Goellner: Finding Your Passion

Wade Anderson:

Hey, manufacturing world. Welcome to another episode of Shop Matters, sponsored by Okuma America. I'm your host, Wade Anderson. Today joining me in the studio here in beautiful sunny Charlotte, North Carolina... I actually don't know if it's sunny out today, but we're going to go with it. Sunny, Charlotte, North Carolina. I've got Nick Goellner with Goellner Incorporated. All of you listening to the podcast probably would recognize Nick more from brands like Hennig and Advanced Machine and Engineering, correct?

Nick Goellner:

Yep, or The MakingChips Podcast.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, MakingChips. Absolutely.

Nick Goellner:

That'd be the other place they would know me from.

Wade Anderson:

All right. Well, welcome, Nick.

Nick Goellner:

And you're right. It's not super sunny today, Wade. I was talking to my wife on the way over and she was talking to me about a hurricane and she's like, "Are you going to be able to fly home?" And I'm like, "Looks fine to me."

Wade Anderson:

It's coming, yeah.

Nick Goellner:

I said, "It's a little overcast, but that's it."

Wade Anderson:

My son, I think you know my son is stationed in the Coast Guard. His first duty station was Sabine Pass, Texas, which is right at the corner of Texas and Louisiana. And we're sitting there watching the news last night and Sabine is going to take a direct hit so-

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, he'll get some experience.

Wade Anderson:

Well, he just got stationed in Virginia for A school. I texted him last night and I said, "You're either hating life because you're going to miss out on all the action or you're glad that you're in Virginia and not riding it out in Sabine."

Nick Goellner:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Wade Anderson:

Nick, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about Goellner and a little bit about the company and what you guys do.

Nick Goellner:

Okay. I guess I'll start with myself. I'm third generation. I didn't grow up with the typical background for manufacturing. I was actually a fine artist.

Wade Anderson:

Oh, no kidding. Wow.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah. Yeah, I used to do a lot of paintings and more on the creative and communication side. I always felt like a little bit of a black sheep in this industry. My grandfather founded our company. He's a German immigrant and he invented a machine tool and that's the catalyst for the whole business. The machine tool that he invented was the first circular carbide production saw for high production sawing through steel billet or rail, or stuff that you can't do with a bandsaw because it just doesn't have the productivity. And so, that's the catalyst for the whole business. And I grew up with my father, who's an industrial engineer and an MBA-type thinker, and everyone's great at math and everyone's great at engineering. And I was always wondering, "Okay, how do I fit into this thing?"

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, where do I fit in this equation?

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, and my father always thought, "You're probably going to be best with marketing." And it didn't really resonate with me until later in life and it turns out, he was right on. I mean, that's my total passion.

Wade Anderson:

Oh, that's awesome. And that's something... I get to host a lot of the high school students when we do Manufacturing Day and things of that nature. I work with our local school district there in York and we bring these students in and there's so much more to manufacturing. They get stuck on, "You got to be a machinist," or "You're an engineer," or that side of it. But manufacturing involves, I mean, every occupation you could think of from accounting to sales to, in your case, marketing, right?

Nick Goellner:

Right, yeah.

Wade Anderson:

There's so much more involved in manufacturing than just the G- and M- code and making chips side of things.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah. Now with that being said though, because I totally agree with you, my biggest regret is that I never actually ran a machine tool because now I lead a sales department at the company and there's just no substitute for knowing exactly how to set up a part and knowing the way a great cut sounds. And I've had to learn a lot of that over the past 10, 12 years, just through osmosis and through spending just plenty of time, hours and hours and visits and visits. And after a while you learn it, but I just think, "Man, if I had that background of running a machine, it would have been so much more valuable for me."

Wade Anderson:

Sure.

Nick Goellner:

On the other side, because I came through a different route, I've got a secret weapon, something that a lot of other people don't have.

Wade Anderson:

And you've got a different perspective on things, right?

Nick Goellner:

Exactly, yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Sometimes you get that tunnel vision. If all you're doing is that one thing, you don't see the bigger picture at times. You can come into some of these situations with a whole different perspective than what I might would have, for an example.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, and I think that's one reason why the company values me is because I've got that bigger picture perspective. I'm always thinking about, "Okay, what's possible? How can we make our customer successful with this next big initiative?" And then the people who have weathered a couple more recessions than I have or scrapped a few more parts than I have are always trying to bring me down to Earth and somewhere between that perspective and my perspective is where we need to be. We have that healthy tension between me, the entrepreneur, pie in the sky type thinker, and then the more practical, "Okay, how are we going to get this done," type thinker.

Wade Anderson:

Right. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm a big proponent of you get what you focus on. You look at everything in management and it's all about measurements. And if you focus on, as part of measuring, you focus on it, you can achieve it. But if you think about things from a big picture perspective... I visit thousands of machine shops, get swamped with thousands of customers throughout the course of a year, and you can see certain personality types maybe might be the right way to say it, but you've got the job shop guy, who's just, "Woe is me. I'm just a small company. Well, I can't do some of the things you're talking about. I'm only a small company."

Wade Anderson:

Then you have the other job shop guy who's like, "Well, yeah, in the next five years, this is what I plan to accomplish." He's thinking about this big picture and then there's steps that he's got to take to block and tackle and get there, but he's focused on how big he's going to be, how successful he's going to be, how grand he's going to build this company. And then the guy over here is the one thinking about, "Well, I can't do that. I'm just small. I'm just..." And that's where it's focus is so he's going to stay in that area. And this guy is going to go places and innovate and do things creative that you wouldn't have thought about. You definitely have to have both of those visions, I think.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, and I think sometimes the more practical or the more integrator type guy gets a bad rap and the more I grow up and the more I learn from other people in my company and other people in the industry, the more I value that perspective, even though it's not mine. And so, we actually set up our whole company that way. Advanced Machine Engineering has five different business units, everything from the sawing machines to the workholding group to, we've got a whole fluid power product line and a few others. And so, at the top, at the helm of each business group, there's two leaders. There's more of the, keep his head up and out looking for that next new opportunity, visionary leader and then there's more keep his head down and focused on keeping all the promises that the other guy makes.

Wade Anderson:

Execution and- Right, yeah.

Nick Goellner:

And we need that. And there's often a healthy tension between them where one guy's like, "Jeez, can you just stop? We got enough on our plate." And then the other guy's like, "Well hey, we got to keep pushing the pace because that's what it's going to take." We try to find people who have good, integrator personalities and find people who have good visionary personalities and have them have that marriage at the top of every business group.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. That's excellent. I belong to a leadership group and one of the things they teach or talk about is tent pole leadership. They talk about if you look at people in a tent and you divide that tent into quadrants, you've got different personality types that live in that tent. And your job as the big leader, if you will, overarching side of it, is to keep the tent over everybody. If you get a guy that's running too far ahead, he pulls that tent pole too tight and it leaves some of the people outside of the tent over here. That can cause a lot of problems and you can get yourself into financial problems and other things because of that.

Nick Goellner:

Sure.

Wade Anderson:

But if you got the guy in the bottom corner pulling too hard this way, then you can't grow. You can't accelerate but you got to maintain that rhythm of keeping that tent over everybody.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, exactly. That's the role my father has to play being the CEO of the whole business.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. Talk a little bit about the business units then. You touched on the Advanced Machine and Engineering. Talk a little bit about what you do from that perspective versus Hennig and how that's set up, what your products are, things like.

Nick Goellner:

Okay. AME is broken into five main business groups. Design and build is in our DNA. I talked a little bit about how our company started with the invention of a machine. We have a machine design and build group. Nothing that you would find in a catalog. They need a special custom machine that's going to maybe do a milling operation and then do some drilling and then chamfering. And instead of putting on three different machines and doing one of the processes manually, we'll design and build a custom solution all around that application. That's one group.

Nick Goellner:

The second group is the AMSAW group. A lot of our business units that were originated from AME will be AM this, AM that- for advanced machine- saw. AMSAW is our high production sawing machines. Then we have the AMROK group, which is all workholding. We're a workholding integrator most known for making a lot of tombstones, probably the largest domestic manufacturer of tombstones. But we're a lot more than that because of our design and build roots. It's always, "How do you want to build on the rock? What do you want to put on your tombstone? What can we combine with this five-axis base to do more parts on your new five-axis mill?" And we work with a lot of really key partners. Some of them are our Partners in THINC partners as well to build on the rock. That's the workholding group.

Nick Goellner:

We have a group called the Spindle Interface group and it's all about tool clamping. There's a power draw bar inside the spindle and then there's a gripper on the end of the power draw bar that grabs the retention knob of your tool holder and pulls it into the spindle. That whole system is what we do in the Spindle Interface group because we're the partner with a company called OTT-JAKOB and OTT-JAKOB's the de facto standard in the world for tool retention. And so, a lot of our relationships at our company have come through German relationships that my grandfather maintained and when they wanted to expand into North America, they would go through us and we've just been technical enough and astute enough and customer-focused enough that they just never decided to greenfield and do it themselves. They've just worked through us. Spindle Interface group is one of those.

Nick Goellner:

We have a fluid power group where we have a product called the AMLOK and that is for position and hold on a pneumatic cylinder or a hydraulic cylinder. If you really want to like lock something in place so there's no drift, you would use an AMLOK. We have another partner in that group called Sitema, another one of those German partners and those products are for press safety. You've got a big power press and you lose hydraulic power. Instead of turning a person into a pancake or screwing up your mold or your dye, this locks. As soon as you lose power, it locks.

Wade Anderson:

Lock in on the cylinders.

Nick Goellner:

How a SCHUNK VERO-S pod is pneumatically unclamped and mechanically clamped and if you lose power it locks. The same principle there.

Wade Anderson:

Okay. All right.

Nick Goellner:

And shoot, I think that's all five. I think I just listed all five. If I didn't, sorry for whoever I forgot. So that's AME and it's a challenging business because we're so diverse. When you hire a sales guy, it's like, "Okay, get ready," because he's got a lot to learn.

Wade Anderson:

Buckle up your seatbelt. You got a product...

Nick Goellner:

Yeah. But everything's really designed and built. It's an engineered solution. It's all just designed around making manufacturers more productive. Hennig is our sister company and Hennig's known for chip conveyors, coolant filtration, way covers, facility safety products, machine protection, that type of product. A lot of the fabricated products that you'll see on a machine tool where it starts as a piece of sheet metal, we'll laser cut it, we'll bend it, we'll put whatever components on it that are required so that it can protect itself from the environment, the manufacturing environment. You're making chips and you've got a precision ball screw. You need to protect that with a way cover or you got precision ways. You need to protect that with a way cover or you got an X, Y shield that the spindle travels on. You need to protect the chips from getting back into the backside of the spindle head.

Nick Goellner:

Hennig makes those kind of products and then on the facility safety side, we'll make custom enclosures for machine tools or other equipment, fencing, guarding, more on the fabricated side, where AME's more on the precision machining side. Those two companies, Hennig and AME make up the bulk of Goellner Inc. and AME is primarily in North America. We do some export with our machines. Hennig is in.... Okay. Geez. Okay. We're in the Rockford area. We have service centers in Charlotte, in Oklahoma, in Cincinnati, in Detroit, where we're repairing way covers. We've got a facility in the Czech Republic, a facility in France, a facility in Munich, a new facility in Bosnia, and partners all over the world.

Wade Anderson:

Right. Big global footprint.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Wade Anderson:

Talk a little bit, I think there's a unique history between Hennig and a company that, from an Okuma perspective, we deal a lot with in Japan, with Enomoto. Tell us a little bit about that history, if you could.

Nick Goellner:

On the way here, I was trying to brush up on my history because a lot of this happened before I was born. In 1987, the year I was born, Okuma moved from... Tell me if I got this right.

Wade Anderson:

You're making me feel old by the way.

Nick Goellner:

Okuma moves from New York to Charlotte.

Wade Anderson:

Yep. We started out in Long Island and then yeah, 87, we moved and came to Charlotte.

Nick Goellner:

And you were manufacturing machines here in Charlotte at that time.

Wade Anderson:

Yep, ground up. Yep.

Nick Goellner:

And so, Okuma reached out to their largest supplier of chip conveyors, a company called Enomoto, and they said, "Hey, we want to be supported in North America." Enomoto somehow had a relationship with my grandfather, Willy, who founded our company. And they were like, "Hey, one of our big customers needs North American support. Will you be our partner?" And so, Willy said, "Why don't we license our way cover on our machine protection technology to you and you license the chip conveyor technology to us?" And ever since, we've been sharing intellectual property and actually, Okuma's the reason we got into the chip conveyor business.

Wade Anderson:

Isn't that something? Wow. Very neat.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Wade Anderson:

It's funny how small the world can be sometimes and how-

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, especially in this industry.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. The machine tool industry, we're all intertangled in some form or fashion and we've been talking a lot about IMTS here lately and a lot of us, we talk about going... When we would physically go the show. Obviously, that's not taking place this year, but when you physically go to the show, it's like going to a family reunion. You see all your friends in the industry-

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, I love it.

Wade Anderson:

... and over time, somebody worked for this company. Well, they never seem to get out of that industry. They just went from this company over here to this company and they might be in a new booth, but they're still at IMTS and they're still happy to see you and it's just this little get together every two years.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, I always relate it to the prom. It's like the prom of the industry. Everyone gets dressed up. Everyone tries to lose a couple pounds. Everyone gets their best machines out there and there's no prom this year. How crazy is that?

Wade Anderson:

Yep. And there's a side of me, it's probably a good thing. I don't know. I'm gaining weight while I've been home.

Nick Goellner:

You got the COVID 15, right?

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, I went to COVID 50, I think.

Nick Goellner:

I'm with you, man.

Wade Anderson:

Something I think new and exciting between Okuma and Goellner is you guys recently joined the Partners in THINC program. Talk a little bit about that.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah. I'm really excited about it because, before my time, we actually were invited to the Partners in THINC program and for whatever reason, I don't want to get into it because I'm sure I would have disagreed with the reason, we declined. I think it's a mindset thing. I think it's... I'm about open innovation. You talk about how everyone's entangled together in this industry and it's like the more you think of that as a beautiful tapestry of knowledge and expertise, the better it's going to be for your business. But when you think of it as a tangled knot that over-complicates things, it's a problem, right?

Wade Anderson:

Right.

Nick Goellner:

And so, I think for whatever reason, we were like, "Well, why would we join that? There's going to be other people in it. We've got to pay or whatever." And we declined. And then I think we've been kicking ourselves ever since. And so, we've been wanting to get back into an opportunity where we could get into Partners in THINC and we must have sent you about 20 emails over the past five years. I know Scott Cooley did a good job trying to get us that opportunity.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, Scott's a good egg.

Nick Goellner:

I was at your, what do you call it, the Summer Showcase?

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, mm-hmm.

Nick Goellner:

At the Partners in THINC program with MakingChips because you guys invited us out to do some onstage, podcast thing.

Wade Anderson:

Yep. And see, I wasn't even aware of the connection between yourself, Hennig, and then the MakingChips side so interesting.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah. It was new because two years ago, I became partners with Jason and Jim who host the podcast and now I'm the third host and got a whole marketing agency as part of it too. But that's another story. While I was there, I'm just looking around and I'm like, "This is what the industry needs." You've got all these different brands that all have their different specialty and they're all working together for the greater good of the end-user, just to help people make chips more effectively. And I'm like, "Man, this sucks that my family's businesses isn't in it." Here I am doing a podcast and I'm looking at all these other companies, many of them that I partner with, like SCHUNK and I can't even have my own say here. I don't know what the catalyst was for you to give us another shot. I think one of Scott's emails finally made it through and you gave us another shot and I'd like to hear from you. Why did you consider us?

Wade Anderson:

It's interesting. I like getting asked questions. Usually, I'm the one sitting here asking questions so I appreciate that. From my perspective, I looked at it from a different take. Scott, good sales guy, right? Very persistent, all the time staying in front of me. But I wasn't interested in the chip conveyor side. We've got partners that are fantastic partners from a chip conveyor standpoint. We do a lot with them, inventory, and things like that. And that was the avenue that just kept coming up was Hennig, Hennig, Hennig, chip conveyor, chip conveyor. Thanks, but no, thanks. If you keep adding the same flavor to the partner program, you just water it down for everybody.

Nick Goellner:

Sure.

Wade Anderson:

I felt like we've got options on that. Don't need another chip conveyor company. But then we started working together on some other projects. A gentleman that reports to me is a guy named Tom O'Toole. He's our double column product specialist manager and he manages all the big machines, all the big double columns. You could put a house on the table of these things. And most of the ones we bring in, we bring in without a full enclosure because everybody's needs are a little bit unique and it never fails. When we bring the machine in from Japan with our corporate full enclosure on it, there's modifications that's got to be done. There's different things that you have to tweak to make it fit for this customer. And Tom had worked with you guys on a customer application. I don't know if we can say their name, but a customer application.

Nick Goellner:

Sure.

Wade Anderson:

It was from a project management standpoint to final execution and sign off was just flawless and-

Nick Goellner:

Is this the video?

Wade Anderson:

Yes.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, you could say their name. It's a company called Bluco.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, Bluco. Wasn't sure.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, it's one of my favorite videos.

Wade Anderson:

We didn't prep it.

Nick Goellner:

I know exactly what you're talking about now.

Wade Anderson:

Yep. That was one side of it. And then looking at what you guys do from an AME standpoint with basically with custom integration of workholding, automation, things like that. I'm a firm believer that automation, as much as we talk about it and it's the wave of the future and it's here now and all we're doing, we're focusing a lot on automation, there's so much more that can be done, but it takes creative minds and it takes not just the creative minds, but the horsepower behind it to execute it.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, exactly.

Wade Anderson:

And you guys brought that. For me, bringing you guys in from a Partners in THINC standpoint, wasn't about chip conveyors. It was about all the engineering horsepower and fabrication, machining, and things like that, that you guys bring to the table.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, makes a lot of sense and for us, we take a big risk to employ that many different kinds of engineers. I'm sure you're familiar with this industry when you have to design and build a solution that you may only sell once, it's challenging to be profitable and you got to try to think, "Okay. Is it worth it for us to have this capacity?" But we've always decided that we're going to be a design and build company. That's going to be one of the things that makes us unique. And we have a high tolerance for risk. We go after the projects that other people will be like, "There's too many things that could go wrong." That's where we raise our hand.

Nick Goellner:

And so, I think you hit the nail on the head for our value proposition. Between everything that we do at AME and Hennig, it's all designed around how do we make our customer successful? And we staff accordingly. We have controls engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, all sorts of different engineers And then the manufacturing capacity to actually build the stuff and test it on our floor and make sure it works before we ship it out to the customer.

Wade Anderson:

Yep. I think you touched on something that I like and I gravitate to is, you've got a high tolerance for risk. I think there's a lot of companies that they think about innovation and they want to do these cool custom one-off, Skunk Works kind of projects as long it's guaranteed to be a home run success, right? You can't guarantee that. I think you either have that in your DNA or you don't have it in your DNA. You have a proven manufacturing process and you don't want to waver from that, or you've got it in your company DNA that you're flexible. You're Gumby-like where you can take the risk and know sometimes it's a home run, sometimes it's going to be a dud, and you got to be able to level load that and be able to ride the peaks and valleys and make a business unit off of it. I think it's a different-

Nick Goellner:

You just nailed it. I mean, we think of our custom machine design and build business group as our R&D department because for every time you make one of one thing and you maybe didn't make a bunch of money on it, there's that fourth or fifth time where now you need 10 of them or now, like you said, could become a whole business unit, a whole new product line. By having that DNA, it allows us to create opportunities for ourselves whereas if we were to be like, "Hey, you're just balance sheet only type thinkers," like "I'm just going to look at the Excel sheet and that's not making money here." Next thing you know, it's like, "Okay, well you have no capacity for innovation anymore because all you do is focus on making the same thing over and over again." And there's a lot to be said about being able to make the same thing over and over again and doing it well. And there's a lot of really great lean minds who can optimize that whole thing. But for us, we'll never lose our inventiveness.

Wade Anderson:

Right, and I think that's important. That's part of the entrepreneur spirit that you have to have to be able to grow into different markets. I've seen people, there's these CEOs that are turnaround specialists. They come in and turn a company around and you can see there's different personality types or different philosophies with that. And there's some that are really good at not losing money and then there's some that are really good at making money. And those are two complete different philosophies, different mindsets. One is more about avoiding risk and being safe and doing your spreadsheet type management versus the other one of, "How do we balance that with taking the risk and growing and stepping out into things that make us uncomfortable?"

Nick Goellner:

This comes back to the whole visionary and integrator at the head of every business unit because I got one thinker who's like, "Okay, let's protect this," and the other one who's like, "Let's go attack."

Wade Anderson:

Right. But if you don't get out of your comfort zone and try something, you never expand that boundary.

Nick Goellner:

Exactly.

Wade Anderson:

You can't push the limits to see, well, why can't we do that?

Nick Goellner:

Right. Right. Exactly, like starting a podcast.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, there you go. Exactly.

Nick Goellner:

Not a lot of people think of that as... And to your point earlier, there's so many different professional career paths in this industry. If you're really into content marketing and you like the idea of creating a podcast, you can get a job at one of the biggest brands in the whole industry. You know what I mean? It's interesting.

Wade Anderson:

Yep. Yeah, I started out, I think I've said this before on this podcast, but my first job from a chip making standpoint, was turning chips on an Okuma LB15.

Nick Goellner:

Okay.

Wade Anderson:

Now full circle, I'm working for the company that I started making chips on.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, that's awesome.

Wade Anderson:

Interesting how it goes. And to your point of, if you told me when I was graduating high school that I'd be sitting across the table from a guy that was in marketing and talking podcasts and things like that, I'd told you were crazy. Now all these years later, I won't say how many years, but here I am. I went from being a machinist and doing service work and application engineering work to now more on the sales and partner side of things and it's interesting how there's so many different opportunities in this field.

Nick Goellner:

Exactly. And what I've found is the people... You don't really ask for a promotion. You just go take that new job. You see an opportunity. You just go make that your job. That seems to be a common thread with successful people in our industry is you just find an opportunity and you just go start doing it and it just becomes your job. You know what I mean?

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, that's a very good point. This whole podcast thing, this isn't my full-time job, by the way. People listening, it's just something we do to supplement part of what we do in the industry. But to your point, it was exactly that. It was just, "Hey, this idea was kicking around the company and it was one of those things of somebody needs to do something about this. Somebody ought to..." Okay. Well, be that somebody. And that doesn't matter if you're talking maintenance on a machine tool. Somebody ought to be maintaining this machine properly. Well, be that somebody. Be the guy that gets in there and makes it happen.

Nick Goellner:

And make a YouTube video that shows exactly how to do it for the next guy. See, I think you took it a step further than a lot of people would. A lot of people would have this conversation, two people on the phone, but by recording it, we get to inspire so many more people. And so, a lot of people will know how to do maintenance, but if you record it and do a how-to fix your chip conveyor or whatever it might be, now all of a sudden, you can inspire more people.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, your reach just got expanded.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, it's all just being open to new possibilities and being open to innovation.

Wade Anderson:

Right. This conversation's gone a lot of different routes here, but talk a little bit about from the viewpoint of a customer. I'm Wade Anderson. I own Wade Anderson's Pretty Good Machine Shop. I make these widgets. I'm a job shop. I'm going after work. How do I expand that? How do I grow that? How has marketing changed in today's world than what it was 5, 10 years ago? I think we're seeing things more at a very fast rate as technology changes and people are adopting YouTube and podcasts and things like that. I mean, what do you see from a marketing standpoint? And again, view it from if you're the shop owner, you're the guy making chips... Keep going back to you're MakingChips reference but-

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, we got a good name there.

Wade Anderson:

Its such a good name, right? But you're the guy making chips and how do you expand that business? How do you reach new people? I mean, what are things you're seeing marketing's changing?

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, probably the biggest thing is more of a mindset thing. I think there used to be an over-emphasis on protecting your intellectual property and, what I would call, closed innovation. The best ideas come from our company. We're going to keep everything internal. We're going to hide our secrets. And I'm not saying, "Give all your detailed CAD away."

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, your IP.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, I mean, there's value to that and you do have to protect it, but I think it's like, "Okay, if I share my process, my competitors could find it and take it and do it better than I could." And so, a lot of people were hesitant to even take pictures of what they're doing or share what they're doing or explain to even their customers how they do it so well because they just are too... It's a fear-based mindset about, "What if my competitor gets a hold of this?"

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, the "what if" mindset?

Nick Goellner:

Yeah. And I think you can turn that. You can make it positive and say, "Well, what if my audience learns why I do this or how I do it," or "What if the next young, talented machinist that I'm trying to hire, the next young, talented engineer sees what makes our company special?" And so, by being more open and sharing what you're doing, you'll start to see that yeah, a lot more people see it. Some of them may be your competitors, but the people who you want to see what makes you special, how you process a part or how you design something, or what's unique about your approach, the more you share that, the better it actually is for your own company.

Nick Goellner:

Forget about if your customers are going to find it because if they really want to find it, they're going to find it anyway. It's really not that hard to get ahold of stuff. You can buy it through somebody else and reverse engineer it or whatever. If you really want to find something on your competition, you probably can. But I think the companies that are open and say, "Here's what makes us special. I want to be the leader in this area. I want to teach others. I want to inspire an entire audience that may include some of my competitors, but I'm going to be the reason they learned about that, instead of they learned about it from my competitor because they beat me to it." I think that's probably the biggest, philosophical change that I've seen.

Nick Goellner:

And it's really hard being on the sales and marketing side of our business to get people to let go a little bit because I'll be trying to pull insight from our engineers and use it to inspire an audience. And they're always like, "Well, do I want to share that?" I'm like, "Look, I'm not going to publish your CAD everywhere, okay?" Here's an example. I have two educational blogs on my website. One of them is called the Sawing Academy and the other one's called Workholding Wisdom. And we just literally publish our insight on there for anyone to see. Anyone could use it. And a competitor could visit it, but I'm more interested in the next partner that I want to be reading that site and saying, "Wow, I want to work with them," or the next customer to read that and be like, "I trust them that they're going to be able to design a fixture around my part."

Nick Goellner:

I think for that, Joe's Pretty Good Machine Shop. What makes you special? Don't be afraid to share it. If your machinist has his phone out in the shop and he's not playing a YouTube video or watching something that's distracting him, but instead he's taking a short clip for an Instagram or whatever it is to try to get your brand out there, that could be the best thing that you've ever got going on from marketing and it's pretty much free.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. There's a guy I watch on... Different industry, but along the same philosophical view. I'm trying to think the name of it. I think it's BlueCollarKyle on Snapchat and he wears, I think it's the Google glasses, got the little camera built into it and he does-

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, the HoloLens. Yeah.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah, he does the body shop work. And I just find it so interesting that all the stuff that I've always wondered, "How do you do all that," well, he's showing you point-blank, day to day, and why his skill set is so valuable as a skilled trades type person. But yeah, to your point, everybody, every competitor could see it as well. I could see it and say, "Oh well, I'm going to start doing my own body work." Well no, I'm not because I do other things that adds a lot more value to my life. If I dent up a fender. I'm taking it to probably Kyle's Pretty Good Body Shop, somewhere, right?

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, exactly because I already seen it. I know this guy's good. It's the same thing Home Depot or Lowe's does. They show you how to fix your dishwasher or whatever. Yeah. And then I'm the moron who gets halfway through it and it's like, "Dang, I should've just called their service guy. He made it look so easy."

Wade Anderson:

I would have been money ahead if I had just had somebody come in here and in an hour be gone.

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, for sure.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent. Well, very good. What do you see in the future? I mean, what future trends do you see in manufacturing?

Nick Goellner:

I'm more focused on the business development sales and marketing side. And so, my perspective goes through that lens. But one thing that I would say that I see coming in the future is something that I'm calling product and content integration. What I mean by that is, for example, I'll just use an example that we use because it's fresh in my mind. If you have a damaged way cover and you look at our name tag, there's a QR code on it and you can pull your phone out and scan that QR code. It's going to let you know everything you need to know about that product. Helpful videos, where our local service center is, the difference between a steel way cover and a bellow. Just on the actual physical product, it's going to be amplified. The value of our physical product will be amplified by the digital content that we create around it.

Nick Goellner:

I see that happening more and more. I mean, you can get real futuristic in the virtual reality and augmented reality to the point where I've seen some really good examples of people standing in front of a machine with an augmented reality device or virtual reality glasses, where it's telling you as you look at it, "Open this. Check this. This could be what's wrong." A lot of that digital amplification of the physical product. I think that's something we're going to continue to see and that's exciting for marketers because that's where we live. We're always describing the value of products. And so, I think it's great when the actual reason someone buys your product is because of how well you crafted content that supports it.

Wade Anderson:

Yeah. Fantastic. Well, I think we're coming up about on our time slot here. Nick, I really appreciate you joining us. I appreciate all of you listening to this episode of Shop Matters. If you have any thoughts, ideas, questions, you can reach me at www.okuma.com/shop-matters. Nick, how do they reach you? What's a good way to get ahold of Hennig, AME, and Goellner?

Nick Goellner:

Yeah, all of our websites make it really easy to get into contact. You can reach me at my email address, [email protected]. And of course, you can find me at MakingChips, just makingchips.com, all one word, and subscribe and get some more insight if you got other podcasts you want to listen to.

Wade Anderson:

Excellent. I appreciate your time today. Till next time.