Manufacturing Mavericks

Greg McHale sits down to talk with Mike Payne, Owner of Hill Manufacturing about his unconventional path to becoming a shop owner. Mike was actually helping the previous owner look for a buyer when he decided to make an offer himself. After 25 years in software and private equity, Mike realized that he really liked the can-do attitude and willingness to help each other that manufacturers share. This episode explores how Mike leveraged his background in private equity and data analysis to double his shop’s size in 5 years - every five years.
  • Bloodstains, sweat and tears (1:40)
  • Taking the plunge and buying a shop (11:19)
  • Why there’s a big red barn on the shop floor - and we’re talking BIG (19:29)
  • Yay, it’s Monday. Building a great culture where people want to come to work  (21:55)
  • Setting the standards everyone can operate within  (26:04)
  • The technology & tools to grow the business (35:30)
  • Don't want to be the cheapest option (41:40)
  • Doubling the business in 5 years - every 5 years (46:22)
  • This podcast pissed me off (48:59)
  • Being there for each other (54:12)
Links Referenced:

Creators & Guests

Host
Greg McHale
Greg founded Datanomix, a company delivering game-changing production insights and intelligence to manufacturers of discrete components. Datanomix was founded on the premise that the 4th industrial revolution would require turnkey products that integrate seamlessly with how manufacturers work today—not clunky workflows that depend on human input or complex data extraction. He brings enterprise data skills to a market ripe for innovation. Greg has held engineering leadership positions at several venture-backed companies and is a graduate of Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Guest
Mike Payne
Owner, Hill Manufacturing

What is Manufacturing Mavericks?

Manufacturing Mavericks aren’t afraid to shake things up and stand out from the crowd. They are embracing the best tools and technology to showcase world-class American manufacturing and grow their business.

Join Greg McHale, founder of Datanomix, as he sits down with these exceptional people to hear their stories and explore the important lessons they learned along the way. Listeners can gain valuable insights they can use in their own facilities to improve their bottom line.

Greg: Welcome to Manufacturing Mavericks, a podcast where we showcase and celebrate exceptional people from across precision manufacturing who are boldly embracing new ways to improve their processes, grow their bottom lines, and ensure American manufacturing will thrive for generations to come.

Greg: Welcome to this episode of Manufacturing Mavericks. I’m your host, Greg McHale. As the founder of Datanomix, I’ve had the privilege of visiting hundreds of shops all across the country and in those visits, I have met some of the most incredible and innovative people in this industry. Our goal with the Manufacturing Mavericks podcast is to highlight those leaders, those mavericks of manufacturing who are innovating not just with technology but with culture, people, and process too, so we can all learn not just what they do but why they do it. We’ll dig into what got them into manufacturing, what fires them up to go to work every single day and pour their blood, sweat, and tears into keeping the manufacturing dream alive in our country.

Greg: With that, I am honored to introduce today’s Manufacturing Maverick, Mike Payne of Hill Manufacturing. Welcome to the show, Mike. How are you doing today?

Mike: I’m awesome, Greg. Thanks for having me.

Greg: It’s a real pleasure, Mike, because I’ve been out to your shop. You know, we talk in the introduction about people pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into their business. I think we’ve had phone calls at 5 a.m. We’ve had phone calls at 11 p.m. talking about how to get that edge, and how you’re growing, and the types of things that you’re doing, so I think this one’s going to be fantastic for our audience, so really, really appreciate you being on.

Mike: Blood, sweat, and tears is absolutely right. And I know I’m not unique in that, but I can actually walk out on the floor to show you some—one of my bloodstains.

Greg: Oh, yeah?

Mike: Yeah [laugh].

Greg: We got to start with—let’s start with that. How did that happen?

Mike: Well, stupid me… total operator error. You know, we had promised a customer some parts tomorrow, and the somebody—they needed to run all night for that to happen. And I said, “Guys, I’ll run them all night. I don’t care.” So, a couple hours into the evening, and my last guy’s leaving and he comes over, and he says, “Hey, whatever you do, when you open that door, don’t pull that one chip out that’ll be hanging off the front of the part because you’re going to slice your finger.” And I turned, and I said, “Hank, I know that. You don’t need to tell me that. I’m not stupid.”

Greg: [laugh].

Mike: And within about 15 minutes, I was texting him a picture of my thumb sliced [laugh] completely open. Yeah, so… but there is still a blood stain on the floor from that.

Greg: Hey, owner running an important job? That’s the sweat part, too, right? It’s a two-for-one.

Mike: Yeah and my tears are here also, for sure.

Greg: [laugh] They have to be.

Mike: Good and bad tears.

Greg: Yep. It’s just how it has to be. So, you know, Mike, you have a super interesting background in terms of types of things you did previously, and then ultimately, how you took an interest in manufacturing, you know, as someone who really came at it from the outside in. So, why don’t we start with, what was the progression of your career that resulted in that manufacturing torch getting lit for you?

Mike: So, this goes back 25 years ago, maybe. I graduated college with a degree in Management Information Systems. So, computers for business people. I was a founding member of a software company. Our niche was in the manufacturing space.

So, if you go back to the, you know, mid to late-’90s, you can imagine what was going on. It was a little bit of Wild, Wild West, right, with computing, and people were just starting to even get computers at people’s desks at that point. Companies were implementing massive ERP systems. Only your biggest of big companies were doing it, of course. But they were, I guess, basic by today’s terms.

So, they’re making these major investments in these systems, but they aren’t getting the data they need off the floor, necessarily, to have good systems. So, our specialty really was in integrating into shop floor systems, or kind of creating shop floor systems to feed into financial ERP systems. And we were based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and if anybody that’s in consulting is listening to this, as they know, a good consultant is always from out of town. So, we traveled the country, essentially, and our major customers were all over the place, mostly Midwest, but everywhere, and they were some of the largest companies at the time. You know, you’d recognize most of the names.

But I got to walk on these floors and see tires made, vegetables canned, milk jugs made, airplanes, paint, if it was made, I got to see it made. I mean, that’s the way it felt. I loved it. When we would go to these places and plan out these systems, we would often be on site for anywhere from a month to six months. I got to spend every day on the shop floor, essentially, asking people, “What’s that piece of paper for? Should we replace it?”

I just fell in love with it. That company did well, we grew pretty rapidly. We exited about six years later. And in exiting the company—so we had gone through a couple rounds of fundraising, we’ve gone through the process of selling the company, and in that, I also found a passion for the transactional side of business: buying, selling, investing. So, from that point, I was sitting there going, what do I want to do now? And it was not retirement-for-the-rest-of-your-life-type of money. It was just, I mean, we exited, that sounds good, and… but I wasn’t getting to hang ‘em up, right?

I was 30 years old and had a one-year-old, and maybe a two-year-old, but little kids, ready to go. I found myself essentially in private equity for the next 15 years. Bought, sold, funded, managed, turned around, so forth over, I don’t know, I think it’s over 120 companies over the next 15 years. A lot of those were also in manufacturing. I don’t know what percent. I don’t know a count or anything, but the ones I liked the most, and the ones that I had the most fun with, were definitely in that space. All along that line, I was looking for something to buy myself, and eight years ago, I was actually helping sell Hill Manufacturing.

Greg: From your PE side?

Mike: From my PE side. I had known the founder for 20 years and was helping her evaluate buy offers. Eventually, just made my own.

Greg: That sounds like cheating [laugh].

Mike: Well [laugh], yeah, maybe. It actually, the—maybe the first offer I made might have been cheating, that she turned down mine and the one we were doing, but the last one really came. And I’m sure a lot of peo—I mean, I know a lot of people in manufacturing, and I’m sure a lot of people listening to this can appreciate, she had kind of reached a point of, “Just sell it. I don’t care.” Right [laugh]? Like, just, “I’m done.” And there was an offer coming in that she probably would have taken, and I didn’t like it. And I said, “No, we’re not selling for that, and let me get you a better offer.” And I made the offer.

Greg: Wow. So, you didn’t cheat. You actually improved the outcome.

Mike: Yeah.

Greg: So, couple interesting threads there, Mike. Your first view of the shop floor was actually from the software side. And you said shop floor systems, and you know, that can mean a lot of different things, so I’m curious, what kinds of shop floor systems were you guys doing, and how did that get you connected to the shop floor?

Mike: So, we defined our niche was, we were shop floor data collection. That meant a lot of things, as you can imagine. This is also—again, go back mid to late-’90s—like, barcode scanning is becoming affordable and readily available. There’s a lot of things going on in technology at that time. Price of equipment’s coming d—you know, price of hardware is coming down, all sorts of things. You know, even memory is becoming more and more available, right? I remember I always joke, like, we used to—there was a hypothetical thing called a terabyte back then—

Greg: [laugh].

Mike: And now I think my phone may have that [laugh] I’m not sure. But—

Greg: It could.

Mike: Yeah, so things were just rapidly changing at that time. But really what we looked to do on the shop floor was we were just looking to collect data to feed the ERP system. So, the ERP systems at that time, in my opinion, were mostly grown out of the finance or the accounting office. And they said, “We need all this data so that we can crunch the numbers and know how we’re doing and how this job went,” or whatever. So, they relied very, very heavily—and I remember walking into places where you’d have a hundred people doing data entry of the pieces of paper that came off the floor yesterday, right?

And it might be production data, it might be quality data, it might be inventory data. I mean, it could be everything. So, our job when we would walk into XYZ, you know, company that’s 2 million, 3, 4 million square foot buildings with thousands of employees was to go, “Okay, what data can we collect directly off the shop floor, get better data, less opportunity for manual entry,” which creates errors, all those types of things. So, we’re putting terminals in people’s hands to do counts. We’re tying directly into machines and pulling machines’ data, you know, counts and runtime type stuff, much like Datanomix does.

Greg: You had it way harder than we do.

Mike: We had it way, way harder [laugh].

Greg: [laugh].

Mike: And yeah, because back then everything was—I mean, there was no—there weren’t really standards.

Greg: No.

Mike: But, you know, so we’re tapping into this machine differently than we’re tapping into the machine next to it. But we’re capturing as much data as we possibly can to feed back to the ERP system, essentially. I mean, I’m very generally using the term ERP, but shop floor data collection really was our specialty. So, we’re using barcodes to keep inventory or inventory locations, so we’re implementing, like, that whole system. You know, again, we’re tying directly into machines that knows, maybe, like how much of this—what’s the weights of the inputs? How much does that output? To then turn into how many parts did that make? How many widgets did that make?

We’re collecting quality data, all those things that, you know, frankly, today, we kind of take for granted, but back then, that was a piece of paper that went to an office and somebody was sitting there in a—maybe not completely by the end of the ’90s, but, you know, you might have walked into a smoke-filled room of 75 people, just sitting, typing away, enter—and matter of fact, when I was in college, I had one of those jobs. I sat there for eight hours a day, taking forms, entering in codes—

Greg: Paper in your left hand, number pad in your right hand, keep just crank.

Mike: I can out 12-key almost anybody I know, right?

Greg: [laugh] I believe it. No competition for me, I’m not going to try.

Mike: So, we’re collecting all that type of data, feeding it into leadership—whether that’s shop leadership, financial leadership, you know, whatever—could then crunch that data and do job costing or inventory analysis, whatever they were needing to do with the data.

Greg: So, that actually gets you connected to the business processes pretty intimately, right?

Mike: Yeah, we had to, as you well know, being in the software business yourself, I mean, you need to understand how the data you’re trying to collect is gathered, but you also need to know how they’re using it. So yeah, we absolutely got well into the reporting side of things of, okay, how can we present this to you in a valuable manner?

Greg: So, that exercise, basically, you learn the hustle and bustle of the shop floor, you’ve got the data that’s tied to the critical business processes people are trying to execute. Okay, let’s get this stuff automated, then—so you get into private equity manufacturing businesses, or whatever, a decent percentage of the stuff that you’re doing. Did you feel like you had a leg up on how to assess those businesses from that experience? Like, you take a look at Hill, you’re working with the owner, she’s trying to sell the company. What’s the connection between all that time walking all those shop floors and how you start thinking about and falling in love with Hill?

Mike: I think it just satisfied a lot of my personality, maybe. You know, when you just look at—I mean, I get excited about working with my hands to start with. Probably my most long-lasting and fun hobby as an adult is doing woodworking, right, because I just, I like making things. So, going back to being on the software side of things, you got to start to see how small changes can have massive impacts. If you’re able to speed up a process, if you’re able to improve a process, improve the quality of a process, anything like that, once we had the data, and we could see, oh, from the last time we did this to this time we did this, this one change in the process affected a lot of things. But at the end of the day, is it making you more money is really what most business owners should be focused on. Maybe they aren’t always focused on it—

Greg: We prefer it when they are.

Mike: Right. And it’s not all about—I mean, well, we don’t need to get into that. It’s not always all about making more money. It’s about doing things better, safer, you know, whatever, too, but, you know, coupled that with my then 15 years of buy, and sell, and trying to improve companies, you know, when I look at cost reduction, I look at it at four or five times that, right? So, if I save $10,000, I save 50, right, because I’m looking at multiple of EBITA on that number.

And if I spend money, if I lose money, I’m looking at a four or five, six times that. It’s just, to me, that was probably just a really great baseline of the marriage of all those skill sets I have, and that I enjoy, to pull all that together into looking at Hill and saying, “Gosh, okay. This is a good business that exists and has the opportunity to do a lot more.”

Greg: So, that opportunity to do a lot more obviously rooted in your optimizing business processes, you’re collecting data to help do that. As someone who comes from PE, I mean, that’s the name of the game, right? It’s all optimization. Now, you get your hands on the business, and what’s the culture you walk into? Like, what’s the state of a shop where the owners had it for that long, and they’re like, “Hey, I just want to sell the thing.” So, what do you walk into, and you know, what are your observations?

Mike: I, you know, six years later, I’d say we walked into a very traditional shop. We walked into a good family environment. I have people here today six years later that had worked for her for 10, 15 years prior to me buying the shop.

Greg: That’s awesome.

Mike: And they will tell you, they were family. They knew they were loved by her and vice versa. They loved her. We had a real concern that we even be able to retain everybody when we bought the company. And she did good with us, you know, kind of during the due diligence stage of making sure—I think there was only one other person in the company that knew the sale was going through.

Because I had been working with her a few years, they knew my name and face at least, at least most of them did. So, it wasn’t a total shock, I don’t think, when we had that first meeting. But I’d say the overall… culture of the company was a tired, 40-year-old company with a lot of really, really, really great employees that had been making, in some cases, the same parts for the same companies for 40 years. Not exclusively, but I mean, we still today are making parts they made in the first couple years of starting this company, 47 years ago, now.

Greg: I hope those are some of your best performers.

Mike: They are. At least we know them the best.

Greg: [laugh].

Mike: We haven’t always been able to adjust the price to being best performers. But there was this huge legacy of the company with an unlimited future. That’s what, as investors—buyers—I liked was, if we changed nothing, this was a good investment, it’s a good company. If we bring to it the current state of the industry, there’s huge potential, so that’s the road we set out on. You know, workholding was tired, tooling was tired, certainly technology across the entire organization—and when I say that, that’s—and I mean, I understand technology is a very, very broad term, but I still had someone using an old CRT monitor when I bought the company.

Greg: Electricity savings alone, right?

Mike: Right [laugh]? You know, at that time, like, a new flat screen is 99 bucks, right? But I mean, I—to me, I mean, it’s the heart and soul of the industry, right? I mean, what we bought was… it’s a get-it-done company, right? True entrepreneur, you get it done, you get it done with what you have. If you have to invest, you do. If you don’t, you don’t.

Greg: Absolutely.

Mike: I mean, that’s this industry, and I think that’s part of what I love about it. I still tell my team this often, when I ask, “Can we do this?” Like, you know, talking to a new customer, whatever, I remind them this, but I think the industry in general already acts this way is, “Don’t tell me no; tell me how.” Right? It’s a can-do attitude. Like, yeah, we can do it, it may or may not be the most economical or smartest decision, but we can do anything.

And I think that’s part of what I love about this industry is people just, that if they’re veterans of the industry, that’s just how they approach life. And it’s like, I mean, these are my people. Once I got in, I mean, that’s what I realized. I mean—and I guess I knew that before, but once I owned the company, and I’m spending, you know, 10, 12, 14 hours a day with my team, yeah, these are my people. These are—we get it done.

Greg: What a great way of saying it, Mike. I mean, you’re right. The entrepreneurial spirit in manufacturing, definitely one of the things that drove me to the industry as well. I mean, I look at it, as a software startup guy, every part is a startup. You look at it, and it’s a journey from what’s the concept? Can we make it? Should we make it? How do we do it better? How do I—you know, if I get ten right, can I get 100 right? If I get 100 right, can I get 1000 right? Do I have all the things I need to take the sales of that component to the next level? Can I get more business from that person I just did that component for? I mean, every part has baked into it unlimited upside that is tethered specifically to the creativity and the capability of the people trying to get it done. I mean, there’s just there’s no better thing.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I [laugh] I laugh someti—and my team—I mean, we have such a great working relationship now—but they get it done. I’m decent at sales, Greg [laugh]—

Greg: You’re good. You know it.

Mike: I mean, we’re all in sales, right? I mean, whether you’re selling yourself or whatever, but you know, I’m like any good salesman, I sometimes commit to things that you come home and they go, “Why did you say we could do that?”

Greg: [laugh].

Mike: And this—I mean, this goes back to the software days, right?

Greg: Yeah, that never happens in software, Mike.

Mike: Right. You could say it’s a personality trait, but by God, they figure it out, and we get it done. Those are people I can work with.

Greg: Love it. I mean, I know how important culture is to you, and I actually think, you know, when someone visits your shop for the first time, there are two significant indicators of your culture, and one of them is that fantastic break room.

Mike: [laugh].

Greg: Everybody loves the break room. I want to talk about the big red barn. And then the second one is a sign you have hanging in your men’s room. But let’s do the barn first.

Mike: [laugh] Okay.

Greg: Tell us about the barn.

Mike: I have to give credit to the original owner of the barn. God bless her. I’m so glad she did it, but it fits so well with what I wanted to do anyway. So, she grew up on a farm. So one, to her, farming represents a lot of things: heart and soul of America, hard work, and get it done.

The other thing the big red barn, you know, indicated to her was that in her mind, if you had a big red barn, you had a big farm, and you were very successful. So, when she was building out the facility we’re currently in, moved—I think she moved in here in 2007, 2008, so whenever that was exactly—she said, “I want a barn.” [laugh]. So, they built her a barn. And it’s you know, so it’s our break room.

If you’re standing in the middle of the shop, you look over, and you go, “Why is there a big red barn in the middle of your shop?” And I get that question a lot. And you’re right, everybody likes to talk about it. What works so well for me—and again, go back to where I kind of grew up in late-90s, 2000s technology space, Silicon Valley’s blowing up, right, you had the dotcom boom, and then bust, and then mobile coming along, like, all this stuff’s going on. One of the things that was constant through that was this kind of like Silicon Valley environment, right, where it was, not only did you have a place to go work every day, but you had a place that was fun.

You stayed there, and your friends or your coworkers, and it was more of a lifestyle, necessarily, than a job. And I’m a big believer in culture. I’m a big believer in having those types of things. So yeah, our big red barn has got a pool table, it’s got TVs, it’s got a full kitchen, it’s got a beer fridge, it’s got deer heads hanging, deer heads, moose heads, elk head, bobcat, mountain goat, most of those things have come from guys that say, “Hey, my wife won’t let me hang this up the house. Can I bring it up here?” [laugh].

Greg: The odds and ends.

Mike: Right. I mean, yeah, we just tried to have a fun place, right? I mean, it’s—look, we spend, at least myself, and I know most leaders, business owners, entrepreneurs, we spend more time here than we spend anywhere else. To a large degree, so to our employees, right? I mean, they may be here 8, 10, 12 hours, but by the time they leave the house and get back home, and you throw lunch-hour there in the middle of it, we’re spending more time with each other than we are our families, good, bad, or indifferent. And so, you might as well enjoy it.

I would say even continuing the culture of Hill, but that maybe also trying to turn the volume up a little bit, is trying to have an environment that, we like being here, we like each other. You look forward to going to work on Monday because you want to tell your buddy what you did this weekend, versus, you know, they old Garfield, “Oh God, it’s a Monday,” right, cartoon. Part of that, too—and you know, and I think this is something that everybody that’s in our space can acknowledge is that when I bought Hill, I think it’s accurate to say, I was the third-youngest employee of the company.

Greg: Third youngest?

Mike: Third youngest. Meaning everybody in this building is going to be gone before I am, and I don’t know how to run a machine [laugh], right?

Greg: [laugh].

Mike: So, that’s a problem from a sustainability standpoint. I had a—you know, if I—

Greg: It’s a big problem.

Mike: Yeah. If I wanted to sit down that first day and put up a SWOT analysis, right, that is a huge weakness and a ginormous threat. Fast-forward six years, and I think I might be the second or third oldest. We’ve really, really tried to build a company around the next generation of manufacturing leaders, and building them, growing them, training them, and also just providing them a workplace that they want to come to every day. The big red barn is—I mean, I actually love that people ask me about it because I think it talks a lot about really who we are and where we’re trying to go, even though it’s just a big ‘ol red barn in the middle of shop [laugh].

Greg: Yeah, I mean, but it’s literally in the middle of the shop, right? It’s almost dead-center in that wall, and it represents the heart of the building. And it’s just so unique. It’s—you walk in—I mean, I remember the first time, I go, “What the hell is a big red barn doing in the middle [laugh] of the shop?”

Mike: That is a very common reaction.

Greg: I got to go check that out. And then the other part, which is—what’s actually fascinating about this—and I don’t think I’ve ever told you this, Mike—is, so you’ve got a sign in the men’s room, right? And so, the first time… the first time I come out and visit you, I see this sign on the wall, and I just love everything that it says. And I take a picture of it, and I share it with our company, you know, in our company Slack channel, and I say, “Hey, guys, here’s a fantastic example of how our customers think about accountability and prescribing culture within their shop.” So, you know, I’m there, first time I see it, take that picture, send it.

Then, you know, fast-forward a couple months. I think we come out to hook up more machines. Our guy that goes out there does the same exact thing. He takes the picture, and he sends it to some of the new guys on the team. He’s like, “This is awesome. You got to see what this says. Like, this is so cool.” And then double-fast-forward, and one of our sales reps is out where you’re doing the Tony Gunn interview, right, the video—where the big red barn is prominently featured, actually, right, in the video—and he does the same thing. He takes it, he sends it to some of the other new guys. He’s like, “Take a look at this. This is how—like, this is it. This is how customers think.” So, what’s hanging in the bathroom?

Mike: [laugh] Well, I’m trying to remember how it’s titled. Essentially, it’s my basic expectation, and it’s so that we’re all on the same page, right? It’s also the front page of our employee manual. So, I got—okay, rabbit trail. I’ll tell you about our employee manual. Sometime in the first week of owning the company, I ask them, I say, “Hey, can I get a copy of our employee manual? I want to see what expectations we set.” And o—[laugh] the first thing I read, Greg—it’s not the first thing—but at the point where I said, “Okay, we got to do a new employee manual,” was when I read that you couldn’t have a Sony Walkman on the floor [laugh]. Now, Greg, I read this in 2018 [laugh].

Greg: [laugh] And I bet you that I bet you that problem was solved by then.

Mike: Yeah. No one had one. Gosh, I mean, I guess I need to go read it again so I could talk a little more about it, but it’s just covering the basics, right? It’s, “Hey, let’s show up to work, be ready to work, let’s get our machines running, let’s keep our areas clean”—I mean, it’s a machine shop, it’s definitely not perfect—and then it gets into a little bit more of, when you have a part in quality for first article, what could you be doing besides just sitting around waiting for approval, right? Well, you could get ready to run.

If you know you’re going to burn through a tap every ten parts, you got a hundred parts, go get ten taps out of the tool room. Things like that. I mean, it’s, you know, in my mind, there’s nothing necessarily revolutionary in there. We call them our shop standards. I mean, I know right out the gate, you know, we say, look, basic goals on a day-to-day basis is to have 85% efficiency, you know, our scrap expectation, our on time, expectations.

You know, even things like, here’s the information I expect you to know. If I or anybody else walks up to you and asks, you should know what’s the setup time on the part you’re setting up? What’s the cycle time supposed to be? When is the part due to the customer? And not only when is the part due to the customer? And not only when is the part due to the customer, but when’s your operation due to your customer, which is the next guy running your part, right?

If you’re running the first op, your customer is the guy run the second op. And when is he expecting to have it so that we can stay on schedule with the customer? Super simple, but it’s not necessarily the way we were thinking at the time, right? And then we go into that hole starting a job, and you know, if you’re fighting a set-up, don’t wait around. Like, get help. It’s okay to ask for help. Like, no one’s going to… no one’s going to knock you out for asking for help. We’d rather it be done correctly, and quickly, and on time, than you fight it all day long.

And then [sigh] then it kind of goes into running a job. I think one of the things that—I mean, it almost seems silly to have it on there—I think it’s on there; again, I need to go look again [laugh]—but you know, like, double-check and make sure your rapid’s at a hundred percent. Because sometimes during setup, you don’t have it at a hundred percent, right? What I had found in that first year or so—I think we put this up in that first year of having Hill—and the—you know, we might get all the way through the rest of the first day on a job, and someone had forgot to turn the rapid back up. Well, good lord, you could be losing 10, 20, 30% time on a part, just because of that, very easily, maybe more, depending on how many tool changes you have. And it happens.

No one is doing it deliberately, but it does happen. You know, just putting even that type of information out there, like hey, just pay attention to the small stuff. If you’ve got a 30-minute runtime and the guy in the cell with you is in the middle of a setup, and he’s maybe struggling a little bit, well, help him while you’re sitting there for 30 minutes in between pushing the green button. Just things like that. It’s kind of the… anybody that owns a shop can—and there’s probably a million different ways to approach this, but even just things like, I assume, from all the shops—I haven’t been as many shops as you have, but I have been in a lot of shops around the country over the last five, six years—I don’t think I’m alone in I get a part started, and I pick up my phone to look at social media or watch a YouTube video, or whatever. So, even that, right, so we had to kind of address that and say, it’s the Sony Walkman. I mean, I think we can all recognize there’s still is a Sony Walkman—

Greg: [laugh] you might, you might prefer the Walkman [laugh].

Mike: Right. You know, and basically, you know, kind of even I think on that same thing, we address that to say, look if everything we’ve talked about on this piece of paper is taken care of, then I don’t care if you’re on your phone, right? If the spindle is turning, and you’re taking care of business, whatever, it doesn’t matter. I think it’s unreasonable to say we’re taking phones off the floor and all that because, you know, anymore, I mean, the guys don’t have a machinist calculator right? They have an app on their phone for that, so there’s value in them having that. We send out messages across the company via text, and if I didn’t allow him to have phones on the floor, they wouldn’t catch that.

You know, we’ve even—you know, I think, you know, some of the same things we talk about on that is, okay, so we do a 45-minute lunch and a 15-minute break twice today. So, on the lunch, my point is, look, you can have a 45-minute lunch in this hour-and-a-half span because what I had found prior to this, you know, I don’t know, explanation, not rule, but you know, if it’s five minutes before lunch and I got a 10-minute runtime, I’m just not going to run a part because lunch starts in five minutes. But by giving, you know, a little bit of freedom there, you know, there’s no, Fred Flintstone blowing the whistle at the rock quarry, you know, just be smart. Run one more part, go a little bit over, start your lunch five minutes late. That’s okay, too. Same way with breaks and so forth.

I mean, what you’re getting at in asking that question is just kind of—the list is not like, “Do this, do that; don’t do this, don’t do that,” as much as it is just kind of these shop standards of, here’s kind of the guide rails we’re expecting you to operate within. You know, we want things kind of straightened out and cleaned up, we want you to run your part smart. If you’ve got one or two parts left at the end of the day, just run them out so we start fresh tomorrow. Nothing frustrates me more when I walk through at the end of the day, and we’ve got one part on a job left, and you know, it’s a 15-minute cycle time. They could have finished in 15 minutes. Tomorrow, it’s going to take them an hour, right, because they got to come in, warm up the machine, size it in, run the part.

Like, yeah, I’m not going to come yell at you because Fred Flintstone already blew the whistle at the end of shift, and you’re still out here running a part. What all that boils down to, for me and the culture that I’m trying to drive day-to-day, and this part of our mission statement now, and everything else is, we just want to be professional. And in a professional world, you don’t have, you know, necessarily a finite list of rules to follow, right; you have guardrails. And you act like a professional, you get your job done, you act professionally, I’m not going to question you why you had overtime, or you didn’t have overtime. You got your job done, and you want to—and it’s a little bit early on Friday, and you want to go fishing, go. That’s fine. I want us to behave like professionals, I want us to be professionals to our customers, and, you know, if we do that everything else kind of takes care of itself.

Greg: I know what our team loved about it was it’s sort of this combination of, like, “Hey, here’s some of the awareness things, little shortcuts that if we do these handful of little things, it has a significant impact.” And then, “Oh, by the way, it sets you up for all these other opportunities.” Like, you’ve got stuff in there about cross-training. It’s like, well, if you help the guy with the next op, guess what you learned, right? Now, you know how to do this. Well, what does that do for you, right?

It wasn’t just about, like, “Hey, here it comes down from on high of how you work.” It was literally all rooted in employee development, and how it makes the company better, and what that really means, and what systems, and tools, and things you’ve put in place to try to help have that professional and highly effective work environment. Which I actually think transitions beautifully into something that I know is important to you, which is, you know, really technology as part of the culture. And you’ve got—you know, I can picture it in that thing that’s hanging up there, you’ve got what the efficiency target is, you’ve got, you know, “Pay attention to your cutting time and your touch time.” If you don’t know this, go look it up in ProShop.

Mike: And if you don’t know how to do that, ask.

Greg: Right [laugh] right. It’s all such a nice closed-loop thing. But again, a lot of what’s woven in there is how that feeds the development of the employee, which helps the growth of the business, which feeds investment back into the business to help the development and growth of the employee. So, you know, especially with your PE background, and investment background, I mean, how do you see technology integrated across your business—and like you said, technology is a massive word—but then also, you know, what specific investments have you made in the last couple years? And what are you seeing for impact out of those?

Mike: It’s a big answer, probably. I’ll try to keep it reasonable, but go back to why I bought the company. I saw a tremendous legacy business with a lot of untapped potential. I would say it was mostly maxed out, given its current state when we bought it January 3rd, 2018. I don’t know how much more you could have done other than add a second third shift, you know, whatever, right? Throw more people at it. Given my background, all the way back to the beginning of my career in technology, all through private equity, I’ve had a front row seat to what the term technology can do for any number of businesses in any number of industries. Manufacturing, in particular, I think has been probably slow to adopt, maybe, this traditional sense of technology. When you talk about software, and you know, computers, and even email—

Greg: CRT monitors.

Mike: [laugh] Yeah.

Greg: [laugh].

Mike: Yeah, manufacturing has been incredibly aggressive in the sense of technology when you talk about machine tools, and CAD/CAM, and I mean, it’s actually an incredibly advanced technology industry. But in the traditional sense of, how can technology help me grow my business, I certainly saw opportunities there. So, go back 2018, we bought the company, I knew based on my background, from the early parts of my career, and then throughout 100-plus merger-acquisition investment opportunities that there were two things I was looking for. That was an ERP system—we had a homegrown system, that was an Access database with some reporting that basically just kind of processed an order, and created a lot of paper. Side note, my sister actually wrote that Access database system for this company.

Greg: No way. Come on.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is just ironic, right? It was called the Blue Screen. And it’s… for what they needed out of it, it was fine. For what I needed out of it, it was not fine. The other thing I knew was that I could get data out of my machines that could tell me a lot because I had done it. Now, when I did it, custom installations, half-million dollar [laugh], you know, custom software jobs, I knew I couldn’t do that, but I knew it was locked up inside there.

So, [sigh] 2018, I go to IMTS to look at two things: ERP systems and machine monitoring. That’s the only thing I was really going for. I had plenty of machines, I had plenty of everything else, but I needed those two things. And in all honesty, I went to see two. I went see one ERP system and one machine monitoring system, and was very pleased with the ERP system I found, was not pleased with the machine monitoring system I found, not necessarily because of them; it just wasn’t what I needed, and part of a big need for me was I wanted integration to my ERP.

I didn’t want to teach two or three systems out on the shop floor; I wanted one. And you can even blame that on my early days. I mean, Greg, when we used to install software on the shop floor, we had to teach people how to use a mouse. But I mean, that was, you know, again, mid, late-’90s, right? I mean—

Greg: Yeah.

Mike: —there wasn’t a computer in every home and every desk. So, I certainly didn’t want to take on teaching my shop floor two systems [laugh]. I wanted to start and grow. So, you know, we had a—every business I’ve ever bought, invested in, whatever, had very aggressive growth goals. I believe it’s very doable. It’s very hard, but I believe it’s very doable to, if you put the effort in, to double every five years, which is 20% year-over-year growth.

I knew I could do that with this company, but I was going to need technology to help, right? I needed an ERP system, I needed a lot of things to help get me there. I left IMTS in September 18 with a decision on my ERP system. We were live in January of 19, so we implemented training everything in, what’s that, three months. It was super quick.

It was very, very aggressive, but you know, like you said earlier, we were with ProShop, and it’s very doable with ProShop. So, along the lines of that more traditional technology investment, and it being part of our culture, that was kind of the—to me, it was almost the foundation of what we needed to go where we were expecting to go. From there, I mean, gosh, I must bug poor Paul Van Metre, probably quarterly for the next several years about a machine monitoring solution that would integrate, until he introduced me to you.

Greg: Thanks for that intro, Paul.

Mike: Yeah [laugh]. You know, I mean, that’s another piece of the technology right? I mean, if I know what’s happening on the machine, I can improve what we’re doing, and—or use a successful job to learn from, to maybe improve a job that’s not going well. I can show my operators, my machinists, “Hey, you know, we’ve got you running—you know, we have the two of you running these three machines. Here’s data straight from your machine, right?” There’s no filter in there. It’s just like, “This is when it was running; this is when it wasn’t.”

“Do you see here you could have got this part started while this was running?” Not from a using a whip on the floor standpoint, but from a training our people. And as I told the guys not too long ago in the shop meeting we were having, you know, the skills we’re trying to teach you or not to make Hill better, they’re to make you better. You take the skill of knowing how to keep two machines running in an efficient manner, and you’re valuable to everybody in this industry, not just Hill. That’s not us trying to crack a whip on the floor; that’s us, trying to be as efficient as we can, so we can be competitive on our pricing, we can hit our schedules, and improve everybody every day.

That’s where I look for technology. So like, one of the—this is going to get me on a rabbit trail that we may not want, but are you familiar with the servant-leadership model?

Greg: Totally.

Mike: Right, so that’s how I view leadership. My customer is everybody in this building. We have our customers that we deliver parts to, but my job as the, you know, owner of this company is to provide everybody the tools they need to do the job I expect them to do. Same way with my management team. Their job is to provide the guys on the floor everything they need to perform in the manner that we need them to.

So, whether that’s—and when I say every tool, that might be an end mill, right? I mean, it doesn’t do any good to give somebody a job that we don’t have the right end mill. It also doesn’t do any good to give them a job that we don’t know how long it’s going to take set up, and we don’t have an expectation of how long it’s going to take to run that job. That servant-leadership model is probably core to our culture of, let me give everybody that needs it the tools they need to do their job. So, whether that’s an ERP system, or a machine monitoring solution, or an end mill, to me, those are all the same thing. Those are tools and resources that my team needs to do what we promised to our customers, which is, to deliver quality parts on time, every time. That’s it.

Greg: In the slogan.

Mike: In the slogan.

Greg: That’s right, from the slogan [laugh].

Mike: So, technology is a big, broad word, right? That’s a self-centering hydraulic vice, or it’s a piece of software that automatically bubbles the prints for quality, or it’s machine monitoring that tracks how we’re doing on the job so that we can price it correctly. One of the things I just went over with my team—and shame on me I hadn’t explained this earlier—they’ve always felt like our machine monitoring and our tracking of their time is to make sure they’re doing their job, right? Like, it’s kind of—it’s a little bit of a Big Brother thing. Just last month, we were having a shop meeting, and I explained to everybody, I said, “Look, it’s not always about, you’re not getting it done in the time we thought it would be done.”

If you’re getting it done twice as fast, I need to know that too because that may mean my price is out of line. If I’ve quoted it to be a 20-minute operation, and it’s taking 11, I’m probably charging too much for that part, and if someone comes in and rebids that part with my customer, I’m going to lose it. So, it’s not always an opportunity to go, “Oh, look, we’ve doubled our shop rate because we’re running twice as fast as we’ve quoted.” You’re also exposing yourself to an opportunity for someone to come in and take the work from you. So, the accuracy of the people doing the work entering the data correctly, but also then to back that up, like having machine monitors, through Datanomix to pull the real data, it allows me to make sure that I’m—and I will also say, this is to make sure that I’m competitive.

And competitive doesn’t always mean that I’m close to the lowest cost; I want to be right in the middle. I don’t want to be the lowest, I don’t necessarily want to be the highest, right? I want to deliver quality parts on time, every time. And if my price is competitive, and I’m delivering quality parts on time, every time, I’m not going to lose that work. There’s nothing in there that says I’ll deliver you the cheapest parts on time, every time. And my customers respect that.

You know, again, we’re very fortunate we’ve, our customer base is very relationship-driven, and they don’t—they want me to make money. They don’t want me to go out of business because I didn’t make money. They want quality parts on time. That’s it. And as long as they’re not having to pay an unreasonable premium for that, it’s fine.

I just need to be competitive. But technology allows me to be competitive, whether—so again, whether the software, whether that’s the correct tooling, workholding, so forth, or automation, you know, robotics, bar feeders, parts catchers, those types of things, to me, that’s all technology, and if I utilize them correctly, they make me better. They make me bigger, stronger, and faster.

Greg: Sure, do. I’m looking at some of your recently run jobs, Mike, and I’ve got to say you’ve got a bunch of stuff dialed in. I’m looking at one you’re running on the TC-2500 today. Eight-minute target in ProShop. You’re typically running them in anywhere from seven-nine to seven-thirty, and you know, you look at history, you were doing them in you were doing them in 9, 10 minutes, you know, not that long ago.

Mike: Yeah, I know that job, and you know, what’s interesting about that job, too, I would say we’ve been running for 15 years.

Greg: Wow.

Mike: Technology, right, has allowed us to drill that in, and I know for a fact when we bought the company, and I first was exposed to that job, that was a ten-minute job. But through knowing what we can do, looking at workholding, looking at tooling, looking at—and actually, in that particular job, we even worked on some material specifications with the customer, we’ve totally changed the way we ran it ten years ago. Today, what did you say, we’re running close to seven minutes?

Greg: Seven minutes, yeah.

Mike: We’re still getting paid for the ten minutes, honestly.

Greg: [laugh].

Mike: The benefit on the customer to that—I mean, I would tell the customer that: the price hasn’t gone up. Look at the period of the economy we are in right now, right? I mean, like with inflation, and material pricing, and labor rates, and all that, like, skyrocketing over the last couple years, those types of advancements in technology, and the investments we’ve made, and the machine monitoring—you know, all the things we’ve done to be bigger, stronger, faster, it’s given me much more freedom to not have to pass all that along my customer. If we were still running ten minutes, my customer would be paying probably 20 to 30% more than they were five years ago. But they’re not. So, it’s been—it’s good for them, too.

Greg: Your investment in technology is actually inflation protection for your customer because the material you’re putting in there is certainly way more than you were paying for 15 years ago.

Mike: Two to three times.

Greg: [laugh]. Your tools are more expensive, there’s no doubt about that. Your process optimization, right, your labor is more expensive, your electricity is more expensive, but your process optimization more than makes up for it.

Mike: I’ll go back to what I said earlier. I had an aggressive goal to double the size of the company in five years. I mean, most business owners would tell you that’s aggressive, right? There’s people that have done it; I’m not—I mean, I’m not anything special, but when I add the statement of ‘every five years’—so ’18 to ’23, ’19 to ’24, ’20 to ’25—I have that expectation every year. It gets a little more aggressive.

Greg: A lot more aggressive.

Mike: It’s one thing to have 20% year-over-year growth for five years. It’s different to do it for 20 years.

Greg: They call that a dynasty.

Mike: I’ve been very fortunate in a lot of the endeavors I’ve been involved in over the last 20 years, we’ve been able to do that. It’s hard work, but if you have the right team, you have the right tools, it’s definitely doable in a year. It’s hard to do over five years, especially when there’s a pandemic in the middle of it. But I mean, we did it. From a revenue perspective, we were $10,000 short in our fifth year, I will admit, but I’ll take that. I mean, so we were 99.8% of the way there. But you can’t do it on cruise control. Fortunately, I’m at a point in my career where I don’t want to be on cruise control.

Greg: That’s the disease of entrepreneurship right there. No such thing, unless it goes really fast.

Mike: Yeah, don’t get too comfortable.

Greg: So, Mike, I mean, every time we speak, I learn so much more about the depth of your journey, and why you do things the way that you do, and even more in this conversation about how you got into the industry. So, the one of the things we like to end with here on Manufacturing Mavericks is, given that fully compound experience you just took us through, and that windy road of walking the shop floor by selling data collection systems onto it before anyone even knew how to do that, to getting into the investment side, the financials of the business, and seeing wow, you know, manufacturing companies are a great business, to falling in love with one right in your backyard, and you know, wanting to carry on the tradition and the culture of it, if you could go back in time, and you could talk to the version of yourself that you know when that manufacturing torch was first lit, when you first fell in love with that shop floor, what advice would you give to yourself back then?

Mike: Man, you hit deep.

Greg: Existentialism.

Mike: Man, almighty. I might broaden that a little bit.

Greg: Please do.

Mike: Maybe this touches on the manufacturing torch, maybe it doesn’t. I like listening to podcasts. Half the time, I’ve got an AirPod in my ear, listening to something, all sorts of different topics.

Greg: You keep those on your Walkman?

Mike: Right [laugh]. I have a whole suitcase of cassette tapes.

Greg: [laugh]. That’s awesome.

Mike: I mean, I learn a lot from other people. I enjoy learning their journeys, and what they did well and what they didn’t. And I actually heard one today—and this is going to be a side subject—and it honestly, like, frankly, it pissed me off.

Greg: Really.

Mike: Yeah.

Greg: It wasn’t one of ours, was it? It wasn’t Manufacturing Mavericks?

Mike: [laugh] It was not Manufacturing Mavericks. It was in the manufacturing industry. If I’m honest, it made me mad. It was very discouraging to a potential entrepreneur. It was like, “Hey, this is hard. You don’t want to do this. This is a hard business to be in, and you’re going to have to do this, and you’re going to have to do that, and you’re going to have to hire an attorney, and then you have to have an accountant.”

And I was really turned off by it because at the end of the day, I’m an entrepreneur’s biggest cheerleader. I don’t care what you’re doing, man I am… I’m the biggest cheerleader an entrepreneur might ever have, vocally or not. Like, I’m rooting everybody on. I know how hard it is, and I’ve done it many, many times, all the way back to straight out of college to today. How I’m trying to tie this together is, you know, whether it’s manufacturing or it’s women’s pajamas, I mean, I’m just, [laugh] you know, like, whatever, it doesn’t matter—but you have to manufacture those, too—if you love something, just go for it, you know?

I mean, probably my biggest—this is a good example. Got out of the software business, had moderate success in that—I was certainly proud of what we had done—and I remember sitting on my back porch with, you know, little kids, sitting with my wife, and she’s like, “What are you going to do next?” I said, you know, I really enjoyed manufacturing. Like, it was fun. Like, it was cool watching things be made and figure out how to make them—figure out how to make them better.

There’s so many dials and knobs you can turn to try new things, and you know, like, improve, just improve what you’re doing. But I also really liked the transactional side of business. You know, she reminded me a couple years ago, like, that I’m living my dream because sitting on the back porch that night, I told her, I said, “You know, I think I really want to help other people achieve their dreams.” And that’s what I see, like, my career in private equity was, you’re helping people achieve a dream, right? They started a company, they want to sell it. They want to buy a company, you know, all the—I mean, these are dreams of theirs, and it enabled me to help other people help themselves, raise money, buy things, sell things, whatever it was. And along the way, hopefully, I’ll make enough money myself in that deal, that then I can do it for myself.

And she reminds me this—because remember I told you, I’ve known that the previous owner of Hill for 20-plus years—I had said, you know, maybe I can do enough private equity and merger-acquisition type work to make enough money to buy, like, my own manufacturing company. She said, “Well, what’s manu—what do you mean? What’s a manufacturing company?” And I said, “Well, something like Cheryl has, like, Hill Manufacturing.” She goes, “Oh, okay.” That was kind of the end of that.

Well, she literally reminded me 15 years later, that I have the opportunity to buy Hill Manufacturing [laugh], and that I had built my whole career, not with that front-of-mind—well, the whole issue of the Hill Manufacturing, I mean, you know, not to back up too much in the podcast, but when the opportunity really arose, I was having a lot of fun running a very successful private equity fund. We had 30, 40 companies—or, you know, investments—under our purview, and it was fun. I—there was nothing in my life I wanted to change. The Hill opportunity comes up, and I’m like, “Man, I don’t know. Like, I’m having fun.”

It’s personally rewarding, it’s financially rewarding, I mean, everything else. And she reminded me of that story at that time when then I knew it was time to pull the trigger. Like, okay, this is what I’ve actually been working toward. I didn’t remember that that’s what I was working towards, but I had the opportunity I dreamt of 15 years prior, sitting in my lap. So, back to your question: what would you tell yourself? That’s a long way to get to that answer.

Greg: [laugh] I think I see it coming.

Mike: Yeah, which is just do it. It’s hard work. So, the thing that podcast had right today is, it’s hard work. It is absolutely hard work. But if you love something, and you want to—you know, you think that this is where you want to go, just take your shot. Go ahead and throw that machine in your garage, start making parts.

I’ve got people here locally I’ve worked with that have done exactly that. They’ve put that machine in their garage, and now they have three, and now they’re looking for a building, you know? Now, they got some money from the Department of Commerce to help them relocate to a building that has four machines and two employees. And just know that along the way, you’re going to have cheerleaders like me saying, “I love that story. Here, why don’t you run these jobs for me because I want to help you too.” You don’t have a granite table to check your parts on? I got six extras.

Greg: [laugh] Wow.

Mike: I’m going to load it in your truck. Take it with you. What I would say specifically about anybody in manufacturing that has dreams and ambitions, I’ve been in nearly every industry you can name. I mean, we could play, like, a little quiz show thing. It’s like, “Mike, have you ever done the deal in this industry?” And the answer is probably going to be, “Yes.”

This is the only industry I’ve been in that, like, we’re all here for each other. The community is amazing. Locally, nationally, regionally, it doesn’t matter. I mean, everybody’s here to help. I mean, just look at the vast number of people that are in this industry that are doing what you’re doing with this podcast, or other podcasts, or like Tony Gunn with all he does, right?

This is all free information and advice to people. Titan Gilroy, right, great example. You know, he’s got an entire education program to teach you to become a machinist, and a really good one [laugh], right? When I have my younger crew—you know, I said I’ve got a great crew under 30, and even 20—and they’re like, “What can I do to get better?” I’m like, “Just go follow Titan and, like, join his program, and do it.”

You do all the things he’s taught people to do? I’m going to immediately start paying you a lot more than you’re making. You know, learn every day, learn about all this technology, whether it’s metal cutting tooling, or whether it’s machine tools, or whether it’s automation, or whether it’s ERP systems, and machine monitoring, and inspection software, you know, all these things. This industry, I would say, is more accepting and open to anybody and everybody than any industry I’ve ever dealt with.

So again, travel back in time, if your passion—if my passion in 2003 when I sold my software company was to eventually get in the manufacturing business, in all honesty, it shouldn’t take me 15 years to do it. The resources, the knowledge, the people that are willing to give you a helping hand to do it are there, and I could have done it a lot earlier, and I didn’t. It worked out fine for me. I’m not regretting the path I took, but you can do it. Like, just go for it. It’s there.

Greg: What a fantastic answer, Mike. I know you thought you took a long journey to get there, but I mean, here’s what I heard, is if you’re built for entrepreneurship, there’s only one way to find out, and it’s to do it way sooner than you probably think you should. Just go. And the reason that podcast pissed you off, and why it would piss me off, too, is because no one has the right to be the gatekeeper over what you’re going to do, right, over what your dream is, over what your enterprise is, over what you’re aspiring to do. There is no gatekeeper other than the guy in the mirror. If you want to go, go. And if you don’t know if you want to go, go too. And if you don’t like it, go somewhere else [laugh].

Mike: Right [laugh].

Greg: It’s a big world out there.

Mike: The number of people that made it and that are more than willing to help the next person make it is unprecedented, as far as I’m concerned, in business.

Greg: No doubt about it. Infinite game, infinite opportunity, and in my opinion, someone who’s playing it incredibly well. Definitely one of the Mavericks of Manufacturing. Mike, always enjoy speaking with you. Really appreciate your time being on the podcast. Can’t wait to come back out there and see you again and hit a couple pool shots in the barn, and maybe see the updated list in the men’s room.

Mike: [laugh] If we need—we need to do that. And bring your golf clubs, and we’ll go play a little golf, or maybe drink a little bourbon, too.

Greg: Your wish is my command, Mike. Awesome. Awesome having you. Thanks again for the time. Fantastic episode. I can’t wait for this one to come out. I wish you continued success, Mike. Let’s go double again.

Mike: Thanks for everything you’ve done for us, brother. Appreciate you.

Greg: You got it. Take care, Mike.

Greg: Thank you for listening to Manufacturing Mavericks. If you’d like to learn more, listen to past episodes, or nominate a future Maverick to be on our show, visit mfgmavericks.com, and don’t forget to subscribe to and rate this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app.