Host: This is the story of how a first time mid career entrepreneur bought a small business in a forgotten industry and turned it into a star. Back in early 2017, Reg Zeller didn't know what search was, he just knew he wanted out of his corporate job and buying a business seemed like a good way to finally strike out on his own. He had manufacturing chops from his years in corporate as well as a thesis though that too was a word he didn't know. Reg just believed in onshoring, that is Bringing manufacturing back to the us. He identified a small foundry that he liked. Everyone told him not to buy it, that it would be a terrible move, but Reg touched the hot stove anyway. As he puts it, it went okay initially, though not without some scares, including finding himself in the fetal position on the bathroom floor in the middle of the night. This is an image Reg has become somewhat known for on Twitter. But six years later, Reg's company Cancast has emerged as one of the most dynamic in foundries. There have been seven acquisitions in total aggregate revenue is on track for $30 million in 2023 and REG is confident that $100 million is attainable in the not too distant future. We get into so much in this interview you're going to learn the many decisions and insights along the way and that turned a first smallish acquisition into a streamlined acquisition machine with Playbooks, best in class operations and a large and growing moat. Enjoy this deep dive with Mr. Foundry Reg Zeller. Welcome to Acquiring Minds, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith. Acquiring an existing business is an awesome opportunity for many entrepreneurs and on this podcast I talk to the people who do it. I want to share an update on the Acquisition Lab. As you know, the Lab is a highly vetted cohort based accelerator and community for people serious about buying a business. After going through the Lab's month long intensive, you have ongoing access to almost daily Q and A sessions with advisors, regular live deal reviews with Walker Deibel, author of Buy, Then Build Potential Deal, Team introductions and a very active Slack group with other searchers on the path. Well, the update is that the Lab recently passed 60 businesses acquired and for well over $100 million in aggregate transaction value. Also, all members now enjoy lifetime access to the Lab because when you buy a business it's often just the first of many and the Lab wants to support you in every deal, not just your first. Lastly, check out my recent interview with Shane Ursum, episode 105. Shane acquired a business with over $1 million in EBITDA in just six months. And he attributes a lot of his deal success to what he learned in the lab. Check out acquisitionlab.com or email the lab's director, Chelsea Wood. Chelseieve.com Reg Zeller welcome to Acquiring Minds.

[3:19] Guest: Hey Will, thanks for having me, buddy.

Host: Reg, a lot of listeners will recognize your name and may even already know your story. But for people who don't, I'm going to call out three things that I think you're most associated with. Foundries. So you have acquired multiple foundries and you're building a roll up in one of the world's oldest manufacturing businesses. The fetal position. We'll get into that. But for now I'll just say that as successful as you've been buying small businesses, you're vocal about people not taking this path lightly. And then lastly, your partnership with Josh Schultz, who's kind of the operating genius at Canecast, your company. So we're going to get into each of those and more. But for those who don't know you at all, Reg, how about starting us off with some background, please?

Guest: Sure. So my simple background electrical engineering undergrad, went through four Fortune 500 companies, everything from engineering to product management to general management, including stints in M and A and corporate strategy along the way. After about 17 years just decided I was absolutely sick and tired of making font changes on PowerPoints and sitting through pointless meeting after meeting and not actually adding value, at least what the value I saw was. So decided to jump out on my own. Part of the idea of jumping out on my own was that the last four plus years of my working career in corporate was as a general manager and we had production kind of all over the world but a couple of places that we'd re shored, brought back or near shored back from overseas we were very successful at and from a dollar and cents standpoint, on paper it didn't look great per unit, but if you looked at our Overall profitability, growth, etc. Our ability to put product on the shelf, have quick turns, do any type of flexible manufacturing, etc. Was actually driving substantially higher growth and profit percentages than any of my peers certainly and as the industry as a whole. So you know, with that was really my thesis, if you will, using current searcher terms, which I had no idea what any of that stuff was back then was that I really wanted to do small US based manufacturing. So ran into a really, really terrible boss. August 2016, came home, told my wife I was done, time to figure it out whatever she wanted to do And I'd help her figure out her career because I was going to go either buy something, start something, go to work in private equity or something as a CEO type of a role. But whatever it was, I was done with that. So kind of my quick version.

[6:17] Host: And so you liked. So your thesis quote unquote was near shoring US based manufacturing. But from those options that you just said, either starting something or buying something or being a CEO for a PE fund, how did you decide on the path that you did take, which was buying a small business?

Guest: So let's say two things that was easy to eliminate. Going to work for somebody else again, I'm sure it would have been better, especially based on some of my friends that have gone and done this since then. In my wife who's currently doing it, that would have been substantially better because I would have been able to make a lot more decisions, drive the organization how I saw fit, etc. But it just didn't make as much sense to me as being able to not have a boss, period, other than going to write a check and getting money from the bank. And then on the other side of it, I'm not a startup guy, I'm not an idea guy really. Like I can take something that exists to go from, you know, I always joke a lot of people take something from 0 to 1 startups, you know, I kind of 1 to 3 and then the big strategy to get from 3 to 10 or to 100. And then you mentioned Josh already. You know, Josh is the guy that took our business, the operational side of it, you know, to go to from 3 to 10 and 10 to 100, that's much better what he fit. But you know, in order to do that, there's just very few ways you can go buy, hire, etc. An operator of Josh's caliber early on. So you have to do the operating, which we can get into later I think is absolutely imperative for somebody that is starting out to actually go and operate the business in their, in their industry for a while. But yeah, for me it just was, I would rather cut a check, go get some money from the bank and own 100%. Now. Did I have any idea what that took? No, I had absolutely none. So I chose that path.

Host: And you were not familiar with like search?

Guest: No, I, I literally 8, wasn't even 18 months ago. I bet I was explaining it to somebody what I did and they said, oh, you were a self funded searcher. I was like, I was a what? I don't know what that means. I cut a check, they gave me money and I bought a business. They're like, yeah, that's. And then they explained to me self funded search and search funds and the Harvard or Stanford guides and whatnot. And like I knew none of that. No clue. My experience was thankfully who the business that I bought from. They happen to list with a broker and that brokers, I guess agency if you will. The, the parent company, they had this thing that said, oh we do pre approvals through this guy over here, John Thwing was his name. He's now moved. But John was like a savior for my. And he pretty much told me, listen, I can handle this. You don't have to worry about it. You just go figure out the business, I'll figure out all this back end stuff. You looked at my resume, my financials, whatever. He's like, yeah, don't worry about it. I can solve this piece of it. You just make sure it's the right business to buy. And I'm going to take care of all this SBA stuff. And that's always my running joke is I didn't even know how to spell sba, much less what it meant or how it worked. But you know, in the process walked in in September for the first time ever into a foundry, which I do not recommend to anybody else but you know, if you've run a lot of businesses, it's kind of a widget, doesn't really matter. But yeah, I walked in for the first time in September and you know, kind of a snowball turned into an avalanche in January 31st. I owned a business.

[10:04] Host: And reg, for those who might not know and I believe there are some because I wasn't confident that I knew what is a foundry.

Guest: Nobody knows that. That's easy. So this is a world that literally existed. They first know of it for sure about 6,000 years ago. And all that it is is melting metal and pouring it into a form. And then that form after the metal cools, you get a finished product after you have to do some additional finishing and whatnot. But yeah, it's that simple. It is. We take liquid metal and we either pour it into a sand casting, what they call it, you know, a mold that is, it's like a negative shape of what it is or it can be steel, it can be all kinds of stuff. And in our case we are mainly aluminum, non ferrous is the technical term for it, meaning we have brass, bronze and zinc as well. But if you just think of it as aluminum for easy reference for most folks yeah. And we just pour liquid aluminum into a form. We let it cool for anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes, break the sand away and cut it off and you have a product.

Host: And, and the way this typically works is you are being contracted by a manufacturer. Yep. Who, who is a. You are in manufacturing, but the official manufacturer, the one who's delivering the product to market, says, I need, you know, a thousand pieces of metal that do this.

Guest: Yep.

Host: And so, so, so talk to us a little bit about get. Give us a couple example products.

Guest: Sure.

Host: That you might. Your end product. And then also about the business model. A little bit about the business model.

Guest: Well, the business model is a mess. That's a whole other story. But no simple products for people. I mean, the common thing that everybody would see stuff that holds up railroad crossing signs or traffic lights or if you go to a playground ever in your life, there are these huge horses. If you look at my Twitter feed, there's been a few people that have gone and seen it. We had some installations at Rock center last year and earlier we've had them. They're all over playgrounds today. It'd be a big horse with a spring at the bottom. You'd rock back and forth on them. We're the only domestic manufacturer of that. Things like golf ball washers and anything imaginable. People don't realize castings are in like 70% of everything you see around you. You just have no idea of it. But it's kind of the most critical infrastructure piece that exists in our country. But we just, to your point, contract manufacture for somebody else. So we don't sell direct to a consumer. We don't sell direct to, you know, a third party business. We sell to someone who comes to us and then they in turn sell to whomever it might be. You know, we have very little product that goes direct to a consumer, direct to an end user business, etc.

[12:47] Host: Yeah. And so the business is a, let's say the, the manufacturer or the end manufacturer of the hobby horse. I don't know, I don't know what you call that particular playground toy. Toy or ride comes, comes to you and says we need this spring. And they give you specs and then you cut a mold and then figure out the metal and then pour the metal and deliver them a thousand of these springs.

Guest: Yeah, the, the, the joy is we actually put the horse on top of the spring. We don't build the spring. That's a different company that would bend a spring. But yeah, so we make the actual horse that goes on top of it. But yeah, conceptually that's exactly what it would be. And that's part of our game. Right. They would go to this company to get the spring and this company to get the plate that would anchor it to the ground. And a different company to get all the screws that would be able to actually mount that into the cement that would go into the ground. And ultimately we are the ones that are providing just the horse in this. So that company comes to us and says, hey, we've got an order for 10 of these. Can you make those in as fast a period as possible? Typically is how that works, because everything is done that way. But no, it's. So we get everything from. We've got some customers that give us forecasts for the next 12 months. We have other customers that come to us in a last minute panic saying, I got this order and it's holding up a $10 million order and this is $10,000 worth. Can you get this to us in six days and everything in between?

Host: Fascinating. Okay, well, let's return to your story, Reg. So you were drawn to manufacturing, but this foundry foundries are a niche within an enormous category of manufacturing. Did you have a thesis about foundries in particular, or was that just kind of the. The nearest business at hand that was for sale that you liked?

Guest: Yeah, no, it was. It. I'll be the. The easy one is I've never stepped foot in a foundry before, as I mentioned before. But what it amounted to was I kind of alluded to, I'd run so many different businesses, quite literally everything from solar and wind to thermostats and electrical distribution panels that hold your breakers in your house. So for me, I'd been in so many different businesses, I'd seen so many different things. The widget didn't necessarily matter. I knew I'd have to jump in. I knew we'd have to learn it. I knew we have to figure it out. But at the end of, didn't necessarily matter how I made the widget because I knew that 90 plus percent of that was all going to be the same. So it happened to be. And I was looking nationwide, it didn't matter. My wife and I had been all over the country for our jobs before. And ultimately the intention was that we were in Minneapolis just for a short, kind of, let's say, development assignment for her, I guess because I decided I was going to leave no matter what. And then I decided that randomly when this foundry came up for sale 20 minutes from where we lived, that I Walked through, decided this is really great fundamentals and bought it. Now the key to that, when I say I decided that it was great fundamentals, I was warned by at least 10 people foundry experts tried and true, 10, 20, 30, 50 years of experience in foundries that told me absolutely in no way, shape or form do not buy a foundry. This is a terrible idea. These are bad, bad places to be. You could not make a worse mistake buying this. You're gonna lose your money, hate your job, hate your life, et cetera. And everybody told me and I listened to everything they said. The stove was hot and I said, eh, I know more than they do. I'm going to go buy a foundry.

[16:35] Host: Listeners of Acquiring Minds know that for almost any business you acquire, its success comes down to the people and how you develop and manage them as their new leader. Thing is in addition to management, there is also a lot of process and bureaucratic work when it comes to your new employees. Payroll, compliance, hr, technology, hiring, to name but a few. These processes are crucial to get right, but at the same time distract from where you want to be putting your energy in leadership. So Aspen HR is an HR firm and PEO that takes this work off your plate and handles it with the care it demands. Aspen is owned and run by Mark Sinatra, himself a successful former searcher. So Aspen's own leadership understands the HR challenges that searchers have. Post acquisition, the firm is offering Acquiring Minds listeners a complimentary pre acquisition HR and PEO review for your target business. Check out aspenhr.com or contact Mark directly at mark aspenhr.com reg let's get into that. Why? What were the reasons they pointed out that it's such a terrible business and then why? How did you overcome those in your own mind?

Guest: Yeah, so overcoming my own mind and then overcoming in reality are two very different things. But the simple answer is that. So let's start with the things that people commonly think of, especially in the search world as what you don't want to buy heavy capex, not really reoccurring revenue, a lot of working capital required obscene key man risk. You know, really the stuff that they say don't do this type of thing. Probably had I actually done a search fund, people would have told me I was insane and they never would have backed me to go buy this. But for me I looked at it as so not just those elements but you know, the other big part of it was that a lot of this had gone over the last 30 years, had gone overseas. You know, so in our last 50 years in this country, 80% of foundries have gone out of business. So I was already playing in a very tiny pond. I expected a lot more. But the demographics of the industry were that the last time people really came into the industry in droves was 30 plus years ago. So at that time, you know, early 60s, maybe late 50s in age was where people really expected. Those were kind of the young side of the generation of people that were in foundries for the most part. So, you know, if you kind of look at the key man risk, you look at the capital expenditures, you look at all those things, I looked at it as okay, but if I do solve those, which I thought I could, and I'll tell you kind of how I thought I could, then I'm going to build a giant moat that nobody else is, is going to be able to get over. And also I know that I'm going to be protected from private equity or any of these other folks. Like, if I could build it big enough, an individual wouldn't be able to come compete with me by buying a small foundry and a private equity firm, which I dealt with a lot in corporate America or certainly a corporation, they weren't going to want these facilities, right? I mean, when I was there, we shed every asset we could off our books throughout corporate America, right? We would have sold and leased back the real estate, we would have tried to find third parties to do it, etc. So all these things in my mind made sense. And then the biggest one, the key man risk was I just assumed, okay, these guys don't really want to quit. They don't have anything else to do. When I talked with the key people that were running our shops, they said, yeah, it might be done in 1, 2, 3, 5 years. It really depends on how long my body holds up. You know, it's a hard job. These are, you know, in August, on our poor decks, it can be 130 degrees. You know, these guys are moving around 50, 60, 100 pounds for a 10 hour shift. This is by no means easy work. And their bodies just physically break down. And so my mind was okay, but if I can build this up enough in the next, you know, year, build enough profits, I can just pay those folks to stay. I can let those key people continue on and their job will only be for the next six months, 12 months, 24 months, whatever, to create, to train the people that I have, but then also to start to create knowledge bases, start to create training programs, etc. Then on the same thing, once I get that, I'D have the key personnel. Now I could have an advantage over my competition. Now take that start to buy any type of the equipment that I need that other folks wouldn't be able to buy because I had these key people. And then I just further and further continue to create moats. And now, you know, seven years later, we're so far ahead of all other small foundries in the country. I'm not saying we're untouchable, but I don't know who would ever go do it. I mean, it would take you $20 million probably to catch us. And you're probably going to return a pittance on that and you're not going to be able to operate them the day you buy them. Like, it just, it just doesn't make sense. Right? I mean, it, it's. And then also, also, I should say one thing, I got very lucky and that Covid accelerated a ton of this. I thought this was going to take seven years or 10 years. And then, you know, three years ago, Covid hit and it went overnight. Completely stratospheric. I mean, it was because of the

[22:17] Host: supply chain issues and everyone was looking for local manufacturing. Local meaning domestic manufacturing.

Guest: Correct, Reg.

Host: Going back to the first acquisition, give us a sense of the size of.

Guest: Was about 2.7 million in sales roughly, and probably half a million dollars roughly in EBITDA or SDE technically.

Host: And is 7 million a. How big a foundry is that? Is that tiny, medium large?

Guest: 2.7 million. And that's 2.7 million.

Host: Yeah,

Guest: it is of a small foundry. So foundries kind of break up in a really. Let's say it's a, it's a medium sized small foundry. So foundries, you'll see them as small as million million and a half in sales. Small foundries, you'll see as large as they get to like 4 or 5 million. Then you tend to see a massive gap. At least you did pre Covid. Now things have changed because of some commodity price issues between like 5 and 10 million. Maybe 15 million is no man's land. If you're familiar with the rule of three, that is the ditch in a pure strategy standpoint. And then over 10 or 15 million in sales, you start to see some really big foundries again. And then over 100 million. You know, that's where you get the few foundries that would serve automotives or aerospace or something like that. So very small casts in a few years. Yeah, exactly. But we'll still. That's the great part about it though. We still will compete in that small foundry space that is our business model is that we are not chasing after. I never see like I have a really good friend CEO of a much larger foundry. I've not one time seen them in a competitive bid situation. We don't have the same customers, we don't think about the same customers because we make very small runs from a quantity standpoint compared with what they do. So yeah, I mean we can mimic what they do, but we compete on a totally different part of the market.

[24:25] Host: Reg, your, your first acquisition. So now let's, let's bring in the infamous fetal position. You have, you have you. You warn people. I'll let you tell it. What am I referring to here?

Guest: Yeah, it is. Let me back this up a little bit. This comes from my advice that I try and give to everybody, which is you need to find a peer group. Now I didn't have a peer group until many months in like a year plus in technically to having this. And what I found myself in is about six months in. We had a. The business that we bought was going down between 5 and 10% a year before we bought it. Nothing really specific that was negative. It's just they weren't chasing after new business. So if a customer decided to go to a new model, they wouldn't even go bid on the new model, for instance. Right. So it was just attrition anyway. I'd also said, hey, need to understand maintenance. Very dirty environment in foundries. And I was told, yep, we shut down for maintenance twice a year. Well, that was supposed to be first week in July. We got really busy. I screwed up. Talk about that in a second. So here comes August 2017 and I had a problem where we had a key product we had to get out the door and this machine broke down and went in there, talked to the third party who was coming in to help us fix it and he said, well, best case right now we can replace it. It's like 26, $28,000. I was like, I don't understand. Like this was all done, all the maintenance. What's happening in my head, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, during the 4th of July shutdown period that we were supposed to have, I told customers I drug all this work and had to pay overtime into June. Then my July was virtually non existent. It was essentially completely dead. So I probably cost us 75 or $100,000 just between those two months and now this $26,000 fix. And I start talking more and I was like, if we did the maintenance why is this happening? And they said, what do you mean? Like yeah, I heard we shut down twice a year. Like we didn't do it this year because we were so busy, but like we haven't done that in a lot of years. And I was like, what do you mean we haven't done that in a lot of years? Like we've just stopped doing kind of that general main overhaul maintenance on these machines. And all I could think of at that time was oh my God, the business is still dropping 5 or 10%. I'm not getting traction with customers yet. I don't have any new customers now I've got this $26,000 fix. I'm going to write that check out, I'm going to be $26,000 poorer. And then I thought, oh my God, all these other things. And by the way, if that $26,000 fix didn't work, which the guy wasn't sure if it would or not, it was going to be like $150,000 bill that I was going to have to pay. I didn't know if I could get the money for it. I didn't. I assume no bank would ever lend me money against that piece of equipment. I now since know that's totally false, but that's a different story. But yeah, and I just got in my head and I went home that night and I just could not stop catastrophizing everything. It was like, oh, what did I do? I should have just stayed in my W2 job. It was a guarantee. It would have been easy. You know, I might have hated it, but I'd had plenty of, now I'm going to go bankrupt, my friends are going to make fun of me or my own co workers and like everything, it was just pure catastrophe in my head. And then Fast forward about 3am that morning and I found myself literally just like laying on the bathroom floor. Like just every negative thought imaginable going through my mind, assuming that we were going to go bankrupt. And then I just wasted millions of dollars of my wife and I's hard earned money and it was all gone. So yeah, it was. I always joke about the fetal position. And then so I finally started talking about this because there's a few folks, this is two years ago now probably, and they started talking about it and I'm like, oh, this is easy, no big deal. Leave your W2, sign a PG and go on a business. And I was finally like, okay, we're gonna actually talk about at least what I went through because I have A bad feeling that someone else might have gone through it and other people should know this. And I started talking to people about it and everybody goes through it. There's nobody I know that hasn't. I mean, granted, it might be a little worse, a little better, but anything imaginable, it's just one of those things where you don't know what you're doing. You're gonna screw stuff up. That checkbook, at least at the beginning, feels like your money. I knew that it wasn't. I knew from corporate America, things break you. You know, you pay money here, you do that, but it's just part. Even in the P. L. I knew there was money in there for repairs and maintenance that were occurring. Like this wasn't out of the ordinary. This just happens. But again, until you see the cycles up and down and normally then. So I keep telling people after like 18 months, some people it's a little more, some people it's a little less. But it's somewhere around there that magically just starts to go away. You just get used to it. And again, you and I talked about this a little bit. I can't tell you why. I don't know how much of that is. You become a better owner, you start to know the market and the business and the industry. So you kind of understand the ups and downs. I don't know how much of that is. Your risk tolerance just drastically increases and so it doesn't bother you, you know. And then again, I tell the last part of the story is fast forward to two years ago. It was right before we hired Josh, right when my old president quit. We had a question and we had like, I can't even remember the number now. It was like 200 some thousand dollars. And someone asked me like, or maybe it's 300,000. I don't even know. My office manager, accountant was like, hey, we have this bill that we paid for. Like you literally, like authorized wrote out the check. And I couldn't remember what it was. And so, you know, five or six years later, like I was. Couldn't barely function thinking of $30,000, you know, and I was a 10x number five years later. And I didn't even know what it was for. And it's insane to me to think, don't get me wrong, like the idea that you can write out a $300,000 check and have no idea, like that's. That would be like the nicest house in my small town in Wisconsin I grew up in would probably be about 300,000 so. Or at the time when I grew up, at least, you know, and so I don't. It's just something that you have to get through and you have to understand that it's coming and it's not going to be easy, but once you get through it, it just becomes a lot, lot easier. And it still comes once in a while again, we've got plenty of money in the bank and we know our plan, we know we're going to grow. I'm sure we'll talk about getting to 100 million in sales plus that's right in front of us. But it doesn't mean that randomly, all of a sudden, I'll get some minor ping of anxiety and stress. But at the same time, it, it goes away relatively quickly now. And it comes maybe a few times a year, not like once a day or every other day like it did at the beginning.

[31:45] Host: So this moment of terror that you had turned out to be fine. Well, did it? Well, actually I, I know it turned out to be fine because of where you are today. But what did happen with that machine and that fix and the fact that the maintenance schedule had not been adhered to? Like. Yeah. What was the end of that particular story?

Guest: I mean, obviously it was just like you find out in every small business now, it turned out totally fine. You know, I paid the 26, they dropped the piece in place that needed to be changed out the head of the, the, the VMC and all was fine. It has still literally run to this day. Was that six, six and a half years later, no problem whatsoever. And then we started doing preventative maintenance again. And so that was good to learn that you have to learn those things at some point in time. And maybe that's part of the reason why it hasn't broke down, but ultimately it just became one of the normal kind of standard operating days. Now I don't even think about what it would be or how it would be any different again. That's like a random Tuesday. We have things that break down probably weekly in one of our different shops. But I think part of it is you have to take it and learn from it. And then that's just what you bank. You understand, hey, sometimes things break, you're going to have to pay that. And then ultimately the big thing you have to learn is that your checkbook is no longer your personal money and what the business needs to spend money on. It's not as if, yeah, technically, I suppose I own 100% that I was $26,000 poorer that day, but Then also that machine has probably produced a million dollars worth of profit in the last six years, too. So, you know, you spend money to make money is kind of the old adage, but you eventually have to break yourself. And this is where I got and where I started this on having a peer group. Had I had the peer group that would have been going through that, multiple other of my friends who had bought businesses right around that time, randomly, two of them I'm now really good friends with that had bought before me, had experienced things exactly like this. And they're like, yeah, we did the same thing. We could have told you, that's fine, no big deal. Six months, nine months. And now would I still been worried? Yeah, for sure. But at least I'd have known more of it. But. And that's part of what I'm trying to do on Twitter as well. I don't. I'm not getting any value per se, like monetary value out of Twitter. I don't ever expect to. I hope not to. But I do want people to know that things like this occur and it's going to happen, prepare for it to happen. It doesn't mean that it's not still going to suck for the first 18 months or whatever it is, but I think it's a lot easier to know that we all go through it. And especially if you can go find a peer group to talk through it, people that are like it, and then mentors that are five years and 20 years in front of you, it just becomes a lot easier. You realize it's not. You're not alone. And ultimately, and you mentioned this before, if this is what you're built for, you'll get through it. Right. And I think the big thing is the difference is there's a lot of folks when things started to go bad early during COVID or even during the bank run. This is just. We're recording this right after svb. You know, the bank run went bad or the economy starts to turn south and you see people curl up in the corner. It's really easy to run a business, you know, when there's been a great market for the last 15 years. For me, I called Josh on Friday and I was like, excited out of my skin about what might be happening in the world because, yeah, could it suck? Sure. Like the economy is going to go bad. That's. There's going to be some elements that are bad, but that's when we operate like that's our favorite time. Like that, you know, it's the time when you Actually go make hay, right? As they say, it's. It's the time when, you know, the best operators come out. You get excited about that, you get through it, you figure it out, and then you go make great businesses. And so that's, I think, the big difference where, you know, just like that day, like it was terrible at 3am, but at 6am I was back in the shop and, you know, I'd said yes, I'd called the guy and said, hey, make sure you get here this morning, replace this piece of equipment. And then we started talking to the other. I'm like, okay, hey, what are the things we need to do? We need to start doing maintenance. So that first weekend we did maintenance on all the machines. The preventative maintenance that we should have done, we went through and we checked out everything else. We replaced things that were broken so that wasn't going to hurt production going forward. And then I started telling that story to customers of, hey, we're doing all these things. You're not going to see downtime where you have more capabilities. We have excess capacity, we're investing in this place, we want new business. And then everything kind of turned around. It wasn't quite right then, but it was at least a story for me to go start to talk to customers about. And as any salesperson will ever tell you, you just need something to go talk to a customer about. It doesn't matter what it is. You just need an excuse. And once that excuse happens, then you can go figure out how to solve something and then you go sell more product and then fast forward literally 12 months practically from that day. I replaced two other pieces of machinery in that facility and in refinance because we double profits over the next 12 months. So it's really about getting up. And you know, we always talk about. Some people talk about, yeah, it's just like chewing glass. Mine is sort of a, you know, small business. You just have to learn to like getting punched in the face and coming back for more.

[37:32] Host: And so is this, like, should it serve as a filter for people of like, who should do this and who shouldn't? I guess it's kind of like if you hear that story and you're like, man, I would not have been able to scrape myself off the floor then you know that it's not for you sort of thing. I guess, I guess what the takeaway? Like, what's the takeaway if. Not if I've already bought my business and I know they're going to be hard times, but if I'm contemplating doing this.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: What is, what exactly is the takeaway? That I just need to be really prepared for some pretty hard moments, but that I'm likely to survive.

Guest: Yeah, I think that's the easy takeaway. I'll separate this into what to be prepared for versus what that should do for people. Thinking about it 1, 100%, you should know it's coming. And I, again, I spent 17 years in corporate. I'd seen all the ins and outs. I'd literally run everything from a startup inside of a corporate machine doing a couple million dollars a year in sales all the way to like a 400 million dollar division and everything in between. Thousands and thousands of employees. I knew what it took, I saw everything. But it's just different when it's your money. And there's a new guy, I can't think of his name on Twitter right now, but he had done a traditional search and now has just purchased his own. He's in Arizona, I believe, if I'm not mistaken.

Host: Yeah, I saw that thread.

Guest: Great thread. But yeah. And so he'll tell you the same thing, like it's still different because other people's money, you know, opm, when it's your money and your, your personal guarantee, just know it's going to be different. And I think that what that should filter out. And this is why I'm very vocal about this. I do not want people and this scares me to death right now because I know how terrible some of those times are your first 18 months to go through. I don't want people to hear my story or to see, you know, there's a lot of us in that Holdco group. There's kind of a dozen of us that are floating around. There's a lot of other people as well that are, you know, make it look easy or simple or successful or whatever it might be. It takes a lot to get here, right? I mean I've been grinding away for seven plus years and I want people to say, oh, my job sucks, I hate my boss, whatever, I'm just gonna quit and go buy a small business. That's a terrible reason to do it. And I can tell you, for me, almost hurt like every single day I spent in corporate, like it was just sucking the soul out of me, like it was physically difficult for me to do. And I'm not talking like the Sunday scaries that everybody talks about. I'm not talking about like hating your job. I'm talking just like I could not fathom not going to do my own thing like one more day. And so every time, because you'll also go through this. Most likely if people go through due diligence, there'll be multiple things that make you pause. You'll be concerned about something or, you know, some bad part of a deal will come up. And I've seen so many people, searchers and otherwise they will find any excuse to talk themselves out of a deal. And I was completely other way, which probably shouldn't have been. I was finding any way imaginable to talk myself into the deal just because I would much rather have gone down swinging my own, like taking my own shot than continuing to work for somebody else. I just, I couldn't fathom anymore. I'm like, ah, can I make that work? Yeah, I'll make a plan, contingency plans, this, that, the other. Now granted, I was totally wrong about those, but still figured it out. But yeah, I think that's what it has to be. You just have to like, know it. And then again, there's a ton of jobs in small business or medium sized business or family owned businesses. Right. It doesn't necessarily have to be that you need to be the owner. It doesn't need to be like there's a ton of great jobs. I mean, we'll talk about Josh. I mean, Josh is an absolute rock star. I mean, I'm happy that he's my business partner. It's amazing to me he doesn't have to own it to have what he believes to be a great job and probably a great career and something that's going to make him multi generational rich. There's other roles you don't have to be in the role that I took. Right. So that's what I think I want people to understand is really, really think hard about it. And if you do. But then on the other side of that, if people do know they want to do this, I will do anything imaginable to help people to be successful. Especially if you want to be in manufacturing. You can call me all hours of the day or night, like, I'll help no matter what. I'll figure it out. I love it. I really want people to succeed. Just don't want to steer people into this because suddenly, you know, this is the new untapped asset class and suddenly this is going to make you rich and it's easy. And they just back a Brink's truck up every other week to your house.

[42:16] Host: That was great, Reg, thanks for that. I, I just to put a point on it, multiple of my guests have referred to this fetal position moment. So it, it certainly traveled well, that concept. And, and also you, you seem to have predicted something that really does happen to so many people. And also with, with the, the second half of that prediction, which is they, they seem to get through it. So not. Neither of us are here telling you, oh, you'll just get through it. It'll be fine. You, you gotta figure out how to make it fine. And you know, there are bad stories out there too. So yeah, this isn't the a unicorns thing. But yeah, maybe it's not quite. Maybe it's not quite as bad as you think in the moment.

Guest: It's not. Absolutely not. And again, like it. It is. What happened then, I wouldn't even think about now. And we have way bigger problems that happen weekly in our facilities. One, I don't even know about it. Josh shields me from that anyway. But two, you just figured out how to get through it. But I'm really happy though, that I'm going to be known as the foundry guy and the fetal position guy. That'll be great. It's going to be a heck of a foundation fetal good legacy for me. I have to add a third F to my.

Host: I was trying to do that ahead of our interview here just to make it. Just to round it out perfectly. I couldn't come up with one. So if you do, let me know. We'll make it the title.

Guest: Get it?

Host: All right, Reg, let's get back to your story a little bit. So first of all, to jump to the end, how many foundries have you acquired now?

Guest: We are in the process of acquiring number seven for foundries. Like we will have it. I don't know how fast this will come out, but it's coming within the next month of recording.

Host: Okay. Yeah, it could be. I mean, this will come out in about within three to four weeks. So it could happen right around then.

Guest: Perfect.

Host: Well, let's just hear the quick story. This is what I want to do is hear the evolution of you buying this first business to then doing your second business. And like, and when it was that your now vision, which is doing this big roll up to $100 million when that started taking shape. Because to be clear, when you bought that first business. Yes. You thought you were going to improve X, Y and Z, build this moat and emerge on the other side with this, you know, really healthy, strong business foundry that your competition couldn't touch. However, you did not. You were, you were not thinking that you'd become this holdco of foundries on a path to 100 million. Right. So, so take us from your, that, that first notion of what you do to how did it evolve to what you're doing now and if maybe your second or third acquisition was part of that. Tell, tell those stories in brief as well.

[45:06] Guest: Yeah, so I haven't talked much about this for me, and I've certainly talked about this part of it. I think it is absolutely imperative for someone that is coming in as a small business owner to buy and run your own shop for 18 months, 24 months, whatever. There's a few reasons why I think that's obscenely important. One, you want to be able to call BS on customers, employees, vendors, et cetera. And if you don't actually sit there and operate the business day to day, you'll never be able to do that. It's been what I always referred to in corporate as being an empty suit. So being in there, not only will you have the knowledge of your industry, but then you'll also learn what it takes to go operate on a day to day basis. And then going forward, you'll always be able to go back in if something happens. Like when my president left, I could jump back in immediately and go run. We didn't miss a beat. We actually improved drastically, very quickly. Not just by adding Josh, but also by me coming in there and realizing like, oh, we've been screwing this up for I don't know how long I got to fix this really fast. And then the other part of that is that you get used to those ups and downs. You see them and you can always help your employees, knowing that they're going to have these struggles. You can. My favorite way of teaching people is to give them the autonomy to be their sounding board and then to starve the system, as I like to call it, of resources. So make them go, have creativity to solve it. Make them come to you with solutions. If they see a problem, don't answer the problem for them. Make sure that you're telling them or asking them. I should say, hey, how are you going to solve it? Have you thought about this? Have you thought about whatever, like just constantly teaching people. And if you've never done that, if you've never operated for that 18 to 24 months, you can never get there. So with that, my story is, you know, my first one, I ran fully day to day for 18 months, was in the weeds mainly, didn't. I mean, I wasn't in like the actual making of a mold per se. I did that a little bit, but it wasn't like I was actually on the shop floor day to day, but I was in there talking to customers, driving business. That was ultimately my main goal, and from that standpoint, learned a lot. But then after the 18 months, realized that we had some real fundamental issues with our business. Even though we'd almost doubled profits in the first 18 months of the business, we still had some things that were drastically holding us back that we knew we weren't going to be able to get over as long as we didn't own it, control it, et cetera. So we started looking around. So after 18 months, I just started talking to people, realizing, hey, there's three or four things that we really need to do. Started pricing out new equipment, started figuring out how we were going to do that. And the easy one, the biggest one that I had was it was about a million dollars to buy a new piece of equipment, have it installed for this one specific piece that we needed. And the other one was about a half a million dollars to buy the equipment and have it installed. Now, both of these, we didn't have the knowledge to run that equipment. So not only would we have had a million and a half dollars worth of equipment installed, we also would have had to hire people. And then immediately we're going to have to start paying the bank back. So we would have had to go figure out, you know, how to get customers really fast. Now, I'll come back to why this is a nightmare that a lot of companies get into kind of a death spiral when you start to do that. So instead of doing that, I said, well, that doesn't make any sense to me. I can't figure out how to pay the bills with that. And I started looking at other acquisitions then and happened to stumble across a business that was doing very poorly. And we're talking less than $2 million in sales and less than $200,000 in SDE. You know, by the time the owners were taking money out of there, there was no money left over. Nothing had been done. No upgrades to equipment, no maintenance, no hiring, no anything. Well, fast forward, you know, So I found that about. About two years in almost exactly one of my buddies randomly referred me to it. Came through a kind of a broker, not really. And started kicking the tires on that. And the end of that story is I ended up paying $256,000 for that business with both of the pieces of equipment that I needed. It would have cost me a million and a half dollars, but I also got the $1.8 million in sales and almost $200,000. So worst case, it was close to, I mean, $226,000. I just wrote out a check for it. But the thing was almost cash flowing. And by the time we picked it up, moved it increased price, and started putting our own customers through that. That business made a half a million dollars the first year that we bought it. So that was a tuck in that we literally purchased combined operations with our first one that we'd bought. And as soon as I saw that, it was just like the light came on instantly. And this mounted to like, wait a second. And I started talking to our customers a little more like, oh, we love that you're investing, we love that you're growing. That really gives us a sense of, you know, positivity and confidence that you're going to do the right thing. And so we want to start to give you more business. And then just kept growing on it. And they're like, hey, have you ever thought about buying something over here and over there? And they started talking to me about other things. And so it just suddenly realized as I talked to customers, the big customers wouldn't give me their business because they needed to have multiple locations to de risk having. They didn't want to put all their eggs in one basket. And the small customers wanted to come see us. And from that I realized, well, we'll make this simple. I'm just going to go start buying these things. They want to be able to drive in one day. I'm going to buy them like every 500 miles because you figure in order to. And what they wanted to do with my small customers is they wanted to wake up in the morning, get their kids to school, drive in, come watch their product get made, shake hands, go have lunch, drive back home and be home in time for dinner. Or they wanted to be able to have us be able to make a product and deliver within one day. So that was just suddenly became our thesis for why. And then again, like I said on the other side, the large corporate customers, you know, 90% of their volume is overseas. Their last 10% now, because we have multiple facilities, if one burns down, they know we can just pick it up and ship it somewhere else and we can build it somewhere else in the country. One of our facilities now I can get both sides of our customers. And that's literally how we started off and running.

[51:44] Host: And so, so you sort of perceived a gap in the market where you wanted, you wanted to be able to provide the volume and the scale of a larger foundry, but also have this Kind of like localized small town foundry option for the smaller, your smaller end customers who would literally want to visit the foundry and get beers with the, with the managers.

Guest: Yeah. So the actually being able to compete with, with the equipment of the larger foundries came a little bit later. It was just the insight that I could solve a customer problem by buying more of these. And every time I bought them, the cash flow was paying for it. So I've been talking about this a lot on Twitter lately. People talk about how I rolled up in my mind every time we bought this. I would think of except for the first one. I've never taken more than the IRS mandated minimum $120,000 a year out of my foundries. Just continue to roll that forward and obviously get perks and benefits out of there. Some other stuff, but that's notwithstanding. But every time we go buy another one, we then break it up. And so anytime I go buy the next foundry, I think I'm going to break that up into a third. A third, A third. So a third is going to go pay for the loans, a third is going to go to equipment upgrades and a third is going to go pay for the next C suite executive. So every time I've bought these, I haven't taken more money personally out of it. I've rolled this back in and continued to compound. And so I was solving a customer problem in that the local customers. So now I could get local small customers all across the country. I could get the largest corporate customers all across the country even though they didn't care where it was made. So local customers cared where I was. The large customers cared that I had multiple. And then what I realized as we started to grow this now, you know, I was paying the nut. And the other two thirds of the business I was investing in people and equipment. And that's what suddenly built that moat in my head. The next one of now I'm going to be so far ahead. Our company is going to be so far ahead of where everybody else is because now we can invest in the latest and greatest. We can have equipment on site which we're actually putting in. One should be here by the end of the year. We'll be the only foundry in the country with this capability, bar none. There's one other that is available to the public. There's one other place that we know of that is a captive foundry, meaning that they build product for the Boeings or whomever of the world that, that they own. We're the only one. And so now what happens Is we've got kind of centers of excellence, if you want to think of it that way, in that. So these coes, one of our facilities will be the high volume shop. Another of our facilities will be the place that does really big product. Another be the place that we do brass, bronze, zinc. Another one will be, you know, the permanent mold. Like there's all different ways that we can do this stuff. And now we can figure out how we, you know, we can have everything that a large foundry has. We just happen to be distributed, you know, in. Ultimately, it'll be 10, 11, 12 different locations across the country. But each one of those are able to deliver value that nobody else is able to in the country.

[55:01] Host: And Reg, why do you think it is that no one else had perceived this opportunity? Whenever I see somebody grab a good opportunity, that's always my question. It's like, why did nobody else see this? There are literally hundreds of other foundry owner managers around the country. You're talking to all of them, or you're at least stalking all of them to figuring out who you want to buy next.

Guest: Pretty much.

Host: But why? Why? Of those 500 people out there now, probably many of them are retirement age and they just don't feel like it. But, but why didn't they realize somebody realized to do this, you know, 15 years ago when they were 45 and still were kind of hungry?

Guest: Yeah. So I alluded to this a little bit. And what happens is they got bigger, but they did it in one location. Right. And so our unlock has been the ability to manage these facilities remotely. But if you think about it, you know, a lot of these foundries started. And so to give you a quick history how most of the foundry industry in the US kind of built up was in the 40s, a lot of the, the people came back from the war, so grandpa or great grandpa started the foundry in the forties when they came back. And every city would have one or two of these little thousand, two thousand, you know, cinder block building foundries. And then they continue to grow. And certain of them got massive, you know, they're 100,000, 500,000 square foot foundries, while others of them just stay the same size. And what would happen. And then you saw a lot of this hit where some of these more successful foundries started having to compete with a lot of their bigger customers going to China. And so they would install automated equipment or whatever else it might be. And what that automated equipment would do is create a massive financial burden on them. Again, this is what I mentioned before. I buy equipment and that cash flow helps. You know, the equipment's already there, it pays for it, right? As long as I buy right, I'm paying for that. I'm not all of a sudden adding $2 million or two and a half million dollars is going to cost me, you know, 400, $500,000 a year for a seven year note to go pay for. I'm able to go take that and build this on top of it. And then the real big unlock is that we can manage, like I mentioned, remotely. So these folks continue to get bigger, but as soon as you get bigger, then you have to chase higher and higher volumes. The higher and higher volume you chase, the lower and lower margin you get. We're the other way. We continue to focus on the small, lower run, higher margin, etc. Type customers and products that they want built. Then when Josh came in, you know, he was really the one that figured out, okay, we need to go make this from. We have one really well run foundry that was the first one that we built, bought, grew, etc. I mean, that one is 5x larger, 4x larger than it was when we initially bought it. And then the other ones that are in the system as we grow through those, these are now being run like that. So he's creating the playbook of how we can remotely manage these. We don't need general managers anymore, we don't need all the back office people that are supporting them anymore on site. We've got a holding company level team that is able to do all the engineering, the planning, you know, ap, ar, payroll, all of that gets pulled off. And then what's locally on site is simply a plant manager whose job is to make it, you know, essentially keep employees healthy and safe, build a quality product, deliver that quality product on time. So that sounds really, really simple. But if you actually go look at all the systems, processes, et cetera that Josh has built, it is light years ahead of even the largest foundries I've ever been in, in my life. And that's what it really allows us to do it. So even if someone would have thought of it, I don't know how they would have pulled it off. Because as we went through it, that was my big thing, is I needed to go find an operations person, someone that was an absolute rock star like Josh to pull this off. I admittedly probably couldn't have done it. And if I could have done it, I would have hated every minute of it. But I think that's the big difference. And so I don't think it really crosses people's minds. I think it's been done multiple times. It's just so small. Even micro private equity wouldn't want to go roll this up. It's too small for them now. It's plenty big now. There's people beating down our door every day that want to go buy us because we're an untapped asset class, because we can go make million or two million dollar shops into $10 million shops in the way that we do it. But you know, that's just not reality unless you've got the systems and the processes and the knowledge base and all this backed up.

[59:45] Host: Reg, I wanted to. So on the complexity and well, all the systems that you said Josh has put into place and how under the hood there's a lot of complexity to enable this centralized management of these remote, all these remote foundries. Can you talk a little bit more about like what some of those systems look like? I assume a lot of it is software and documented processes. I know you have this, this wiki and so just kind of give us add a little bit more color there. And then specifically on the software, I know no code has been something that Josh has taken a lot of advantage of. Give us an example or two of something he's built with no code. That's really been an unlock.

[1:00:23] Guest: Yeah, you're going to be way outside of my knowledge base here. So this is not my expertise. I'll hit on some highlights but. And I won't be able to give you deep, deep specifics. You're going to have to have Josh on for that. But so simple answer is yeah, you're 100% right. But it's bringing in all the latest and greatest tools. You know, it's bringing in automated payroll, AP, AR, that type of stuff. And then also on the other side, you know, that's the simple ones and I think a lot of people have started doing those. Those are easy. And then it's also building offshore teams. Right. So we have teams in Mexico and teams in the Philippines that help with this. And then on the other side of that, you know, now in the actual tools there's things, you know, confluence, ClickUp. We use Acumatica for erp. All these pieces tie together. There's numerous things in airtable that connect and then what happens is ultimately I think it's fathom that actually outputs everything. So as long as when he creates these processes with the team now it becomes really easy for us to enable making this work so, you know, it can go from the, the software and the systems, the data that comes in out of our operating systems will get fed into the tool. The tool will say, hey, something is off. It'll automatically flag so that our director of operations gets to talk or knows to talk with the plant manager. The plant manager will be alerted before the next shift starts, says, hey, something went wrong. We don't know what went wrong. But go investigate, figure this out. And then as that kind of propagates through, you know, so there's a lot of tools that exist in there. Some of that's learning, automated learning. You get more and more data that things get better and better on the other side of it as we make those simpler and simpler, same thing, follow the steps. Things like getting credit cards in, getting bank statements in, whatever it might be, making sure that's all in in the first two, three, four days after the month close. And then as long as that's done, it's a coup. Hours of work for them, maybe half a day of work. They press a button and our books are closed. So for us, everything goes really, really fast and really, really simple. And then as soon as the books are quote, unquote closed, we can instantly send out whatever information we need. So it goes all the way from the very beginning on day to day operating metrics and what's going on so that we have visibility to make sure that it works all the way through to the far side of. Once we see monthly data, we get that on, not we can get monthly data on real time. So they're looking at it much closer. But financials, ultimately, most of them don't matter as long as you're doing the right things. Operating financials should take care of themselves or very close to it. So really then we get to see. And then at every separate level of the organization, you know, what I see that gets automated kicked out to me is completely different than what a plant manager sees. So while that's customized, it says, hey, here's the. Josh knows, here's the three numbers I care about. That's all I see. I don't see anything else. And we only see exceptions. The plant managers might see 30 different things that matter that they care about, but totally different. And so all of that, we've just simplified. What used to take days and days and days of work, now become just simplistically like whatever they need to work on, you know, however they're working through that. So that's just. Everything is just simplified. And. And again, we talked about this before, Josh, and I's perspective on everything we build. We want to be able to 10x. And on the other side of it, as we look at anything that we're going to do, it is going to be automate, delegate or eliminate. Like that's our, our mantra of, of tasks and what we need to do. So if we are going to keep it so either we're going to automate it or delegate it or maybe both, then it's going to be something that needs to grow 10x. We don't want to build something now and then have it be something that we're fixing again next month or six months or even 18 months. So, you know, that whole system, you know, when you put this information in, everything is built such that we don't solve a problem twice. We'll spend the time up front to solve a problem once and not have to do it again. And especially you're going to watch Josh and I go spin in circles and go absolutely crazy. You see, you let us have a problem that comes up two or three times in a row that we're still doing the same thing for and we didn't spend the extra two hours. So instead we're spending, you know, three hours of time rather than just doing it right the first time and, and making sure that it never comes up again. That and again it makes it for a lot harder up front, but it makes it for a lot easier down the road.

[1:05:10] Host: Reg and so the all of these kind of data flows and this kind of no code stack that is gluing everything together, is that all actually built by Josh or is it kind of directed by him? And there are more than just Josh actually literally, you know, doing the airtable code to make it happen.

Guest: Yeah, I mainly Josh certainly he's trying to build and build more resources inside the organization and hire more resources to help. But at this time, you know, mainly the way that Josh and I think about it is his role coming in as president and coo and he's quickly, within the next few months here, going to be giving up that COO role and title and handing that off as he moves on to the next major thing. The idea was the first 18 to 24 months that he was here, he was going to dive in and kind of deep dive on each piece. So it started with operations and then it was customer service and then and currently we're ending its finance and all the implementation of our erp. And so the next thing that he's going into is marketing and sales and the same thing he's done in all the rest of the part of the organization, he's going to go do that. And then after he figures out, because he's done all of this stuff in his past with the family business that they bought and then the other places that he's worked. So he knows what he's doing. He's just never had kind of the free range to go build everything that he wants and anything that he wants, I guess in some regard and do it however he wants to do it. So he's building this and he's going to jump in and build it and then we hire somebody. So, you know, like I said, we're going to be in the next month or so we'll be taking this on this new acquisition at that point in time, you know, his role is going to be to integrate, make sure all that is done. He's going to build a process around what it takes to integrate. There's some folks like Everest Brady who just started for us, there's going to be helping him immensely to, to document and onboard people and make that work. And then his next role is with marketing and sales. He'll document, figure out how we're going to do that and then we'll hire a chief commercial officer as part of, you know, this, this latest acquisition. So you know, again, that whole thing, we buy something, you know, we kind of split it up into upgrades of equipment, upgrades of people, you know, the other 2/3 of the money roughly, then we should be all good to go. And so with that, I think that's, you know, something that'll just be simple in their regard and making sure that, you know, we continue to build and grow. And I think over time we'll see a lot more people like that coming into the organization. Partly just I think our brands per se that Josh and I are building, we're starting to attract a lot of people that want to come and work for Cancast and build this. And especially, you know, people know that Can Cast is the first roll up we're doing. But there'll be numerous other roll ups in small manufacturing as we go forward with our systems and processes that we can drop in. So I think people are starting to realize or starting to be interested in coming and working with us, especially Josh as he, as he tears this thing up.

[1:08:27] Host: And Reg, how many people are you at the Holdco level today?

Guest: So we have shared services, that's I think four or five and then cto, soon to be coo, currently director of Ops and Josh and myself. So four plus shared services wow.

Host: Okay. Not a lot of people. No.

Guest: And anyone who hears that will be in knowing roughly our size will be shocked to know that we do not have a CFO or controller. That is a. Probably the most shocking thing for most people when we start to talk about it, is that we don't have a head of HR and we don't have head of finance in any really way, shape or form.

[1:09:16] Host: Is that because you haven't gotten around to it or is there some philosophical reason that you don't just.

Guest: I mean, there's HR somewhat. We want to go build that out and really own it and we haven't found the right person yet. Potentially we've got some ideas on what we want to do with it, but right now it's not something that we're seeing a payback on it. And from a finance perspective, it's much more philosophical in that we think we can build a system and we haven't found other people, whether it be fractional, whether it be full time, when we get the pairing of what we need in manufacturing and how we want to run this, it's just we're not sure that someone like that exists yet. And we think we can do this in a much better way. And every time we talk with people they continue to tell us that we're idiots and we don't know what we're doing. So just one more thing, we're going to go do it our way.

Host: Reg. What? What? Where's your revenue today? If you could. And then we've now, we've now teased this hundred million dollar number a couple of times.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: Talk to me about how this path before you to 100 million is at this point feels pretty straightforward and inevitable.

Guest: Yeah. So we'll do, I think in the next 12 months we'll do somewhere around 30 million in that ballpark, probably a little more. And then the thing with the rest of these pieces, the reason why I think we can grow is that we've established so we took our one facility from under three to over 10. We have that playbook. We know we're going to go buy. I again, I've talked to over 600 foundry owners across the country. We currently have about 35 that are on my list of folks that I know that I'm going to buy or want to buy potentially depending on what they want to do. I don't need to go buy all 35, you know, I need to get another 10 or 15 probably. And so it's just a playbook where we know that we've got the bank financing. So our guys at Security Bank, Kevin and Andy, do a great job for us and they've supported us. Now we've started doing business. We're going to redo our entire debt stack with them as we speak. When we do this latest acquisition, they're willing to go support us across the country with, you know, pretty close to mid market type terms as we get closer to it and we continue to grow. As people know, once you get over 5 million in EBITDA, bankers come out of the woodwork. But you know, the, the game is once we handle that, it's just we know what we're going to go buy. I throw it over the wall to Josh. Josh knows the playbook to go take those things to over 10 million. So math is pretty simple. You have 10 locations, you do over 10 million in each. It's over $100 million. So I mean 100 million is. We, we kind of use it as a, it's just, it's just that kind of ten by ten thing. I actually think it's probably going to be more. But now it's, we've now built it and I am unbelievable. I thought it was going to be a real struggle before Josh came on board and the way that we're doing it now that we've kind of, Josh and I have figured out how we like to work and how we're going to do it where he's able to isolate me so that I can really go focus on doing acquisitions. It really should just be something I don't want to say. It's paint by numbers. It's never going to be that easy. But it's a playbook that we have. We have to just go execute. We just have to go find the right people, the right businesses, the right time, whatever it might be. And that's really the extent to what we need to worry about. So again, I'm never going to say it's ever going to be easy, but you know, I think people can infer pretty good idea of what that's worth. And I think when people hear that we're going to go do this three, four more times, there is something in my head and I really want to see someone become a unicorn out of the small business space. And I'm willing to race anybody to it. So it'll be a fun time. I don't know, I won't be, by the way, I won't be sitting in that chair. It won't be me. Just to be very, very clear, I Will be long, long away. Will have hired people that are way better and smarter than I am that's going to be running the place by then. I do not want to be one of these people that are working late into their 60s and 70s. I want to be just advising and helping and doing whatever I can. And I have a fundamental belief. It's not that I don't love this job. It's going to be the worst thing in the world to give up, is going to do deals. But that doesn't make a good company. It doesn't make a robust company. It doesn't make a valuable company when myself or anybody else in the organization is imperative. So something that very, very soon. This will be the last deal I have to do. This will be the last deal I do by myself from every deal here forward. By three more deals from now, I will no longer be doing the deals day to day. How we always train people is that the person who owns the process puts a rough process down now, or at least I'm going to have a rough process. In Josh's world, he'll have a perfect process. But I'm terrible at documenting stuff. Don't know barely how I do it. So the next time we do a deal, I'll have somebody with me and they'll just document everything we do. They're just going to witness, observe, take notes, do whatever they need to do. And then the second deal after that, they'll be manning parts of it and we'll work through what their notes are and how they handle it, and I'll be coaching. And then the third deal, they're going to be leading with me, mainly kind of observing. And then by the fourth deal, it should be theirs.

[1:15:08] Host: And. And then at that point, you will do what? That's when you. That's when you step out.

Guest: I think that's because I have to

Host: say, Reg, I mean, spending your time shopping for deals sounds like a pretty fun way to.

Guest: No, no, that'll be spe days. Yeah, exactly. No, that's what I'm saying. But, yeah, it'll be. So I'll give up. I'll probably give up the foundry side of it and I'm going to go figure out the next manufacturing thing we're going to do. That's when you do that. Yeah, Right. So, yeah. Well, hopefully understanding by then, Josh is going to have a little more work to do. He's not going to be able to come with me quite that fast. But quickly thereafter, then, you know, it'll be the next thing and then Josh is going to have to find his replacement and other people are going to have to step up and some of our folks at the hold co level are probably going to have to come with us and they'll have to find their replacements. And so we've got a lot of work to do in the next three, four, five years.

Host: Reg, I want to wrap up with two big questions to do that, but first an observation. The, the. I feel like there's this pattern that I don't know if it's explicit or it's just the way you guys have evolved where you learn how to do something, the higher ups, you whatever, or Josh learn how to do something, maybe do it a couple of times, then immediately start. It's just like what you just described with the M and A process. Then immediately start documenting it and trying to, you know, push it down in the organization. So. And bring up somebody behind you to do it. And if you kind of keep that going in perpetuity, it's kind of like there's always you, you're always avoiding key man risk or that too much of the organization's intelligence in quotes is locked in one person's brain.

Guest: Yeah. So 2023 for us is the year that people and Josh and I started talking about this. I have a fundamental belief that every single person in our organization needs to have, if they get hit by a bus, we need to have someone that can step in essentially immediately. Right. Within three months at the absolute most that they can step in and they can do the job. And then there has to be a second person behind that person who can within one to two years be able to step in and do that job. And so that is key. I explain that to every one of our people that come in, every one of our executives, everybody in plant manager. And I say, hey listen, if you want to, we're growing, we're going to have a lot of opportunities. But if you don't train somebody to be your current replacement and someone that can be who your second in replacement is within a very short period of time, you're not getting promoted. It's just not happening. So that really forces that on them. But yeah, it is very, very explicit and it's very something that I fundamentally believed in. I mean, that's a corporate thing that I picked up in some regard. But, but that's also like. Yeah, I was just going to ask

Host: is this from you or is this something that is a best practice in corporate America?

Guest: No, that's definitely. I mean that was Aware. Yeah, that. That's, that's a corporate structure. You have to do, you know, you do reviews on a. On an annual basis of saying every single per. I used to have to go review every single person in my organization, myself included, my boss and their bosses had to do all the same thing of saying, okay, you know, eliminate key man risk. You know, what do you say? If you leave or whatever, who is going to do your job immediately? And if it's not that person because they decide to leave also, you better have a second person being developed as well. So it constantly forces you. And then also it really builds that aspect of our organization where people aren't trying to hoard information. And when we find people that do hoard information, we'll have those conversations with them. And if they continue that they will not be in our organization for long. It's just not. Josh and I just fundamentally disagree with it. We share openly. We believe that everybody has a role on the team. Everybody, you know, we, we talk about it. It's a, you know, baseball team or whatever. Everybody's got a position on the field to play, and they have to do that. But you have to be able to freely share with anybody else so that they can come in kind of that understudy perspective. But also anybody across the organization does it. And we've had a few people that haven't been that way and they're no longer with us, and it's just. It just can't do that. It's too small of an organization to not do that.

[1:19:16] Host: But then, well, you had the fact that you, you brought that with you from corporate. I guess that explains also why you were pretty comfortable with key man risk going back to your very first acquisition and why all these people were telling you not to buy foundries because you, you'd already seen many times how, how to eliminate key man risk. You, like, you knew what playbook to throw at keyman.

Guest: Yeah, and I think it's. And it's just the mentality. As long as you give people a reason why to do it, you know, I think a lot of people won't do it because they're concerned for their jobs. But if you explain to them, hey, this is going to help you, this is going to enable you to do the next job. Bigger, better things, you know, more efficient use of your time, resources, expertise. I think it starts in how you frame it, and then you've got to continue to push it. You know, if you got someone that comes in and someone's prepared and you've told them what it takes to get to the next role and then you hire someone in over the top of them without letting them know why. Yeah. Then you're going to immediately eliminate all loyalty and understanding in that. But if you continue to do what you say you're going to do and people see it, especially the other way, if people see that they got passed by because they didn't do it, then you know it's a very powerful culture change and motivator for folks in your organization.

Host: Yeah, yeah. No, it, it really does lay down a good culture where there's this sense that everybody is kind of on moving up or at least should be. I mean, they're always constantly training for their replacement and there's this kind of sense of momentum in everybody's kind of.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: A trajectory that everybody's, that everybody's on time.

Guest: We try and use human nature to our advantage whenever we can. We try and help ourselves. We don't try and fight ourselves when we don't have to Reg.

Host: The. Let's just talk about in a kind of abstract way, your Josh, who's come up time and again and, and, and you, and you mention a lot on Twitter and in all of your interviews, he's obviously integral to the organization. Sounds like he was maybe the biggest unlock of all. Couple of, you know, your insights about what, what you could do here was, was a big one. But bringing on Josh, I've heard you refer to now multiple times, other than the fact that you have in Josh, this amazing visionary operator guy. And so I guess, lucky you. Is there something that people listening can learn from your finding and putting in Josh or the stars align and it's just, it was just like a happy accident and you're, and you know, you're luckier for it.

[1:21:42] Guest: Yeah. So I, I think people get lucky, but I think you have to put yourself in the position to get lucky. I would say there's a little bit of arrogance in me that would say the vast majority of people that would want to hire a Josh, not specifically Josh, I don't think they have companies that are big enough, complex enough, moving forward enough, etc, that would keep someone like that interested. But I also think the biggest thing for on my side is that I believe in giving people full autonomy. And that's how this whole story with Josh came about. You know, we were the only two mainly talking on Twitter about manufacturing. You know, I'd kind of seen his background. I understood it. It seemed like a really good fit. But then also he was talking about how he was not interested in working for someone else, didn't want to do any more consulting roles, et cetera. And that's when he and I started talking. And, you know, we just mentioned, hey, this is the situation. Here's what it is. I'm like, hey, I just wanted to at least reach out. I get it, you don't want to do this. Here's the current situation, here's what I'm thinking of doing. And we hit it off right away. I mean, it literally was. It started with how we wanted to schedule the meeting where I reached out to him on a DM and he wrote back and said, hey, yeah, I've seen you on Twitter, meant to catch up with you. I don't really like meetings, so I'm just gonna. I'll just send you a text message next week on roughly when and. And if you're not available, or if you're available, great, we'll talk. If you're not available, great, no big deal. We'll just ping back. And he's like, and after, like a week, if it doesn't work out, then, you know, this is. We'll just schedule an actual meeting. And so both of us hate meetings. And I was like, oh, this is amazing. Like, I. This is fantastic. Like, ping me. I. I hate being in lockdown, even, you know, sit down through whatever meetings they might be. And I mean that. Whereas I haven't had, I don't think, a formal meeting yet this year, I'm not positive in our company, we've actually had a formal meeting that I'm involved in. Those guys have his operations, but I don't. Josh and I just ping each other and talk whenever we need to. But, yeah, so we just started talking about it. And, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, you're lucky to find Josh. And I was like, well, part of it was that I, you know, I listened to what he really wanted. Like, I talked to him about it. Like, he really wanted the autonomy to go run the day to day. And the quick version of the story was he said, hey, you know, I don't, you know, I love what you're saying. This might be interested. He's like, how about this? What about if I give you 18 months, I'll set this all up, figure out how to, like, create a COO role. I'll do all the operations, I'll do all the playbooks, and then you can just hand this over to a director of ops who will become your coo. Or you can hire somebody or Whatever. And then for that 18 months, I'm putting in. Then the last six months, you teach me how to buy a business. And, you know, we kind of talked through it, and I was like, I thought you just said you didn't want to buy a business you didn't want. He's like, I don't. But, you know, no one will let you run operations the way that I want to run operations. Like, I have ways. And he's like, people say they will give you it, but then when it comes down to it, the owner, the boss, the whatever, they'll always have their piece on that. And. And so we went back and forth, and I was like, bro, so you're telling me, like, you literally want me to teach you to help you to buy a business as opposed just because you don't want to be able to run something? I'm like, I have a way better idea. Like, come run all the day to day at Canecast. I won't even talk to you if you don't want. Like, 100. You bro, like, no problem. And so, yeah, we just chatted about a little more, and we worked through it because we had, like, very clear lines of delineation. Like, I do this, you do that. Like, you. Like, you protect me from the day to day. That's 100 years. You run that however you want. Like, granted, yeah, Like, I still have to hold him accountable. Like, ultimately, like, his job. He has to make operations better this year. He has to get the ERP done. He's got to integrate Beamer, and he's got to integrate Beamer's. Just by the way, the name of our. It's just the code name for our company and the acquisition. And he's got to go figure out how he grows the people part of the organization and the marketing and sales. Like, that's what he has to go do. Like, okay. But we talk about it all the time, but ultimately it's his decision. And that's what I think the big difference is, is if you're going to hire really great people, you have to give them pure autonomy. You have to help them, you have to coach them, you have to teach them what they don't know. Sure. Like, I can help him understand foundries. He didn't even know what a foundry barely was when he got in here. So we walked through that. But at the same time, you know everything about operations. He's a much better operator than I am, but I think that's the part. And then you have to be honest with yourself. That you're going to actually go do it. Like I know 100%. We're making decision right now with our CTO and Josh, and they're doing some things. I'm trying to help out, but ultimately it's going to be their decision. They're going to screw up. They are going to cost me a hundred thousand dollars. I guarantee it. It's going to happen. But you know what? I've done mistakes before. I won't let them make major mistakes. But it's their decision. They're going to tell me, I'll tell them. They're going to decide that I'm wrong. They're right. They'll do it. They'll find out they're wrong. They're going to cost 100 grand. It is what it is. But that's fine. That's a learning experience. That's tuition. That's what you need to be able to go do. And again, if I'm continually there, if I'm continually the crutch, I will always be the crutch. I will never be able to go buy. So I'm going to go buy this next foundry. That's going to make us millions of dollars a year. Or I could go focus on this $100,000 mistake. Great. I'll take the, you know, the 95% payback is much better. Going to do my job while they go figure out how to do their job. And that's really hard to do. I mean, that's hard for managers to do in corporate. It's really hard when it's your own money. But to me, so, you know, this is why I bristle a little bit at being lucky. I don't. Sure, it's. It's fortuitous that Josh and I met for sure, but at the same time, it's how you set it up. And so anybody can go find that it's about the right cultural fit. It's about having the respect for each other. It's about making sure that you understand what your job is going to be and what their job is going to be and that you're there to help. You're a sounding board, you're whatever. But at the same time, you know, you're there to celebrate the wins and, and ultimately, it's their decision and it's their job. And, you know, I tell them, like, I'll give you 100% autonomy. It doesn't matter who it is. And this is what I pushed out on Josh, too, with his team. Got to give 100% autonomy. Which is sometimes hard for him because he likes doing everything. But then you got to hold them accountable. And you know, those are lessons, those are tuitions. And if they screw up once and you teach them and then they screw up again, and that's a major problem. If they screw up a third time, probably going to be a pip and they're probably not going to be here any longer or for much longer. Right. It's just, you know, it has to be a high performance organization that everybody's accountable to everybody else, but we can't be doing each other's jobs for each other. And at the same time, you know, we can't be holding ourselves back. And that's why I always talk about having the person behind you that can take over immediately and another person that can take over in a year or two and, and then that's holding the same thing because everybody has to continue to lever up. You can't, you know, more than 10x a business. You know, these foundries, I mean, they have grown 2, 3, 4% at best a year for the last few years, you know, over, you know, you said 80% went out. So we're bucking every trend imaginable to have 10x plus this business. And ultimately, right, we're going to be 50x or, you know, 60x or whatever it is in, in 10 years total. You can't be stagnant and you can't do things the way they used to be done and you can't do other people's jobs. We're just too lean and too much work to do to get that done. So the big problem is just, you know, you have to be able to give that up and have honest conversations about it.

[1:29:13] Host: Reg, last question for you. So you just have discovered this amazing opportunity in foundries to roll them up, improve them, and you see that this playbook that you've developed can be dropped into other niches within manufacturing. I'm just wondering for the audience who, for people who are listening who might not be interested or know anything about manufacturing, I wonder, do you see, do you see what you've done here? Opportunities to do the same in non manufacturing spaces? Or was there something it, was there something inherent to manufacturing that, that made what you're doing possible?

Guest: Yeah. So the simple answer is, I think there's a lot of other. You already alluded to it. There's a lot of other manufacturing spaces that can have exactly what we've done rolled up. That's part of why Josh and I mentioned the other day we're going to start doing this. We'll put some investments in companies, and we'll add Josh's systems, and we'll add Josh and I as kind of mentors, board of advisors, whatever, so that we can get upside as we build these things and ultimately enable manufacturing across the country. But this is 100% doable. You know, guys like Rich Jordan are literally doing this right now, plumbing H vac. There's many other places you can go do this. And I think you can do this without having massive private equities. Certainly you can do this with private, you know, the way private equity is doing it, put a GM in place, put all the systems and whatever in place with larger companies. But I think you can do it on a lot smaller scale. You know, again, Josh had the unlock to go figure this out, to make this work ultimately, like, of how we're going to continue to scale this everywhere. But at the same time, I don't think that this is unique to what we're doing. I think it just requires breaking every rule and doing it your own way. This is one of my. I talk a lot on Twitter about first principles. I think there's way too many times that people just follow the herd and they see something and they do it. And we are exactly the opposite. Our CTO we just hired, it was funny. He met with a vendor, with one of our plant managers the other day, and they said, well, this is, you know, as you get bigger and do it, this is the way you're going to do it. And he literally told the vendor, well, I'm really happy you told me that, because now I'm definitely going to do it a different way. Because if. If it's common knowledge that you do it this way, I'm certain we're going to find a better way to do it. And I love that. Like, that is the attitude exactly that I want. It's the same thing we talked about with the finance people, right? Like, you have to figure out what really matters. Like, don't go do what everybody else has done. Don't go figure out how you're going to handle something. Reading a playbook, like, do all those things, read all those things, talk to all those people, but then really think through yourself what really needs to happen, and then go do that. That's the only way this has happened. Do I think a foundry is special compared to anything else? No, I just think we happen to be in foundries first. We can go do this in just about anything imaginable. You know, you just.

[1:32:14] Host: I Wonder what the, the characteristics are that would be similar in totally non manufacturing industries. Is it, I mean, lack of scale? The kind of the classic fragmentation boomer businesses lack of scale, Key man risk. What I wonder, maybe that's it.

Guest: No, I think, yeah, I mean lack

Host: of scale is really the big one.

Guest: Yeah, I mean I think that it's, it's that fragmented piece and then it's can you go and so I was just, I was talking with, with Gurdley's Holdco group that he put together the other day and we talk about this. Michael and I joke. He's very much a decentralized model and as am I technically. But I, I still want to debate him a little bit because we run that centralized playbook and again we will, once we get to be a true holding company above our rollup, you know, we'll have a holding company of roll ups essentially we're going to have everything decentralized the way it's going to look there. But if you think about it, we're centralizing eventually inside of a decentralizing. So if you can figure out a way that you can rip out again, you have to figure out how you get your key people to be able to operate. And in order to do that you have to put blinders on them to handle something that's really simple. And as they get more trained, they get more education, they get more knowledge, et cetera, they get better at their job. Then you can give them more and more responsibilities and autonomy. But again, our plant managers, we go buy from an owner that's really a GM that does everything and we strip out 80% of their duties and that's the person that we leave. It's much easier to hire that person. It's much cheaper to hire that person. Now we can train and grow and do whatever we want, those folks. But that's because we have a lot of centralized services. So some combination of, you know, that centralized service and the other pieces that we have of really having good people that want to come here, that want to grow, we incentivize them to do it, you know, in that fragmentation. I mean it's funny when I see and I talk to people and I'll some searchers or people looking to buy business and they'll talk themselves out of the business that I look at. And I was like, yeah, I might go buy that later because I could take what you guys are saying no to right now and I could tear that place up up like. But again, like that's part of it. You just gotta see, like, oh, this book told me not to take key man risk or customer concentration or this or that. I'm like, well, go think through it yourself. If you can solve that, then don't worry about it. Like, great, get a discounted price, go roll that up and go find 10 more of those and do it again. Like, but again, it has to be first principles and it has to be understanding what you're going to do and how you're going to do it.

[1:34:53] Host: Reg, actually I have one more question I want to sneak in here just about manufacturing. What would you say to searchers looking at manufacturing, understanding that that's an incredibly broad category, but I haven't had that many people on who have bought manufacturing businesses and many of them have been more kind of fabrication and not pure manufacturing. Right. So I don't know, is there anything that you could say, like if somebody's interested in manufacturing broadly, something you might say to that searcher?

Guest: It scares a lot of people off. You just have to know what it's going to be about, like working capital. You just have to know. And if you've read Shoe Dog for instance, it's like my perfect example of a guy, Phil Knight, had to bet his company over and over and over again because working capital was trying to kill his growth. It's the same thing. You have to understand maintenance capex depending on how big it is. And as long as you can understand that depreciation is a real expense per se in the way that they write those off in businesses and you figure what you're going to spend on equipment and maintenance and on the other side you understand what it takes to grow in a working capital environment. It's just like any other widget. Now the one thing I'll say, if you're coming from an Excel world where you're just pounding away in a keyboard and you think that manufacturing is easy, good luck. It's going to be very different. But I've known people that have done it. It's just about the right mentality. Go jump in, get your hands dirty. You can figure it out. We need a lot more of it. And again, manufacturing tends to be very much, you know, no one's looking for manufacturing actively. There are some, but yeah, it's not 80 or 90% of people. You know, not everybody can go buy a service business. Not everybody can just do services. I mean, I'm happy if you do because it's leaves more room for myself. But that's a whole other story. It's just not it's just a widget though. It's not, it's not scary, it's not a big deal or it's not any scarier than anything else. I mean, you're still gonna have a personal guarantee. You're still gonna have to figure it out. And there's enough folks that, like myself, that have done it that we can help you through the little pieces of it. And now it's becoming known, you're seeing it being written about a lot of reshoring and how this is going to be critical for our country, how the government's going to be investing in these supply chains and fixing them and everything's going to be more local.

[1:37:15] Host: And do you think that this is a real tailwind for onshoring for US Based manufacturing? Yeah, we're hearing about it. Will it really happen?

Guest: I mean, with automation we can be very competitive on price. I think there's a few pieces where there's, there's a reason to have manufacturing everywhere. We, the pendulum swung way too far thinking that everything can be built low cost overseas. Now we're also seeing some of those things catch up. You know, your, you know, wages are 5 or 10x more than they were when we started moving things overseas 30 years ago. You know, they were constantly chasing low cost. China's not low cost anymore, Vietnam's low cost and now Africa's low cost. I mean, there'll always be lower cost, sure, but it's a heck of a lot harder to get a casting out of Africa into the US than it is anywhere else. And then you're also going to have to figure out how to build the infrastructure and get it all down there. And there's a lot of other problems that you're going to have. So is it? Yeah, but there's a reason to build stuff here. There's a, and there's a desire to build stuff here. So I think there's certainly a market, I think there's certainly a tailwind. Is it going to be 100% move back? Of course not. That'd be stupid. There's no reason for that to come back. But is there a reason for 10, 20, 30% when there's 2% today? Yeah, absolutely. You know, we get calls, we deal with this. I did a reshoring article three years ago. I think it was before Josh was maybe it was two years ago, two or three years ago, before Josh was even at the company, talking about how many people we'd talk to about bringing stuff back from China. And now it's insane during COVID I mean it's daily, weekly. We get pinged like, hey, we need to move this back. We want to move this back. Like, Josh probably just got done with a meeting right now. I started like an hour and a half ago with a company that is moving their entire supply chain back. I've got another customer who've literally said, if you go buy an entire foundry and spin it up, I will fill it 100 with my products.

[1:39:12] Host: Wow.

Guest: So, yeah, and that's. You're talking 30 or 15. That's probably 7 to $10 million in sales to bring back just with that one customer. So, yeah, it's definitely there. You have to figure it out. You have to have the reputation, you have to figure out how to do it. You have to solve, you know, the machines and the, the key people, key personnel, etc, risk. But it's absolutely doable. And I will happily go argue with all the, the searchers that tell me actually, I don't want to argue with them. I don't want them to suddenly change their teaching in their MBAs that they should stay away from, from this space. It's nice.

Host: Yeah. Be careful about winning that argument.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: A lot of competition running around.

Guest: As many people that want to come in, I'm happy to help. We need, we're not going to be able to do it all. There's a lot, a lot of it available.

Host: So you've said, you've said that you want to help searchers who are looking at manufacturing. What's the best way to reach out

Guest: to you dms and well, you're better off probably tagging me on Twitter than DMing me on Twitter. My DMs are an absolute disaster. But yeah, at Reg Zeller on Twitter, we telling what we're doing, building in public, making a fool of myself most of the time because I'll tweet about my losses just as much as my wins. But normally whatever randomly pops in my head or when I'm having a conversation. Like if, if someone reaches out and wants to have a conversation with me and I'll talk to them about it, I will anonymize it. But that will end up on the Twitter sphere. Like, hey, think about it this way. Like most of them are either in stuff that I remember, stuff where people are like, hey, don't do this. And I was like, oh, by the way, I'm definitely going to tweet about this, but they won't know it's you. And then once in a while they'll jump in like, my replies and be like, hey, bro, I'm like, I told you this happened and you didn't have to call yourself out.

Host: Like, fine.

Guest: Like, but you can't do that. That's terrible. That's a bad idea. And everybody else needs to know that's a bad idea. So again, just trying to help. I'm like, ah, if I can share my losses publicly, you can share your losses anonymously. It'll be all right.

Host: It's fine. Well, Reg, you were one of the very, very first people that I followed on Twitter when I was first taking an interest in this space. It's taken me a while to get you on, but I've been watching and learning from you from afar for a long time. So thrilled to finally get you in the seat here.

Guest: It's been amazing.

Host: Sorry I won't meet you in person at SM bash, but I'm sure there will be other opportunities.

Guest: Hold co conference, buddy. That's. That's what I'm built for. Yeah, we're. That's our space. So it'll be all.

Host: We'll give a little plug. That's the. That's Kelsey's conference. Kelsey later this year. October.

Guest: Yeah.

Host: John Wilson. September. October.

Guest: I think it's September this year. Yeah, September, October. I don't know. It's in there sometime.

Host: Okay. And the follow conf.

Guest: Yeah, I mean, but that's the place. That's where. I mean, it's. It's great. You know, it. That came up some of the SM besties conversations that the two of us or the three of us had and then the two of them went, did. So it's fine. Great place for us to go. A lot of people to figure out if you want to. If you have one after you're done with this, if you have one and you want to go figure out how to have multiples or if you have multiples and figure out how you want to do more. It's a great group. But that, you know, same thing. Gurdley's got that same thing on there. So a lot of places people are talking about doing like one business, multiple businesses, and it's absolutely incredible. For none of this existed seven years ago. I mean, it was. Yes. Yeah. No, it's an absolutely. I can't imagine again, I would have screwed a bunch of stuff up anyway because people would have told me and I still would have touched the hot stove. But again, it was. At least it's there and people can help and ask for help. And so you're telling all the searchers

[1:42:43] Host: out there, that they got it easy now that there's all this stuff out

Guest: there compared to, you know, 2017, it's, hey, listen, there's the influence information is there? Let's just put it that way. Yeah. Whether it's easy or not is a whole other ball game. But there's a lot more research there.

Host: At least it is remarkable. Like, and I've said this to guests who, who bought whatever 10 years ago or so, like, this is very hard today, but I can only imagine how much harder it was when there wasn't the pods in the books and the SMB, Twitter just completely figuring it out alone.

Guest: Well, we screwed up a lot more. At least I did.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: Other people didn't, but yeah, it's good.

Host: Although there was less competition, so there was also. There's also that.

Guest: Yeah, it's. Yeah. Well, we can get into. There's. There's a philosophical debate probably, but generally speaking, if you're built for this, competition isn't that hard at the bottom of the market. That's the nice part. But, you know, gotta take care of customers and take care of your employees and a lot of things just fall into place and then you learn more and then you grow a little bit. And it doesn't mean that you're buying today thinking about, you know, a three million dollar business like I was, and you have to worry about a hundred. There's a lot of steps in between three and 100 that you don't have to worry about yet. So you left. You'll have plenty of stuff to do for a while, I promise.

Host: Great. Well, let's leave it there. Reg. Thank you very much for coming on, sir.

Guest: Thanks, appreciate it.

Host: All your stuff in the show notes. All right. Till next time.

Guest: Great, thanks.