00:19:12 · Jim Belosic
[00:19:12] S1: Everything's gonna stay the same except for our timelines. You know, without money, I can hit most of my goals in the next five to eight years, with some cash. I can do that in eighteen to twenty four months, you know, so it's a time machine. It's it's it's literal rocket fuel. We're already doing well. We're growing. This is fuel on the fire. We're gonna go faster. Things that won't change like I'm still cheap. I mean, frugal, I guess. I know we talked about that in the last one, but, it's, it's my upbringing. It's our culture. Like we buy stuff used on Facebook marketplace, you know, the scissor lift that I'm staring at, you know, got that at auction or something. So I try and make sure that I'm a good steward of money, whether it's my money or somebody else's. I think if we had taken a bunch of money right at the beginning, that's when you end up with brand new, super amazing forklifts and crazy equipment that you don't really need and maybe too many staff. And then you have like a really nice conference table for some reason and Herman Miller chairs and you know, it's like, just focus on your customer, have a good product, focus on profitability. We have that muscle memory forever. I had it in my last two businesses. I had it since I was little, you know, mowing lawns. I was like, oh man, can I, can I do this pattern a little bit faster so that my hourly rate, you know, I'm more productive or whatever? So it's just, it's in it's in my nature. It's in our nature as a company. So all of that is gonna stay the same. We're gonna go a hell of a lot faster though. We're gonna have more capabilities, better customer experience, which I think it's pretty damn great right now, but I think it could be better.
00:21:01 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:21:01] S0: On the customer experience side, like you're very focused on trying to create as much love with your customers as possible. [00:21:07] S1: Yeah. [00:21:07] S0: What is the thing that is the biggest, like keeps you up at night because it just sucks right now? [00:21:13] S1: The fact that in periods of high demand, we can't take the time with a customer and really hold their hand and understand, like, what their project is, give them advice on how to make it way better or whatever. You know, sometimes we can spend, you know, an hour, you know, working with a customer or whatever, but I'd love to have it unlimited. You know, if we need to go back and forth with a customer, jump on a phone call, invite them to a facility or something and be like, Hey, show me your thing that you're trying to make. Hey, we can re engineer it to save some money here. Or Hey, if you take a half inch off this dimension, we can actually fit more on a sheet and it's gonna cut your price in half or something like that. That would be so fun. We get to do it sporadically, but what if we could do it every single time? It's an investment that doesn't make a whole lot of sense on a spreadsheet. When the finance guys look at that, they're like, why are you spending all this money? But it it feels damn good as a customer. It makes me feel good as like a company that I wanna run. If people can learn about manufacturing through our customer support, then hell, yeah. You know, that'd be amazing.
00:22:19 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:22:19] S0: Last time we talked, you were very wary of having a CFO and having someone that was too focused on making money and too focused on watching the costs to the detriment of creating real employee love and vendor love and all these things. And you have this wonderful concept of Jim Bucks where you'll just hand out $100 bills as you're going throughout your day. How has that kind of shifted? Like, why did you decide to hire someone in finance and what is shifting there? [00:22:46] S1: Oh, no. We still have no CFO. [00:22:47] S0: Oh, really?
00:22:48 · Jim Belosic
[00:22:48] S1: Yeah. No. I'm avoiding that for as long as possible. And, you know, shout out to, Andrew and and Matt who actually, like, believed in me to give me a bunch of money without having a CFO. Because It's I think they know that that I'm I'm frugal. I'm frugal, but generous. Like, I I like generosity to our customers. I like generosity to our crew. We try and take really good care of people. So what you're talking about is if you let someone who's only focused on the dollars and cents, it can erode that customer satisfaction. It can erode, you know, just love with the staff. You know, one of the things that I'm fighting actively right now is, you know, we're almost at 500 people. With that size staff, you know, as we approach a thousand, 2,000 people, there's policies and rules and HR starts to become this like big org within an org. And they love to be able to point to a chart and say, okay, you have this many years of experience and listen, that's exactly, you know, you're gonna make 31.18 I'm like, what if they're awesome? Like what if they're doing stuff that you can't track? Like, can't we have some flexibility in there? We're So trying to build in like a slush fund, you know, where it's merit based, but sometimes you can't just like line all these things up. There's intangibles. I don't know, maybe that's a theme of our whole company as our approach to, you know, our products and finance. It's intangible. You know? Doesn't make sense on a spreadsheet, but it sure as hell makes sense when you're on the receiving end of it as a customer or staff member or whatever. So as long as I have control over slush funds and intangibles, and I can keep a lot of hundreds in my pocket or whatever, or if I can, you know, upgrade stuff to overnight, you know, to make a customer happy or some MIT kid that's working on a formula SAE car and we have to throw an engineer at the project for him or whatever. It's yeah. When you pencil it out, you're like, oh man, that just costs us, you know, thousands of dollars worth of time. I'm like, yeah, but help the kid get his project done. Yeah. We're in that position. Like, why not use it? You know, what do they say? What's the good of having fuck you money if you can't say fuck you? That's what I want. I want, I wanna be able to do stuff that feels good, whether it makes sense on paper or not.
00:25:06 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:25:06] S0: I know you've been like very focused from the beginning on like hobbyists and people that just tinker and build things and they need a part quickly. But as you kind of scale, you're gonna be able to go from just having a given part and you have to like know CAD and stuff to be able to even order it to you basically just type in here's what I want, and then a finished product comes to your door. So how does that actually look like? [00:25:28] S1: Yeah. It's happening now. Right? So we built our own tools so that you can kinda talk to it and say, hey, I need this kind of bracket, you know, it's three inches long, whatever, and we can generate the CAD for you using LLMs. And that's that's good. But I think there's a limit to what we can do in house. We only have so big of a team. We only have so many ideas. What we're doing is we're just open sourcing, you know, how how our system works so that everyone else out there can go and make better tools than we could even make. Hey guys, here's all of our DFM calculations. Here's our limitations. Here's our capabilities. And it's all in, you know, a language that's readable by an LLM. It's like, go make tools, go figure it out, go make your own plugins, go make your own little use cases and we'll manufacture it for you at the end of the day. I don't want to, you know, gatekeep anything. I just wanna make parts. So if people can understand our ecosystem and make really cool tools to make even more parts, then I'm all for it.
00:25:28 · Jim Belosic, Ty Morse
[00:25:28] S1: Yeah. It's happening now. Right? So we built our own tools so that you can kinda talk to it and say, hey, I need this kind of bracket, you know, it's three inches long, whatever, and we can generate the CAD for you using LLMs. And that's that's good. But I think there's a limit to what we can do in house. We only have so big of a team. We only have so many ideas. What we're doing is we're just open sourcing, you know, how how our system works so that everyone else out there can go and make better tools than we could even make. Hey guys, here's all of our DFM calculations. Here's our limitations. Here's our capabilities. And it's all in, you know, a language that's readable by an LLM. It's like, go make tools, go figure it out, go make your own plugins, go make your own little use cases and we'll manufacture it for you at the end of the day. I don't want to, you know, gatekeep anything. I just wanna make parts. So if people can understand our ecosystem and make really cool tools to make even more parts, then I'm all for it. [00:26:33] S0: As we were walking through the factory and just doing a tour before this, there was a sign that said 3PM is the new midnight. And I think that is basically when the trucks leave. And if the trucks don't leave on time, then they don't make the plane, so the parts don't get delivered. So how did you kind of like come to that?