00:51:12 · Jim Belosic, Ty Morse
This is like, you can talk to an investor all you want and they'll say like, yeah, everything looks cool. The business looks awesome. And then it goes to diligence. Holy crap. Like they go through everything. They're trying to figure out like, you know, what's going on there. They're looking at like cookies on the website. They're seeing like, oh, you know, do you have a meta pixel and cause there's these new suits that people are going after meta pixels that aren't disclosed for him. Thank God we didn't have any of But just these little wrinkles that people uncover, it would be so daunting to have to do all that in year one. It would destroy a lot of your customer experience. But like I said, if you're patient, you keep doing it. You knock some of those check boxes off every single year and then eventually you're pretty good. So when we [00:51:59] S0: were talking last night, you mentioned that you really loved Home Depot as this example of a business that kind of empowers individuals to modify their homes and make changes and improvements without needing to have a complex network of everyone that knows what's what. And I think a combination of that with YouTube is just incredibly empowering. How do you kind of think about the analogy of your business to Home Depot?
00:52:21 · Jim Belosic
[00:52:21] S1: Yeah. I... I'm hoping that we can be similar. You know, before Home Depot, if you wanted something done, you'd have to go to a lumber yard, which may or may not be open to the public. You know, if you needed a toilet, you'd have to like call a plumber and he'd be like, hey, here's my two distributors that I that I work with. You have two choices. It was very, very complex. You'd have to go through a bunch of different steps, limited choices, unknown prices, unknown timeline. I think Home Depot disrupted that not only for the homeowner and like the everyman, the DIYer, but for contractors too. Like, I know today can go and get roofing materials at Home Depot as a contractor, sometimes less than you can get it from a distributor. It's good because of that scale. So manufacturing is very similar to the pre Home Depot days right now. You can't just like walk into a place and chitchat and try and figure something out. You can't go into a manufacturer that does every service under one roof. If SendCutSend could be, you know, a fraction of that, I think it benefits everyone. It benefits people just learning about manufacturing, like all these, you know, young engineers that are graduating and maybe they have a degree in mechanical engineering, but they barely run a lathe. They need to come in and see what manufacturing is actually like. And then to all the seasoned people, they're used to dealing with a very small subset of vendors, that are telling them what's possible. It's like, well, what if you could go into this, you know, big manufacturer that has everything under the sun and learn and see what else is out there. So accessibility, you know, I keep talking about accessibility to manufacturing and Home Depot did accessibility to home improvement. I think SendCutSend could add accessibility to manufacturing.
00:54:15 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:54:15] S0: I think for a very long time, we've kinda like outsourced manufacturing, and there's a whole lot of reasons we've done that. Now this is kinda flipping, and we're bringing things back to America. We're gonna make more things in America. What is like different about today than five years ago or ten years ago that is enabling this? [00:54:30] S1: It... I don't know. It feels like vibes. I don't know how else to put it. There's there's some rah rah rah of patriotism, reindustrialization. People are a little scared of offshore now. It's like, oh, are they gonna cut off my supply chain without a new warning? Are they going to steal all my IP and make a competitor or whatever? I don't think people realized those issues, you know, in the early days and now everyone's like a little more aware. They're a little scared and US is actually a viable option now. We're in our early days for accessibility and price and speed and everything, we're getting there. So I think people are testing the waters. [00:55:11] S0: You've been basically capacity constrained for the past seven years, something like this. And you've never necessarily had the money in order to build capacity significantly ahead of demand. How are you kind of thinking to yourself how to build capacity today without a full clear picture of here's exactly where the demand is gonna materialize and just making sure that goes well?
00:55:32 · Jim Belosic
[00:55:32] S1: Well, I believe that we would have all the work in the world if we could say, hey, order today, you get it tomorrow, you know, with any process that you want, whatever, and at a really, really low price. So I'm not too worried about building capacity ahead of our demand. I think the capacity creates demand. As soon as we have machines idle, all of a sudden, you know, the lead time drops to near zero. You know, it's like, hey, order it by noon, come pick it up at one. Like, I don't care. You know, we're gonna be incredibly fast if we had excess capacity. Then people are like, wow, I can get it so fast. I'm gonna order more, and then that capacity starts to fill up. And then that's where we go back to that ratchet thing where I'm like, okay, crap. If I just told them they could have it in one hour, I can't go backwards from that. So I have to keep adding more and more capacity. I don't worry too much about getting ahead of it. If let's say we reached total market share for, you know, sheet metal or something like that, that's cool because then we can add another service. There's... Manufacturing is, you know, infinite in possibilities. There's, you know, stamping and injection molding and tube and, you know, forming and forging and, you know, everything else that you can imagine under the sun casting. So as long as our customers are creative, as long as they need parts or projects manufactured in The USA, and we have the ability to add new services and capacity, then we will never run out of things to do.
00:57:01 · Ty Morse, Jim Belosic
[00:57:01] S0: How do you think about basically building capacity in the event that you have this like surge demand and you need to fulfill in a short period of time? How do you actually do that? You always need some surge capacity because, as a [00:57:15] S1: as a on demand manufacturer, we have no idea what we're gonna do that day. We might do a 100 parts or we might do a million. I don't know what people are gonna order. So we have flexibility built into the system, but there's only so much surge you can take. So being able to have, you know, 10 times the surge capacity is it's hard to do because then you have idle equipment and idle equipment doesn't amortize very well. You know, you want those machines running the best possible uptime. But part of being quick turn is we have to have surge capacity whether we want it or not because we have to have redundancy as well. We have to take machines offline, for planned or unplanned maintenance. So there's always some bit in there. You just, we want additional surge capacity, but then we fill it with demand. I don't know. It's like this. It's a very difficult like, needle to thread. Just, it never ends. I don't know if there's a right answer. It's this algorithm that I don't think we can ever solve, but we're trying. [00:58:22] S0: One of the things that you do that I haven't seen very many other people do is you're like default skeptical. You have a very high bar for the people that you allow close to you and who you let into your life. But once they're in, they're really in. Why did you kinda come to that philosophy?
00:58:35 · Jim Belosic
[00:58:35] S1: I have one of the best bullshit meters that I know of. I don't know where that comes from. But man, I can I can just sense if some? Someone's not Inauthenticity. Yeah. Yeah. It's... It it triggers me. I'm I'm a pretty good salesman. You know, I like to sell and I like to build relationships and everything, but I always do it in a trustworthy way because I'm so sensitive to when people are lying to me or they have an ulterior motive or something like that. So yeah, default skeptical. I guess I am. I was gonna say I'm actually incredibly trusting in the first interaction. I'm like, gonna be best friends, you know, or we're gonna get married, whatever. I'm I'm super excited. And then as the relationship goes on, if I see something, all of a sudden my radar will go up. And, you know, maybe I'll have to push back a little bit and then earn it back. So it's kinda like Dunning Kruger where I'm like, this is gonna be great. And then I see a little something and I have to reset. But being skeptical allows you to, I don't know, have some some backup plans, I guess. I'm like, okay, I thought this was gonna be really great. I saw something that maybe I'm unsure of. I'm gonna research it. But then immediately I'm starting to plan like, if this doesn't work out, what am I gonna do? I guess I do that with people. I do it with equipment. I do it with buildings, whatever. It's wow, this new building is gonna be incredible. And then we get in there and we're like, oh God, it's full of raccoons. So I'm like a little skeptical And then build it back up at the same time knowing, okay, if we have to punch out of here, you know, I have a backup.