Growing a $5m Metal Business 40% in Year 1

Right. But you can also look underneath and say if, if this is what you can see, then you have an idea about do they take pride in their work? Are there some systems involved? Do they take care of the equipment?

And those things tell you, I mean, they're technical things, yes, but they also tell you deeply about the type of people who work there. Right. Because conversely, manufacturing facilities can be a mess. Right. And that tells you something too.

And I think you can also tell that by the length of tenure of the people there. Right. And one of the unique things about this business was too that typically a lot of manufacturing, the skilled workforce is aging out. We actually have a relatively early career workforce, especially for a business like that.

And so that told you something about how they develop people, how they bring people along and the fact that people actually wanted to make a career here. Right.

And so then the, the sort of values that you were, look, these tells, these signals that you were paying attention to, to indicate what you're looking for are values that are values of quality. So the quality of the product, the at which tell would be kind of the quality of the facility. So a high quality shop and then treating people well there, treating the employees well, cultivating employees.

Does that sound right or is there something even more specific? And the reason I'm pressing on this is because you did emphasize in our pre call, as you are now, values. And, and that's not necessarily something I hear very often. So I'm just trying to tease it out.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's the fact that deeply, a lot of businesses say that they care about people again. And obviously the job of a business is to make money. Right? A business is there to serve its customers and to make money.

And that's how it's mostly talked about. But we believe that there's a third pillar, which is the business is there to care for its employees and be a steward of those employees. Because none of us lives to work, we work to live.

Now, we may have different views of what that looks like. I work a lot and There's a lot of people who don't want to work as much as I do, and that's fine, but that's something that we believe is important. And so that value there, you know, probably the third value that we have, I mean these, these are our values that are on the wall.

But it's create value for our customers, care for each other and continuously improve. And, and the continuous improvement is the one that we've kind of had to add. But that one in some ways is, is the easiest one to add, right?

Having somebody who says, you know, one thing we heard over and over was that we put the Springfield name on these things and you can walk around our customers facilities and see our name on it. We want you to be proud.