Industrial Talk is speaking with Samson Olanrewaju, Technical Application Engineer – Fictiv about “CNC Machining Complex Components”. Get the answers to your “CNC Manufacturing” questions along with Samson's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get 10% off your first order at Fictiv.com by entering INDUSTRIALTALK! Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

SAMSON OLANREWAJU'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samson-olanrewaju-34002286/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fictiv/

Company Website: https://www.fictiv.com/

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM: https://www.neom.com/en-us

AI Dash: https://www.aidash.com/

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

The post Samson Olanrewaju with Fictiv appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk we're onsite at IoT Solutions World Congress and talking to Dr. Gunter Beitinger and Petra Monn with Siemens  about “Digital Transformation Value to the Enterprise “.  Get the answers to your “Digital Transformation” questions along with Gunter and Petra's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2022. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

DR. GUNTER BEITINGER'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gunter-dr-beitinger/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/siemens/

Company Website: https://www.siemens.com/global/en.html

PETRA MONN'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-monn-19a85b79/

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

digital transformation, factories, digitalization, siemens, petra, people, iot, industrial, shop floor, software, problem, industry, technology, solutions, logic, enterprise, bucket list, armas, world, insights

00:00

Industrial Talk is brought to you by Armis. Yes, you were in the digital transformation game. Yes, you need to find trusted companies, trusted individuals to help you along with that journey. The Armis platform delivers complete asset intelligence, you know what that means, insights into your connected assets, you're in the digital transformation game, you have to have that insights into what is connected, go to armis.com find out more, you will not be disappointed. Also Industry IoT Consortium. At industrial talk, we always talk about education, we always talk about collaboration, we are always talking about innovation. And if you're a business that has any desire to be resilient to the future, you need to be able to educate, collaborate, as well as innovate with other industry professionals. That's a must. Industry IoT consortium brings that all together, you need to be a part of this community, you need to be connected with these leaders that are all apart the industry IoT consortium, go out to ai consortium.org. Find out more again, you will not be disappointed, you're just going to be happy. Hey there, and welcome to industrial talk. And you're saying to yourself, Scott, where's that jazzy intro that you normally have for your podcast? Well, this is a series. This is a unique series of interviews that were conducted on site at the IoT solutions World Congress in Barcelona. Excellent event, excellent venue, incredible professionals all focused on solving problems, helping us navigate these waters of digitization, and it's all happening at the IoT solutions World Congress, you need to put that on your bucket list. So with that said, let's get on with the interview.

02:02

To experts, Siemens as a company, we're going to be talking to Gunther, and Petra, specifically around the value to the enterprise with digital transformation. As you guys are all caught off guard, you didn't realize that's how I roll it. You guys do it. You have to Yeah, good time. Good. Good conference. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Just just yeah. Thank

02:31

you. Thank you for inviting us good. Yes. We already enjoy it here. The conference, walking over the floor and looking what is new.

02:41

Actually, it's also very nice that it's in Barcelona.

02:44

That no problem, isn't it? That's not That's not a bad thing. It's, it's a plus I keep on telling everybody. Yeah, once you come to Barcelona, make sure that you make this part of your bucket list to come to this particular conference. But yeah, Barcelona, we're going to a secret bar tonight. You want to know about it. Secret one, I see a hush hush. I'll share it with you guys if you want to, because I will. That's how I roll their toe. But we're gonna. So for the listeners out there. Let's start with you, Petra, and give us a little background. How long have you been with Siemens? And what's your background? As a professional?

03:20

Well enough to many years actually enough? Been a customer of Siemens before that that's been working in the aluminum industry? Oh, yes. Really? Yeah, we were flat rolling aluminum for can makers to make a lot of cans for beer, and other beverages, of course. So I've been a customer of Siemens, and then I changed sides. We recruited you. Well, I sort of wanted to know, you know, how they're all doing that. And then they told me I should try to actually unify a little bit of their portfolio because they're having lots of software. Since around about 10 years, they've been investing heavily in software, and they want to unite that software portfolio with their hardware portfolio. And that's a challenge.

04:09

Yeah, you're sort of soft pedaling. It's a big challenge. And it is something that has to happen in the world of digital transformation. If digital transformation is the sort of this solution to make you more efficient, create a business that's far more resilient, be able to give you insights, all of that good stuff. You need. need people like you to be able to make that happen because apparently you execute what about you? Gunther? Give us a background. Dr. Gunther?

04:36

Yeah, so yeah, I'm was research collaborator in a university there is where the doctor comes from, and now I'm since Yeah 99 with Siemens, but in different roles and in different areas. I started with Siemens, automotive, then Siemens healthcare. And then now so large drives and now with digital industries. Yeah, I've worked in The US and Mexico and also in other countries. So now I'm making stronger digital transformation.

05:08

Yeah, mad streak right now. But one of the questions I do have, and when we start talking about digital transformation, let's say I'm a manufacturer, okay? I'm Scott manufacturer. And and I hear about all this digital transformation stuff, everybody say, Hey, you got to do there, got it, you got IoT, you got the edge, you've got thin edge, you've got far edge, you've got near edge, you've got all of this stuff. And it's, it's just this lexicon of just things and all I care about is making my business more efficient. Getting some insights, and I don't want a headache. And I need to trust somebody to do it. Because all of a sudden, IoT for I O T is like this miscellaneous file now. And it includes everything doesn't include my laundry, but it does include everything else. Money never know. Sure, come next year, and Scott, we're going to be dealing with your laundry, IoT. So how do you how do you approach someone with the with the fact that this is the market that you navigate through? And how do you begin to instill this to Guntur? How do you instill some confidence in trust? Knowing that, yeah, you're the one.

06:23

First of all, because we are running our own factories, and we are using also our solutions in our factories. So this is what we also can show and demonstrate to our customers when they are visiting our factories. And yeah, by circumstances. Some of our factories are internationally also known as digital Lighthouse factories, and recognized by this also by the World Economic Forum. And as we are using our tools and implementing them, of course, we are able to develop them really, so that they are bringing the value to our customers.

07:09

Outside of the fact that I was pretty geeky about digital lighthouse. I like that word analogy, because I believe there are many out there that that we talked to use cases was like, hey, there's a new use case here. Here's a technology that is new, and we have this one. And then we created a new use case that apparently this is a problem. And we just sort of keep on going. But with Siemens, there's there's there's, there's real, it's, it's real, and I can me, I can say, hey, I want to go there, and I'm going to see it in action. Right?

07:45

Absolutely. And I think what it really adds value to all of this is really fast, we can not only talk about use cases and technologies, but we can also talk about what you need to make it happen. To implement it, we can really give some hints as to how high the efforts are, what kind of people you might be needing, and, and all the stuff that you need to think around. Yeah, you know, making the tap. And also,

08:10

you brought up another good point and we can sort of pull on that string just ever so briefly, is that there is a workforce component here. And there is a need to because this is so new outside of the fact there's a velocity that exists here with this technology. Yesterday, it was this and now today it's that and and the workforce itself has to have that, you know, upskill reskill, do we have the right people, how do we plan going forward? What is that going to look like? How do we begin to address that from a Siemens perspective? Because, again, you come to me and say, yep, digital transformation is going to create this business that's going to be more efficient, you're gonna see this you're going to do this you're going to be more resilient than whatever, but I can't find people what do we do with that?

09:01

Yeah. Now you have, how we address this with the staff we have on board and the other aspect was what you mentioned how we can find people Yeah. So, of course, we have to deal exactly with the same problems as anywhere in any any other company out there of why we are implementing these digitalization in this digital transformation as this is why it's called transformation. Of course, we have to think about our staff, our people and how to communicate this transformation to them. So from our point what we are doing is we have continuously communication with our people in our shop floor meetings, what they are going to expect what we are going to do and what we are going to address to stay competitive, to stay on the yeah ahead of technology and why we are doing Of course, we are offering all our staff rescaling and upskilling programs, as we are developing these technologies, and we are also imperiled developing rescaling and upskilling programs. And everyone, every every employee at Siemens has the possibility to log on our platform, which is called the solution platform and also the learning world where they are, can find their individual reskilling upskilling paths According to her, and his individual job profile. So for example, if you are a maintenance technician, and you would like to stay up to date ahead and be attractive for your employee, then you go into this learning world, you will find a path, a learning path individually for this career. And then it tells you what will be maybe expected from you in the future and how you can upskill yourself. So you have individually the possibility to create and to follow up, and you do it when you want. So also this is new ways of working you do it when you have the time you do it when you have the Yeah, yeah, when you would like to do it, because then also then when you are percepts, or when you have the perception, and this is how we address them.

11:48

Because that is excellent, you're absolutely spot on. I like that. Because the reality is, is that there's this velocity, this buzz, this thing that exists with in today's technology that is sped up fast, and therefore there is I can't see a time when, hey, I'm good. I'm all I'm all educated, I'm good to go. And it would seem to me, that is a continuous education, because there's going to always going to be some new technology, there's always going to be greater value in whatever is getting and it's going to we're going to roll it out. Petra, how did you sort of you're semi new, but you've come from the aluminum industry, that's a heavy duty manufacturing centric type of business. How did that that business deal with this digital transformation? Were they wrestling with it at that time? Well,

12:42

I, of course, it's a different type of manufacturing in aluminum. And so I would say they were probably a little bit behind Siemens also, because if you look at Siemens, as a company, it's a very engineering driven company. Of course,

12:57

a lot of companies are behind Siemens. So sure, if that's a problem,

13:05

totally, you could see that, you know, you would have all these very curious engineering driven people in the factories also. And now here comes a very special element that we have, with the digitalization of our own factories, it is that we can add even more purpose to what the people are doing. And putting in all this effort into digitizing our own factories, it is that they can actually help to make our own products better. So they have an extra purpose in what they are doing every day. They do not only make our factories better, but they help the solution providers that we have in house in Siemens who provide software for industry to make that software better. And so I think that adds a little extra spark in their little extra motivation, especially also to the already highly skilled workers and engineers in the factories. And it also adds obviously, a little bit more speed simply just because you're exposed to to higher pressure also or you want to you want to show off, you know, not only for your factory, but also towards the towards the solution provider.

14:14

So, go until we start talking about digital transformation. There's a lot of people talking about it. Yes, it is a word that is bantered back and forth. But I like the fact that you mentioned the need to bring value to the enterprise. In that process going to do is sit down with an organization can you say hey, let's take a steineke tiny step, move forward there. Or how do you how do you approach an organization to saying you need to do it let's bring value let's do it this way.

14:48

Yeah. As we are wanting to bring value to the digital transformation to digitalization, we are not coming from the technology. We are coming from the most pressing topics of our factories. So, we are going into our factories and together with them, we are working out what is the what are the most pressing topics and how can we how digitalization can support to solve these, and we cut out a piece of a maybe a bigger problem and make the life on the shop floor for the factories easier. And so, this is how value comes into the approach what mostly, we see is done wrongly that you address it by technology, hey, how about using Blockchain how to use edge technology and then what is the value now, you have to address it from the problem and and while you are really solving a problem together with the factories, you are leverage the motivation, the acceptance at the same time. So coming back to our people, and also the value is directly there. The next thing is if you are looking for solutions on the shop floor, and you do it in many different factories, you get a feeling of which solutions are scalable. So yeah, so you develop a solution, which can then be rolled out over the factories, and you multiply it and then digitalization has a much higher impact on the company. And while you are looking for such scalable solutions, so the step, bringing this to the market and have an even an enterprise impact while you are offering a solution, which is tested in your environment by a problem is then something which brings also value to the customers.

16:59

So one of the things that I've really, I can appreciate it, it seems that this IoT, this conference, there is a there's good and bad with a pandemic got it, I understand the bad, but the good. I've come to realize that there is a necessity to collaborate more, there's a necessity to be able to have greater conversations and what you just painted Gunther is said, we're going to sit down with your customer, we're not going to we're not going to say hey, here, this is the device you need this is this and and and you just sort of do this. No, you're there to have that dialogue to say, Okay, what is that pressing problem, we can slice it out. And then we can say, all right, it's gonna work, scale it, and then be able to create greater value, which is your ultimate effort. You don't want to just do something and say, Yeah, that's it, man. Good luck. That's a headache. And we know that there are a lot of legacy systems out there that fall into that category. So Petra, where do you see? Where do you see that going? I mean, I'm just telling you right now, two years ago, or three years, when we're when I was here last three years ago, maybe that's and then we hit the pandemic. So it's been four years. God, it's been three years. Yes. I just became older. Anyway, the conversation has changed so dramatically. I mean, it has to where it was like, Hey, we can put this device on this asset, and we can pull data. Now it's complete. That's like, yeah, that's, yeah, we can do that. But now let's start looking at the data, slicing the data, making sense out of the data, creating tactical recommendations. From here, where do you see it going? I mean, this, this is exciting. I don't have a future. What do you think it's going?

18:57

Yes, I think you're so first of all, yes, I think you're right. I mean, we've really shifted from a hive discussion into a, you know, sort of no nonsense discussion. So people are really working on many of these use cases, and they have the people that it takes for it. So where are they going? I think what we see now more and more is that we go away to be going to a very data driven logic. And that also means that we start to start to slowly shift a little bit away from that engineering driven logic logic, which is an if then logic where we think we can sort of control everything in that sequence. But to turn obviously, to statistically driven logic, some some start to call it AI and then go into all these algorithms and so on and so forth. So where we go into data clustering, and then really, you know, have all these these data scientists also on our shop floors, I'm looking into our data. So that is definitely something that I can be that I can see another thing that I believe is happening to is really this convergence of OT and it Oh, that's a huge, that's a whole nother topic. Yeah. So, so we were having all these people who were really, really good with all the machines and, you know, have their their very own programming logic in there. And now this programming logic from the from the machine level needs to fuse into the logic that we have in software. And that blink brings such a whole lot of changes we did, that's not just on a technical level, actually, that really also goes into how we're driving projects. Because software, people tend to have a lot shorter innovation cycles, they're, they're all working in that really HL mode. And that's something that from the hardware world, we don't know as well, because we are very used to hardware needing to really, you know, stand too many limits, and really stand up too many quality tests, and so on and so forth. So we are not used to put out into the world some piece of hardware, which is semi functional. Whereas we might bring some semi functional software onto the market, just because we can very quickly and very easily in short cycles improvement. So

21:21

that's, that's why when Microsoft launches a new update, they know that they're going to have bugs, and then that's already out there, whether they like it or not, they're going to have the user community saying that's not working. Hey, thank you very much. It's corrected now. You know, that's, that's the reality. And one last question to go into. This is all interesting, from my perspective, the reality is this available from the small to midsize businesses as well or is this just a, this whole digital transformation is only for the big boys and girls, and it's available for the small amount

21:55

that will be there, the whole digitalization aspect is nothing. Just for big enterprises. I would sometimes also name it, digitalization pushes lean to the limits. So you start from the shop floor, you implement smart solutions, small solutions, which make a great impact. Even a small algorithm who predicts maybe machine breaks down a few hours or a few hours before it really happens, brings a lot of value in small companies. It's very easy to deploy a very easy installed. And the big solutions, of course, installed over factory networks. Yep, that is then for enterprise companies.

22:47

All right. I gotta run off to another meeting that can you believe it? Well, yeah. And go on into the auditorium. You're gonna see me over there. And thank you for having us. So let's, let's for the listeners, how do I get a hold of you, Petra, talk to us. How do I how do I connect?

23:02

My name is Petra, mom. I'm looking forward to meet you.

23:05

That's right. That's M O N. N. And Dr. Gunther? How do they get ahold of you?

23:12

You can also find me on don't biting their nails.

23:17

You guys were fantastic. Thank you very much for saying yes. I enjoyed this conversation. Excellent job. All right, listeners, we're gonna wrap it up for today. This is day two, the end of day two, at the IoT solutions World Congress. It is an exceptional event. Put that on your calendar. And if you have any issues, comments or concerns about the contact information for your night, it's going to be at the industrial talk.com. And we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. So stay tuned, we will be right back. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network. All right, once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk. And as you can tell, we were broadcasting live from IoT solutions World Congress in Barcelona, what a great opportunity. It was a lot of fun. I gotta tell you to meet incredible professionals, why Cooter, Petra and others that are really focused in on solving problems making the future bright, for lack of a better term? All right. Put that on your bucket list. Yeah, why I now we're going to have all the contact information out on industrial documents. But we're also pulling together a just an ever expanding ecosystem of professionals like gouner and Petra, and others that are really focused in on delivering value, thinking differently. So please, support industrial talk, support the individuals that are out there, support the sponsors that make this happen, like Armis, like cap logistics, and please be that we're gonna have another great conversation from IoT solutions World Congress, so stay tuned.

The post Gunter Beitinger and Petra Monn with Siemens appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk we're onsite at DistribuTech 22 and talking to Sabine Erlinghagen, CEO Grid Software with Siemens  about “Grid Modernization and Powerful Solutions “.  Get the answers to your “Utility Grid” questions along with Sabine's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2022. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

SABINE ERLINGHAGEN'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/serlinghagen/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/siemens/

Company Website: https://www.siemens.com/global/en.html

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

grid operators, conversation, sabine, industrial, utility, software, people, grid, industry, consumers, absolutely, world, point, charging, solution, ev, logistics, talk, challenges, collaborate

00:04

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's get Hey, once

00:22

again, welcome to industrial talk, thank you very much for joining the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates you and I'm pointing right at you, you industry hero from around the world, you are bold, you are brave, you're daring greatly. You collaborate, you solve problems, you innovate. I think I've pretty much named them all off, and you're making my life and the lives of many from around the world a better place. Thank you very much. All right. Sabine, is in the hot seat, the company is seated. She is the CEO of grid solutions there. And I just have to give you a heads up. We were on site at distributech. And so this is the interview that happened there. Let's get back. Yeah, see this, this platform? I'm telling ya. It's an ever expanding industrial ecosystem of problem solvers and leaders? How about that, put that in your bank? All right. Again, I want to make sure that you understand this is a series. And this is a series that we were very fortunate to be on site at distributech. And it was a great, great event. And if you're in the utility space, or energy space, or digital transformation space, this is a this is an event that you need to put on your calendar for next year. There's a lot to see a lot of collaboration, a lot of people are just, you know, they're, it's, it's a really exciting time. If you're in the utility world, boo. There's a lot of big thinking going on there. Before we get into that interview, we are brought to you industrial Talk is brought to you by capital logistics, and IoT world now capital logistics i i love the conversation that is around supply chain. And you know, as well as I do, that you need a trusted resource company, that person that can help you with your logistics challenges. If it's big, no big deal. If it's not no big deal, Cap logistics, have you covered, go to cap logistics.com Find out more you will not be disappointed in. And I've had the great honor of working with IoT world. And they never disappoint you go on to IoT dash world.com. And they put together some great content. Because we're all about learning. We're all about growing, we're all about educating. And as I'm telling you right now, the way the industry is working or going it is fast, and you need to keep current. And you need to listen to people like like Sabine, who have just the fingers on the pulse of what's taking place, go out to IoT Dash World. Find out more again, great company, great people, all right, on site. This is this was a great extravaganza. And so my background is in utilities. I was a transmission lineman, many of you know that I was, I dealt with a lot of renewables anyway. I was a kid in a candy store. And then when somebody likes a beam comes up, and I get the opportunity to be able to talk to her about the challenges that are happening within the grid like we take it for granted as consumers, we just sort of take it for granted that when I come into a room, I flip a lightbulb that's on and everything's fine. I don't think beyond that. Well, I do just because I was in the utility industry. However, we have some really unique opportunities and challenges that companies like Siemens, and Sabine and her team are really addressing, and really trying to find that solution. That really, in essence, we don't know anything about it, right? We're just consumers. But it's an exciting time. Now you're gonna hear some noise. It's going to be a little noisy back there because we're right on site on the floor, and just having a great conversation about what's happening with Siemens. So enjoy the conversation because I certainly did. I used to be it's been great to be able to run you down. Lucien, who's standing right in front of me. He's the one that has been burning all the calories. Try to find you. Not me.

04:31

It's been busy times and a lot of great conversations here anti tech. So yeah,

04:35

so you had a good conference. Conference? Absolutely. This is your first time here.

04:41

It is. It is I just counted. i It's my 10th Inlet, which is the European equivalent. It's my first tech. Can you believe that? No.

04:49

Well, this is my first time to you know, my background in utilities. It's like a kid in a candy store here because there was a company out there that had a I pulled top switcher and I said, Are you kidding me? Let me go look at it. And I'm touching it. And I'm going, Wow, that's fantastic. stupid stuff. Amazing. All right, so you're here, Siemens is here, got a great presents got a great solution. Talk to us a little bit about that product launch that you mentioned ever. So briefly on May 5, talk to us.

05:20

Absolutely. And it's actually not only a product launch, we reveal our strategy and an entire suite of products. We call that the grid software suite. And that goes from planning to operations and maintenance of grids. And the Tweak to it really is that we think it from A to Z. So plan to operate, maintain.

05:45

What was the sort of that? You know, genesis of that conversation? Because you're one of the challenges that I see here is, I need if I was if I was a utility, if I was just whatever, I'm looking for a trusted resource, a person, something that I know that I need to do this, I need to venture into this new, Brave New World, but I need somebody to be able to sort of bring us through, was that part of the thinking behind it and saying, hey, somebody needs to be getting it. We need we need it all the way through?

06:19

Absolutely, I think what we realized is that, it is a very, very tough challenges that utilities and especially distribution and transmission companies are facing, because that transformation is nothing that anybody has ever seen before. So the that challenge, we feel that by and large, the industry is leaving our customers a little bit too much alone. So we said, we got to embrace the point of view of our customers.

06:51

I gotta interrupt, who's a customer in that conversation.

06:54

And the customer in that conversation? Is any grid operator?

06:57

Got it? Got it go continue. I was struggling. I'm a customer. But I'm not a grid operator.

07:02

Yeah, no. Thanks for asking. So for grid operators, I think we're as an industry not yet doing a good enough job of helping grid operators to maneuver through that transition, which is an exponential growth case of Drs. So facing that as exponential growth, I think the human brain can cope with exalted curves, right? I mean, we've seen that in COVID, you can just lose time, because if you lose time, it's already too late. Yes. So the same situation is the one that we're facing with what the grids need to cope with. And here we go. I mean, we are thinking silos, we're thinking point solutions. Here, you have a planning app, here you have an operations, and here you have that, and then we leave it to the grid operator to stitch that together. And that's really hard work. Because it's overlapping data is not flowing properly. It's hard to connect. And so that's, that's a problem we are solving for them.

08:08

You've touched on a number of points. And I think that I have to be honest, we have to talk about here on industrial talk, you know, modernization of the grid, but you're the first person that actually said, Hey, there's the customer, there's this human component, these are the, the grid operators, the the ISOs, whatever you might have. And they're the ones that have to sort of make it work because we consumer wants to flip on the light. There it is, it works. And we don't want to have the interruptions. And we're pretty binary when it comes to that, like good.

08:46

And we want to have an EV charging, we want to have a solar, we have one, battery storage, we want to have an energy community, we want to know how much we consume what we can contribute to climate, like mitigating climate change. Yeah. And

09:02

my ear bleeds when I have these conversation, because my background is sort of old school. And it was sort of that centralized generation. That's an easy model. And the utilities are very good at that. Because it's been doing it for 100 years, Siemens has been a part of that. It's just that's what it is. So I have generation of transmission. I have substations I have distribution, and so on and so forth. Now we're talking system operators, having to take solar panels, battery, EVs, and be a part of that whole mix, and then be able to do that. And that's a technology conversation to

09:39

mean Did you know it's 7x the growth of the quantity 20 37x that's exponential?

09:47

No. But that's, that's frightening to

09:50

it totally is and I mean, the transmission system operators already have a challenge because it takes that to distribution. I mean, connecting those DVRs and admitting them planning for it getting the flexibility, getting the inertia, right?

10:07

These are really sophisticated conversations. And if you have any appreciation for the love that we as consumers are, we take it for granted that our power is our power. We don't really mean if I'm a customer, I don't think about. I don't think about that. I'm very simplistic, but there is. No, you're absolutely right. It should be invisible. It should be just business as usual. The risk I see is that if we don't get this, right, if we don't, you know, partner with companies like Siemens, to make it right. If we do it wrong, the consumer sort of doesn't like that.

10:54

I mean, you will have to care, then. I mean, that's like going back to the middle age where you get get to know at which point in time you can switch something on. And I mean, middle aged, wasn't switching something on but

11:04

but if you were at that spot on the point, it is, but then we start talking about I look at it, there's a there's a there's a messaging component to it, right? Because there's a lot of incredible things that your company, people in your company others are doing that is just sort of like the unsung heroes. They're having these collaborative conversations. And it's, and they're discussing,

11:33

I would say it's the grid operators are the unsung heroes. I mean, it is really perfect. It's not us.

11:41

Well, I gotta admit, I can appreciate the pragmatic approach, because the grid operators are going to always say, hold it, I still gotta deliver power. And it's got to be reliable, and I can't just incur a bunch of costs. So it's got to be, you know, reasonable and cost. And it's got to be done safely. Right? I got to do that. Because if I don't do that, then I fail. So it's good. But are you finding that the necessity is to strive to collaborate with these, these grid operators and bring them in and say, We're going down that road?

12:18

Absolutely. And I mean, if you close the doors, I mean, grid operators will admit that they're actually not following through with connection requests of key hours. So this is slowing down the energy transition. And that the partnership is about helping to accelerate the energy transition, helping to make it easy helping to be fast and nimble to adapt, or oh, there's EVs coming up here, charging poets coming up here, more solar introduced here, or there's a kind of a big car park with a charging being built there. So God to be much more flexible than we had been in the past. And if you translate that to the technology world, then software has got to be the solution. Because software, yes, things. It does help you to operate grids closer to them limits mean, so far, we have physical limits, where you have this buffer of portion in

13:14

there. Yes, that's right. And overbuilt. Over built.

13:17

Yeah. Because you got to be reliable. Yeah. But I mean, there was somebody in a utility A while ago, who told me like, oh, oh, this is so we can kind of reduce that buffer and capacity. And then a colleague of yours said, like, look, we used to fly planes with four engines in the past. Now we fly them with tools. Right, right. We're still feeling safe. And that software, it's like, the instrumentation, the precision, the transparency about that we are still good enough to fly. And that's what we need to bring to power grids. It's the software that gives you the transparency of how close are you statically and dynamically to your limits? How much more can the power grid take and investing in software's? There's so much better return on the investment than just adding capacity and copper and bigger transport? That's right, right. It's so much faster. So getting the software right, for me is the key to facilitate and accelerating that energy transition integrates.

14:30

How do you have these conversations with the you know, the system operator over here and a system operator in this service territory over there? And each one has a different story. They're in a different place in this journey? I think there's a recognition that, yes, it's going to happen. I hear it. I understand. I talked to other colleagues, it's going to do it. How do we take it across the board like and have some sort of consistent messaging right there and saying, Okay, do this

14:59

and Think you're absolutely right, everybody starts from a different position. So not only the grid topology is different, the D ER or EB charging, status is different. But also the IT and OT topology of every one is totally different. So the art is to. That's what agility is about. Like when we talk about agility, it's about being able to make small steps, make them fast, and iterate. So it's, that's why our software suite is modular. Modularity enables you to go Agile, and to not replace, and total ADMS and derms. In one goal, if your project, please don't risk. And I mean, we've been doing that over the years. But the recipe is, how can I go live was one thing. Next thing,

15:56

I love the incremental approach, it allows the human side, like me, put my, my arms around it, achieve some sort of success, say, I got it. Okay, I'm learning, I'm walking. Now, let's, let's start to scale a little bit, let's talk, let's target this versus that right now. And be able to do it that

16:20

way. The whole I mean, a, it delivers value much faster, because you can do something very fast. So the second thing is, I mean, it's a human transformation, you keep emphasizing. So it's about people with habits of working with a system for so long, now need to change to work with new software. So you want to give those people the chance to get those new habits. So get them touch the software really fast. Get them kind of learned. Like it like we learned something on the smartphone, right? I mean, you you learn it intuitively, instead of five months of training after a five year project, and it's kind of Big Bang, see your it's not how transformations are being done.

17:08

See, you're touching on so many things. I believe that true adoption has to come with simplicity. If if you create friction in this, whatever this journey is, I'm not I'm just naturally going to not want to be a part of it. It's too hard. And you also spoke on that, that cultural, that utility, cultural mindset, that legacy thinking we've done it forever, this is how we've done it, we've perfected this.

17:34

And you know what? It's that's super interesting, because you see, kind of different types of people coming in now. And those conversations are super intriguing. Because I mean, a you have 80 people sitting next to what we would call Ott, right. So they come from different backgrounds. And what we find is, if we discuss our principles and software and how we build our software, how we deploy our software, it actually resonates with both. So it's not the conflict of I win, you win, or I push you out, you push me out. But it's something that serves both needs, and for good reasons. So it's the best of all worlds. Yeah. And it has the advantage of the reliable reliability of OT, but the flexibility of it, and the speed of it.

18:30

See, I think, you know, I point this out, the pandemic did a couple of things. One, we understand the bad stuff, got it bad, bad, bad, bad. But the other thing that I thought was pretty good about the pandemic is that it it quickly identified the necessity for us to collaborate, and to be willing to collaborate and to be insane. I don't have all the answers. I know I need to go down this road. But I don't have it. So I need to collaborate. And that's what you just pointed it out. OT it, that collaboration when when and and that realization that yeah, it just has to happen.

19:07

And then those, those conversations are real fun. I mean, like I can imagine when we bring everybody in the room is like sometimes in the beginning, there's a little bit of the reservation,

19:17

because it never happened before it never happened. And then when people are leaving

19:21

the room, it's like, wow, I mean, like, sometimes we get kind of that those teams afterwards calling their CEOs and said like, yes, this was like, they never experienced that it can actually not be against each other but with it each other and it really to like thinking things entirely new.

19:44

I think it's an exciting time. I really in a positive way. Yes, people are going to skin, their knees and bump their heads and all of that stuff and it's going to happen however, I still think that there's this momentum that's happening. then it is going to happen. And either you participate, either you'll part of the solution, or because of the velocity of this, you're going to be left behind and you don't want to be in that room. You don't we won't. You Oh, that's what you guys do. You do it all the time. I enjoyed this conversation. You know what it was well worth the wait. Thank you. Yes. How do people get a hold of you? Just got to? I mean, if they want to get some more information, where do they go?

20:30

Just ping me on LinkedIn.

20:32

I mean, that's the way to do it. This is

20:34

where it is man, I will have all of Sabines contact information out on industrial talks have been your fantastic. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk. Once again, we are broadcasting from distributech 22. And as you can tell by Sabine it is a, I don't know a collaborative environment that solving problems, excellent, excellent environment, please put this on your bucket list because you will not be disappointed to get to meet people like to be alright. Thank you. Once again, we will be right back.

21:03

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

21:11

All right, once again, thank you very much for joining industrial talk, remember, go out to industrial talk.com And you need to connect with somebody and you will not be disappointed. This was an incredible conversation. And, and I mean, there's more there's so much activity happening within the utility, energy space. And it requires people like Sabine team seems to be able to navigate those waters trusted individuals to navigate those waters because it's important stuff. So go out to industrial talk.com. Remember, we were on site distributech 22. And we're going to have some more incredible conversations coming to you from this event. It again, put it on your bucket list, you will not be disappointed. Join us. We are creating this ecosystem, expanding ecosystem of leaders like you. So please reach out to me go to industrial talk.com You will not be disappointed. All right. Be bold, be brave, daring, greatly. Hanging out with people like Sabine team Siemens, be bold, be brave. They are greatly you know what you're going to do? Change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.

The post Sabine Erlinghagen: CEO Grid Software with Siemens appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk we're talking to Dave Evans, Co-Founder and CEO of Fictiv about “Product Development Manufacturing Speed Solutions”.  Get the answers to your “Product Development” questions along with Dave's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2022. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

DAVE EVANSS CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evansda11/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fictiv/

Company Website: https://www.fictiv.com/

PODCAST VIDEO:

OTHER PODCASTS, BLOGS AND VIDEOS OF DAVE:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-journey-from-traditional-to-digital-manufacturing/id1475280105?i=1000506232734

https://www.augmentedpodcast.co/guests/dave-evans/

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7mqqRraB8HBtAVrouXlQmk

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/supply-chains-are-on-the-cusp-of-digital-transformation

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveevans/2021/11/23/saving-the-supply-chain-wont-be-sexy/?sh=dd712976a1f8

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveevans/2021/05/03/2021-state-of-manufacturing-digital-transformation-is-the-key-to-winning-in-the-next-normal/?sh=66a753384405

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-YsWlv8eVU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DTmoI2up4A

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Fictiv, scott, build, supply chain, quality, supplier, world, industrial, people, product, manufacturing, ford, engineer, part, pandemic, wheels, dave evans, manufacturers, industry, solution

00:04

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go. Alright, once again, welcome to industrial talk the, let's say ever expanding industrial ecosystem that is dedicated to you, the industrial professional solvent province. Yes, collaborating, absolutely innovating you back here, industrial talk. We're featuring incredible professionals that embody those qualities each and every day in the hot seat. Speaking of which, his name is Dave Evans. He is founder, co founder excuse me, of a company called Fictiv Fictiv FICT i v. And you know, we're talking about some of the challenges that are happening in the supply chain and what can we do for new product development? I'm telling you right now, that Fictiv platform, stellar let's get going.

01:13

So

01:15

in my past, I guess it's the past Yeah, it is, it's the past, the way I used to do product development as you you know, you design it, and then you'd have to go find some sort of company to be able to develop it and, and as as time goes on, as time went on, that you just keep on working at it and designing it and then try to come back and see what happens and then refining it. There's a lot of work that goes into this, this whole product development. And I think today, once you'll hear from Dave, that the future in new product development and supply chain,

01:52

it's bright, and I know that we're we're struggling right now with supply chain stuff, but I'm telling you right now, team, Fictiv Dave, his team absolutely got their fingers on the pulse of of a real solution. That if it's transformative, it's transformative. And I not It's not hyperbole, I really enjoyed the conversation. And it's all doable. Because of all the technology and the innovation that exists out there a couple of things.

02:19

One, again, we're going to be at IoT solutions World Congress, this is a Barcelona broadcasting live. So make sure that you catch all of those great conversations from industry leaders, companies that are truly solving problems, desire to collaborate, absolutely their IoT solutions, World Congress, we're also going to be up in Dallas. And that is for distribute tech, and we're going to be talking utilities, energy, and all the solutions that are around there, we're going to be broadcasting live there. And then we're going to also be in Chicago digital manufacturing Summit. And the same thing we're going to be doing, we just got word that we're going to be at IMTS, that is going to be in September, that's a huge manufacturing platform. So my call out to you.

03:06

If you are there, and you want to be able to talk about what you're doing, and you want to do it in person, and you're going to be at that conference there. You got to start, knock on the door, come see me. And if I have you down there, I'm gonna be pushing this all day long. But I would love to be able to have the conversation and have a conversation with you talking about what you are doing. So that's it. Another thing that I want to make sure that you guys are aware of we're starting the campaign called we are industry and and if you're looking out on video, I have this hash tag on my shirt there. And it really is just sort of a celebration of the human component of industry, industry as humans, right. It is made up of people who have a passion to try to solve problems. It puts food on the table it creates meaningful work for a number of people around the world. And so this campaign celebrates that and it's we are industry hashtag. We're going to put it out there on on LinkedIn and just hopefully be able to highlight those human stories of people solving problems helping people succeed, because that's what we're all about. Right here. Education, collaboration, and innovation. All right on to the interview. So Fictiv reached out and you go out to stack art. It's fantastic. And

04:30

it is just a wonderful conversation of how this platform accesses a number of of capable manufacturers to come up with great product development solutions, deals with the logistics, all of the components associated with that so that you new company, existing company, what you do is you just say hey, Fictiv. I've got this product, and then they work hand in

05:00

glove with you to come up with the right product and then be able to sort of begin mass producing it. It's a fabulous, fabulous solution. So you're going to tons of information that you're going to get gleaned from this particular conversation. So, enjoy the conversation. Again, Dave, thank you very much for joining industrial talk. How're you doing today? Doing great. How are you doing? Scott, I thank you for your flexibility. We had a bit of a burp up last week listeners and he was very kind and gracious and said, Okay, no problem. So here we are, we were able to good all good, all good. Yeah, I see. I like that. I like that flexibility. Real good. All right. Before we get into the topic, let's talk a little bit about your background. Give us a little background on who you are. Yeah, let's do it. So I'm sitting here in sunny California, in San Francisco. And I'm a mechanical engineer by training. So

05:51

founder and CEO of Fictiv and prior to that I started my, my world in the automotive industry. So I was at Ford building infotainment systems, so dashboards of cars called vehicle bucks. This was kind of 2020 12. So what we were trying to do was basically put, think about tablets, iPhones, iPads, Android devices into a car, you know, almost a decade ago. And the challenge was really its development cycles. So we took a lot of this time from Ford, my training as a mechanical engineer from Stanford, and saying, how can you help basically put better consumer electronics into a vehicle? How do you shorten development cycles to really make that happen?

06:34

But then how do you also make it easier to bring products to market? So you know, what we'll talk about the company, I think we'll get into the problems we've seen supply chain. But really, this comes from, you know, a decade ago, looking at how products are designed and developed in an automotive setting, and saying that to be a better way, Scott, and, and I wish we'd made more improvement in 10 years, but I think that the future is even brighter ahead of us. So we'll dive into all that I'm sure. Yeah, it's I love, I love the emphasis on speed. Because I know for me, personally, I expect things faster. Now, you know, I expect delivery of whatever quicker, right? And it's just a modification in my expectation DNA. And I think, across the board, I think what's crazy is, as a consumer, as you start using an Amazon or I use DoorDash, to get food delivered to me, right, I click a button and Uber comes, it's not like a taxi, and you call and you wait for it to come or you know that you had to go to the local store, go through five different shelves to find that, you know, pencil that you like, it's just everything's immediate in a consumer world. So then you come into your business world, wherever you're working. And you're back to like Excel spreadsheets and faxing forms to vendors and manufacturing, and like having to get on a plane and go to Vietnam to fix an issue. And you're like, wait, but in my consumer world, I can just order you know, that device. And and, or I can get a taxi, just, you know, an Uber directly to me, do I want to an SUV or a black car, or I just want to Toyota, you know, Prius to show up. But then you come to the industrial world. And it's like, nothing's happened for decades. And so that was my experience, being a hardware engineer at Ford building infotainment systems. I was like, Man, this is a mismatch and you know, speed was the emphasis. But then what you've learned is actually it's quality. Because speed without quality is nothing. But quality without speed is actually like, well, you know, if I wait two months for something, and it's the highest quality, I didn't get any learning. So we started with speed, but then quality had to become table stakes. And you know, that that's the that's really the emphasis that what we'll get into as we peel back the onion here, but definitely started with speed. Yeah, and and I think you're, I think that's an important component. I mean, I'm just I expect things faster. I just, I don't I don't have the patience like I used to, and maybe it's because I'm an old and crotchety son of a gun. But it's, it's the reality of business, especially today and that window of opportunity, right? If I'm able to work with Fictiv and say, I got this idea. Here's the design, let's get it rolling. And press that because the old way or no, even today, it still works the same way where it takes a long time. Give us a little sort of rundown on on the process. Yeah, for sure. Let's let's lay that process out. Yeah, I think so. Let's go back to that example. So I'm at Ford. I want to build a new vehicle Buck dashboard. How do you do it? Okay, I got an idea. I want to do some amount of you know, put an iPad in that you bring with you. Okay, you go to your CAD station we use CATIA, you're going to 3d model and design this

10:00

From there, you have a physical, or you have a digital design of what you want to get done. Maybe you have some requirements for what that part or, or mechanism looks like. And you have that. And now you got to get a physical form of that meet, you got to build a prototype, we call this whole thing, new product development and PD. So in my Ford way, which not much has really changed, I would say in a decade was you would have kind of three options, you would go to your internal machine shop prototyping shop, wherever it's a Ford has a whole facility that's dedicated to this. That's option one. Option two is maybe I call it my tier one supplier, I call Magnus I called Dana call, I call someone I say, hey, tier one supplier go make this prototype for me.

10:48

And, and you use that tier one or tier two. And then there's a third option of hey, I'm gonna go a little bit rogue that I know Scott's local prototyping shop down the street from me. And Scott and I have a relationship we met at a trade show. And I'm, I'm just going to call up my buddy Scott and and have him build this. And so what I found at Ford was my internal shop had a backlog, that was way too long. And I was never prioritized. It was always too busy. The tier one shop, they wanted to make a million of something. And I said, Hey, build this one mechanism for this iPad, and they're like, I'm not busy enough. This is only 50 grand or, or whatever, I don't want to do it. And then I found myself as a mechanical engineer, I'm great at thermodynamics and fluids and all these things, having to build relationships with Scott's basically all these local direct relationships. And so yeah, I could get speed maybe from Scott's you know, local shop.

11:46

But like, Scott, you want to know how I bumped up the queue in your shop, I brought a six pack of beer. Not that I was gonna send hundreds of 1000s of dollars to your machine shop. I've literally I'd fly there I drive it. Hey, Scott, I know you love Guinness man, here's a six pack of Guinness, can you take me to the to the queue?

12:07

It's all crazy, right? So it is not it's yeah, it's like this is the way that the industrial world runs is it's relationship driven. It's some, it's some local, and it's primarily offline. It's low sets of tools. And so when we looked at the space, you know, I'm at Ford, and with my co founders, also my brother, Nate. And I'm like, Nate, this isn't just my problem at Ford, like every design engineer that I know, has the same thing of internal, a tier one supplier that they build relationships. Meanwhile, you know, Lyft and Ubers. Coming out, I can stay in someone's house with Airbnb, you know, there's all this what we, you know, Cloud is going on, that's things are transitioning. And I was like, Nate, there has to be a better way of not just relationships in the industrial world, where we can do this. And so what we set out to build, you know, almost nine years ago, so almost a decade ago, now, Scott was we said, hey, let's find all of these manufacturers in the world that have the best quality, we're going to vet them. And then we're going to find idle machine time at any of these factories. And we will allow engineers to order custom mechanical products, high quality products from this pre vetted network of basically Scott's machine shops of of all of these factories around the world. And this was just an idea back in 2013, right? And we said, well, if we did that, could the engineer speed up their development cycle? Remember speed at high high quality? Yeah, yeah. And could we drive more volume to the Scott's manufacturing plants all over the world? So kind of these two thesis of better for Scott because he's getting more work sent to him from like Ford, better for Dave as the engineer, because he can order things just like he does on on Amazon or Uber or wherever. And we said, Wow, that that'd be pretty cool. And so what we call this is a digital manufacturing ecosystem. That basically like we we digitize this ecosystem of manufacturers, to allow an engineer or a supply chain professional out of Ford, to order custom mechanical products from a pre vetted network of of machine shops. And there's a whole bunch of cool stuff that goes on there to make that happen. But it's it's really this basis of a of a distributed network, idle capacity, and really speed and quality. So I, Dave, now, all I have to go to is a platform just like Uber, or Airbnb, whatever, and be able to, in that interaction, find

14:49

a manufacturer with idle capacity that has the qualities already been vetted. You know, yeah, that's great. And be able to

15:00

create that dialogue, that relationship that is so important and begin compressing that time, but in it and still maintain quality, is that right? Totally, what I would adjust for you is like, Well imagine the scarf, what I did was, I just gave you the we have 250 of these partners globally. But now you still have to build relationships with them. I'm not actually helping you as a design engineer, or a supply chain professional. In the same way, it's like imagine if you ordered Uber, and you personally had to vet every car, or you had to have a relationship with everybody there, that wouldn't be much help. So actually, what we do is, we are your manufacturer of record Fictiv. Meaning if you're that supply chain professional, or they're you're buying apart from Fictiv. I just don't own any machines, but I'm accountable for the price. I'm accountable for the quality of that product. I'm accountable for the pre vetting and management of that network. So basically, what I'm doing is, Hey, Scott, I'm going to guarantee for you the fastest speed at the highest quality, but I don't own machines, but I have a whole group of people, you know, an entire quality department that vets all these manufacturers is boots on the ground for you checking your parts before they come out. And you want to know what we've made 19 million parts to date through the system. So like, You think we're good at this. I've done it almost 20 million times. And, and but we are your manufacturer of records. So it's not like you have to vet all of these ones individuals even better. Yeah, to me, it makes me feel warm and fuzzy. Now,

16:38

if I came to you and I have a budget constraint, right, it's like, here it is, right here. You work with me on that 200%. What I think about here is, how do you give an engineer or a supply chain professional choice? Meaning like, there's always three aspects, you're trying to do speed, which is a schedule driven quality, which is like something really hard to have to go to space or a medical device, or price, you have a budget. And so from there, think of this triangle, you're moving around into which one do you want? And so let's say you have a budget constraint. Great. We'll build that overseas for you. We have an entire team in Asia, it's a lower cost region, maybe the maybe it takes an extra three days to ship it. Oh, you have a lightning hot project, you got a trade show coming up needs to be there tomorrow. Great. We're gonna build this thing. You're in Charlotte. So we're gonna go build it in Atlanta for you like pretty close? Overnight it directly to you'll have it there on Friday. Oh, hey, you have the highest quality, you're in aerospace. But all of your manufacturers are capacity? Well, we actually have a medical grade supplier that can do the same level of quality requirements that has available capacity. And maybe you don't need that certification. Okay, great. Let's just leverage another supplier from another industry with available capacity to get to that quality need. Oh, you have a quality requirement. Great. These all have certifications of 1345 and medical as 9100 and aerospace. We all know that's pre vetted for you. So think of this as like, what I what I like to tell folks is think of this as like your sandwich shop. You know, your show up there. Oh, I want the sourdough roll. I don't want the you know, peppered crusted turkey with Havarti. And I want to avocado on it. Okay, great. There's a primo sandwich, and we'll build it for you, whatever, whatever you need. Scott, do you

18:37

know me as a user of your solution and platform part of the ecosystem whatever it might be?

18:45

Do I get an opportunity to sort of look at maybe the

18:51

the manufacturers or do I just say hey, here it is. I've got this budget constraint I'm looking for this type of quality and I'm and I needed in this time and just allow Fictiv team Fictiv just to come up with a the right solution for me. Personally, I'm lazy, I don't want to get into the details. I just want the delivery of what I want. So I'd say we have we have to, to kind of like personalities that come in. We have the Scots you describe I'm a lazy give me what I want. Yeah. We we define quality, as conformance to requirements.

19:28

It's always a good one. What is quality? Everyone's like, I don't know what quality quality is conformance to requirements. So if you come in Scott, and you say I want this product at the highest quality, what that translates effective is I need to make sure that every requirement can is conforming in the part that comes back to me. So then the question is the old school or traditional ways like I want to control the conformance aspect meaning like, I want to pick the supplier, I want to be on site. I want to go see it. And what I'd ask you is like, Well, why do you want to do that? Do you think you're

20:00

I'm better at controlling that quality than I am like, our entire livelihood. 19 million parts is controlling, you know, we can conformance to requirements. So hey, maybe maybe Scott, you as an engineer, you've produced maybe 5000 parts in your career? Yeah, I've done 19 million. And we've done it at the highest quality. And so it always takes a little bit of trust, like any relationship, you know, where, where you got to show it. And so we do that through data, you know, we can show what we call QBR is quarterly business reviews with them, we can show them quality ratings of like, how much in the last 90 days has this manufacturing partner been on time and to spec and I can show you data, not just for your parts, but every single part they've produced on a on a trailing basis and say, Hey, yes, you could go control this supplier, pick them. But don't you think that processes and system and data is going to have a better outcome than what you might do? And I think generally, after you break this down, you start to build trust. And then you start small, I build one part, I build 10 parts of the 100 parts. And it's this combo. And so I'd say you do have the two personas got you have you where it's like, it's not that you're lazy. It's just like, I trust you take care of it, rather than you have the skeptic that comes in. It's like, I want to do the whole thing. And to the skeptic, you say, Here's data, here's processes. Here's historical, like, trust me, we got you, you know what, we'll, we'll take care of you. Yeah, because you can't you, you can't afford to have a burp on that, right? No, you just oh, if you're, you know, if I got Johnny Ives from Apple showing up, and he wants to look at the quality of this part. You can't just trust Fictiv that you're gonna get it done. You have to like you have to guarantee and that's really what we do is we say, look, it is a combination of technology to make sure that part's right. But it's also people on the ground. And that's really important, Scott, it's not like, yeah, it's not like it's this marketplace of 1000 suppliers, we send it out there and you do this, cross your fingers and good luck. We've literally have supply quality engineers that have eyes on every single part that ships through our system. So with that said, if I would imagine the your manufacturing ecosystem that can manufacture it's expanding, because there's always going to be somebody that say, Hey, effective, can I be a part of your network part of your ecosystem? And you say, okay, here, this is the quality requirements, give it fill this out? Let's let's Batchi and all that. And yeah, you get the the seal of approval from Fictiv when that happens, and you guaranteed, you know, boots on the ground. And that person's in, you know, Timbuktu, you hire somebody out there and just say, hey, we need to find somebody to verify that the qualities if that supplier is that good. And there, they make, you know, magnesium parts, you know, for aerospace, and it's like, yeah, then we're flying out there. It's boots on the ground. We're living in the factory and doing it, because that's what it takes. This is the industrial world. But what we do on top of it, Scott, which is really important, is you put technology in place, so you don't miss park a button there. And so you stay there. We've used technology to come in. And so what I like to tell folks is like you can track a Domino's Pizza better than most people can track their supply chain, which is just absolutely mind boggling. Your mind boggling it Edwards somebody has to that except you sit there on the app, and you're watching it update.

23:48

And so you want to know what we built at Fictiv Scott, we basically built the Domino's Pizza tracker. But for supply chains, I kid you not. So you can sit there, you place an order 5000 bucks, I need this titanium part. And it goes boom, parts been ordered. Boom. It's been scheduled with a partner. It's in production. It's off the machine. Once when it's Oh, it's in quality photos are getting taken of the part through our technology going through quality. Hey, Scott, you get a little notification pushed to you and saying Do you want to see your parts with all the quality reports before they ever shipped it click the button. You can see photos of all of your parts and all the dimensions that have been measured, analyzed conformance to requirements remember before the things ever left the facility. And so all of that is like at your fingertips that it's like hey, it's been tracking great. It's just shipped out of Guangzhou, China and it's going through export through through their customs. Now it's going through import through through US Customs. Hey, now it's at a depot like all of that is able to be tracked through our technology through the platform we've built

25:00

You bring up a good point about the supply chain and and going through customs does Fictiv hat handle all of the paperwork associated with that? You have to? I mean, because what, how else would I manufacture a record? I'm the manufacturer of record. And what we found is that a lot of people just make this a manual process, Hey, okay, maybe this is streamline. But then once we get to the customs, it's back to email and and PowerPoints and Excel files. We've built a whole workflow, all for the logistics engine, basically, because like, if you can't get the stuff imported, what good is this Suez Canal stuff gets stuck in his ship? Like, I mean, look at the last two years, as I was gonna ask, you could get everything right. And it stuck in the LA port, and like, what are you going to do? And so when we say we control this ecosystem, Scott, it's from, you have a set of requirements, and I'm gonna give you choice, all the way through to that part being on your desk, and we are your guides to get you through that entire process. Because like, I mean, come on this thing is called industrial talk, right? Like, this is the industrial world. Like if I if I just said, Hey, Scott, you deal with customs? Yeah. Oh, yeah. So I'm having a hard time poking holes in your your value proposition, quite frankly, because I, I've been there done that manufactured overseas, it is a headache. It's, it's problematic. But the challenge I always had to deal with is, is is quality. I was that was always scary for me, you know? And I would say, look, it's scary to us to every day, we're making custom products that have to be perfect every time. So when we think about quality, you have QA, quality assurance, and you have QC, quality control. Assurance is all of your pre emptive processes, structure QMS quality management, it's all the stuff you do upfront. Quality control is the reactive things, meaning after the part comes out. How do you actually make sure it's conforming to requirements, it's all the checks here. And so what I'd say is like, Scott, we nerd out on this. So when I say we do quality, I promise you we are deeper than probably any supplier you've ever because like we've had to think through this, because we've built an ecosystem. We're not running a machine in a factory. We're trying to build processes, QA upfront, plus, you know, technology to do quality control at a global scale at 10s of millions of parts. And so the result of it is like I I'm with you, Scott, like I was at Ford, building dashboards of cars. And I'm, I'm up at 1am with a supplier on on Skype, trying to make sure that like, you know that my steering wheel is done, right. And then like, I don't trust it enough. So I have to get on a plane and fly and my my family's at home. Like, I don't want to do that. I want to stay at home. I want to hang out with my kids. I want to you know, I want to I want to do I want to make products. I don't want to fly to a supplier, you know, and so all those things are I think the reason why you're having trouble poking holes is like, like, this isn't our first rodeo. Yeah, like we've been doing it for almost a decade. Then on top of that, like we live the pain like like we're built by engineers for engineers kind of right now. But just in the case of supply chain when if you're manufacturing something in China, Asia, whatever and you've had all of that the the interruptions as a result of the pandemic, you recognize the fragility of the supply chain, something just burped snarled and fart and, and and it's just a problem. What does Fictiv How can Fictiv sort of navigate those those challenging waters? It's a great question. So I love examples. I'm an engineer, so I need tangible things. So let's take some of that recently happened in q1 of this year. So like in February of 2020, Shinzen, overnight went on lockdown. 17 and a half million people. China government said you're not going to leave your apartment, sorry, like this happening in Shanghai right now. But let's use something that was you know, a little bit in the past few months ago. So we woke up on a Sunday. And it was basically like 17 and a half million people can't leave their homes. And like we're like, okay, we pull out the playbook because we have this from 2020. And it's like, here's what we run. We had 249 Work Orders in flight in that region turn 49 in 24 hours, we moved all 249 to other regions that weren't affected with near zero impact on lead time or cost to our customers. Just like right move this move this move this Think of it like an air traffic controller diverting planes to an airport that is shut down. And because it's a digital ecosystem, we spent

30:00

But but but, and like near zero impact to the entire customers. If we were running in a manual way, Scott Yeah, like what would happen to those 249 orders, you would have been like, Sorry, bud, like, we're just going to wait for the Chinese government to say you can go back to work. And you'd be sitting here like, I'm trying to ship my products, my customers are mad. And you're and you just sit there with your hands tied. And so I think of this as like, the air traffic controllers are really good one, which most people can relate to. The other one is like, this is what cloud computing has done for the industry. It used to be like, Hey, your your on prem server racks went down. So hey, your website's just down. Sorry, too much traffic, you know, we just, we can't handle the load. That doesn't happen anymore. You're just like, hey, I'm on AWS, I'm on as your Hey, the Northeast region just went down because of a blizzard, they just moved the stuff to the south east. And like, your servers are still up and running and, and crunch. And so I always ask folks like spacing in industrial, you're so used to supply chain disruptions, like a pandemic, a trade war with China, a global conflict going on in Europe with a devastating war right now. And so you're kind of like, man, but I would say like, does it have to be that way, because in cloud and it, they found a way to have resiliency, they have all these different regions, you know, in other industries, you know, taxis want to go on strike, hey, Lyft and Uber are pretty much immune to that, you know, and so, I just, I think that you got to be creative and supply chain to say, there's another way to do this, there's another way to build resiliency, and, and, and you've got the product development down pat. And then you do handle, let's say, scalability, and packaging, and all the other stuff. Uh, you know, I got to load up a container, and you just go through all of that the total, I would say, there's kind of three major solutions where we like work really well with customers, there's what's called an NPD. So new product development, we just talked, talked about all that, hey, I got an idea. I want to build a new microphone, we're going to help you get through that new product development. The second area where we really help it's what's called eto engineer to order. So think of this as like one off products that I am

32:35

building, you know, maybe some very custom stage equipment for a Beyonce, you know, tour or for Led Zeppelin going back out, or ZZ Top, or whoever, and like you're building, you know, a flame machine. But one time that eto, we do a lot of these one off products, you know, that are custom. And then the third,

32:59

you know, solution where we do a lot of is what's called an MRO, which is maintenance, repair and overhaul. I like to tell folks especially in the industrial this is like aftermarket for your car, hey, you have a 1970s Mustang and you need a new fender for this and like they don't make anymore, we make a lot of that aftermarket product or you know, aerospace and their, you know, engines are getting refurbished, you know, we do a lot of MRO as well, so it tends to be a new product development, these customer customer engineer to order or in this like aftermarket MRO that's a that's our sweet spots god it's where this solution that we've built really, you know, really kicks butt. You know, I believe we take that MRO component for granted. For example, I'll go out there and I'll find some obscure product just an obscure product in fact, I just for our neighbor, I just bought the trolley for their old that broke on their garage door opener. There it is plastic. Boom. Like it's not it's it's what you need. What literally lat last week came back from a long trip. Put my luggage you know, on the plane, like it like a dummy. I didn't put it overhead I checked it. I come off. What have they done? They've snapped all the wheels broke on it. How do these wheels

34:25

so normally what would you do? You just you toss out toss it right and another one? You want to know what I do? I go to Fictiv and make a little wheel. I upload the wheel. Oh it's 40 bucks. Cool. It's gonna be in carbon fiber. Awesome. Just hit Buy literally came back last week, put the new wheels on the luggage and I'm like, Hey, honey, like our luggage is fixed and she looks at me like Oh god, what am I gonna do on it's pretty dead sexy story, right? No.

34:55

I'm not throwing out this luggage. This is a nice piece of luggage. The whole thing's good. It's just

35:00

wheels busted. And unlike they probably didn't have, you know, you know, carbon fiber wheels on it. I just printed it, you know, on a on a high end 3d printer made, you know, two, two wheels that I needed. And it was simple, it was great. See, and again, I think that we take that for granted. I just it's just the other thing that unfortunately Amazon has done is, is created my expectations that are so high, I better have a better be looking for that Amazon truck. I just ordered it an hour ago. Where is it where

35:34

like, think about this example of the suitcase. It's a silly example where it's like it's not, but like, normally, you would just throw it out or if you didn't have Fictiv and if I had to design it, I had this call up Scott's you know, 3d printing service bureau and the email back and forth. I wouldn't go through that hassle. But for me, it was like it was a 10 minute exercise. It was like Amazon is like, here's the wheel for me. I can design really quickly circle extruded. Put a few things. Okay, great. Upload it. Oh, that's 50 bucks as too much. Just okay. $40 that material hit by it was like, you know, it was it. It was a little bit longer than Amazon. But it wasn't matter. It wasn't that much more so doggone cool. Now what? What's the pushback? I've been trying but what's the pushback? I'm impatient. I want things yesterday. I know. And I have grand visions for whatever. And I have ideas that are spewing out of my ears. What's the pushback? Why is why are people I think jumping on board. status quo is really hard Scott to change often. I'm sure all the listeners on here. You're like, come on. I I've known Scott's machine shop for 20 years. Yeah, Scott's never done me wrong. And he just he takes care of me. Why do I need this digital system data? And I'm like, trust me once when you try it. Like once when you try it, there is a there's a better way to do this. Right? And it's like, I remember my my in laws, they didn't have Amazon Prime. And then they'd always be like, Dave, why do I like why do you buy everything on Amazon. And I'm like, because I don't want to go to Walmart. And when I show up, it's not there. And they're like, God, it's always there at Walmart. And then all of a sudden, you it's like, you drip on them, you drip on them, you drip on them. And I'm like, Lisa, like, you should just try prime just like just try to. And so finally it was like around Christmas or something. She tries it out. And now every time we come over Christmas, my father in law, you know, he's sitting there and he's just like, man, it's another Amazon boxes come in and like, it's just it's too easy. You know? It's grumpy guy. He's like, whatever. Swipe right. Yeah. So he's just like, what, this is so much better than going to Walmart and standing in that goddang line. And, and so what I'd say is like, what's the what's the barrier here? It's like, man, Fictiv sounds too magical. How do they do this? It's, it's too modern for me. But what I'd say is, like, just try it. You know, it's like, if you try it out, you know, I think that like, I think that you'll really see that there is a better

38:13

there's a better way of of doing this.

38:17

And like, and that's what I would would really push for I don't think you can be build a build a business of resilience, if you're not in the business of trying to figure this out and be more efficient and and be, have greater responsiveness to market pressures demands, whatever it might be, and the needs of the market, funneling. And I think that, you know, for businesses that aren't deciding to build geographic resiliency, or agility into their supply chain, you're spot on, they're gonna be left behind, like, what the world has shown us is like, it's not if another trade war is going to happen. It's not if another pandemic or force majeure situation. It's not if there's going to be another, you know,

39:04

weather delay, you know, on there, it's when. And so then the question is, if you're not thinking about how to reimagine your supply chain, reimagine the way that you build things like somebody else is, and so I'd say it's not so much of like, of like, is this good for business? Should I do it? It's kind of like, if you don't do it, like your competitors are. And we're, we're seeing that shift today. We're totally seeing that. You have to, and you have to have a sense of urgency for one eye, and everybody through this pandemic, all of a sudden, everybody became a supply chain expert. Do you know why? Because they went to the Walmart, and then Walmart didn't have the product that they had on the shelf that they had before, but it was all stuck someplace.

39:50

That's the real pain. That's the customer component. And it ticked me off. Well, I know I'll go I'll go one step further. That ticked you off because he couldn't buy

40:00

Like during the pandemic toilet paper, we couldn't find him you couldn't find that with a wheel for your, your neighbor's garage door opener. But what I'd tell you is like, what if the world was perfect, like, like, you know, stay with me here for a second, we're in this utopia, supply chains run everywhere, and there's no delays. But like, Scott, you have to buy everything that's mass produced today. Like we talked about the microphone that you have here, how awesome, you know, the this, this thing is from plug ear trumpet labs, check it out, whatever. But labs ear trumpet labs go to the website. But like, what if you could buy things which were customized for what you wanted? Like, what if there was this world where you didn't have to buy that garage door, that like, you know, is just the generic one that you could get the special one that was for folks that, you know, were six foot five, and like, you know, really tall and it had, you know, all the bells and whistles for tall people or something like if that product could get to market because it was easier to design and develop it. Like, that's a pretty cool place. Like that's a now we live in an industrial world where you have more customization, it almost is like the software apps that you use is like you can find the the like, as a podcast, you know, creator yourself, you have all these little tools for your business. Imagine if you could do that in the physical world. Like, that's a cool place to live. And so when I dream and I think about like what could Fictiv actually help we help enable product innovators to create, meaning that whether that product innovator is a company or an individual, we are enabling them to create, and like, I think that all human beings are creative in some form or another. And we need more help enabling that creation to happen. And like, I get pretty excited by it. Yeah, and you bring up a good point, just think about all the ideas that get stifled just because they have no avenue to go. Like, Hey, I got this great idea. And I think it's work but I have no, I don't know how to do it. And then just let it die and it moves on. The benefits to society have been, you know, impacted. Let's figure out how we remove those, that friction. And so if you bring this bar if you if you lower the bar of entry to creation, what type of innovation would you unlock, and I'll give you like, an example that's out there. We went to the moon, what, like 60 years ago, and it took the entire US government to go push it. You know, fast forward six years later, technology's amazing. Look how far out we are. Who's getting the space today. It's a private company. It's like, when, when I was watching the first images of the war going on in Ukraine, it was from satellites of customers that we built those satellites Capella space, one example of it, and they're taking low Earth orbit images of this global conflict going on giving you like, like an API call. That's what Capella space does with an API call. You can take a photo of anywhere in the world. And I'm like, dang, that's cool. So like, like, they lowered the barriers to like, satellite images. Whoa, you know, and I'm like, but like, if you didn't make it easier for them to build all the hardware to do that would Capella ever be able to do it? Probably not. You know. And, and I think about this as an all of these ways of like, there's all this innovation that gets stifled because it's only the large, massive companies that have budgets and resources to do this. But if you can bring those barriers down, you'll see some really cool innovation that happens. There's some smart people out there, big dreams, we've just got to help enable that that dream become come to pass. Well, and that's that's excellent. How does somebody get a hold of you? Yeah, I think best way is, you know, you can websites, the easiest way is to go to Fictiv.com. You can check it out. I think the best thing that we have here is we produce a lot of really nerdy content. And I'd say like, we help teach people how to do this. And so go check out victor.com There's an entire what we call hardware guide. It's a guide to help you build physical products, whether you're a Stanford mechanical engineer that knows thermodynamics and you want to get super deep or you're like your Bob or Sarah, and you're like just trying to figure out you know how to make this thing like there's different levels of of information. So definitely check that out. I know we worked with the Scott thank you that we built a code so you can get a discount. industrial use the code industrial to get 10% off your first order.

45:00

So we'll make sure that's in the show notes. But you could test drive. Yeah. What do you got to lose?

45:07

Amen. So we just we want to show people, there's a better way to do this and just like, try it out, you know, like, don't don't take my word for it. We're not trying to blow smoke here. It's like, but we know change is hard. So, you know, use that code. Get out there. Sign up, literally, like, whether it's a suitcase wheel that we talked about. Yeah. Are you building a satellite Park? You know, for Capella? You know, go go check it out. Yeah. That's pretty doggone cool stuff. All right. Thank you. Big time, Dave. Big Dave. Wave. Big Wave. Dave, whatever you want to call it, man. Thank you for being on industrial talk. Man. You were awesome. It has been super fun Scott and looking forward to seeing what people create. It's cool. It's cool. See, that's cool. All right, listeners. We're gonna you know, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side, all the contact information for Dave and Fictiv will be there. So stay tuned, we will be right back. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

46:11

All right, Dave Evans is his name. Fictiv is the company

46:17

and after that conversation, you should just be an absolute Gomer for the company and what they are doing anything to remove friction. In your work, your day to day work, is a big plus for me. And I'm sure a big plus for you think of is really worked out the kinks. And they've they've done it successfully. Why would you want to do that? Trust them, reach out to them? Ask them some questions. Bottom line, they are an open book there to help you in a big way. Remember, we're gonna be going to IoT solutions World Congress. We will be at distributech. We will be at manufacturing,

46:58

digital manufacturing

47:01

symposium, and many others. You got to look for us. We're going to be on the floor. We're going to be talking to you. Yes. Because you have a story. All right. Hang out with people like Dave Evans. Be bold, be brave, daring greatly. You're gonna change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stick around

The post Dave Evans with Fictiv appeared first on Industrial Talk.

On this week's Industrial Talk we're talking to Scott Drake, CEO and Executive Director with JumpCoach about “Growing Modern and Agile Leaders in Weeks, NOT Years.”.  Get the answers to your “Leadership” questions along with Scott's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2022. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

SCOTT DRAKE'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdrake/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/jumpcoach/

Company Website: https://www.jumpcoach.com/

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

AI Dash: https://www.aidash.com/

Armis: https://www.armis.com/

Trend Micro: https://www.trendmicro.com/en_us/business.html

CAP Logistics: https://www.caplogistics.com/

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

We the 15: https://www.wethe15.org/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, leaders, scott, leadership, organization, problems, industry, world, manager, challenges, culture, company, purpose, train, skills, important, build, contact, coach, manufacturing

SPEAKERS

Scott MacKenzie

00:04

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's get

00:22

to it. Hello there. Welcome to industrial talk, the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry heroes all around the world. Because you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly. You're solving problems. You're innovating like nobody's business, and you're changing lives, and you are changing the world. And that's why we celebrate you here on industrial talk. All right, Scott, Drake is the gentleman in the hot seat. He is the founder and executive director of jump coach, and growing modern, agile leaders is the topic of conversation, let's get cracking. Leadership. So all of this innovation stuff that's happening out there, the number one, the number, and I mean, numero uno, reason why things do not succeed. So I always getting down to leaders and people and culture. It's always a human equation that impacts definitely impacts success and failure of whatever initiative you're you're working on. So that's Scott Drake right there. We'll have more to say about it. All right. Here's a couple of things. I want to make sure that you keep in your mind. Right. So I've been noodling on some things about marketing and sales. And I'm a big marketer, and I love sales and I, it's a, it's a passion of mine. But I want to throw this out for you. And it's stats. Everybody says, Hey, you got to sell with stats. Oh, so was stats here. Let's see what we got here. It was at, I was looking at it oh, here it is. Here it is. So, note this note this 45% of sales, people never follow up with the prospect 45% This is a stats and I I'm just sort of regurgitating the stats. 25% of salespeople make the second contact and stop. Okay, 12% just a measly 12% of salespeople make three contacts and stop and only 10% Go beyond the three contacts. But here's the real reason why you want to multi contact, multi touch is that 2% of sales happen to only two with the first contact, okay, we're an industry we're selling, we're doing a lot of things with, with innovation, these are big, big challenges, and I don't think you're going to be able to, you know, meet one time at boomin. The, the deal is cut 3% of the sales made. On the second contact 5% of the sales made is on the third contact 10% On the fourth contact. But here's the real clicker. 80% of the sales are made on the fifth and 12th contact, fifth through 12. Contact. That's a lot. So my question to you is what type of mechanisms do you have in place that adds value every time you're making contact, and you can add its multi contact? Because clearly, your sales will truly benefit if you have a mechanism to be able to constantly and revolving around those contacts and adding value. You know why? Why do they want to listen, you better add value, you better add value to what they are doing. The other thing is,

04:01

it's a little quote, it's just a teeny little quote, the fortunes are in the follow up. How about that is true? I don't think you can deny that. So if I was running sales, which I've had I've done in the past, or marketing, which I've done in the past, or running companies, which I've done in the past, is I want a multi touch, multi connection process that adds value every time. Not to me not to my company, but to them. Am I solving their problems? Right? That contact that solves the problem. You know, that to me is where it's at and do you have that funnel in place? I just throw it out. I'm gonna continue to harp on that just because I think it's so important for your success. It's important for mine, Guy No, I do I have multi contact, you know, all right, couple of events that you need to put on your calendar. But I'm broadcasting from these events, which is pretty cool. And I'm excited about broadcasting from these events. And the reason I'm excited is because it sort of feels like normal, right? Feels like normal things are, you know, sort of, it just feels good, right? And and I get to broadcast I'm very fortunate to broadcast and connect with people, and have a great time, and have meaning and purpose in these connections. The first event is the IoT solutions, World Congress, this is in Barcelona, if you have to go to if you have to go to Europe, I guess Barcelona would be the place to go, this is the 10th through the 12th of May, right around the corner. I'm excited about it. And this is a unique event, because they really work on providing real solutions to your challenges and your goodness, you get to sit there and talk to people that have the solutions. And it's a worthwhile event. It'll be my third time there. And I've been very, very, very, very fortunate to be able to do that. That's IoT solutions, World Congress 10, to the 12th. The other one is distribute tech, this is May 23rd, to the 25th. This is in Dallas, Texas. And it is really sort of the premier event, we're broadcasting there to premier event that features a lot of the utility generation solutions that that are needed to bring this whole utility industry moving forward. Distribute tech, so I'll be broadcasting there. So you know, be on the lookout of that. And then another one, finally, this is sort of a smaller one, but very focused on digital manufacturing Summit. This is that's what's called digital manufacturing Summit, and that's made 19th And that is in Chicago. And again, there's some there's some great things that are taking place, we've got to consider to have that digital mindset. But there are a lot of components associated with you. And that success, just f y i It's important. We haven't even touched upon cybersecurity, I mean, you touched upon a lot of the elements. And so we're going to have to start painting that picture of that holistic look at digital transformation, finding trusted members of your team to be able to make that happen, because the reality is, you're going to have to do it. If you're a manufacturing, you got to do it. So find somebody that you truly trust, work with them move forward. There are a lot of things being discussed out here. Now finally, I've got to Mike, I call them micro micro webinars. And the reason I was micro I, I gotta be truthful with you, I'm impatient. I always want to move fast. And I do struggle with something that lasts longer than an hour, right? It's just, you know, as my wife has my kids, they'll concur. But the reality is, is that we have to have, we have to have consistent, more, I say, micro webinars focused on real challenges. So I'm working on one that is called utility maintenance. There's a lot of stuff that's happening out there in the world of utilities. And this is like a No BS approach obtainment time and money. That's one. So be on the lookout for that. And another one is manufacturing, we're still sort of figuring out what that title might be. But there's a ton of options. But this is the ability to react to look at and and really ask, you know, if you're not traveling around, whatever, ask leaders that have questions that are you're struggling with. And then and then it'll be out there and it'll be evergreen, and you can follow up. And so you know, here at industrial talk, we just want you to be a success, how's that? We do. We're going to provide everything that we could possibly do and then some if you want to connect with them. That's what we're all about that those are micro webinars, one in utility maintenance, and the other one in manufacturing. And we got a lot more scheduled. All right.

09:10

On to the interview, Scott Drake. Now I've been a little remiss because Scott and I had a conversation some months back and I'm finally getting around, but he knows what he's talking about. And for a guy like me, who tends to be a little impatient. This is write down my just ate I ate it up. It's like growing modern and agile leaders in weeks, weeks. I'm all in. I need leadership. Yes. Not years, helping scaling organizations grow leadership teams. How can you argue with that? That's got Drake, jump coach is the organization. Enjoy the conversation. Scott, welcome to industrial talk. Thank you very much for finding time in your busy schedule to talk to the iron Have to say the best listeners around the world. How're you doing today? I'm good, Scott, how you doing today? Thank you for asking. I'm doing well. I'm telling you listeners, we're gonna have a great conversation. And it's about leadership, but it's about a topic that is near and dear to my heart and for many manufacturers, many in industry is, what do we do? How do we, how do we build up a workforce that is engaged, that wants to be there, and we're just, it's a topic that's got to happen. It's just got to happen. Alright, Scott, before we get into the conversation, give us a little background on who you are, and why you're such an incredible professional.

10:41

Well, thanks, God. Yeah, so yeah, my name is Kendrick, I'm an executive director of a company called Jump coach. And my background is in tech, I kind of came up through the ranks in tech, I spent some time early my career at Microsoft, and then some time down into Silicon Valley, getting into leadership, and then making all the mistakes in leadership, and learning a lot of lessons in leadership. And as as I moved up the ranks, I started seeing the leaders behind me making all the same mistakes that I had made. And I thought there's got to be a better way to grow leaders who really know how to build engage teams, and who really know how to work together as a team. So, so I sat down on a research project, and, and built some tools, and in earlier this year, have embarked on this, and I'm gonna make this the next 1015 years of my journey is to really say how do we how do we get the leaders in place that, that can really build the companies that we need in the future?

11:28

Yeah, we have COVID, we have the pandemic. And I, and one of the observations that I had with this pandemic, outside of the fact that pre pandemic, I thought we were bringing our C and B game to the table, but now I have to bring the a game, but it also highlighted leadership weakness, you know, either you are a good leader and being able to navigate the waters of this pandemic, or you are struggling as a leader to try to figure out how to navigate these waters of this, this pandemic. But, you know, neither here nor there, we're here. So let's talk about workforce. One of the areas that many within manufacturing many within industry is they're having a hard time, and they're having a big time, hard time finding people finding a workforce that is engaged, that is necessary to keep their doors open, to keep their legacy of whatever their businesses and and, and keep them in the door, keep creating sort of a stickiness. Let's talk a little bit about that. Those are the challenges. Let's talk a little bit about four factor hiring, which is interesting to me, give us a little background on what that means.

12:40

Yeah, so four factor hiring is, is basically, you, when you get hiring, right, it's a magic, right? You know, the people are engaged, they want to be there, they do a great job, they show up prepared to work, but when you get it wrong, like it can really be damaging. And you can do a lot of problems that all industry are dealing with a turnover, or people who don't do good work or don't care are they, you know, give poor customer service and some of those things. So what we found it again, I come into the tech world, and we kind of been dealing with a lot of the problems that other sectors are starting to deal with. Now, we've been dealing with this stuff for 2025 years. And what we've found in tech, oh, what I found is that when I would hire for, hey, I need somebody who has this particular skill, and somebody who will take the pay that I can offer them and is happy with the perks that I can put in front of them, then that person might show up, but they're really often not going to be a good employee. And they may quit in six months. And they may drive me crazy as a manager because I'm having to try to coach them all the behaviors that I want them to do and coach out of the behaviors I want them to not do, right. So four factor basically says look you've got what are the skills? What are the extrinsic motivators, the pay and the perks that you put in front of somebody. Then the third part is that fifth piece, which is to say, what behaviors what code of conduct does this person need to naturally exhibit? And then the fourth piece is really, why does this why will this person be motivated? Right? What is it about my organization that we can provide this person that's going to bring intrinsic motivation, and have that person show up every day excited to be there? And we have to hire for that, right? We can't just assume that every organization is same different organizations gonna find different things within these intrinsic motivators to, to bring the right people in place. So it's really about hiring for all four of those and then managing for all four of those is what we help companies do.

14:24

But I gotta tell you, I'm desperate. Manufacture I'm desperate. I need people I need bodies, and it doesn't sound sexy. But I need bodies. I need people to fill roles. And it's almost like, is it better to to identify the skills, take your time, identify the skills, but to really identify number three that fit that individual that fits the culture. Is it better for that? I I don't know. I don't have an answer. All I know is I need people and I'm somewhat desperate. Is it better to look at that and then teach to it. What what? What's your thinking on that?

15:04

So it depends. I mean, there's no one right answer, I think different people can find different success in different places. But we really sit down and we got to start asking why do people want to be here? Right? It pay is not enough, right? I can pay them $15 An hour or $20 an hour or $40 an hour pay is not going to get people to show up with their hearts and minds, right? There's got to be something else. And those something else is tend to be your code of conduct. And some of those things are they tend to be your purpose? Why do you exist? What are the types of products maybe that you're, that you're creating, and the services that you're offering that those have a meaning to somebody, right, what you're doing your work has meaning to somebody else. And in that work, you can put some purpose, or it may be growth, like, I'm going to show up, and I'm going to give my best for the next two or three years, because I'm going to grow, and I'm going to be a better person when I come out the other side of it. So there's got to be something else there. And it's really in being honest with yourself as a business leader, and saying, What are we offering these people beyond the pay in the parks, that is really where you're going to find the solutions to some of these

16:06

problems? You know, it's interesting, because I don't think we cover purpose. Enough. I don't think that industry as a whole, under, they might say, Hey, this is our mission statement. This is our values, whatever, this is our vision. But really, when we start talking about purpose, what, what does that mean, from your perspective telescope?

16:29

From my perspective, it is why do I want to show up every day and give my heart and soul to this, and it's not going to be for X dollars an hour, right? And it may be for my team, it may be that I show up every day, and do my best and give my best because I'm part of this team. And maybe because of the problems that we solve and the people that we get to help. There's different things that you can build a purpose around it, it's not always some aspiration, or some big, you know, the fuzzy thing, it's often some very concrete things. I know there's one, one store, I can't remember where I heard about, like there was a roofing company that they decided to make their purpose, giving ex cons a second chance, right. So all of a sudden, this organization has something beyond just being another roofing contractor that everybody's just just price shopping on. And they built something else around this business to say, we have a purpose beyond just that. And that's what attracted a lot of people and a lot of the problems that that company that industry sees as a whole, that company no longer saw because they built something else around what they were doing. That's the kind of thing that you can build purposes around.

17:37

Yeah, and I see that if I me, if I had a desire to build a business of resilience, I would want to make sure that everybody is rowing in the same direction on the boat. And that, to me is a focus on on purpose and why we're here and what what is the ultimate goal and challenge and and we're all just motivated to do that. And and Is it is it better for me and I looked at the four factors, you've got skills, you're looking at skills, you're looking at motivators fit culture, and intrinsic motivators. How's that different number two, and number four differ from each other.

18:14

So intrinsic motivators are the things that are paying perks are things external to me, right? They're not things necessarily control, they're not only things that I feel, right, they're things that I get, and getting things is only going to motivate me so far. And it hits a point where you get these intrinsic motivation, which is I'm going to do this because it's interesting for me, right, there's something in it, that I get some reward that is either intellectual or emotional. From doing this work, or from participating in this group of people in this organization, I get something from it beyond that, that that brings me motivation. One of the things I love to say in the tech world is most programmers will work for free. And most do work for free. They go to their job, and they're miserable, and they go home, and they work on side projects that are nonprofit work, or they work for some other organization that's doing something interesting because they get to work on challenging problems that are interested in them, right? So so it's really about finding those things that you can then bring into your work that that bring you that that satisfaction from the work itself, not necessarily from what you get from the work.

19:18

I like the way that is laid out if if I was a hiring manager, director or whatever I'm hiring, I would naturally gravitate to fit and culture and intrinsic motivator. And then of course, the skills I could always train to is, but those would be those are matters of the heart from my perspective. And I would, I would probably gravitate toward that. Let's say I'm an organization and our normal way of doing businesses I've got I got an HR I need a I need an individual to satisfy this particular role. I need these skills that that that that that that and I need to pay them x y or Z doesn't? Like, here's my scale, my salary range, right? Rarely. And I mean today, rarely do I talk about fit to culture, or my, the intrinsic motivators of these individuals. And I will not interview to that. How do you begin change in an organization? Because I think that, to me, is super important when I'm dealing with a workforce challenge out there, if I can, if I can work on those and get that down, I think I'm better positioned. How do I start that journey?

20:33

Sure. So we start them off by saying, what instead of saying, What do I what do I need something? What What skills does this person need? We say, what are they get to do? What is this person going to get to do? What are they going to get to work on? Right? And then what? Why does that mean anything to anybody? Right? What is what are they going to get to do for the next year? What are they gonna get to do for the next six months? And then why should anybody care? Right? What what what is it about that work that there is actually something interesting about and then it's, it's taking that and saying, Okay, that's where you're going to find something to sell to somebody else, instead of saying, I need somebody to come in that has these three hard skills, and they must have 10 years experience of doing this, and they must be able to take $20 an hour, we actually the way we write the we do we do our job descriptions, we say, here's what you're going to get to do. Right? Here's what's exciting about it. And what's going to happen is the people who would actually be excited to do that work, there's going to be some intrinsic motivator, they're going to they're going to look at that and say, oh, you know, that would be fun, that would be interesting, I would learn something about doing that. So you talk about the things that people get to do not about the demands that you're putting on them, you know, that that's what we tend to talk about, you must have, you must have, you must have instead of saying you get to you get to you get to. So it's really about shifting the mindset of the leadership team and the HR team, to start looking at the world in that lens. And it is hard, because we have been trained our entire lives to think, you know, efficiency and consistency and predictability and this mechanistic approach, we've been trained our whole lives to think that way. And you have to stop and step back and go, This isn't working anymore, we have to learn to think differently. So that's really where you start,

22:03

like, you get to.dot.in, your job description, I think that that's a great beginning, is there also a way of being able to say, Okay, you get to dot dot, dot, also dot, dot, dot, whatever it might be. Is there, is there an educational component that is also a part of that conversation? If you can't do if, if you don't meet these, but we'll train you that type of thing? Is that conversation out there?

22:37

It absolutely is. And we actually, you know, again, a lot of times when I'm hiring and hiring, I start with the problem that we solve, because it's like, at like the last company, I was an executive at we were in medical education. So we would talk about, hey, you're going to work in educating doctors. And what I was trying to do is attract people who maybe came from a family of doctors, or who maybe had a wife, who was a nurse, or a husband, who was a nurse or something along that line, you know, it's so you, I was looking for putting out in front of them, those things, but then I would say, and here are the types of things that we think you're going to need, and we're going to need, but that if you've got some of this other stuff, if you got some reason to want to be here, I would rather train you and help you come up to speed. If you're going to show up every day excited to be here, then we'll train you. And I Yes, we would absolutely build some of that in. And those would be some of the conversations that we would have, I would rather attract the 10 people who want to be there than 100 people who don't, right, and and so and then train those 10 people. So yeah, we would talk about some of those things, both in our job descriptions. And as in our early interviews, and some of those things to make sure that people understood that it was the want to be here was was often more important than the specific hard skills and you think tech, you think the hard skills attack, like you got to be able to program in this language, you gotta be able to do these kind of things, we would be pretty flexible sometimes with those if they had some intrinsic motivator that made them want to be there. So yeah.

23:54

In what sense, right, interesting is some of the feedback that I've received as a result of that say, Yeah, I bring them in, I train them to do whatever it is. And then of course, there are hotter commodity, because other companies are looking for that skill, too. And therefore leave but but the reality is, you if I can create a culture that that encourages people to stay, then there is a level of stickiness, and then I can train and then I don't have to really worry, yeah, they'll make your own decision. But I think that if you can create that culture that encourages them to stay, then your investment into what they're doing their education stays within the confines of your organization. Is that am I looking at that right?

24:43

No, you are and you got to you've got to it's not an issue that they quit then you got to go Why did they quit? Right? Why does what why was company be more attractive than us? Yeah, what were they doing differently and it's in a typically going to be more than two or $3 an hour more. Right? And maybe They didn't have a good relationship with their manager, because their manager didn't understand really how to be a good manager, right? People tend to quit managers, people quit teammates who don't follow a code of conduct, people, you know, quit and consistency or lack of clarity, right? So what are the things that cause that person to then want to take that training and go someplace else. And it's rarely about money, there's often about other things. So it's really, again, you've got to be honest with yourself, and you got to be willing to look in the mirror and look at your organization and say, what, what are we doing that we should be doing better? That would, that would help us keep these people

25:33

here, see, and you touch on something that's really important. And that is sort of the macro look at that culture. And that requires all your decision makers, your managers, the ones that are moving this company forward to be online, and you can't have it. And I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, Scott, if it doesn't take much for me to get pissed off, at some manager, doing something over here, even though I might have 20 managers over here that are great, that one manager is going to piss me off. And I'm going to leave. And it's so important to have everybody in line. I mean, it just is, especially in today's work environment.

26:12

It is it doesn't, it doesn't take much. I mean, we teach. So we teach two things that I think are really helpful. One, we teach what we call moments that matter. And that's that leadership happens in these small moments of interaction between people. And if in those moments, people get clarity, and motivation, and they're treated well and they feel they were treated fairly, then then they're typically happy with a company. But if in those moments, people get things they don't need, like confusion and doubt, or they're reprimanded in a way that they don't feel was fair, then often they're going to leave, but those small moments matter managers often don't even realize that they've done something that that kind of tripped up that person. So we actually end normally a delegation, or coaching problem solving, or if the employee has an idea, and they share it, and it's not received with any curiosity or like those little things that are so small, can really derail and take what is a great happy employee and force them to go look at companies. And it's about getting those

27:05

right, and that employees gonna leave that office or whatever it was and start chirping in the ears of other people within your organization. It is that quick, that's for sure. You said that two things, you got moments that matter which I like. And number two,

27:21

the second one is we actually teach a scorecard. So a lot of leaders a lot of leadership is confusing, because it is such a big topic. Right? People don't understand all the nooks and crannies, they don't understand that I've got to do A, B, C, D, and E, right. There's four goals of leadership that are kind of kind of conflicting. And then there's nine jobs that leaders have to do. And most leaders don't understand all four goals are the donor Central, not job. So we actually give them a map, it's essential that hey, I'm going to give you a map of New Orleans, like, you know, New Orleans or big city, right? Most people get to the airport, they don't understand everything you do. They look at a map. Same thing with leadership, there is no map of leadership, there wasn't. So we created one. So but what that map does is it gets all those leaders aware of all these little nooks and crannies and saying, You look, all of us have to be in lockstep around our culture and our values. All of us have to be in lockstep in challenging our team appropriately and building motivation and not doing things that damage motivation. We have to be lockstep in how we hire. And if you can get that, then you do get that consistency, and you see fewer problems. But yeah, if you do have one rogue manager who's trying to be helpful, but steps on somebody's toes in a way that really, you know, increased them, then then you can cause problems. So it is really about getting all those managers working well together from the same playbook in a complementary

28:31

way. And it's huge. I'm just telling you right now, it's huge. It's huge. Jay, one last question before we wrap it up. Yeah, can it can everybody be a leader?

28:42

So I think about 10% of people lack empathy, or emotional intelligence, they have some psychological or emotional challenge that prevents them from developing the empathy or emotional intelligence. The there's another 10% that are natural leaders, they just naturally kind of think about leadership in the right way. And the other 80% of us we can learn, right, but we have to learn but yes, that that there's 90% of people who absolutely can be effective as leaders if they want to be right that's the other piece of it is they really have to want to be for the right reasons. It's not about status, and getting more money and moving up the ranks and those kinds of things really got to truly be about we want to create a great place we want to solve problems when we want to work together it's they have to have the right attitude about it. But yeah, if they want if they want to do it and they want to shift their thinking and have that right attitude about thing Yeah, everybody in my opinion, except for about 10% can can grow and you can become really effective

29:33

leaders. That is an interesting, I like that cap off just because it what it tells me within an organization if you're running an organization, you're the head cheats, whatever that is, your leaders have got to be one train and on a common on the common roadmap, common whatever it might be, to be able to ensure that that everything that culture is nurtured and and move forward so that you don't piss people off can get aboard piss people off, especially your, your workforce and future leaders within your organization too. So not a part of that, too. All right, how do people get ahold of you, Scott? Yeah, best

30:15

thing to do is just go to jump coach comm again, that that assessment that scorecard we actually build a free tool around it so people can go and it's under our free tool section. And they can just click on that. And actually, it takes about 10 minutes go through the assessment. But let's go to show you're going to show your gaps. It's going to say, here's where you're doing well, and you're aware. And here here your gaps. So definitely, yes, stop by jump, Coach calm and take that assessment. If you're curious about it.

30:34

There it is. I'm out on your website right there. And I see leadership assessment, leadership, Q and A. All right. All very, very cool. Scott, you were absolutely wonderful. And I think that what has been provided great insights. Alright, manufacturers, all right, industry professionals. I think that this is a great key to deal with your workforce challenges out there. Yes, it's a journey. Don't say, Scott, it can't happen overnight. It can't. But you got to commit to it today. Today. No, yesterday. Let's put let's put a little urgency. Thank you, Scott, for being on industrial talk.

31:12

Hey, Scott, thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed it very much.

31:14

All right, listeners, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side, I'm going to have that link to also the free tool. So don't worry about that, as well as how to get ahold of Scott and the website, everything that you need to know. Right there ready to go. So stay tuned, we will be right back.

31:29

You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

31:38

Alright, again, thank you, Scott Drake, jump coach is the company. Leadership is definitely in thing, especially now when we start talking about digital transformation. We need leaders, we need it. Every every doggone problem that happens with implementation always gets down to Leadership, Culture, people, technology is just the technology. You know, just just keep that in mind. It's important. You'll have all the contact information at industrial talk.com. All right. Again, we've got IoT solutions World Congress, you got distribute tech, and we've got digital manufacturing summits in may put them on your calendar, and they're all out there too, as well. Now, the other thing finally, does that. Let's just Let's just be you know, let's just be frank. Sales is important. We need multi touch, make it happen. Let's figure out those processes that are necessary to make that happen. Simple. All right. All right. Be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with Scott will be bold, brave and daring greatly and you're gonna change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly.

The post Scott Drake with JumpCoach appeared first on Industrial Talk.

In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Paul Kiesche, President of Aviate Creative about “Stop Commodity Selling and Improve Recruitment and Employee Retention through Branding”.  Get the answers to your “Branding” questions along with Paul's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2020. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

PAUL KIESCHE'S CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkiesche/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/paul-kiesche-design-llc-/

Company Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aviatecreative

Twitter: https://twitter.com/paul_kiesche

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aviatecreative/

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

CAP Logistics:  https://www.caplogistics.com/

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

Safety With Purpose Podcast: https://safetywithpurpose.com/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

Paul Kiesche Interview

Tue, 6/29 12:22PM • 29:31

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

branding, logo, paul, perception, people, industrial, company, website, important, industry, manufacturers, business, talk, dated, NEOM, positioning, creative, stay, exciting, psychology

00:04

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go Alright, welcome to industrial talk where we celebrate industry heroes such as yourself, you are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly you solve problems, you're changing lives and you're changing the world. Do not, do not forget that that's what you are doing each and every day. And that's why we celebrate you on this particular podcast. All right, in the hot seat, we have a gentleman by the name of Paul Kashi. Now it's spelled k i e, s, CH e aviate. Creative, he is the president. And we're going to be talking about branding. And if you don't think branding is important. After this particular podcast, you will say, Wow, branding is important. Let's get cracking.

01:03

Alright, you know, I'm always talking about industry being the dream makers. So the miracle workers, the individuals that

01:13

really, really are impacting this new embrace the future, right? I say it all the time, because I am such a fan of what industry is doing around the world. Unfortunately, for me, and for Team industrial talk, we get a chance to constantly constantly highlight these individuals and and the hope that they bring to the future. And it's big dream makers, miracle workers, and hope. That's what you guys are doing. And I just want to make sure that you never ever, ever forget that. Now, speaking of which,

01:52

I know that you've heard me talk about this before, but I have to reiterate and speak when when, when I've had QA hours, countless hours of conversations that are wrapped around innovation wrapped around industry for Dotto cloud edge, all of the neat and unique innovation that is taking place out there. One of the questions that always comes to me is like where's it being implemented? Where's it being put into action? Now it is being put into action in a lot of places, but one of the areas that are just just absolutely, positively bought in on on creating the the future today, the

02:36

community of today. And that's Neil, right. So if you're out there on video, you'll see it out there. This of course, there's a podcast, but it's a video too. If you go out to industrial talk, the YouTube channel, you also see the video, but you'll see this website, and it's just an E o m, right. And

02:54

what why I'm so fascinated by Neo is the fact that they're taking all of this incredible tech, and putting their money where their mouth is, and they're doing it and they're executing on it. And I want to just encourage you to go out to NEOM.com. Right. And just look, just just look at the website, look at the brave and bold

03:18

passion that they have on developing this community of the future. It's fantastic. It is it's fantastic. And that's and I'm going to keep on pushing us. If you ever have a chance to reach out to Beverly Rider, and she has recently just joined team NEOM.

03:36

She is all about changing the world. And that's why industry is so exciting. That's why this is so exciting. Go out there, I highly encourage you to go to NEOM.com. The other area that I want to just sort of point out is when we start talking about creating content, right, and when I'm gonna be talking about branding in this particular podcast, but when we start talking about creating content, are you just sort of bent on just saying, okay, we're just created, whatever the content is, if it's poor content, so be it if it's low entertainment, so be it if it's low engagement, meaning low time, so big now, the low learning, so we've got sort of up our game. So I have this engagement quadrant and it's broken into and I've spoken about this before, but I want to offer it to you to just sort of keep this in mind when you're creating your content because you have to be successful. If you're an industrial professional, you have to be successful. If you're an industrial company, you have to be successful and part of that success comes with creating content that is both

04:42

great right? solving problems right? And it's it's got max entertainment, Max engagement time because if I'm not engaged, I don't care if you have the cure for cancer if I'm not engaged, so what right and then max learning because we have to be

05:00

out that education we have to be about that learning we have to be about everything that's associated with industry. Here is just an engagement crop of content that encourages to create great content, solving problems, Max entertainment, that means maximizing the human component as well as the fun component. And you'll see an improvement on how you're opening up opportunities and we've got to open up opportunities, especially this post pandemic world that we live in opportunity opening doors, a must. Alright, let's get on with the interview. I rambled on on that one. But I'm telling you, right, you need to go to Neil. Neil, calm. I get all I get all dolled typically when I see that website, because it's pretty cool. It's it's a bold vision for the future neon cop. All right, Paul kiss ish. Kisha excuse me, Paul, kitschy, aviate creative, we're going to be talking about branding and why branding is so important. One of the points that I think is really important with branding is that you got to stop that commodity sales, right? Do not become commoditized. And if you're branded properly, you avoid that commoditization of your business, which is really vital, right? You don't want to fall into that category. I've lived that

06:21

category lifted. And it's not fun, because you're constantly hammering on the margins that you can make as a business. Also, we're having challenges, gaining and getting quality talent into the doors of people, resources, branding, all a part of that. All right. Enjoy the conversation with Paul. Paul, welcome to the industrial talk podcast, the number one industrial related podcast in the universe. And I don't think I'm selling, overselling it by any stretch of the imagination. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks, Scott, for having me. Thank you very much for spending time and sharing your wisdom and insights into branding, which, you know, it's interesting listeners, I didn't realize how important branding was until I was in business. And branding was everything. And so it, it sort of slaps you upside the head, and you realize how important it is. But before we get into that great conversation, give us a little background on who Paul is. Yeah, sounds good. So I own a BA, creative, a creative agency, with an edge in manufacturing. So we specialize primarily in the industrial businesses, manufacturing, engineering areas, and also technology.

07:37

So we can help with things like branding, certainly in web design, print design,

07:43

right writing collateral, that kind of stuff.

07:46

You know, why? Why? Just just for the listeners out here, they don't think that Brandon's important, which it is, by the way, FYI, why is branding important? You know, it's interesting, a lot of manufacturers and industrial companies kind of think of branding is just like a pretty picture and a pretty image, but

08:06

it, it's so impactful for the brands. And so many of these brands, hat used to think it was important, you know, so many of them looked great back in the 70s, or 80s or 100 years ago, and now they're way outdated. So some of the reasons why they might be thinking that it might be important is the one of the primary things that people think of is increasing sales. So certainly, branding makes an impact on new prospects. Well, the interesting thing is that a lot of manufacturers will tell me well, sales is not a problem, right? Now we have other problems. So some of the things that could also help with is it can help

08:47

recruitment and retention issues. So thanks for now, baby, big time. Again, hope. You know, when you're selling your company and exiting your company, it can help change your commodity, you know, your your commodity thinking. So instead of thinking that you're going to be selling this commodity product, you can become more of a premium product or just sell based on other factors. So there's a lot of different things that Brandon can kind of influence and change for your company that a lot of companies are not considering. Yeah, I think a couple of points that I that really stood out one, you don't want to be in a commoditized business. That's one thing and if branding can help you differentiate your value proposition and to become more of a premium product, that's a plus. The other thing that I find in manufacturing is the recruitment and retention challenges that exist today. And I would imagine it becomes very difficult if you have a dated logo dated culture dated whatever, that's circa 1970s Plus,

09:55

what do we do? How do we begin to journey down that road of saying okay, I here

10:00

Paul man, what do I do? Yeah, so so much of it is perception based, you know, when, say, say, if you're talking about the employee, or if you're talking about a prospect sale, they have a certain perception about manufacturing, they have a certain perception about your brand and your company. And if that perception, if they look at your brand, and your website and your, your company, and they see an outdated, you know, something that looks like it's from the 70s, something that looks dirty and greasy, and stuff like that, they're going to relate that to your brand. If they see your company, and it looks like it was run by college kids, because it's so poorly done. They're gonna think that your whole company and your products are run that way. So it perception is is huge. You can massively impact perception by changing the branding of it, I would imagine it's even more so today. I mean, it's it just seems that

10:56

given the culture that we live in, given what it is, I know, I'm easily swayed. I'm not gonna just be gravitating to a website that does look dated. I just not I just don't think that's good business. So I agree with you. 100%, there's a, there's a massive perception. What do we not mean? Let's talk about that perception? How do we start changing that? Once again? I want to change it. Yes, I'm dated, whatever, let's start talking about that perception? Yeah, absolutely. So part of that is defining who you are. So understanding your positioning. So you know, do you want to, and one thing a lot of people don't realize is that branding, can be a reflection of who you are now. But you can also when you design branding, you want to reflect who you want to be. So if you want to be a bigger company, if you want to be,

11:49

you know, national, instead of regional or international, if you want to be more professional or more fun, or more exciting for the perception of your brand and can change all of that. So and even for employees, like employees can be much more excited about the idea that they're working for a fun big company, then working for some small, boring company kind of thing. So that perception could be swayed significantly. And a lot of that's done with positioning. So you want to define your target audience, define your niche market, you want to really kind of understand your competition and how you differ from your competition and what's your advantages, right. So and then branding can help, you know, really pull together a lot of that with taglines, with imagery with the colors, everything, it can help

12:39

emphasize all your differentiations and emphasize why you're better and stronger than a Yeah, and you know, there are a lot of companies out there that are just absolute

12:50

nuts about their branding position. And it's a good discipline to get into. So if you don't think that branding is not important, or positioning your product, or finding that niche is not important, just look at some of the successful companies around there. And try to have a conversation that goes sort of away from that brand. It doesn't. It's it's always on brand, on purpose, on target on niche, if they're so disciplined about it, you need to be disciplined about that, too. One of my favorite things is like manufacturers will often say to me, they'll point to a company like apple, and they'll say, well, Apple has this logo that does this, and they have this site and I'm saying okay, well, Apple actually pays attention to their branding, Apple used to look differently, Apple used to have a rainbow in their logo, they used to have the word Apple next to it. And it evolved over time, and it changed and it got better and stronger and simplified and cleaner. And their website has not been the same it changes probably, you know, every year every two years or something. So to compare yourself to that, and then to not adapt with the times, it just doesn't make sense. Same thing goes for UPS, FedEx, you know, Pepsi, all these brands, they didn't start, you know, with one thing, and then just stop, they all continue to evolve.

14:14

There's so many examples out there that you go to just look out on fast foods and how fast food has changed as like the logo. And it's just once again, if you find yourself in a position that you have a stagnant brand, you might be just passionate about it, that logo, that color combination, whatever it might be, I guarantee you, you can improve upon it because you got great people like Paul and others that that understand the cycle. It's psychology to right, it's there's a psychology about it. I can you explain a little bit about that. I mean, I just I'm sort of Geeking on that one. Yeah, and you touched on something as well, which is, um,

14:56

you know, a lot of times there's brand equity involved. So people are like, oh, they're in love.

15:00

their brand and I like they want to hold on to it. But a lot of brands can hold on to brands but update and stave off like Apple is a great example of that where it's always had that Macintosh Apple with the bite taken out of it. But it's gotten a little more refined over the years. So you can stay true and pay tribute to an old logo, but refresh it. So that's certainly part of that, which was part of your first question. I'm sorry, what was the second? The Psychology, the psychology of it, it's like, even I know that if I look at something, and I'm not an expert, like you, I'm not an expert, like a lot of people, but I just intuitively know if I'm looking at something. And it just doesn't feel right. Right. It just doesn't feel right. It can. But it doesn't. That's the psychology and I'm always just like you're put off. And it's very interesting that people know when something's wrong, and it's bad, but they don't necessarily know when it's right. And what's really interesting is when people say, oh, marketing doesn't work on me, and I don't believe in advertising. It's like, well, you probably do a lot more than you realize. There's a reason you went to the McDonald's down, you know, the highway because you saw five billboards on your way. And you didn't realize it they kind of sunk in you know, one of my favorite billboards is like the most simple where it says, Your look, you know, something like, buy you're looking at this prove that it worked. Yes, yeah, yeah.

16:29

I got there, you gotta

16:32

stay.

16:35

It's so true. It's so spot on. But I psychologies all in it. I mean, like, you know, there's psychology of, of the colors, there's the psychology of how professional it looks and how modern and contemporary it looks. And there's like everything. So when we do a logo, we, we fill out a creative brief where we fill it, we ask a ton of questions about positioning and the company. And also they're like, why do you need to know what our brand personality is? And why do you need to know our comparison? It's like, because all of that goes into that simple little image. And it makes you stand out, differentiate, differentiate, too, it puts a vibe in there, right? So like, we'll ask what the company personality is. And a lot of people like, I don't even understand that question. I'm like, okay, so when you guys go out to a bar and have a drink afterwards, what's the personality? Is it funny? Is it fun? Is it celebratory, and what is it, and we try to get into what that differences and some are more funny, some are more clever, some are just really, really professional. But if we can pull some of that into the logo, it's just really subtle, you know, really little things, that kind of change that it can drive so much more of the brand personality and the logo. And his you know, it's interesting, he brought up an interesting point. And that is, you don't know how much business you're losing with a stagnant logo or stagnant brand or stagnant whatever, you have no idea. But

18:02

you know, that that intuitively, you are losing a potentially losing revenue? And that to me is a bottom line? I mean,

18:11

I don't know, man, I just think i think i never I never thought about brand being so important until it is. Right. And, and mean, thing is, is that like, say your say, I talked to so many manufacturers, and they say over, it's all about relationships, and it's all about these existing things, I say yes. But if that relationship sees that you're staying with the times and growing, they become more excited, and they want to invest more. If you're stagnant, and you look like you haven't changed, and your site is getting older and older, they start saying well, we better go look at another vendor, because these guys might not be around next year, you know, and they start worrying and eventually start exploring other things and building new relationships. You have to keep fresh, you have to stay current and look irrelevant. You know, you can't look like, like, what drives me crazy is these manufacturers are producing the future. They're making super high tech stuff that's super exciting. And then their brands look like they're from the 70s Yeah, and I'm like, it's not matching up. You gotta you got to, if you want to sell stuff to aerospace, you should look futuristic. Not like it's super old. You know, I'm saying that's a really interesting point that that that you're aligning, that is to your point positioning and your niche and defining that and aligning that. That perception that look in line with your market. I think that that is that's brilliant. And I think that that, you know, I didn't really think about that, but that is absolutely brilliant. Yeah, like without a doubt, you know, and like another totally different direction is like we worked with a

19:46

food manufacturer that produced

19:50

in this case, they produce matcha powder for like foods and beverages, and they came across really chemicals sterile because they're

20:00

laboratory. But I'm like, but that's not what the customer cares about. The customer cares about the licious. They care about culinary, exciting, interesting. And I'm like, you're this amazing product that makes food so exciting. And yet you're showing them a laboratory. I'm like, let's inspire them with gorgeous, beautiful shots of delicious foods and drinks. And that should get them excited. Not some laboratory, you know, I think so. It's, it's all about that perception and all about talking to your audience and understanding your niche market. You know, let me let me ask you this, when when?

20:36

When I think about going down this, it can be overwhelming, right? I can sit here and say, yeah, it's important. Yeah, I need to, but I don't even know where to start. Can we approach it from an incremental point of view? And then all my, my stationery has all my old logos. And, you know, you know, what that conversations like? Absolutely. What do we have smoothly, you can start incremental. Um, you know, I think there's this ideal of, if I create a logo, maybe I even rename it and create a new tagline. And what happens is, it starts getting overwhelming, because somebody is like, Oh, my God, I got to do all these things. Branding is not just a logo, right? branding is also like, sometimes all you have to do is add a tagline onto your logo, and it speaks to your audience more, or sometimes you have to just do your website over or your, your, your collateral, it's all part of branding. But if you're talking about the logo, one of the beautiful things right now is that most everything's digital, so digital doesn't have to all be printed.

21:40

You don't have to do your stationery and letterhead right away, you don't have to do your business cards right away, you could start with your website and logo and kind of branch off of there. But it is good to have that full, comprehensive,

21:55

you know, consistent look all the way across with your brand. So certainly, that's the ideal, but it does overwhelm people. And one thing that I try to avoid is some customers start adding on to the bill. And it keeps saying, Oh, we need this, we need this, we need this, I slow down. Let's do it in phases, phase one, phase two, phase three, because if you do it, try and do it all at once, if everybody freezes, you know, the budgets get too tight, companies start panicking. So do a phase one approach, you know, you hit a couple things face to approach, and he rolled out. One thing I want to say though, is that

22:31

people get nervous about what their customers are going to think and what their employees are going to think when they rebrand. And my answer is always take them on the journey with you let the employees and the customers know about it and get excited about it. Like if the customer knows that you're growing, and it's the same, all they care about, is it the same people that we have the same relationships, and then they're excited about the growth and the change. But if you if you don't bring them with you on the journey, and you just announced all sudden, we're a new logo, then then it starts to send panic because they're like, Oh, my God, we you know, are you guys selling? Are you you know, is it the same people, they start worrying about it. But if you bring them with you, and you you tease them a little bit, and you give them a little bit of a campaign, it turns into a great marketing campaign. And they become very excited about the brand. And they feel like they're part of it. And I see I like that I like that a lot.

23:24

The one question I would have is

23:28

do you think in this world of this pandemic world that we're sort of coming out on the other side, I guess.

23:36

But let's say we're coming out on the other side, do you think that upon reflection, a lot of these companies were just somewhat lacks when it came to this and they just sort of got a little lazy? Do you find that today more than ever, it's important that you really nailed down that brand more than ever, like clarity. Well, this that's why I brought up the employment thing, because I think it's so interesting. So so many of the manufacturers I talked to are saying, we're too busy for this right now. We're too busy for branding. But we're we know we can't find anybody to hire. And I'm like, Okay, well, let's talk about hiring people. Because when that person goes to find a job, and they come onto your site, and it looks like a terribly old, dated company, and it looks gross and stuff like that, they're not going to want to work for you. So maybe don't do it for the sales right now. But do it for the employees because that's and for your current employees. So they know that they have a future there and for your prospect employees so that they get excited about working there, and that career page on air and make sure you're got the right messaging for them. I like that approach because I know that I know. Even I'm very visually attracted to things and especially now and I know the market is a you've got a tight market out there with I just think that this is just the you got to go down this road. I just agree. Yeah, and you know, to go back to your point though, I think

25:00

That,

25:01

you know, companies are going to find that they waited too long, and you don't actually really know it, no one's going to tell you, no one's gonna be like, Oh, your logo so terrible or whatever, you're just gonna start to see more and more of your business, go to competitors and not really understand why. And it's because you didn't really stay on top of your marketing, right? Like, it's even when you're the busiest you need to continually market so that way, six months down the line or a year down the line, you're still not busy.

25:28

So you know, I think that you need to stay on top of it. That that is that you're right. You can't just, you just can't stop. Right. And

25:37

so, give us some roadblocks. I mean, you're you're, you're talking my talk, give us some roadblocks. Why there's a problem.

25:46

why somebody might not do what you're saying. Yeah. Alright, so, uh, like I said, right now, a lot of people are saying they're too busy for it. They just can't.

25:57

They can't justify spending the time on it. Another thing is certainly budget, right. So they think it's just too expensive to rebrand.

26:08

Another Roadblock, I guess, would be, you know,

26:13

the brand equity thing that we talked about before is that, you know, our customers are used to this logo, they love this logo. They think that?

26:21

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, they're,

26:25

they're convinced that, you know, that is what got them where they are. And maybe that's the case. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to take them the next, you know, 40 yards, whatever, you know,

26:36

it

26:38

just because it, you know, got you that touchdown, you know, five years ago doesn't mean it's going to continually do that work for you, you have to stay up to date with it. And like I said, you can still pay tribute to your old brand. We have plenty of logos that we've done that,

26:52

that still pay tribute to that old brand, but have a whole new contemporary feel to them that just looks fresh and exciting. You know, I like the incremental approach. I love the fact that you don't have to take these big bang approach and big steps in any day. I think that that's important. listeners, I think that when we start talking about improving that perception, important positioning, defining that niche, all important. You've got to stand out, you've got to differentiate yourself. Do not be commoditized. How do we get a hold of you, Paul? Sure. Certainly, my website's a great place to start. So that's aviate creative calm.

27:33

My emails right on there. Let's see new. Hello, nav creative calm. And I'm on all the social media. So look me up for for Kashi or aviate. Creative. And I'm certainly

27:48

it's a good thing. You're on all those platforms. I was gonna say, if you're not, come on, man. Well, that is great. Thank you very much, Paul, for being on the industrial talk podcast. I love the topic of brandy. manufacturers. Get your branding act together. That's what's important here.

28:06

And it's gonna it's gonna be a fun journey. It's not gonna be

28:10

painful. It's fine. All right. Thank you, Paul. Thank you. This was great. All right, listeners. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. So stay tuned.

28:19

You're listening to the industrial talk, Podcast Network.

28:27

All right. Once again, thank you very much, Paul. kissy, thank you for joining the industrial talk podcast. Of course, he's the president of aviate. Creative. We talked about branding. So important, so important for your company and your success. Absolutely. Think about your brand big time. Again. Neil and e o m.com. Where ad is a dead sexy doggone idea and vision for the future. It is a new community. It is leveraging the technology. It is absolutely great. As well as get your you know, I want you to create great content. I want you to great content that is entertaining or fun and humanized. Because we've got to open up doors and create opportunities for you. That's all out there. Everything. You're contacted Paul, everything's out there on industrial talk.com. All right, be bold, be brave, dare greatly hang out with people who are bold and brave and daring greatly. And you're gonna change the world. And that's what the industry does. Thank you very much for joining industrial talk. We're going to have another great interview right around the corner.

The post Mr. Paul Kiesche with Aviate Creative talks about Stopping Commodity Selling Through Branding appeared first on Industrial Talk.

In this week's Industrial Talk Podcast we're talking to Spencer Brooks, Founder and Principal of Brooks Digital about “Website redesigns don't have to be complicated, frustrating or messy – Welcome to Agile Website Redesign”.  Get the answers to your “Agile Website Redesign” questions along with Spencer's unique insight on the “How” on this Industrial Talk interview!

Finally, get your exclusive free access to the Industrial Academy and a series on “Why You Need To Podcast” for Greater Success in 2020. All links designed for keeping you current in this rapidly changing Industrial Market. Learn! Grow! Enjoy!

SPENCER BROOKS' CONTACT INFORMATION:

Personal LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencerbrooks/

Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brooks-digital/

Twitter:  https://twitter.com/spencerbrooks

Company Website: Brooks Digital | Web Design & Development Agency for Health Nonprofits

PODCAST VIDEO:

THE STRATEGIC REASON “WHY YOU NEED TO PODCAST”:

OTHER GREAT INDUSTRIAL RESOURCES:

NEOM:  https://www.neom.com/en-us

CAP Logistics:  https://www.caplogistics.com/

Hitachi Vantara: https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/home.html

Industrial Marketing Solutions:  https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-marketing/

Industrial Academy: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial-academy/

Industrial Dojo: https://industrialtalk.com/industrial_dojo/

Safety With Purpose Podcast: https://safetywithpurpose.com/

YOUR INDUSTRIAL DIGITAL TOOLBOX:

LifterLMS: Get One Month Free for $1 – https://lifterlms.com/

Active Campaign: Active Campaign Link

Social Jukebox: https://www.socialjukebox.com/

Industrial Academy (One Month Free Access And One Free License For Future Industrial Leader):

Business Beatitude the Book

Do you desire a more joy-filled, deeply-enduring sense of accomplishment and success? Live your business the way you want to live with the BUSINESS BEATITUDES…The Bridge connecting sacrifice to success. YOU NEED THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

TAP INTO YOUR INDUSTRIAL SOUL, RESERVE YOUR COPY NOW! BE BOLD. BE BRAVE. DARE GREATLY AND CHANGE THE WORLD. GET THE BUSINESS BEATITUDES!

Reserve My Copy and My 25% Discount

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT:

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

website, spencer, industrial, templates, agile, people, listeners, scott, business, prioritize, quadrant, brooks, build, wix, incremental approach, work, platforms, content, industry, big

00:04

Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's go, Hey there, welcome to industrial talk, where we celebrate industrial heroes such as yourself, you are bold, you're brave, you dare greatly you solve problems, you're changing lives, and you're changing the world. As we speak this very moment. That's why we celebrate you on this podcast, we have a gentleman by the name of Spencer Brooks. And we're going to be talking a little bit about nimble, nimble or agile website redesign. And I think right now, that is a great topic to have. So let's get our car rack in.

00:59

So we're going through a homepage redesign as we speak. And that just begs the question of what you want to try to do, what do you want to go with your website? How do you want to engage individuals on the website? What do you want to do? And I mean, those are great questions to ask. And especially in this sort of post, new world that we live in, I think it's a great, great opportunity to be able to just ask specific questions. Now.

01:28

With that said, with that said,

01:33

I am going to talk a little bit and if you're out there on the video, if you just listen to the podcast, you listen to podcasts, that's fine. Picture, picture, what I've got an engagement quadrant, because I'm going to ask these questions. And this is what you have to start thinking about.

01:51

When you start developing content, and we've been doing that for the past, whatever contents everything right, you get it out there, you get that attention, you want to be able to engage people, and you want to be able to get their feedback, and you want to hopefully open up doors for opportunities. Now. I've put together this engagement quadrant and what it just does. So you have four areas quadrant, right? And to the right and to the top. The top is great content, right? So at the top great content, what is that it solves problems? It answers questions, right? It's short, it is relevant to today's challenges. To the right of that our max entertainment. Is it humanized? Is it fun. So if you combine something with great content that is also entertaining, then you have a greater opportunity to engage, right? It just makes sense. It's but but if you look at the quadrant to the left, if you have sort of a sort of a lazy type of entertainment, it's boring. sameness, doesn't set itself apart. And the poor content is like, hey, it's all about us. It's an infomercial, you're not helping anybody, you're not trying to solve problems, you're just saying, hey, it's us, then your engagement, the opportunity to engage the time that people are engaged on your content, right? is limited. If any, right? I'll be the first to admit, if I see something that is boring in the same and it's like an infomercial, I'm zipping right by, and I'm sure a lot of other people are doing the same. But if I see content that is truly relevant to today, solving problems, that is human and entertaining, then me my time to be able to learn increases. And within that's the bottom line, we want to help people learn because we're all about that education, collaboration and innovation. And you can't do that without that education and learning. So if you're out there on the video, you see the little quadrants, you see it if you're out there on podcast, you sort of get the picture but I'll have it at industrial talk comm you just sort of download it. Every time you create that particular you know your your content, think about those components. And I and and really, it'll improve now. Let's get on with the interview. So we're going through a industry, industrial talk to Dotto is happening. And we want to make it easier for you to get information, we want to make sure that it's easy for you to get it and it's entertaining, so that you consume it and that you know what are better and we're highlighting the best within industry. And we're able to do that because we're going through another redesign. It's and

04:51

with, with this one agile website redesign and what Spencer brings to the table is a really nice approach to be able to do

05:00

It's not overwhelming. It's not. It's not, you know, a big job. It's just an incremental approach to be able to

05:10

change and give you a little bit of fresh perspective on your website. Because sometimes we just get a little old we get a little lacks and right now is not the time. All right. He is the founder and CEO of Brooks digital. He brings a lot of street cred when it comes to this particular topic. We've got a lot of information out there and we're going to be talking about agile

05:34

redesign of your website. So enjoy. Spencer, welcome to the industrial talk podcast. Thank you very much for finding time in your busy schedule, schedule. And to join the wonderful, absolutely wonderful listeners of industrial talk. How you doing? Hey, Scott, I'm doing awesome today. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to share what I can with the listeners. I like it. I like your setup. You got I mean, you really sound good.

06:01

Thank you. Right That's that's always what I want to hear. You do? broadcast voice? I tried man you write on it. You got your your windsock you got everything happening. There you your five by five. All right, for the listeners out there. Spencer, give us a little background on who you are. Sure, yeah, well, I run a company called Brooks digital. We're a digital agency. So we build websites, mainly for nonprofits who focus on a particular disease or disorder like diabetes, cancer, things like that. And we do that by taking a particular approach an agile approach to doing that, which sort of prioritizes responding to change, and adapting to, especially in the healthcare industry, and things like that things change very rapidly. So we want to take an approach with online, the website and digital presence that can adapt to that changing environment. So that's, that's what we specialize in. Alright, listeners, you're saying to yourself, Scott, how come you have this gent on the industrial talk podcast, because you need to hear about agile websites, you have to understand that your website is well questionable. And there is a way of being able to take that questionable website and put it into a way that can definitely be an asset to your business. Because that's what's real important. You're in it. Don't come to me and say, Scott, that's not important. It is important. I'm just here to tell you. And when Spencer connected with me about agile website redesign, I just said, yeah, that's important. And industry needs to hear about it. Who I'm worn out by yelling at everybody. That's if they really care. No, you do you need to care. So let's, let's define a little bit about what agile website, what does that mean? What are we doing? Yeah, that's a good, it's a good question, Scott. So with that, I mean, without giving the entire history lesson, no one needs to take notes here. Right. But the idea with with agile website redesign is maybe back, I don't know, 20 years ago, there's a group of software developers and they noticed a problem that they would take years to develop some sort of digital product. And by the time all those years had passed, the product that they had developed, the piece of software was no longer relevant anymore, because the problem had changed. Or the industry had changed. And they said, you know, this isn't working, we can't, we can't spend 235 years trying to figure out and build something, and then launch it. And our assumptions are totally off. So the idea with agile came about because they said, and it's true with website development, with software development with product development, they said, We need a way to build something that's rather complicated in a way that we can actually change and adapt that on the fly to the market conditions to even our own knowledge about what it is that we need, and and adapt that so we can track a moving target. So that's in a nutshell, what agile is about is about prioritizing change and responsiveness during the process of developing a website, either. So just putting a pin in the ground. Yeah, so here I am. I'm an industrial guy. And I've got a company. And we've been in business for many years. And I've got that unfortunate problem called legacy thinking. And this is how we always do it. And this is what

09:33

the what I've seen in this pandemic is, of course, a situation where it would have been great to have a great website at this particular time to be able to facilitate hopefully some commerce or whatever it might be, is if I have a website and I'm My mind is like, I'm about 10 years behind.

09:51

Can you take us through a sort of a step by step approach to what that might look like? Her? Yeah. So if you're if you're already

10:00

behind the ball a little bit right now, I mean, first year, your, your sense of you said a little bit. I'm saying that there's a lot of people behind the ball quite a bit. All right. Yeah. So okay, so you're way behind the ball and you know, you're waiting on the ball. Don't stop pedal this right. Okay, there you go. Yeah, that's right. Okay, I'll be straight here. So yeah, I think the first thing that you need to realize is, number one, you don't have to do this whole thing at once you might have a big you might have, it could be a big project to think about, it could it's frankly, it's overwhelming to think about this, you could go Oh, man, like, I don't even want to open that can of worms and you shove it, you know, in a folder somewhere that you don't open for a year. Just remember, you don't have to do all this at once. The great thing about a website is that you're not it's it's not like you're constructing a building that you can't, it's very difficult to change this, you can, you can change your website every day or every second, it's it's flexible, it's malleable. And so you can launch a first version of it. And it doesn't have to be a complicated first version. And the next day, the next week, the next month, you can go and add something else to it. So if you're in that position, just First of all, no, you don't have to, you don't have to do it all at once. So once you commit to that mindset of saying, I don't have to launch the ultimate version of whatever I want my website to be right up front. And you can just focus on prioritizing your most the most important things that that the website should do for your business. And then after you launch it, then you can just work your way down the list and continue to add stuff and add more features that might be important or respond to changing market conditions and things like that. So I like that incremental approach. And it's sort of it really I mean,

11:52

it can be done. And I think that, from my perspective, listening to what you had to say, because I'm going through a redesign with my particular website, and of course, I'm sitting there going, well, it's got to be all or nothing. But you've just changed my view, I could get it. I get it to a warm and fuzzy position and boom, and then I could continue to add to it, I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong.

12:13

Strategically, you don't want to put yourself in a bind. So it's sort of incrementally you can just keep on adding, I like that. Absolutely. The thing about websites is it can be surprisingly complex. Once you actually get into the details, it seems like Oh, sure. It's simple. I want a homepage, right. And then you realize that every single thing that's on that homepage, you've got to decide how it's going to be displayed and how it's going to be managed on the back end and all the rules about it. And you just spiral into a black hole. And so in that complexity, just mushrooms, the more stuff you add. So the real the key to taming the madness there is to to get very disciplined about chopping out all the things that you say, you know what we're going to deal with that later, and prioritize in a small bucket of things. And knowing that by saying no, right now, it's not like you're saying no, forever, you're just saying you're saying yes to that later on. And that's a big deal, because you can get totally overwhelmed. That is huge. I'm just telling you, that's a that's a great way of approaching the situation. So when when you're in a when you're you're engaged, Spencer, and when you're engaged, how do you? Do you have that conversation with clients and saying, okay, there's your, here's your existing website, or we need a website, let's just say we're doing with an existing website, you look at it, and then you start to have that conversation correct with your clients? Absolutely. Yeah. And so usually, there's some combination of my existing website is terrible, and it doesn't work, it's broken, it looks bad. All these things, usually, it's a combination of things that need to be fixed. And then also some aspirational things like, you know, I want to I want to add all these, these new features to help you support my business and to help to help grow it. And so it's this hodgepodge big melting pot of all these different things. And so I think, honestly, the first step is, in order to prioritize, you got to know what your priorities are. And so sitting down and saying, All right, like, what's if your website had a job description, if it was a person that was employed, 24, seven that never ate, and that never slept? And it just worked for you? And what is the job description of that website? What is it supposed to do? What are the most important

14:32

responsibilities and functions, and then that I think it helps clarify the key outcomes that the website should be delivering on and then you can use those outcomes and that way of thinking to start structuring and making priority calls about what should be included in the website for the first version. And so you have to develop a framework around which to prioritize before you can start making those decisions. Okay, a couple of things, listeners.

15:00

Keep note of it could be done incrementally. So don't come to me and say, Scott, I've got a website, but I can't do it. Don't come to me. It can be done incrementally think through that. The other one I really like, is job description for your website. That to me is an interesting, I like that. I like the incremental approach. I like that job subscription. That to me brings it down to the level that I can understand. I don't have to sit there at chirp tech talk. I can say, No, I want my website to do this. That's the job description. I like it. Why for industrial? The listeners hear of industrial talk, why is it important to have a good website?

15:39

I think if you go just go out anywhere, right? Scott, if you go out here in line at Starbucks, look around at all of the people in line at Starbucks, you know it or outside and take a guess at what they're looking at their heads, their heads, yeah. And they're looking at a screen, they're looking at a screen. And so I think from a marketing perspective, it's very important to just even culturally pay attention to where people are paying attention, and they're all paying attention to their screens. I think the I don't have a hard stat on this, the average person is spending hours a day on their iPhone, it's like multiple hours, literally. Yeah. And if you look at your own phone, you know, you can enable screen time on your on your iPhone, if you have one. Just look at how much time you spend staring at a screen. And you want to be where people are directing their attention. And so that's the I think one of the the biggest compelling reasons why you need a good website is because frankly, people are spending hours a day in front of their screen for and to simplify it. What is a good website? What is what's, how do you? Like? You know, I've been on our websites, and I'm not sure if it's good or bad. I don't even know if mine is good or bad. What what what drives a good website? Yeah, that's I mean, that is a key question. I think, first and foremost, a good website is going to, it's going to generate a couple of key outcomes. First of all, it's going to generate awareness for for your organization. So it's going to get eyeballs on you. So people are going to come and visit it, I think that's the first function of a good website is that it's delivering people to it. And then it is converting them at some to some kind of further engagement with you. So that could be signing up for an email list. It could be filling out a contact form or some sort of interest, like I want to have a sales conversation, and things like that. And then it's providing the resources that facilitate that process. So if you want to get someone's attention, and you want them to reach out, you know about working with you, then you that website needs to have the right information to address common concerns, you address objections and to deliver a person to you that, that as a lot of that information already answered, so it makes your job easier. So I think a website really has to facilitate that process of taking a stranger, getting them to understand that your organization exists to get familiar with you, and get common questions and objections answered, and then ultimately have them take whatever action it is that you want them to take after they view the website. And so I think if you look at your website through that lens, and some of the actions and the details are going to be different, obviously. But if you look at it through that framework, I think that's what a good website does. He Yeah, it's interesting, it

18:41

I'm just telling you right now, I do judge a book by its cover, if I go out to website and I find that that website is just not

18:49

not appealing to my eyes. What is I, I'm, I'm shallow, I'm moving on, I'm moving on to the next thing. And and I'm trying to find a website, a portal, a place where I can find information and not be offended. Meaning, you know, the colors are good. Again, a good user feel with this. And it's like, yeah, that's cool stuff. I'm more apt to say yeah, give me some information if that website

19:18

looks and feels and flows. Right now. I think that's a it's a good point, Scott in that design. It simply removes a barrier, right? It's not a good design is not going to make a customer necessarily because I'm sure you've gone to websites that look beautiful, but you have no idea. It's the information there's not good you're like what do you do? I don't understand. Right? Right. But a good design is going to remove as you set out that barrier Scott of credibility. So someone comes and looks at the site and makes that subconscious judgment call. This is I'm going to stick around this is pleasing to my eye don't feel like this looks like it was designed by someone's nephew. And I'm not sure about it. You

20:00

And then that person can get into the information. But all that being said, is that, frankly, I think you can, if you're, if your website looks like doodoo, but it delivers a ton of customers, it's probably a good website, although most websites also looks really great. So I think the design just removes a barrier. And it does. I, you know, it's funny, I've gone to websites that do provide a lot of good content, and they do drive and it's like, but it doesn't look good. And it's like, okay, and I'm sitting there with this bad attitude, but I'm getting the information I want. But I'm not fond of this particular website.

20:40

You know, it's, it's a love hate type of thing. Now,

20:45

there are templates out there, there are templates that are out there that you can sit there, you don't have to be.

20:52

You don't have to understand the color palettes and everything, which I would just my head would explode, my ears would bleed, whatever. But there are templates out there that can be leveraged and expanded upon, right? Absolutely. There are tons of templates. And in fact, probably the larger problem is just how do you choose which ones do you use? And but I think that's a great, a great space to start with, is just literally like, I mean, you could go to any what Squarespace, Wix even if you want to do like with a WordPress site, there are some templates there. And you can just get up and going and they provide a lot of great structure. So I don't think it's a it's certainly not a matter of the the tools not being there. It just kind of depends on how quickly you want to get going and how complicated you want things to get. See, you mentioned a couple of things. First off, I like the fact that you can look at these templates, they're out there. And I I find it stimulates

21:49

proper business thinking it's like, yeah, that that feels right. That's what I'm trying to do. And you don't have to sit there from a blank slate saying, oh, oh, what do I do? Is the color red decent. Now you can see it in these templates. And it's always a beautiful thing to be able to do that. You mentioned Wix, Squarespace WordPress. Can you explain a little bit about that? Yeah, of course. So there are tons of different website platforms. And frankly, they're all just different types of tools for different needs. And some tools are, are more complex than others. But something like where Squarespace or I was gonna say, where where spacing slicks,

22:34

you can do that a product, somebody probably heard it and said, I need to do that. Another web platform. Yeah, that's Yeah, that's gonna be I'm gonna I'm gonna launch squeaks. That's my new. My new business idea. I think legally, I'm fine. I'm fine with that.

22:50

Right. But yeah, those are those are website platforms that are you just build it yourself. So it's literally you, you will sign up. And they have provided templates. And you don't need to know how to code you just drag and drop, but in your content. And they have some pretty full featured, full featured features, I guess, where you can do blogs, you can have contact forms, you can portfolios of different kinds of work and contact, contact form. Maybe I already said that, but there's just lots of different stuff. So there's that. And that's probably the easiest to do. The downside of that is once your website gets to a certain size, and when I say size, I mean mostly complexity in terms of what it's providing, then it tends to not be as customizable because you are locked into what those platforms provide from a functionality perspective, which is great when you're starting because you don't have to, you don't have to decide every little detail, you just go. But once you get to sort of a next tier of website, you get into platforms, like WordPress, or Drupal is another one. And those tend to be kind of like a Lego kits in a way where they provide you these different components that you can structure and customize. So instead of maybe like, something like Wix would be, you know, you would you would just get a buy something off the shelf, plunk it down, versus getting the Lego kit where you sit down and you really decide how do I want to assemble this and build this and customize it and I can take it apart and assemble it in a different way to suit suit different needs. And it takes a bit more time to set it up that way. But the result is you do get something that is more customized to your particular business. And it would seem to be scalable to Yeah, exactly. It earliest. I had some issues with some other other platforms. And and I realized that I couldn't scale and then I went to my website is WordPress. And then I got all these little things.

25:00

logins. And then I could sit there and I could play around with it. And they, they, it was just like, I like the Lego analogy. Yeah, it's just like, there'll be a built in such as Oh, okay. Great. Cool. And, and.

25:12

But

25:14

I think that

25:17

there is a, for me, this is just me speaking listeners, I didn't realize the level of functionality that can exist within a website that is truly valuable to your business. So, like truly valuable. I,

25:34

I mean, people can connect with me on my website. It's like, it's just, it's a beautiful thing. I'm just telling you, what are the roadblocks?

25:44

I think when you're talking about agile and things like this, where you're taking this the the more of an iterative mindset, right? It's it's cycles is quite honestly, there is most stakeholders within your organization, it's might be other executives, it could be managers board, but whatever. They're not going to intuitively think that way. And so if you are, if you've listened to this, and you said, you know, what, I'm savvy, I've got this, this is the way to do it. There is there's probably some other people involved in that decision that are gonna say, well, do we have a Are we going to build all this at once I want it strict, you know, it needs to be all scoped in entirely upfront. And they're going to want to do it the good old fashioned way, which is to build a big honkin website with all the bells and whistles. And, and, and there's going to be some there, there might be some conflict there. So I think really, the biggest roadblock is conceptually just getting everyone on board and bought into the process that you don't have to do it all at once. Break that mindset. No, I'm telling you, man, that is an aha moment for me. I like that. I like it a lot. And I think that

26:56

it's a great way of moving forward, creating a new website be agile, again, I guarantee you, you can benefit from a new website. It changes your perspective. Now we're gonna have to wrap this up. Spencer, how do people get ahold of you?

27:15

A couple ways. First of all, you can go to the Brooks digital website. It's just Brooks dot digital. It's not calm. It's one of the fancy ones. Wow. Yeah. So there you go. You can also send me an email Spencer at Brooks dot digital. Feel free to connect with me there as well. Like that. Again, it does. We'll talk we'll have all of the contact information for Spencer big time. I like that dotdigital that's new. Yeah, it's pretty cool, right? Like you get you don't have to fight with all the other dot coms. You just say oh, no, whatever. I don't. I can just do dot digital or dot. There's tons of

27:51

Yeah, there are tons. Alright, listeners. That is Spencer, thank you very much for joining the industrial talk podcast Spencer. You're pretty welcome, Scott. It's my pleasure. Excellent. Again, listeners do not go away. We're gonna wrap it up on the other side. So stay tuned. You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

28:15

All right, his name is Spencer, Brooks, Brooks digital, is the company. Let's just be real here. Look at your website, see if there's ways to be able to improve it, and improve the experience of the clients that you serve as well as the future clients. Think about that. You can approach it from an agile perspective. It's all doable, and especially today, make it happen. We've got three events. I'm going to tell you just go out to industrial talk. COMM one is the IoT solutions World Congress brought to you by industrial internet consortium and fair Barcelona. And then we have the manufacturing and Technology Conference that's coming up in November. And it's out there on industrial talk.com. And we're going to put together a mastermind in utility. big topic, big conversation. All right, be bold, be brave, daring greatly. and hang out with people who are bold, brave and daring greatly, and you're going to change the world. Thank you very much for joining the industrial talk podcast. We're gonna have another great interview right around the corner. So stay tuned.

The post Mr. Spencer Brooks with Brooks Digital talks about Agile Website Redesign appeared first on Industrial Talk.