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11. When Growth Creates Chaos: The Systems That Break First When Your Shop Scales · The Manufacturing Blueprint

• speaker-0: Hey guys, welcome back to the Manufacturing Blueprint Podcast. We're excited to have you here. We hope that you'll stick around. Hit that follow button. Let's get started. Everybody says that they want growth until they get it. Now listen to me on this. Most growth in manufacturing doesn't just bring opportunity, it also exposes the weaknesses in our system. We're starting a two-part series where we're going to break down both sides of that. Why growth creates the chaos? And how the best shops actually scale and stay within control. Growth is what most every manufacturing business wants, but for a lot of shops, growth doesn't always feel like success. It can feel like chaos. More jobs, more pressure, more problems. And somehow that ends up bringing less control. So in this two-part series, we're going to be breaking that down. In part one, we're talking about why growth actually creates that chaos in the manufacturing facility. And in part two, we're going to be flipping it and we're going to talk about how you can scale without losing control. If you've ever felt like your shop is growing faster than your systems, this is the one for you. This is the Manufacturing Blueprint Podcast. Let's get to work. Welcome to the Manufacturing Blueprint. This is the show where manufacturing leaders, shop owners, and operators come to sharpen their thinking, strengthen their teams, and improve the way work gets done. From leadership and culture to systems, strategy, and execution, we break down the blueprint used to build high-performing manufacturing organizations. No fluff, just straight talk and real conversations, real lessons and real results. Here's your host. Jason Davis. All right, Paul. So as I'm thinking about why growth creates chaos, it definitely is the opportunity. I know in my experience, you know, we we all want to grow. We all are trying to get the next customer. We're all trying to get those larger orders. And you've got the the build up, the lead up to getting to that point. But once that new work actually comes, it's just not all a bed of roses. speaker-1: It's never plain ceiling. But I would say there's not a business owner out there that isn't dreaming of their business doubling in size, right? And if you're not, you're probably not ambitious enough as a business owner, right? Everybody wants to grow. The problem with rapid growth is the lack of stability that it brings. And I guess that's what we're gonna talk about on the show. Rapid growth sometimes is is a real test of the stability of the business. And rapid growth tends to at times outpace our infrastructure. what you've got set up as a business, it can stretch your financial resources and even your capacity of your managers and your management systems. While increasing the sales are positive, everybody wants it, they can become a liability if the organization can't support the new demand. It can lead to operational chaos, cash shortages, and then reduce quality, which is reputational damage. Yeah. speaker-0: That's it. I and you think about those growth months. Like I I think we all have gone through months where we have like really, really great months. Maybe you're you're kinda drifting along your stable and then all of sudden you have a really big month and it does create this atmosphere where it's like you're running around, you're just trying to like, you know, patch things up, make sure that you get this done, get that done, get get all these things together, just trying to get get product out the door. But so often I think that's what I've seen is that that growth can start to expose a weaker system and making sure that you've laid that groundwork for the growth, which is which is also difficult because working on those businesses and creating product is one b major part of it. But developing the system that runs your business is probably more important for that long term growth because those systems have to be able to support that growth in the future. speaker-1: Yes, right. So sometimes in business we can see a hump coming in our schedule, right? And we just think, Well, we're just gonna work hard, we're just gonna run a little bit of overtime, we're gonna get over this hump. And sometimes that hump doesn't turn into a hump, but it exponentially grows and you never step back and all of a sudden you can become out of control and unprepared for the growth. And I think that's the most dangerous, right? And that's what we're gonna focus on on tonight's show is whenever you get unexpected growth, a little a little overtime is fine, but when that becomes the norm and you start just working harder and your people start working harder and you start to stretch your business without actually your systems and infrastructure growing, it's really dangerous. speaker-0: Yeah, and I think that's kind of the first point for me is how that growth can expose your weak systems. Right. So those systems that worked at a lower revenue, they have a real potential to break at scale. ⁓ so once you start to to to grow that business, those systems have the opportunity to break because now you're starting to introduce things that weren't there before. I think for for my business, one of the really big parts is as a machine shop. What we want to make sure that we're doing is not creating a system where we've got to have tribal knowledge. We've got to have this one person setting up the machine the same way every single time and that they always remember that this special tool needs to be here or this special drill needs to go there, that those instructions and it's fine if that's the case, if that's how we found that the the product needs to be manufactured, that's great. But make sure that those are in our instructions, those things are written down. And that way our products can get pushed out the door on time, at scale, and not just ⁓ continue to fight that. speaker-1: Yep. And bottlenecks can be anywhere whenever you're seeing growth. And it doesn't matter where it is, rapid growth's gonna expose that. So if you're if your process right now, you may not think it's terribly inefficient, but if you're producing five times the volume, that's exponentially worse, right? If you're producing ten thousand units, it's a lot worse when you get to fifty thousand units because your bottleneck is still constrained where it was before. And all of a sudden you're trying to put more volume through all your processes. And that that's really, really, really tough for the business. And it's really tough for the staff and the management side of it. It just ⁓ it magnifies it all. Even minor errors can turn into systemic failures within your business. Increasing the demand, yes, that's success for a business, but that stress test can collapse your business. It's gonna cripple you. ⁓ you talk there about people, staff, mentors. even how you train your personnel, if if it's not scaled right in a controlled manner, your business will suffer, whether that's through output and hitting your targets or whether that's your quality of your product that you're trying to produce. speaker-0: Mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, and I think ⁓ the first part of that scale, you probably start to feel it on the floor first, right? You were speaking earlier about, okay, well, we can just add a little overtime, we can do this, you know, we can we can maybe add a little piece of a shift, and that's that's something else we can talk about is is adding shifts, but that's a whole that's a whole nother set of problems that comes along with that. But I think you probably start to feel that on the floor first. as you start that growth, because again, it is back to that tribal knowledge, it is having operators that have been trained properly, having set up individuals that have been trained properly and that you can trust, working through our quality inspections. Those are all pieces of that that are that are critical. And you're gonna have to really work to grow that infrastructure from a personnel side in order to handle that upcoming that that growth. speaker-1: Yeah, if you're talking about your personnel, it's a it's when do you know to make your decisions that you need to grow and expand? Right. How far do you stretch your people before you start to say, ⁓ I need to onboard, I need to hire, recruit more people? 'Cause sometimes the recruitment time can be really slow. I don't know what it's like for you guys, but for us in big corporations it can can take a long time maybe to get approvals for additional headcount. And at the same time, as a smaller business, you don't want to hire people unnecessarily, because that's just eating into your profits, right? If you're not fully utilizing the people. So the tendency is to stretch the people, run a little bit of overtime, do weekend work. But the danger is that that becomes habitual, right? And that runs into weeks rather than a number of days. It runs into months rather than a number of weeks. And if you leave it too late and your business is growing too fast. It's very, very hard to recover that. By the time you try and get the right skills on board, and then how do you train, how do you upskill that employee? Because that that's ⁓ I don't know what it's like in your shop, but I know a lot of places would like have a body system where a new employee's going in with a veteran right and they're training each other for a period of time. Generally, if you're going through rapid growth, maybe you don't have that time to spare. You don't have that time to give them. And what you do is you sacrifice the quality of your training. What happens is then you start then sacrificing the quality of the output because that right. And then your scrap rate's gonna go up. You might get you might think you're getting your output, but ⁓ maybe you're not really by the time you look at your rejections. And so how do you ensure that you scale up your employees and equip them? to be able to do that role and adjust for the rabid growth. speaker-0: Yeah. And you know, even I I I think everybody has to kind of figure out where that length of training comes in, right? I obviously every job, every shop is different, every job is different. And you've got some very simple jobs that we would be totally fine putting somebody that's green onto and then obviously there's more complicated jobs that we're that we're not gonna just throw somebody into, but you know, finding that balance for that buddy system and for that internal training. Between, you know, keeping them growing at a nice steady pace and then just throwing them in, like there's a real balance there because if you just need bodies because you're behind schedule, you've got customer kind of breathing down your neck and you're under the gun, like you're gonna be more apt to make mistakes because your goal is to get product out the door. But if you're not producing that good product, and that's something we're gonna talk about a little bit later as well. That's how those things can suffer. But yeah, we've we've got to make sure that we're keeping ourselves, I guess, really accountable for our training and for our preparation of the employees, because I d I don't know what you guys would consider to be like a standard length of time for having a buddy system, but I can certainly see in that situation it's about, ⁓ well, they've been here two and a half hours, let's let ⁓ go you know. speaker-1: Yeah, and and the danger with that is that they learn how to perform a task, right? But sometimes it takes it takes longer to develop the experience, right, about how to read a machine, right? Read the machine's behavior and to speaker-0: Yeah. Even sounds sounds. speaker-1: Right. And th things that they'll pick up on, whether it's sound, vibration, and even for their ability to spot a defect or where their a tool could be worn, anything like that. They're not things that you can just pick up. You can show them how to switch on a machine or run, right? Operate basic hand tools. You can tell them to do this, then this, then this. But it's the other soft stuff that you can't teach them that takes experience to build up over time. And And that that's hard to get. It's it's it's your business. How do you get them to learn and have knowledge of the wider business and the wider business infrastructure and how their role interacts and how it supports other parts of the business, right? Because the business is is all linked together and the people has to all link together. But if we rush it with new employees and they don't understand that, then they don't understand the consequences of what they're doing and the decisions they're making. And we can't underestimate the time that it takes. And as you're going through rapid growth, what you're trying to do is you're trying to build more experienced employees faster rather than new hires. ⁓ and that's the challenge. speaker-0: Yeah, you you kinda touched on like some of those soft skills. You're right. Anybody can just kind of maybe load a part. This is for us specifically. You can load a part into a vice and press go. But I'll tell you one of the most important things and one of the things that's difficult to learn is deburring. So some of our jobs we can deburr in the machine, but some of our jobs we're not gonna be able to deburn the machine for one reason or another, and it's important. And I can I can tell you that I I've Definitely have experience and anybody out here that's listening that has a machine shop has has had this exact experience. You've got somebody and they've got a good part and they are trying their best just to make the part right. Like but they just don't understand that they just can't take it to a a sanding a sander, a grinding wheel or a buffing wheel, ⁓ or even a de bird tool. Like it's So important to work on your communication, maybe even have photographs, show them what to do, watch them do it, make sure that they're seeing, you know, seeing what needs to happen because they can destroy a good part in seconds, but in their mind, they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. They're not doing it on purpose. They just don't know, right? And it's just a a learning thing. It's just a learning curve. It's the experience. And it takes time to become good. It's an art. Ahmed honestly, it's like you don't get good at it overnight, but as you spend time your deburring tools, your files, your your pencils, you can get better at those things for sure, but you have to be super careful because you can take a good part and destroy it just by the deburring. So really important part. speaker-1: The lack of documentation sometimes we have within our process is amplified as you go through this, right? It's okay if you've got really good standard operating procedures, but if you're in the middle of rapid growth that was unplanned and you don't have those procedures, it's it's really hard to deal with. I'm thinking even as staff, if you have to go out and you have to bring in staff to get you through a rapid growth, you're gonna end up trying to hire skilled workers already and you're gonna end up paying higher salaries for those, maybe than you would if you recruited earlier, right? You could recruit maybe people on lower salaries and upskill those people, train them. Mm-hmm. And that's an opportunity. But what that's gonna do is is is eat into your profit margin. Again, if you have to hire people that are higher skilled that you're not training yourself. speaker-0: Have you guys heard this? We're giving away a machine, like an actual CNC machine. Making chips with DN Solutions and Kinemetal partnered up to put a fully tooled up SVM 4100 in someone's shop. Totally free to enter. Go to making chips.com slash giveaway and put your entry in. And it gets better if you're heading to IMTS. We got a little game for you. So come find the Making Chips recording studio. We're in the South Hall in the Hennig booth. And we're going to send you on a little bit of a scavenger hunt. working with our partners. That's gonna help you stack up even more entries into the giveaway. We'll be announcing the winner from the main stage at IMTS Friday afternoon. So go to making chips dot com slash giveaway and get your name in the hat. Hope to see you at IMTS. speaker-1: Another thing, Jason, we haven't talked about when we're talking about the people side and the rapid growth is the management structure. Mm-hmm. Right? Because we know we have problems already when we're when we're slow. We we've got problems. And then you all of a sudden you ask yourself to double your output. All of a sudden what you're asking for your management is double the problems or or should I say half the time to react. It's it's not even proportionate, right? The problems just go up. And those people that you have, their skilled managers, those people in management positions in your company, they're the people that it's even harder to replace. And what you do is you work those people even harder, right? Those people are stressed thinner. And that can have a snowball effect because we talk about communication flow within the business, right? People's waiting on communication, ⁓ problem resolution. And the time that it takes for management to make decisions and get that down to the shop floor. And all of a sudden you're stressing the business with all this more, more, more work. But at the same time, your management team may not be able to process and resolve all those issues quick enough. And it can snowball out of control really, really, really fast. It's scary. speaker-0: Well, and I think that plays into just your your job readiness, right? Th having those jobs prepared, having like f I think for me it's like more of like like job and machine. You've got you've got the management aspect of managing those jobs, not necessarily even managing the people, right? But you've got to manage those jobs. You've got to make sure that your engineering is taken care of up front. You've got to make sure that your quality control plans are in place. You've got to make sure that you've got all the gauges you need. You've got all the tools you need. So when you're ready to start that job on the floor, you don't you don't get started and then all of a sudden you're like, ⁓ well we forgot to order this thread gauge that we don't have in stock. So now you've got to make a decision. Like the schedule says you should be starting this on Tuesday and you should be finishing it next Tuesday. Well, on Tuesday, once you're setting it up, you find out that we don't have this gauge and it's gonna take three days to get it, two days to get it. You know, somebody that's managing that, they've got to go on the floor or they've gotta be there with the with with the operators, with the setup team and decide, okay, do we tear down what we've already done, set something else, let it run for two days? Do we just hold that machine? You know, you've got you've got all these decisions that you shouldn't even have to be making if you just had the gauges there that you needed. So that that's part of that snowball effect that if you start missing things on the front end, if you've got unclear expectations or you've got an unclear drawing, sometimes we're waiting on a customer. You know, like once we get dig into it, we find out, okay, well, we didn't see this small detail. that I mean obviously it's part of our process w but once we got into it we've we found that this dimension and this dimension are a little bit conflicting. One can be right, but they can't both be right. So now we've got to ask the customer which which one would you prefer us to control? You can choose A or B, but you can't have ⁓ both because of, you know, math. And it might take two days for us to get something back from them. So we can't just pull that job out and put another one in, you know, at the snap of a finger. There's actually you know, time to to pull it out, time to reset something else up. And then if we do that, we've got to tear that one down and then reset up what we started with. So there's a lot of things on that front side that those management teams have to deal with if you're prepared, like you should be, and you would be if you if you were ready to scale, but that you're prepared to handle that you don't even have to answer the question. You know, they're they they're just not even there to begin with. speaker-1: How do you prepare or do plan for that? Whenever you have those unexpected downtimes, whenever you're overrun with growth and suppliers pushing you for more or your customers are pushing you for more and more output. That's not the kind of delay that you want or can even afford, I'm sure, at that time. speaker-0: Yeah. Well it it has to do with building a robust system. And you know, one of the things that we do is so being a smaller shop, I've been in situations and I mean just totally being open about it. I've had a customer that's a larger group. We were we were a bit smaller. We had a larger group that we were working with and they wanted to have a a pre production planning meeting and I'm like, Okay, yeah, no problem and then they break out this spreadsheet and it had fifty questions on it. And it was like, and it was so redundant. It was like, do you have the drawing? Yes or no? And you have to physically check that. Okay, good. Does the drawing have a revision level on it? Yes or no. Do you have the right revision? Like and it was very, very redundant. But what I have found is as we've grown, it is important that we have also we've we've implemented those same type of things, not to that level We have a much shorter list, but we definitely look at okay, do we have the correct revision of drawing and model? We're double checking that. And some of this is part of our APQP responsibilities for AS ninety one hundred and and especially the AS is changing, I think, coming in the fall. So this is all part of that as well. It is beneficial to us, but we can look at the raw material. Is it readily available? Is it something that we can get? Is it a decent lead time? And we can also review if is it machinable? We've got quality aspects. We bring quality in on it. We ask them to look to are there any gauges that you need? Do you need anything for the CMM to be able to do our inspections? Are there special tools that are needed on the mill that are going to need to be ordered? Is there any special fixturing or work holding that ⁓ well while we're gonna make most all of our fixturing and and work holding, is there something special that we need to purchase? And what are the lead times on all of these things? Because we wanna go ahead and check that up front. We'll check on outside services. Do we have a vendor associated for this already? Is this a process that we have the do we have all the specifications? Are those leads times viable? And we'll take all of these things, we'll go through that checklist and we're putting that in front of our people, purchasing, engineering, quality, and production. And we'll give everybody a chance to make sure that they've got what they need in a dedicated meeting once a week. So that way when it gets to the floor, We're not stopping machines. We're not stopping people. We're not stopping production. We have made sure that we have every single thing that we need and we have it at the mill, ready to go. So we we are much more streamlined. And that's part of having that job being ready to go, keeping yourself streamlined. speaker-1: That's good advice and I guess that's something that you can't afford to sacrifice no matter where you're at through your growth cycle, right? 'Cause if you get if you get to the point where you just say, I'm just too busy to do this stuff. I just have to get stuff out the door and you're on the shop floor yourself and you're just hands on. I mean, that comes at a cost. That comes at a cost. You're not forward thinking, you're not forward planning. And that can snowball out of control, right? These are some of the things that you can't sacrifice for the sake of the growth. Uh-huh. speaker-0: Yeah, a hundred percent. Manufacturing needs more than technology. It needs people who are inspired, connected, and ready to lead what comes next. That's why you should check out Elevate, powered by AMT and Women in Manufacturing during IMTS 2026. On Wednesday, september sixteenth, from one to four thirty, Elevate takes place in the West Building. This dynamic program is designed to inspire, empower, and connect manufacturing professionals through powerful speakers, meaningful conversations, and community building opportunities. And after the program, there's a reception where you can keep the conversations going, meet new people, and build real connections across the industry. If you're heading to IMTS and you want to invest in your leadership, your network, and your place in the future of manufacturing, make time for Elevate. Learn more at the link in the show notes or head over to IMTS.com. We talked about that kind of that trap of growth, how that growth starts to expose the the weaker systems. We've talked about how your jobs have to be ready, your management team has to be ready. And then that to me that next turns into the scheduling aspect because it's very easy for your scheduling to turn reactive. You were talking about having a little bit of a hump, right? So okay, well we just got a little hump, so we're just gonna put a a little bit of overtime on it and we'll take care of that. But as that growth continues to to go upward. If you do get that drop on exponential growth, now you're just totally reactive. You're not you're not able to plan those schedules, that's gonna really create another huge amount of chaos. speaker-1: Scheduling it's quite in our business, i there's a whole lot of scenarios and you're looking for the most optimal way to run your production lines and to get it the most efficient. And the thing is when you add more and more volume to that, you add in an infinite amount of scenarios, right? Well, we could build this or or we could make this. Or actually we could make this and then we could make this and and the more you get, the more scheduling that you actually can try and do to try and find the most optimal way of doing it. And sometimes that's just at your detriment because maybe that doesn't matter so much. But I guess it all depends on how you're scheduling and what you're using to schedule, whether you're using manual spreadsheets or whether you've got an ERP system. Sometimes it depends on whether you've got real time data or whether you're old school and you're waiting for people to carry worksheets back and forward on the completion of work. But as you get bigger and as this thing grows, The more real-time information that you have, the better on when jobs can complete when they should that's so important when you get into it. About being either static or dynamic, about how you're scheduling, right? About how predictable is your volume, and can you handle the constant flux of orders and the changing of priorities that come with rapid growth, right? Whenever suppliers are phoning you and saying, actually, I know I wanted this last week, but we need it shipped out this week. And how well you can re can react as a business because as you scale up, you get more and more of those fighting priority challenges. speaker-0: Well, I think we need to ⁓ give our audience ⁓ a moment here and answer one simple question. What's a schedule? No. ⁓ speaker-1: A schedule. Schedule. Schedule. speaker-0: Yeah. What it what is yeah. Schedule. speaker-1: You've known me long enough now you understand me. Everyone else might struggle. speaker-0: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. No, it's good. One aspect of that that also gets overlooked often, ⁓ I do want to come back and I wanna touch about like the manual systems and I wanna touch on ERP systems and having things automated. But you talked about a a customer calling and wanting to pull something in, and that's that happens right. We that's what everybody a lot of time thinks. I don't know about other people, but we get pretty regular calls that that our customers want to push things out. Their schedule changes. So they're wanting to push it out. So it's not a huge deal. But if I've gone through the process of developing my plan and now they say, okay, instead of me getting this in the beginning of July, now I want it the end of August, because their schedule changed and maybe now they're bringing something in. That's fine. But me having to push products out makes a huge difference because while I probably have already ordered material, is it on my floor? That's that much longer that I've got to carry that inventory. You know, some of our products have longer lead times because of outside processing. So there's a good possibility I've already machined products. I've already got them at outside so ⁓ processes because if I've got to do assembly to them, like it's not very easy for me just to push something. I mean, we will push them push it off and work with our customers. But just because I do that, there's a cash flow that that has to be accounted for because I was planning on selling that at the beginning of July and getting paid based on the customer 30, 60, 45 days or whatever. Now I've got to push that whatever that was, I've got to push that another 60 days. That can put you into a a bit of a crunch. So that's important to be aware that the push outs can hurt just as much as the pull ins different parts of your business. You touched on the manual scheduling and I think any business that most businesses that start that's gonna how especially from an entrepreneurial side of things, if you've got one or two people that you're starting a business with, that's probably how you're you're doing it. You're gonna be doing it with paper. And I mean I even remember back in the old days where, you know, you had your ledgers and log books and that's what kind of how things started and now we get to speaker-1: DC's Jason, was it? speaker-0: That was right w nearly when dirt was created. No. All right, so to to show some age though, I remember when we had one computer for email. We had one email address and usually once a day we'd hit the dial up speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: any of you guys that don't are so young that you don't know what dial up is, I'm sorry. But we'd hit the dial up, we'd download the emails for the day, and then that was it. Using the fax machine to to communicate with customers, receiving POs. speaker-1: What's a fax machine, Jason? What? speaker-0: I know I know, I know. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Look it up. Go to Google and type in what is a fax machine? speaker-1: I don't know. speaker-0: I know you do. I would say, you know, the majority of people are going to start with an Excel spreadsheet, ⁓ and they're going to use that spreadsheet to to to help develop. But you did touch on how having live data is really critical. And I will give a a short plug for Pro Shop. That's what we use ⁓ at D and D and it has been a real game changer for us because the visibility is insane. What we have the ability to do from a scheduling standpoint is is really cool because when you're working with an Excel spreadsheet, you know, w ⁓ just the things I talked about a moment ago. You've got raw material, you've got the machining, you've got quality inspections, you've got outside processes, we've got assembly. So we've got all of those things and there's there's time associated with each of those. Previously we would use a a magnetic board, right? We made these little tags and we had a magnetic board and each machine had its own spot and these little magnetic tags could move around with a job number on it and with the p a part number on it. And that worked well for us, honestly, as we're growing. But we didn't have the control and the flexibility to move things as easily. It was more of you had to have that tribal knowledge. You had to know that, okay, well this part has to it's gonna take, you know, three days to run it and ⁓ well it's got three outside services. So I you know, you just kinda know those things. So as you're manipulating that board. But what's been really cool about the with Pro Shop and most ERP systems, especially the newer ones, if they have a good robust scheduling ability, you build those things in on the front side and we can just drag and drop that job or that that work order into a different position on our schedule. And just the very simple color coding. If it's green, then you're on schedule. If it's yellow, hey, you're still okay, but it's getting closer to the window that you need to be aware of. And if it's red, you probably need to make some adjustment. It's taking into account the lead times for not only the machining, but the outside services and the transit. So you kind of set all that up in the beginning. And then while we're logging into these jobs, we can get real time data. We can see exactly where we're at. We can get information as far as costing. So there's a lot of things that ERP systems gonna help your business do. So I I can't speak highly enough about how important that that will be that as an organization, that's gotta be one of the main things that you gotta focus on is trying to get to that point to where you can add that. Yeah. Yeah. speaker-1: You sold it to me. So you're saying if you're if you're a business out there and you're struggling to grow you're right though. You you can't afford to do it any other way unless you've got live data, right? If you're still relying on yeah, paper travelers, what happens is you end up making decisions with outdated information. Mm-hmm. Whether that's rescheduling or anything connected to that, the data's not live, it's not quick enough. You don't have the visibility of seeing what's happening on the floor, right? If there's a machine, if there's downtime, if something breaks or something stops, well the all the operations guys are in there trying to fix it and maintenance will be there, getting the machine run and working out a plan B. But who is it from a management perspective sees that we're now half a day or a day behind schedule and how do you react and recover to that? And the speed in which you can react is is critical, especially as that business is growing and multiplying really, really fast. The other side is your support departments as well, right? If they're not really integrated into your management system, they are also late coming to the party with information. Sure. And you can get away with that when your business is small, whenever it's slow, you only have but as your business grows super fast, how do they deal with that information? How does your quality department, your purchasing department, your sales department, how do they all come together and come up with a robust plan fast enough to support all the demands of a of a big business. That's really, really tough. And sometimes and and I guess it depends how big your business is, but if you have multiple salespeople, which we do in a large corporation, sometimes I get the feeling that they don't talk together in a strategy, right? And sometimes they're gonna come back with all this work and sometimes it's work that you don't want. And sometimes you get I'm not saying there's bad work. Everybody wants work, but there's always we experience there's always work you would prefer, right? Yeah. Sometimes you get you get all this work and you're like, ⁓ why could there not be, you know, a different type of work, right? Why is it always this complicated stuff that's gonna give us loads of headaches and it all comes at the one time? But you can't pick and choose. You need to take the work. And again, you just have to be prepared and you need all your departments to have a robust structure that can support your business, that can deal with the the growth and the increased noise that the growth will bring to the business. speaker-0: You can't spell high-end without DN. If you're serious about taking your shop to the next level, it might be time to stop thinking in terms of good enough and start thinking in terms of capability, flexibility, and my favorite, automation. DN Solutions is helping manufacturers move into true high-end machining with their SMX multitasking series, the DVF five access machines, and advanced automation solutions designed for shops that want to run smarter. faster and more competitively. The SMX platform gives you the ability to combine multiple operations into one setup, reducing handling, improving accuracy, and helping you get complex parts out the door faster. Their DVF five axis lineup delivers the precision, rigidity, and confidence manufacturers need for today's demanding aerospace, medical, and high performance applications. And when you pair those machines with automation, you're not just buying equipment, you're building a more scalable business. High end parts, high end capability, high end thinking. Because you can't spell high end without DN. Learn more at dnsolutions.com. Well, you talked about having quality production, maybe there's purchasing sales in a smaller business. That might all be one person or whatever that might all be two people, you know. And so that's where I think, you know, kind of touching on as that growth happens, those ERP systems, and maybe if it maybe not even specifically ERP, but some of the quality systems, those things are really important to have in place and to do that prep work up front because Depending on where you're at in that scale or in your s this in the scale of your business, you may need to be the one that's making those decisions to start with. I'm just just saying, you know, Paul, we need Paul to be the man. He's got the most knowledge, the most experience. But what we want to do is we want to start getting his knowledge and experience into a system, into a process, into a procedure that can be replicated by somebody else. So that way we can take Paul out of that and put him onto the next large project, the next major important milestone, and we can push somebody else into what was his role, but they've got the framework. They don't have his knowledge, but they've got the resources to make decisions. And that's where the ERP system comes into play. A lot of it is kind of pre built internally so that way we can drag and drop. And, you know, like I was talking about with the schedule, you literally it just kind of becomes a little bit of a puzzle that you you don't have to know all the ins and outs of the machining world, but you've got to have obviously skill, but it doesn't require your most experienced person to make those decisions. You can have them doing something that's more valuable for the organization while you've got somebody that's not as valuable. And I don't mean that as a from a personal standpoint, but obviously we've got more experience. Some people are more experienced than others, but you can have someone with less experience starting to handle some of those other jobs below them. speaker-1: Thinking it's probably a bigger risk the smaller your business is, or maybe not even smaller, probably the less employees you have, the bigger the risk to the business, right? Sure. If I left my job tomorrow, probably no one would miss me, right? Someone else would come in, would take over because there's a lot of experienced business. We've got thousands of people around the world doing this. If someone else needs to come in and do it, someone can step in, right? And big businesses think carries less risk. If you if you're a small business owner, You probably carry that business in your head, right? Mm-hmm. But how do you get a second one of you? And that and that's that's your point, right? And being able to train those out. And you might even have a good right hand man or woman and they're trained and they're and they're working. But as your business grows, if if you start to stretch them and the business is growing and for some reason they leave, if you don't have your robust standard operating procedures in place, if you don't have robust ERP systems in place, if if they don't know all your control plans, all of that stuff that fundamentally makes your business successful, then you're in trouble. speaker-0: You know, that takes us into the really our next point for me was your quality has the ability to suffer and then even your people start to feel the pressure. And that's where, you know, as you're stretching your individuals, as you're stretching people outside of their comfort zone, outside of their knowledge zone, if you've not built that system underneath of them, then you do have that that issue or that potential for your your s to create more scrap, ⁓ have products that require more rework. ⁓ you're gonna have some those frustrations and where once those things start to happen, those people start getting stretched further and further and further. And there's gonna be a breaking point with them there that either they're gonna, you know, start to give up, start to not care, or maybe they're gonna start to look somewhere else. I mean, that's very, very real possibility too. And as a smaller organization, again, like you said, if you've got you know, three thousand people in the entire organization. Well, losing one or two is not the same as if you've got ten and you lose one. I mean, you've just lost one tenth of your workforce. Even thinking about that, if you've got ten and that pressure is building, well it's probably not just one person that's feeling it. There's probably two or three. And if one makes that decision to leave, then now that second one is probably filling it even more. So you've got the potential snowball effect. So then, you know, one can turn into four. And if you lose forty percent of your workforce unexpectedly, then, you know, you're gonna be in a really, really bad situation versus, you know, if a the business has two or three thousand people and use f lose five five to ten, well, that's not quite the same. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think qu your quality will start to struggle a little bit as you as you start to feel that pressure and and you're trying to put new people into roles that they're not experienced in. speaker-1: Did you mention quality? Yeah. I'm thinking even from a quality perspective, what tends to happen is you start running your machines longer, whether that's on a second shift or overtime, sometimes that then comes at the expense of planned maintenance. And then you get more unexpected downtime. Mm-hmm. It could be tools getting damaged more because they're running more cycles than they would before. Even quality inspections you might see because you're putting up more more volume and there's more throughput. Maybe there's actually less inspection points, inspection times and and very quickly you can have a quality escape that can cost you either reputational damage or just financially. But they're all risks as you grow that you have to figure out how do you scale all of those even inspection process to ensure that every part is treated to the same standard that you'd expect at a lower speaker-0: ⁓ Yeah, and I think, you know, we've touched on having systems in place, but creating a a way to measure our progress, creating a way to measure those scrap rates, creating a way to measure your throughput, that's a really important aspect of it because it gives again, building that system that gets rid of the tribal knowledge, building a system that starts to equip people with less experience, equip them more, having them more prepared will help the throughput, but then putting systems, that same system in place with a way to measure and monitor it, then that allows that person with the most experience to step out just a little bit and then kind of handle more responsibilities and and really prepare for that growth. And that's really what we're we're talking about with all of this is just really preparing and setting the stage for growth and making sure that we're not falling into this just complete chaos that comes with it. As you step in through that growth, that pressure is going to reveal things about your system. It's going to reveal things about how you're set up, how you're organized, how robust you are. I think the the real advice for me is making sure that you are getting those things done and making sure that training and you're giving proper time and adequate time to train individuals is really important because you want to be able to to turn somebody loose on a project and then them be able to complete it. Now it doesn't have to be completed as fast as your fastest guy. I mean, I know thinking about here, I've got individuals that, you know, if a setup should take them an hour, they're taking an hour and fifteen minutes, but they're getting it done right, I'm okay with that. But I've also got somebody that if they if it should take an hour, then they're getting it done in thirty minutes and it's right. And I'm really, I'm really okay with that. You know, it's important that you're you're creating the main goal is creating a system that each of your employees can be successful. And then that is going to lead to better morale. That's going to reduce that pressure that they're feeling. And it's also going to make better quality products for you and for your customers. So why does growth feel like failure? So as we start to, I think maybe wrap everything up, you know, sometimes that growth ends up making you feel like you're at a point of failure. That's when, you know, that growth is outpacing your system. We're not setting the clear standards. We've got a or a lack of standardization altogether. We're not setting clear expectations. Have there been any any things that you've you've kind of experienced through your career where making some of these adjustments really set the stage for your growth and your next step as an organization? speaker-1: think one of the big factors that really helped us in our forward planning and our growth was our MPI, our new products, right? How we integrated those into our business and the time that we spent in preparation and when we developed our A P Q Phases and all the work that we had to do to deliver a new product to market. And forward planning and success of scheduling mitigated a lot of those risks. So You know, if I'm giving any business advice it's it's don't compromise in your forward planning. Don't be so worried about today's schedule and today's backlog. As a manager, as a leader, as a business owner, you need to be looking three to six months further in advance and making sure your business is ready and is capable to grow and in a in a controlled and a structured manner. speaker-0: Yeah, you're right there. And I know we just kind of keep reiterating the fact of like having a system, creating a process, but it it it is so, so vital, especially if you're somebody that wants to grow. And I think the other part of it is a lot of the people that I think a lot of the leaders that we're gonna be that we're talking to now are entrepreneurs, right? A lot of people that are entrepreneurs, they probably go into business for themselves because they want to have more flexibility. They want to have more free time. And often those entrepreneurs are the ones that are working more hours, right? Because they've got the risk. They've got more tied up into it than anybody else. But I think that there is a path out, right? Because by setting up these standards, setting up these processes, setting up these measurement controls, you've got the ability to step away a little bit and help work on the bigger part of your business. While giving away some of that responsibility in a controlled fashion to other employees is going to help you manage that scale and it's gonna help you ⁓ take that next step. speaker-1: Think you can't step away from the business and the business still function, then I think you haven't got a business. You are the business, right? A very dangerous place to be. You can't do everything yourself, or you're limiting your growth. You gotta be able to step back and and do that forward planning. I was also, you made me think there, Jason, about capacity. We talk about efficiency whenever we chat and about how do we optimize it. We talk about lean. speaker-0: That's right, yeah. speaker-1: And reducing the waste and maximizing profitability and we want the business to be running at one hundred percent capacity. But that's also a very dangerous place to be. And we have to consider about how utilized that our business is, right? When you get downtime, when there's something that has gone unplanned, how do you recover your schedule? How do you recover from that feeling? If you're running at one hundred percent capacity. Then you've got no room for growth and you need to be continually evaluating in that and saying, How utilizes my company right now? How utilizes my people? Where am I at? Am I at eighty, ninety percent utilization? Have I got ten percent growth? And what's my plan for next year? Am I planning twenty percent growth next year? Is that what I see in my forecast? And don't be caught out because it takes time to grow your business. Whether that's from ordering machines or hiring staff, you need to know that, plan in advance and keep monitoring that. speaker-0: Back to your point about, you know, if you are the business, that's okay. I mean, that's totally okay. And some people are gonna maybe that's the way they want it, right? And that's fine for them. But I think the advice is if you are the business and you don't want to be the business, then that's when you've got to start putting things in place so you can step away. ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah. speaker-1: You're limiting yourself. How fast can your business grow if it's one hundred percent depending on you for every decision making, for the scheduling? speaker-0: ⁓ no, I I I a hundred percent agree with you in there. What I'm saying is there are probably some people out there that that's what they want. That's all they want. They maybe they don't want growth. They're just content to be the business on a very small scale. And that's totally acceptable. But I think the point is if your goal is to scale, if your goal is growth, then you cannot remain the business. You have to be able to step outside of that, work out of the business. On the business, not in the business, we've we've heard that thousands of times. But ⁓ yeah, putting those things in place so that way you can step out of it. So again, recapping this segment, you know, we talked about the trap of growth and how we kind of get sucked into that. It can be quick, it can be kind of out of the blue, but making sure that even though the growth feels like winning, sometimes it's not. But as we progress, that growth will really start to expose some of our weak systems. It can expose, you know, that job readiness. that has the ability to collapse on us. Our scheduling turns to be more reactive ⁓ than proactive. We we start to see suffering in our quality of our products, maybe our rework and our scrap rates go up. ⁓ and we also see where our people start to feel the pressure. And those are all kind of creating this real problem where growth is outpacing our systems, not having those clear expectations and not being able to take what your knowledge is and translate that into something that you can add personnel, add people, and help your organization grow. So if this sounds familiar, ⁓ if the growth of your shop has felt more like chaos than progress, just know that it's not just you. It's something that ⁓ hundreds and hundreds of shops have dealt with. And it's usually not just a people problem because Most of the time people are willing to jump in and they're willing to work the extra hours and put in the extra time. ⁓ but it's something you probably need to think about. It's probably a system problem, something that's underlying that's that's keeping you from scaling and keeping you from growing a little bit, getting on that larger growth path. And that's exactly where we're gonna be going in the next part of this episode, or in part two, we're gonna be talking and breaking it down a little bit. Further, how to actually scale that manufacturing business and do it in the right way without losing control, ⁓ without the constant firefighting, without burning out your team. So make sure that you catch the next episode because this is where it will all come together. So that's it for this shift on the manufacturing blueprint. Your work is just getting started. You've got the blueprint. Now go build it.