The Manufacturing Startup That's Outcompeting China | Jim Belosic, SendCutSend | Round II

19 May 2026 · 1 h 2 min · 31 chapters

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In short

How SendCutSend (founded by Jim Belosic) is building U.S. manufacturing capacity to compete with China by scaling speed, quality, and customer experience through selective automation, great labor, bootstrapping-to-scale, and culture-first operations.

Guest background

Jim Belosic is founder/CEO of SendCutSend, a U.S. parts manufacturing company. He’s been operating in “bootstrap mode” for about eight years, raising little early capital, and now is scaling factories across the U.S. with a focus on profitability and culture.

Key claims

  • U.S. manufacturing can compete with China, but requires scale; most U.S. shops are tiny and don’t scale to lower prices/speed.
  • Automation isn’t the “magic bullet”; the winning mix is robots where useful plus “really good labor” that cares about quality and deadlines.
  • Culture can’t be scaled 10x faster than hiring; they scale culture by training and leadership “eyes and ears” on the floor.
  • Promises drive expectations (“I don’t make threats, I make promises”); missing due dates hurts the brand.
  • Speed is the future, but logistics (carriers) becomes the constraint.

Notable examples

  • “3 p.m. is the new midnight” to ensure truck cutoffs are met for same-day shipping.
  • Scaling from prototypes/hobbyists to enterprise orders (90% enterprise now).
  • Factory expansion gambles: placing equipment POs before leases are signed to save ~60 days if the lease works.
  • Power-infrastructure bottlenecks (amps, air compression, electricians scheduling) delaying CNC scaling.

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

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Competing with China in Manufacturing

0:45 to 2:12

Discussion on what it takes for U.S. startups to successfully compete with Chinese manufacturing.

“Fully automating and dark factories and lights out manufacturing or whatever.”

Bootstrap Success and Scaling Challenges

2:12 to 4:32

Insights into Jim's bootstrap journey and the challenges of scaling a manufacturing startup.

“I know for the past like eight years, you've been in bootstrap mode and you've raised almost no money to date.”

Maintaining Quality While Scaling

4:32 to 6:16

Exploring the balance between rapid growth and maintaining product quality and service standards.

“So because we've scaled, I mean, we've scaled fast by some measures, but we've scaled slow by others.”

Navigating Growth and Investment

6:16 to 10:51

Discussion on the decision to raise capital and the impact of funding on business growth and strategy.

“Even with money, you can only scale culture so fast.”

Expectation Management in Business

10:51 to 14:00

How to set and manage customer expectations effectively and learn from failures.

“And not only that, you kind of exceed it most of the time.”

Learning from Customer Pain

14:00 to 15:02

Discover how experiencing customer challenges firsthand improves business practices.

“I like to get the pain so that we can make the system more robust so it doesn't happen again.”

The Importance of Speed in Manufacturing

15:02 to 16:10

Understand how speed and convenience influence customer expectations in manufacturing.

“Let's have additional customer support people so that they're not waiting for a response for hours or whatever.”

Scaling Manufacturing to Meet Demand

16:10 to 18:13

Learn about the challenges and strategies for scaling manufacturing operations effectively.

“You know, UPS and FedEx are incredible, but it's expensive to move things by air all the time.”

Unique Startup Journey

18:13 to 19:46

Explore the unusual path of starting a manufacturing business without significant funding.

“So scale for us is being able to say yes to everything, you know, including, you know, this traditional stuff that would be done by these very large, you know, OEM level manufacturers.”

Customer Experience Focus

19:46 to 21:13

Examine the company's dedication to enhancing customer service and support.

“Like we buy stuff used on Facebook marketplace, you know, our scissor lift that I'm staring at, you know, got that at auction or something.”
Show all 31 chapters

Balancing Finance and Customer Care

21:13 to 23:16

Understand the tension between financial management and maintaining a strong customer focus.

“Hey, we can re-engineer it to save some money here.”

Innovation in Manufacturing Tools

23:16 to 25:51

Learn how open-sourcing tools can enhance manufacturing capabilities for customers.

“It can erode, you know, just love with the staff.”

Cultural Shift in Shipping Practices

25:51 to 27:49

Discover the shift in manufacturing culture towards meeting shipping deadlines reliably.

“And I think that is basically when the trucks leave.”

Preparing for Future Growth Challenges

27:49 to 28:00

Explore the unknowns and challenges of scaling a business rapidly with new funding.

“What's the biggest thing that you're fearing right now?”

Scaling Challenges: Recruitment and Training Bottlenecks

28:00 to 29:11

Explore the bottlenecks in recruitment and training as the company scales.

“I believe it's actually going to be recruiting and training.”

Infrastructure Issues: Power and Space Constraints

29:11 to 32:04

Understand the challenges of inadequate power supply and building infrastructure.

“So we're biasing towards optionality right now.”

Capital and Material Costs: Navigating the Landscape

32:04 to 33:59

Learn about the financial and material challenges faced by manufacturers.

“And I think that's actually a big problem in the U.S.”

Pricing Strategy: Competitive Pricing and Customer Experience

33:59 to 36:55

Discover how competitive pricing impacts customer relationships and growth.

“Can we, you know, use those efficiencies of scale in negotiation and efficiency with our vendors so that they're not starting and stopping a production line for us or something like that?”

Taking Risks: Accelerating Production Timeline

36:55 to 39:52

Examine the approach to risk-taking in minimizing production delays.

“you lower prices, people do more with it.”

Empowering Workforce: Training and Career Development

39:52 to 42:00

Learn about strategies for training and empowering employees across new locations.

“Like when we're walking down the hall and they see the three of us, they're like, oh, God, what are you guys up to?”

Empowering Young Talent in Manufacturing

42:00 to 44:12

Discover how SendCutSend nurtures young talent and creates career opportunities.

“So we're really lucky to have a lot of young staff.”

Challenges of Scaling and Joy in Work

44:12 to 45:42

Learn about the challenges of scaling a business and maintaining joy in work.

“And, you know, you're trying to stuff way too big of an engine and way too small of a car and, you know, there's challenges and that's, that's cool.”

Finding the Right Business Partners

45:42 to 47:30

Understand the importance of choosing the right partners in business ventures.

“So how did you decide which partners made sense with that context?”

Prioritizing Customer Problems in Business

47:30 to 49:26

Explore how to prioritize customer needs over internal business issues.

“Um, cause we're going to be doing this for a long time.”

The Importance of Product Quality Over Perfection

49:26 to 51:08

Learn why product quality should take precedence over administrative perfection.

“So if the customer is like, hey, I want to upload this thing, but my file doesn't work.”

Bringing Manufacturing Back to America

51:08 to 54:32

Discuss the shift towards domestic manufacturing and its implications.

“And I think the combination of that with YouTube is just incredibly empowering.”

Building Capacity in Manufacturing

54:32 to 56:00

Understand strategies for building manufacturing capacity amid uncertainty.

“And now everyone's like a little more aware.”

Building Manufacturing Capacity for Demand

56:00 to 56:56

Learn how to manage manufacturing capacity to meet fluctuating demand.

“If let's say we reached total market share for, you know, sheet metal or something like that, that's cool because then we can add another service.”

The Challenge of Surge Capacity

56:56 to 58:22

Understand the complexities of maintaining surge capacity in manufacturing.

“How do you think about basically building capacity in the event that you have this like surge demand and you need to fulfill it in a short period of time?”

Philosophy of Trust and Skepticism

58:22 to 1:00:28

Explore the balance between trust and skepticism in personal and professional relationships.

“You have a very high bar for the people that you allow close to you and who you let into your life.”

Vision for the Future of Manufacturing

1:00:28 to 1:01:49

Discover the speaker's excitement for future innovations in U.S. manufacturing.

“I'm excited that I get to go back to doing what I do best, which is build.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Jim Belosic:Today, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Jim Belosic, the founder and CEO of Sinkasend. Sinkasend is absolutely crushing building factories here in the United States. And in my mind, is one of the few manufacturing companies that is genuinely competitive with China. So with that in mind, I want to start this off with what does it take for a U.S. manufacturing startup to be competitive with China? And is it even possible today? Yeah, of course it's possible. It takes scale. You need a lot of scale. manufacturing in the US right now is like I think 93 % of it is companies that are 100 staff or smaller and then like 75 % of that is companies that are 20 staff or smaller so lots of you know mom-and-pop type shops you put them together and we're a force to be reckoned with but no one is really scaling at the proper level to bring prices down increase speed whatever so that's what we're to do we compete with China on parts right now you know maybe 20 % of everything we do 25 % we actually can meet or beat China but I'm I'm not happy with that I want it to be 100 right now we have a bunch of machines in the background that in most cases are like semi-automated or a large part of the process is automated but there is obviously some human touch so how do we actually make you you know, companies like this competitive?

1:23Yeah. Automation is not the magic bullet. Fully automating and dark factories and lights out manufacturing or whatever. Yes, it helps, but that's not the magic bullet. You know, we'll get there someday, but today is not the day. You have to have a mix. You know, we're really happy to have robots where it makes sense to have robots. And then we have good dudes where it makes sense to have dudes and dudettes. Everyone thinks like, oh, because China has cheap labor or whatever, the only way to compete with that is to automate. And what we found is, no, you just have really good labor. And if it's expensive labor, they care.

1:58They like their job. They want to produce a good quality product. They want to hit deadlines. They want to go faster. They want to improve the process. So you take really good people and you level them up with really good technology and you're good to go.

2:12Jim Belosic:I know for the past like eight years, you've been in bootstrap mode and you've raised almost no money to date. A lot of people when they're starting a you know a manufacturing startup They just raise a huge amount of money out the gate before they actually have any product or customers And they kind of hope things will work. Yeah, what's it called product market fit? That's what they're looking for you inverted the entire thing where you raised almost nothing and then figured out this entire process and how to scale Before you raise the money. How do you kind of go from that R &D mode to now? You're gonna be scaling a bunch of different factories around the United States so I I'm trying to show people like what the path is I hope that we're a template for how to do this my belief is you have to figure something out you know a very small scale prove it get the customers understand what customers want understand what your capabilities are scale it using profits of the company my thinking is very very old school you know I've said before I run this company like lemonade stand.

3:12I buy lemons for 50 cents and I sell them for a dollar. I take the extra 50 cents and invest in more lemons, right? So my concept of running a business is you have to be profitable from day one. Now, not everyone has, you know, a million dollars laying around to go buy equipment or whatever. Neither did I, but you can get a loan on it. So to anyone listening out there, make sure that you have good credit. Leverage credit and debt to get your business off the ground and then put your head down and grind. You know, it's, yeah, we're eight years in. People are looking at us and going, oh my gosh, you're an overnight success.

3:50It's like, no, you haven't seen us get punched in the face for eight years. Now is the time for us to like really add rocket fuel and go to the next level. So the challenge that we have is we've gotten to this big scale where it's very difficult to continue bootstrapping. Like for us to, in the old days, to open up a new facility, you know, maybe it was like a million dollars, something like that. Now for us to open up a large facility, it's$50 million. And it's, I can bootstrap that, but it's on this timeline that I just, I'm very impatient for. Yeah.

4:31Jim Belosic:I know there's also this like dynamic of you don't want to be like turning away customers but you also want to make sure that the products and services that you're providing are of the quality and standard that you care about and so if you want a 24-hour 48-hour turnaround from someone asking for a part online and then having it show up at their door you know you can deliver that at small scale but then if you scale too quickly maybe suddenly things like slip and so how do you kind of think about making sure that the product service experience that you create scales with the company? That's really hard.

5:05It's culture. So because we've scaled, I mean, we've scaled fast by some measures, but we've scaled slow by others. We've scaled fast for, you know, a self-funded or mostly self-funded company. I did raise a little bit of money. Shout out to Mark and Sandy. Thank you. We didn't take, you know, this massive amount of money right at the beginning when we had no idea what we were doing. So it forced us to go at a certain pace and build the culture without getting too far over our skis and falling over. So what I'm concerned about is, you know, with some money to spend, all of a sudden you go 10x faster.

5:43Do we start hiring people 10 times faster and there's, you know, 50 % of them aren't the right fit. Luckily, we have this really deep culture already ingrained. So everyone new gets to learn from the people that have been here. They understand how we operate, what our quality standards are, how generous we are. So doing that at scale, yeah, you need about 400 people in order to like serve everyone the Kool-Aid. You know, it's because we're going to have another thousand people coming on. I couldn't I couldn't go from 10 people to a thousand. I can probably go from four or five hundred to a thousand.

6:17Jim Belosic:Even with money, you can only scale culture so fast. And I think Sam Walton one of the things he did was he would fly to different Walmarts and basically just see if everything, you know, worked and was or what was amiss. He would go to the distribution centers at 5 a.m. and bring donuts and talk with the truck drivers to see, you know, get a pulse for five different stores at once. How do you kind of scale yourself while you're doing that if you can't be walking the floor every day? Yeah, you can't. So I run into that every day. Just walking around this facility, I see new faces all the time.

6:48Right now, as we're filming, this is C-shift. So So Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'll come in on a Sunday and see 10 new faces. And, you know, some people will be like, hey, you know, where do you work? What department do you work in? I'm like, I don't know what department I'm in. So I can't be everywhere at once. And thank God, because that's exactly how you put a ceiling on your business. If you think that you're the only guy who can go around and make sure everything's working perfectly, you'll be limited by how many hours you can be awake. Very early on, I knew that I wouldn't be able to do that.

7:19So having, you know, an incredible staff as my direct reports, they are my eyes and ears. They go around. They understand what I want. They understand the vision of the company. And I understand their vision, too. Like the office of the CEO is it's not just me as CEO. It's like five people. The CFO is five people. The president is five people. You know, everything is kind of like a group of us that are all additive. And then that way, no matter if someone's on vacation or traveling or whatever, it's basically the same answer to any question that happens across any facility. So hiring great leaders that are a culture fit and then just doing it time and time again, that's the only way that we can do it.

8:04We spend a lot of time traveling now. Our travel budget is through the roof. We're going to have to address that at some point. I don't know how. but especially when we start a new facility you have to be out there for weeks at a time in a rotation with myself with other leaders um so they they understand like the background the history of the company they can be a really incredible operator maybe they came from some massive manufacturer and they're going to run our facility but they don't know send cut send and so it takes weeks and weeks and months of us going out there them coming out here blending it all together

8:41Jim Belosic:it's it's hard it's fun but it's hard yeah I know you just raised 110 million or something like that and I know for a very long time you were very conscious and thoughtful about not raising money and you had some good reasons for doing that but at some point I think things flipped and there was so much demand that you just could not scale fast enough without external capital so what kind of made that flip in your mind in my perception I thought I was disappointing my customers. The only way that we can control demand is by increasing lead times or raising crisis or saying no, you know, put a banner on the website and it's like, sorry, like stop ordering.

9:24We're not going to hit our deadlines, right? That's super painful. And it's incredibly expensive to the brand. Like we built our brand for years and years on speed, quality, good price, incredible service, you know. So as soon as that starts to slip, I think you can grenade the entire company. So we're like, okay, we got to go faster. We got to go faster. But demand was always outpacing our budget, outpacing our bank covenants. You know, we have great lending partners. People give us a loan on our machines all day long, but there's a lot of stuff that you can't get a loan on. You know, I can't get a loan on tripling the size of my software development team.

10:03You know, I can't get a loan on these crazy R &D projects that we need to go and experiment with. And we don't know what the outcome is going to be. So what I'm happy that we did is we waited so long to say yes to taking on money that I didn't have to give away the farm. I didn't have to give away control. Like 50 % of the business. Yeah. I I didn't have to give away, you know, my vision or anything like that. We built a really, really awesome company that looks great to our customers. It looks great on paper. And so when it comes time to negotiate, like, hey, I'm going to give up a chunk of my baby.

10:41You know, we gave up 10%. That amount of loss of control was acceptable to me in order for the gain that it's going to get me to my customers. Because that's a shit ton of money. when you have to like produce every single dollar of profit you know uh as a team over years when someone can just inject a bunch of capital and you get to run with that and add capacity and add scale and lower prices and increase speed and add new capabilities it's like okay that's a trade-off i'm willing to make but i'm glad we didn't do it too early because it wouldn't have been 10 it would have been you know 50 or 70 or who knows what when we were just at dinner last night

11:22Jim Belosic:We talked a little bit about expectation setting and like making sure that whatever you're saying that you're going to do, you actually do it. And not only that, you kind of exceed it most of the time. How do you think about expectation setting in your mind with the customers or even with suppliers and vendors and stuff? For expectations, my son is joining us in the audience here. I always told him, I was like, I don't make threats, I make promises. If you don't clean up your room, I'm going to throw out everything on the ground. and it's like i will throw out everything on the ground and then i had to buy it back again so anyway that hurt me more than it hurt him but expectations are promises so if i promise a customer that it's going to be there on thursday it better get there on thursday um if i promise them that it's going to cost a certain amount it's going to cost a certain amount so the expectations is like live by the sword die by the sword the issue with it is it's like a ratchet when you improve stuff that's the new bar like you can't go backwards which is where you know we run into these crazy challenges like manufacturing is a hell of a lot easier when you're not quick turn so from day one we're like oh we'll be quick turn because i'm impatient i want my stuff fast we should do that scaling that is really hard and then as you get better and better um you're like cool let's let's shave a day off of our lead time it's like amazon where they say suddenly it's two day shipping or, you know, one hour shipping and people don't want to go back.

12:49Yeah, no, you can't. You can't go from one day shipping to seven day shipping. Like people get super pissed and I would get pissed as a customer. I'm still a customer. I think about myself as a customer. I'm, I'm the number one representative of all of our customers out there. Um, and I want what they want. Actually, I think I want more than what they want. I'm probably the most demanding customer that we have and I'm never satisfied. So I'm always ratcheting those expectations and making sure we hit our promises.

13:21Jim Belosic:Were there any like specific examples in the history of the company where you did have those expectations or like set a high bar for expectations and then just completely miss them? And like, how did that feel? Yeah. But, well, it still happens, and it happens through nature. You know, if the pass gets closed during a winter storm and, you know, we can't get trucks over the hill or mechanical issues, you know, maybe a machine catches on fire and we have to evacuate the building for half a day or something like that. Someone accidentally hit a sprinkler in the ceiling. And, you know, so, yeah, you have to you have to make some calls, send some emails and let people know that we're going to disappoint them.

14:03I love to be part of that conversation. I like to get the pain so that we can make the system more robust so it doesn't happen again. That's a big part of our our expansion across the U.S. Because, you know, just operating out of Reno, usually in the winter, it's pretty easy for us to go east, to go west over the Sierras. Sometimes things get stuck. But if we have different facilities in Texas and Kentucky and wherever we're going, they can all help each other. We can all load balance a little bit. Usually we can get something on a plane in Memphis and then they can fly over the weather and then make it to Southern California or whatever.

14:42So, yeah, we have lots of challenges every day where we disappoint people. but if you if your arm's length from that it never hurts you as much like i i want to get touched i by it i want to like feel the burn so that i don't do it again like i'm so stupid like that's the only way i learn you can tell me that it's hot i have to like grab it and see that it's hot and get burned so being like on the front lines and feeling the pain with the customer and having the customers yell at me directly um i'm like okay cool let's let's have backups on backups You know, let's have more material in stock. Let's have additional customer support people so that they're not waiting for a response for hours or whatever.

15:26It's things you learn over time. You finally figure out where all the weak links are, where the chain breaks, and then you make the chain stronger in those areas.

15:34Jim Belosic:But you're kind of looking out over the next couple of years and you're thinking about how the scale up will end up unfolding. What does that actually look like in your mind? Speed. Speed is the main thing. Um, I think Amazon kind of showed the way where if I can get it to you tomorrow or even in two days or whatever, people, people like the convenience. People are lazy. I know I can get in the car and, you know, go to target and get some stuff. Or I'm like, Oh, if it's going to show up tomorrow, you know, that's fine. So that, that Amazon effect on speed is trickling into every other aspect of our life, you know, door dash with food you know like oh 30 minutes that seems like a long time it's like we're so spoiled so people get spoiled on everything being almost instant gratification and it's going into manufacturing too so you know if you give me a million square feet i could have a huge mega factory um and i can produce parts really really fast but i can't get them in your hands fast enough because actually one of our constraints is our carriers.

16:41You know, UPS and FedEx are incredible, but it's expensive to move things by air all the time. So, you know, you go do a ground network and coast to coast, it's five or six days. You know, if shipping from Seattle to Florida, it takes forever from Southern California to Massachusetts takes forever. So the future is, you know distribution i guess i want to make sure that we have capacity wherever there's there's population centers i want that accessibility in all those population centers i want people to think about sun cut send like home depot you know i go to home depot all the time if i knew that i could just go to a local manufacturer that was super accessible and i could just walk in the door and be like hey you know i need this made you know help me out help me figure it out uh that would be amazing I think more of the US needs that every city has tons of manufacturers but their doors aren't open you know some of them don't have websites you know you got to know a guy or whatever so we're trying to change that I want to show the example of what we're doing you know being more open to the public it's actually a good way of doing business in manufacturing can like our customers can grow with us or we can grow with our customers you know we started out just doing prototypes and you know stuff for hobbyists guys in their garage but now i mean 90 of what we do is for you know large enterprise you know we do thousands of parts millions of parts you know for for individual customers that are doing you know huge projects for a long time when someone needed that many parts or they needed that much capacity we'd have to say no or our prices weren't competitive because it's hard for me to like lock up a facility just for one customer and then disappoint thousands of other customers because the machines are going to be busy on that project for a month or whatever.

18:32So scale for us is being able to say yes to everything, you know, including, you know, this traditional stuff that would be done by these very large, you know, OEM level manufacturers. We're doing it today, but we're going to do a lot more of it.

18:45Jim Belosic:You started this business in a very unusual way. This is not normally how people start companies where they're using their own money and taking on loans and doing all the stuff That's the way I did it. I thought it was super normal. Having a whole bunch of money behind you now, I don't think a whole lot of things changes. It brings up timelines. It makes it so you can scale faster, but you don't fundamentally change. You don't suddenly flip to unprofitability so that you can scale, grow unprofitably like most companies do. So what things are going to change and what's going to stay the same? Everything's going to stay the same except for our timelines.

19:16Without money, I can hit most of my goals in the next five to eight years. Uh, with some cash, I can do that in 18 to 24 months, you know? So it's a time machine. It's, it's, it's literal rocket fuel. We're already doing well. We're growing. This is fuel on the fire. We're going to go faster. Things that won't change. Like I'm still cheap. I mean, frugal, I guess. I don't know. We talked about that in the last one, but, uh, it's, it's my upbringing. It's our culture. Like we buy stuff used on Facebook marketplace, you know, our scissor lift that I'm staring at, you know, got that at auction or something.

19:58So I try and make sure that I'm a good steward of money, whether it's my money or somebody else's. I think if we had taken a bunch of money right at the beginning, that's when you end up with brand new, super amazing forklifts and crazy equipment that you don't really need and maybe too many staff. And then you have like a really nice conference table for some reason and Herman Miller chairs. And, you know, it's like, no, just focus on your customer, have a good product, focus on profitability. We have that muscle memory forever. I have, I had it in my last two businesses. I had it since I was little, you know, mowing lawns.

20:37I was like, oh man, can I, can I do this pattern a little bit faster so that my hourly rate, you know, I'm more productive or whatever. So it's just, it's in, it's in my nature. It's in our nature as a company. So all of that is going to stay the same. We're going to go a hell of a lot faster, though. We're going to have more capabilities, better customer experience, which I think it's pretty damn great right now. But I think it could be better.

21:01Jim Belosic:On the customer experience side, like you're very focused on trying to create as much love with your customers as possible. Yeah. What is the thing that is the biggest like keeps you up at night because it just sucks right now? the fact that in periods of high demand we can't take the time with a customer and really hold their hand and understand like what their project is give them advice on how to make it way better whatever you know sometimes we can spend you know an hour you know working with a customer or whatever but i'd love to have it unlimited you know if we need to go back and forth with a customer, jump on a phone call, invite them to a facility or something and be like, Hey, show me your, your thing that you're trying to make.

21:44Hey, we can re-engineer it to save some money here. Um, or Hey, if you, if you take a half inch off this dimension, we can actually fit more on a sheet and it's going to cut your price in half or something like that. That would be so fun. We get to do it sporadically, but what if we could do it every single time? It's an investment that doesn't make a whole lot of sense on a spreadsheet. When the finance guys look at that they're like why are you spending all this money but it feels damn good as a customer it makes me feel good it's like a company that I want to run if people can learn about manufacturing through our customer support hell yeah you know that'd be amazing last time we talked you were

22:20Jim Belosic:very wary of having a CFO and having someone that was too focused on making money and too focused on watching the costs to the detriment of creating real employee love and vendor love and all these things. And you have this wonderful concept of gym bucks where you'll just hand out$100 bills as you're going throughout your day. How has that kind of shifted? Like, why did you decide to hire someone in finance? And what is shifting there? Oh, no, we still have no CFO. Oh, really? Yeah. No, I'm avoiding that for as long as possible. And shout out to Andrew and Matt, who actually believed in me to give me a bunch of money without having a CFO.

22:59So it's because I think they know that I'm frugal. I'm frugal but generous. Like I like generosity to our customers. I like generosity to our crew. We try and take really good care of people. So what you're talking about is if you let someone who's only focused on the dollars and cents, it can erode that customer satisfaction. It can erode, you know, just love with the staff. You know, one of the things that I'm fighting actively right now is, you know, we're almost at 500 people. With that size staff, you know, as we approach 1 ,000, 2 ,000 people, there's policies and rules and HR starts to become this like big org within an org.

23:41And they love to be able to point to a chart and say, OK, you have this many years of experience and listen, that's exactly, you know, you're going to make$31.18. sense. I'm like, what if they're awesome? Like, what if they're doing stuff that you can't track? Like, can't we have some flexibility in there? So we're trying to build in like a slush fund, you know, where it's merit based, but sometimes you can't just like line all these things up. There's intangibles. I don't know. Maybe that's a theme of our whole company as our approach to, you know, our products and finance. It's intangible, you know, doesn't make sense on a spreadsheet but it sure as hell makes sense when you're on the receiving end of it as a customer or staff member or whatever so as long as i have control over slush funds and intangibles and i can keep a lot of hundreds in my pocket or whatever um or if i can you know upgrade stuff to overnight you know to make a customer happy or some mit kid that's working on a formula sae car and we have to throw an engineer at the project for him or whatever.

24:45It's yeah. When you pencil it out, you're like, oh man, that just costs us, you know, thousands of dollars worth of time. I'm like, yeah, but help the kid get his project done. Yeah. We're in that position. Like, why not use it? You know, what do they say? What's the good of having fuck you money if you can't say fuck you? That's what I want. I want, I want to be able to do stuff that feels good, whether it makes sense on paper or not.

25:06Jim Belosic:I know you've been like very focused from the beginning on like hobbyists and people that just tinker and build things and they need to park quickly. but as you kind of scale you're going to be able to go from just having a given part and you have to like no cad and stuff to be able to even order it to you basically just type in here's what i want and then a finished product comes to your door so how does that actually look like yeah it's happening now right so we built our own tools so that you can kind of talk to it and say hey i need this kind of bracket you know it's three inches long whatever and we can generate the cad for you using llms and that's that's good but i think there's a limit to what we can do in-house we only have so big of a team we only have so many ideas what we're doing is we're just open sourcing you know how how our system works so that everyone else out there can go and make better tools than we could even make um hey guys here's all of our dfm calculations here's our limitations here's our capabilities and it's all in you know a language that's readable by an llm that's like go make tools go figure it out go make your own plugins go make your own little use cases and we'll manufacture it for you at the end of the day i don't want to you know gatekeep anything i just want to make parts so if people can understand our ecosystem and make really cool tools to make even more parts then i'm all for it as we were walking through the factory and just doing a tour before this, there was a sign that said 3 p.m.

26:39Jim Belosic:is the new midnight. And I think that is basically when the trucks leave. And if the trucks don't leave on time, then they don't make the plane. So the parts don't get delivered. So how did you kind of like come to that? We had this problem where, you know, on work orders, it has different due dates. So, hey, it's due, you know, into bending on this date. It's due out of powder coat on this date. You know, it's due to ship on this date. So let's say, you know, it's, it's June 3rd is the due date. We would have people like, Oh man, high five. You know, we, we shipped it on June 3rd, but I was like, no, you missed the damn truck.

27:17You know, you shipped it June 3rd at 9 PM. Like that doesn't count. It's not a real ship date. And I think you've experienced that as a consumer too. It's like, Hey, you order something and you get a shipping label and then you're watching the tracking and like, it hasn't moved. It hasn't moved. It hasn't moved. We don't want to do that. So, yeah, 3 p.m. is the new midnight is just a culture thing. It's like, hey, guys, if it's due today, it's actually due today by three hustle. You know, I want to see the Indiana Jones, you know, rolling under the door to get it into the truck type thing as it's pulling away.

27:48And we do that. What's the biggest thing that you're fearing right now? I'm fearing the unknown, the unknown of having a lot of money to deploy. Capital has been a great constraint for us. it's everything starts from there it starts with like how much profit do we have how much can we spend how much debt can we handle and service and all of our decisions have worked backwards from there and so now you know with some great partners that believe in us that's not really a constraint right now and i don't know what the next bottleneck is you know i we're gonna find it i'll find it really damn quick.

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28:29I believe it's actually going to be recruiting and training. I think we have three recruiters right now. We have two more coming on board. So five recruiters, we need to scale up our HR staff because that's a whole thing. But then even if I could hire, let's say I had 50 recruiters and I could hire 200 people in a day, I can't train them. I can't train them that fast. So we need trainers, we need all these different processes, like we need more classrooms, we need more equipment that's just dedicated to training so that we're not taking it out of production. That's, that's, that's my fear. I just don't, I have vague ideas, but I don't really know what's going to happen.

29:11So we're biasing towards optionality right now.

29:14Jim Belosic:What were the biggest like bottlenecks or, you know, things that you would have feared 12 months ago that you were able to kind of solve? Yeah, in the last 12 months, some of our big challenges have been, we've been scaling really fast especially the cnc side i mean this is this whole building is 12 months old we ran into bottlenecks of power just getting power to the building yeah so i think we have 1200 amps in this building and you start to add more and more machines and then we're like oh turns out we miscalculated on how much air compression we need and so you know really the manufacturer says it uses this much air but it actually uses a little bit more then you need a second compressor compressors use way more electricity than our cnc machines do and so you're like okay crap that one compressor is going to take the electrical footprint of four machines so we need to figure out what our next batch of machines is going to be um it's just these little unexpected things uh we'll be like hey we got to land all these machines and we're so focused on getting the machines negotiating the price scheduling the text to come out that we're like oh we also need a lot of electricians here that day.

30:21And our favorite electrician is booked out six weeks because they just landed a huge job somewhere. So we have to go to a backup electrician and they don't know us as much and they're unfamiliar with the equipment. And then they wire it a different way. It's just like all these little things that just it's like death by a thousand cuts.

30:37Jim Belosic:Is that another thing? When we were talking last night, you said that you wanted to buy like a much larger, you know, warehouse to turn into a factory very quickly, but it just didn't have the power requirements that you needed like is that one of the biggest constraints is the buildings that you want just literally don't have the necessary functionality effectively to make it work yeah i was talking to uh sarah from starpath and i was just talking to ed from makina labs the other day and they're they were kind of thinking about like hey reno seems pretty cool like should we come to reno i was like yeah reno's great for a lot of reasons we have huge buildings there's almost no power in them and you know because this is a region that's dedicated to logistics and in logistics you need a lot of space but only enough power to charge forklifts or whatever so we're trying to figure out how do we get power in incredibly quickly how do we you know go to nb energy and try and get to the top of their list and then order transformers that maybe aren't approved by nb energy but we can get them from you know a different state and then you have to go through a permitting process and try and get them like recertified or whatever things that you don't think about become these huge bottlenecks so then when we're looking at other locations we're like okay can we go to a metro that has a lot of power they have a manufacturing background or a history of it you know these buildings that already have 4 000 amps of power and that's one of our big decisions moving forward is because it's hard to go to these cities and states that don't have the infrastructure.

32:10And I think that's actually a big problem in the U.S. in general. It's just power infrastructure now sucks. Everyone wants to re-industrialize, but we don't have the power for it. We need a hundred times more power than we have.

32:23Jim Belosic:Is there any other major bottlenecks that the U.S. infrastructure just does not support? I think our incentives are misaligned. What do you mean by that? I think that the incentives that a software company gets for creating jobs or whatever is, I think it's easier to get than it is to grow a manufacturer. I think the way that venture capital looks at software versus manufacturing is, we're tier eight citizens compared to software because it's capital light and they see these huge multiples or whatever. Whereas manufacturing is incredibly critical. You just don't have the same access to capital as everybody else, or at least that's how it was.

33:05I think it's changing. there's a lot of big shifts right now where manufacturing is kind of becoming sexy and it's a little bit easier to get but it hasn't changed you know as nearly as much as we should so yeah money power um otherwise we have a decent amount of raw material people complain you know that it's nowhere as cheap as you can get it offshore or whatever um but it does exist and there are mills that are starting to come back online it's kind of too little too late you know because for new mills to be spun up it's incredibly expensive it takes five years but it's at least it's starting to happen now so i think it'll be better in the next five to ten years how do you

33:48Jim Belosic:kind of think it's going to shift with having more capacity raw material costs dropping and like how fast you're able to turn products around did you say raw material costs dropping yeah yeah that doesn't happen that doesn't happen at all oh my god it just raw material prices do nothing but go up from what i've seen uh you know and something like you know the straighter her moves being closed you know all of a sudden it's like okay there's you know 15 of the global supply of aluminum is is cut off so therefore aluminum prices go up when the straight opens back up like it's prices aren't going to drop 15 you know it's like gas prices gas prices go up a dollar if there's you know more oil or whatever like maybe it'll go down 25 cents it it never goes all the way back down so the way that we get lower prices to our customers is just purchasing in scale so instead of us buying you know 100 tons at a time can we buy a thousand or can we by 10 ,000.

34:49Can we, you know, use those efficiencies of scale in negotiation and efficiency with our vendors so that they're not starting and stopping a production line for us or something like that? We, you can negotiate, you know, a few pennies here and there, you know, per pound off of that. And then we pass that along to the customer because we want to be incredibly competitive. and even if we have no competition like i want the customer to have a just a mind-blowing price

35:18Jim Belosic:so that they're encouraged to make more stuff i remember when like costco has this rule that they never make more than 15 on any given item in a sale and there was this one specific case where a like shipment of jeans came in and they were way below cost and so suddenly they were able to if they wanted to sell at the normal price and get like a 50 margin on these jeans and they decided not to because they didn't want to set a bad precedent do you have anything like that where you're kind of saying we could charge more but we're going to not charge more because we want to basically create the best customer experience and like know that when you're coming to sink and send you get the best price yeah of course um i don't know it's it's gouging and it's gross uh you have to protect your margins, especially when you're bootstrapping, like your margin is your ability to scale, but consumers are very smart.

36:13Like our customers are geniuses. They know if you're trying to, you know, steal from them. Um, and there's, there's always options out there and there's always like research people go out and they're like, Hey, you know, you're charging me 58 bucks for this and i'm looking at the raw material you know and it's a dollar a pound like what the hell are you doing i don't want to have that conversation i want it to feel very very fair so like i said even if there's no competition we should focus on having the absolute lowest prices the fastest service so that people just kind of get used to like oh this is how manufacturing should be done i don't feel like i'm getting screwed over need a price compare because they

36:53Jim Belosic:just know that the best price and the best like timelines and stuff is going to be here and if you lower prices, people do more with it. Like they order more stuff. They're going to, it's going to allow their company to grow. I'm going to give them some room to have margin on their end product. If I charge someone, you know, I gouge them on margin and then they got to go mark it up. Like their business isn't going to survive. You know, all these little middlemen, you know, they're adding value or whatever, taking their little slice. It gets wildly expensive. I mean, that's why we're trying to go so vertical.

37:23It's so that we eliminate a lot of middlemen, pass that price on the consumer. They can run a better business. They can grow. I want people to bootstrap off of us. That's our legacy. I'm proud of that.

37:36Jim Belosic:When you're turning on a new factory, you want to basically minimize the number of days between actually putting dollars down and signing some contract and things going out the door as finished products. What's the process for minimizing the number of days on that? you gotta gamble uh so like right now are 150 000 square feet across the street when we started negotiating the letter of intent we placed po's on equipment and it was like equipment for that building for that layout even though we don't have a lease like as of as of right now we don't have a signed lease pretty damn close but we've already scheduled electricians um we're hiring for that building, we're taking a gamble.

38:18We've done it many times. If the gamble fails, then we'll go to plan B, plan C, whatever. It'll cost us a little bit of time. But if the gamble pays off, we're 60 days ahead of everybody. So for us, if I can save 30 days, that's millions of dollars. The way that it compounds, the faster I can get into production, then the faster I can scale that facility so I don't really know the math on it but like 30 days saved at the beginning is like you know ten million dollars of new capacity after 12 months because you're so far ahead you know the way that that ramps so yeah we gamble a lot we kind of make some educated guesses and some hopes when you're thinking

39:03Jim Belosic:about taking some kind of risk like that what's going through your mind as in you obviously wouldn't hire electricians if you didn't think that building was going to operate you know on some date so at what point does it make sense to just take that gamble hire the people schedule things uh it's optionality you know we always have a worst case scenario plan i will rarely take a gamble that you know i can't go to plan b on um if i ordered all this equipment and the lease fell through uh and i had no other building like that would be incredibly painful so yeah maybe we go to a building that's a little further away or it's a little older has less power or something like at least we can keep moving so it's always aim for perfection and you'll end up at excellence and that's what brian wolf our vp of operations always says so we have this like brilliant dream that we're trying to hit and usually it doesn't work out perfectly but the next step down is pretty damn good how do you kind of maintain a maniacal sense of urgency i don't think it can be trained i think it has to be bred into you um i don't know if there's a difference between urgency and impatience um maybe it's the same thing but i i don't have any patience if it's within my control i want it as soon as i possibly can get it um when i was little working on model airplanes and model cars like you gotta put the spray paint on it and then wait for it to dry and I never waited you know I'd be working with wet paint and try and like assemble a thing and then you have like glue and wet paint and the thing would look like shit and then I'd smash it um I don't know I'm trying to leverage my my urgency that sounds sounds better than impatience I'm going to use that um in business and I think it benefits our customers but I don't I don't know I don't know if you can teach it so right now Phil Linscheid Brian Wolfe and myself So our director of manufacturing, our VP of operations and me, we huddle up often and we are the three most impatient people in the world.

41:11Like when we're walking down the hall and they see the three of us, they're like, oh, God, what are you guys up to? It's because we we know exactly what we want. And we're just not there yet. And we're trying to figure out how to get there as fast as we possibly can within our constraints. If you don't have that in your org, then you'll fall behind.

41:29Jim Belosic:Are you going to try to do something where you basically take the people that are super well trained from these first few factories that you've spent a lot of time with and kind of forward deploy them almost at the new factories for the first few months or a year to get that DNA similar to what you actually have today? Yeah. Yeah. I love the term forward deployed, although I think it discounts like, you know, our men and women in the military who are actually forward deployed and seeing some shit. Being forward deployed to Paris, Kentucky is not the same as Afghanistan. But yes, we have that concept.

42:02So we're really lucky to have a lot of young staff. You know, our average age in the machine shop here is like 25.2 years old or something like that. And oftentimes when these opportunities come up, it's like, hey, you want to go to Texas either permanently or you want to go there for six weeks and, you know, help spread the send, cut, send love and teach people stuff. We get a lot of hands in the air. They're like, yes, I want to go do it. And then there's career paths, too. It's like, hey, maybe you think that there's no hire that you can go in this particular building. Well, maybe you can go spin up a new building.

42:38You know, maybe you can be, you know, a shift lead or in charge of the building or something like that. So it's really cool. They can see that career path now, which is one of the reasons why I want to keep opening up buildings, too. I would hate for Suncut Sends to hit a plateau where all of a sudden you have to wait for your boss to die or retire in order to get a new opportunity. There's too many really cool young people that deserve us to do really, really cool stuff. And if I can do it under our own roofs, then I'm really happy.

43:07Jim Belosic:I think one of the biggest issues when companies scale or one of the biggest things that people run into is the thing that made you great is no longer what you're actually doing. So with like Soren at Niros, he loved making drones and he just designed and soldered and all the stuff in his garage and he made these drones. And then when I was talking with him a few months ago, he said, I now realize like I got into this business because I love making drones. And now I'm not spending my time making drones at all. I'm mostly focusing on how do we scale, how do we scale the team, all this stuff. How do you kind of think about maintaining your sense of joy, making sure that you're doing the thing that you actually enjoy doing that brings you joy and you have fun with over time as you scale?

43:51I've been full of joy or whatever. I've been doing that for eight years. I haven't known any different. This is a huge puzzle for me to solve. before I started this business, I would get all my problem solving skills out either via software, you know, doing, you know, running the software company or through like cars and hobbies. And, you know, you're trying to stuff way too big of an engine and way too small of a car and, you know, there's challenges and that's, that's cool. This company is full of those wild problem solving challenges all the time. So even if it was solving HR or staffing or something, you know, or something mechanical or, you know, a material issue.

44:32It's, it's fun problems and challenges. I can tell you though, that I went through hell the last, what, three months or so trying to raise money. It is not fun. I am not good at it. And it does not bring me any joy. It's a huge distraction. It's a completely different skillset than being on the floor, like hearing a machine, you're like, Oh, that's going to chatter a little bit. Or I bet that bit is dull. Like I know that kind of stuff, but trying to sell people your company and get them to like, love it at the level that you love it. It's, it's exhausting. So that, that did not bring me a lot of joy.

45:08The process was, I heard that our process was actually pretty smooth compared to others, but I'm really excited to get back to doing what I do best, which is build. So when I see 150 ,000 square foot empty building or a 300 ,000 square foot building in another state, I I'm like back in my element. So yeah, I have to stay in my element I thought everything was my element but not not fundraising

45:32Jim Belosic:I think that was a really big decision to to go do it at all And I know that you're very focused on finding the right partners and making sure that the people that you're working with Are in it for the same reasons that you are and are aligned with your vision for where you want to take the company So how did you decide which partners made sense with that context? you get to pick like you can't really pick your brother-in-law like if you go to get married um the brother-in-law has just come with it and i'm lucky to have awesome brother-in-laws i have i have three really cool brother-in-laws but i've seen some guys who get married and uh brother-in-law's total dick you know or you could say mother-in-law whatever right everyone complains about their mother-in-law you don't get to pick that i see investor partners as like kind of a marriage, but you, you get to pick.

46:22And I was really lucky to have enough, you know, opportunity to talk to a bunch of different people where I got to figure out who's just cool. Like, who do I want to have a beer with? Um, if we're getting married, like, who do I want to hang out with? And we can just like be cool. Who can I text at midnight and be like, dude, I can't sleep. Like, what do I do about this thing? Um, I was lucky to find that in, you know, Andrew and Matt and Patrick Collison and they're just they're weapons and I think we were I don't know if lucky is the word I think we were patient enough to wait until we could attract that level of of person it's not it's not necessarily the firm I mean Sequoia and Paradigm Patrick Collison or rad for the best of the best, but it's more about the person.

47:15Like if you come from Disney company or whatever, but you're a total turd, you know, that sucks. So, so focus more on the person. I'd rather have someone from, you know, a really small company that's just easy to work with. Um, cause we're going to be doing this for a long time. This is, this is not like a race to the exit thing. It's like, cool.

47:38Jim Belosic:Have you already had moments where they were able to come in or one of them was able to come in and kind of unfuck a problem for you or help you think through some next challenge in a better way? Yeah. These guys are incredibly good at what they do. And if they're not good at something, they know someone who is. And it's so crazy being connected to this like brand new network. Like we had all these nodes in manufacturing, you know, these hubs and spokes of of connections and vendors and electricians like i'm good at that stuff i know a bunch of different plumbers that can come fix toilets at any time uh i know machine techs that'll jump out of bed and do all this stuff but then you're like hey how do i deal with you know money and banks and how do i do like executive recruiting how do that's where these guys like are worth their weight in gold and i never put any emphasis on that internally because I was like, I don't know.

48:32It seems weird. But when someone loves it and they're good at it and it's a weapon for you, then it's a perfect match.

48:40Jim Belosic:I think a lot of the best companies allow certain aspects of the business, just like you were describing. You were OK delaying, you know, making something a priority, saying we're just going to focus on how do we set up these factories? How do we delight customers and delay on like perfect accounting and all this stuff? How do you kind of decide which areas to focus on versus which ones you can just basically completely ignore? It's easy to focus on the pain first, right? So it's pain or pleasure, right? It's does the customer have pain or is the customer getting pleasure? If those are two things that you focus on, just keep throwing money at it or throw effort at it.

49:19If the customer doesn't really know, then it always goes to the back burner. So one of the things we always say is, is it our problem or their problem? So if the customer is like, hey, I want to upload this thing, but my file doesn't work. I'm getting all these errors. That's our problem. We should totally fix it. If they're like, hey, I want to upload the recipe for a cake and have you send me a cake. I'm like, well, that's your problem. I'm not going to do that right now. So when it comes to efficiency of the back office and how we do our accounting and how we reconcile our books and all that kind of stuff, the customer doesn't care.

49:57It's not their problem. It's our problem. We'll deal with it behind the scenes when we have time. So, yeah, we've kind of kicked the can down the road on some of that stuff. And we've got to probably straighten up a little bit in some of those areas. But I think a lot of people starting out, they read books or they get the wrong advice and they they try and have everything perfect in their business from day one. They're like, oh, I have to make sure that my accounting is this level of perfect and I need to set up all these SOPs and bylaws and whatever. No, have a good product first, you know, figure it out.

50:32I always people have come to me and said like, hey, Jim, will you invest? You know, I want to do a restaurant or whatever. I was like, go start with a hot dog stand. Go do a hot dog stand really, really well. And then go to a food truck. You know, and then if the food truck is really popular or whatever, then go do a restaurant. But a lot of people like start planning their restaurant first and they haven't even done anything. So worry about the customer experience first. Everything else will kind of fall into place, especially over a longer period of time. Every year that you pay your taxes, every year that you talk to your CPA, you dial in things a little bit better.

51:07uh we just had a huge test with the due diligence so that's what no one tells you this is like you can talk to an investor all you want and they'll say like yeah everything looks cool the business looks awesome and then it goes to diligence holy crap like they go through everything they're trying to figure out like you know what's going on they're looking at like cookies on the website they're seeing like oh you know do you have a meta pixel and because there's these new suits that people are going after metapixels that aren't disclosed from like thank god we didn't have any of that but just these little wrinkles that people uncover it would be so daunting to have to do all that in year one it would it would destroy a lot of your customer experience um but like i said if you're patient you keep doing it you you knock that some of those check boxes off every single year and then eventually you're pretty good so when we were

51:59Jim Belosic:talking last night, you mentioned that you really loved Home Depot as this example of a business that kind of empowers individuals to modify their homes and make changes and improvements without needing to have a complex network of everyone that knows what's what. And I think the combination of that with YouTube is just incredibly empowering. How do you kind of think about the analogy of your business to Home Depot? Yeah, I'm hoping that we can be similar. You know, before Home Depot, So if you wanted something done, you'd have to go to a lumber yard, which may or may not be open to the public.

52:33You know, if you needed a toilet, you'd have to like call a plumber and he'd be like, hey, here's my two distributors that I that I work with. You have two choices. It was very, very complex. You'd have to go through a bunch of different steps, limited choices, unknown prices, unknown timeline. I think Home Depot disrupted that not only for the homeowner and like the everyman the DIYer but for contractors too like I know today you can go and get roofing materials at Home Depot as a contractor sometimes less than you can get it from a distributor because of that scale. so manufacturing is very similar to the pre-home depot days right now uh you can't just like walk into a place and chit chat and try and figure something out you can't go into a manufacturer that does every service under one roof um if send cut send could be you know a fraction of that i think it benefits everyone it benefits people just learning about manufacturing like all these young engineers that are graduating and maybe they have a degree in mechanical engineering, but they barely run a lathe.

53:42They need to come in and see what manufacturing is actually like. And then to all the seasoned people, they're used to dealing with a very small subset of vendors that are telling them what's possible. It's like, well, what if you could go into this big manufacturer that has everything under the sun and learn and see what else is out there. So accessibility, you know, I keep talking about accessibility to manufacturing and Home Depot did accessibility to home improvement. I think Senkut Sen could add accessibility to manufacturing.

54:15Jim Belosic:I think for a very long time, we've kind of like outsourced manufacturing. And there's a whole lot of reasons we've done that. Now this is kind of flipping and we're bringing things back to America. We're going to make more things in America. What is like different about today than five years ago or 10 years ago that is enabling this? it i don't know it feels like vibes i don't know how else to put it there's there's some raw raw raw of patriotism re-industrialization um people are a little scared of of offshore now it's like oh are they gonna cut off my supply chain without any warning are they going to steal all my ip and make a competitor or whatever i don't think people realized those issues you know, in the early days.

54:56And now everyone's like a little more aware. They're a little scared. And U.S. is actually a viable option now. We're in our early days for accessibility and price and speed and everything, but we're getting there. So I think people are testing the waters.

55:11Jim Belosic:You've been basically capacity constrained for the past seven years, something like this. And you've never necessarily had the money in order to build capacity significantly ahead of demand. How are you kind of thinking to yourself how to build capacity today without a full clear picture of here's exactly where the demand is going to materialize and just making sure that goes well? Well, I believe that we would have all the work in the world if we could say, hey, order today, you get it tomorrow, you know, with any process that you want, whatever, and at a really, really low price. So I'm not too worried about building capacity ahead of our demand.

55:47I think the capacity creates demand. as soon as we have machines idle all of a sudden you know the lead time drops to near zero you know it's like hey order it by noon come pick it up at one like i don't care you know we're going to be incredibly fast if we had excess capacity then people are like wow i can get it so fast i'm going to order more and then that capacity starts to fill up and then that's where we go back to that ratchet thing where i'm like okay crap if i just told them they could have it in one hour i can't go backwards from that so i have to keep adding more and more capacity I don't worry too much about getting ahead of it.

56:22If let's say we reached total market share for, you know, sheet metal or something like that, that's cool because then we can add another service. There's manufacturing is, you know, infinite in possibilities. There's, you know, stamping and injection molding and tube and, you know, forming and forging and, you know, everything else that you can imagine under the sun casting. So as long as our customers are creative, as long as they need parts or projects manufactured in the USA, and we have the ability to add new services and capacity, then we will never run out of things to do.

57:00Jim Belosic:How do you think about basically building capacity in the event that you have this like surge demand and you need to fulfill it in a short period of time? How do you actually do that? You always need some surge capacity because as a as a on-demand manufacturer we have no idea what we're gonna do that day we might do a hundred parts or we might do a million i don't know what people are going to order so we have flexibility built into the system but there's only so much surge you can take so being able to have you know 10 times the surge capacity is it's hard to do because then you have idle equipment and idle equipment doesn't amortize very well um you know you want those machines running the best possible uptime but part of being quick turn is we have to have surge capacity whether we want it or not because we have to have redundancy as well we have to take machines offline uh for planned or unplanned maintenance so there's always some bit in there you just we want additional surge capacity but then we fill it with demand i don't know it's like this It's a very difficult oscillation.

58:11Yeah, it just, it never ends. I don't know if there's a right answer. It's this algorithm that I don't think we can ever solve, but we're trying.

58:21Jim Belosic:One of the things that you do that I haven't seen very many other people do is you're like default skeptical. You have a very high bar for the people that you allow close to you and who you let into your life. But once they're in, they're really in. Why did you kind of come to that philosophy? I have one of the best bullshit meters that I know of. I don't know where that comes from. But man, I can just sense if someone's not. Inauthenticity? Yeah. It triggers me. I'm a pretty good salesman. I like to sell and I like to build relationships and everything. but I always do it in a trustworthy way because I'm so sensitive to when people are lying to me or they have an ulterior motive or something like that.

59:14So yeah, default skeptical. I guess I am. I was going to say, I'm actually incredibly trusting in the first interaction. I'm like, we're going to be best friends, you know, or we're going to get married, whatever. I'm super excited. and then as the relationship goes on if i see something all of a sudden my radar will go up and you know maybe i'll have to push back a little bit and then earn it back so it's kind of like dunning kruger where i'm like this is gonna be great and then i see a little something and i have to reset but being skeptical allows you to i don't know have some some backup plans i guess i'm like okay i thought this was gonna be really great i saw something that maybe i'm unsure of.

1:00:00I'm going to research it. But then immediately I'm starting to plan like, okay, if this doesn't work out, what am I going to do? Um, I guess I do that with people. I do it with equipment. I do it with buildings, whatever it's, wow, this new building is going to be incredible. And then we get in there and we're like, Oh God, it's full of raccoons. Uh, so I'm like a little skeptical and then build it back up at the same time knowing, okay, if we have to punch out of here, you know, I have a backup.

1:00:27Jim Belosic:Let's end on what are you most excited about over the next like 12 to 24 months for the business? I'm excited that I get to go back to doing what I do best, which is build. I have a much longer leash now I can, I can run faster than I ever have. And then I'm really excited that I have all this experience. We've done it before. We just had constraints. I have a little less constraint now. So I don't know. I'm excited for the impact that we're going to have on manufacturing in the U S I'm excited for the positive impact we're going to have for our customers. I'm excited to kind of show the roadmap, show the template of, Hey guys, if I can do it, anyone can do it.

1:01:11I don't know if this plan is going to work out perfectly, but hopefully it does. And people can model it and say, Hey, let's do it the same cut send way. you know let's build something that's really good and it can survive on its own two legs and then you add a little rocket fuel and then you do more and more and more i think it's the way to build a business i think it's the way to do manufacturing in the u.s i i hope that we're an example that people look up to i don't know i i'm super happy i'm happy to be done fundraising i'm happy to go back to hauling ass and making cool stuff

From the publisher

Jim Belosic is the founder and CEO of SendCutSend.

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