00:37:36 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:37:36] S0: When you're turning on a new factory, you want to basically minimize the number of days between actually putting dollars down and signing some contract and things going out the door as finished products. What's the process for minimizing the number of days on that? [00:37:50] S1: You gotta gamble. So like right now, our one hundred and fifty thousand square feet across the street, when we started negotiating the letter of intent, we placed POs on equipment. And it was like equipment for that building for that layout, even though we don't have a lease like as of as of right now, we don't have a signed lease. Pretty damn close, but we've already scheduled electricians. We're hiring for that building. We're taking a gamble. We've done it many times. If the gamble fails, then we'll go to plan B, plan C, whatever. It'll cost us a little bit of time. But if the gamble pays off, that we're sixty days ahead of everybody. So for us, you know, if I can save thirty days, that's millions of dollars. You know, the way that it compounds, the faster I can get into production, then the faster I can scale that facility. So I don't really know the math on it, but like thirty days saved at the beginning is like, you know, $10,000,000 of new capacity after twelve months because you're so far ahead, you know, the way that that ramps. So, you know, we we gamble a lot. We kinda make some educated guesses and some hopes.
00:37:50 · Jim Belosic, Ty Morse
[00:37:50] S1: You gotta gamble. So like right now, our one hundred and fifty thousand square feet across the street, when we started negotiating the letter of intent, we placed POs on equipment. And it was like equipment for that building for that layout, even though we don't have a lease like as of as of right now, we don't have a signed lease. Pretty damn close, but we've already scheduled electricians. We're hiring for that building. We're taking a gamble. We've done it many times. If the gamble fails, then we'll go to plan B, plan C, whatever. It'll cost us a little bit of time. But if the gamble pays off, that we're sixty days ahead of everybody. So for us, you know, if I can save thirty days, that's millions of dollars. You know, the way that it compounds, the faster I can get into production, then the faster I can scale that facility. So I don't really know the math on it, but like thirty days saved at the beginning is like, you know, $10,000,000 of new capacity after twelve months because you're so far ahead, you know, the way that that ramps. So, you know, we we gamble a lot. We kinda make some educated guesses and some hopes. [00:39:02] S0: When you're thinking about taking some kind of risk like that, what's going through your mind as in you obviously wouldn't hire electricians if you didn't think that building was going to operate, you know, on some date. So at what point does it make sense to just take that gamble, hire the people, schedule things?
00:39:02 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:39:02] S0: When you're thinking about taking some kind of risk like that, what's going through your mind as in you obviously wouldn't hire electricians if you didn't think that building was going to operate, you know, on some date. So at what point does it make sense to just take that gamble, hire the people, schedule things? [00:39:19] S1: It's optionality. You know, we always have a worst case scenario plan. I will rarely take a gamble that, you know, I can't go to plan B on. If I ordered all this equipment and the lease fell through, and I had no other building like that would be incredibly painful. So yeah, maybe we go to a building that's a little further away or it's a little older, has less power or something like at least we can keep moving. So it's always aim for perfection and you'll end up at excellence. That's what Brian Wolf, our VP of operations always says. So we have this like brilliant dream that we're trying to hit, and usually doesn't work out perfectly, but the next step down is pretty damn good. [00:40:05] S0: How do you kind of maintain a maniacal sense of urgency?
00:40:05 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:40:05] S0: How do you kind of maintain a maniacal sense of urgency? [00:40:07] S1: I don't think it can be trained. I think it has to be bred into you. I don't know if there's a difference between urgency and impatience. Maybe it's the same thing, but I I don't have any patience. If it's within my control, I want it as soon as I possibly can get it. When I was little working on model airplanes and model cars, like you gotta put the spray paint on it and then wait for it to dry and I never waited. I'd be working with wet paint and trying to like assemble a thing, and then you have like glue and wet paint, and the thing would look like shit, and then I'd smash it. I don't know. I'm trying to leverage my urgency. That sounds better than impatience. I'm gonna use that, in business, and I think it benefits our customers. But I don't I don't know. I don't know if you can teach it. So right now, Phil Linshide, Brian Wolfe, and myself. So our director of manufacturing, our VP of operations, and me, we huddle up often and we are the three most impatient people in the world. Like when we're walking down the hall and they see the three of us, they're like, oh God, what are you guys up to? It's because we know exactly what we want and we're just not there yet, and we're trying to figure out how to get there as fast as we possibly can within our constraints. If you don't have that in your org, then you'll fall behind.
00:41:30 · Ty Morse
[00:41:30] S0: Are you gonna try to do something where you basically take the people that are super well trained from these first few factories that you've spent a lot of time with and kind of forward deploy them almost at the new factories for the first like few months or a year to get that DNA, like similar to what you actually have today?
00:41:46 · Jim Belosic
[00:41:46] S1: Yeah. Yeah. I love the term forward deployed. Although, I think it discounts like, you know, our men and women in the military who are actually forward deployed and seeing some shit. Being forward deployed to Paris, Kentucky is not the same as Afghanistan. But yes, we have that concept. So we're really lucky to have a lot of, young staff. You know, our average age in the machine shop here is like 25.2 years old or something like that. And oftentimes when these opportunities come up, it's like, hey, you wanna go to Texas either permanently or you wanna go there for six weeks and you know, spread the SendCutSend love and teach people stuff. We get a lot of hands in the air. They're like, I wanna go do it. And then there's career paths too. It's like, hey, maybe you think that there's no hire that you can go in this particular building. Well, maybe you can go spin up a new building. You know, maybe you can be a shift lead or in charge of the building or something like that. So it's really cool. They can see that career path now. That's... Which is one of the reasons why I wanna keep opening up buildings too. I I would hate for SendCutSends to hit a plateau where all of a sudden like you have to wait for your boss to die or retire in order to, you know, get a new opportunity. There's there's too many like really cool young people that deserve us do really really cool stuff, and if I can do it under our own roofs, then I'm really happy.