Staying Customer-Centric Through Sustained Company GrowthStaying Customer-Centric Through Sustained Company Growth

Staying Customer-Centric Through Sustained Company Growth Transcript:

Jeff White: Welcome to The Kula Ring, a podcast for manufacturing marketers brought to you by Cooler Partners. My name is Jeff White, and joining me today is Carman Pirie. Carman, how you doing sir? I’m 

Carman Pirie:  I’m doing great. How you doing? 

Jeff White: I’m doing excellent, thanks. 

Carman Pirie: I’m doing great because we’ve been doing this show for a long time, and the listeners know that there’s a fair bit of overlapping topics over time. Not that that’s a bad thing. I always explore in a different way, but it’s really fun when you just get to talk about something completely different. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s a topic that’s near and dear to our hearts. Something that we both enjoy in various ways.

Carman Pirie: Yeah. Which part? The selling part or the speed part? 

Jeff White: Both certainly speed on my path. Anything that can be done quickly is enjoyable. As far as I’m concerned. 

Carman Pirie: Everybody of a certain vintage is wondering if we’re talking about another type of speed at this point? 

Jeff White: Oh no. More, more like speed on wheels. But look, let’s jump into it and introduce today’s guest. I’m looking forward to getting this conversation underway.

Carman Pirie: Me too. 

Jeff White: So joining us today is Sean Momsen. Sean is the VP of Business Development and Marketing at Evology Manufacturing. Welcome to The Kula Ring, Sean.

Sean Momsen: Thank you, guys, for having me. Yeah. Excited to talk about all things speed of business.

Carman Pirie: Sean, I appreciate the business specificity there to get us away from our previous comment. 

Jeff White: Yeah. Gotta pull us away from that, that ditch 

Carman Pirie: Indeed. 

Jeff White: Maybe it’s three espressos that have got me thinking about things very clearly.

Carman Pirie: First thing, first, Sean, let’s understand, Evology, what do y’all do there? 

Sean Momsen: So, Evology is a rapid manufacturing company, is the best way to describe us. We’re a build-to-print company, so we build parts for other people, and we just happen to do it very quickly. We use a multitude of different manufacturing technologies from, traditional manufacturing of machining and assembly and fabrication, all the way to additive manufacturing. Myself and my business partners even though the company is fairly young, just over two years old, we’ve got quite a bit of extensive manufacturing experience in, number of different industries and have a lot of experience in additive manufacturing. So, 3D printing very early on, I think my business partners at a previous business that they were at got their first 3D printer in 1995 or 1996, and their first metal 3D printer in 2004, 2005. So very early on in the technology process.

Jeff White: A lot of people think of 3D printing as a relatively new thing, but obviously, it goes back quite a long way, well before that, but certainly popularized in the last decade or so. 

Sean Momsen: Yeah, I think it’s maybe new to consumers and attainable to consumers with some of the desktop units coming out and the advances of computing and programming, where it used to be just more of a prototyping tool for industrial products.

Jeff White: I have a question for you about the formation of the company, but I’d love to learn a little bit more just about your background before you helped form Evology here. 

Sean Momsen: As any good college student might do, you change your major and change what you want to do in life based on your skills. So I started as a mechanical engineering student, and ’cause I’m a big gearhead, I always wanted to design cars and love how they work. I love working on my own vehicles, but. I quickly realized, as I got into class, that I was not very good at CAD. And so computer-aided design, and I would be in class and we’re trying to be 3D modelling this thing, and I’d look over at the guy next to me and he’d have the whole thing done with like crazy text swirls on it to flare it up a little bit.

And for me, I was still like a block with a chip out of it. I realized that some of my skills weren’t necessarily going to help me along in finding a career in mechanical engineering, and transitioned to a major that had the dynamics, statics, that type of stuff, but it was also more business-focused. So I transitioned to there. I got my start in an internship doing hot section, non-moving parts for turbine engines. Land-based gas turbines, auxiliary power unit turbine engines, kinda moved into the overhaul and repair of those. More of the customer-facing side working with them and their fleets of engines to overhaul and repair them for the airlines. People think of airplanes and engines are really just a battery for them, right? They will take the engine off, send it out to get repaired and put a new one on so they can keep that asset flying and keep it making money. Obviously,, that’s not a two hour job to change an engine.

But then from there went into product development. Really got my start as a product manager. We were developing lighting and electronics for the interior of aircraft and exterior of aircraft. So we were changing all the incandescent lights to LED to make it more efficient and lighter weight and everything like that. And then moved from there into a returnable packaging business and was the director of product management for a few of our teams there. And then all throughout all of those careers, I had used a company called Midwest Composite Technologies as a supplier of mine that could do things quickly, get prototypes so we could get through product development testing as fast as possible. And in the aviation product development industry, if you don’t hit timelines, there are fines. There’s, I remember one project we were on, it was $10,000 a day for every day we were late in delivering the product, ’cause the aircraft can’t fly. So this company eventually went to work there.

Met my business partners, my Evology business partners, there. And eventually we ended up leaving that company, letting our non-competes expire, and then starting up Evology manufacturing roughly two years ago, ’cause we love making cool things and we like working with engineers and making things happen very quickly.

Jeff White: What an awesome trajectory. It’s very cool. Wanting to be a mechanical engineer and then realizing you’re not good at CAD was like when I went to design school and then found out I was really terrible at drawing. And when you started Evology with your partners, was the goal originally to think about things in terms of the speed that you could bring them to market? Was that the founding principle of what you were looking to accomplish? 

Sean Momsen: Yeah. Yeah. I think, we’re very much a service-based industry, even though we’re manufacturing tangible, physical products. We’re not doing the design. Our customers are doing the design. They know their products and their customer base better than we do. Where we come in with design is really designed for manufacturing or additive design for additive manufacturing, where we can help them. Hey, if you change this feature, we can orient the part at a different angle and actually build it faster or reduce your cost because we don’t have to have as much post-processing. And so we helped them with more of the manufacturing process design and whatnot. But yeah, we certainly had this service in mind. When we left the previous company, it was our service had gone downhill. And if you’re paying for this additive service and rapid prototyping service, you should want to get it quickly.

We knew we could do it. We had done it for a long time. I experienced it as a customer for a long time. And we knew what we could do and got back into it. 

Carman Pirie: Is it in some ways? Maybe I’ve already answered the question, but it just seems weird to me. Not weird, but in some instances, the world of additive manufacturing and 3D printing, like you just said, it’s rapid prototyping, like rapid’s kind of in the name. Speed is expected. So is it just that the industry overall has maybe gotten a little slower, as there’s been some consolidation and bigger players are in it, and they just maybe don’t move as fast, they’re not as responsive. What’s happened there? 

Sean Momsen: I think getting away from things that surveys show and really understanding your customers and what their needs are, right?

We’re not an inexpensive product or service that we produce. And it’s interesting when we get our customers who typically produce. Their production numbers are higher in a month, a lot of times, than our single year of even just parts manufactured. But they’re doing it differently, right?

And so when they come in. And they see some of our machines sitting idle. They get nervous, is this company gonna be okay? And I have to tell them and remind them that when their engineer calls at, 3:45 in the afternoon and gives me a file, I can have that file printing at four o’clock in the afternoon and they can pick it up on the way to work the next day if it’s a short enough bill.

If I didn’t have that machine empty and it wasn’t waiting there, I couldn’t provide the level of service that we want to provide for people. So when our backlog gets out, two weeks is a long time for us. We start getting nervous, and we’re like, oh, we can’t provide that level of service we want to provide.

Jeff White: I love how you’re thinking about the business and how you execute on this. I’m wondering how does it come to life in your marketing? Like, how are you explaining this and getting that point across? 

Sean Momsen: Yeah, I think having been on the other side, I know what it’s like to go into these product development meetings and have to tell upper management, Hey, we failed a test. We’re not on track anymore. Or, tell your customer that you’re developing the product for hey, we might be late. Or things aren’t going as planned, or those types of conversations where you get into the unknowns because you’re developing a product, it’s brand new. Things are going to happen.

And so the answer is usually is, what’s the plan to recover? How are we gonna do this? And a lot of times, that goes back to how much overtime we can work or is there anything we can do to pay more to expedite to figure this out? And it gets back to just the human element of it, right? I had to look those engineers in the face and say, Hey guys I’m sorry, but is there anybody willing to come in this weekend to work on this so we can try to get ahead of Monday so that we can condense this critical path of timeline, we can get back on track. Is there anybody willing to do that?

And when we at Evology hear from an engineer or a buyer or a customer that, there’s that human element in there of, we’re not just doing things quickly to get the product back on track. We’re doing it so you don’t have to come in on Saturday and we’re doing it so you can go to your kids’ baseball game.

And it’s that human element that we try to come across in our marketing, we understand you’re a human, you’re a very intelligent business person developing some of the most innovative products in the world. But at the same time, you’ve got a family, you’ve got friends, you’ve got a partner that you want us to spend time with. And so what we really do is sell time.

Carman Pirie: And do you, you express, I’m gonna, man I wanna start writing some ad copy for this, right? It feels like you could have a lot of fun. Yeah. Are you being that pointed and that explicit as you’re marketing the customers or more in the sales conversation?

Sean Momsen: A little bit of both. We’re trying to figure out, we do a lot of content marketing. We develop content. We try to be as like you said in the beginning, people sometimes, think additive is new. And so we try to educate as much as we can for the people who still think it’s new or for the new things that are happening that they might need to be educated on.

They might not know about the latest material or this new software package or this new additive technology, or mixing and matching of technologies together to help get them the results they need. So we take very much the educational approach first and then probably, I would say about 10% of our content is focused on that emotional. The emotional approach. And I think as we start we’re still, two years old, so we’re still in, hey, we exist mode we’re here, we’re around. So once we get more of our brand established, I think we’ll probably transition to more of that emotional connection and less of the education.

Right now. The education certainly helps for SEO and search and, placing that content. But we try to still get to it. It’s just we’re maybe not as pointed on that. Content side as I am in this conversation or like you said, more I certainly view marketing as from knowledge of existence to RFQ that kind of span. And then sales is more RFQ until you get paid. That’s how I view the separation of the two duties 

Jeff White: On that point. I noted on your homepage one of the headings about halfway down the page it says quotes in hours, delivery in days. And you see here that there’s speed baked into that, obviously in messaging that you’re using, but then it also has to come to life on the backend from a sales perspective. So, I don’t know how far you want to go into that, but I’d be interested to understand how you… Is there automation involved? What are you doing in order to be able to quickly turn those things around? 

Sean Momsen: That’s the core of our business, right? That service aspect of it. It’s not just a slogan. We try to live that as best we can. And when we know we’re not gonna live up to that, we try to inform our customer right away. Hey, I know you’re used to getting quotes in a few hours from us. This is gonna take a little longer. And just set that expectation. Some of our competitors have an online quoting system or an instant quote where you upload a file and it’ll give you a price. We certainly try to take the more relationship path with that. We don’t have a online price tool or anything like that. We have an upload form where you submit your file and tell us a little bit about your project and what’s important to you. And you’ll probably get a phone call from us or an email back asking for some more information because a lot of those online tools. You don’t know what orientation the part is gonna be in. It’s probably just the cheapest, fastest way to get it to you, and they might gloss over what’s important where, if as someone who’s been in product development, you can look at it and say, okay, where is this going in the project?

And what’s important? Is there a bearing that gets pressed into this? So you need a really tight tolerance for where that’s gonna go. Or do you just need something that’s gonna work? Or are aesthetics really key on this because you’re gonna put this on a boardroom table in front of executive leadership, and it just doesn’t need to function. It needs to look good too. There’s all these little nuances to it that will change the way we do something. And so that’s why when we do say quotes and hours, our average quote turnaround time is about three hours. Once you give us all the information you need, we need to quote it. It’s about a three-hour turnaround on most of the stuff we do. Again, we’ll set that expectation if it’s gonna be longer upfront. Then our average plastic turnaround time is about 18 hours. So we’re, from the time the PO comes in to the time it ships out the door is about 18 hours. Now there are certainly builds that can last three days, seven days, 15 days of building before the part’s done.

But that’s our average. And then for metal, we’re around a two to three-day turnaround time. We try to put some automation in there to help our workflows. We try to communicate to our customers the file type we need to help make us efficient, so we don’t have to go convert it, or we try to give the… Ask for the information that we need upfront to help make us efficient, which helps get them what they need faster. We have a homegrown ERP system and MES system that I can pull up on my phone. I can look at our visual. We have a bunch of big screen TVs around the place that have our schedule on them.

So anybody can look at it at any time and say, how far out is our lead time, and can I take this job? And if I take this job, what is gonna be my delivery date to the customer? So we’re all on that same page. It may not be the most efficient way to do it, but if it gets it out the door faster to our customer, that’s what matters, and making sure it’s right when it leaves our building.

Carman Pirie: Sean, I wonder, as you go down this path of really leaning into selling speed and making that the end I appreciate that there are lots of other benefits to doing business with y’all. It’s not like you don’t know what you’re doing and you’re only selling speed, right? You’re selling quality fast, et cetera, but nevertheless, leaning in and selling speed. Is there any part of you that’s concerned that as you grow, that you won’t be able to be as fast? 

Sean Momsen: No, I think it’s certainly scalable. That was one of the things that the previous company had, they had some concern over that it wouldn’t be, but then when they tried to scale it, it didn’t work, and we went backwards. But they weren’t scaling it the way we knew how to scale it, I think. Certainly here, it’s that communication aspect and some process or sorry, as you guys would say, process. Putting that in place to make sure there’s some consistency. There’s that standard work, but then when things don’t go right, you still have to have that freedom to flex; it gets back to that mix of people as well as equipment. The nice thing about this equipment is that you do the work up front. You hit the button and it goes right. You have to maybe load it with material or do something like that. And then the labor work also happens on the post-processing side. So after it comes out, cleaning the part up, getting it ready to ship. So I think as we lean into speed and how we can continue to grow yet stay efficient and stay having the best service in the industry. There are just some key positions that we need to continue to add to make sure that deviation of work always leads back to customer experience and customer satisfaction. It starts on the front end right now it’s me doing a number of the quotes when they come in. When we get a lot of quotes in at one time, we’re a small business, right? So we flex, and I’ll pull in our operations guy to help with quoting, and then vice versa. Hey, quoting is a little slow right now can you help change over a machine? Can you help break this part out? As a small business, we can do that. And so that cross-training is very key as we continue to grow and scale on the sales side, on the operations side, and continuing through those things. So you can flex when you need to, right?

Carman Pirie: That would be an interesting process to watch evolve over the next number of years. 

Jeff White: It is right, the name of the company. Yeah. 

Carman Pirie: Just so. Jeff, you can think about that as an agency owner, probably much the same way. If you wanna hire a web designer who can also do some front-end coding and isn’t a bad illustrator and so on, and you’re trying to get that kind of cross-function, and it is possible, but you’re going after unicorns on an ongoing basis, and so the pool is small. Yeah. I appreciate that. This might be a bit different, but it’s kinda, I think it will be interesting to see how the systems that you build into maintain the speed advantage. 

Sean Momsen: Yeah, we’re always… We’re very much a theory of constraints view, again, back to that machine. If I don’t have an empty machine, there’s my constraint right away, right? If I have a bunch of quotes coming in, I’m the constraint and I need help. So pull in operations if we’ve got a bunch of work. But like you said, on the creative side, it’s being able to flex and not necessarily what those people want to do every day. But what they still can do, and they’re somewhat good at, if the vision is clear of the business and they can see how what they’re doing is task significant to the end goal, then it’s okay. We’ve gone a week or two months with this constraint, people aren’t liking it. So we clearly need to hire for that core competency. But then once that core person comes in, we’re gonna cross-train them as well. You know and that job description has to have that in there, too.

Jeff White: How have your, I guess I’ll ask this as a bit of a two-pronged question, but how have your customers responded to this and how have your competitors responded?

Sean Momsen: So customer wise, a lot of our previous customers are very excited that we’re back. And they are ecstatic. Our biggest challenge with them right now is the previous business took 30, 40 years to build all that capacity, all that technology, all of that. And they want us back. But with that level, and obviously we’re still a small business. We’re growing, we’re adding, and we’re doing the right things and we’re on our way, we just can’t snap our fingers and get there with how we need to. So they’re excited.

Our competitors, it’s been… An interesting few years just in the overall additive space. Not just companies like US, contract manufacturers and service providers, but even in the OEM machine manufacturers, the people who are making the machines that we buy and use to service it. It’s been interesting. There’s been a ton of consolidation on the machine manufacturer side as well as the service provider side, some of these online platforms. I think the interesting thing is you get back to the speed side of things and once you can provide somebody with that level of service, they usually don’t go anywhere else. And so that’s been our biggest challenge is we don’t want to grow to fast, and let our customers down. We never want them to experience that because if we do and we can’t provide the service levels they need, they’re gonna have to go somewhere else because that project has to be done. So for us it’s making sure we can always provide that level of service, which means machines sitting idle waiting for a job to come in or… Not advertising a technology as much until we get enough capacity where, we don’t just have one machine, we’ve got a few machines that we can keep going. And then the labor side of things and the talent side of things. Making sure we have the right people cross-trained before we go out and start advertising a technology right. 

Carman Pirie: I think Sean, I think it’s gonna be fascinating to watch it grow though. This is a cool approach. I really, I don’t know. I feel as we started this conversation, I was like, okay, are we gonna be able to get Sean off of his game here where he stops talking about speed and then, and get distracted. Man. I think I tried a number of times and, you’re very focused on this being the core differentiator and that’s I think a lot of people listening would do well to listen to that part of it, whether it’s speed or some other point of differentiation. It’s the focus on it that I think is going to win the day here. So thank you for sharing your experience with us. This has been awesome. 

Sean Momsen: Absolutely. I think that customer experience is so key. Like you guys could literally go out and buy the exact same machines we have, do the exact same thing. And if you can’t provide that level of service, where are people gonna go? Obviously there’s a pricing element and everything like that to it, but whether it’s a restaurant, whether it’s a marketing agency, whether it’s whatever business you have, if you can do something faster than somebody else for relatively the same price you’re gonna win, right?

Speed is such a key differentiator. The challenge with that is making sure that speed doesn’t sacrifice that customer experience, right? If you make yourself fast but difficult to do business with… It has to go hand in hand with being easy to do business with as well. So I think that’s really where we see the great feedback from our customers. Rarely do they say you’re the best price out there, but they say your service and ability to pull rabbits out of the hat is really good. 

Jeff White: Man, you don’t often actually see somebody who fulfills… normally it’s the, you can have two of three, quality, speed, or price. But you guys seem to be hitting all three. So I’ve really enjoyed the way that this conversation has gone. And as an entrepreneur myself, I love hearing about not just how you’re talking about it from a marketing and sales perspective, which is obviously where most of our audience is, but also just from how you’ve structured the business and thought about it from the, imagining it at the beginning and how you’re executing on that. It’s been really fascinating. Thanks so much. 

Sean Momsen: Yeah, thanks for having me. I think somebody asked me the other day if I would give you a million dollars to market. What would you do? What would you use it on? I think we keep doubling down on content. I think that is the ocean front property that everybody can buy right now. You just keep making as much as you can and keep buying that ocean front property. But then I would honestly put it into our operations side of things. Because the best marketing and the best salesman’s tool is, execution of doing what you say you’re gonna do. 

Jeff White: So wonderful. Thanks.