Manufacturing Culture Podcast

Jim opened this one by getting the guest’s entire bio wrong. He had researched a different Alex Troesch, announced that this one started at Google, and got politely corrected in the first thirty seconds: it was Target, not Google. He left every second of it in, warts and all, which is a pretty good preview of the whole conversation.

Alex Troesch is VP of Product at Fulcrum, and the second person from that company Jim has had on the show, because he was impressed enough after talking to co-founder Sonny Han that he wanted to hear fr...

Roger Bassous has spent about a decade doing something most people would find deeply uncomfortable: walking into other people’s buildings and asking permission to watch. His software measures machines, which means it also, inevitably, measures the people running them, and Roger has watched more shops react to being watched than almost anyone alive.

He did not start in manufacturing. He and his brother Richard were software guys at CompuWare in Detroit when Android launched, and they built a phone backup app that spent years in the top five of the Play Store. When that market crowded ou...

We agree too much. We nod along at the same conferences, repeat the same narratives, and almost never say the uncomfortable thing out loud. So Jim grabbed a bottle of Fireball, a stack of NFL challenge flags, and the five-man team behind Covari, and borrowed the MakingChips booth to do the one thing manufacturing avoids: argue.

This is the first episode of Fireball & Challenge Flags, a new, unfiltered, occasionally profane segment where disagreement is the whole point. The rules are simple. Somebody makes a claim, and if you disagree, you throw your flag and fight it out...

Nick Popa learned his trade at the Henry Ford Trade School under Henry Ford, then ran a shop called Epic Machine. A teenager swept its floors, worked his way onto the machines, survived a motorcycle accident that put him in traction weeks before his daughter was born, and eventually bought the company on a twenty-year handshake buyout. That daughter is Melinda Keway, and today she owns the place.

Melinda never planned any of it. She studied journalism, wanted to be Barbara Walters, and was chasing a career on the police beat when her father called and said...

Summary

Anna Falcon's parents left the Philippines with two little girls and started over in the United States. That is the opening scene of the movie she would cast, and she will tell you everything else is built on it. The persistence, the resilience, the hard work she watched up close became the base for a career she has spent noticing the dynamics between people in every room she has ever walked into.

She studied industrial engineering at Georgia Tech and took her first job on the shop floor of a Lockheed Martin...

Alex Gruebele sees cathedrals where the rest of us see trash. Hand him an aluminum can and he will tell you it is one of the most engineered objects on the planet, made by a company whose other, less profitable line is building satellites. That is the whole man: relentlessly curious, a little obsessive, and unable to walk past anything manufactured without wanting to know how it was made.

He grew up in Champaign-Urbana, studied mechanical engineering at Illinois, and earned a Stanford PhD building soft actuators and sensory skins for robots that work alongside humans. Then...

Charlotte Allen did not set out to make the food in your kitchen. She trained as a respiratory therapist, watched healthcare turn toward managed care, and decided she wanted to affect people's lives in a more direct way. Food was the answer she did not see coming. Kraft recruited her out of school, and she spent sixteen years there leading innovation and technology strategy across more than ten brands you almost certainly have in your house right now.

What kept her at Kraft was the culture, a diverse group of people from all over the world who...

Ask most people to picture the future of manufacturing and they will describe a slightly better factory. Ask Sunny Han and he will describe a self-replicating machine you launch into an asteroid belt, go to sleep for a thousand years, and wake up to find has built a communication network across the galaxy. That is the altitude this conversation runs at.

Sunny is the founder and CEO of Fulcrum, a manufacturing technology company that connects more than 700 manufacturers with the digital infrastructure they need to compete. He did not grow up on a shop floor. He was...

Tiffany Bryson is one of Jim's oldest and closest friends in this industry, and she is also, as this episode reveals, the reason the Manufacturing Culture Podcast exists at all. Twenty drinks deep on a curb in Atlanta in 2022, she listened to Jim describe the handful of shops with great cultures who had written back to him, and told him he had to start telling those stories. Then she kept texting until he actually did it.

But this conversation is Tiffany's story, and it is a good one. A recently divorced single mom selling houses, she took...

Every glass of water you pour, every jar of baby food, every energy drink you crack open ran through stainless steel pipe that somebody welded. And if that person did their job right, you will never once think about it. That is Steve Feamster's whole craft: being invisible in the best possible way. The weld that matters most is the one no one will ever see, on the inside of a pipe, so clean that nothing can hide.

Steve is the founder and owner of Sanitary Welding LLC in Novi, Michigan, where for more than sixteen years...

Jim Goerges is an accountant who fell in love with a machine shop, and then fell in love with the one job in that shop nobody else wanted: keeping the coolant right. He was so obsessed with it that when he could not buy the tool he wanted, he built it himself, and that turned into a whole second company. His shop in Brainerd, Minnesota started with four products in 1993 and now has around six thousand, and odds are good it had a hand in the glasses on somebody's face right now.

The heart of this one...

This episode was recorded as part of a paid partnership with Structify.

Ronak Gandhi grew up in Fort Worth, where Memorial Day means fifty people in the backyard, dinner cooked by friends who brought their own coolers, and a clock that somehow reads midnight before anyone notices. He explains the difference between that and a New York Memorial Day, all brunch reservations and itineraries, and in doing so tells you most of what you need to know about why he built Structify the way he did.

His grandfather came to this country in...

Bob Teska describes his life as an underdog movie, Rocky by way of 8 Mile, opening on a kid getting picked on, a dad who disappeared, and a mother who told him he would not make it through his first semester of college. He turned wrenches for ten years, went to school at 26 with a newborn at home and three jobs to pay for it, and walked out with a near-perfect GPA and a path to becoming a CPA. He spent fourteen years as an audit partner advising family businesses, and then did the thing most advisors only talk about...

Alex Huckstepp has spent his career where new technology meets the people who make things. A mechanical engineer out of USC who graduated into the wreckage of 2010, he spent the next decade running commercial strategy at four hardware startups in a row: 3D printing, metal additive, robotic forming, composites. All of them fundamentally new ways of making physical things.

Then he and his co-founder Benny got tired of begging investors for money to build complex hardware, and went looking for a problem they could solve with software. They found it inside the tens of thousands...

Most manufacturing conversations are about the machines. This one is about the building around them. In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, host Jim Mayer sits down with Todd Drouillard, licensed architect and principal at HED, one of the country's top science and technology design firms. For twenty-five years, Todd has designed the places where manufacturing actually happens: clean rooms, hydrogen test cells, semiconductor plants, robotics labs. A Detroit native whose father and grandfather worked the steel mills, he explains why lighting and daylight change a shop floor, why a warehouse is usually the wrong home for a...

Anoosheh Oskouian came to the United States alone at fourteen years old. She had convinced her father to let her leave Iran before she finished high school, the same way she had once convinced her parents to change her birth certificate so she could start school early. She landed in Denver, finished high school at George Washington High, and then the revolution back home turned Iranians into targets overnight. So she did what she has done at every hard moment since: she set her own rules, kept her focus, and moved forward.

Decades later, that same resolve...

The Shop Floor Social came to Dallas, and the room was full of people who run the floors. Hosted by Jim Mayer and brought to the community by Hexagon, this live session of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast put three local leaders on the panel: Chase Auker, a quality metrologist at Firefly Aerospace who measures everything from rocket engines to lunar landers; Andy Mears, who leads intelligent factory integration at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control in Grand Prairie; and Fernando Castaneda, the quality leader at SPM Oil & Gas.

The night started where every honest manufacturing conversation starts...

Becca Wolfinger did not set out to run a machine shop. She figured she would cheer her husband on from the sidelines after he left the military, went to school to become a machinist, and got tired of working for people whose only answer was "we've done it this way for twenty years." Then the website needed building, and the LLC, and the logo, and one by one, Becca did all of it herself. Before long, she was scooping chips, breaking down setups, and learning to make parts on the floor of a renovated 1970s garage in North Carolina.<...

Erich Baur could have gone a hundred different directions. Engineering degree from UC Davis. Peace Corps in Guatemala. Fluent in Spanish. Music minor. Instead he swept floors at a Fortune 100 aerospace shop, fell in love with precision machining, and spent the next several years going deeper into every corner of the industry: process engineering, sales, programming, supervision, consulting. Six months ago he opened Nordstrand Precision in Colorado Springs, named after the Norwegian cabinet makers in his family lineage who built the ship they sailed on. In this conversation, Erich and Jim cover what the Peace Corps taught him about...

Chris Hutson spent 30 years in manufacturing as an industrial engineer, maintenance manager, field service leader, and now VP at MaintainX. He's seen the inside of Fortune 500 operations and developed over 25 people who are now directors or above. In this conversation, Chris and Jim go deep on what drives reliability in manufacturing. It's not the technology. It's the people side: coaching, development, knowledge transfer, and the culture gap that no software can close for you.

Key Takeaways

Johnny Goode spent a decade as a patrol officer, narcotics detective, and SWAT team member in Bloomington, Indiana. When his dad offered him a seat at the family machine shop six years ago, it made zero sense on paper. Today, MSP is having its best quarter in 83 years. In this conversation, Johnny and Jim cover what law enforcement actually teaches you about leadership, how to dismantle a toxic culture from the inside, why bonus structures aren't the answer, and what it means to build a shop where people look forward to Mondays.

Key Takeaways

Adam Crandall almost became a pediatrician. One afternoon in an OR changed everything. Twenty years later, he's the CRO of Addtronics, a private equity-backed automation platform that's doing something the industry rarely sees: actually protecting the culture of the companies it acquires. In this conversation, Adam's second time on the show, Jim and Adam go deeper than their first episode. They talk about the non-linear path into manufacturing, what it means to lead with people first inside a PE firm, and why Adam got emotional talking about the thank-you messages that still find their way to him years after...

Steven Gao grew up in a small town in China, taught himself computers, then made a snap decision at 18 to study mechanical engineering instead — a choice that took him from a Chinese university to Germany, to a GM joint venture, and eventually to Tesla's first gigafactory outside the US. Now he's building what he calls an AI manufacturing engineer: software that can do everything from reading customer requirements to troubleshooting a production line. In this conversation, Steven and Jim dig into what transformation actually looks like across three countries, why manufacturing is facing an engineering capacity crisis, and why St...

Dustin Bowe grew up in the Bahamas dreaming of becoming a pilot, stumbled into a P&G plant tour in college, and never looked back. Now a manufacturing software founder, Dustin brings a rare combination of electrical engineering, cybersecurity, and frontline leadership experience to one of the industry's oldest problems: we ask people to run faster without giving them the tools to actually do it. In this conversation, Jim and Dustin go deep on what culture actually means, why trust has to come before credibility, and why the human on your shop floor is still the most important variable...

Sam Fritz didn't plan on ending up in manufacturing. He studied mechanical engineering at Texas A&M, took a sales job at Keyence to get out from behind a desk, and started walking into factories across Illinois. Something in those buildings got him.

Four years and hundreds of facilities later, he's Area Sales Manager at Banner Engineering, still walking in doors, still paying attention to what he finds inside. In this conversation, Sam discusses why he entered the industry, what kept him there, and what he thinks manufacturing gets wrong about attracting the next generation.

...

Jim Mayer interviews Kerry Burns, founder of Mason Road Manufacturing, about his diverse career in manufacturing, the importance of hands-on creation, and the future of manufacturing skills. They explore the value of local manufacturing, DIY innovation, and fostering a culture of safety and creativity.

Key Topics

Chapters

In this episode, Aaron Kolosic shares his 25-year journey through manufacturing, leadership, and mentorship. He discusses the importance of culture, resilience, and personal growth in the manufacturing industry, offering valuable insights for leaders and aspiring professionals.

Key Topics

Chapters

In this episode, Jim Mayer interviews Todd Smith, CFO of AMFT, who shares his unconventional journey from banking and law to manufacturing leadership. They discuss company culture, private equity, industry misconceptions, and the future of manufacturing, emphasizing the importance of trust, technology, and investment in people.

Key Topics

Chapters

This bonus episode was recorded live at Hexagon's Shop Floor Social in Nashville — and it did not go the way a typical panel discussion goes.

Jim sat down with Kieth Bieger, Global Metrology Specialist and CMM Programmer at Destaco; Todd Prettyman, Director of Global Quality at Gibson; and Michelle Bangert, Managing Editor of Quality Magazine. The room was full of quality professionals, and that shaped everything.

What started as a conversation about the challenges manufacturers face turned into something more honest than most panels allow. The group covered why quality always takes the blame, why th...

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, Jim Mayer interviews Kyle Ellis, the leader of Torque Manufacturing. They discuss the transformation of a machining business into a brand that emphasizes craftsmanship, clarity, and strategic thinking. Kyle shares his journey into machining, the importance of culture in the workplace, and how he rebranded his company to reflect authenticity. The conversation also touches on the significance of building relationships with customers, hiring for fit, and the legacy Kyle hopes to leave behind in the manufacturing industry.

Takeaways

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture podcast, host Jim Mayer speaks with Steve Shebuski, a seasoned professional in the supply chain and warehousing industry. They discuss the complexities of supply chain management, the importance of workplace culture, and the role of innovation and technology in improving processes. Steve shares his unique journey into the field, the challenges he has faced, and the misconceptions people have about warehousing. The conversation also touches on the impact of robotics and AI in the industry and the importance of enabling teams to learn and grow.

Takeaways

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, host Jim Mayer speaks with Kevin Tamanini, an expert in industrial and organizational psychology, about the critical role of leadership in manufacturing. They discuss the importance of culture, values, and succession planning, as well as the evolving landscape of leadership development in the face of technological advancements like AI. Kevin shares insights on how effective leadership can impact not only organizational success but also personal growth and development. The conversation emphasizes the need for intentionality in building a strong leadership pipeline and the significance of understanding the human element in manufacturing.<...

Live from Tempe, this Shop Floor Social brings together manufacturing leaders for a straight conversation about what actually changes after technology hits the shop floor.

This isn’t about hype or digital buzzwords. It’s about reality. Better data doesn’t fix broken systems. It exposes them. It changes how people make decisions, how teams communicate, and how work actually gets done.

The panel digs into real issues shops deal with every day. Incomplete RFQs, shifting demand, inspection headaches, and the constant pull between production and process improvement. Then they get into what it really takes...

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, host Jim Mayer speaks with Justin Keskel, a multifaceted expert in CNC machining and modern manufacturing. They explore Justin's journey into the trades, the importance of mentorship, and the evolving culture within manufacturing. The conversation delves into the daily challenges faced by machinists, the significance of processes and attention to detail, and the current trends impacting the industry. Justin shares insights on the future of manufacturing, the need for greater awareness of skilled trades, and his aspirations for legacy and mentorship in the field.

Takeaways

In this episode, Jim Mayer interviews John Albers, a retired Marine Colonel and founder of Albers Aerospace, about the critical importance of rebuilding America's manufacturing base as a national security strategy. John shares his insights on the fragility of the current industrial base, the significance of culture in manufacturing, and the balance between digital engineering and skilled trades. He emphasizes the need for a cultural shift that values trades and skilled labor, and discusses the future of manufacturing in the context of national resilience and purpose.

Takeaways

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, host Jim Mayer welcomes Jared Reining, a skilled machinist and entrepreneur, who shares his journey into the world of manufacturing. Jared discusses his early experiences in the trade, starting from a casual job in his uncle's machine shop to becoming a proficient machinist at PharmaMed Automation. He emphasizes the importance of hands-on experience and the value of networking within the industry, highlighting how his career path has been shaped by various roles and responsibilities over the years. Jared also reflects on the pride that comes from creating tangible products and the...

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, host Jim Mayer welcomes Daniel Stanphill, a passionate figure in the electronics manufacturing industry. Daniel shares his journey from stumbling into manufacturing to becoming a business owner and eventually finding his niche at Aurora Boardworks. He discusses the transformative moment when work became more than just a job for him, fueled by curiosity and a supportive team. The conversation delves into the importance of workplace culture, the challenges of the electronics manufacturing landscape, and the misconceptions surrounding the industry. Daniel emphasizes the need for authenticity and vulnerability in sharing personal stories...

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, host Jim Mayer speaks with Chuck Coxhead about the importance of evolving manufacturing practices and company culture. They discuss the need for leaders to abandon outdated thinking, the significance of differentiation in a commoditized market, and the transformative changes in business practices post-2020. Chuck shares his journey in the RF cable assembly industry, emphasizing the importance of customer experience and the buyer's journey. The conversation also touches on empowering frontline workers, achieving alignment across departments, and the future of differentiation in the industry.

Takeaways

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture podcast, host Jim Mayer speaks with George Pesansky, a global authority on operational excellence. They discuss the importance of workplace culture, the need for systems over people in problem-solving, and the leadership gaps in manufacturing. George shares insights from his extensive experience in various work cultures and his transition to nonprofit work, emphasizing the value of donating talent. The conversation also touches on performance improvement, preventing employee burnout, and the future of work, highlighting the significance of respect and trust in the workplace.

Takeaways

In this episode of the Manufacturing Culture Podcast, Jim Mayer speaks with Andrew Johnson about the intricacies of manufacturing culture, the importance of authenticity in leadership, and lessons learned from early-career failures. They discuss the dynamics of family businesses, the challenges of innovation, and the evolution of ShelfAware as a digital inventory management platform. The conversation also touches on change management in the manufacturing sector and the future of American manufacturing, highlighting the need for innovation and a return to the trades.

Takeaways