Episode 1

1 - Jem and the Robots

Jem and Justin chat about custom job shop work vs products, their Airtable ERPs, Justin's brain-dead YCM mill, and consider Profit Sharing and more in the first episode.

DISCUSSED:

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Please note: Show notes contains affiliate links.

  • Jem: Custom jobs
  • Grasshopper for quoting, now Airtable
  • Link Index 
  • Workflowy
  • Airtable - Overall view Technique Base
  • Single dump as records then filter with views
  • ERPs
  • PDXCNC Training courses
  • Job Shop Work and Challenges
  • Manufacturing Consulting / Product Development
  • Sales
  • Internal drive vs external input
  • Internal products are more predictable
  • External richness - Learn a process from a client's job
  • Time Tracking - Xero Projects
  • Quote vs Actual
  • Why are we time tracking? “How much time”
  • Open Book Management - open finances
  • Team Investment / Profit sharing?
  • Microphone Stand?
  • Jem's Quarterly Walk - “Review” 1 on 1
  • Jem Rebuilding Shopify Theme

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Show Info

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HOSTS

Jem Freeman

Castlemaine, Victoria, Australia

Like Butter

More Links

Justin Brouillette

Portland, Oregon, USA

PDX CNC

Nack

More Links

Transcript
Justin:

Good morning to you.

Justin:

I don't know if I told you this, but since the last time I tried to set the

Justin:

recurring reminder and then you'd had a daylight savings time kind of thing.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jem:

Which has been really good actually.

Jem:

So when we chatted last week, that was kind of the first time in a long time that

Jem:

I'd managed to get up at 5:00 AM and then daylight savings changed over the weekend.

Jem:

Suddenly.

Jem:

An hour easier to get up at 5:00 AM.

Jem:

So I've been taking advantage of that and I've been doing it every

Jem:

day and coming in and like getting some proper play time and fantastic.

Jem:

That's been, it's been good.

Justin:

Oh, wait, we've chatted about that before.

Justin:

I love that time when there's nobody around.

Justin:

There's no questions.

Justin:

Just few in like a quiet room of machines ready to be used for some reason.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

That's kind of the dream.

Jem:

Oh, is my alter ego.

Justin:

I feel like you were in a band or

Jem:

are in a band.

Jem:

Yeah, well, this gem in the hologram, so you're familiar with it,

Justin:

but I need to see it now.

Jem:

Kids, kids got chain from the eighties.

Justin:

Oh, are you in the cartoon?

Justin:

No,

Jem:

before my time, but I've got the Jigsaw puzzle now.

Justin:

Interesting.

Justin:

I haven't heard of it.

Jem:

That's a good reason.

Justin:

91% of people like the show though.

Justin:

So it's not like you're alone.

Jem:

How are you

Justin:

going?

Justin:

Pretty good.

Justin:

We're I dunno, it just feels like we're in constant limbo.

Justin:

It's versus how things were the first few years of having this like job shop

Justin:

business, things were easy to get and source and prices were the same and

Justin:

it just kind of always a new thing.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

We've talked about plywood a little bit.

Justin:

The other day.

Justin:

You switched to material to try to have a better supply, you know, from

Justin:

the Baltic Birch is the issue lately.

Justin:

It seems.

Justin:

And so we tried to switch and now the new thing is everybody's gobbling

Justin:

that up and it's not available again.

Justin:

So just kind of always playing whack-a-mole with that.

Justin:

Other than that, I don't know.

Justin:

Trying to do too much usually.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

Now if I have a good week, Productions kind of quiet at the moment.

Jem:

We need a little bit more flowing through onto the floor.

Jem:

Kind of got a lot of being custom jobs in the wings, just waiting to drop.

Jem:

So I feel like the end of the month, it's going to be crazy.

Jem:

But at the moment, we're pretty crazy just getting through as much

Jem:

as we can to free up production.

Jem:

So, yeah, just trying to smash out everything that's in the system

Jem:

and get that capacity for later on when we're going to need it.

Jem:

I think we're good.

Jem:

The team team's going really well.

Jem:

Good vibe.

Jem:

I'm just, yeah.

Jem:

Quoting, quoting, quoted, quoting it's all Mike.

Jem:

I feel like that's all I do at not morning playtime.

Justin:

It's going to say is that one of your main

Justin:

responsibilities still is quoting.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jem:

Share it between myself and Aaron and Sarah, there's kind of three of us.

Jem:

So we work on quotes, but Aaron and I are the main ones.

Jem:

They sort of sit down and crunch numbers on jobs and we do it in grasshopper.

Jem:

And I

Justin:

knew we were going to get into that.

Justin:

You've sent me screenshots before videos of your grasshopper, and I've

Justin:

used it some very functionally as well.

Justin:

I'm not very great with the design aspects of it, which is what a lot of

Justin:

my colleagues used it for in school.

Justin:

But you're like quoting systems through is fantastic.

Justin:

Like at least as an individual sentence.

Justin:

It's

Jem:

fantastic.

Jem:

One word.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

Out of control.

Jem:

Do you like it that way?

Jem:

I do.

Jem:

It's really good.

Jem:

We've actually tie-dyed it up.

Jem:

Papes we've um, kind of switched.

Jem:

Switched way, the calculations that happening previously, we had that crazy

Jem:

grasshopper patch, which you've probably seen screenshots, which was by wires

Jem:

everywhere and all the, it was basically just a complex spreadsheet, those

Jem:

running, all the calculations required.

Jem:

We've seen recently we've moved all of the sort of calculation

Jem:

side of that over to editor.

Jem:

And so now gossip is really just there as a geometry input tool.

Jem:

So it's like, here's a sheet of parts.

Jem:

How long are they?

Jem:

How many inches are they?

Jem:

And what's a square meterage, et cetera.

Jem:

And then we plugged that rotary to air table.

Jem:

So gossip is a smaller part of it.

Jem:

It's still there.

Jem:

Um, but that means that a table's doing all the calculations.

Jem:

Because we were running into issues with blank.

Jem:

Wow.

Jem:

You know, in the current climate with material processes, changing

Jem:

every day, just having to manually update, like all the true that'd been

Jem:

now with an inventory base in air table, which is kind of the master

Jem:

point and everything references that.

Jem:

So whether it's quoting a product pricing, everything, so it ties

Jem:

back to that infantry title.

Jem:

So it's been really good.

Jem:

Yeah.

Justin:

That's great.

Justin:

That's kind of the dream.

Justin:

We had a guy.

Justin:

Built up.

Justin:

A lot of arrows are doing the Nack Wall, like trying to get that into

Justin:

an air table, adding skews and things, just stuff we hadn't really

Justin:

done before and was tying quotes.

Justin:

We got from vendors and materials into all that.

Justin:

And it's, it's fairly challenging to do in a scheme of like, you know, different

Justin:

materials and different, different types of things that are, that aren't alike.

Justin:

Time, you know, labor, and then you've got like material and then there's like cost

Justin:

breaks in there and yeah, maybe I'm over maybe taking it too far in some cases.

Justin:

No, it

Jem:

gets, it gets deep.

Jem:

And like the stack gets really deep, very quickly wild, um, like a sort of diagram.

Jem:

I can't masturbate in an app in air table that we got.

Jem:

The graphic dive hour, like all the connections, it was kind of like if you

Jem:

could see a table as a grasshopper patch.

Jem:

Okay.

Jem:

There's

Justin:

like a I think it's called schematic or something

Justin:

like that little plugin.

Justin:

Those are really cool.

Justin:

That was actually one thing I was going to ask you about really irritable was

Justin:

the thing that I struggle with with it.

Justin:

I'm doing a lot of the, like, you know, architecting of how it

Justin:

potentially works for others to use.

Justin:

I find it challenging to have like an overall view of you have all these bases

Justin:

potentially, or even if you just have one base with a bunch of tables in it, how

Justin:

do you, how do you keep track of that?

Justin:

Or do you use a different system outside?

Justin:

Do you use a base to control the bases?

Jem:

Yeah, I've thought a bit about that.

Jem:

I do personally.

Jem:

My solution to that is to have a link index.

Jem:

So we came from using workforce.

Jem:

Yeah, everything.

Jem:

And I still use workflow is my sort of personal

Jem:

organizational note taking system.

Jem:

So I've got a tab open all the time, and it's basically a link, a link index, which

Jem:

is a shortcuts tool, the key documents.

Jem:

Cause I just get lost.

Jem:

Like they got a Google doc say a table, blah, blah, blah.

Jem:

So many different things.

Jem:

And I just.

Jem:

That quick draw sort of going jumping to where I want to go and not have to

Jem:

sort of navigate through these systems.

Jem:

Um, so that's been my sort of personal hack, but I am aware of that, like for

Jem:

our guys, like trying to remember where to go, to find the information about

Jem:

being as like they'd be down in a base.

Jem:

Yes.

Jem:

So one thing we've done recently to try and tackle that is like,

Jem:

we've got a technique base, which is supposed to be like out.

Jem:

No, I'd go to a document on how to do anything in the company.

Jem:

And when we first started using a table, we built out like heaps of tabs across the

Jem:

top, and everything was in a separate tab and it was starting to side scroll to find

Jem:

the right tab and search functionality is kind of a wacky and air table.

Jem:

And so our solution to that has been to just have like a big buffet single table.

Jem:

And you just like.

Jem:

Everything into that, but everything's just a separate,

Jem:

um, a flying item and then using views and filters to access that.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

I feel like VA's and filters like are so powerful.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

And by having that sort of single, you know, dumped spot with all that

Jem:

information, I mean, search functionality is quite good within that as well.

Jem:

So that's been our sort of, go-to more recently.

Justin:

It's kind of, one thing that's challenging I find is once

Justin:

you start making something, it's a little bit hard to back it out.

Justin:

And like, you can't really merge stuff from other ones unless

Justin:

you do the sink table, but then they don't really merge it.

Justin:

It's really brilliant.

Justin:

If you've sought out, it's the same as fusion, right?

Justin:

If you've thought everything out from the beginning perfectly, it works great.

Justin:

But if you need to change it, God help you.

Justin:

It it's you gotta know how to basically undo all of your challenges and I love it.

Justin:

I love it.

Justin:

It's it's I love the challenge of it.

Justin:

I love how it's air table is one of the only things that has worked, and

Justin:

we've always had a small team of people.

Justin:

Two people total and four at one point.

Justin:

But I mean, we tried other ones, other project management things, and they all,

Justin:

all sucked for one reason or another.

Justin:

And a lot of it was because it wasn't, we weren't able to do

Justin:

really what we needed to do with it.

Justin:

It was always like too much about the middle-management or like, you know, the,

Justin:

all the ERP is, are super driven off of like an old school machine shop mentality.

Justin:

It seems like.

Justin:

And.

Justin:

I like being able to like, make it what we want and I'll take that over, having

Justin:

too much stuff that nobody wants to touch or the process fails completely.

Justin:

Did he, did you

Jem:

research, did you think about getting something off the show?

Justin:

Yes.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

I mean, I kind of especially coming into this, I think we both, maybe if I had

Justin:

to just speak for us, at least for my.

Justin:

I come into all of this.

Justin:

So not like naive to any type of, like, I didn't learn anything about project

Justin:

management in school or business.

Justin:

It was like, here's, here's how you design something theoretically.

Justin:

And then everything after that, you know, you kind of figure it out on your own.

Justin:

So, you know, I knew of these things basically from like listening

Justin:

bomb or like something else you find out, oh, there's these other

Justin:

software things that aren't Trello.

Justin:

And which I, you know, I, Trello is great for me at one point, but I just find them

Justin:

all to be a super expensive like job shop and B two or whatever the other ones are.

Justin:

And like I was saying before, it's super driven by, it seems like what the perfect

Justin:

old school machine shop was or is, or what they are supposed to be or something.

Justin:

And I just.

Justin:

Or like, they have to be installed on site as some kind of like local server thing.

Justin:

Like I don't even work on site half the time.

Justin:

Like that's going to suck.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

We sort of 18 months ago when we were like, right.

Jem:

Workflow is not going to call it anymore.

Jem:

Cause we've kind of built a little hacky ERP in WorkFlowy with

Jem:

hashtags and deep menus and stuff.

Jem:

So amazing.

Jem:

That was great fun.

Jem:

But.

Jem:

But we kind of like, okay, right.

Jem:

This isn't gonna work moving forward and we need them all.

Jem:

We need an IPI basically workload didn't think still

Jem:

doesn't have an API, like cool.

Jem:

We need something a bit smarter that we can connect to Shopify.

Jem:

And it gets some automation happening and we shopped around a bunch of

Jem:

things and we researched proper AIPs and everything was like, well,

Jem:

that's yeah, that's a lot of money.

Jem:

Don't know that we can justify that yet.

Jem:

I think fulcrum looked really good.

Jem:

It was at the time expensive.

Jem:

It seems out of that range, but I think you're right.

Jem:

Like it's everything that is kind of close to manufacturing fields,

Jem:

very traditional job shop focused.

Jem:

Anyway, we settled on building our own in our table.

Jem:

And in hindsight, I didn't want Slido.

Jem:

We've probably spent the equipment.

Jem:

In just people's wages building.

Justin:

absolutely.

Justin:

Oh my God.

Justin:

If not more.

Justin:

Yeah, no regrets, but what I love about that, and you hear like Saunders talking

Justin:

about this too, is with like their systems, two hunters in Grimsby is at

Justin:

the end of the day, we can still keep editing it ourselves and we don't have to

Justin:

pay somebody else to change their system.

Justin:

And so if.

Justin:

It's like, well, who wants to tackle that for the most part?

Justin:

Like, we don't have a lot of stuff.

Justin:

That's like custom scripted.

Justin:

It's got enough built in automation features.

Justin:

And like you're saying, the PIs used a decent amount of like Zapier Zapier's

Justin:

AP, or I don't know if I've said that out loud to anybody else I say as, yeah.

Justin:

So it's yeah, it's pretty good.

Justin:

I, I think that's one of the things we originally chatted

Justin:

about was CNC T routing.

Justin:

Eh, fusion air table is about the, our top three.

Justin:

How are you doing this?

Justin:

And I found it pretty hard to share.

Justin:

Like, I want to just share kind of more about air table, but it's

Justin:

pretty hard to share the process.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

I've tried to give people denies of hours before and then

Jem:

yeah, it doesn't quite work.

Jem:

It's hard.

Jem:

I mean, Probably because if I want a screen share and give a

Jem:

video demo, it's like it's full of client information, exactly.

Jem:

Financials and stuff, which, you know, it depends who it is.

Jem:

Might be fine, but I'm not going to do a YouTube video talking through

Jem:

our like ordering system because it's, everything would just be grayed out.

Jem:

So yeah, it's a tricky one.

Jem:

You almost have to let duplicate it and put in dummy data and then

Jem:

that's, that's just the thing job

Justin:

it is.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

I've been trying to think through process.

Justin:

I've made a couple like online courses, basically in the beginning

Justin:

of the pandemic here, we lost a bunch of work in 2020, and we weren't

Justin:

getting prospect of Newark at all.

Justin:

It was just like nobody had wanted to do anything.

Justin:

The businesses all stopped.

Justin:

It seemed like, and I had, I had like probably in a week or two, a half

Justin:

dozen people ask about doing training.

Justin:

Of the type of machine that the CNC router we had.

Justin:

And I was just like, well, Hey, I'm not going to your shop and training

Justin:

you right now because I don't know what this thing is and nobody's working.

Justin:

So my solution was to try to make an online course that actually turned out

Justin:

to be better than I thought it would be in terms of wanting to take it.

Justin:

I can't speak to how good it is to bias for that, but it's

Justin:

like, it was pretty good.

Justin:

The process and it seems like it helps some people, but I've wanted

Justin:

to make more of those things because a, it spreads easily.

Justin:

Right?

Justin:

You don't have to come and go anywhere.

Justin:

You can take it from wherever.

Justin:

So one of the things I've thought about is trying to do an air table.

Justin:

Like I have people ask about it whenever I share a little bit, like how, how are

Justin:

you doing your table a year P thing?

Justin:

And I'm like, good.

Justin:

That's exactly what you're saying.

Justin:

It's like, I can't show you ours.

Justin:

Like, you know, I got to like redact half of it.

Justin:

And so that was my thought is to duplicate it as, you know, a blank

Justin:

basically, and build it kind of in steps and see how that goes, I guess.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

I mean,

Jem:

sharing little bit.

Jem:

Yeah, I suppose it's not a cost then, but like you inspired us to look at

Jem:

the QR inventories, scanning stuff.

Jem:

For instance, I'm trying to go at that giant and I saw that on your Instagram

Jem:

or like, oh yeah, we need to fund, um,

Justin:

I, I find that I kind of get.

Justin:

I don't know, just friends and things that I've brought up.

Justin:

Like we using QR codes functionally too, or like, oh, you should try pitch.

Justin:

That's like big, give me this look of like, what is wrong with you?

Justin:

Because for the longest time they were like laughable.

Justin:

Right.

Justin:

You know, they didn't work half the time, but honestly, I even people

Justin:

here like Justin, what is wrong?

Justin:

Like nobody wants to scan a QR code, but I find them like infinitely, usable,

Justin:

like so useful to like quickly pull up something it straight to it, you know?

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

Okay, great.

Jem:

I'm interested in your, so the customs are to be able, but isn't this, like

Jem:

how much time are you spending quoting?

Jem:

Is there an appetite for custom work over there?

Justin:

As in we designed something or people are making things and then

Justin:

want us to make it like Prius for them.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

People

Jem:

bringing you either ready files or like kind of partially

Jem:

ready files for machining.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

That was kind of what we did largely from 2017, but I kind of

Justin:

accidentally started the Portland CNC.

Justin:

The reason I had some awareness that that would work was I couldn't get anybody

Justin:

to make things that were custom locally.

Justin:

It was especially if it had to use flavor of being a 3d model, 3d machining, it

Justin:

was like our machine can't do that.

Justin:

And I, that, you know what, what's your machine.

Justin:

Then we can do that.

Justin:

You just don't know how to set it up.

Justin:

You know, I was trying to make my own products at that time.

Justin:

And I was like, well, set up the side business.

Justin:

It kind of happened upon the name which worked out for SEO.

Justin:

And from that, it, it, you know, I wouldn't say it took off, it kept

Justin:

me busy until all of a sudden I was in a new shop and another shop

Justin:

and had hired one or two people.

Justin:

And honestly, I think a lot of our, if we call it success was that we were willing

Justin:

to try things and try to take on things.

Justin:

People didn't want to do, especially with routers.

Justin:

I think a lot of there's a lot of capability in the metal milling machining

Justin:

world, but yeah, nobody wants to do 3d things or didn't for the longest time.

Justin:

I think fusion helped to change a lot of that.

Justin:

Oh yeah.

Justin:

We kind of have started to move away from that.

Justin:

As we're trying to do our own products, there's still definitely a desire.

Justin:

We still have a handful of clients that want either repeat work or

Justin:

a lot of prototypes work was kind of where we hit our sweet spot is.

Justin:

We are not really set up to do like big production runs of anything

Justin:

we can't really do finishing, like we don't have the space for that.

Justin:

So it's, it ends up being, we used to get a lot more, but for a few reasons

Justin:

with focusing our inquiries a little bit more, so we get jobs that we will

Justin:

do well on rather than every spectrum of jobs, because there's a lot of the

Justin:

introductory people to CNC that just don't, it takes a lot of education

Justin:

time to bring them into the process of.

Justin:

Here's what you can make your project start.

Justin:

Right.

Justin:

And that whole process is basically free.

Justin:

It's tough when you're a small company to help people along.

Justin:

So, yeah.

Justin:

I've always been curious how much of that you do?

Justin:

I know I've seen a handful of projects and you also, it seems like most of your

Justin:

business comes from product related, things that you design and sell.

Justin:

Yeah, we do a fair bit of it.

Jem:

We certainly get a lot of quiet inquiries.

Jem:

The Stripe CNC, machining jobs.

Jem:

And it's a real mix.

Jem:

And I think, yeah, the education side of it's a really interesting challenge

Jem:

of like, how do you make it accessible, but not spend excessive amounts of time

Jem:

helping problem-solve someone's files.

Jem:

Yes.

Jem:

And so I think.

Jem:

Having good resources online, which I would say we dine, like we've always had

Jem:

just like the single plates, all the page.

Jem:

Like these are some considerations with file types and these of main

Jem:

sort of tool diameters we use and, you know, offsets and blah, blah, blah.

Jem:

Yeah, I think we could, if we wanted to sort of focus on that

Jem:

area, having better resources online, even like file templates.

Jem:

Black, you know, this is gold standard for how to set up a rhino file or

Jem:

a fusion file, the chaining, but they need, you're relying on people

Jem:

who have those skillsets and that's not always going to be the case.

Jem:

So, but to answer your question, we do a fair bit of it, sort of one-off unit

Jem:

parts, come off the machine and then go straight out unfinished unsanded or there

Jem:

might be a bit of post-processing around.

Jem:

Over's a bit of edge sanding, and then now.

Jem:

It's a really broad range.

Jem:

And I think, yeah, it often is sort of prototyping related, whether it's

Jem:

student work or commercial work, where they're just trying to get

Jem:

prototype off the ground or they're testing ideas for land for Iran.

Jem:

I guess we can then support larger runs up to a point.

Jem:

Like we're not very rarely doing anything in the thousands, but we're

Jem:

comfortable doing some of being on hundreds of units of something.

Justin:

I kind of similar, pretty similar.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

I've always had a hard time just frankly, like both quoting and then

Justin:

like scaling a job from, oh, you know, some will say, oh, I want to,

Justin:

if I just did 10 of these or 500 or a thousand, what would be the pricing?

Justin:

And I'm like, I mean, I haven't run 10 of them yet.

Justin:

You know, like how do I know what a thousands is going to be

Justin:

like, like, are we really going to have any cost savings in this?

Justin:

And I think some of that stuff comes with maybe the more traditional experience

Justin:

with going through a shop, you know, education, or like coming up through it.

Justin:

And I'm just like, I don't wanna lose my shirt, you know?

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

That's a tricky one to balance.

Jem:

We'll often like quote the prototype and then put estimates on the.

Jem:

Same that they can get resolved once we've machined, you know,

Jem:

one, a little more, a few of them.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

But it's hard because people are often coming with an idea for a product

Jem:

and they, like, they came to kind of block in their product pricing and

Jem:

say, it's a strict drinking balance of giving them a price saving.

Jem:

If it's not fixed.

Jem:

Yes.

Jem:

Has to be informed by the reality of actually doing it.

Justin:

I feel like that's why we do it.

Justin:

Yeah, sure.

Jem:

I feel like we do quite a bit of work for people who are

Jem:

effectively doing product development.

Jem:

So people have become more and more aware of it slightly.

Jem:

It's like

Justin:

consultants, basically.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jem:

As we've tried to sort of zero in on what our target

Jem:

market is or what we're good at.

Jem:

That's definitely something that's high on my list.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

Product development consulting within a very narrow window of

Jem:

sort of materials and processes, but people come to us with, yeah.

Jem:

I want to develop X and we then help them get that to a sort of a make-able

Justin:

thing.

Justin:

I definitely, you know, when we were in our, let's say, Hey, day of, I felt

Justin:

like we've kind of turned the page.

Justin:

Seeking that that's our top capability.

Justin:

Like w we're good at it.

Justin:

I think, you know, helping people make their products.

Justin:

I don't know that it's what I want for a longterm business.

Justin:

It's really challenging to make that stable and profitable and reliable.

Justin:

I think I joked before it feels like everybody wants

Justin:

their thing done between five.

Justin:

10 days.

Justin:

And that's impossible to plan for in terms of scheduling.

Justin:

And, and I had a early employee that was really great.

Justin:

He had a lot of experience and he would always tell me that we were missing the

Justin:

missing, being able to bill some of that early development process with clients

Justin:

of like, basically from the time you get their file to even the time when

Justin:

they agree to a quote, there's a lot of this back and forth that happens with.

Justin:

That's not producible.

Justin:

And, and I, I kinda went the side of always, like, I'm never

Justin:

gonna make somebody part without letting them know it doesn't work.

Justin:

There's like a, I don't want to waste the material.

Justin:

I think that's wrong to just make stuff that doesn't work.

Justin:

Part of being a service that helps people is it should have some ethics to it.

Justin:

And he would always say, we'd give that away.

Justin:

And I, I think he's right, you know, at a certain sense, but it's really

Justin:

hard to also say, pay me money before.

Justin:

Help you with your project, you know, like yeah.

Justin:

It's a challenging prospect for somebody to go.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

Well, I don't know.

Justin:

Before we look at that, I need a little money here.

Justin:

You know, like it feels like the mob or something.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

I suppose if you can communicate your, you know, your offering and, you know,

Jem:

skills set, but before doing the work.

Jem:

So, yeah, what's that value proposition of what you're going to

Jem:

do for them then that could work.

Jem:

But yeah, that's a really tricky gray area and it's so variable job to job.

Jem:

Two was that, was that advice from your employee coming from

Jem:

sort of industry experience, wave I'd seen that that was different?

Jem:

Or was it more just like this doesn't feel right?

Justin:

I think maybe both in terms of.

Justin:

I don't know, I don't have much experience.

Justin:

I think maybe one of the reasons I was attracted to like you and

Justin:

what you were doing was it felt like we had a lot of that overlap.

Justin:

I don't know a lot of shops to do CNC routing as a job shop, especially locally.

Justin:

It's just not that common, I guess.

Justin:

So it feels like some of those conventional thoughts

Justin:

about them and how they work.

Justin:

Like I just, and some of that's completely being naive to coming into this.

Justin:

Not knowing that there probably are a lot more than I'm aware of, but

Justin:

he had no experience in that either he, he had done like without going

Justin:

too deep in his background, but he just had a lot of different types

Justin:

of experience in different types of manufacturing, custom making things.

Justin:

And, and then seeing also he'd helped a little bit with quoting what we were up

Justin:

against in like how, who who'd spend, you know, a decent amount of time.

Justin:

And then not when a project, you know, it's, it's kind of like sales

Justin:

in a certain sense in that way.

Justin:

I suppose that I'm also challenged at, so I don't know.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

It's, it's an interesting game.

Justin:

I don't know that I ever thought I would be doing and

Justin:

doing like a service business.

Justin:

It wasn't really what I was imagining.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

W what way are you imagining?

Jem:

Did you have a plan?

Justin:

The plane was like, I want to design and design and, or make things,

Justin:

you know, and probably selfishly in the way that I want to do it, rather than

Justin:

following something that felt wrong or maybe lesser in my view of quality or

Justin:

ethics or, you know, different things.

Justin:

And so, yeah, I went to architecture school.

Justin:

Didn't like architecture as a business at all, I've did about

Justin:

a year and just was not for me.

Justin:

So it was pretty easy.

Justin:

I'd already done some like product development with this

Justin:

Kickstarter and some other products under what is now next studio.

Justin:

That's how I basically fell into trying to make things for other people with

Justin:

Portland, CNC by trying to make my own products and having bottom machines.

Justin:

The CNC part was basically an accident like Portland CNC was like, I just

Justin:

need to make a little money so I can pay this machine every month.

Justin:

And there was enough people that kind of kept growing to a point

Justin:

where I was like, well, this is basically a full-time thing now.

Justin:

So I've always wanted and had the passion to like design and make things

Justin:

that people can use or find enjoyable.

Justin:

That's that's my.

Justin:

Driving passion of like making it good.

Justin:

And then also now I've found that I love to make those really efficient

Justin:

processes to make those things.

Justin:

That's kind of like my new saying, how can we make that faster?

Justin:

You know, it keeps the same quality.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

I don't know if that was a long answer.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

That, that,

Jem:

to me, that speaks to one of mine sort of ongoing.

Jem:

Conundrums, which is, I love that sort of internal, you know, product

Jem:

design, making things for our end product range, with our own processes.

Jem:

And from a business perspective, that sort of work is much more predictable.

Jem:

We know what the margins are in a product and we can sell it.

Jem:

And you know, if we've priced it right, then we make money, but

Jem:

there's, I'm aware cause we've been so.

Jem:

Custom external work has always been by far the greater proportion of our revenue.

Jem:

Pretty much since the beginning.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

I'm aware that that external input brings a whole lot of richness as well.

Jem:

Yeah, true external ideas.

Jem:

A lot of our products have come from client problems.

Jem:

You know, I need a thing to do X and it's true.

Jem:

We can, we can come up with a thing that does that.

Jem:

And we design a thing and you know, maybe we completely undercharged for

Jem:

that design or we don't charge for the design at all, but we end up with

Jem:

that sort of a product out of it.

Jem:

And some of our best products have kind of come from those external inputs.

Jem:

When I've at times I've sort of fantasized about like, cool, ah,

Jem:

I'm done, let's turn off custom.

Jem:

I can't do this.

Jem:

Let's just go home.

Jem:

I then, you know, think about, you know, that external energy and, you

Jem:

know, problems are good thing, problems lead to new solutions or new ideas.

Jem:

And yeah, I think that's at the moment, my current thinking, I don't

Jem:

think we could ever turn that off.

Jem:

Um, if we go got to sort of an 80% product mix, I think there'd still be, you know,

Jem:

10 to 15%, uh, the SU customs, special projects, whatever you want to call

Jem:

it, event that problem-solving world.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

I'm not to say that there's not problem-solving and just making

Jem:

product, because as you said, like building those systems and

Jem:

efficiencies is really enjoyable.

Justin:

No, that's interesting.

Justin:

I've like, I hadn't thought of it in those phrases of like internal

Justin:

versus external drive or input.

Justin:

And that I was shaking my head vigorously as you were describing

Justin:

that, because there's so many things like, you know, a couple plays here.

Justin:

It said we've basically in, when we decided to start doing more

Justin:

product related things we had to discussion, it was like, well, we

Justin:

basically been tooting this factory.

Justin:

You know, our own little factory from my novice experience and making things,

Justin:

you know, like I'm always capable of thinking up crazy things that probably

Justin:

aren't producible or not profitable.

Justin:

And I've been slowly learning how to make that profitable by working through other

Justin:

people's problems for their projects.

Justin:

That's so true that like we've created all these new ways to do fixturing,

Justin:

as I think is a big tease towards how.

Justin:

Made a very cool little as you call it, the pencil sharpener.

Justin:

I'd love to talk about that at some point, too, right?

Justin:

Like all of those potential, like one of our first decently, and if you

Justin:

can see it behind me does iMac basis.

Justin:

You're kind of like sitting up there.

Justin:

So that was basically that manufacturing process came from.

Justin:

Projects of how to hold it.

Justin:

It's not complicated, but it's a tall ish chunk of wood that we

Justin:

wanted to come out really clean and pair with an apple product.

Justin:

So it's like, it can't be flawed and with a bunch of tooling marks on it, and we

Justin:

don't want to hand sand everyone to death.

Justin:

So, yeah, that's so true.

Justin:

How, I guess I had died of the virtues of it internally, as much as I've

Justin:

thought about how much it's painful.

Justin:

Right.

Justin:

Do all these things we just talked about with custom work that is challenging,

Justin:

but it's definitely valuable.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

I feel

Jem:

like we have the conversation really regularly here in staff meetings.

Jem:

It's like, oh, well that job went terribly.

Jem:

We've definitely lost money on that.

Jem:

But then on the bright side, you know, we learned how to do, you

Jem:

know, this new 3d machining or, you know, we learn how to do this.

Jem:

And like, I think.

Jem:

Yeah, I'm a dangerously optimistic person, which is terrible when you're

Jem:

responsible for quieting all the projects.

Jem:

But it does mean that when you sort of cultural, culturally, I think we're always

Jem:

trying to sort of look on the bright side of experience and want to be land turfing.

Jem:

That's really important

Justin:

takeaway from.

Justin:

It's almost like, I don't know.

Justin:

Do you go as far as to have project debriefs of like that kind of thing,

Justin:

or is it mostly that status meeting?

Justin:

That's like just comes up how we're trying

Jem:

to get, trying to close the loop on that.

Jem:

Um, for, for a long time, there's been this disconnect

Jem:

between quoting and report data.

Jem:

We use zero projects to track time and get a sense of how.

Jem:

And the idea is that that data is, you know, it's not about whether someone,

Jem:

you know, did X number of hours per day or whatever it's about, you know,

Jem:

feeding profitability, profitability, whether that quote was good or not.

Jem:

But there's always been a bit of a disconnect because you know what

Jem:

we were quoting in grasshopper and then reporting zero, it was like,

Jem:

you'd have to sit down and write.

Jem:

And again, to draw

Justin:

all those.

Jem:

the plan with air table not requiring an anti-police dubbing.

Jem:

The next step is to build out the reporting functionality within a table.

Jem:

So it's like most loop you at the end of the job, you end up with

Jem:

two cells next to each other.

Jem:

And it's like, this is what I quoted.

Jem:

And this is what happened.

Jem:

And like really.

Jem:

Comparison, which can then directly inform the next quote or the

Jem:

next thing that was like that.

Justin:

I mean, theoretically, you get to this place.

Justin:

All right.

Justin:

I dunno if you've do you know, Zometry like, do you have that there?

Jem:

Uh,

Justin:

yeah, so they they've, you know, have some types of very algorithmic.

Justin:

Quoting system where you throw out a solid file at their web interface, and then

Justin:

it quotes the project for the client.

Justin:

And then it also sends it once they accept out to producers, which are

Justin:

largely not their company ID, you know, it, you would imagine it's constantly

Justin:

evolving to meet the price, you know, keeping the price low for the client, but

Justin:

then keep, you know, making the people that make the parts happy, which I've

Justin:

actually been on both sides a little bit.

Justin:

And it's very interesting to see.

Justin:

What goes in one side and comes out the other from the producer side and

Justin:

we've, we've done the same thing.

Justin:

I've always been really fascinated and found valuable to time track.

Justin:

And, you know, everybody that does the time-tracking is screw this, you

Justin:

know, like, what are we doing this for?

Justin:

How much time do you want me to spend on time tracking?

Justin:

This is the best question of that.

Justin:

And I'm always like as little as possible, but don't do it, you know?

Justin:

Since probably when we chose to do more product development stuff,

Justin:

we've kind of curtailed time-tracking and I feel weird about it.

Justin:

I feel really weird.

Justin:

Like, what are we missing here?

Justin:

Because I know it was helping me to make better quotes because we get

Justin:

to the end of the day and I go, oh my God, we went over by 30, 40, 50%.

Justin:

If we have a job like that again, if you can catch it.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

Quoting it.

Justin:

We need to make sure and cover ourselves because otherwise, you

Justin:

know, I, I just imagined that's the one way you go out of business

Justin:

quick is, oh yeah, don't do those.

Justin:

They don't track time.

Justin:

And that way you track it for like, who's getting paid, what, you know,

Justin:

salary like hourly wages or something.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

The question of

Jem:

the sort of employee question of like, why are we doing this?

Jem:

So like, why are we spending so much time tracking out time?

Jem:

And it's an interesting one.

Jem:

And I think.

Jem:

Yeah, it's an ongoing conversation and we're trying to keep the system

Jem:

as lean as possible at the same time accurate and something that's helped

Jem:

us, I think is pretty, we pretty much run open book management now.

Jem:

So like the company's finances, uh, on the table and in discussion

Jem:

every week, I think that's helped to sort of communicate why.

Jem:

Yeah, for sure.

Jem:

Yeah.

Jem:

And it's a tricky balance because you don't want to scare scape people

Jem:

or make someone sort of feel this empowered by saying, oh, you know,

Jem:

we lost another 30 grand last month.

Jem:

And like someone who's just coming to work might be like, whoa, what,

Jem:

how, like, what can I do about that?

Jem:

You know, how can I feel any sense of responsibility or even just.

Jem:

Uh, feeling powered to make any difference.

Jem:

Um, but yeah, it's a tricky balance, but I think for the most part sort of

Jem:

running pretty much open book has meant that that conversation has gotten easier

Jem:

about like why we track times like wisely and what those reports are for.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

I've always been pretty open about that stuff as well.

Justin:

Never to the point of like, here's something you can go dig this.

Justin:

And that's honestly not for the fact of like, I'm afraid for the,

Justin:

for people to see that it's mostly like, kind of challenging to

Justin:

present it that way, by the way.

Justin:

So the curiosity I have in saying that is it's like use

Justin:

zero accounting, like ex CRO.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

I've used that forever to it.

Justin:

And as far as I could tell, it's like, you basically have to give certain

Justin:

levels of, of user access then.

Justin:

Is that the way you keep it open or you just discuss it in meetings at a certain.

Jem:

Yeah, it's more that, you know, some people obviously have different

Jem:

levels of zero access depending on their role, but it's more across the team.

Jem:

It's more than an open discussion.

Jem:

And, you know, the monthly financials might go up on the whiteboard in terms

Jem:

of proper and basic profit and loss.

Jem:

So we look at, in our report to NCR project report data every week,

Jem:

and you know, where our billable percentages are as a team and sort

Jem:

of actively trying to improve that.

Justin:

Interesting.

Justin:

This is naturally leading into, I always have bigger aspirations

Justin:

than the company is currently because it's two people right now.

Justin:

This is hilarious.

Justin:

But I even at that point, I've always had this thought of getting some

Justin:

of this feeling of having worked.

Justin:

Other places I've always wanted to have something like profit sharing.

Justin:

I mean, that assumes prof profit in the first place.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

That'd be nice profit sharing because I think.

Justin:

I want to always do the best thing for, you know, people that work here and

Justin:

it's not like I'm, you know, getting rich on any of this situation anyway.

Justin:

And I just think it's a really great way to give incentive

Justin:

for people to be invested.

Justin:

I think a lot of the times people are here.

Justin:

I've a really good luck that people are very invested in

Justin:

wanting to do the best thing.

Justin:

And I'm pretty open about financials.

Justin:

But to me, that's like the last step is.

Justin:

I think a lot of people are in jobs are driven by money.

Justin:

So it's like, what's how do I make this business make more money

Justin:

so I can make money, you know?

Justin:

Yeah,

Jem:

yeah, yeah, totally.

Jem:

That's something I'd love to learn more about too.

Jem:

It's an idea of sort of toyed with, but I've never sort of gone deep

Jem:

on research about ways to do that.

Jem:

Effectively.

Jem:

Same sort of uninformed.

Jem:

Friction point that I rub up against pretty quickly.

Jem:

It's like, how do you do that?

Jem:

But not create a competitive workplace to be sort of a team attain wide push to be

Jem:

effective and efficient and profitable.

Jem:

Um, if you sort of break it down to a single operator level is like, I imagine,

Jem:

and maybe this is not a thing, but I imagine you could potentially create.

Justin:

Uh, competitive

Jem:

environment in sound competition can be good, but you know, there's addition

Jem:

as well, but yeah, in show it, I'd love to learn more about it and say, yeah,

Justin:

I know.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

Oh, there are companies that do not personally, but that's

Justin:

part of, I think part of it is I think, I just think it'd be great.

Justin:

I think.

Justin:

And we create more unity.

Justin:

And I guess I hadn't thought about it in a competitive sense.

Justin:

My very novice look at it would be that from not having any understanding, really

Justin:

at this point, it would be like, it's the same, maybe across the board or in

Justin:

some level, or of like your seat, your, your time with the company or something.

Justin:

I'm not sure, but yeah, definitely interested if you

Justin:

have more thoughts at some point.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jem:

Well, it sounds good.

Jem:

Afternoon.

Justin:

Afternoon is man.

Justin:

I think I was telling you before I've, we've got this new to us mill

Justin:

since last summer and we've used it.

Justin:

Okay.

Justin:

Amount.

Justin:

It's been mostly like prototypes and we've upgraded like our router with it,

Justin:

but it has this one major drawback to it.

Justin:

That's for my experience and the people are.

Justin:

It has 512 kilobytes of memory internally.

Justin:

And that is like one decent fusion file.

Justin:

And it is so challenging for me.

Justin:

And I know that people have been using these things for a long

Justin:

time and figuring this out, but the, I need to get that working.

Justin:

We have a job to do on it, and I found this system where

Justin:

you can use a compact flash.

Justin:

You put a bin file, which is like a windows kind of like storage volume on it.

Justin:

And that the fan of controller can look at that and then run it like internal

Justin:

memory rather than external, because otherwise you have to tape run it.

Justin:

And it's like this whole thing with you.

Justin:

Can't restart the files.

Justin:

So it has to start over and it's just, it's just cumbersome, honestly.

Justin:

No.

Justin:

Well, so I'm still that's high on my list to figure out how the heck that thing

Justin:

works better in how we make it profitable.

Justin:

And it looks, it looks like a new Ishmael, a contemporary machine it's 2015.

Justin:

Okay.

Justin:

But it was a local client of ours that basically bought it for one

Justin:

job to expedite some processes that they were trying to run.

Justin:

And then.

Justin:

They didn't run it for more than about six months or they just sat there.

Justin:

So it has, it had less than 300 hours on it when we got it.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

Wow.

Justin:

So it's basically new.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah.

Jem:

Very jealous.

Jem:

I can't believe you'd go to the mail.

Justin:

Cool.

Justin:

Well, I do.

Justin:

And no memory.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

It's kind of brain dead to some degree.

Justin:

It's mostly me not knowing how to, how to utilize it the best as we could.

Justin:

So what about you?

Justin:

Uh, what's on for

Jem:

today?

Jem:

I've got.

Jem:

Little prototypes, prototyping, design development jobs to finish

Jem:

our, or get drawings to people for.

Jem:

But for the most part, I've got sort of business development

Jem:

tasks on the list today.

Jem:

Got a dig through.

Jem:

Um, we do like a, a quarterly walk.

Jem:

One-on-one walk with everyone on the team.

Jem:

So we've got, I think, eight people on the team at the moment and every three months.

Jem:

We do it one-on-one together where we just go and walk around the block or go and

Jem:

sit in the park for now and have a chat.

Jem:

Um, and we did that probably a few weeks ago now, and I still

Jem:

haven't sort of gone through all my nights and written my action items.

Jem:

Ah, yeah, that's on my list of things to do today.

Jem:

And what's cool.

Jem:

If I have time, we're rebuilding our Shopify theme at the moment and I need to.

Jem:

Getting into that and just start populating the new build with some

Jem:

fresh photography and coffee and stuff.

Jem:

So that's fun.

Jem:

See how we go.

Jem:

Cool.

Justin:

Now.

Justin:

Yeah, it was good to chat.

Justin:

We'll have to catch up on your new microphone stand next time.

Justin:

And your pencil sharpener.

Jem:

It's currently typed completely typed up with electrical tape.

Justin:

The one that you made on the sharpener.

Justin:

That's all right.

Jem:

I'll send you a photo.

Jem:

Because the sound caught in this pace, so it's not actually

Jem:

working, then we'll get that.

Jem:

We'll get that.

Jem:

That's pretty good.

Jem:

MacBook pro and

Justin:

yes, then I'll be testing for next time.

Justin:

Mack, Mack, the pencil sharpener and something else.

Justin:

Anyway.

Justin:

That's good.

Justin:

It's good to chat, man.

Justin:

Yeah.

Justin:

Yeah.

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About the Podcast

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Parts Department
Justin Brouillette (Portland CNC) and Jem Freeman (Like Butter) discuss CNC machines, their product design and manufacturing businesses, and every kind of tool that they fancy.

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About your hosts

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Jem Freeman

Co-founder and director of Like Butter, a CNC focussed timber design and manufacturing business in their purpose-built solar-powered workshop. Castlemaine, VIC, Australia.
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Justin Brouillette

Founder of Portland CNC & Nack