How a Hillbilly in Nevada Bootstrapped a $140M ARR Manufacturing Company | Jim Belosic, SendCutSend

23:03Turner Novak:it was kind of like dirty almost or it's like maybe that's not the right word but because i was thinking about this when i was picking up my coffee like an hour ago just sort of like the way i don't know america has evolved like you think okay you you don't want to do this physical hard job or your kids you like you don't want them to do to be like a plumber and you know standing all day and hurting their back you want them to have a cushy fake email job where they sit at a desk and it's easy. So we basically like guided society away from doing these harder things. Yeah, I think, I think, you know, as a parent, you want your kids to have a better life than you have.

23:48And I think a lot of boomers or whatever worked their ass off. And they saw this new thing, you know, called college and computers. And they're like, oh, air conditioning. That's the job I would want if I could. And everyone went into that. And it was good for a while. And now everyone's getting their ass handed to them with AI and stuff.

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24:44Turner Novak:Amplitude. With AI analytics, all you have to do is ask. Anyway, you were asking about bootstrapping and raising and capital intensive. Yeah, that is a term I learned. Because I feel like manufacturing is kind of like a somewhat sexy category for VCs right now. At least I see them talking about it quite a bit. Well, it is in 2026. Yeah, it was it was not in 2018, 2017. that everyone wanted capital light. They're like, hey, Jim, you really need to sell the software. So many people told me that. And by that time, I knew that more software was not the solution. And just as far as how the industry adopts software and everything, I knew that it wasn't going to work.

25:31So bootstrapped it for as long as I possibly could. I used a lot of personal money. personal guarantee. That's another thing that I learned. I personal guaranteed all kinds of crazy ass loans. And then my wife was like, oh shit, if something goes wrong, we're losing the house, we're losing everything. And to help us sleep at night a little bit, she was like, hey, maybe we should try and use someone else's money just in case.

25:59Turner Novak:What a novel idea. Yeah. I was like, oh, okay. Well, that's the thing. You know, I've, I've, I've driven through Silicon Valley, I guess, but, you know, I'm, I'm from Genoa, Nevada. Actually, it's a town of like 400 people. Went to school in Minden, Nevada, just like 30 ,000 people. So all of my influences were, you know, for business was like agriculture, you know, blue collar stuff, you know, plumbing company, lumber company, whatever. And I knew that to run a business, like you take a product, you sell it at a profit, then you take that profit and put it into buying more product. You know, I always tell people that I run my business like a lemonade stand.

26:46I buy lemons for 50 cents. I sell it for a buck. and then I go buy more lemons. So that's how I thought businesses were run. You know, I have a high school education. I don't know anything about accounting and finance still. I kind of, I'm learning some things. I learned about gap accounting a little bit. Holy shit. That's all made up too, by the way.

27:04Turner Novak:It is. I will like get, hopefully my account is not listening to this, but I just look at my bank account and, you know, my account will like do all this stuff and like I don't even look at it. And then, you know, you owe him a bill for quite a bit of money and you're like, what were we just doing here? Like, this didn't even help me at all. Like, I know how much money is in my bank. I get that you have to pay taxes, and I do that. But it's like, this is kind of ridiculous. Yeah, sorry to all the accountants out there. But yeah, I feel like accounting was invented to keep other accountants busy.

27:39I feel the same way about legal sometimes. I love my legal team, by the way. But anyway, I run my businesses very, very simply. And the idea is to make money. So we had to be profitable very, very early. You know, we had a couple months where I could self-fund a little bit because it was like me and two other guys. And then the other thing that with the laser company that's really cool is sometimes you can delay that first payment for a little bit. So I think your first payment is due, you know, after you, you, uh, are done with training and we just never did the training. So you just wait until the salesman comes by and he's like, dude, you guys got to make a payment.

28:27So, so we, we could run like that for a little while. And then, you know, we, we were buying sheet metal, we were adding value to it and selling it and making a profit. So that allowed us to bootstrap for a while, but because it's capital intensive and. You got to have inventory. You got to have more staff. You got to have all this stuff in order to grow. It did make sense for us to take someone else's money. So shout out to Sandy Corey from Horizon. He knew me from the software company because he always tried to do his little VC thing with the software company. And I was making so much money.

29:05I was like, I don't need your money. I'm making plenty of money. So we had this relationship for a long time. And then I called him and I was like, Hey man, all right. I told you I didn't need you, but I need you now. Cause I'm doing this weird manufacturing company. And he was like, no, no way. That's capital intensive. He said, call me in six months. And I told him, so I made a little chart and I was like, here's where we're at. Here's where we're at today. Here's where we're going to be. And six months later, I called him and I sent him the chart and I was like, Hey man, look, I did what I said I was going to do.

29:35And he was like, Oh shit. Okay. You guys are awesome. So he backed us. it allowed me to sleep at night a little bit it was very expensive money because we ended up like not deploying all of it it it gave me just enough safety net though to like really haul ass um so so anyway yeah that was my first experience but then that was in 2021 and that was that was the only thing so i guess we call it like pre-seed or something as like friends and family type round i guess you know pretty small because because it's

30:08Turner Novak:almost, I think if you actually, if you calculate kind of like the cost of equity or the interest rate on that investment that you basically paid to the capital holder, the person who invested the capital, like as if it was a loan, the interest rate on venture backed equity is like three figures, right? Like it's like pretty close to like a hundred percent. It's basically a payday loan essentially for when it works out some of the times. It can be pretty high, you know, interest rate. But to your point, sometimes it's only capital. It's highly risk-seeking if it's done correctly. And then also to your point, you probably would have done things differently if you didn't have it in the bank.

30:50Turner Novak:Obviously, you didn't touch it all, but it allowed you to take more risk. And that's the point of it. A million percent. Because when I tell this story to to, you know, close friends or whatever. And they're like, Oh my God, you know, don't you wish you could go back in time and say no. And I'm like, hell no, hell no. It got me to where I am today. Like, yeah, it was expensive or whatever, but I don't have a time machine. And I don't know, everything kind of builds on everything else. And having that money in the bank allowed me to take on more risk and to make risky bets. Sorry. Sorry. I'm playing.

31:28I made a, I made a banana.

31:31Turner Novak:Just for this or you already had one, right? Oh, yeah. There's lots of bananas. Yeah. So. I think like the interesting element of this, too, is like, let's say like traditionally, when you raise VC money, you saw about 20 percent of the company. It's just like an even fair number. And like, let's say you only technically use the capital that was equivalent to like 12.2 percent. And it's like, would you go back and only sell 12.2 percent of the company? So you got that extra 8%. Well, you don't know what that number is actually going to be really. And again, it's like, hey, in a perfect world, you would have loved to know exactly and like sold a little bit of a lower number or whatever.

32:11Turner Novak:But the chances of this succeeding might have been lower. And it's really just optimizing the chances of success. You want to win. You want this thing to be successful and do what gets you there. That's the point. It could have all gone to zero. So, but it's doing great. And I don't know, I'm really happy. Sandy's been an awesome partner this whole time and Mark and the cool thing about the investors that we took on is they know nothing of manufacturing. So they have let me do whatever the hell I wanna do. They're just like, whatever you say, Jim, we have no idea what you're doing over there, but you're doing a good job.

32:53and it's been actually a really great relationship. So, and, and I would say that that's probably like the ideal target for all investors is you want to make sure that if you're investing in someone, they are the subject matter expert, let them do what they do. And like I said, I'm bad at accounting and finance or whatever. And usually investors are pretty smart on that kind of stuff. So they're good at what I suck at and vice versa. Yeah.

33:20Turner Novak:And actually I, I do have, I have one question from Sandy. I'm just going to read it because I want to make sure we get on. It's probably a good, actually, place to introduce this. So he said that your go-to-market execution is epic. Nobody in his industry has ever done anything like it. I'd be curious to hear how he thinks about the strategy of doing that. I don't know what you're going to say. I think I have a little bit of an idea, but I'm just curious. With Sandy's question, how did you guys think about just getting customers, going to market? What did you do? And what was so different than how people have done it?

33:50Thanks, Sandy. And also, sorry, that's another term that I hate is go to market. What does that even mean?

33:58Turner Novak:It's sophistication. Yeah, you've got to sound like so like you're intellectual and like you've thought about this, you know, you got to be legible to the capital holders. I think Sandy asked me that at one point. It was like, what's your go to market strategy? I'm like, what are you talking about? Like, how are we getting customers or whatever? Our go to market strategy is it's based on me. It's based on what I know. which is I'm not a great salesman. I don't know how to get into enterprise customers. I know nothing about like talking to procurement departments or whatever. But what I do know is, you know, people in their garage trying to make stuff.

34:37Makers, fabricators, car guys, people doing model rockets and stuff like that. So what we did is just make sure that the product was really incredible, really easy to access, very, very fast. And then we just kind of showed off what people are making. And, you know, so like Instagram, you know, we're like, hey, check out these parts that we made. How cool is that? Check out this robot that this guy made with our parts.

35:07What happens is all of these people that have hobbies, usually they have a day job too. And usually the day job is just to support their hobby. So I like to think about all these people in the early days that were just using us for silly projects. We had a guy who was making an electric skateboard in his garage. And we made a bunch of parts for him. And he wrote in, he sent us some photos, and he's like, dude, check out how cool this thing is. I'm going to tell all the guys at work about you. We're like, cool, man. Yeah, whatever. If they can use us, that's great. It turns out that he works at a very large American electric car manufacturer.

35:48And now we have 400 and some engineers inside that company that use us. So just, I guess, now it's called Bottoms Up, I guess.

35:58Turner Novak:Bottoms Up Adoption, yeah. Yeah, which I didn't know. It was just like have a cool product, allow cool people to use it, do a little, you know, surprise and delight when they get the part. It should be better than they expect. It should be faster than they expect. We throw a piece of candy in there. They get a sticker. You know, if they tag us on Instagram, we spread the love. We send out like gift cards and thank yous and hats and stuff like that. So it's just trying to be like a cool, friendly company. And if you do that for years and years and years, then it starts to snowball. Yeah, I think if we're going to like continue poking the bear about the fancy words, I feel like like someone might call this like PLG product led growth, right?

36:41Turner Novak:Like, essentially, what you did is there are people at these companies that started using the product individually, and then they like onboard the rest of the company. So even though they didn't even use it for work, it's like they you were basically selling the product to the larger enterprise. You're just like getting the individual to like become the champion and bring the big American electric electric car manufacturer on board and like sell the product internally. Yeah, yeah, it's there's soldiers on the inside. Your customers can sell for you better than you could ever hope to. So we put a big focus on that, although it wasn't this brilliant strategy.

37:21We didn't sit in a boardroom and be like, oh, we're going to do product-led growth. It was just, what do I want as a customer? Which is another part of our culture is we are our own customer.

37:38Almost probably 50 % or more of the people that work here use Send, Cut, Send for their personal projects. We have a couple of different Slack channels where people just post everything they're making. You know, all employees get a really hefty discount. But using your own product, eating your own dog food, it helps make it better and better and better. So oftentimes, you know, when I order stuff, I'm always pissed that it took so long to get to my house, you know, or maybe a part wasn't high enough quality for me or maybe the candy that I got was stale or something like that. So we're always trying to make it better.

38:18And if we make it better for ourselves, then we make it better for our customers and our customers are happy and then they tell their friends.

38:24Turner Novak:I think you have this concept called fun coupons. I've heard you talk about this kind of like this whole giving people like extra little fun incentives. They're fun coupons. What are they? Yeah. Usually a hundred dollar bills. It could be, could be other stuff though. So what I've learned with fun coupons is not everyone is motivated the same way. Some people like cash, some people like PTO, you know, they're like, Hey man, you want a day off? You can do this thing for me. And, and we can make that happen. Some people only need praise, you know, so finding out what people are motivated by is important.

39:05A lot of guys are motivated by whiskey too. So So a$70 bottle of whiskey has the same effect as$100 bills usually. And then a lot of the young kids don't know what to do with cash. They're like, can you Venmo me?

39:19So again, I hope no accountants are listening, but we recycle all of our scrap metal. And scrap guys, for whatever reason, they love to pay in cash. I don't know what their business model is, but that's probably something I want to get into in the future is like scrap recycling because it's very cash and they always drive nice cars. I don't know what kind of like seedy underbelly of the recycling world they're dealing with, but they give us cash. Most of it goes to the accounting department, but then, you know, we keep a little petty cash in our pockets so that if we see something outstanding or if we need to say thank you to a vendor or a FedEx driver or something like that, you pass out a phone coupon and it just kind of builds rapport.

40:04and people appreciate it.

40:06Turner Novak:Continuing this maybe topic about manufacturing, making a manufacturing company, one argument someone might have is like, there's no moat, right? Like I, as a listener, could just go and do exactly the same thing that you are doing and just sell it for a lower price. And that's how I compete against you. How have you kind of thought about that while building SendCutSend? It's a commodity. Like the, you know, I'm buying steel, I'm buying aluminum. We pay commodity prices. Anyone can get it. Anyone can get the lasers and equipment that we have. We make modifications to them with a little bit of secret sauce to make them run a little bit better.

40:44But I don't think it's moat worthy. Our software was a moat. I'll just say another great word, the moat, the sophisticated investor word. I don't know if there's any moat anywhere because there's so many smart people. that have figured out stuff. If you think you have a moat, you think that people being born today aren't going to be smarter or more driven or have more energy than you, it's going to happen again. So with us, our moat is continuing to deliver and exceed expectations. And it really, it's speed. A lot of speed is probably the best moat that we have because even if someone can sell it cheaper if we can get it to them faster and they can complete their project faster that's the most important thing so speed capacity quality i don't know think about it like chick-fil-a you know popeyes sells a chicken sandwich mcdonald's has a chicken sandwich or whatever but people love chick-fil-a because it's high quality it's consistent maybe the locations are convenient.

41:57The drive-through is pretty fast, even though the line is long, whatever. So I don't know if that's a moat or not, but they're running a really good business. So we try and do the same thing. Yeah.

42:08Turner Novak:Cause I guess if I'm, if I'm thinking through this, you know, if I'm an overseas manufacturer and I just say, you know, I have a lower cost structure than send cuts end. So I'm just going to pass all the savings to the customer, maybe even more, you know, half the price or whatever, but I'm in, I'm across an ocean. And so I have to, I have to figure out how to get things to you, to American customers, probably faster than you can. When someone is placing an order on your website, the software is just cutting this piece. I don't know the same day, how fast does it go? And then you just ship it and it gets to their house in like a day or two.

42:46Turner Novak:I don't know how long this all takes, but is that maybe like a fair, a fair way to kind of square this all up? Yeah, like we have an option right now. It's called noon by noon. So order by noon, you can get it by noon the next day. So yeah, that's difficult with offshore to compete with. But internally, we always run the teleport model where we're like, okay, let's say China could teleport. And as soon as they put it into a box, it magically crosses that ocean and then gets delivered. So all of a sudden, yeah, there is no moat, right? What does that look like with our business? And our answer to that is it's the entire experience.

43:32It has to be the look and feel of the product. It has to be the support before the sale, after the sale, during the sale or whatever. However, with manufacturing, the tough thing about manufacturing is DFM, design for manufacturability. So just because you can design something doesn't mean that it can be made, especially to all of you people listening with 3D printers. Just because you can 3D print something doesn't mean that it can be made on a CNC machine or injection molded or whatever. So you have to make compromises in your design or adjustments in your design in order for it to be manufactured.

44:10we invest a significant amount of resources into helping our customers understand you know how to make their design better how to make it cheaper how to make it faster and that's something that you know offshore has challenges with this on the support side and just like the partnership side i'm trying to think of i'm putting myself in the mindset

44:32Turner Novak:of someone who was like trying to compete against you i guess right now to kind of think through this topic because to your point about the um the teleportation thing you could i don't i think this is a little bit far-fetched but you know with all these rocket all this rocket technology launching it's like you know i manufacture on the other side of the world rocket launches and delivers it in an hour or something i don't i don't know yes i i could actually see that happening maybe at some point, I feel like some people maybe accelerate the timelines a little bit on some of this adoption of new technology.

45:08Turner Novak:But I could see us eventually maybe getting there. But yeah, then you get to the point of like, do they trust you? Do they feel like they're getting the best experience from you? That kind of level of excellence of like, you'll never let them down. The product will always work. They can just trust that you're going to get things on time and they're going to be high quality. i'm gonna call it you know instead of the teleport uh we could call it the the rocket ship scenario because that's actually way more realistic so or drone i guess there's like drone but yeah rockets rockets like the cross the global the icbm right yeah i see delivery hopefully not like the full uh icbm experience just the you know the launching part i want submarine launched sheet metal parts landing anywhere within six hours.

46:02So if we run that scenario, let's say we know that that's coming because the cost to launch is dropping so crazy. Maybe that is a threat. Well, then the thing that we can do is continue to scale. With scale, there's economies of scale. And people say, oh, China has cheaper labor and they have cheaper equipment and cheaper commodities or whatever.

46:34yes and no i mean on really good equipment that's expensive in the u.s you can actually output more with you know really good labor that's making a good wage they actually care more they they put more quality into it they're looking for ways to improve the process the really the big thing that that american manufacturers need is is scale they need to be able to make sure that their they have a robust supply chain where they're buying millions of pounds of raw materials. They have 24-7 operations. They're distributed geographically so that transit doesn't really impact their cost structure that much.

47:18So even if that moat completely goes away, I'm confident that we can compete not only on quality and service, but we can compete on price too. And oftentimes we do today. You know, especially in larger quantities, like we start to get really, really close with offshore stuff.

47:39Turner Novak:And one thing I've heard you talk about before is the way that you launch kind of new products and capabilities to customers. There's sort of this trend in, I don't know, tech, software, Twitter. You got this launch video, right? You're like, you make this video, there's a lot of fanfare on what you're doing, you announce it. I feel like you do not take that approach. What is your approach to the new products and capabilities that you guys roll out to your customers? Yeah. We call it the gaslight launch, where we say nothing. We just turn it on, and we wait for customers to discover it. And you'll turn it on, and then for a day, nothing happens.

48:23Then the next day you get like one order. A couple of days later, you get five, whatever, and it starts to snowball from there. But what that does is it allows you to understand what the demand is. It allows you to start to learn where the process goes wrong or whatever. We test everything. We do test orders. We make a bunch of people in the company order stuff and we beat it up like a soft opening. But everyone has a plan until they get punched from the mouth. So when you turn it on to the public, the public is endlessly creative and they will find ways of breaking your stuff. So I think the worst thing that you can do is announce like, Hey, we have this new process.

49:04Go try it. Well, if, if a thousand people decide to try it that same day, you might disappoint a lot of them when you only have capacity for like a hundred. So the gaslight launch is we turn it on, let it run, let it run, let it run. We get good. We iterate. And then our favorite thing is when a customer will write in and be like, oh my God, you guys do welding now? I'm like, yeah, where have you been? We've been doing welding for months. Like, geez, man, I take offense that you don't even know that. And then once you're really good, once you're six months in, then you start telling people about it because you know your capacity.

49:42You know what goes right. You know what goes wrong. You know what kind of customers are going to be a good fit or not. So I don't know. It takes a more patient approach, but it works out really well for us.

49:53Turner Novak:You can control the customer experience then too. Because it sounds like really like the biggest thing for you guys is that the customers trust you to do exactly what you say. So it sounds like that philosophy kind of rings true in this approach is like you make sure that you are only doing things that you know you can deliver on at the highest quality possible. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just so nervous that one bad experience can cause a customer to go away for life. I had a really bad experience at a Chili's once and I have never set foot in a Chili's again. So it's stupid. It was just a waitress. I can probably go back.

50:34But

50:38that kind of sticks with me. So I want to make sure if we say we're going to do something, then we do it and we exceed expectations. So to do a big proper launch with a launch video and you're like, hey, today's the day we're live. Yeah, you don't know if you're going to get 10 people or 10 ,000. So yeah, roll it out slow. Figure it out as you go. You know, I remember hearing stories of when they opened Disneyland for the first time. Like it was crazy hot. People, you know, ladies in high heels, their heels were melting into the new asphalt. what no way yeah they're just like they had this huge ass launch and you know they they made they made some mistakes and the reviews from that first day launch were were pretty poor um so anyway

51:27Turner Novak:that's that's how i avoid those yeah oh and you you mentioned uh you mentioned restaurants you i feel like you've talked about restaurants a couple times when it i i know that you said you've you've learned a lot of things from other businesses like you like going into another business and just seeing how it works and whether it's restaurant whether it's manufacturing company or i don't know car dealership like a store i don't know i mean so what have you kind of learned and borrowed from other industries and maybe like any memorable most memorable things that you maybe are not intuitive that you've kind of borrowed for send cut send yeah um no i'm I'm endlessly curious about every business except for manufacturing.

52:13So I think you can know too much about something and then you won't do it. So I can tell you right now, knowing everything I know right now, I don't know if I would have started this business eight years ago because there's crazy challenges. But if you can leverage the Dunning-Kruger effect and you're just like, that seems easy, you'll end up doing a lot of innovation. So I don't like to learn too much about manufacturing, but I do love to learn about everything else. Like my wife, my wife went to like yoga class and they had this really cool app to schedule the class and to make payment. And it was like really smooth.

52:53The UI on it was really, really smooth. I was like, oh man, I like that checkout sequence, maybe we can borrow that. I went to a packaging trade show. It's all about jars and labels and cardboard. At least that's what I thought. It was actually about cannabis and weed. It was about how to package weed for weed people. But there was crazy stuff that we learned there. They had these ultra high precision scales that had an API and stuff. I was like, oh man, I can use those to count parts. They had this like vacuum packaging stuff that was intended to keep the smell out, but it actually works really well to prevent parts from moving during shipment.

53:38So yeah, the cannabis trade show is really good, even though I don't do the weed.

53:46We've toured distribution places, Arrow Electronics. We got a tour of their place and they used these really awesome carts that I didn't know existed. But I was like, oh, man, that would save us from carrying all this heavy stuff across the room or whatever.

54:03Turner Novak:What are the carts? These are automated or they design a certain way? Yeah, they're kind of modular, I guess. So you can put a bunch of different totes on them. And the totes are designed to go on the cart and it's super efficient. but then it's kind of organized so when you go through the different stops you can drop off the totes at the right area and it limits how much that you're going to make mistakes we use we use a modified version of it we call it the train which is just like a like a baggage cart that you see at an airport and then we drive that through the facility to to move parts around because we got a quote once for four million dollars in order to do conveyors and i was like there's no way in hell so we went on Facebook marketplace and found this old aircraft tug and made it into our, our$4 million conveyance.

54:57But yeah, you can see stuff like that everywhere at the frozen yogurt place, the way that they market, you know, a new flavor or whatever. They're like, Hey, tag us, show us a photo of you eating this new flavor and tell your friends or whatever. It's just little stuff like that, that I kind of pick up and I use what I think is best. Yeah.

55:17Turner Novak:And I know you mentioned before that you think you, in order to run a manufacturing company, you cannot run it from a spreadsheet. Like you must be in the facility, walking the floor. Can you just explain that a little bit? Because there's some people that probably think like it's just a math problem. Like it's just a spreadsheet. Doesn't seem that complicated. it why do you why why do you think you need to kind of like be in there what do you get from like going into the facility and just walking around yeah so what's what's crazy now you know we have we have six buildings so i can't be in all of them at the same time but i have dashboards my dashboards show me everything i need to know and i'm like oh my gosh why is you know bending so behind in Texas?

56:08Or how come powder coat has no work in Kentucky? When you walk the floor, you actually see what's going on. You're like, oh, the reason bending is so backed up in Texas is because one of the machines is down. Or Larry had to go to a family reunion and turns out three of the other operators are family and they're all gone. Or the reason there's no powder coating work in Kentucky is because we ran out of powder coat and no one said anything, you know, so, so you can see it on a dashboard, but then you have to go investigate. You have to go do, you know, root cause. And usually you can figure that out, you know, all the time.

56:51One of the things that that's kind of funny that happens is I watch almost all of our purchase requests and about once a week we'll get a request for more totes you know we use like those kind of tsa totes to to move parts around you know like at the airport those little bins you stick through the the tsa thing yep yeah you put an order in it and goes through it through the process and i get requests like we need more totes we need more totes we're running out we're so busy And that kind of makes sense. But then when you look at it, it's actually we don't need more totes, we need to process more orders.

57:36It usually turns out that like, we don't have enough staffing in shipping so that they can empty the tote and put it back to the front of the line. So you know, it's hard to see on a on a spreadsheet, you can't see that kind of stuff, you have to walk the floor, or you have to have like really good leaders that are walking the floor and combining gut with data. Also, if you just have gut, that doesn't work either. Like you need data to back it up. It goes bold ways.

58:03Turner Novak:Yeah, so then what kind of things have you done then as a manufacturing company? You have a history making software. Are there other things where you've invested in building different things to give you more data or automate parts of the manufacturing process that maybe are not just the automatic quotes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the physical side is really important. And that's where I see, like I said earlier, I get outreach almost daily from people that are like, hey, I've never been in your building, I've never been in manufacturing, but if you use this software, it's gonna make your business better.

58:45As an outsider, you're not seeing where the actual bottlenecks are. For example, like for machine monitoring, we hook up systems to the machines so that we can understand exactly what their uptime is. How often they're in an error state? How often they're idle? Is the power on or not? Are they running? Is the spindle moving at the right speed? Is there a vibration? What's the temperature of it? Whatever. So we kind of strap on all these little monitors, you know, they're Arduino powered or whatever, but it gives us additional insight. So when you're walking through the building, you might be like, oh, man, that sounds a little strange or that smells a little strange.

59:31And then you can look at the data and be like, oh, yeah, that thing hasn't been maintained in a while. You know, maybe that's the reason or whatever. So use all your senses plus data, you know, sight, smell, taste, whatever. Yeah.

59:45Turner Novak:And you mentioned bottlenecks. So what are, in your experience, what are or have been some of the biggest bottlenecks of trying to build a manufacturing company and scaling it relatively quickly? It changes. It changes all the time. As soon as you solve one bottleneck, the next one pops up. So it's, you know, we're playing, have you ever played the game Factorio? Do you know of Factorio? I know of it. I actually have not started playing it. Don't do it. Okay. When I, when I play video games, I play them with my kids. So it's like Minecraft rollercoaster tycoon. We've been playing together lately, which is not quite factorial from everything I know, but it's a little bit of this like simulation management thing.

1:00:30It's addicted. It'll, it'll steal, you know, days of your life. So I don't recommend anyone do it, but it's, it's this game basically where, you know, you have to, you know, mine some or and then turn the or into metal and then take the metal and do something else. So it's kind of what we're doing. So as soon as you're like, oh man, I can't mine enough ore, and then you do more mining, then you're like, oh shit, now I have too much ore and now I can't process it enough. So it's the same thing with us. If we can't ship fast enough, we add shipping staff, shipping technology, we try and innovate and streamline the process.

1:01:06Then all of a sudden, it's like, well, now shipping doesn't have enough work. Okay, let's go upstream from that. How come and there's no work, we're waiting on powder coating, okay, let's fix that. So not only does the bottleneck change every single day, it changes per location too. So all of our facilities have different bottlenecks and it also changes day-to-day because we don't just make our own parts or for our own product, we make parts for everyone's product. So we don't know if we're going to make a million parts in a day or if we're going to make 10. So the bottlenecks are always changing, very, very dynamic.

1:01:49Early on, a big challenge for us was inventory.

1:01:53Turner Novak:This is raw material inventory to have it on hand? Raw material. So, again, my lack of accounting knowledge, I was like, oh man, I want as much material as I can possibly afford so that if we get a spike in orders, we can handle it without disappointing people. Turns out that's really bad for cash flow. apparently all that inventory is actually like millions of dollars that you could have deployed. So we had to get really smart on that. But because we're quick turn and because we're self-serve on demand, someone can place an order and wipe us out of a certain material or whatever. So we had to get really smart with that, get really smart with predicting.

1:02:40It gets easier and easier as time goes on because you can start to see seasonality or you can start to understand certain customers buying behaviors. Sometimes we know that they're going to order before they do.

1:02:54Turner Novak:Oh, really? Yeah. Just, you know, after years and years of collecting data, you can start to see patterns. And, you know, we're trying to get better with like machine learning and stuff like that so we can get smarter. I'm hesitant to say AI because LLMs have no place in that. But good old machine learning helps a little bit. Yeah. And I feel like you kind of benefit a little bit from maybe the concept of float or cash conversion cycle where maybe this isn't true. Maybe I'm making this up. But because an individual is just entering their credit card and making a payment, you get paid the cash immediately versus if this was kind of like an enterprise RFP order, there'd be like an invoice and negotiating and like payment terms.

1:03:47Turner Novak:So maybe you benefit a little bit from that to like kind of offset this tricky navigating the inventory investments, or maybe that's not true. I don't know. I just. We, we, we bank with JP Morgan Chase and we have a great team over there. They love us. And I just heard that term like three weeks ago. They're like, your cash conversion cycle is the fastest I've ever seen. And I was like, I don't know what that is, but awesome. Seems to be working for us. And it was exactly what you said. Like we get paid immediately. And then we usually have to pay our vendors 60 to 90 days later, you know, 120 days if we can squeeze it.

1:04:30And yeah, that's what's allowed us to kind of grow without, you know, a ton of outside capital.

1:04:37Turner Novak:Yeah, maybe if I was getting like super, you know, trying to dissect this, like you may be like tapped into that kind of, you pay your vendors as like a more of a B2B payment and procurement process, but then you collect from your customers with this more of like consumer, you know, pay on, to pay on like order, pay on delivery, which again, like that, I don't know, it sounds like 120 days of manufactured kind of float that you kind of made for yourself based off of just this, like basically the software to like give the customer, the customer this like faster, more efficient experience where they're willing to pay you up front because you've just made things easier for them.

1:05:16Yeah. We, we ran into that in the early days, um, dealing with, you know, some of these very, very large companies. And they're like, we don't pay on credit card. We pay on, you know, net 60 terms or whatever. And I was like, Hey man, our system is set up to take credit cards. I don't know what to tell you. Do you need the parts or not? And then turns out, you know, the, the engineers would go to procurement and be like, for the love of God, give us the parts, you know, of course, over time that's changed. We've been able to support, you know, payment terms and whatever. But yeah, a good chunk of our business is that, you know, credit card instant payment stuff.

1:05:53So it works really well. But yeah, the larger the company, the more weird their procurement cycle is, or, you know, if they have to use like Coupa or Punch Out or these EDI systems or whatever, it starts to get really crazy.

1:06:08Turner Novak:And so maybe slightly different topic, maybe you've actually hit on this before, I'm not sure. But what do you think is kind of the hardest part of running a manufacturing business that someone who has not done it before would come across? Like if me, if I'm just like, I'm going to start a manufacturing company and you're Jim, you're like, sounds great, Turner. But by the way, you're probably not thinking about this. This is the most difficult part that you should think about going into it. I think the hardest thing is doing many, many things at once. And so we were lucky where we started, you know, just cutting sheet metal.

1:06:50And a lot of people told us that that was never going to work because the sheet metal fabrication industry actually needs, you know, 100 more steps to it. It needs to be bent. It needs to be painted. It needs to be passivated or whatever, you know. And I was like, nope, I'm just going to cut it. Then we slowly added over time. So what I see now is people are like, I'm going to get into manufacturing. I'm going to build a factory. I'm going to try and make bicycles, for example. It's incredibly complex. You have to have the raw materials and the cutting of the tubes and the welding and then managing supply chain for gears and sprockets and pedals and then the tassels that go on the handlebar or whatever, all these different stages of assembly.

1:07:33Doing that all at once is really, really challenging and it's almost overwhelming. And the thing that people try and do today, so like, well, I'm going to automate it all. And that's where things go really sideways, because you can over automate. We're very sensitive about, you know, when to use dudes and when to use robots. And we put robots where robots make sense. But then just we have great people to that. That can adapt at a, you know, within seconds. they can move all across the factory and be where they're needed to be. Whereas automation is very difficult to set up accurately the first time.

1:08:20So anyway, a long way of saying like doing everything at once in manufacturing is hard, but it's kind of what you have to do unless you have the luxury of like a slow ramp. So if you could start with one very, very simple product and then scale up, If I was going to make a humanoid robot, I would start with just winding copper. I'm going to wind copper around an armature, and then I'm going to take that and make it into an actuator. And then maybe I'll make some of the PCBs or something like that. And then I'll make the cameras or whatever over months and years before I had to do a whole humanoid.

1:08:57So people with much more ambition and smarts are doing the whole thing at once, but it's very, very hard. Yeah.

1:09:06Turner Novak:So it sounds like do the most simple thing and do it manually. And it seems like this is kind of the philosophy of a lot of the stuff you do is do simple things manually, get really good at them. And then you're able to kind of automate around the edges and kind of like expand the scope of automation or like the ambition of the automation that's happening. Yeah. And you just made me realize like we were able to do that because we were mostly bootstrapped. We had no pressure on us to deploy capital or, you know, hey, in 18 months, you better have this factory humming and, you know, I want full on humanoids coming out.

1:09:54And that's I think that's probably one of the bigger problems with with venture right now is they they're throwing a shit ton of money at people without a ton of experience. and the expectation is like, all right, you're going to figure this all out very, very quickly because we got to make our money back. And it takes longer than that. It takes a lot of partnerships. And oftentimes, where you start and where you end are going to be different. You might start out to start making toasters. And it turns out that you're actually just really good at the electrical components and you become an electrical component manufacturer instead of a toaster manufacturer, whatever there's the, the path is very winding and, and sometimes there's like better opportunities.

1:10:42So, but if you're forced to do it all at the same time, you're going to have this shitty toaster factory that's putting out really garbage toasters and nothing works. And then everyone's money is lit on fire.

1:10:54Turner Novak:Yeah. Cause I think when I, when I put on my, my like VC hat and you probably like, I don't know, the darling right now is anthropic, right and you just look at it and i don't know it's like the fastest growing company ever but whatever like i think they went from like 1 billion in revenue to 30 billion in like a couple months or something like a couple quarters or i yeah i mean i'm sure the numbers are all different but but so an investor is like that's what you have to do like they they pattern match you to that and they say this is what our expectations are and you know that may be completely unreasonable and impossible.

1:11:34Turner Novak:And, you know, meanwhile, the path that Anthropic went on was like not it's not like they just flipped a switch and like that happened. Like it was a very long winding and they probably got lucky in some cases of like like OpenAI was they were trying to do an ICO back in 2017. Right. Like I don't know if anyone remembers is like they were trying to do like a crypto token launch thing to raise money. Like all these companies that, you know, we kind of like are benchmarking everyone too. They also were not perfect from the early days. And there was an element of luck. Maybe there's a lot of skill, but an element of like the environment.

1:12:17Turner Novak:You got lucky in terms of things hitting and switching. And, you know, really accomplished, really good team. Of course, that's what you're looking for. Really good product. You like the elements of the market. But like a lot of these companies that really take off, like, you know, NVIDIA back, I don't know, six years ago, no one was talking about NVIDIA and AI. It was all about crypto and like Bitcoin mining, right? And but they were positioned for it. I think Jensen, you know, he knew that what was happening with artificial intelligence, like NVIDIA was a cornerstone of that. But like the market didn't really know that, right?

1:12:57Like, so I don't know, I think it's maybe a long winded way of saying like in investors don't know as much as, you know, they like to pretend they know.

1:13:07Turner Novak:And a lot of this stuff is just kind of like you got to be positioned to get lucky and then take advantage of the timing and the luck when it happens. Yeah, I agree. And I guess that's why that's why I hear, you know, investors say sometimes they're backing the founders, you know, or they're backing the team more than they're actually backing the product. And that makes sense to me because if we've had to pivot and we've changed and we've added services that I never thought we would have. So being able to pivot, being flexible, being able to adapt, overcome, whatever, that's probably the most important thing because the market changes.

1:13:46We're always worried about what's the next black swan event.

1:13:50Turner Novak:What was COVID like? I'm assuming that was an eventful time for you guys. Yeah, COVID was actually really good for us. We were lucky. I remember I grabbed everyone, and we all went out in the parking lot and put our arms out. We're like, okay, everyone's social distance. I was like, okay, we have six weeks where we have enough runway to pay you guys for six weeks. So if we don't have a lot of orders, we'll just like do painting and we'll clean up the shop and we'll, we'll get ready for when the work comes back. And then like the next day we started making parts for, you know, hospitals and ventilators and sneeze guards and all that kind of stuff.

1:14:41So a lot of, a lot of other manufacturers like shut down during that period, you know, they were deemed as not necessary or whatever. But we kept running and came out of it stronger than ever. And that was a crazy time. We had so much demand and the supply chain was so screwed. Trying to get clear plastic to make a steez guard was damn near impossible. And if you'd call an aluminum vendor, all their salespeople were working from home and they'd never worked from home before and everything was really sideways, but we got through it. But I'm glad that we had that experience in recent memory. So we always kind of prepare for whatever the next one is going to be.

1:15:33So that being able to pivot and change and adapt is kind of in our blood. It's in our culture. Yeah.

1:15:39Turner Novak:I mean, thinking about pivoting, adapting on like an individual, like a labor level. I know there's a lot of people that say we have this skilled labor shortage in America. And even if we do bring back manufacturing, people don't even know how to run some of these machines. How have you guys approached that? Because you need to hire people. I think you mentioned you have 350, 450? 450, yeah. Again, that's where starting a company in a small town is a huge advantage. You don't think so at the time. But, you know, okay, I'm buying these ultra high tech Japanese fiber lasers, million dollar machines.

1:16:24And there's like, what, two guys in Reno, Nevada, that already knew how to run them, maybe, maybe one guy. I knew that was unsustainable. So it forced us early on to like, kind of build our own training program. Like, all right, we're, We're going to learn about the maintenance, the operation, best practices. We're going to innovate our own best practices. And, you know, I didn't know it at the time, but we were like trying to create an academy company. You know, I want people to be able to learn a skill here and hopefully apply that skill long term and create a career out of it. But if they get poached away, I think the biggest compliment I could have is someone's like, hey, I want to hire you.

1:17:11And I was looking at your resume and you worked at SendCutSend. Oh, man, you must be amazing. We think about Pepsi a lot. I think Pepsi has created more CEOs than any other company in history.

1:17:22Turner Novak:Really? Did not know that? Yeah. they have this crazy like management leadership program that just generates awesome people. And they end up going and being CEOs other places. So entrepreneurial spirit, you know, that kind of stuff. So we do that everywhere. You know, especially like in CNC machining, CNC machining is an industry where you have to be an apprentice. You know, you have to go through this whole journeyman type thing to become a machinist takes years and years and years. And I knew that at the scale that I wanted to operate, there's no way that I could do that. There's just simply not enough machinists to hire, especially in my small town.

1:18:07If I was in Los Angeles or Chicago or something like that, then I probably would have taken a different approach. But instead of spending effort on trying to find skilled machinists, we decided to invest in creating skilled machinists. So over at our machine shop, I think our average age over there is like 26.2. And it's because we have a bunch of 45-year-old guys like me skewing the metric. But yeah, we have 19-year-old kids running multimillion-dollar machines, and they're doing it better than their peers that have been doing it for 20 years.

1:18:44Turner Novak:Yeah, I think I saw a post you had. Some of the previous experience of your newest hires is like donut shop worker, accountant, janitor, bartender, call center rep, a nurse, school custodian, graphic designer, AI data analyst. So it's like pretty much all over the place. Like how, how do you train people? Is it, do you do like an internal kind of apprenticeship program or did you like make coursework and like there's classes or like, how do you, how do you teaches people how to run these machines. No, it's very hands-on. So we have designated trainers and we have programs, you know, we have standard operating procedures, but those are kind of bullshit.

1:19:28No one actually looks at those. It's about like learn by doing. So my daughter just started going to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and that school model is learned by doing. And she's a business major. The first thing that they did, they're like, all right, you're going to create a business. Go run it. Let's figure this out. It's going to fail. It's going to work or it's not. So we take that same approach. We're like, hey, let's go touch and feel the machine. Let's feel what a normal sound is. What's a bad sound? What's the safety? What's the maintenance? What does it look like when it's running good, when it's running bad?

1:20:07That's where we start. And then there's additional levels. It's like, all right, now you want to get advanced? let's dig into it. Let's dig into the electronics. Let's dig into the programming of it. So there's always these steps forward. We do have a pretty sizable classroom and we'll do little sessions in there. If people want to learn something new, we'll do little breakout sessions on the floor. It's like, hey, we're going to have a little class on welding or something like that. But I don't know, we just don't know any different. And so it's kind of just became second nature for us to train people.

1:20:47Yeah. It's kind of a good point when you say, she's majoring in business and the first thing

1:20:52Turner Novak:is start a business. Because I went to school for accounting and finance and the first accounting class I took, I was like, this is so confusing. There's just so many things going on. And then I did an accounting internship when I was like, oh, this all makes sense now. I'm actually using this stuff and I get it now because instead of just you sit in a classroom, you're reading a textbook. And I feel like even with my finance classes, I was kind of like, you're learning all these rules about finance and stocks, investing, whatever, versus I made this paper trading account where you get a fake million dollars and you buy some stocks and you watch them all go up or down like, oh, shoot, there's this thing called like a banking crisis.

1:21:40Turner Novak:Like I think it was the Greek banking crisis, like the banks in Greece were like collapsing or something. And you're like, oh, my, all my stocks are down like 20 percent. Like you really learn very quickly how to invest when you actually are thrown into it. And luckily, it wasn't real money because, you know, 19 year old kid, you buy some stocks, you're going to make a lot of bad decisions. But I agree. Just like the hands-on, like going in there, like just do the thing. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to learn. That's really the best way to learn things. Well, they have a huge safety net.

1:22:15You know, they have leads and supervisors and managers and trainers and then their co-workers. And, you know, we have a no assholes policy. So the reason why we hire the donut shop person and someone who is working at Dollar Tree and someone who is a nurse or whatever, a bartender, it's because they're friendly. And they're just like, they're used to dealing with people. Customer service is kind of built into them. And so even if they're not talking to our customers, they're talking to their colleagues. And so oftentimes you'll find in skilled trades, there's hesitation to share those skills. Like, well, if I teach this guy, what if he becomes better than me?

1:23:01I'm going to lose my job.

1:23:03Turner Novak:Yeah. I mean, that's pretty scary. Yeah. So here we have none of that. Like everyone's like, hey, I want you to be the best you possibly can be. because there's just not that like old school trades mentality of you know hiding the the good tricks because you're going to have some some leg up because we're we're just hiring people that are are cool to begin with it i can't teach someone how to be cool or friendly but i can teach them i can teach them how to weld i can teach them how to become a machinist for sure yeah one thing that i really i like the kind of philosophy how you think about things is when you when you're talking about kind of the employees that work at the company you think about it is like you're supporting their families really where like you know it's it's not just uh you know you hired this guy 28 years old 32 years old married has some kids it's basically like you're paying his mortgage you're paying for the kids to play sports like the vehicle like the vacations that they take like you're essentially supporting the entire well-being and it's not just this person that's being turned from a donut shop worker or a bartender into a machine machinist you're like you're really like taking on them as a member of kind of the extended family in a way and i feel like not a lot of companies think that way yeah i you know the way that i rate how good i'm doing or how good the company is doing is based on you know what does our parking lot look like?

1:24:37Does everyone have a car, a decent car, or is there a bunch of people taking the bus because they can't afford a car? Or is there a bunch of Corvettes out there or something? There's a few. How many send, cut, send babies are there? We keep track. We have little send, cut, send onesies that we send out to newborns. So I like to see that stack go down because people are, you know, they're like, Hey, I have a good enough job to where I can have kids. I can start a family, whatever. That's, that's really important to me.

1:25:14I selfishly, I think about, okay, let's say, let's say I'm on vacation in Mexico. I get abducted by the cartel. If I make a phone call, I'm like, guys, like how many dudes in a van are driving down from Reno to come like bust me out? And I think I have a few. I think there's a couple bandfuls of people that are going to come into the rescue because I try and treat them right. And I think they would treat me right in return. So I don't like to think about it as a family because that gets all weird. And it's tough to hold accountable when you treat them like family. But we definitely do more like the sports team analogy.

1:25:59It's like, hey, we're all high performers. we all want to win the super bowl let's all kick ass and do it yeah yeah that's a good way to think

1:26:08Turner Novak:about it i i saw that you uh hired a college ambassador at florida tech i think you mentioned maybe there's some other so so why hire college ambassadors as a manufacturing company like i don't know how did i don't i'm trying to think like how does that compute like what's the point doing that we have the means to give back i don't i don't know if it generates any customers okay so this is like a test you're just trying this thing yeah i don't oh god it's so first of all like marketing attribution is the most thing in the world it's all vibes we throw money at a bunch of different stuff if it feels right then keep doing it the reason we have college ambassadors is because there's so many kids trying to learn stuff and do really cool stuff like Formula Baja, Formula SAE.

1:26:59College rocketry programs are incredible nowadays. We sponsor concrete canoe teams. Are you familiar with that? Did your school have concrete canoe? Canoes made of concrete? Canoes made out of concrete. So these engineering students, usually they're like civil engineers or whatever, they have to develop cool concrete mixes, make a form. And at the end, they float them and race them. I didn't know you could make concrete float. I just assumed it sunk. Same. As long as it displaces more water than the concrete ways, I guess it works. But anyway, there's all these programs, seismology labs, mining labs, whatever.

1:27:46and these kids have great ideas but sometimes they don't have access to actually getting the parts they need to do their experiments or whatever some colleges have machine shops or whatever but they're usually backlogged or you don't have access so I just want everyone to know like hey we exist use this if you want you know we sponsor all their efforts all we ask in return is like hey send us some photos if you guys you know win a competition or something like take a group photo. They never do because all these engineering kids are really shitty at marketing and advertising and customer service, but they're really good engineers.

1:28:24But I don't know, it just feels good. It's cool to see those projects. When I was in software, especially like marketing, Facebook integration software, my kids had no idea what the hell I did all day. And in this company, especially with sponsorships and helping out college kids, you can kind of point to something. It's like, hey, you know, our company like made those parts for that rocket or, you know, see that that go cart that these kids made. Like, look, those are our parts. You know, that's that's kind of cool. So they know kind of what dad's doing and it makes me happy. So the whole thing is probably just selfish.

1:29:05Yeah.

1:29:06Turner Novak:Okay. That's fair. Yes. speaking about kids, my kids, there's definitely been times where they're like, Oh, what does dad do? He's like, Oh, he like eats bananas all day, like banana capital, like he just likes bananas. Like, that's what he does. It's like, I try to I try to like, but then when we play, we'll play games like roller coaster tycoon or something. I was like, Oh, it's kind of like I, I invest in people starting businesses, like you're starting a theme park, like I help give them money, and then they make their their business. And we've kind of done like a lemonade we did a lemonade stand once and by the way as a kid lemonade stand highest margin you have like 100 margins your parents buy everything they help you for free and you keep all the money best business ever and so yeah it's like you know it's like i just help people run their lemonade stands like i help people get lemonade stands going and i do exactly what i just did for you i give you the money and i help you for free so my dad did it differently for me I had to pay him back for all the country time mix and the sugar in the cups.

1:30:06So I learned margin very, very early. Yeah. Yeah. He was incredibly strict.

1:30:11Turner Novak:Maybe I should make that tweak because I'm teaching the kids that there's like unlimited free money. I should. Oh, they're going to start watering it down, man. They're going to, all of a sudden it's going to be like almost clear lemonade because they're going to figure out how to stretch that margin. Yeah. We do do chores that where it's like, you know, if you unload the dishwasher, I'll give you a dollar. Or like if you clean the house, you know, do this thing, we'll give you like five bucks. So, but again, maybe that's teaching them a job that you get paid for and not the running and managing of a business.

1:30:41Turner Novak:Maybe we need to upgrade a little bit, but they're pretty young. So we're just teaching the, you do something, you get money. Like we will pay you to do a thing. Trying to like, you know, create that habit young. Yeah. They have to, they have to spend that money back into the ecosystem though. You know, it's like, Hey, I'll pay you a dollar to do the dishes. But a plate of dinner is 25 cents. You know, it's like, that might get CPS called on you, but... Yeah, mine just buy stuffed animals. They've got like 100 stuffed animals. Well, this was a lot of fun. Yeah, this was super fun. Thanks for having me.

1:31:15Turner Novak:And thank you for listening. Thanks again to this episode's sponsors. Upgrade to Flex with one of the two links in the description and get$1 ,000 after your first$10 ,000 to spend. Put your sales tax on autopilot at numeral.com and for AI analytics, just ask Amplitude. If you enjoyed this conversation, please like, comment, subscribe and share this episode with a friend who's thinking about starting a manufacturing company. Make sure to check out the back catalog of over a hundred episodes with the founders of companies like Robinhood, Sweetgreen and Mercury. Tune in next week for my conversation with Ali Partovi at NIO on the importance of betting on outlier talent when investing at the earliest stage, how to identify it and lessons from investing in the first rounds of Cursor and Kalshi.

1:31:56Turner Novak:If you don't want to miss it, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, linked in the description to get each episode, plus the transcripts emailed to you directly to your inbox every week. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.