Speaker 0 | 00:09.645

All right, welcome everyone back to Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. And today we have Marcus Merchant on with us. He is the director of IT at Old Thompson, which is actually a really cool company. You guys make spices. And we’re going to continue the theme. of or build upon the theme of IT as a business force multiplier because a lot of people get stuck in an environment where IT is really a cost center. That’s kind of the old school mentality and we might not even call it old school because a lot of people still manage IT as a cost center. It’s still a line item on the P&L. But first, welcome to the show, Marcus. Why don’t you just give us a little background on yourself? A, how did you get into IT to begin with? What’s the history there? Maybe, what was your first computer? I like asking people that because I kind of like living in the past a little bit with my 386. Let’s just go from there, man.

Speaker 1 | 01:12.047

Great. Thanks for having me. I’ve been in the IT world for quite a while. Kind of a funny story, how I originally got into it back when I was 18. My parents… moved about six hours away and I decided to stay and I had broken my foot. I had broken my foot playing roller hockey and my friend was doing tech support for a company in Southern California here where I’m at and he actually stole a copy of the test and I memorized the answers and faced the test and

Speaker 0 | 01:52.023

got the job.

Speaker 1 | 01:54.404

When I first started way back then, all management was gone at Comdex. It used to be held in November. So all the management was gone at Comdex. This is prior to CES. And so I got my first week with no one knowing that I didn’t know what the heck I was doing.

Speaker 0 | 02:11.814

Okay, so what year is this?

Speaker 1 | 02:14.735

Oh, this would be 97.

Speaker 0 | 02:18.738

So internet just kind of… I mean, where were we at with AOL there? I mean, did you have an email address yet?

Speaker 1 | 02:27.201

I did, and I was doing support on dial-up modems, 56K and 33.6 modem.

Speaker 0 | 02:33.543

Nice. I still try to explain that to my kids. You know, like the internet is like not really that, you know, it’s new. It’s still new. It’s really not old. Like you’ve never been in a world without internet, and we grew up in a world. You know, where there was a point in time where there was no internet. I just, that to me still, it’s, I might sound cliche, but it still blows my mind that, you know, we grew up in a world where there was a, there was no internet at one point.

Speaker 1 | 03:04.551

Yeah. The kids, kids, my kids don’t even know what it’s like to have a phone that has a cord attached to it.

Speaker 0 | 03:10.453

So, all right, so cool. Go, go on. This is great.

Speaker 1 | 03:13.934

Um, so after that, um, it kind of put me in the computer world, if you will. did some miscellaneous stuff, I was doing tech support, and then I was an on-site, you know, technician, got into more of the engineering side, and worked for an email marketing startup back in 2000, in LA, back during the internet boom. Like the owners of that company were just a tad late, looking for, to jump into the boom, just as it was getting ready to crash. And then from there, got into a company that also did telephone systems. But hey,

Speaker 0 | 03:52.332

let’s just rewind real quick because I got to hear the rest of this story about you going to work not knowing anything and everyone has gone at a conference.

Speaker 1 | 04:01.836

Sure. So, yeah, so I started, I basically had a script to work off of, you know, because my buddy got me the job. You know, he sat next to me in a small room, a bunch of cubes. You may have heard of them. If you’re in the modem world, it was at those peripherals or new comms. Uh-huh. It was just funny, such a shady company. Looking back at it, they ended up getting shut down by the SEC for a bunch of fake revenue and food stock. Luckily, I left a month before that happened.

Speaker 0 | 04:33.005

Telecom. There’s a lot of shady stories there. I’ve been thinking of doing just a show on just exposing the corruption.

Speaker 1 | 04:44.553

You’ll be on for a long time if you try and get all that.

Speaker 0 | 04:47.475

But I might get killed.

Speaker 1 | 04:53.086

Yeah, this is true. But yeah, so I was basically sitting there answering phones and being coached by my friend and what to do. And it took a while. Obviously, it took a while. used to it my call volume was lower than a lot of the other guys but you know it if you will we’re pretty lazy so i don’t think anyone took that many calls as it was so it was text it was basically dial up tech support dial tech support we did modem sound cards uh i think we’re the two the big products so support back then it was you know good talk on windows 95 windows some windows 98 and some windows 3.1

Speaker 0 | 05:32.458

Yeah. And just out of curiosity, was that at a point where you guys had network cards and could play games in between calls and stuff like that? Just out of curiosity?

Speaker 1 | 05:41.987

We did. Yeah, we were running on the system. We used to, yeah, we played a lot of, yeah, we played games and we would use WinNuke and do screen people’s computers for fun.

Speaker 0 | 05:53.778

Nice. We, I mean, it was… I had a similar first job, which was a tech support for Quest Wireless out in Colorado. And they eventually moved me up to like the premier account, right? So the premier account was like real low call volume. You got a call like every hour. And I had come from where it was just back to back calls. You know, like you hang up, another call comes in, you hang up, another call comes in. And then eventually I got moved to this premier account because I was good with it. dealing with like, you know, upset people that wanted to, you know, return their phone or, or lie about a warranty replacement. And, you know, we would, you know, we’d save customers and stuff like that. So eventually moving this premier account, would you get like one call every hour? And it was just seven of us sitting in these cubes and there was nothing, nothing was locked down back then. Nothing, there was no such thing as like, you know, a content filter or there was none of that. The computers are just all networked and. We had some kind of OC3 internet connection, probably two of them coming into the building because it was a large call center. So we had crazy internet speed back then. And all the computers were networked. So we would play a whole game of Civilization in one day, all networked together, where we could chat with each other and put someone on, like, hold on a second, I’ve got a call. I’m going to take a call. Quickly replace the phone and then get back on the game. And it was ridiculous. Then eventually they closed that account. And that was the end of one of the best jobs ever. you know, for a college kid. Um, so, okay. So, so fast forward, you got your, you got some experience there and what was kind of like your first big, maybe like it job and, and I don’t know what, what happened?

Speaker 1 | 07:36.210

Uh, from there, it was actually a friend that had worked, a guy had worked with there, um, ended up becoming friends and he went to work for that startup out in, out in LA and, uh, got me hired on there as their, you know, IT manager. And it was it was jumping in it was basically forcing me to up my game Setting up all of a sudden now went from doing you know I love modem tech support to setting up exchange servers and setting up development environments for programmers with you know revising control on their coding and stuff like that, so it was a Really just jump in and do it

Speaker 0 | 08:15.038

Did you have a mentor or someone that was helping show you stuff there or was it drinking from the fire hose and figuring it out?

Speaker 1 | 08:20.414

It was fire hose. It was all fire hose. I think most of my learning has been, been that method self powder or, or yeah. Or fixing something that doesn’t work. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 08:32.544

There’s something about experience versus schooling that makes a big difference. So,

Speaker 1 | 08:37.188

yeah. Yeah. And back then it was huge. You know, the whole, you know, get your MCSE, you know, and I took some of those classes and I’m like, this is, this is, this is garbage. This is, you know, Maybe great knowledge. No, but it tells you, it tells it’s great book work. It’s like, no, this doesn’t happen in the real world.

Speaker 0 | 08:55.882

Nice. So last time I asked you, you know, for like a piece of advice or kind of, kind of like a theme or a one liner. And you said, do not implement version one dot O of, of anything. Never, never implement version one dot O. And you know, there’s some people, there’s, you know, if you look at kind of like the bell curve of, of, product lifespan, right? There’s always a group of people that immediately that are like buyers number one, like the iPhone comes out, like they buy it right away. The new version of Windows, the first people to download it, right? And then there’s the larger majority of people in the middle that like, well, let’s wait for some patches and let’s wait for this to get, you know, get better. And then you get your large number of people that implement in the middle. And then you’ve got some real late comers to the game and those people still have Windows XP. But what’s the story around why not implement version 1.0 of anything? What’s the deal with that?

Speaker 1 | 09:47.414

Well, if you have a lab environment and you’re not using it for any kind of production type of stuff, I’d say go for it. It’s a good learning experience. But when I was in the telephone world… If you have time. If you have time, yeah. If you have time, if you’re really bored, yeah. And it doesn’t keep you up at night when stuff doesn’t work. Yeah. After that, I moved into the Avaya world. And at the time, Avaya didn’t have anything in the small to medium-sized business world with voice over IP, PBXs. So they bought a company.

Speaker 0 | 10:19.996

Was there an IP office?

Speaker 1 | 10:22.138

This was IP office, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 10:23.639

Okay, prior to, or I mean, how big was the typical customer back then, just out of curiosity, non-business, non-small business?

Speaker 1 | 10:33.627

Our next market. Via, at that time, well, they had two products. They had a mid-market product, but it was all digital, no VoIP, which was good for the 20 to 100, you know.

Speaker 0 | 10:44.686

Like PRI stuff.

Speaker 1 | 10:46.146

Yeah, PRI or a couple of PRIs or, you know, even doing point-to-point and, you know, call routing over point-to-point multiple buildings. And they had the big system back then. It’s called the DFINITY. And those were, I think it was probably a good 80% of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. were using the DFINITY system back then. They had nothing in the VoIP world and obviously Cisco had come on, you know, starting to get into the game and 3Com had their MBX out back then. And Avaya, rather than developing their own product in the space, they bought a company out of England called IP Alchemy. They rebranded it in the US and called it, you know, the Avaya IP Office.

Speaker 0 | 11:28.290

And just for anyone out there that gets real nerdy about this stuff, if you actually Google you know, alchemy, like Avaya alchemy stuff, you’re going to see all kinds of threads that come up of like other IT guys, like, Hey, how did you do this? And how do you change this? Cause it was actually kind of funny because I looked it up and all kinds of threads came up with people trying to program it in various different issues, but I’ll let you expand upon that on what happens.

Speaker 1 | 11:56.118

So they brought their product to market here in the U S uh, you know, version 1.0. And, uh, at the time we had I had put one or two of them in, I think one of them was in some really rich house out in Brantwood.

Speaker 0 | 12:11.011

Residential.

Speaker 1 | 12:11.451

And then I went to class. And we went to class, and the instructor had never seen the product before. First time he’d ever opened it, taught the class anything. So, you know, really it was, well, here’s some units on your desk, you know, have fun, good luck.

Speaker 0 | 12:27.164

Let’s figure it out.

Speaker 1 | 12:28.065

You know, let’s figure it out. We’ll go through the instruction, the work suits together. So I mean, this is a great way to learn if you’re that type of learner. And that’s what I, you know, that’s how I am. Give me my hands on it, give me the keys and I’ll figure out how to drive it. That’s just how I’ve always been.

Speaker 0 | 12:47.276

It’s just, you don’t want to implement it in your own company that way, if you’re learning it that way, because what it means is get ready for numerous issues, get ready for trouble ticket train coming through of end users being upset with all their little ticks and everything. And really kind of like learning by trial by fire, which I don’t think is the best way to implement something if you are in charge of the IT department for your entire company.

Speaker 1 | 13:11.289

Absolutely. Yeah, it becomes a high stressful situation. And, you know, when your users are not happy, it’s tough to deal with. And then they decided to throw their own IP phones on the system while the DFINITY guys didn’t talk to the IP office guys and tell them that that… that firmware did not work on those phones. So I spent countless hours troubleshooting and on conference calls with guys from England who were part of the original IP alchemy team. It was just a, it was really a nightmare. It was, I mean, looking back, good learning experience.

Speaker 0 | 13:52.282

But it’s also classic telecom.

Speaker 1 | 13:53.583

I’m glad I wasn’t on my dime back then.

Speaker 0 | 13:55.623

You know, a lot of people don’t understand this. That’s classic telecom. which is, you know, don’t worry about it. Go sell the deal, go sell a bunch of deals and we’ll figure it out. Right. And then the sales rep, you know, like goes and does his job, you know, trying to sell one product, you know, square peg into a round hole type of thing. And then this is just classic telecom. Someone sells something disappears and then you are left with this, you know, this implementation insanity. And no one would really know that that’s going to happen unless you had inside information and inside knowledge. So it’s kind of, again, don’t implement version 1.0 of anything. Another way of saying that would be, hey, don’t worry, we’ve got teams on the roadmap and it’s going to be out in August. So let’s sign this now and don’t worry, you’ll have it by the time it comes to installation. That’s another kind of a warning sign, I guess.

Speaker 1 | 14:52.378

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 14:53.659

Are you following me? Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 | 14:55.965

Yeah, no, definitely. I definitely agree with that. Having a good roadmap is definitely something. And knowing on that roadmap where you want to be with that product. uh makes a big difference and these days i’m in the erp world and it’s huge having that road map knowing okay okay i know that you know in our in our case for example like iot right we know iot is coming for on the you know manufacturing floor all right we see that it’s coming out july of this year okay great that’s when that’s going to be my time for example after that point um you know in a sandbox make sure it works before i roll it up to the production floor and knowing where that’s coming down the road and how that can fit into your own scheduling and your own plan.

Speaker 0 | 15:40.231

So just to take a step back and summarize for everyone listening, because we’ve been kind of all over the place, and that could be because I’ve drank a lot of coffee this morning and I just got back from jujitsu and I’m fried. So because it is just we’re recording this at 9 o’clock in the morning and I’ve been up early and, again, drank a lot of coffee. So to summarize, back in the day in your career, primarily been IT support for companies supporting customers. And we’ve got Avaya, a massive company, buys Alchemy. It’s a small business product, throws it at you, and now you’re supporting all of the issues that come with that. So you’ve learned along the way all the things not to do if you were running your own company or you were the IT director for your own company. Does that make sense? Am I summarizing that correctly? Okay. Now we’re talking IoT, which we’re going to get to this big story in a moment. And we’re going to actually get to the point of how IT is a business force multiplier. And basically what you just said was, don’t just go out and implement anything, have a good proof of concept process and a process where you can test something, have it in a sandbox environment, ensure that it works and know that when you go to roll it out, it’s going to work correctly. And I find that a lot of people don’t do that. A lot of people, they buy into the aspect of, no, you know, the sales rep told me you can just demo a product and, you know, we demo it and it’s going to work and that’s great. And give me like a trial period. And then they go right into implementation. And quite frankly, the trial period is painful. And every company knows that if you sign up and you go into the trial period piece, going backwards is harder than it is just to… go through the pain of getting through the trial period and dealing with all the issues, which isn’t cool. A proof of concept is better because you’ve tried it, tested it ahead of time, and you’ve got a roadmap, a process. You already know how it’s going to work once you implement it into your environment. So with that being said, let’s talk about the… you know, this, this problem that you’ve had in your environment, kind of this, this IOT thing and how you’ve, let’s give an example of that, I guess. Let’s give an example of a good POC process where you tested something in a sandbox and what the results were.

Speaker 1 | 18:09.106

Well, the nice thing, nice thing is having one, one is having a sandbox, right? So you’ve got to create that environment if you don’t have it currently. Yeah. And try to make it as real world as possible. I mean, obviously when you’re doing proof of concept, some of the things, some of it’s going to be, theoretical users there’s really no way around that as much as you can make it so if you’re not dealing in theory you’re dealing more in real world and real scenarios make makes a big difference once we have that environment set up going through a testing process and being able to document right so you need to really and that’s that’s one thing that at least me and I found that a lot of IT people I deal with were pretty poor about documenting It’s so important. It’s really important to document it so if something happens, you’ve got a reference point, you have a scenario if you need to roll back, or how to troubleshoot it, or how you fixed it last time when it happened. And myself included, I hate having to do the documentation because it’s such an important piece of having something to refer back to and having a standard operating procedure when you’re doing something.

Speaker 0 | 19:18.202

It’s historical data. It helps other people. Not only is it evidence to things, if you need to, you know, point a finger for whatever reason in the future, right? And that goes just in general, I think, because you’ve got a lot of people that just pull IT aside, don’t enter tickets, there’s no process. And Joe Blow gets more attention than someone else just because, you know, he’s pulling people aside, things aren’t getting documented, etc. And back to that proof of concept. piece as well. I’m assuming you want to get a good sampling of your end users in various different departments as well.

Speaker 1 | 19:56.932

Yeah, it’s all going to depend on what you’re trialing, if you will. But you definitely want to, the bigger the sample size… the more, the more accurate your, your outcome is going to be and how more predictable your outcome is going to be when you go live with it. Um, you know, if you forget a department or forget of a piece of the software and like, Oh, I’m not going to worry about that. That’s the one that’s going to come by too. When you go, when you go live with it, if you haven’t tested it, if you haven’t even thought about it.

Speaker 0 | 20:23.295

So we’ve been going, um, just all the kind of like the nerdy tech stuff so far. Um, let’s, let’s bring in the business aspect of this. So we, um, let’s just go back to that kind of real. real world example here. And I think to talk specifically the red zone reporting piece and that 40% uptick in production, let’s just kind of give an overview of the whole story from POC sandbox type of thing to final results and how that improved the business and how IT in general can drive the business forward. Sure.

Speaker 1 | 20:57.876

So fast forward at a… Where I’m at now at Old Thompson, manufacturing, it was kind of a new world to me. I didn’t really know ERP. I worked in manufacturing plants as far as putting in our phone system, working on computers, but never from inside the business. So it was a new world for me. We decided to implement a product called Red Zone. And in the manufacturing world, they deal in OEE, which stands for overall equipment effectiveness. And what it does, it measures how well you’re performing on the plant floor. You want to be able to know, okay, if I’m supposed to be able to make X number of parts in an hour, am I getting close to that? Are my machines down? Is it because this arm that’s supposed to pick this up and move it over here is broken? Whatever it might be. And also quality. So 100 pieces come in, do 100 pieces go out? So it kind of takes all those factors and has a formula and it gives you this overall percentage of how well you’re running. And we had some ideas in our head here on, you know, okay, well, we think we’re running at about, you know, 60% based on, you know, what we think we can do.

Speaker 0 | 22:22.334

And what were some of those things? What were some of those hints? Like, what were some of the things that, like, made you think that? You didn’t have the hard data or you didn’t have all the reporting in. So what were some of the things that, you know, gave you a clue?

Speaker 1 | 22:38.022

Some of it was just really just throwing darts. You know, I think some of it was just really throwing darts and not understanding our downtime. We knew how fast we could run and how fast we were getting them out. But all the other factors,

Speaker 0 | 22:52.254

you know. When you say them specifically, we’re talking like bottles of spice filled up, put in a package and sent out?

Speaker 1 | 23:00.000

Correct, yeah. So, the empty bottle comes in and a full bottle in a box comes out the other side.

Speaker 0 | 23:08.245

Cool. And there’s human portions to this too. Like there’s a person like grabbing something, I’m assuming, and physically grabbing a bottle and putting it onto a machine of some sort, correct?

Speaker 1 | 23:19.993

Yeah, we’ve got quite a few people on our floor. It’s become a little more automated now, but we still have a lot of people down there. So there’s a lot of pieces that they do, you know, they’ve got to get the spices into the big hoppers that can fill, you know, someone’s got to unbox the labels and put them on a roll and unpack the boxes and get them on the thing, on the conveyor belt, that kind of thing. So a lot of manpower. And so, yeah, so we had an idea that how fast we could fill, but all the other pieces, all the other factors that went into that formula. not accounted for, you know, downtime, you know, okay, well, it’s taking us, you know, two hours to do a change from, you know, from spice to spice. And in the food world, when you do that, you’ve got to do a full cleaning in between, right? So that’s what takes a good majority of the time. Well, if you’re running, you know, if you’re doing these small orders because you’re behind or because you’re not planning well, all of a sudden, you know, I ran for a half hour just to go and clean for two hours because I had to make this one little customer’s order for them. So it kind of allowed us to take a step back, looking at the red zone, take a step back. Okay, let’s look at our manufacturing process as a whole. Where do we need to improve the entire process, not just purely how fast these machines can run, because there’s a lot of other factors that go into how effective you are. So we implemented that, and with their product, they’re very good at coming in and really pushing the coaching side of it. Not just, you know, let’s just put up numbers. Let’s improve the processes. If we don’t improve the processes, we’re never going to get those numbers. We’re never going to be able to improve those numbers. So when we implemented it, we saw that we were closer to 35% OEE. Wow. Right? So we had this idea that, oh, yeah, we’re running about 60, which, you know, it’s not great, but it’s not horrible. Well, no, we’re running 35, which is pretty poor, pretty close to poor.

Speaker 0 | 25:28.186

Well, there’s a big opportunity.

Speaker 1 | 25:30.048

Yeah. Huge opportunity.

Speaker 0 | 25:32.289

Okay.

Speaker 1 | 25:33.654

So we implemented the red zone and we started going through that and started looking at our processes and where we can improve and where we can schedule better. It allowed us to track our downtime on the machines, which was huge. And it gave us the ability to say, you know, we really need more maintenance staff. So we’re bringing more maintenance staff to help keep those machines up. We can see a part now and say, okay, this part’s costing us three hours of downtime in a given day because it breaks or dams or whatever it might be. And now, now we can attach the dollar amount to, well, three hours of downtime running at however many units an hour, it’s going to cost us, you know, $50,000 in a month of downtime.

Speaker 0 | 26:15.263

And labor, people standing around, all kinds of things.

Speaker 1 | 26:19.304

People standing around, yeah, product, product not being made, you know, units not being shipped. I mean, it can factor a lot.

Speaker 0 | 26:27.148

The ROI is crazy. And just to, just to pause for a second. what was your role kind of going through this whole process? Like, what are you doing during this process? I just want to kind of get an idea of like, because I think a lot of people in IT think, look, my job is to like keep the network up and running and to make sure desktops operate. I want to know your role in this situation.

Speaker 1 | 26:51.791

What were you doing? Was my role supposed to be? No, it’s not supposed to be.

Speaker 0 | 26:56.374

I want to know what you were doing because it doesn’t matter what it was supposed to be. I want to know. like what you are actually doing, because that’s where the difference really happens.

Speaker 1 | 27:05.720

Sure. So for, for me, you know, all of a sudden we have this big investment in this software.

Speaker 0 | 27:10.462

Like, did you need it? Did you take over? Like, I mean, you know, like what was going on there?

Speaker 1 | 27:15.844

Originally I ended up taking over. Um, originally I was obviously there to support and help and get the, you know, get the hardware out there that we need to get the software up and running that we needed. And I was really fascinated with the process of improvement, the operational side of it. I really enjoyed that and ended up taking it over. And did we make this investment? Well, I want to make sure that investment, you know, works correctly, that we see value in that investment and we’re just not spending money for the sake of spending money. Right. You know, so I really took it over and made it successful. And enjoyed it the whole time. I really love the idea of the process improvement and a lot, and it kind of opened the door for other things. You know, there’s, there’s plenty of processes in, in the IT, you know, under in my realm that need to be improved as well. And it gave me the opportunity to, to see how to do that. And some of the best practices in making that happen. And, and the technology can help.

Speaker 0 | 28:15.301

Yeah. And the reason why I’m bringing this up is because you were really acting as a CTO there. You weren’t acting as IT director. And I think that that’s key because that’s the bridge. And I think a lot of people, a lot of IT directors, you know, I talk with guys, they ask me advice all the time. Phil, I want to get into this, you know, this IT role. And I, you know, and unfortunately I have to kind of look at their, you know, whatever their profile, resume. I see lack of experience there. And I try to tell people like, you’re not going to just jump into that role. What you want to do is you want to take any role that you can get. I don’t care if it’s system admin, whatever it is. And then. act outside of your role and make a difference in the business.

Speaker 1 | 28:55.916

Exactly. You have to provide value. If you want to keep excelling, not only in IT or in the job you’re at, but in life in general, you’ve got to add value to where you’re at. You hear the saying, you want to dress for the part that you want, not for the part that you have, or dress for the role that you want, not the role that you have. It’s the same thing. Take action. Act as you want to be.

Speaker 0 | 29:20.946

It’s very,

Speaker 1 | 29:21.926

you are that person. Yeah.

Speaker 0 | 29:23.668

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. So, so, so move on. So, um, so you took over this project, um, implementing this, this red zone software and just out of curiosity, was there any other options on the table or was, was red zone the only option? Like how did you guys end up choosing that and were you involved in that?

Speaker 1 | 29:41.122

There was, we, we looked at a couple of different options. Um, uh, our ERP system has some native stuff in it as well. It would have required some third. third-party applications or third-party vendors as well. And really what we decided that in the ERP world OEE, the majority of what you’re going to see, at least especially for the cloud-based one that we use, is that the ERP will be able to do a lot of the work that we’re doing. uh it’s mostly automotive right so the huge in detroit uh air michigan area a lot of automotive so it didn’t quite fit exactly what we were looking for and red zone is specific to the food and beverage industry um and their cost their cost model was good their price construction was good and their turnaround time they have a pretty quick turnaround time which i think made a a big part of that this phase in Um, so they’re not even fully integrated with our ERP system at all. It kind of runs on its own Island. Um, but it does, it does what we need.

Speaker 0 | 30:47.370

Okay. Gotcha. Um, cool. So, all right. So let’s go back through the implementation process and back to like, what were some of the like roadblocks or I don’t know if it’s a roadblock or something that you noticed and, and you know, or reporting or data that was given to you guys and the changes that you personally suggested?

Speaker 1 | 31:16.421

We had several hurdles to have to overcome. One of them was definitely our data, information around data. It gave us an opportunity to review what we thought we could run at speed-wise, look at our number of SKUs that we have, make sense of order of… order of operation you know what order should we run these things if we’re gonna you know what are the spices that we don’t have to clean between if we don’t well let’s get other runs accordingly let’s do product a and product b because we don’t have to clean between going from a to b but we would if we did it from b to a for example um so taking a look at our master data if you will getting that cleaned up I think the other biggest hurdle to overcome was the culture shock, right? We went from fighting fires every day and, you know, everyone kind of doing whatever they thought was best for the business or best for what they were trying to accomplish out there on a given day to, you know, processes. Okay, this is our process to get to the top. When, you know, X happens, your goal in doing that is to do… Steps one, two, and three. And the other person has to do four, five, and six. Whatever that is. So human deployment.

Speaker 0 | 32:36.780

Literally human deployment maps and stuff like that. Don’t just do whatever. You literally walk from here to here and you do this next. You do not do whatever you think should be done.

Speaker 1 | 32:47.970

Exactly.

Speaker 0 | 32:48.591

That’s huge in the restaurant world. I worked for a Starbucks for years and I had a saying that was just, where’s the broom? And it was whenever someone would just come to me and just ask a random question, like, where’s the chocolate chips or where’s this? You know, I’d be like, where’s the broom? Because every time, you know, you have a new manager that comes in, they might have a lot of ideas that aren’t backed by anything. They’re just ideas. Like, I want to change this. I want to change where the broom is kept. I was like, okay, I hope you’re ready for that. Because if you change where the broom is kept, you’re going to have 20 people asking you, where’s the broom? Yeah. You know what I mean? And every time someone interrupts you, like the, you know, I think it’s an automatic, like, every question or every interruption costs like a manager seven minutes of their time or something. And that’s just like a very small example. So how do you deal with the pushback or the staff pushback or making the changes? Because that can be sometimes a big hurdle.

Speaker 1 | 33:39.962

It was, it started to be a big hurdle, but I think the biggest thing for us that we did was we brought that staff in when we were looking at a process, let’s say like a cleaning or, you know, sanitizing the line, for example, we would bring them in and ask, their opinion and say okay what are you what are you struggling with out there where can i help you and that’s really big i think from the management standpoint is knowing that our job isn’t to tell them what to do our job is to help them do their job better more efficiently make them happier as management we’ve really got to you know look at the in red zone they call it the upside down pyramid right that my job and it’s the same thing i think as far as like IT in general, right? My job is to serve my company. My job is to make everyone’s job easier, make them more efficient, give them the tools they need. You’ve got to do it, and that’s where providing value is. My value isn’t telling them to reboot their computer, right? Anyone could do that. My value is helping them be efficient at their job and making sure that what they’re using on a daily basis works for them. So in the manufacturing, on the plant floor, it’s the same thing. Brought them in, okay, what do you guys need help with? Where can we help you? Where do you see improvement? And then taking a chunk of those ideas, you know, maybe not all of them, but taking, you know, parts of those ideas or things we didn’t even think about, that they’re dealing with it on a daily basis. They know better than we do. And then implementing it. and gives them a voice and then we have an opportunity to say i am a piece of this you know new process awesome and then re-running the data and seeing yeah looking at it again exactly so we had cameras out there and we would you know time them on a change everyone from an hour on a changeover down to 20 minutes wow and some of that was talking about feedback from them saying no you know we didn’t have a place to plug in the uh the vacuum cleaner wow we didn’t even notice that we didn’t think great get through some power right there and you made their life easier, gave them input, gave them feedback, let them know that we’re listening to what they need. What’s another one?

Speaker 0 | 35:45.778

Give me another example. What’s another one?

Speaker 1 | 35:49.261

Another one was like them having to walk across the room to get some of the cleaning supplies. So what do we do? We got the cleaning supplies, we put it on a wheeled cart, and 15 minutes prior to selling it over, that cart gets wheeled over to right to where they need it.

Speaker 0 | 36:01.252

How about orders in process with the small order, you know, and like… How did you start money on the shelf and stuff like that? How did you redo the process of orders and making sure that we make the right amount of spice and the right amount of time and all that?

Speaker 1 | 36:15.940

Well, it came down to better planning from a management standpoint, understanding our good through forecasting, and then how to package various components together. And being able to look at it, we might look at one of our lines and say, okay, that line. it’s easier and it’s quicker for us to change the bottle than it is for us to change the size. Okay, great. So we’re going to keep the same, not the size, I’m sorry, the spice. So in that case, we’re going to keep the same spice, then we’re going to change the bottle because it makes more sense on that line. On our other line, it’s much faster to change the spice than it is to change the bottle size. Okay, well, let’s keep the same bottle and package size, and let’s change the spice when you do change the spice. So really taking a look at that from an overall… standpoint and then also cleaning up you know what we’re selling you know do we really want to sell this this product that’s selling all 50 units at a dollar a unit you know you’re no we don’t want to make it anymore let’s get rid of it get them into something else or you know or we got to price it to where it makes sense so in the end what’s the where do you guys stand today then we’re sitting we’ve had the last six weeks we’re sitting at 70 78 percent oee and do you know

Speaker 0 | 37:35.596

what that translates into revenue for the company?

Speaker 1 | 37:40.258

It’s a huge number. More than revenue-wise, I think, percentage-wise, it’s given us 85% more revenue. If you look at the OEE points with the other things added into it,

Speaker 0 | 37:55.924

it’s tripled its capacity.

Speaker 1 | 37:57.025

How much more revenue? Or,

Speaker 0 | 38:01.387

yeah, like, what was there?

Speaker 1 | 38:02.047

It’s given us double.

Speaker 0 | 38:03.472

Okay. Okay. So in other words, flow through profit, if we’re talking, if we’re looking at a P and L and we’re looking at line items and stuff like that, you affected, I’m assuming labor was one that was affected. Um, you know, obviously production went up. So automatically there’s, I mean, it’s, I guess it’s major savings and then producing stuff.

Speaker 1 | 38:22.205

And well,

Speaker 0 | 38:24.126

if you want from 30% to 70%, it’s literally almost double time.

Speaker 1 | 38:28.889

Yeah. And it’s really, it allows the triple our capacity. with about 60 percent of the headcount in there. At the time we had a lot of temporary staff when we were busy and not running efficiently. We’re able to to cut the temporary staff down to virtually none and we’re running with yeah triple triple the capacity because it allowed us to we have nine work centers nine lines and we’ll run we only have to run seven of them. during the first shift of the day, and one, maybe two of them the second shift of the day, during the day. And prior to that, we were running all of them all the time.

Speaker 0 | 39:09.522

So 3X at 60% capacity. That’s crazy.

Speaker 1 | 39:13.805

Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah, the 60% of human capital, which has been amazing. So more so than generating revenue, it’s brought our margins way up on our current sales.

Speaker 0 | 39:28.135

So… There’s one theme I’ve been taking notes this whole time. And the one theme that I have that keeps coming up and up again with you is, and I want to ask the question, why were you successful when you had no experience? And maybe that’s the reason why. Because what’s interesting is every role that you kind of jumped into, it was drinking from the fire hose. I don’t have the experience for it. And do you think that that was one of them? Do you think it’s a creative mind and your ability to think outside of the box that it is? Combined with the fact that you were thrown into a situation where you had to figure it out that was helpful, that might’ve made you more successful or what’s made you so successful?

Speaker 1 | 40:11.382

I don’t like to lose. I don’t like to lose. No, it’s… I like that.

Speaker 0 | 40:17.363

That could be it.

Speaker 1 | 40:17.803

Learning new things. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 0 | 40:19.944

Some people are just, you know, relentless. Like, no way. Just relentless. There’s no such thing as going backwards ever.

Speaker 1 | 40:28.086

Yeah, yeah. And I don’t like giving up on something without putting in the honesty. I don’t want to give up on something or back off on something if I haven’t. If I can’t say I didn’t give it my all. Right. So, and for me, I love learning new things. I love technology. I don’t like to be bored. I’m not the type who’s going to sit there and be happy with doing the same thing day in and day out. That’s just not Marcus. So they gave me these opportunities to come up, to jump in and take the ownership of it. And I don’t have anyone fighting me on it. And they’re like, okay, well, yeah, go ahead. Go for it. Great. I’m going to jump in and take it and see where we can take it.

Speaker 0 | 41:11.122

Uh, that’s a good point. Cause a lot of people do just want to go to work and a lot of people do just want to show up. I mean, that’s the first, the first rule of any job is you got to show up on time, but I mean, a lot of people do just want to show up.

Speaker 1 | 41:22.130

Um, yeah. And they just want to mail it in. Well, I, I don’t, I want to make an impact. I want to make a difference.

Speaker 0 | 41:27.994

Yeah. Taking ownership in the company is, is, is big. Not only that, it’s, it’s, it’s very rewarding. And, um, not only are you adding value, but it brings immense value to yourself. A lot of people say add value. I think that’s, it’s too, you understand what it means because you understand because you’ve done it. But I think we need a better definition for that. I think we need a more detailed, you know, when we say add value, what does that mean? Does it mean, you know, take ownership in the company, understand what the vision is of the company, how does the company make money and how can you affect the, how can you affect that bottom line? And I guess either, either save the company money, make. more money, improve efficiencies and processes. That’s where we’re really talking about how we add value. I think it’s ownership, take ownership in the company and understand how the company makes money.

Speaker 1 | 42:19.816

Yeah, understand how they make money, understand how we can save them money or improve something to where they’re making more profit in a certain process or whatever that you’re doing. If you look at, you know, in our case, like the platform, for example, you know, we’re spending a lot of money on automation. Why do you want to do that? It’s a big capital investment. Well, you look at it and it adds value because over the, you know, 18 months, all of a sudden that piece of equipment put in costs a lot less than, you know, wear and tear on someone’s body on, you know, repetitive motion that we might have to deal with or lifting heavy. you know, boxes or whatever, whatever it might be. Well,

Speaker 0 | 43:08.761

that’s a good point. How much did this whole thing cost? And I’m not, if you can’t reveal it, that’s fine. But I mean, what, I mean, what are we talking about as far as, you know, it, because a lot of times something that seems like a big number is not a big number. If you’re cutting, if you’re cutting all of your temp staff and you’re, you know, three X in your production at 60%, then all of a sudden that investment is,

Speaker 1 | 43:33.126

really probably one of the best investments you ever made but a lot of times people look at just the numbers and and you know that’s it that’s the end of the discussion yeah and there’s a big so there’s i’m glad to talk about it there’s there’s a lot that goes into this investment um it’s the whole plant foreign production in general um not just the red zone piece not just you know the human capital piece or the process improvement piece but overall looking at about a seven million dollar investment um that we expect to have an ROI within 12 to 18 months.

Speaker 0 | 44:07.028

Well, a 12-month ROI, a 12-month payback’s great.

Speaker 1 | 44:10.669

Yeah, yeah. And we have, you know, we’ve got some private equity investors in it. That’s, you know, any investor, if they can get their return on investment in, you know, under three years, they’re thrilled.

Speaker 0 | 44:25.416

Yeah, 12 months, 18 months. And then, I mean, that’s $7 million. It’s a pretty good, it’s a pretty big number. Um, and it’s been, it’s been a great conversation for anyone out there. Um, you know, anyone out there listening, did you have anyone, any one piece of advice or anything that sticks in your head that, you know, it’s kind of like any piece of advice for anyone?

Speaker 1 | 44:46.338

Well, you know, you know, a couple of things. One, if you want to go get it, right, you’ve got to want to go get it. Um, and you know, don’t, don’t take no for an answer. If you believe in something and making it happen. you know, IT or, you know, process operation, whatever it is, you’ve got to give it that honest thought, you know, don’t give up on something if you can’t say that you honestly gave it your, gave it your all, if it’s something you believe in, it can make it happen. And for me, we’re food and beverage manufacturing. You look at the industry, in the manufacturing world, it’s very low-tech when it comes to the medical equipment world or manufacturing or automotive manufacturing. And soon we’ll see a lot of bioengineering manufacturing. It’s right around the corner. believe there’s any reason why a food company in California can’t be just as high tech as some of those other ones and use those, that technology for our advantage. So that’s, that’s my goal is bringing us into the, you know.

Speaker 0 | 45:53.206

Well, Hey man, there’s no bigger model. There’s no bigger model, uh, than McDonald’s. Okay. And that’s food. Okay. And they’re probably like the most automated. I mean, if you look at just the whole McDonald’s story in general, which is pretty mind blowing how fast a hamburger joint grew to the size of it. that it did, you know? Um, and that’s all about process and, uh, you know, maybe not so much it, but definitely process. Um, so man, it’s been, uh, it’s been great talking with you. It’s been a great show. Um, and I look forward to having you on the show again in the future, man.

Speaker 1 | 46:26.148

Yeah, definitely. Great. Thanks for having me. And just to answer your very first question, my first computer was the leading edge back in the candy days.

Speaker 0 | 46:33.754

Nice. Nice. Was that like a cartridge? I don’t remember that. Was it a cartridge computer? Floppy drive? What did we have on that?

Speaker 1 | 46:42.280

It had the five and a quarter. Yeah, floppy.

Speaker 0 | 46:44.902

Beautiful. Five and a quarter. People don’t even understand. It was like you need a boot disk. It was like a boot disk, and then it was a disk to run the program. Then it was like a disk to save your one-page paper. And then flipping back and forth between disks to even print something sometimes. craziness and using using scotch tape to make it read right or not yeah yeah exactly remember it was like you would have like a whole stack of like discs for your like papers for your paper that’s great man all right thank you so much