. It’s a spinoff from a guy who worked at BF Goodrich, I think he retired and then invented this, well he didn’t invent it. I’m jealous of that move but many companies in the state of Ohio do a lot of cool military things, I was just in a machine shop a couple of weeks ago. I’ve been in machine shops that look like hospitals and they’re just immaculate and there’s not a chip on the floor. There are barely any chips in the machine because they’re cleaning them so much and it’s just unbelievable. This place was not like that, but they were making some of the coolest shit in there. I wondered what they were making in there. Was it simple machining like hammers? When the guy was walking me around, he explained that it was a piece of a gun they had machined. They are the only ones certified to make it in America. Like they’re the only ones. All their stuff works, and they take good care of it. It doesn’t have to look pretty to make awesome stuff.
I think it’s very disjointed. Just to have the ability to organize it and to show people what exists, it’s the art of the possibility right in your backyard, we want to expose what we don’t know currently.
That is why I am excited just doing this. We have a funny name, MFG Monkey. Hopefully, somebody, even if one person listens to this, and thinks it’s pretty good then they go to our website. They may be able to find a partner in us. That’s freaking awesome to me.
If it benefits one person, then I feel like we have done our jobs. We of course want more, but if it benefits one, I feel like we’ve done our job. If only one person listens to this, if you put my name out there, you might not get any people listening to this, so I apologize.
I think I hold the trump card there. So, but what else? There’s something else that we talked about talking about, did we cover everything?
Technology is one of the things that we talk a lot with manufacturers about. Three to five years ago, people would shy away from technology, thinking it would eliminate jobs. Now there is this void of talent. Part of the workforce answer for us is to start looking at ways to automate some of the processes. There’s an investment component to it and there are a lot of things to consider. What are your thoughts as a small business owner, or a small manufacturer, on automation? Where do you think you stand in that realm right now?
I love it. I love technology. I love automating anything that we can. The challenge for a small company is the investment piece, buying machinery. When you helped design the line, it was cool. We came up with how we were going to do it right now but then also in the future. We had three phases. We are still working on phase one. We are buying machinery for phase two. We are going down that path and then phase three will be fully automated. We have had to communicate with our team because the person that works on that line is concerned that could be replaced. He is awesome, there is no way on earth I want to lose him. I think his rate right now is like 125 widgets a day and with this machinery, he can do that in an hour. He will be able to do a whole worth in a week. He was concerned about what he would do the other three weeks. We will find something for him, he isn’t going anywhere. This automation is going to be easier; it’s going to be less labor-intensive. Then hopefully at the end of the day, he doesn’t feel like he just got out of an MMA fight. Then he can stick around longer because he isn’t going to be 19 forever. I physically went in there and did what he was doing at like midnight because the person before him told me that he couldn’t hit the rate that we wanted. I was lying in bed one night and thought maybe I was asking too much. I drive into our shop, set everything up, and kind of move things around the way I think they should be. The way it worked in my brain and how Matt showed us how to set it up. I started running it and was able to hit the rate that we asked for and exceeded it a little bit. Then I knew it was possible and understood that I was not asking somebody to do something impossible. Ashley called me, she had received a notification on our security cameras.
Now she can’t sleep either because you’re waking her up with a security camera.
I couldn’t sleep. I was fretting over this rate thing. The whole automation does a couple of things. It saves on employees and creates more capacity. Now instead of having only one job that we run, we may be able to increase our capacity by like 800% or something. We are certainly able to do more with fewer people. Then we don’t have to find another Diego because the dude is awesome. Finding somebody with that work ethic is few and far between. To answer your question, I say automate where you can. It is going to solve a lot of problems.
We work a lot in process improvement. Is the line set up the way it should be? Are you reducing the amount of travel time? Are you organized? Is it a continuous flow? Just any number of processes, making sure everything makes sense. From our approach, let’s get the process to the best possible point. Then from that point, we can look at automating it, to make it simpler for your staff, to make it simpler for your operator. To cut down on insurance costs for the repetitive things, and then also for you to utilize them in better ways for your company, look at new opportunities, the next challenge, getting a little more capacity out of a process, or need to streamline it. You think of Lean Six Sigma and process mapping, they have been around forever. It is still probably our number one or two service offering. People either A, aren’t familiar with or aware of it, or B, they just can’t sustain it. So they might do it in an area, but they don’t carry it over across all their processes. We want to work on process improvements and then from there, let’s look at ways to make it simpler. There’s going to be some investment, but there are ROIs on all these investments because you’re making more, making it quicker, making it more effective and your quality is getting more consistent and better. There’s just so many benefits to it. I think the mindset’s changing from eliminating jobs to now filling voids that we have, is key. There is a lot of affordable automation. I had a partner of mine in Dayton and they were doing a process improvement opportunity. They looked to automate a certain part of a process and went to Amazon and a little piece of equipment that was a couple hundred bucks. The client loved it, they had never even considered it.
We ran a military project that came to us. Our die-cutting/kiss-cutting machine is all in line. It is not that we can do things that other companies can’t, but we can certainly do it more efficiently with fewer people. Instead of somebody setting up five different machines, having five different employees, and five different setups and teardowns, we do it all in line. It cuts out a lot of air. We had this project come to us though and it’s a million pieces. Their strap rate was 70%. They were throwing out 700,000 and only getting 300,000. We helped a landfill out because now you’re not throwing all that stuff away. We went from 70% to under three. I didn’t even know we could crush it like that, but everyone was super excited. We were able to tweak the material and then that improved their process because we could hold such a tight tolerance. All of that is through automation. We would have not been able to cut that job as quickly, easily, and efficiently without the automation. We’ve had other companies that are over capacity come to us and want us to run X number of pieces and we can run it. We can run it and sell it to them for less than what they were paying to have it at their shop. One project that would have taken them six months to run we were able to do in a week. We would cut it and then sell it back to them. We saved them 50%. Automation must happen. That is how we’re going to be able to reshore things.
Absolutely. It’s a must.
Without automation, we’re not competing with low-cost countries.
It is one thing that I’m hearing more and more of, is not necessarily for the MEP program, my program. We are not IT folks. We don’t dabble in the IT space. However, when you think about automating, connectivity of the shop floor, the industrial internet of things. All of those things are entry points for folks to tap into your infrastructure and hack your system. With the more automation and connectivity that you get, I would highly recommend considering cybersecurity protection in some fashion, The MEP can help. We can do any number of studies and look at your systems and help you. It is such a daunting task to be cyber-compliant from a DOD perspective. DOD has a framework in place. It’s called CMMC. It’s eventually going to be a part of a contract with the DoD. You must meet certain cyber requirements. I fully expect automotive and other industries to follow. It is just the small business owner wearing a bunch of hats. You are probably not thinking we are going to be hacked. You are as susceptible as anybody.
It is so easy; I probably get 10 emails a day. They’re bullshit emails that have a link in it, review your invoice that’s due or review something. If you would click on it, they will own us. It is so important to read every email when it comes in and if it looks suspicious at all, delete it. If it was legit and you delete it someone is going to call asking if you got their email. You can then explain you thought someone was just fishing for tuna.
The number one thing is, are you training your staff so that they know don’t click on those types of things? I am hearing about it far too much lately.
Yeah, I did it once. It was awful. I probably delete emails that I shouldn’t.
If you’re a medium size, say you’re a 500-person shop you rely on technology. Your paychecks are all directly deposited, all your data, all your employee data. They are trying to get your employee data is really what you’re trying to do. When you get hacked, it just shuts the company down. They can’t operate. It is just a scary thing.
I know a guy that somebody clicked on something, and they ended up with ransomware. He paid $500,000 to get his stuff back. He had insurance, but he didn’t know if once he paid, he was going to get his stuff back. You obviously cannot trust the person. It is very scary. We had somebody four years ago; click on an email that he shouldn’t have. They were able to get all our email addresses for our customers. They sent out a change of remit, saying we were changing how we were getting paid. Instead of customers using our current ACH, they were advised to use this other bank account. I was worried we would have customers that did this and then that money is just gone. Cashflow is hard enough. Our guy did a lot of training following that. It is a scary thing and luckily, we have a small customer base. Our customers were calling us asking if we were changing our bank account. We have had instances where we’ll quote something, and we’ll get a purchase order for something. Sometimes it doesn’t feel right, I call the buyer and confirm because we catch something in the URL. Always pay attention to the URL, one little dot or dash off is all it takes. My office manager got on LinkedIn and searched for the guy who sent the purchase order. It looked like the guy was the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company. He isn’t sending his purchase orders. There are a lot of things you must pay close attention to.
It’s just another thing for a small business owner, a small manufacturer owner to have to worry about. It could put you out of business, it really could. I think that because everybody’s so busy and often going in so many directions. You say automation, we want to do it, we want to implement it, but you’ve got to do it the right way. You’ve got to be secure when you’re doing it. Even the training component of this so your people know, don’t click that link. Like what you’re saying, Dustin, it’s a big deal. I see other industries adopting what the Department of Defense is doing and its national security for DOD. If there are small business owners that have been thinking about it. Look us up, let us at least tell you what we could do and get you going down that path.
Then it’s going to give the owner peace of mind that you’re doing things right. I must deal with this another government thing, it’s the last thing I want to do. I know you don’t want to hear that, but at the end of the day, it’s a pain in the ass. It costs some money, but I sleep better at night knowing that we are compliant, and our servers are protected. I don’t want to say we’re unhackable, but we’ve done a lot to go down that path. I know that Matt’s helped us with some stuff and it’s even more important, the more automated you become because like you said, all things internet. Everything we do lives in the cloud now. Our warehouse management system lives in the cloud, our ERP system also lives in the cloud. We are recording this podcast on the cloud. Everything is in the cloud. I probably have very little on my computer and all our servers are in the cloud. If you do it right and it’s secure, like double authenticated. That gives me peace of mind. If you want to see me, go bonkers, it’s over a password. So they get saved.
Think about how much of your day is spent typing in passwords. I don’t know how many times if my computer goes to sleep, I come back, I log in. It is what it is, but we have to remain diligent. You have to.
I like some of this stuff. For example, my computer now has a scanner, and put my finger on it, and it scans me into my computer, and it saves me a couple of passwords. Hopefully, we keep going down that path more, with eye scanning. You can sit down and look into the camera and never have to enter a password. If somebody is working on that, I want to hug you.
I’m with you, I’ll buy him a beer.
I’ll buy it. Yeah. I’ll buy them a lot of beers, whatever. I don’t care what kind of beer it is. I’m buying a lot of beers for that person or whiskey or wine or wine coolers, uh, white cloth, whatever you’re into. I’m buying.
It’s just amazing the amount of time that we spend typing in passwords. Then trying to remember all these damn things. I don’t know about you; I can’t keep track of them.
I’m not that smart. I promise you that. All day today I thought it was Thursday. It’s Friday. Do you think I’m remembering 500 passwords? Hell no. Now I’m ready for a beer. We talked about this before we got on. I think it’d be fun to get Jeff Spain on here and Brent, to do this all together, and we all have fun together. Brent and I are playing golf here in a few weeks, that’ll be fun. It’s warming up. With warming up comes some crazy weather. I texted Brent earlier today, his parents have a place up at Indian Lake. They had all that devastation last night at Indian Lake.
Oh, I didn’t hear that. Last night? Gosh.
I’m not a big news watcher either, but my dad called me, and he never calls super early in the morning. Then my uncle called me, and we had friends up at Indian Lake. The tornado hit Indian Lake last night and just devastated it. I think the last I read at least three dead. It just destroyed the area. They’re not letting anyone in. Sheriffs have all the incoming traffic shut down. They’re just sifting through everything. Let your prayers be with those folks. We are sitting here talking about passwords and people dealing with much bigger issues today.
Absolutely.
Well, I live in Hilliard and two weeks ago there was a touchdown in Hilliard, and went down to Madison County. Within a couple of weeks span, we’ve had a couple within a 30–40-mile radius. That’s kind of wild, man. That’s terrible news.
My uncle called me. He goes, “Is the warehouse, okay?” He asked if we had damage. I thought he was joking around. It isn’t April yet. He said, “There was a tornado last night that hit Indian Lake and you guys are pretty close to there.” Our internet’s down, but outside of that, I think we’re good. You will have to get on the news and look it up. There is an old bar up there, called Indian Head. It’s on the southwest side, its entire roof was ripped off the place. Um, some places are just, you know, just sticks now. I mean, it’s crazy. There’s a mobile home out in the middle of the lake, I guess. Just wild. I did talk to Brent and his parents were renting the place out. They were trying to get a generator up to the folks that were there but could not get up there. I really brought the mood down with that news. Holy cow.
Anyway, I am excited to work with you guys again. As I said, we’ve got a couple of projects that we’re going to be working with you on, doing our ISO is very exciting for me. We turn 10 years old this year. We will probably throw a party. I mean, why not? Right.
That’s a huge accomplishment.
I was looking at things and doing some research. I was reading a book about startup companies. I’ve always thought it was cool to start a company, but it’s based around buying a company, not starting a company. One of the statistics in the book was, less than 1% of all companies make it a year. I know I’m going to screw this up. I think it’s less than 1% of all companies make it a year, and less than 1% of that do over a million dollars in revenue in their entire existence. I thought that was amazing. We used to and I still love to work with startup companies. We are still in the startup phase. We are always reinventing and doing different things and starting different projects. To work with startup companies, we spent just a tremendous amount of time with startup companies. We had to pull back and be very selective. When I was starting, people were selective about working with us, and rightfully so. There is a lot of risk there. Now ten years and this year we should be ISO certified, which will be awesome. It’ll be a huge accomplishment, a personal accomplishment for us. You guys are going to help us get there. I know Brent is the ISO wizard, he is going to come in and be a part of our team. Then this EV project, you guys will be a big part of that as well. So thank you.
Well, you know, doing the ISO certifying, that can open a lot of new doors, Dustin, for you. The cool thing about that Sustainment Platform is you can promote that within your profile. Someone can go in and say they need someone that is ISO certified and boom, you pop up. Now you’re looking at new opportunities. So it’s not easy. It’s a process. There are some costs associated with it. But man, that could open a lot of doors for you. So that’s awesome.
We hope so. We have been down a path where we’re super excited about a project, with Honeywell or Raytheon and they ask us to send over our ISO certs. It takes the wind out of our sails. We are ISO compliant but that doesn’t mean anything to some of those companies. Hopefully, it will open some doors for us.
It’s just a better way to operate. It gets you organized and gets your processes in place. Now you’ve got to keep up with those and they’re going to want to come back I think every year, and everything must stay up to date. If you are willing to go down that path, I think it is a great thing for your company.
I love the process improvement. It is like being a Lean Six Sigma black belt. With the black belt, you’re not done but you’re continually learning. All our folks are Lean Six Sigma somewhere, some are black belt some of them are not, but they will be. I think it’s very important, it sets that mindset. You go to our shop floor, and everything is orderly. It’s not acceptable if the broom’s not in the right place. Those things, people don’t think make any difference. I personally think it does.
It’s part of your culture. You drill down into the culture and you’re consistent with it. If you’re not thinking in a continuous improvement mindset, you’re going to get passed up. Everything you’re doing, keep doing it, man. You’ve got another 10, you’re going to start the second 10 years here soon.
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll have grayer and whiter in my beard.
I’m just trying to keep mine right now.
Thanks again. We will get all the websites and everything that you mentioned on our website with the Podcast. You can go to mfgmonkey.com and there’ll be a transcript of this. So it’ll have those links in there. Every platform that we can post a podcast on, we’re posting on, obviously the big ones, Apple and Spotify. In the description, you will find all the links, URLs, websites, and whatever we mentioned will be in there. We will post your contact information, so people know how to get ahold of you. Thank you, you guys have been a huge part of our company, and I’m sure you will continue to be a huge part of it.
Of course. Absolutely. Here to help. Let us know what you need, and we’ll do what we can. Looking forward to continued partnership with you, Dustin. Take care.
All right, buddy, thank you so much.
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