Career Consultant Who Bought a 7-Figure Manufacturer

So it's not, that doesn't mean there's 400 active work orders happening on the project floor, on the shop floor each day. That just means things that are in our pipeline that are getting scheduled day by day. Any given day, you may have three, four, five different customers, projects happening on the shop floor.

But it's really the dynamics of how quickly the customer needs something, what materials we actually have on hand. Are we still waiting on something? Do we have someone out sick that day that needs to work on that particular project?

So it's been a really big challenge to keep, maintain the same clip of workload and capacity that we have with one of our lasers down. Yeah.

One down because you were swapping in a new one.

Yes, yes. We had a Ferrari and what we really needed was a Toyota. We had a fast machine, but it was also one that was pretty expensive to operate and maintain. And we needed more of the Toyota.

It's not literally a Toyota, but... Um, something that, uh, a lot lower maintenance, um, still very high performance machine. So we went ahead and decided to purchase that.

Um, and yeah, and that, that's that in and of itself, it's like, well, you're, you're now spending more money on something that you'd already baked into what you thought the business could generate. And that's what drove the valuation. So it, that's a tough pill to swallow, but I'm, I'm not going anywhere anytime soon.

I mean, I'm, I'm here for quite some time. And so. If I thought about what we needed in place, we needed a new laser, and we also have a new automated loader that will let us load in, say, five, ten sheets of metal and just have those go through and be processed automatically.

Not fully hands-off, but we're not going lights out or anything, but that's where you can walk away from the machine and just have it do its work while people are doing other value-add work throughout the shop.

Yeah. Well, sorry to keep focusing on all these places you spent additional money, Paul. For the benefit of the audience, another illustration of a feature of this business, which is the capex intensive nature. So you get in there and you got to buy a new laser.

Now, maybe you were able to, and this other thing, what did you call it? Yeah. It's a loader.