Today’s podcast episode is the second half of our interview with Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor, the founder of Hyphen Innovations, a firm that develops low cost, damage resistant aerospace components.

When Onome does engineering research, he fuels his creativity by embracing resource constraints and what he calls the “fail fast” mentality. The fail fast mentality means you can look at failure during the problem solving process as a positive. If “failing” means you learn something that propels you forward the next time you try to solve the same problem, then it really isn’t a failure. It’s a success.

We also discussed Onome’s desire for more young African Americans to feel confident in their abilities to pursue degrees in engineering.

You can also view the podcast in video form on our YouTube Channel.

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Interview Summary

Noah Graff: What does the expression “failing fast” mean to you?

Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor: I ask myself, what will I learn when this happens? If I decide that what I’m going to learn is healthy, it’s not failure. It’s just a prediction. You go fast, you fail, you learn something, you make it better. You go fast again.

Graff: You told me previously that you often prefer to stay in the background and observe other people from a distance. Do you see this as a positive?

Scott-Emuakpor: I think it’s a positive. I like to pay attention to the way certain things play out in the background before I make a decision. Take this entrepreneurial journey that I’m on right now.

A lot of people would say, “I want to start a business.” And they jump right into it. In my case, I went through an entrepreneur opportunity program.

I shadowed a lot of people. I called a lot of people. I had a lot of mentors. I took a year, essentially a sabbatical, going through the Air Force, understanding all the intricacies, sitting in the background, and paying attention to how things are done before I actually said, all right, I’m ready to make a move and make a decision.

Graff: Do you often consciously see yourself as an artist?

Scott-Emuakpor: Yeah. Sometimes I [think], yeah, “I’m a fine arts guy.” You’re drawing something or you’re coming up with some creative idea. In high school, we had an assignment where we were given two dissimilar animals to figure out a way to draw them to create a new thing. Sometimes I apply this to a turbine engine.

If you look at a conventional turbine engine, you have a fuel nozzle and a turbine inlet nozzle. These are two separate pieces. How do you manufacture them so they’re the same piece and significantly reduce weight while improving the efficiency of a combustor?

That’s the exact same exercise. You’re looking at these two different things that are not together, and then you’re getting creative and you’re bringing them together. The only difference is that now I have to bring in physics to make it actually work.

Graff: Do you think many people label themselves as not creative, but they could be creative if they were taught to believe that they were.

Scott-Emuakpor:  I think that people just lack confidence because of their environment—not seeing yourself in somebody else. Not seeing your color in somebody else. Not seeing your personality trait in someone else. Not seeing your gender in somebody else.

When I was getting done with my PhD, one of the things that I wanted to do was become a professor. Not necessarily because I wanted to teach, but because I felt like there were a lot of young black people who didn’t believe that  becoming an engineer or getting a PhD while (still) being themselves was a thing.

One of my missions was, I want to be an engineer, but I’m going to keep my hair with long braids. I’m going to keep wearing baggy clothes and keep wearing jeans. I’m going to keep wearing Timberlands, and I’m going to teach classes.

And people, especially young black men, are going to see themselves in me and say, “I can be him.”

Question: What was your last failure that turned out to be a good thing in the end?

For more information about Hyphen Innovations go to https://www.hyphenmade.com/

The post Thinking Like an Artist to Solve Engineering Challenges, With Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor—Ep. 181 (Part II) first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

Noah is attending IMTS this week, so we are resharing one of our favorite podcasts from last year. This episode of Swarfcast was recorded in March of 2023. The second part is also available online here.

On today’s podcast, we talk about how you can apply the artistic side of your brain to solve engineering challenges.

Our guest is aerospace engineer, Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor, founder of Hyphen Innovations, a firm that develops new advanced aerospace components for the Department of Defense and other clients.

Onome’s family immigrated from Nigeria to Lansing, Michigan, before he was born. In high school, he was an average student but excelled in fine arts classes. In college, he played Division I basketball at Wright State.

While at Wright State, Onome realized he had a passion for engineering. Today, he says one of the keys to his success as an engineer is using the same type of creative approaches he embraced as a fine arts student.

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Interview Highlights

Noah Graff: Give me a quick explanation of your company, Hyphen Innovations.

Onome Scott-Emuakpor: With Hyphen Innovations we make aerospace parts. We make them lighter.  We make them stronger. We make them low cost, and we do that with unique out of the box design. And we use really intriguing advanced manufacturing methods.

Our main interest is turbine engines and turbine engine structures. The reason why we’re focused on the turbine engine is because we know that there’s still a lot of innovation. There’s still a lot of juice to squeeze out of that technology and improve the thrust to weight, so to speak, and do all that while also maintaining affordability with it.

Graff: You mentioned to me before that you were interested in fine arts when you were younger. What kind of art did you do growing up?

Scott-Emuakpor: I loved to sketch. Then in high school, there were classes that broadened (my) artistic capability. All of a sudden, I was painting, using watercolors, using colored pencils, painting with pastels, painting with oils. And it was like, this thing that I had been naturally good at as a kid just expanded through to all these other mediums. I was like, this is it. This is what I want to do. I wanna sit in one place, and paint or draw.

Graff: Did your parents expect you to do well in school? Were you in honors classes in high school?

Scott-Emuakpor: I was not (in honors classes). I don’t think I ever did homework in high school. I did homework five minutes before class, and that’s just because it wasn’t interesting. Math was kind of interesting, but it was interesting to me because I liked the challenge of seeing how well I could do on homework if I did [it] minutes before class.

I took the ACT, and I did terribly on it twice. I [scored] a 19. But on the math part, I got a 30-something.

I remember my dad (when I got to college), said “don’t put fine arts as your major. That’s not a major. I’m gonna go sleep on it and I’ll tell you what you should do.” And [he said] “I had a dream. You should put down engineering.”

It wasn’t until I actually started taking engineering classes that I thought, oh, this is kind of interesting. It wasn’t until I actually got a job that I was like, I now see where all the math is going. I now see where all the physics is going. I now see where all these classes are going.

Now all of a sudden you walk into a class and they say, “this is vibration.” And I’ve been working in a vibration lab, and I know what vibration is.

Graff:  So you finally got your PhD. You’ve done all this research, you’re a career academic in your mid-twenties, and then you said, what do I do with this?

Scott-Emuakpor: I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I got my postdoc position, which was through the Air Force, or the National Academies. I was working at the Air Force base (in Dayton, Ohio), the same place that I worked as an undergrad, and the same place that I did my graduate school research.

Graff: How do you feel about doing research?

Scott-Emuakpor: I love it. Research essentially allows me to engage in my creative side. It allows me to essentially do art with science and engineering.

When you think about art, it’s like you’re given a blank canvas to create something. You’re essentially creating something from nothing. Even when you’re taking a picture, you’re creating something from nothing. When you’re writing, you’re creating something from nothing.

Graff: How much are you leaning on other people’s research for your own research? How much are you inspired by it?

Scott-Emuakpor: I’m constantly looking at what other people are doing, and I’m constantly looking at what people are doing outside of my industry. Inspiration can come from anywhere. It can come from people arguing in a meeting while you’re sitting in the back. I just pay attention. I’m constantly thinking, I’m constantly thinking of how I’m going to solve the problem.

For more information about Hyphen Innovations go to https://www.hyphenmade.com.

Question: What type of fine arts classes did you take as a student.

The post Thinking Like an Artist to Solve Engineering Challenges, With Dr. Onome Scott-Emuakpor (Part I)—Ep. 180 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

Terry Iverson is a lifer in the machining industry. His grandfather sold machines for Hardinge over 100 years ago, and for 40 years he ran the Hardinge machinery distributor for the Midwest. 

Today Terry focuses his efforts on getting young people in America into manufacturing. He wrote two books directed at parents to open their eyes to manufacturing careers for their children.

His latest project is a machining camp called Camp CHAMP, in which middle school kids are mentored by high school kids running CNC machines.

Even though Terry is 20 years older than me, I feel like we really connect we talk. We’re both third generations in a family machine tool business. We’re both creatives, and we both love to reflect on serendipity in our lives.

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Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion!

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Main Points

Choosing a Trade in United States Vs. Europe

Terry Iverson: In Switzerland and Germany, they ask young people early in life to figure out what they’re passionate and skilled at doing. At like 14, 15 years old. 

Noah Graff: How does a 14 or 15 year old know what they’re meant to do?

Terry: Sometimes they do. In this country, internships are the answer. I write a lot about that because you don’t know what you’re passionate about or what you’re even good at unless you try it. It’s awesome if you could get an internship when you’re a teenager, that’s life-changing.

And if someone gets an internship in something and they say, “I hate this,” that’s not a bad thing. You just saved yourself potentially four years of college studying something that you should never study.

Noah: I think one of the great things about the United States is that we’re into trying different things.

Terry: There’s no question. But I think the biggest takeaway is that we need to spend more time empowering our young people, our children. What are they really good at? What are they skilled at? What are they passionate about? And allowing them the freedom to pursue something that they’ll spend a lot of time doing and presumably enjoy and do very well.

Camp CHAMP

Noah: Tell me how the CNC Machining Camp came about?

Terry: I did a camp. I actually picked up and shipped a CNC machine down to Florida at my expense. I set it up, programmed it, took an optical inspection system down with me, took a week off work and spent time with 10 high school young people and taught them about manufacturing.

What I realized is, not including the hard costs, just the cost of the machine tools, it was 10 grand. 

What it taught me is that this was not a sustainable role or path in terms of introducing manufacturing to young people.

So I decided to buy a couple custom-made tabletop CNC machines and have them programmed, and we set up making pens. The lathe turns the top and bottom segment of the pen. And then the mill, we take pieces of wood and mill out, almost like a router, the wood for a top and bottom case for the pen.

Then I came up with a concept to take these out into the field to inspire middle school students. It’s not educational because it’s not broad enough to be educational. It’s more inspirational and informative, introductory. IMEC, the MEP for Illinois, decided to give me a little bit of money to do five camps. We ended up doing six over about a six-month period. A camp is defined as a morning session and an afternoon.

We have six different stations: lathe, mill, CNC control, laser engraver, assembly station, inspection station, and a programmable rotary station. What we do is every 15 minutes, we take 24 young people, divide them into six groups, so there’s only four per group, and then we have a mentoring component. We have a high school CTE student mentor the middle school students.

The middle school students become the mentors later for the next group of middle school students. And the host can either be a technical college or an industry member. So you have a path from middle school to high school to technical college to industry. It’s a total path.

We did the first six camps, and now IMEC has come to me again and said to keep doing this, they’re going to fund us again.

One thing I left out is that out of every 24 young people that come, only one or two know anything about manufacturing. We ask them when they first arrive. At the end, you can tell just by the excitement that you see and what they’re learning. They go home with a pen with their name laser engraved on it, and they get a shirt with their school name and cool logos. 

There’s at least 10 that go home all excited about manufacturing. It plants a seed.

 

A Serendipitous Moment

Terry: I was having a tough time being the only sibling in our family to work at the company.

I went to a class at Harvard for a week. It was a strategic finance class.

I was really struggling, and I met a woman from Brazil that literally kind of said, “Get over yourself.” And I’m like, “What? I don’t even know you. What are you talking about?” She’s like,

“Going into your family business and being the chosen one to take it into the future is an honor, don’t you know? You were chosen for a reason and you should be privileged and honored that you were chosen. Quit whining and get over yourself. Just accept your destiny and just do it. Do what you’ve been destined to do.”

I was just so taken aback by her candor and her frankness. I was just like, “Well, obviously I needed that.”

Noah: And you were in the right mindset to receive it.

Terry: I’m always open. That’s why it happened.

Question: What are your ideas on how to get American kids interested in manufacturing careers? Transcript was generated with the assistance of claud.ai.

The post CNC Machining Camp, with Terry Iverson–EP 225 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

This podcast episode is the second part of our interview with Will Healy III about how to get the most out of trade shows, which we did before IMTS 2022. It’s a great time run the best of, as IMTS 2024 is coming Sept. 9!

We suggest you listen to Part I of the podcast before you tune into this one.

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Main Points

Participate and Follow Social Media Related to a Show

Will suggests announcing ahead of time on social media that you will be going to a trade show. Often this will lead to meeting up in person with new people, or reuniting with old contacts who you had not realized were going to the show. 

Will likes to post on social media about what he is seeing at trade shows, mainly on Linkedin, which can provide interesting ideas to other show goers about places to see that they didn’t know about.

This year, for the first time, IMTS has a new booth called the creators lounge, devoted to content creators and social media thought leaders where you can hear them speak. The thought leaders will also be going around the show creating a live stream.

Student Area at IMTS

Will suggests to check out a student area at IMTS, hidden on level 1 in the North building. There you can see students presenting projects related to machining. It also has many booths encouraging young people to go into the machining field. Robotics companies as well as firms such as MasterCam, Haas, Autodesk, and even NASA have booths there. 

Take Advantage of Conferences at Shows

Trade shows such as IMTS are packed with conferences for attendees who want to learn more about the latest machining technology and industry trends. Will is going to be presenting for two to three conferences and will be on the IMTS+ Main Stage as a panelist. 

The post How to Get the Most From a Trade Show, With Will Healy III (Part II)–EP 164 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

The 2024 IMTS International Manufacturing Technology Show coming up in two weeks in Chicago!

We did an awesome podcast two years ago about preparing for trade shows and IMTS in particular, so we will be rerunning both this week.

The following is a summary of our 2-part interview with Will Healy III. Will has been going to machining industry trade shows such as IMTS for a long time, as an exhibitor, a speaker, and attendee. I myself have been to quite a few trade shows over the years, including IMTS, and I have to say, I wish I had known a lot of the stuff covered in this interview back then, like how to plan your schedule before a show and the best strategies for networking. We even talked about how to stop a conversation if it is running too long.

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Main Points

Have a Plan Before the Show

If you go to a show like IMTS without a plan, you will walk a lot, you will not see as much as you want, and you will probably not see the things you needed to see.

There are four main exhibition areas at IMTS spanning three huge buildings in McCormick Place, which can be quite overwhelming for show goers. Will says when he goes to trade shows like IMTS, he wears gym shoes to traverse the show grounds, carrying dress shoes in a backpack if he has to work in a booth.

Will advises to study the IMTS map prior to the show to pick out the technologies you want to see, the companies you want to visit, and the people you want to talk to. Then plan a strategic rout.

Make Appointments with People You Want to Visit

Before a show it’s great to tell your venders that you’re going, so when you visit a booth they’re ready for you. If you don’t make appointments before the show, you can still swing by a booth and make an appointment to come by later.

Take advantage of networking events

After the show ends for the day, there are tons of networking events in the evenings put on by trade organizations and vendors. The show presents a rare opportunity to meet a lot of new people in your industry in person. Will says one philosophy he has when traveling for work is to “never eat alone” because there are tons of people from all over looking to connect with peers in their industry.

Tips for Interactions at Networking Events

Will says at events when he meets new people, he likes to write down their names in a notebook. He is not a fan of taking notes using smartphones because taking out phones creates disengagement in conversations. He also likes to follow up with most people he meets via email or social media after the show ends.

I also suggested that it would be good to have the calendly app ready on a smart phone to make appointments on the spot if you want to make sure to lock in a meeting post trade show.

Disengaging from Conversations

Will says it is important to be ready with some clever ways to end a conversation, so you don’t end up spending all of your limited time talking to only one person. Two of his go-to disengagement excuses, which enable him leave a conversation without lying, include having other appointments to get to and needing to go to the bathroom. He thinks people will be suspicious if you lie about having received a text message.

Question: Which booths or other events to you plan on checking out at this IMTS?

Will Healy III can be found on social media at the handle @willautomate

Go to Part II of this interview! 

The post How to Get the Most From a Trade Show, With Will Healy III (Part I)–EP 163 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

Most of us don’t have a knack for pivoting. 

We follow the standard curriculum, and we keep going forward when we get in a lane, whether we believe it’s the right direction or not.

But for Michael Gimbel, my guest on today’s show, seeing setbacks as serendipity and then pivoting is a natural gift.

Michael built a CNC router in his garage by age 12. He dropped out of an elite university after one year to start a company selling 3D printing technology that he invented.

When the company failed, he picked up the pieces, shifting to contract manufacturing and engineering consulting.

But that business didn’t excite him, so Michael pivoted again to manufacture a spindle gripper he developed for automating his own vertical CNC mills. Today his company, Gimbel Automation, is thriving and his spindle grippers are saving machining companies hundreds of thousands of dollars on automation. And he’s only 26!

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Interview Highlights

The Startup

Noah: Tell me about your interesting career journey.

Michael: I got to college and was totally miserable. I was doing things I’d already studied and aced because they wanted me to. It was such a downgrade from the equipment. The only thing I could fit in my dorm was a little 3D printer. I went from having a full shop to just a couple of crappy pieces of equipment, taking courses I’d already taken. I got burnt out and chose to drop out after a year.

To be honest, I felt like I wanted to do my own thing. Hopkins is good for the right person, but it wasn’t me. You have to want to follow everything from A to B to C by the book, believing in the process. I’m the kind of person who wants to try everything, see what I can do, and see where I fail. It’s not a place that curates failure on your own, and that’s what I really needed.

Noah: Interesting. So you decided to leave after freshman year?

Michael: I completed freshman year, dropped out, and convinced six or seven professors to give me about $70 grand as startup seed money. Then I moved to Los Angeles and raised venture capital. I raised about 1.25 million dollars as a 19-year-old with just a dream, a plan, and a couple of experimental 3D printers. I had invented a new 3D printing process. From there, it was its own wild ride.

Noah: Then what happened?

Michael: What happened was exactly what you’d expect when you hand a million dollars to a 19-year-old. I tried to run the company, but I didn’t know what I was doing. We made cool tech developments, but I didn’t understand how to manage people or how to get things to the next level. Ultimately, that first company failed.

Contract Manufacturing and Engineering Consulting

Noah: What came next?

Michael: There’s a long, convoluted path to my next stage. The company’s assets traded hands a couple of times. The original investors didn’t want anything to do with it because it was a money pit.

Eventually, it came into my hands and I ended up paying off all the debts. I had the idea to run a job shop or contract manufacturer again, to have all these machines in this space for my next chapter. I’d looked for jobs but couldn’t get behind anything, thinking I’d fall into building someone else’s dream.

I wanted to build my own thing, even if it was difficult. And it was definitely difficult.

I started doing job shop work for startups. I learned quickly that startups are awful customers because most don’t exist in a year or two. We slowly moved into engineering consulting. The startup company was 3D printing, but to do our own R&D, we had machines – a water jet, a Haas CNC machine. I thought, we need to make money now, so we’ll do job shop work. That’s how we started and how I paid off the debts at first.

We then moved into engineering consulting and production work, like specialty stuff and art. We were doing all the stuff other shops didn’t want to do because it wasn’t full production quantities and was complicated. We took on customers who didn’t have drawings but needed certain requirements. We grew rapidly, doubling in size every year.

We quickly built up to four people. Everything was great. We were mostly in engineering consulting, not only making parts but designing components, putting assemblies together, and testing them. Then COVID hit, turning our whole business upside down. 90% of the revenue disappeared. I had to lay off two people and put one part-time. This was the only time I ever laid people off.

We started making face shields for a while and found a way through. It took a year and a half, but the engineering consults came back. People had projects they wanted to accelerate. The year felt like a rocket ship. Right after COVID, we won a big engineering consulting job that added 35% to our revenue overnight. Then it happened again with another customer. We were growing really fast, but you also have the tension of having one huge customer and working around their demands.

Before the breakthrough, there was another “Icarus flies too close to the sun” moment. I didn’t really love consulting. It never made me excited to wake up in the morning. We had a four-month R&D project where we lost about $350,000 developing a metal 3D printing system. I was convinced it would be great. We built it, it worked, the machinery was awesome, but when we tried to test it in the market, it failed. I was a bit bored and looking for shiny objects to work on, but the big thing in my head was needing stable, recurring revenue in addition to these big customers.

I really wanted a product. I think a lot of job shops have felt that. I’d been working on projects when bored for years. I once built an all-metal operational clock with a swinging arm. We built a shrink fit machine with virtual holders.

One of the things we’d built was a spindle gripper to run internal production on our own components.

The Spindle Gripper

Gimbel Automation CNC Robot Gripper

Noah: Explain how the spindle gripper works.

Michael: A spindle gripper goes into the automatic tool changer of your machine, loading into the spindle like a tool. This whole sub-assembly goes into your spindle, and when air is turned on, it closes. This allows it, like a robot gripper, to grab a component. Parts are loaded onto the table in a tray on a grid. The gripper comes down, clamps on a part in the grid, lifts up, and drops it off in an automated vise.

It does this without an external robot. We invented a new method for machines without through spindle air coolant, which is a huge portion of the market. We soft launched it and sold quite a few. We started with a couple big customers who liked what we were doing. We’ve exponentially grown the automation business from there, adding air vises, a conveyor loading system, and modules. Lately, we’ve focused on delivering total automation solutions.

Noah: You came up with this because you were short on people?

Michael: When I invented it, there were four of us, but I was the only one who could run a CNC machine. For production orders, I had to either turn them away or do them myself. It was built out of necessity – I needed a way to run parts. We used it for years before turning it into a product, which is now our primary business.

Noah: It’s a gripper that hooks onto the spindle. How is it automation? The part still has to get in the machine. Don’t you need a robot, person, or loading system?

Michael: We put at least one piece of automated work holding, like an air vise, onto the table, and have a fully adjustable part tray grid. You need room for a vise and a tray, and one of these grippers goes in the spindle. You set the vise, and using our program generator or automated templates, you upload your program. It’s as easy to program a run of 20 as it is for your setup guy to run one part.

When you hit go, the generated program moves the table so the tray of parts is perfectly under the gripper. The gripper comes down, clamps a part, lifts up, centers over the vise, deposits the part, and the machining cycle runs. For a simple one-operation pallet system, we put that part back and move to the next one. The machine keeps going until the tray is empty. We’ve taken it further with a system using a second vise for the second operation and an integrated flip station for a third operation in the same cycle.

Questions: When did you pivot in your business or life? What would you like to pivot to? Transcript was generated with the assistance of claud.ai.

The post Pivoting to Manufacture a Product, with Michael Gimbel – EP 224 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

Our guests on today’s show are Michael Ottenweller and Terry Hanson, of Ottenweller Company, a medium-sized fabrication and machining company headquartered in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Ottenweller is a 108-year-old fourth generation family business. I spoke with Michael and Terry about how a family business can grow and thrive for over a century and continue to find new quality talent.

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Main Points

Ottenweller Company was started as a blacksmith and iron repair shop in 1916 in Fort Wayne, Indiana, by Michael’s grandfather, Ed Ottenweller. During World War II, the company made truck parts for General Harvester, which had a truck plant in Fort Wayne. They also made components for General Electric, which was making specialty motors for military applications. After the war ended, Michael’s father, who was a General Electric Engineer, came on to run the family company. Over the years, components for the construction industry became one of its most significant businesses. During the RV boom in the 1950s, Ottenweller got into putting trailer hitches on cars and trucks, a job that Michael participated in as a teenager. Today the company has a diversified customer base in markets such as construction, energy, life sciences, forestry, and defense. 

Michael was the sixth child of 11, with five brothers and five sisters, but he was the first of his generation to join the business. Most of his siblings went on to have successful careers in professions such as medicine, law, and academics. Growing up, Michael was less interested in school than his siblings, instead gravitating to the family’s blacksmith shop and mechanical applications. Though he was a mediocre student in high school and college, he majored in mechanical engineering at Purdue, finishing with an associate’s degree at the Fort Wayne campus. He says he can relate to young people today who prefer to work in the trades rather than “book learning,” which they are pressured into by today’s typical school curriculums. 

When Michael started at the company he gravitated to managing the shop floor. Nancy, his younger sister, after getting a degree from Indiana University, took on the responsibility of managing the company’s finances. Gary, Michael’s youngest brother, is the only other sibling to join the company. He heads sales and marketing. 

As the oldest, most experienced sibling, Michael eventually assumed the role of President when his father exited the business in the 1985. He and his brother and sister, eventually bought their father out. Michael describes the buyout process as a “handshake agreement.” He said the process was more or less an agreement that after his father retired he would continue to receive a paycheck until he no longer needed it. 

Michael Ottenweller and Terry Hanson

Michael says trust is a vital factor for a family business to sustain itself through generations. He says, unless a company is making significant returns, it is hard to manage succession solely based on financial compensation. In the ‘80s and ‘90s Ottenweller grew rapidly, modernizing its equipment, expanding its geographic reach, and doubling its workforce from 75 to 150 employees. Michael says that by delaying compensation for the older generation that was selling out, it enabled the company to have capital to invest in modern equipment and grow.

In 2005, the fourth generation of the Ottenweller family entered the business, using a similar type of transition as its predecessor. Though Michael is still involved in the company, his son David is now President, and his sister’s son Kevin Dwire is Vice President. They have overseen the company grow to 250 employees, 50 of whom are in a new satellite location in North Carolina.

Michael’s brief summary of the transition makes it seem like an easy process, but he admits that succession has important nuances to take into account. The company did employ a business succession consultant for guidance. 

Michael first reached out to me after reading Lloyd Graff’s blog, “Where have all the Men Gone?” The blog had explored the difficulty for many young men in the United States to find a good career fit. He suggested we have Terry Hanson, Ottenweller’s head of Human Resources, join the interview to talk about the company’s efforts to recruit talent.

Terry is a worldly charismatic guy, who cut his teeth in HR, being charged with recruiting staff for Obama’s 2008 Presidential campaign and later leading other staffing roles for the Obama administration. He lived in Australia for a time and started a small bar in his hometown of Chicago with some family members. His wife, who hales from Fort Wayne, lured him there to raise their family. Terry says when he visited Ottenweller Company he immediately loved the company’s energy and connected with the people working there.

Terry has spent a lot of time involved in Fort Wayne’s Ivy Tech Community College. He puts effort into exposing the area’s young people to opportunities in the trades. He hopes his efforts will attract smart young people to come to work at Ottenweller. He also says the company has found some great employees who were unsatisfied in other industries such as food service or retail. Ottenweller has a paid internship program to grow its own talent in-house.

Both Terry and Michael stressed to me that to maintain a committed and happy workforce, management has show employees that they care about them. Ottenweller’s management regularly spends time on the shop floor. They take time to get to know individual people and recognize their successes in front of their peers.

Family businesses fail for a myriad of reasons when new generations take over. I think one cause for failure is when a new generation of management coasts on the success of the previous one, rather than asserting itself to grow and evolve the company in their own right. From the interview, it seems like Ottenweller Company is on a positive trajectory. Talking to Terry and Michael I could see that they both genuinely care that Ottenweller has a positive company culture and a plan for healthy growth. It would be interesting to talk to the fourth generation to get an impression of how they view the company’s path.

Questions: What is the best thing and most difficult thing about working in a family business?

The post How a Machining Company Thrives after 108 years in Business, with Michael Ottenweller and Terry Hanson—EP 156 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

Often the best deals and business decisions happen when you’re doing something that seems crazy to other people and even a little bit crazy to yourself. As used machinery dealers, putting our money down to stock old, dirty machines that we’re only interested in for resale, we have to have chutzpa. To some people, the business model seems a bit ridiculous, but it’s how we eat.

These days I often question if it even makes sense stocking machines. Often we make a good profit brokering machines we’ve spent no money on, selling them right off the owner’s floor. 

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Link to Graff-Pinkert’s Acquisitions and Sales promotion!

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Interview Highlights

Stocking machines requires risking your cash, so you have to have some big self-confidence. It requires you to believe that you’re smarter than other people, which is an important trait to make clever business moves. But as you can imagine, it could also lead to doing some very stupid stuff.

Seeing other used machinery dealers out there rolling the dice on old equipment makes me feel a little more secure specking on machines. If we were the only ones buying other people’s discarded treasures, I’d be more nervous doing it. But still, most of our dealer contemporaries don’t buy the same junk we buy—Legacy Hydromats, Davenports, Acme-Gridleys—some as old as American presidents. Obviously it’s not really junk. Otherwise we wouldn’t buy it. I’m just trying to sound dramatic.

Anyway, even when a deal seems REALLY interesting, it’s easy to question yourself. Why hasn’t anybody else bought it? Are we really smarter than other people out there who aren’t specking on screw machines built in the ‘50s by companies that don’t even exist now?

And why is someone selling these machines? Do they know something we don’t? Or do they just have other things they want to focus on besides worrying about maximizing the value their old iron that they’ve already written off?

In any case, our biggest deals these last few months have been selling a bunch of Davenports, New Britains, and Acme-Gridley multi-spindle screw machines. I’m not going to lie, I was not enthusiastic about Graff-Pinkert’s recent purchase of a group of these machines out of a shop in the middle of nowhere.

As Rex and my Dad, Lloyd, plotted their bid on the machines, I thought back to the last New Britain Model 52 we owned. It was actually a really nice machine that came with a lot of spare parts. We ended up selling it very cheap after it sat in our warehouse for four years. I also thought about the New Britains in an auction we had two years ago that sold for nothing.

Yet last month, we still had the audacity to buy more of the same kind of machines, but this time it worked because we bought the machines right and sold them quickly for bargain prices. 

It was easier for Rex and my dad to pull the trigger on old sexy ugly iron like this because they were around when these machines were mainstream, when their resale was paying my college tuition. But the reason the deal was a success  was that other people didn’t know about it, and other people weren’t stupid enough or smart enough to buy it.

Meanwhile, we have some beautiful relatively late model CNC Swiss machines that have been sitting in our warehouse for two years give or take. We bought them during a period when everybody was dying for Swiss, so it felt like a safe move at the time. We thought we were clever when we imported them, but we weren’t. We were following the herd, the same herd that has their own similar machines taking up warehouse space right now.

We need more deals that others overlook. Deals where we’re competing with ourselves rather than other dealers.

We need to learn about more types of machines, get out of our comfort zone, and try to not think like other people. 

I’m trying to take inspiration from some unconventional deals we’ve done in the past. Some were really profitable and some weren’t, but they were still worth doing. I always love to think about when we bought our first INDEX MS32C at an auction in Australia. The machine cost $70,000 to ship to Chicago, but then we sold it to shop in Italy for a huge a score.

I’m also thinking about one of Graff-Pinkert’s most memorable deals from before I joined the business. We had several Eubama transfer machines that we just couldn’t sell, so we traded them to Tony Maglica, the owner of Mag Light for 23,000 flashlights, several thousand of them monogrammed with Graff-Pinkert’s name. I think it took us about 20 years to give all of them away, but they were interesting high quality swag for customers. It was a much better solution than scrapping the machines, and it was just cool!

When our B2B magazine Screw Machine World started in 2000, we put copies in the bathroom stalls at IMTS. Did it lead to subscribers and advertisers, who knows. But I know it was fun, a bit crazy, and it energized us. It’s the kind of thing that makes me feel alive. The kind of thing I need a hell of a lot more of at work.

What do you know more about than your competitors? What could you do that they might be afraid to do? What could you do that they would think was crazy?

Question: What was something crazy you did at your company that you’re proud of?

 

The post How Crazy Ideas Fuel Your Business–EP 223 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

Today’s show is the second episode in our season about Swiss machining.

I interviewed Chris Armstrong last week while he was parked at a rest stop somewhere in Texas. He was en route on an all day trip to service a customer’s Citizens. I met Chris and his partner, Ryan Madsen, owners of Texas Swiss, a few years ago, trying to sell them some Citizen L20s from Asia.

Texas Swiss, formerly named Mad Science, is a CNC Swiss job shop not far from Houston that focuses primarily on Oil & Gas and Defense, along with some medical and other work thrown in. Chris told me that some of the medical parts the company produces actually have similarities with gun parts because of their size and various other features and shapes.

Scroll down to read more and listen to the podcast, or listen with Google Podcasts,Apple Podcasts or your favorite app.

In the past, I’ve usually talked to Ryan when peddling machines because Chris always seemed to be on the road, servicing the machines of other shops. That puzzled me, but eventually it became clear that servicing machines is truly a second business for their company. Just cranking out parts isn’t enough for Chris because his true passion is wrenching on machines.

Chris’s Citizen odyssey began 15 years ago. He was 21 years old and had just gotten laid off of his job as a welder at a fab shop. The night he lost his job and the following day he let off steam by blaring Metallica and starting a rehab on his condo’s bathroom. His neighbors in the building complained about the noise. When Chris explained to them that he was pissed off about losing his job one of the neighbors suggested he visit her son’s machine shop the next day. 

When Chris came to the shop he laid eyes on a 1993 Citizen L316, and it was love at first sight. The machine was a new addition to the shop because the company was bringing new work in-house, so nobody there knew how to run it yet. Chris seized the unclaimed position of operating the shop’s lone Swiss machine. He taught himself to run it, taking books home at night and memorizing them. He was the beginning of the company’s Swiss department. The company, which was a medical shop, grew exponentially the next few years, but Chris eventually left to work for Citizen. He traveled around doing applications, sales, and support for awhile before finally deciding to start his own Swiss shop. Eventually he teamed up with Ryan Madsen, a high school friend to start their company Mad Science (later renamed Texas Swiss). The company’s original name came from Chris’s nickname, “Mad Scientist,” which he was given when he learned to operate a Matsuura MX-520 in one legendary morning on his own.

Chris says he enjoys the “crime scene forensics” element of troubleshooting machines. Yet, he says the root of most problems he encounters in shops comes from simplest of culprits. He says a lot of problems occur just because machines are not kept clean. Stray swarf and chips can easily cause a chain reaction of production mishaps.

He also says machines often don’t work correctly because they were poorly set up. He says setup people are sometimes in such a hurry to get a job up and running they use the wrong tooling, which is the cause of a lot of machining issues. He told me he likes to say “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” His philosophy is that the machines are already plenty fast, so taking a little more time for a setup will make production a lot more efficient in the end. He adds, its always important check machines’ sleeves because they’re always suspect. 

Just talking to Chris a few minutes you know he can’t be content with staying home running a production shop, never venturing out into the field. He told me it would be a waste of a God given gift for him not to service machine tools, and that helping people overcome their machining heartaches and bring their projects to life gives him purpose. 

Question: What was the most difficult problem on a machine that you overcame? The post CNC Swiss Mad Scientist, Chris Armstrong–EP 110 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

“This is how it’s always been done.”

Businesses sometimes can do OK with a philosophy like that. Maybe even make good money. 

But it sucks being just ok, because you know you could be so much better.

Today on the podcast we are joined by Jim Mayer, founder of the Manufacturing Connector and host of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast. Jim is a manufacturing advocate who helps companies break free from the “it’s always been done this way’ mindset. 

He specializes in transforming workplaces where the culture is “just OK” into awesome places to work, where employees are engaged, people trust each other and they celebrate successes together.

It was a great conversation, he even gave me valuable advice about improving meetings at our company, Graff-Pinkert.

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Interview Highlights

Noah Graff: On your website you mentioned taking “OK” scenarios at manufacturing companies to a new place. Explain that.

Jim Mayer: “OK” in the sense that I use it means status quo. The way things have always been done. When I hear people say, “That’s the way things have always been done,” I see it as a sign of room for growth, opportunity, and improvement.

I can take what has always been done and provide a solution or a way to become better, become more profitable, become more process-oriented.

Noah: I know you don’t believe that a culture for one company is necessarily right for another. But how do you define a “healthy culture” in your surveys and when you’re consulting manufacturing companies?

Jim: The idea of organizational culture is that you have a good culture when your employees and your organization have alignment of values.

When your company values are X and your employees also value that same thing, that’s when you have alignment. That’s when you have a healthy culture for your organization.

It’s individualistic because every employee is going to have their own values. Every organization is going to have their own values based on the values of top-line leadership.

That’s why it’s not my job to judge. What I value may be different from what that company values or what the employees value. I’m just making sure they’re aligned.

Noah: How has remote work affected business culture and manufacturing culture? 

Jim: Typically, what I find with the shops I work with, remote work is not accepted where it could be. Of course, folks on the shop floor can’t be remote, but they can have flexible hours more suited to their lifestyle and work-life balance needs.

It all comes down to what that individual is looking for. But remote culture in manufacturing can thrive.

It’s just a matter of trust. That’s really the foundation of why it doesn’t work. Leadership in this industry is so conditioned to have eyes on processes and people who are part of the processes. When they aren’t able to have eyes on somebody, the trust just isn’t there that they’re getting their job done.

Noah: One thing I’ve wanted to do more at our company, Graff-Pinkert, is have some huddles or meetings. We have never had anything routine. We are moving right now, and we’re going to have the added challenge of having a separate office and warehouse. I’d like to have some meetings to bring people together and be more engaged.

Jim: I would say start with a weekly meeting. But really define what that weekly meeting is designed to accomplish ahead of time. “Hey team, we’re going to have a weekly meeting where we talk about this week’s wins, this week’s failures, this week’s lessons learned.” You have to have that defined ahead of time so that people don’t walk into it thinking, “Why are we having this meeting? I have no idea.”

I always like to talk about celebrations. What were our successes? What were our opportunities for learning this week? When you take that kind of mindset, it changes the framework of the discussion.

But then also, the way that you create a culture that values those people and values that learning and development is asking them, “What were your failures and what did you learn?” What were some of the misses we had this week and what did you learn from them?

Companies that generally have healthier cultures don’t view failure as a mistake. They view failure as an opportunity to grow.

Questions: 

What aspect of your company’s culture are you most proud of?

What aspect of your company’s culture would you like to improve?

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This transcription was aided by claud.ai. to improve readability.

For more information about Jim Mayer’s services go the manufacturing connector.

The post How to Create an Awesome Manufacturing Culture, with Jim Mayer–EP 222 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.

Today’s episode is Part II of our interview with industrial auctioneer Robert Levy. In Part I, I tried to get an understanding of what’s going on inside the mind of an auctioneer. In the second part of the interview, I asked Robert to give me some practical advice on how to be a successful bidder [...]

The post Machinery Auctions Off the Stand with Robert Levy, (Part II)–EP. 146 first appeared on Today’s Machining World.