Gimbel Automation on The Job Shop Show Podcast

Welcome to the Job Shop Show, where we talk with the owners, suppliers, partners, and customers of custom manufacturers. Listen and learn the secrets of top performing job shops, the tools, techniques, and backgrounds that have made them successful. All in the quest of raising the bar for custom manufacturing.

I'm your host, Jay Jacobs. This episode is sponsored by Paperless Parts, connecting buyers and suppliers of custom manufactured parts. The Paperless Platform is a secure, ITAR compliant, cloud based manufacturing system for suppliers that reduces the amount of time spent on sales, estimating, quoting, administration, and order processing.

It offers seamless integration with the accounting and ERP software tools that shops already use, such as QuickBooks, E2, and Job Boss. Paperless Parts was founded with a mission to make manufacturing more accessible by streamlining the quote to cash process, spend less time quoting and more time selling.

Shazam! This is Jay Jacobs. Welcome to the Job Shop Show. Have we got a rock star for you today, Michael Gimbel, the founder and CEO of Gimbel Automation. Would you have had the balls to drop out of John Hopkins University and bet on yourself instead? Michael sure did, starting at just 19 years old, a venture backed 3D printing company pioneering an innovative way to print 3D parts.

But a few years in, that didn't work out. And I specifically don't use the word fail here, because if you learn something from an experience, it's not a failure. Michael sure did learn, and he pivoted, using the company's machining center to start a design and build machine shop. And then, not satisfied with commercial automation solutions, he created some of his own.

Realizing there was more potential in these tools, he again pivoted, focusing on an automation business, Gimbal Automation, which sells to machine shops and other manufacturers. This guy is a winner and we really dive into the ups and downs of building his companies, the specific lessons he's learned about management and delegation and how he made real the desire that many shop owners have.

Indeed that I had that of having a product to sell. Let the inspiration begin now. Welcome to the job shop show, Michael. Awesome. I'm just happy to be here. And I really love the podcast, Jay. I just want to give you a shout out paperless parts when we were a job shop was a huge boom for our company and made things a lot easier.

And there was one article in particular that you wrote that really opened my eyes to what it was like, you know, running a job shop, specifically talked about how most commonly with a job shop is like three big customers. And you're always trying to keep those three customers happy and doing all kinds of things that don't necessarily make sense otherwise.

And. When I read that article, it was really a perspective shift and a real inspiration for us to move into the next phase of our business. And what phase was that? Well, I mean, it's probably worth taking through the whole story. So we'll get into that. First of all, I really appreciate you being on and you and this conversation are the reason that I started the podcast, because I would have conversations like this on the phone and.

I would hear some really interesting things and like, oh, wow, you know, I'd really like to share that with some other folks, but it was gone and on the same thing. The questions that you might ask me, or other folks ask me, they tended to be common, or at least sort of the 8020 rule. So, yeah, this is the reason I started the podcast is so that, uh, you Conversations where I can get to know you and your story and learn some of the things that you've done.

Because I've been on LinkedIn and looking at some of your videos. It's very cool. So, let's start back. You. And you can tell me where you want to start, but I saw you were at John Hopkins as for mechanical engineering, but only for two years. It looked like, or maybe even one. Yeah. Okay. So that's pretty different.

And that's someone who has the talents to get into a school like John Hopkins. You decided not to further your education after a year. So how did it start? Or were you always a child? Yeah. Tinker and engineering was inevitable. Yeah. I kind of think it started like when I was nine, and that's really where I started kind of going crazy, convincing my parents that they shouldn't get me like normal Christmas gifts, you know, I wanted like a woodworking router and a table saw and a bandsaw.

And when I was nine they bought me a drill press for Christmas. After a lot of pleading and begging. And that was kind of the. You know, the trigger for me of, you know, now every single holiday had to turn into a tool. and I, you know, slowly built out a wood shop. You know, nine, I got a bands saw, or a, sorry, a, a drill press and a bandsaw, you know, 10.

I got a woodworking router, and by the time I was 12, I, I had a table saw and a whole little wood shop. So, you know, when I was a middle schooler, I just, I couldn't help myself, but to go and, you know, watch how it's made as soon as I got home and I would put it on for hours, I was just obsessed with making stuff.

And ever since I was a little kid, I was making cool stuff. And then from there, when I was 12, 12, 13, like the first year of high school, I entered this. Like engineering competition for high schoolers, and we had to build like a prosthetic arm basically. And what ended up happening is we won like the national competition, which, you know, it was cool as a freshman in high school, but the really neat thing that actually came out of that was when I was like 14, uh, through the connections I made there, I found myself at a lab at children's hospital in Colorado, where I was running a, you know, a million dollar EOS 3d printer.

I was running a quarter million dollar Stratasys 3d printer, and I was just You know, at that point, super duper obsessed with manufacturing and doing cool stuff. So, you know, from there all the way through the rest of high school, I was spending all my time in solid works. I was just designing and building stuff whenever I could.

And really that left me in the position when I graduated high school, where I wanted to keep going and I wanted to take it to the next level. And when I got into Johns Hopkins, I was excited. You know, there was another kind of biomechatronics lab there. But, you know, ultimately I had a wood shop, you know, in my garage, I could do stuff all the time.

You know, I was running these millions of dollars worth of equipment. And the reality is when I was there, I was just kind of disappointed because, you know, I'd gone from, you know, here's this million dollar 3d printer you're going to run every other day. You know, here's this big Stratasys printer and here's a whole, you know, little wood shop in your garage to, you know, the kind of normal expected resources you would expect a freshman in college to have.

And. Honestly, I didn't do super well at Hopkins. I wasn't super happy. I didn't get super good grades when I'd been like a straight A student before, because it was like, my tools had been taken away and I didn't realize how important it was to me. And I actually ended up dropping out of Johns Hopkins and, um, Going to start a venture capital, uh, based company.

So I invented this new type of 3d printing. We raised 1. 3 million and I moved to Los Angeles on a whim. And that was kind of the start of my journey when I was 19. So you're in school, he said, this isn't for me. And. How did you raise 1. 3 million? How old were you? 19? 19. Yeah. And I didn't expect it to go that way.

So the very first thing I did was I convinced a bunch of the professors who I'd been working with to give me like 65 grand. And from there, I moved back to Denver, kind of worked on these experimental 3d printers out of my parents basement and did that until I thought we had enough to raise more capital.

And then I moved to the West coast and you know, what's started as, Hey, I want to raise a quarter million dollars, you know, I don't know, right place, right time. I I'm a good talker, very persuasive. Apparently that 250, 000 raised turned into well over a million bucks. And then I basically, you know, ran that company for like 18, 19 months.

So, okay, let's, let's drill into this a little bit. So. You're in Denver. You say, okay, I think I've got what type of 3d printing technology was it? So at the time I had invented a new type of 3d printing technology that was essentially a way to put Soluble supports on into SLA prints. So it's kind of like the best of both worlds and you know I'd made kind of a Not a great version, but an okay version out of my parents basement and had a little automation cell on it.

Okay. So enough proof of concept. Yeah. So why Los Angeles? Why did you feel you had to go there? And then I'm always curious because someone. At your age, you don't have a lot of money. I don't know if you do people there or not. You just packed up and, and, and how did you, you rent a space? Did you, how did that all go?

Well, I was lucky that the people who had given me that, you know, the initial like 65 grand were, were reasonably well connected and. It was essentially through a connection. It was like, Hey, you know, one of the people who knew one of the people who had invested in like the pre seed round had said, Hey, come to Los Angeles.

You know, I'm, you know, friends with a CEO of this company and you can work out of this maker space and I'm, you know, friends with these people with like a. Uh, you know, a whole like, you know, ADU, like it was like next to their pool, like an additional unit that you can stay in for like six months for free.

And honestly, I love my parents, but I didn't want to stay in my parents basement any longer. That was one thing I really loved about college was just having some, some distance and growing into my own person. And I just thought, well, you know, this is too good of a shot not to do. And I also knew, Hey, like raising money in California.

Yeah, sure. It's not the Bay, but in Los Angeles was going to be a lot easier than trying to do it out of Denver. So what I'm hearing here is that you talk to a lot of people and you actively make connections. Sort of how you reached out to me, you said, Hey, I think I'd be a good candidate to be a guest on the job shop show.

And you took it in a different path here. It sounds like. And I'll share, there's so much serendipity when you start talking to people, you don't know where it's going to lead, but you know that if you have enough conversations, something good is going to happen. Would you say that that's your experience as well?

Oh, a hundred percent. And I look at all the paths of like how I got here and all of them are these kind of like random black swan events where, you know, if I hadn't been at this one meeting in middle school, I would have never signed up for this particular engineering competition, which then led to this lab, which then led me to Hopkins, which then led me to raise money and any of these tiny, tiny events, if they're even slightly different, you know, I, I don't see myself being in exactly the same place.

And some people. Might say that you got lucky. However, I would say there is definitely luck involved, but you create your own luck. You put yourself in the position to receive luck and kudos to you for doing that. So you get out to LA And you've got a makerspace to work, lots of conversations. Did, how did you structure, did you go for like chunks of a hundred thousand dollars or did you have a, how, how was this?

Are you one man band? Yeah. I mean, at the time it was just me. So it was, you know, I was the company, just me and this technology that we had some provisional patents on. And basically the way we did it, it was, we've got these like, you know, VC Like group meetings, so we'd get a bunch of people in one room and I do one presentation and you know that that was enough to secure two or three interested parties.

And then, you know, at that point, how did you get a whole bunch of people in one room to hear just you? I mean, that was honestly a little bit of luck. And you know, that one guy that connected me to that space had enough kind of social pull to get those people in the room. Um, and I guess he believed in me.

So, you know, that, that's, that was definitely like a bit of luck and a bit of serendipity and, you know, without that connection, it wouldn't have been as easy. But I had a pretty easy time raising money. It was, you know, running the company was zero management experience. That was the hard part for me. Like that, that first time around.

Yeah. So how long did it take you to raise the money? Four months. Okay. So relatively quick. That's yeah. And what year was that? I was 19, so seven years ago. Okay. So the money's in the bank. What do you do next? Well, the first thing I went and did at 19 was I went and I bought a BMW. You know, that's not what I would do now, but that's what I did.

And then it was like, look for a lease and look for a building to lease and kind of, you know, mid tier flex space. And I generally don't like hash the details too much in my first startup company, because so much of it was like me not knowing what I was doing at all. This is, this is, this is what's interesting.

And people are listening who've never done this before. One of the beautiful things is hopefully what they hear you talk about and, and these details that, and the same thing. I had a bunch of dead ends. Mm-Hmm. on my path to success. And if we have the conversation and people hear it and they go, oh, and it prevents them from making a dead end Mm-Hmm, and their first start, then it's a win.

So again, one of the reasons we're doing this podcast, so the, these details are not unimportant, you. You negotiated any, what I'm trying to get out is what, what sort of learnings, what things wouldn't you do again that you did? Yeah. I mean, the BMW. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, it wouldn't be the start. You know, that was several years to premature.

I think that the first thing is I would just reevaluate it and I have reevaluated just the concept of venture capital. One thing for me that I really learned is like, the company is a huge part of my identity and it took me a long time to kind of wrap my head around that, you know, even now that the current company is, is growing considerably, I still kind of treat it almost like a child I'm raising, you know, it's not so much like part of me anymore, but it's own thing.

But, you know, because of that, I think that honestly, I don't know that from the beginning I was the right fit for venture capital because everything is so focused on growth and building for M& A. And in hindsight, I think I really, I don't really want like a lifestyle company. I want to grow a big, successful company that like has an impact, but I don't know that, you know, venture was the right choice for me because it wasn't about blowing up and making a lot of money.

It was about doing something awesome. And being at the helm with a hundred percent ownership is just such a different experience. And I think that's kind of the first thing that, you know, if I was doing it all over again, I'd probably bootstrap it from the ground. How much equity did you give up when you raised the money?

Oh, I mean, that was another, you know, me being very naive at the time and not knowing what I was doing. I think by the end of like a couple of rounds, I owned like 40%, which not, not a great, great situation for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I was there and. And there was a lot of, you know, other things that I wish I would have learned.

I'm like, I think everyone who had invested in the company was super happy that I was like living in the office and working a hundred hours a week and, you know, had zero life. And, you know, it w it was everything to me. And in hindsight, I'm like, I think that actually set me up more for failure than success.

Because it, because it just wasn't sustainable. Right. And like, you know, when I hit doing it for 15, 16 months and we started to have real problems, you know, at that point, it was kind of where I almost snapped. Right. And said like, well, I don't know how we're going to do this. And I think if I would have had, you know, a healthier outlook and worked a reasonable amount and had like, you know, some kind of social circle or support, I probably wouldn't have cracked as much under the pressure of having to turn things around.

It sounds like you didn't have any capacity in reserve. So well, there's that. Yeah. When something hit, yeah, there's no fuel in the tank. There's there's no buffer. Yeah. And I, I didn't know how to hire people. And that was one big pressure from the people on our board as well. We got to spend more money.

You got to spend more money to, you know, get to the outcome faster. And I just hadn't learned how to delegate or manage people or have reasonable expectations. You know, I kind of had the outlook at the time that like everyone should be as dedicated as me and no one was as dedicated as me. And I, and it's taken me years to learn, like that's okay.

Let's take a little detour there besides that learning. What else have you learned? That has made you more successful in. It took years for me to become a good manager and the, I think it might make sense just to kind of keep going on the same story. So, so like the, you know, the startup, honestly, like I was 19, I had no management experience, everyone thought it was crazy that, you know, people threw a million bucks at me, you know, anyone who wasn't from the tech world.

And I kind of ran that company into the ground by just. Sheer incompetence, right? I didn't know how to manage people. I didn't know how to really take things beyond just kind of the technician stage of, Oh, I go and do something cool. And, you know, we did a lot of cool technical stuff, but I didn't know how to run a company yet.

And basically the long story short there is through a convoluted series of events, you know, that the company closed down, you know, traded hands a couple of times. And I essentially ended up with the ashes. So I ended up with a couple of machines and a lease. Okay. Because I had looked for a job, and I just couldn't get excited about anything, you know, I really was having kind of an identity crisis, because I didn't know, I just wanted to build something.

And I felt like I'd been building something for so long and it failed and that really was awful. But then when the opportunity came to just. Pick up the pieces and keep going. I took it and that meant taking on a lot of debt and a lot of difficulty taking over a lease, you know, the space had some damage that had to be fixed.

And the, you know, we had a couple of machines. There's like a, you know, a water jet and a VF2. And I kind of looked at, at what I could sell, cause you know, now it was just me with a whole bunch of debt and we turned into a job shop. And that's kind of the typical story. I think all the small shops start out as we're quick turn, you know, we can get you parts faster than anybody.

The we'll have really fast lead times, but you know, high prices for it. And I did that. And at this point that was working a little bit, but I was kind of seeing the writing on the wall of, Hey, like what I'm really good at is solid works and design and engineering. And we started to sell more into the engineering market to where.

You know, half of our, our business was like engineering consulting. And when you say engineering consulting, give me an example or two, what that is. Yeah. It's like halfway between, you know, engineering and a machine shop. So the idea is that like behind engineering consulting is that, you know, we have the engineers and the machine shop to build the outcome.

So most shop shops are probably used to like the part is the part of the part, you know, here's your drawing. And the difference between that and engineering consulting is You know, it's like, I have this problem and I need a subassembly for it. And we'll pay you X amount of dollars to figure out the problem and solve for the outcome.

And we kind of found this unique niche where we would work with kind of small medium businesses to solve those specific issues. Designing the full subassembly, you know, making the components and then delivering. What types of products were you? Oh, I mean, that's a, you know, being in Los Angeles, we were kind of at the art center of the world.

So lots of like A and B list artists, which was always interesting because they don't know CAD really, or engineering drawings or specs. So, you know, we would solve problems for them. And then aerospace companies here and there, you know, obviously. SpaceX used to have a lot, a lot more presence in Los Angeles than they do now.

It was really just kind of whatever came and really that's kind of the story of every, like, you know, one to five person job shop, right. And as we continued, I think I got less and less confident in the job shop work because it, you know, the margins are tight and it's difficult. And we got more and more into this engineering consulting where it was kind of delivering an outcome.

So, you know, usually there was oil field stuff. There was, you know, Artistic sub assemblies. There was aerospace testing fixtures, medical testing fixtures. It was, it's definitely a weird, you know, very niche of a niche or the segment of a market. How did people find you? Yeah, I mean, that, that was really just a word of mouth, which is kind of every job shops answer, which isn't a good answer, but I really didn't understand how to do marketing effectively.

But the, I mean, even now that we have kind of a, you know, shadow of a website and all of our Google listings have changed, you know, now that we're primarily running the automation business for, you know, automating CNC mills, we still get RFQs occasionally where it's like, and the, you know, the, the vast majority of them, we tell them, you know, like, this isn't really what we do anymore.

And there's a couple of legacy customers where we'll quote it out to partner shops and see if we can get something together for them. But the, there's just like, honestly, a real need for, you know, That kind of engineering consulting and just, you know, kind of, uh, fast turn manufacturing services, at least when as dense of a population area as LA.

You know, I want to tie this back to why you left John Hopkins. It seems like there's a missed opportunity. Maybe the John Hopkins is more the theoretical. Teaching of engineering. So the broader base and it's, it's not the hands on, but, but yeah, talk to that. Yeah. So like the counselor there was like, look at, we have a 97 percent graduation rate.

How dare you do this? And at Hopkins, there's this, this little crest in one of the buildings and this crest, it like the myth behind it is that if you step on the crest, you won't graduate. Right. Everyone is like terrified of this thing. You know, like I I've seen people like trip around it. Like, you know, the people stay 10 feet away from it.

Cause everyone is so set on going through that program. And for me, when I was there, I really expected, like I'd be surrounded by people like me who were just obsessed with what they were obsessed with. And I, I didn't see that. Right. I, you know, I saw a lot of, you know, talented, smart individuals, but people who kind of viewed what they were doing, like a job, something to show up to something to get done, but not, you know, a passion, And in hindsight, you know, very naive point of view, but that's what I expected to see versus what I did.

And I think that was combined with, you know, when I was in high school, I was valedictorian. I took all the fancy classes. I even took some college classes and I was working on way too much in this lab. And at that point I'd been, you know, using SOLIDWORKS for like four or five years. And then, you know, the entire first.

Two semesters of the main engineering course, we're learning the basics of solid works. And I was watching the professors struggle to make a square. And we'd have these lessons and like these labs where we were supposed to, you know, make a component off of a drawing. Right. And, you know, it was a two hour lab and I'd be done in 10 minutes.

And I was just like, how long am I going to sit here? You know, like half the courses I was taking, I'd already taken. And I was like, how long am I going to sit here doing the same thing? I already know how to do better than the people teaching it to me. And that's just, you know, I just snapped because I'm one of those people that for better or for worse, like if I don't see myself going in making progress, you know, I get really unsettled.

And that kind of discomfort, I felt like I was almost forced to leave and then find the next thing. I have to say your website for your part making for the, the gimbal group looks great. And thanks. That's actually our kind of retired website now. But it's, but it's still active. It still looks good. And, you know, one of the things I was, as I was looking at.

The different online presence that you have is, and by the way, I saw some of the art stuff, the Instagram account doesn't look like you're active on that anymore, but some really cool stuff that you were involved in there. You have a lot of, and this plays into your gimbal automation, you have a lot of, Beyond, I guess, the pure mechanical and more of the electronics.

Is that the yeah. Yeah, for sure. Definitely. You've got the electrical, the software, the, you know, making it a product that works in today's digital world. How did you learn that? Is that. Yeah. So self taught as well. Mostly. Yeah. Let's say I mentioned like, Oh, when I was, you know, nine to 18, I was building out this wood shop, but I guess what I didn't mention is I built my first CNC machine when I was 12.

And there's this book, how to build a CNC machine. It was like, how to build this kind of plywood piece of junk with stepper motors that, you know, cut stuff out because I was just obsessed as a kid of like, how do we get. You know, to be able to make stuff like a printer at home, right. And there's this one kind of funny moment where it was like Christmas when I was 12, that the Xbox 360 had just come out and, you know, I desperately wanted a maker bot, you know, the old like crappy 3d printer.

And I was a difficult child to be fair. And my, You know, parents got me this, this X Box ride, but it's been talking about this maker bought it and in their defense, I just think they couldn't afford it. They were like 1500 bucks at the time for a piece of junk. And I was just like gutted when I opened the thing and there's an X Box there and because, you know, it wasn't a thing I can make stuff with.

So the, and by the time that I was 18, I built several more CNC machines and 3d printers. And like the, even when I was about to go to Hopkins. I had this like little tiny CNC machine that was on like, you know, THQ actuators with servos on it. And I realized, Oh shoot, I can't bring a CNC machine into my dorm.

So I spent like, you know, Three or four days, frantically converting it into a 3d printer that I could bring your door. So, yeah, so that's just kind of always been there. And then I got a lot more experience doing it, you know, professionally in the startup company. So like building machines from the ground up that run G code has kind of, it's always been in the background since I've been a kid.

Okay. You know, it reminds Kamen. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he, his parents were out of town one weekend and when he was in high school and wanted this CNC machining center in, uh, in his basement, but he couldn't get it down the, down the stairs, you know, it was just too big. So while they were gone that weekend, he hired somebody and they lifted the house off of the foundation so they could put the machine in.

So you're not alone in your obsessions. Oh, yeah. And I'm not, I'm not that crazy, but you know, by the time I was 18, I built five CNC machines on it. And actually the like winter break from Hopkins, I came home and I spent the entire time building a CNC machine, another one, because I needed to, I think there's still a YouTube video up.

What computer languages do you know? And which ones do you like? Well, you know, I don't do a ton of that anymore, but at one point I taught myself visual basic and then C sharp. And, you know, a little bit of Java and kind of, you know, learn what you need to. So, you know, I played around with Arduino and Raspberry pi and obviously G code.

I know pretty fluently, but, but at this point, it's, I'm not really writing code anymore. If someone was interested, what would you recommend as a path for them to. Get up to speed. Yeah. I mean, for me, I would actually say code and electrical are not things I like. They're like, you know, a necessary evil to get to an outcome.

I want things to be smooth and digital and an ecosystem, but I've just never found them like really fun. And, you know, because of that, I, we do coding as always an outcome of how do I build that machine? And I kind of learned it on my own when we were smaller. So I could build the machines without having a bunch of.

You know, a bunch of staff that were 150 grand a year to code stuff. So for me, I learned, you know, visual basic and C sharp really as ways, you know, for the kind of modern level PLC that was easy to use was where it was. So I could use these like controller devices that were kind of Windows integrated PLCs.

Honestly, I'm just the wrong guy to ask for people who love coding because I love machines and it's the path for me to build a machine. So you mentioned the Raspberry Pi. I don't have any. Background or ability to integrate a PLC, but let's say somebody just wants to play around and tinker. Is there any.

Path that you could suggest for them to go by a. How it used to be, I don't know if they're still around Alan Bradley, you'll see just the Raspberry Pi or. Yeah, I mean, so the thing that we used originally was this PLC called the K Flop by Dynomotion. And it's really powerful, but it was really difficult to use.

You have to write the entire software stack on top of it. And I'm speaking through the lens as just someone who loves building machines. You know, I would say to anyone who loves building machines to just build a bad machine first. Just do something. And from that point of view, like the tools have gotten so much better than they used to be to just, Get to the outcome of building a machine.

We went from, you know, even just in the last couple of years with Gimbal Automation, from doing these, you know, like full software stack development on top of a Windows integrated PLC to a Linux based Raspberry Pi connected PLC that, you know, we hadn't made by a UL certified cabinet PLC maker. And then we actually ended up kind of moving over now.

We're just experimenting with, but it'll probably be in like our next gen of products, the Maso control, which is like one integrated system that there's pretty much nothing to do. So if your passion is kind of like mine, it's just building machines. So I would say, you know, get the best system. That's the easiest to use that you can afford and just play with it.

Because really the playing and the overcoming the numerous frustrations you will run into trying to build something decent is really where you grow. And, you know, for, for me, I've always been the mechanical mechatronics guy, The software side and the coding side now, you know, at least at this point is something I, I have the pleasure of not doing because I have people who help us who, who work for me, who like doing it a lot more, I would think though, it's easier to manage them because you have a, some semblance of what they are doing as opposed to somebody who's never coded.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. And I definitely like that very trick. Member of the leadership team. Um, the, you know, if you were just coming in from an outside point of view, you'd probably be like, okay, you know, here's your, this is Michael's your CTO. He's your CPO, whatever, probably don't put him at the top. But you know, that, that said, I like actually running the team and setting the direction.

And I'm still trying to strike that balance where I'm not running operations, but I'm directing the vision of the company and helping along with that build the next product that we're going to take to market. Maybe we can jump into that first. I want to hear about gimbal automation and how that came about.

You had a shop making parts. Yeah. Um, have a love of making machines. So sounds like you had a problem or two in the shop and you said, I can make a machine to fix it. Yeah, that has happened countless times. I mean, the first thing. That, you know, we were at four employees and doing about 50, 50 engineering consulting and just straight job shopping and the COVID hit, and that just wiped out a hundred percent of the, the, the engineering consulting revenue.

And I think we saw like 90 percent revenue decline. So I laid off two guys and one guy went to part time and then it was me and him. And for a while, like we were making face shields because that's like what we could sell the highest volume of. So we were doing a little bit of everything here and there, but what surprised me is that after COVID things actually came back stronger.

And the engineering consulting actually kind of came back with a fury because it's like, the markets are doing really well, which was nice for a bit. And, you know, everyone wanted to get their particular project done. So with that being the case, the company actually went through a little growth spur and you got the five or six people.

And we actually made the decision that we would keep kind of doing job shopping on the side, but mostly we were doing engineering consulting. And the big thing that I struggled with is when you're doing these projects, I mean, The engineering consulting projects are often well over a hundred thousand dollars in value.

You know, they can range from 150 grand to a couple million dollars. And you're spending at least 15 grand a month. If you're one of the engineering consulting clients. But these things kind of come and go in waves. You know, we would charge on a retainer basis. And you're either having to collect the retainer or the project gets paused because you're the first variable cost that gets cut.

And I really said, Hey, I need a product where I need something I can sell. I need a widget. Kind of every job shop stream is evolving into a product, right? And for me, I'd had that background dream of, I want to build a 3d printing company. And when I ran the 3d printing company, kind of evolved into a metal 3d printing company with this whole theory that we could use the soluble supports to do basically metal investment casting and an automated process.

And I thought, how, how can I come back? Cause I had some money laying around a bit of a war chest. I thought, Hey, you know, I think I can do what Mark Forge and Desktop Metal are doing, but do it better. And that was kind of the start of, I would say one of my biggest business mistakes, which is doing the R and D without having done any market research.

And I think we spent four or five months, close to 400, 000 of, you know, straight profit in pouring into this, the coolest machine you've ever seen. So it was a, it's a metal 3d printer with like an Aroha style build plate, changing robot attached to it. But it's not just a 3d printer for the metal kind of waxy filament.

It also had a support printing and an integrated CNC milling head. Cause it turns out that material can mill really easily. So, you know, we get these beautiful parts. We spent like close to a hundred grand on these Chinese centering furnaces, and we could center the parts. And we got everything working beautifully after six months of intense R and D.

And then I tried to test it in the market. You know, we got one of these little, you know, automated Xometry style things. And we reached out aggressively to all of our customers. And it turns out that, you know, the reason that Markforged and Desktop Metal failed is that there's not a market for these parts, right?

Like in the metal 3d printing filament base, you know, setup and what little market there is, it's all prototyping and everyone wants to own the machines. And the machine that we've built is good, but it's so hard to deal with the sintering furnaces. It's such a big expense. You need so much space and there's a lot of expertise here.

And I really hit a crossroads of either. I'm going to go back to running a venture capital based company and raise five or 6 million to make this into a real product, or I've got to do something else. And, you know, it took me a while, like a couple months to realize something else was the answer because I just don't want to live that life again.

And I really love having control of my destiny, right? I like having a hundred percent control of the company and saying, Hey, this is where we're going to go, you know, either get on the boat or don't. And kind of what happened is I looked back and I said, I've had all these side projects over time. And I said, Hey, you know, what's the most developed thing that we can do the smallest amount of R and D on.

That has the biggest gap in the market. And I had built this CNC spindle gripper to like do in machine CNC machine part tending like two years ago. And the really clever part was that it had this little bypass block that meant that it would work on a machine without through spindle air cooling. So there was nothing that would do it.

And I said, I'm going to build that. Why is that important? Why do all the others have that feature? Or yeah, so I mean, the thing is the, the existing companies are really trying to sell into the biggest enterprises. And it's a very small subsection of their overall market. Right. And the thing is building a system that can interface with an external air source is annoying and it's difficult.

And I think if you're one of the, you know, huge automation brands like Shonk, you just say, eh, you know, like if a customer wants to automate by three spindle air, right. But as an individual guy, you know, with three people working for me, looking at the existing automation solutions, it was either like, Hey, we got to go spend 200, 000 on a row system or 100, 000 on a robot integration.

And we need another spindle, right? We don't need to spend five to 20, 000 on an automation system. Cause this does, you know, if that money's there, we're buying a spindle. So, you know, I viewed it as like this mid tier solution. And the reason three spindle error or coolant, not needing those as important is because first off, not every machine has them.

But secondly, I mean, it makes it a drop in solution. Otherwise you're going to go spend even with Haas, like five, six, seven grand to get that all retrofitted to your machine. And instead we can just sell you a direct solution for two brand. Uh, so we started selling those, those spindle grippers, which basically grab a part off the table and load it into an automatic vice.

And, and lo and behold, they started selling and we'd spent, I don't know, 10 grand on the R and D some money to start the patent process at that point for the little bypass system. And it really started working. And, you know, at that point we added automatic air vices. And then the next thing that we really ran into was.

Customer is really struggling to install their air, right? Getting the two solenoids to work properly to control their gripper and their air vice. So we made a product that just plugged into the back of the machine that we call the instant solenoid kit. It has a little pendant so you can manually trigger them.

That made that like a five minute install procedure. And that was really the start of Gimbal Automation in that we realized pretty quickly that just from customer feedback, what people wanted was an ecosystem, right? They didn't just want to buy a gripper and buy an air vice and figure it out. They wanted just to get running easily and ideally on their own, at least like the first kind of customers we were dealing with.

And from there, we just started solving problems one at a time. Then the next problem was how do I program this thing? Cause when we first started. There was no program system that made it easy and then we went and we went to great lengths to make an online program generator that, you know, still to this day, just free there on our website.

That means that you can just literally plug in, you know, your X, Y grid dimensions and your stock information and hit generate, and it generates the program that you just upload to your mill, right? So that the loading and unloading of the parts is automated. There's nothing to do. And from there, it really was just been time after time seeing what our customers are struggling with and building a new solution to the problem.

Like the, the biggest turning point after all of this was we built a whole bunch of versions of grippers. We built a whole bunch of different versions to make things easy. But the biggest turning point was when we came out with the two off automation system where you have, you know, not one air vice, but two air vices and a part flip station.

And along with that comes this, you know, macro that, that looks super long and does everything mathematically in the control. But basically what that let our customers do for the first time is they put this little pallet, you know, about the size and weight of a Kurt Weiss onto their machine with two vices and a flipper, they probe three locations, and then they just go into our little program template.

And they put in like a half dozen variables and those half dozen variables automatically take the part from grabbing it off the tray, putting it into the first off vice. Machining the first operation and then putting it into the flipper, which flips it over for the second operation. Then we re grab it with the gripper, put it in a second advice, machine it, and then you have a finished part.

So we, for the first time made it super feasible for like around 10, 000 in hardware costs to go and do a hundred percent two op automation, which even with, with a cobot or a robot system, you can't really do that without some kind of external, you know, part flip station or something similar. And I would encourage people who want to understand that a little better, go to your website.

There's some videos and stuff there, but also your LinkedIn profile. You've got lots of little videos that you post on there. And I, I think that that's kudos on that marketing side. The videos are really what demonstrate, made it me understand what the part flipping really entails and then how you can load multiple parts on, on a tray.

Now it's. Seems like just such a simple system for automation. It probably also makes it easier to automate lower volumes. So if you've got regular runs of maybe even 100 parts or 50 parts, you can automate them and there's not a lot of cost to it, where there would be more with a true Cobot. Yeah. And, and I think we've seen a ton of people saying, Hey, you know, why wouldn't I use a Cobot it's a proven solution, blah, blah, blah.

And almost every time we're like, you know, your CNC mill is a proven solution. It moves accurately, exactly as it's programmed every single time. The system's super reliable, much better precision by an order of magnitude than a Cobot system. And we kind of always tell people, Hey. You have a robot, you just don't know it.

You know, your CNC mills, the robot you already have, and it's designed to deal with forces and loads that are also orders of magnitude higher than you would see off a co bot. You know, a co bot might have a five kilogram payload. Well, your CNC mill can handle 2000 pounds of lateral and vertical cutting forces.

And the other thing is kind of what we tell people is for like one off automation. It literally takes 15 minutes to set up. You know, just getting it to the point where you're loading the one part in, you're running it, you're loading that same part out and you're not doing the second op and I've seen people successful running, you know, 15 parts, you know, 25 is kind of the, usually the, what I would say is the normal break even point on a one op and 50 is where it's like a no brainer to set it up.

And then when we get to the full, like two op automation, you know, it takes two hours to set up, but I think that's about consistent with, you know, by the time you teach a co bot and validate the process, you're, you're about there too. You also have a conveyor system. Yeah. So the conveyor is what I actually think is our coolest product.

And this is something that a lot of the places we actually have problems, just educating the market because people have never seen anything like it before. The conveyor system essentially goes on a five axis machine and we put an, you know, automatic door and an auto door on the side window. So the side window comes up and if you just imagine a conveyor belt.

Laterally going in through that side door and we just deliver a part on that conveyor belt piece of stock to the end. And there's a little stop, right? So that the conveyor belt keeps going, but the part stops that then brings that part within the, you know, the X, Y, Z travel motion of the five axis mill.

So then we just put a spindle gripper, or we also have vacuum solutions into the five axis mill. And then it just grabs the part using the spindle off of the conveyor, puts it into the automatic vise. We move the conveyor out, close the door and we machine the part. And then we do the opposite. We raise the door, we bring the conveyor in, the spindle drops it off, grabs a new part, and it just rinses and repeats.

And, you know, that's a super powerful piece of automation because the, you without all this complexity. We're able to deliver systems that are, are much, much more affordable and much, you know, much faster ROI, pretty much all of our things where we're doing the actual implementation, um, you know, like a turnkey of some variety.

We we're guaranteeing one year or less ROI, which I think our competitors think is crazy, but we're able to do that because our average system cost is like 12 percent of what our competitors are doing. You know, if it's a. You know, a Trinity robotics install or, you know, a halter CNC and automation integration, you know, we're coming in at usually around 12 percent of the overall cost.

And there's always the labor issue, hiring people, even to 10 machines. So if you can move that out of the picture and know that when that order comes in, you're going to be making parts. I love it. You are really creative and, or. The people on your team, you had a video up there, you created a really nice packaging out of plywood that a slot and tab look like a lot.

Yeah. And I just love the innovation. It's not limited to your automation. You're always looking for ways to make things fast and automated and. Be able to slot and tab that stuff and just put together a plywood box. Boom. Yeah. I mean, even our, our conveyor loading system, you know, we have a five axis water jet.

So our conveyor loading system is actually three eighth inch precision. Like, you know, Mike six plate. That tabs and slots together, which, you know, like lets us build them in a couple of week timespan. You know, we powder coat them in house and they're incredibly rigid, you know, like long term I'm sure years from now we'll turn it into a sheet metal.

We get the cost down. We love using tab and slot to just solve an issue. Right. That first issue is how do we make low volumes of the conveyor? Because we're like a 12 person company. We have to be relatively nimble in terms of building these kind of low volume industrial products. You know, especially the conveyor where the cost to build it is significant.

But yeah, I mean, even the box, I mean, we've launched so many skews and it's short enough time span. We kind of have just said, Hey, we're going to make sure we deliver a good product, but we're going to try to do it as fast and as nimble as possible. And inevitably when there's problems with, you know, like our company right now is growing 15 percent a month, which it's very difficult to deal with in terms of, you know, figuring out new staff, figuring out new systems, figuring out how we deal with product launches on.

And, you know, because that's difficult, our approach has been. You know, get the stuff out the door, make sure to get the customer quality product. But whenever there's literally any problem, we just replace it. Right. You know, like your vice arrived, damage, replace it. You know, your, your gripper has an issue.

And you know, that's worked really well for us because it lets us see the issues without slowing everything down to a crawl. And then, you know, like this whole thing came from the two op automation palette. It's, you know, it's a 6, 800 product. And we have one that, you know, like UPS has been damaging the boxes really severely.

And luckily these things haven't actually been damaged, but we've been getting pictures from customers saying, Hey, like this box is messed up. Luckily the product's okay. So, you know, we said, well, can we do, and you know, the, the water jet has a ton of water, obviously. So we are like, okay, well let's use prefinished plywood.

I'm sure it's like 150 bucks a sheet. But then we can waterjet this nice little, you know, nested thing and sure. It costs us 150 bucks and maybe it's not sustainable long term, but you know, right now it's sustainable to make sure our customers get a good quality product and perfect condition every time.

And we'll keep doing that until we find a more cost effective way. The building of a company. You just said you're growing 15 percent a month. You are a member of entrepreneurs organization. I am. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a great way to have a peer group, if nothing else, just to listen to you. I'm not sure if it was your podcast.

I think it was, I think it was, it was either your podcast or I'm trying to think of the other guy's name. It's the like entrepreneur or no, the manufacturing executive, you two talked, right? I think you guys talked about EO, which was actually where I got the introduction to EO in the first place, just kind of speaking of serendipity.

You put yourself in the place where you, that happened. And you also are, Using the EOS system to run your company. Yeah. And, you know, to be honest, I've been kind of struggling to keep up with the growth personally in EOS. There's this concept of hitting the ceiling, right? You grow the company and you hit the ceiling, which is, you know, a metaphor, metaphorical ceiling of your mindset needs to shift, you know, you need to get past your personal blocks and the company blocks that are stopping you from getting to the next step.

And, you know, the, between, you know, February. And, you know, July we doubled our headcount and that was super difficult. We still have about half of our revenue as engineering consulting, and we're trying to make the transition, you know, a hundred percent in automation. Because when I say the company is growing 15%, really the automation company is growing 15%.

And you know, what I think has been difficult for me the past couple of months is, you know, I promoted our senior applications engineer to a director of operations, and I'm still learning how to kind of, you know, You know, give him all the responsibilities and take a step back, right. Um, uh, the, you know, I think that's been difficult for me and, and yeah, I mean, the biggest thing that I've really been learning about lately is how to manage, you know, cashflow on a company that's growing this fast.

It's super difficult, especially now that, you know, I've been kind of historically used to consulting where we're getting some payment usually upfront and spending down a retainer balance to now where we're carrying huge amounts of inventory. Okay. And then we're not just buying this inventory, we're, we're buying it, you know, a month ahead of time because we got to buy the stock, make the parts, put it together, and then, you know, we have to try to build it ahead of the projected growth.

Um, so the, yeah, EO has been super helpful. I actually had my forum dinner last night, which are the little forum plus the forum dinner. And the car window got smashed out and my backpack got stolen. But, you know, a big theme of the forum was with me talking about, you know, me going through this stage of growth was just me learning to let go.

And, and I feel like that was almost a test of like, okay, you know, your, your, your backpack got stolen. 2, 000 laptop and your 500 headphones. It's like, okay, take a deep breath. Sure. I'm already in a cash pinch, but I have the money to pay for this. Like, you know, the company's growing, all the things I want are happening.

So I'm still, still learning to, to deal with these new problems. And, and, you know, I'm trying right now to break through this next, you know, glass ceiling here. Yeah, it's, it's real and it's what prohibits a lot of entrepreneurs from growing into larger companies. It's a delegation is a. Skill learning to focus your attention on the things that no one else can do that you're uniquely talented to do is hard because there's a lot of things that you were probably really good at, but other people are good at too.

And you have to let go of those, even if you don't necessarily like the way that they're doing it, as long as the result is as good. Is it adequate? Right? Yeah. I read this book called buy back your time literally yesterday and have this quote in there that said, you know, someone else doing something that you can perfectly do 80 percent well is awesome.

That's well said, for sure. Yeah, and it's definitely been a journey for me of, you know, being okay when. Something gets handled and it's not the way I would handle it. And I kind of said that earlier, like I kind of evolved from treating the company, like, you know, it was me to treating it like a child I'm raising and being okay when that, you know, metaphorical child, gimbal automation here is making decisions that I wouldn't necessarily make as long as they're, you know, generally good.

To me, there's a period where you start delegating and, you know, It's maybe the 80%, but as your company grows, as your team grows, and as you as a leader, shepherd them, and I use that word because it's a delicate balance, but if you give them enough freedom, you know, what I saw at Rapid was the team started to do things that I was never capable of doing, and not just one person, but so many different areas in the company, and It was so satisfying to be able to shepherd them, give them the guidance and the coaching, and then let them run and create things that made us so successful.

But had nothing to do with me like, wow, and that's really, I think what team is all about and it's not easy as the entrepreneur, the person who starts the company to let go and trust your team. And they will make mistakes and if you beat them down, you yell at them and they're not going to try again. Oh, for sure.

Yeah. And it's been a process and I think I'm a lot better at letting go and letting things kind of go the way that they will. And I think a huge thing for me was really within the last, You know, a few months, we've started to build out a real leadership team. And that's been really transformational.

Just knowing like that, the excellent machinist is super hard to come by. Right. But you need a layer of leadership for that really to be capable where the team can really thrive. Right. Because I think when you hit this kind of 10, 15 head count, you have enough direct reports where it starts, stops being effective.

And building out that first stage of the leadership team has really made me, you know, start to, to cross this bridge where I'm, I'm really starting to trust everything's going to get, get done that, you know, our customers are going to get serviced and they're going to get, you know, everything is going to get done correctly and their parts are going to run automated the way they're supposed to, and it's still a journey and I'm sure, you know, That, you know, we'll, we'll get past this and then we'll move from these kind of 10 to 15 employee problems to the 20 to 25 employee problems.

There's always a new challenge. Do you have an EOS coach, an outside facilitator? So, yeah, two months ago, I actually, you know, we had somebody come in and it was like, okay, well, you know, it's going to be 6, 000 a session. And I kind of knew how much it would cost, but I think the part that surprised me was 18 grand of this is going to be in the next three months.

Um, and I was kind of like, man, I'm like already struggling to be ahead of our inventory and our growth. Can we just spread this out? And I said, Hey, no, I want to try to self implement it. And we tried to self implement it and honestly, we just failed, you know, things got really hectic again, you know, we weren't looking, you know, I was making the mistake of getting in the business and not working on the business and, you know, long story short, I had a conversation with our integrator and said, Hey, can I just pay you monthly?

Can we split this up? So the cash isn't all right up front. And he's like, yeah, sure. I'm like, okay, well, that solves that problem. So yeah, we tried and we failed to self implement EOS, but I've seen it in the couple of weeks that we were really serious about it really do wonders for the business and then, you know, something happens and then I get flustered and I'm triaging and putting out fires and my fingers are crossed.

It's a process. It takes practice. It's it takes repetitions. It will happen. How do you. Look at financing, your growth, you seem adverse to venture capital or, uh, equity funding. What, what's your path for funding? Yeah. And, and I say all those things, you know, probably from the perspective of someone just starting out, right.

I think my tune is definitely changing a little bit where, you know, the growth is fast enough that I definitely have some questions about what's next. We have a credit card that we've essentially been using as a line of credit, right? Because, you know, they trust it will pay off the way too high balance.

And, you know, it's great for the credit card points and everything, but right now what I've been doing historically is essentially funding the growth. Out of the profits of the engineering consulting company, because you know the overheads a lot lower we're not carrying inventory, you know, anything we are buying associated with a customer project is just reimbursed on.

So, you know, that's been the case up until now, but now that we're kind of at that threshold where the automation companies. Bigger than the engineering consulting, that's kind of stopping as being effective. And so that's kind of the next big question for me is, okay, well, how do I continue this? And, and I don't really know a hundred percent what the answer to that is, you know, whether it's, you know, leveraging debt.

We definitely need to more effectively get and leverage a line of credit to keep up. But there's definitely some questions that the short term, I have like an airplane that I used to fly and it used to be a real passion of mine, but I woke up after long enough of like, you know, having a fiance and a couple of dogs and being like, I'm super happy.

And like, this thing is really dangerous. So, you know, at least the super short term, I'm like, okay, I'm going to, you know, sell the airplane and that that'll finance some of the growth, but. Long term, I'm still figuring that out. And I think that's really one of the big questions of how do I keep up with the growth, especially with IMTS coming up in 25 days or whatever, you know, we expect that to be a real big boon and we're getting everything out on time, but it's a struggle already.

So, you know, figuring that out as we're growing so fast and, and, you know, if we're growing 15 percent a month. That 15 percent next month is bigger than it was last month. So I would encourage you to get on board with a bank sooner than later rapid. We had some initial investors, you know, family and friends, and then afterwards it was all bank financed.

Um, and we grew roughly 32 percent a year. So. Less than 15 percent a month for sure, but that took, cause we, we went under at once, but that took 20 percent EBITDA to essentially self fund plus bank debt growth. Yeah, it's a, it's a good problem to have, right? Yeah, it's a good problem to have, but yeah, it's a new problem and it's stressing me out for new reasons, right?

I'm super enthusiastic and you know, I think. You know, I don't know what it is about me, but I just, I want to grow. I think I like really believe in the product and what we're doing and trying to get automation to people. That's not a hundred grand, right? Go buy another spindle and automate that. And for whatever reason, I just have that thing in me where I just want to grow and I want to, you know, get things done and playing that balancing act is definitely difficult and, you know, putting my business hat on and.

And, you know, at some point here, we'll probably have to pull back and say, no, maybe we grow at 7 percent a month because, you know, you know, likely that might not be sustainable, especially if I want to hold on to the concept of self funding, even debt financed, right? I always looked at it because we could have had much more demand than supply at rapid early on as.

That was part of my job as a leader. I thought of it like as the accelerator, and I had to make sure I wasn't flooring it and creating too much demand and killing the shop, but at the same time, I had to make sure there was enough gas, enough pressure on the pedal to give the shop the growth that we were, we're building towards.

And it's a delicate balance. The bigger you get, The easier it gets, and that's actually one of the things that drove me is there are a lot of advantages. The bigger you get, you hire more people to do more things because you can afford them. Now you can invest in new products. Uh, the R and D and it doesn't destroy your cashflow.

So there's a, there's a lot of opportunity for you. You mentioned IMTS, you'll probably get a lot of orders there. So it's something to think about now. How are you going to finance the inventory or the demand that's going to be generated? No, it's definitely been on my mind. And Jay, that's one thing I just want to say is your, your podcast has had some of.

The most like tactical, real job shop, business advice that I've seen anywhere. And, you know, I just want to say thank you for being that resource. Like there, there's a lot of good job shop resources and podcasts and YouTube videos. But I think really what sets you apart, Barnon, is that tactical business advice and coming through everything at that lens.

Um, you know, especially having gone from, you know, rapid and then doing paperless parts. I've definitely gotten the most practical value out of it. And that I just want to say generally, thanks for that. Thank you. It's these sorts of conversations are fun. And I enjoy the opportunity to hear success stories like yours.

And business is such a delicate balance. You have created, appears to me to be just like some home run products. And downside of that is that. Success can be really tough in building the business, and some businesses don't make it, so it's a pleasure for me to be able to give some sort of tactical advice that helps you, perhaps in one way or another.

How about contact information, website, uh, where can people find you? Yeah, it's Gimbal Automation Everywhere. That's spelled G I M B E L. That's my last name. I'm used to people misspelling it. So just Gimbal Automation with a E L and then you can reach us at email at sales at Gimbal Automation. And then the, you know, there's Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, all under the same name, message us through any of those platforms.

As we wrap up here, anything that we didn't cover, you'd like to comment on? Share, get out there or any questions for me. One thing I like to kind of ask everyone is I actually like to ask people what their hesitations are about in machine automation, because my understanding is a lot of people have, you know, questions and there's a bunch of common ones that are almost always never the actual downsides of in machine automation.

I'm just curious what you think the limitations are or what parts you might think it's good for just so I can get, you know, another, Another point of view from, you know, another person who's been in the industry a long time on, on what you think the issues are. So I can see if they're really aligned with reality.

Always cashflow demands for job shops. And you know, that buying another machine, like you said, getting another spindle is a proven solution as opposed to, all right, I'm going to have to get these parts out. The co bots says it may be, they say, they say they can always say, but if it doesn't, but if it doesn't, then I'm hosed and I'm not going to get the parts out and I may have to buy another machine and it's money.

So a lot of it comes back to money. I think. I like to do at Rapid was make a lot of small bets, try a lot of things, and you're coming in at a price point that is low enough that it's not going to really hurt a shop to try your technology. It's not for them then. Okay. It's money. That's not going to sink the shop, you know, perhaps for you is even to offer a money back guarantee.

And this is just off the top of my head. We actually do that. So we pretty much have a 30 day. If you didn't crash it, return it. I would even do like, cause a lot of times shops get. Busy with stuff, but give a 90 day return, but have a non recurring engineering charge, some sort of thing that covers your cost to help them get set up and that.

So, so there's an investment, you know, maybe it's a thousand dollars, 2, 500 that, that, you know, that covers your time and that, and then if for some reason it's not for them. After 90 days, because 90 days really, it gives you an opportunity to really prove it or not. Yeah. And, you know, there's something that we learned about, you know, the customers, cause you mentioned like, you know, job shops are changing a lot, you know, like the word job shop is like, I guess two words is, is such a strange thing.

And, you know, for like the kind of sub five machines, you know, sub 10 employee companies, we've kind of realized, Hey, the solution is we sell them a little 5, 000 one off automation package. Most of the time, you know, those shops aren't, they want to figure it out themselves. They want to make like a small bet.

And, you know, we have kind of like mentally separated that kind of company from, you know, I think, you know, there we try to push, Hey, get this 5, 000 thing, you know, use our online systems. It's easy. You'll make it work. And then we've kind of separated that mentally from like a customer persona perspective to, from the, you know, 25 machine plus.

Either, you know, aerospace, ISO shop, or you have your own product, what have you. Because we've kind of seen those customers, they're almost always getting turnkeys from us. And for perspective, that kind of means like we made up a phrase semi turnkey where we, we do everything, you know, the cam, the full process validation and we test it and videotape it on our machine.

And then we send you like essentially like a detailed documentation on how to install it and then give you phone out four hours of phone support. With those bigger companies, what we found is they want a solution and they don't want to even want to deal with it. So like our approach to that is that, you know, we get them automated for usually about 20 grand.

So it's, you know, 12, 000 or so for the hardware for full two op automation. And usually, you know, six to 8, 000, uh, for, you know, the actual turnkey and a little bit for shipping and what have you, and on those customers were, what we have done is actually, there's a year long window where we guarantee ROI, right?

And the, which is, you know, an interesting thing to do, but the, the idea is that we guarantee one year ROI, because we're confident enough that, you know, if you actually use the system, literally the cost of our system. It's usually in line with like the workholding cost of a co bot. And we have, you know, other weird things we've seen.

Like we've had a lot of customers, we had one customer in particular who, you know, is using these with fanatic robots, right? We're like, Hey, just buy a spindle gripper. We'll do the same thing. And they're like, well, you know, I was the advocate to buy these fanatic robots. So, so they're, you know, they're using the two op station and the flipping.

Inside the machine, even without the spindle grippers. So the, you know, that's usually what I go back to is like, you got to buy the automated workholding anyways. And you know, if it doesn't work, then you send us the grippers back and then, you know, use that automated workholding for your co bot that you're so convinced will work.

But if at the end of the day that you can automate these with spindle grippers, you're 12 grand in per machine, as opposed to if you're automating with the co bot, even without an integrator, still paying a grand for the workholding. And then, you know, 45 for the robot and. Who knows how much for the end effectors and so on.

Yeah. Yeah. To me as an owner, this is a pretty low risk experiment and if it works, awesome. If not. Okay. And with the warranty is like, okay, make sure you try it out in time. Well, thanks so much. Really appreciate it. Fun story, Michael, you are making your passion, you're living, you know, you're, you're able to create jobs for other Pope.

I think you're advancing the American manufacturing and just love what you're doing. So well, thanks so much. I'm really honored to be here. I love the show. I'm an avid listener and I'm just super glad to have the opportunity and chat. And hopefully, you know, one of these days at IMTS or some conference, we run into each other.

I'm thinking you should have a booth at the Paperless Parts Power event next year, because the shop owners, we had hundreds of folks this year. And these are the innovators. These are the people who are bringing innovative technology in house. And I think if they saw that little machine I saw you setting up, you know, that you're bringing to IMTS, and it's a two day event.

So they would have a lot of time to get. Hands on and look at it. So whether it's IMTS or at power, yeah, look forward to meeting you. Yeah, for sure. And send us the power details. Okay, we'll do. All right. If you've been listening again, this is so much fun for me because this is what I love to do is chat with shop owners, entrepreneurs who are making it happen.

Who are. Taken their passion, their dream, making it reality, and I think what Michael's created here is something that I definitely would give a shot at RAPID. So, I guess that's my, my takeaway for you. What's stopping you from looking at automation in your machine and trying out a simple concept like this?

Until next time, keep those spindles turning and those lasers cutting. Have a great day. Thanks for listening to the Job Shop Show Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please be sure to subscribe so future episodes are automatically downloaded directly to your device. You can also leave an honest rating and review on Apple podcasts.

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