Kevin

Hard things I learned in scaling a manufacturing business that I wasn’t fully prepared for: - as the company gets bigger, using slack to communicate across all shifts and factories in different states sucks. You gotta try harder than slack. Things can get taken the wrong way (gotta use lots of emojis) and important messages get lost. Phone calls and travel are so much better but you gotta put in the effort - with 600 employees you don’t know everyone, but you still feel like they are your kids in a way. When someone loses a family member, or they have a sick kid, or they get into a motorcycle accident, I worry about them like they are my own kid. I can’t imagine how this is going to work at 6,000 employees. - entropy is real. We are fighting laws of thermodynamics lol. Everything wants to dissolve into disorder and chaos. Gotta fight it 24/7 - it’s easy to make negative assumptions. I see front office teams grow and I’m thinking “really? It’s a full time job just to do xyz??!” But then I sit with them and realize at scale, yes…it’s a full time job to do things that took us 20 minutes a week in the old days - many vendors and salespeople don’t give you the time of day when you’re small or starting out. Then you get to a certain size and they are begging for your business, offering discounts, and giving you access to crazy deals. If you survive the valley of death it’s nice on the other side - safety and compliance becomes a big deal. When it’s just 5 of you, safety is implied and everyone kinda gets it because everyone has “done it” before. With a larger population, you have to worry about so much more. Some people are brand new to manufacturing and don’t have the instincts that come with working with machines for years and years - the larger the company grows, the more you have to lose. hundreds of families count on me for a paycheck, so the stakes are really high. Easy to lose sleep when things go sideways for a little bit. - when you first start, things seem to cost a couple thousand $. Then after a while it’s $10k. Then $100k. Then you get comfortable with $1M or more and your concept of money is wildly skewed. Every quote you get is some batshit crazy amount of money but apparently that’s how much things cost - mistakes can cost many millions of dollars at scale. You can still take risks, but the downside starts to get bigger - you can’t be everywhere all the time, so you gotta have great people that would make the same decisions you would make if you’re not in the room. Or ideally they make an even better decision. Great leaders allow companies to grow. Build them early