200. How a Hobby Became a Multi-Million Dollar Company

0:00In 2016, Cason Knight was an engineer working in oil and gas when the industry took a sharp downturn. Again, his job disappeared overnight. Instead of jumping back into the corporate world, Kaysen took a chance on a hobby. With a single 3D printer and a corner of his kid's playroom, he started printing small parts and fulfilling online orders. It was scrappy, uncertain, and far from glamorous. But that spark turned into something massive. Today, Kaysen runs iSolid, a 3D printing company with 160 printers and a nearly 9 ,000 square foot facility. And he just got a new one too, so that is double the size.

0:34They serve aerospace, agriculture, medical companies, bringing in over$500 ,000 a month. This is your host, Ryan Atkinson, and you're listening to the Upbook Podcast, where we uncover the secrets in running successful businesses. I am so excited to welcome Casey to the podcast. He's already been on the YouTube and has such a good YouTube episode. So Casey, excited to have you on the podcast today. Thank you for being here. I enjoyed the video, and I'm just equally excited about this. Yes. And for the people that are hearing in for the first time, I mean, you work in a corporate role before. You're now the CEO of a 500K a month company, which we're 100 % going to get into.

1:06But before iSolids, paint us the picture. What were you doing? What were you working on? Tell us more about that. Yeah. So I graduated in 2010 and a mechanical engineering major. And that was kind of, you know, my goal around the Houston area. Oil and gas is a very common industry. The biggest industries here in Houston are oil and gas, medical, a little bit of aerospace, obviously with the NASA center and stuff like that as well. So those are kind of the big things that you typically have an engineering degree and pursue those industries. And I always joke that I wanted to be a rich oil man. My path took a different direction, but I feel just as blessed to be here where I am today.

1:41But yeah, short story is worked in oil and gas as a production engineer, as an application engineer, and then as a project engineering supervisor and had a lot of different positions that gave me a good foundation, I believe. I think one key characteristic is I I started off with a really big company, G oil and gas, you know, Fortune 500, a company that's been around for a hundred plus years. And each step of my career, I kind of went to a smaller and smaller company, but I always like to take some of the lessons learned at those bigger companies. Yeah, super, super good. Well, take us to like 2016.

2:14And obviously you're working as a successful engineer. I mean, obviously, Casey, I've spent a lot of time with you now. I mean, you're incredibly smart here, but no, the unexpected happens and a layoff happens. I mean, take us to that moment and what happened and what the emotions were going on over your head. The oil and gas industry is known, like many other industries, to have its up cycles and down cycles. And it's pretty predictable, I guess you could say, at least looking at historical data. Typically happens around every five to eight years, you'll have an up cycle and a down cycle. And I graduated in 2010, which was kind of the beginning of an up cycle.

2:49And, you know, five, six years later, it's like, okay, you know, this is typically what happens. This is my first experience as a grown adult with mortgage and bills I got to pay and kids. So, you know, I kind of knew it would happen and here it was. I originally just tried to think of something I could do to supplement that potential downturn and how could I diversify my skill set? You know, I'd be prepared to kind of weather through it. And really from 2015, when it first hit to 2018, when I eventually lost my job, I was very fortunate. fortunate. Most people lost their jobs within six months to a year.

3:19I was able to hold on for about three years and really wasn't so much that eventually I got laid off per se, but the company itself ultimately folded. Well, actually they laid me off about three months before the company completely folded. I was fortunate to kind of prepare, I guess. And the reason I mentioned that context is because most people had just a few months to kind of see, whereas I had a few years to prepare before something like that happened. But nonetheless, I'm very glad I didn't just sit idle. I want to really zoom in on emotions there because, you know, you had a family, you had kids, you had like a mortgage.

3:53I mean, that day comes where you get laid off. I mean, what was that conversation like with your wife? I know you had stuff on the side, but like, what was that conversation like with her? It was tough. You know, I think for me in particular, there's a fact that my daughter was just born. She was born in August and I got laid off in January. So it was just four months old. My son was just over three years. I think he was like three and a half, closing in on four years old. So, you know, they're at young ages where benefits and medical benefits, it's like the primary concern. And so that was really weighing over me, you know, not only not having income, we had a little bit of a nest egg because we were, you know, seeing things happening, but not having the medical benefits was pretty scary.

4:35So that was a big concern. But then, you know, coming home, really, really the way the timeline worked out is I'd started iSolids in 2015, really formulated it as an actual entity in 2016. So I'd been operating as this side gig for roughly two years. and I'd come to a kind of a fork in the road where I was still employed in late 2017. So almost two years after I kind of really made this business, it was still employed, was too scared to leave that job on my own, even though I started to see, you know, again, the writing on the wall was going one direction with my full-time job, but yet this new business I was working on, I was passionate about and it was going the opposite direction.

5:13I saw new opportunities. And so the inner part of me wanted to, you know, just say, look, I'm diving full headfirst into this new business. But the logistical side of me said, I absolutely cannot just leave at least a somewhat secure paycheck. At least somebody else is paying my paycheck and providing me medical finance. So I can't leave that on my own accord. Really, things had to line up just right. And what happened was late 2017, I kind of came into fruition with my wife, you know, I can't be going to a full-time job, nine, 10 hours salary position, then coming home and working another six or seven hours working on this other job.

5:51And that leaves zero time for the family. And we made the decision that I would basically lease a small warehouse, a 900 square foot warehouse. And I would become an owner rather than an owner operator of this small business. And I was just going to go hire somebody. All that backstory to basically say, so when I got laid off in January, three months or two months after I signed that lease, and I was still interviewing people to basically be the operator of the small business, I came home. My wife just kind of said, well, I guess I know why you're home early, and I guess you're going to work tomorrow at iSolids.

6:24And I said, yes, I am. oh man that must be such like a good feeling like goodness to you for building something before i know a lot of people always have like something on the side and i think that's like a beautiful moment where it actually comes together where it's like it actually works out with like perfect timing there okay let's go to that timeline then so you know first day you know you get laid off but i saw as you've been building this for two three years now i mean for you was that like the moment it's like okay this is serious now this i'm actually able to provide for my family was that like a switch that you had to make or what was that like it wasn't to pay the bills it was to basically for two years, make a couple hundred bucks a month or a few thousand dollars a month, I take that money because I'm not using, it was basically, I always called it my self-funding hobby.

7:03That was the initial goal. And I spend a couple hundred bucks a month on your hobby and the hobby pays for itself. That's a pretty good gig. And eventually it turned from, hey, I could maybe pay the car note with this hobby. And then it's kind of evolved from there. So when I get to the point where, like you're talking about here, where it's not just self-funding hobby anymore, and I've actually got to pay the bills on it. Then you start to run the math a little bit differently. You can't just reinvest it back in a new machine. You got to actually take some profit out. For me, I ran the numbers and basically said, I'm going to give myself two years.

7:37Statistically, you look it up online. Most small businesses do not last two years, a few months, maybe a year and a half at most, but it's really difficult to get to that profitability and get to that point where you can continue to sustain. So that was kind of my mental benchmark. I said, okay, it's basically January, 2028. If I can survive to January, 2020, and that's a whole new timeline with COVID. So we'll maybe get into that, maybe in the future conversation. But that was my goal is you just last two years. And if I wasn't profitable, then there's no point to continue moving on. So that's basically what we set out.

8:08And I would say for the first six months, I didn't take home any money, which was difficult. And that's also another situation. I know not everybody has that opportunity to have six months of savings to work off of. But again, everything kind of lined up just enough. But I would argue that the reason things lined up is because I prepared. You know, it's kind of there's that saying that says hard work generates good luck. You know, it sounds a little bit boastful, but I would like to say that is true. Most people spend months, sometimes years just thinking about starting a business. But what if you could do it in just 10 days?

8:40That's exactly what the 10 day business launch plan is designed for. It's a step-by-step roadmap that takes you from idea to real operational business in just 10 days. Click the link in the description below and get ready with your business. So you gave yourself two years that you weren't paying yourself. I mean, what were you doing like in that first year? So like what products were you making? Was it just you doing it? Kind of tell us the story about that, like what year one looked like of now doing it full-time in 2018, yeah? So now we're basically January 1, 2018. My wife was highly supportive and highly involved and also a major support when I was still full-time employed and doing this on the side.

9:19She was the one taking things to the post office and dropping off packages. So having that support system at home was very, very critical. But anyways, getting back to the post 2018, about three months, it was just myself. And then I was getting to the point where I'm, okay, I can set up a foundation because what I was worried about is hiring somebody. This was a side gig that didn't have any business infrastructure. I wasn't paying myself. I didn't have a payroll system. I didn't have HR documentation, all that type of stuff had to be created. So that's basically what I spent those first three or four months doing.

9:50And then I hired my first employee. I, you know, basically went to Indeed. I didn't know where else to go at the time, went to Indeed, published the job and, you know, found my first employee. Then we went from there. I would say by the end of the first year, we had two or three employees. And again, I think a little bit of luck and a little bit of being a part of an industry that's pretty exciting. 3D printing, especially at the time, is a little bit more common now, but especially at the time, it was new and fresh and exciting. There was a lot of interest. So for a small business, one, two employees, I still had a relatively large number of people interested in the positions.

10:23Yeah. 3D printing has come such a large way. And what's so funny, Case, I was thinking of you literally on Friday because my nephew, my subdad was explaining this. He's like, he's like, yeah, like he's got like this like little box that like you can just like plug something in. I'll like create it for you. I'm like, he's eight years old. I'm like, he's like a 3D printer, like eight years old. Like that is amazing. I literally sent him your interview. So I think like at the interest of 3D printing has like changed so much. I'm sure you've seen that, but you have three employees after that for sure.

10:47You guys are profitable after year one then it sounds like. We were very close. We're basically break even by the end of the year I was paying myself. So I considered that profitable, you know, like we weren't negative. We were basically break even, but we were also reinvesting everything. You know, basically I took out just as much compensation to sustain our existing quality of life with some sacrifices here and there. But for the most part, that was the goal. We weren't taking home any money. And if there was an extra thousand bucks, I looked at it as I was going to put a thousand dollars in the bank.

11:18I would rather invest in myself than invest in somewhere else. You know, half a percent return on a savings account is nothing. But if I truly believed in what I was doing here, then I'd rather leave the money in the company and do everything I can to reinvest it. And I mean, you gave yourself a two year timeline there, but after year one, I mean, you're breaking even with like a few employees. I'm sure. I mean, did you have thoughts of like, OK, this is actually going to work or like when was that moment for you when it's like, yes, this is profitable. Like I'm actually going to be building this company.

11:43I started gaining more and more confidence over time, of course, as you get more data points and you start to extrapolate. For me, if the company, you know, again, formulated and actually filed as an LLC in 2016, and when I went full time in 2018, I had two years worth of data. Now, granted, there's no overhead, there's no insurance, there's none of that type of stuff. But I did see something even within that, you know, first year and a half, two years with the data, and that was linear scalability. and what I looked at is basically a 3D printer at the time cost X amount of dollars and I could see that it was revenue generating capacity of that printer was X amount of dollars per day and even over the span of time every time I bought a new printer the revenue grew X amount so it was very predictable in that well if I can continue sustain new customer growth using the same methods I'm already doing so just continue to do that and if I believe that those new customers still exist out there, which I did, then I just need more printers to grow my revenue.

12:43And so that's what did give me confidence is basically looking at the numbers. I always say that I'm a pretty anical person to begin with. Let me put that little caveat in there. I always say that there's a little bit of gut factor in every decision being made. But if you can support that with concrete evidence, then your confidence in that decision just goes up so much more. That's really where I was is, you know, even like I said, after six months of not getting paid, I looked at it and said, but we're trending this way. And once I get past this threshold of this capacity, then our revenue should be here.

13:13Our revenue generating capacity as a company should be, you know, quarter million dollars a year. Then we're going to be fine. We're going to hit that profitability. So kind of stay on course and find that niche that works. I think one other thing that I think we talked about a little bit maybe in the video, but not so much here yet in this conversation, but I think it ties into this question. The original company was called Knight and still is, you know, the underlying company is called Knight Engineering Solutions. Originally, the idea was I'm just an engineer and I know how to kind of design some fun stuff.

13:42And I had people ask me to do some CAD work. And I thought 3D printing was going to be supplemental to that. And that was in 2015. I started doing that in 2016 when I created the company and I called it, you know, I created the DBA. I saw it is because I realized just within three to six months that the 3D printing had more potential to scale than the engineering. And I think that goes back to this question because I saw that opportunity. With engineering, you constantly have to have new projects. You just, you have to go out there and hope that there's somebody that needs you to do CAD work and work really hard against a lot of competition.

14:13Whereas with the 3D printing, which I originally thought was going to be, again, supplemental to the engineering side, it was different. It was, I saw it was like the initial project scope would allow you to get to the production. So that seed planted into a much bigger opportunity. I think like stuff that just got to me from that was like just like confidence aspect. I think like speaking for myself, like confidence as like a CEO, you think you have it on day zero, but you truly don't realize how confident you are until a year later, until you go through those punches, those shots to the back where it's just like, holy smokes, this is so hard.

14:46Now I have confidence. But the question I want to ask is that making it actual for our listeners here is you talk about like growth and like projects and everything from what you know now, like a 3D printing industry. What is the best way to go out and get customers, especially like those days, zero people that like I want to do 3D, but I don't know how I'm my first client. What you know now, what would you recommend? Look at things that are long term. And that's easy to say and harder to execute. But a lot of times there's these big short term wins where I'm like, oh, I can do that. And that's a big project.

15:15I can win that. But if I have two options and one is, hey, this is a sustainable customer that will come back and has a good business model. Like I always look at it this way. I like to go after the customers and the industries and the businesses that I would invest in and I would be a consumer of because that makes it one easier to relate to that. And two, if you can see long term potential in it, then other people will see long term potential in it. And that's a good customer industry to pursue. That was a big transition for us, or at least for me personally, is a longer sales cycle. You know, and typically as businesses get larger, they start working with more business to business and those sales cycles become longer, but that reward becomes bigger.

15:56And I think the other thing that correlates to this is punching above your weight class. That was another thing for me there. Initially, I would always hesitate to put myself out there or to say that I could do because I never wanted to be the guy that said, hey, I can do that when I've never actually done it myself. I never want to basically lie to myself or lie to somebody else. But at the same time, you got to live on that edge of your comfort zone. It's like muscle building, right? If you're doing strength training, you max it out every now and then to build those muscles. And then your max becomes larger and larger.

16:29Whereas if you just stay in that comfort zone and lift at 80 % your capacity, you're not going to build those muscles. That's a great point to hit on because for my own company, like we have stayed primarily between like 11 to like a hundred employees, we'll call it that. We like, we traditionally serve, like so many of our clients go there, but we're like, well, how do we grow in 2026? I mean, we're on a 120 % growth this year. How do we do that again for 2026? And it's like, we'll just go after bigger clients that have deeper pockets. It's definitely punching above our weight class in that sense.

16:56So I'm curious, how did you go to market with like, you know, a huge company? Like how did you present yourself? How did that like change your sales cycle and like how you operated? I looked at it from this perspective. People like relationships and just because we're small doesn't mean that we can't still have a good positive relationship. And obviously it almost gives us an advantage. And at the end of the day, these big companies with deep pockets, they're run by people. They're run by individuals and you develop that relation with that individual and then you can grow from that. I can think of, and I can't say that, you know, for confidentiality reasons, we do have terms of service with all of our clients and I do respect that and all that, but I can think of one client, for example, we got in contact with them.

17:37I mean, they were high profile at the time. You know, they were all over social media for some of the recent releases and they called us or we got, I don't remember how we got in contact with them, to be honest with you. But I remember thinking like, this is something I want to put my good foot forward. And they basically said they wanted something we couldn't provide. And I told them, we don't have that technology. We can't provide what you're asking for, but what's your problem? What's your problem you're trying to solve? And maybe we can look at it a different way. And we gave them a completely different solution.

18:07We ended up using a different 3D printing technology that they were looking for. And we kind of manipulated their models and kind of went a totally different approach. And it worked. And from there, that one engineer that we developed that relationship with went back and told everybody else in their company, hey, iSolid's down in Texas. They fixed this problem. Next thing we know, we have like 35 different engineers in that company all ordering from us. So it goes back to that relationship. It was a big company. It wasn't like we had to, I guess, win or secure the company. We just had to win or secure an individual.

18:40That's a great soundbite there. We might be using that quite a bit there. I want to kind of zoom back out here because we talked about like the early days of like iSolid. So I want to talk to about getting to$500 ,000 a month. I think that's a dream for any entrepreneur that's listening right now. What were some of those levers that you guys had to pull? I know we're really fast forwarding the clock here, but like what happened or like, how did you get to$500 ,000 a month? That's such a large question. But like, what were the levers that you had to pull in particular to get there? Something that you kind of mentioned early on or just a minute ago was sustaining growth rates.

19:10You know, if you're at a year, a hundred, 200 % year over year, I'm not trying to minimize it. I don't want that to be what's taken away, but if you're at X amount of rep, say you're at a hundred thousand dollars in revenue, it's not easy, but it is obtainable to get to 200 or 300. and there's your 100%, 200 % year over year revenue. But if you're at 3 million and trying to get to 7 million, that's your same 100, 500, 10 % year over year, but it's way harder. And so things become more difficult. And I think the biggest thing is constantly realizing you're in an improvement process over and over and over and over again.

19:46If you just become complacent with, well, these things allowed me to get to$1 million a year. Well, they won't let you get to two. So you got to do something else. All right. Now you're two. Okay. Got to do something else now. So you're in this never ending cycle of improvement in evolution. That's one of the things that is a challenge and can be frustrating even to some employees because they come in, you know, you train them. You're like, this is how we do things. But just FYI, it's probably not going to be how we do things in a year from now because we're constantly evolving fast. The technology is constantly evolving fast and our customers needs are constantly changing, especially in this stage of AI and things, you know, being different overnight.

20:23So being flexible, I think, is the biggest takeaway for me, or in my opinion, to be able to adapt to those, you know, ever growing challenges you'll see as a business and constantly trying to get to those larger and larger marks. for me, I've been having this thought a lot. It's like entrepreneurship, you're always evolving, like from day zero to, you know, your first year, you're evolving from year one to year two, you're evolving. I feel like entrepreneurship is just always that evolving state. You're always evolving as a person in tact. Like you also need to be evolving your company if you want to hit those growth numbers.

20:54Cause as you said, I mean, going from 3 million to 7 million is a lot different than going from a hundred to like 200 K as well. They're going on there. So when you guys reached like 500k? I mean, were you guys just having like larger projects? Were you marketing something differently? What were those levers that you did pull that? I think this is a similar story for a lot of companies, but we did kind of transition from consumer to business to business. Not all businesses, you know, if it's a consumer focused product, obviously that's not going to be the case, but fundamentally we're a manufacturing company.

21:24And so it does make sense that businesses are going to need more manufacturing needs in higher quantities and those types of things. So we did kind of make that transition. And that was a big thing for us to make that kind of that leap. Really what happened is, you know, these 3D printers in a closet that we started with and still have, they were consumer devices. You know, I go buy it, put it on a credit card, pay it off within a few days or months or whatever, and rinse and repeat. And that was the growth cycle. we eventually got to a point where we had around 120 ish of these 3d printers that might cost a thousand bucks a piece so we got 120 000 and maybe 150 000 worth of assets or hardware and going back to you know kind of that conversation about scalability well i looked at it and said okay this got us to half million dollars a year well if i want to be a million dollar company then i've got 240 printers oof okay that's a whole nevetic you know what again what we're doing now to manage 120.

22:16It's not going to work at 240. Oh, I want to go again. I want to be a$2 million company. Well, now I have 500, 600 of these 3D printers. So that did become a junction point where the metrics I was using to get us to one point and the techniques were not going to get us to the next point. So it's kind of like you have this internal pivot. I would say two things about that though. We didn't pivot from our core product or service base. We pivoted our strategy. And that's when we went to the industrial 3D printing technologies. And I use the analogy of Like when we first got out, we had shovels and, you know, we're doing everything manually.