S1 E05 - Mission Possible: Capt. Jason Deichler on Advanced Manufacturing and Naval Readiness

Sometimes the best innovations start with a simple question: "Can that part be made additively?" For Capt. Jason Deichler, that question sparked a Navy-wide manufacturing revolution.

In this episode of Manufacturing Mavericks, John Barnes sits down with Capt. Deichler, newly appointed Chief of Staff for the Director of Submarines and former Commodore of Submarine Squadron TWO. Through his former role, Capt. Deichler was the driving force behind the U.S. Navy's advanced manufacturing push in the submarine force. A proud Yinzer, Jason shares how a conversation with Admiral Gaucher sent him on a mission that's reshaping how the Navy thinks about parts, readiness, and the industrial base.

This episode is for the problem solvers, the servant leaders, and anyone who believes the best time to swing is before the curve breaks.

In this conversation, you'll hear:

• Why he chose submarines over the F-14 Tomcat (yes, he really did)
• How Admiral Gaucher's simple question sparked a Navy-wide manufacturing movement
• How cold spray technology turned a three-month submarine dry dock into a two-week fix

A conversation packed with leadership lessons, dad jokes, Hunt for Red October references, and a genuine love for the mission.

Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

Connect with John Barnes and The Barnes Global Advisors at barnesglobaladvisors.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

For first time ever saying this out loud anywhere. I've got a new company called TrueField Systems, and we're working on a small harvester.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

I don't know that we've ever launched a company on the podcast. Hey there and welcome to Manufacturing Mavericks from TBGA. I'm John Barnes, founder of the Barnes Global Advisors and Metal Powderworks. I'm a materials engineer, a girl dad, and a key stakeholder of two golden retrievers. I'm glad you're joining us. Each episode we shine a spotlight on the people pushing the boundaries of advanced manufacturing. We explore the edge of technology, dive into economic issues, the trends, the critical ideas driving manufacturing forward, with a special emphasis on the exciting world of additive and advanced manufacturing. We look at new tech breakthroughs, industry trends, and my favorite process economics. But we know there's more to work than just work, so we dig into leadership stories, life lessons, and the quirks that make this field fun. And yes, you can count on some dad jokes and some puns along the way because what's a show without a little groaning? Thanks for tuning in. Let's get into it. Joining me today is Scott Bletso, founder and inventor. I met Scott uh after I stopped mid-run one day listening to the merge podcast about uh the Fury unmanned fighter aircraft. He is a uh experienced aerospace executive with proven skills in building high-performing teams, rapid development of unique and difficult aircraft configurations, operations growth, bringing innovation to the DoD, and interestingly, implementation of quality management systems do not soul crush company culture. So thanks for joining us, Scott. Oh, you're welcome. Glad to be here, John. Hey, did you know that they found a dog floating in the ocean? No, I did not know that. He was a good boy.

SPEAKER_00 1:50

Oh, okay. Yeah. I'm I'm sure there'll be more groaning at it in post. Hey, I've got one, I've got one for you, actually. Oh, okay. And and I got this one from AFRL. So maybe we'll talk about AFRL more later. But uh somebody if at AFRL asked me, how do you know when a regular joke becomes a dad joke? Uh it becomes apparent. Ah, you know that one. Okay, all right. That one was new to me. I thought it was pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 2:13

Yeah, it is a good one. Yeah, so you've had uh a very interesting career. And and uh and I think for for our listening audience, like I was no joke, I was listening to the merge podcast, which if you don't listen to the merge podcast and you're remotely interested in defense and related stuff, I I highly recommend it. You and your co-founder were on talking about a variety of topics, color of money, how the fury came into existence, how it ended up at Andrew. And you know, it's pretty fascinating. I found because it helped like in a very short period of time, you covered a lot of topics, like you covered a lot of space, but you kind of hit on some relatively complex things, I felt like a good way. And I literally I was on a run and I literally stopped and tried to friend you on LinkedIn, which I don't normally do, mind you. I uh this is that was a first. And um I'm honored, thank you. So I was like, oh, this guy's gonna think I'm a freak. So I appreciate you know getting to this point. So we we've had a couple chats now. I I I I think it's also interesting, like we're about the same age. We have parallel experiences, I think, overall. Not carbon copies by any stretch, but you know, maybe later on we'll get into what we're talking about here. And I don't know whether there's anything to that or not. This is where I sort of put my psychologist hat on.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Well, we were both doing aerospace before it became cool. That's one thing. That's true. It's really aerospace. Yeah, it's having a moment now. I think we, you know, I think we both started in a little bit of a lull, uh, you know, kind of late Cold War, and it it wasn't it wasn't cool for a couple of decades, and then it became cool in the last decade.

SPEAKER_01 3:45

So yeah. Well, I know for me, like I always wanted to be a pilot, and I always wanted to be a naval aviator, and then Top Gun came along, and I was like, 100% that's gonna be me. And uh then I read about engineering and I read about materials engineering and how that was limiting these aircraft designs. Uh so that's how I got into it. But you got your bachelor's in in aerospace from NC State, and you started out with Navair. So you actually got to go work on these things, and I think you worked on the Harrier.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

That's right. Yeah, I went to work for the government right out of school. Um, and uh, you know, when I graduated in '94, there was a little bit of a recession going on, especially like I think a month before I started sending resumes out, Boeing laid off like 10,000 people or something. So uh it really seemed like a rough time, and it was a rough time. But yeah, you know, scrambled and found a job with Navair at Cherry Point, and I was working on the Harrier. So it was depot structural repair work that I was doing. And, you know, I like to tell people the Harrier was a fantastic airplane to learn how to be a structural engineer on because it's partly composite, it's partly metal. Uh, it was partly made in the UK with, you know, their names for their alloys and their type of primer, and partly made in the US and in, you know, good old St. Louis. Uh, and then of course the composite bits, uh, I believe they were mostly made in St. Louis, you know, autoclave composites, sort of old school, you know, 350 curing systems that were very finicky. And as an aircraft, it has all of the problems of helicopters and all of the problems of fighters that pull seven Gs. So low cycle fatigue, high cycle fatigue, acoustic fatigue. So it was it was great for me as a young engineer. I I don't know that it was that great uh, you know, for the owners for the Marine Corps, but you know, it certainly created a novel capability and it it paved the way to the uh F-35B.

SPEAKER_01 5:34

Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that uh so I I still had a similar experience, not the same as the Harrier, but um there was a work stoppage at Lockheed Martin one year, and a lot of the engineers went to go fill in the lines as uh as an aircraft mechanic. So I got to learn how to drill holes for two weeks. It's a lot harder to do it right, and especially in composites, and now I I I didn't love composites and I really hated them after I had to drill holes in them. All of the engineers learned a heck of a lot in a very short period of time. So all these things that we had specified, we are now having to do. And uh and they were like, well, we're not gonna do that again.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Yeah, isn't that the truth? I remember doing a um a repair one time. So so after uh Cherry Point, I went to work over in Naples, Italy, still for the US Navy. And there we would we would go all over and do repairs. But I remember working on a uh an EA6B that had a bird strike, and we were replacing the inlet skins, and the inlets, uh the inlet skins are riveted in with uh what are called icebox rivets. Are you familiar with icebox rivets? Yeah. So, you know, you basically are heat treating the rivet and then you're taking it out and you need to put it on dry ice. And I think with dry ice, you have like 24 hours to use it. We didn't have dry ice. So we were in Turkey at a Turkish Air Force base. We we found a heat treat oven across town, and like literally the the Navy guy working with me, you know, is driving like 90 miles an hour after getting these things out of the furnace before they before they cool off and harden because you have to buck them in about an hour, otherwise they're impossible to buck. Um, and so yeah, guy, guy gets a speeding ticket in Turkey. I don't know if he paid it, but uh you know, just but you don't think about these things, right? When you call it out on the drawing, it's just a two n two-letter code on a drawing, and you don't think about what it means to to call out some of these processes. So absolutely I agree with you. Every every engineer needs to get out in the shop sometimes.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

So you went from that experience, so you got, you know, I'll say got your hands dirty, let's say, and you know, somewhere along the line you crossed over from engineer to project engineer and engineering manager, much like I did. It it was was that an intentional thing, or is that just something that you kind of like I did, I just stumbled into it?

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Yeah, I think I just stumbled into it. I think, you know, and this is kind of a lesson for younger engineers. I mean, eventually you will probably find yourself, you know, if you're good at managing yourself, you'll you'll get more and more responsibility, right? So if you're good at at planning a project or or planning whatever scale of activity you're doing as a as a first year, second year, third year engineer, you'll you'll get trusted with more responsibility. And inevitably, you're gonna end up at the boundary with another discipline, right? So, and that to me is where all the really interesting stuff happens. I never wanted to be one of these people who was hyper specialized. Um, some people are. Some people are really good at it. They go on to become, you know, tech fellows, senior scientists at companies, but there's a lot of good work you can do by sort of learning how to meet the other discipline in the middle. And so, yeah, I highly recommend that you you think about that as you start your career.

SPEAKER_01 8:31

I think I I moved into project engineering and then program management from there. And and one of the rule, the the saying that you hear uh all the time is them that holds the gold makes the rules. And I thought that provided us a good amount of security because I I could then make the decision about where effort or resources need to be needed to be placed. And then I think uh so not many people probably know this company. Like if you've been in in the industry before it was cool, you would scaled composites, right? Uh, how did you get to there? And was that as cool as I imagined it to be?

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Yes, I it probably was. I think you know a little bit about scale, but yeah, I'll say that uh it is every bit what you could imagine. So I actually applied there coming right out of school. They didn't typically take people right out of school, and true to form, they didn't take me. Um and I'll say that, hey, just luckily after I was through working for the Navy, I had a security clearance and they had some work that required a clearance. So, you know, I I joke that you know they they lowered their technical standards for me because I had a clearance in place and it can take a year. It's yeah, I can well, if you don't have a clearance, it can take a year, right? So uh I think once I got on board, I proved my worth. But um it was it was an amazing place. If you're not familiar with it, go look it up. Um, you know, I highly encourage you to go find, I think it's on YouTube. There's a documentary called Black Sky, which was about the Spaceship One program. And you know, sadly, uh, you know, one of the guys featured in there, Mike Melville, just passed away in the last week. Um, but you know, it it it covers the the first privately manned or privately funded manned space program. So it was a suborbital space vehicle. It won the X Prize. I mean, sadly, now in 2026, I run into people who don't know what the X Prize was and how important that was. But I mean, John, you'll remember at the time that that was the most interesting thing going on in aerospace. And um, you know, at a time when we were putting people into suborbital space, NASA had no capability to put astronauts in space because of the Columbia disaster. So it was a really interesting time. It was an interesting time to show that a private company could could do amazing stuff. And at the same time, we were doing Spaceship One, which I was not a part of that program. I was running a defense program. Um so we had a significant defense program going on. We were working on an airplane that flew around the world unrefueled, single pilot, right? We we called it Capricorn. It was uh the global flyer. Uh, so Steve Fawcett, another, another gentleman who should rest in peace, was the project sponsor and the pilot on that. And so we had about a 130-person company at the time I got there. And we were working on all these major significant programs. And I learned a lot about that that I applied when I started my own business. And maybe maybe we'll get into that later. But yeah, if if you if you're not familiar with Burt Rutan, if you're not familiar with scale composites, uh, you owe it to yourself to go look it up.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

It kind of reminded me uh, you know, later on, I'd watched a movie of what it was like for the, you know, back in like the 50s, 40s, and 50s, you know, and the relationship that Lockheed and the other airplane manufacturers had with the airlines. It was a it was more of a camaraderie environment. And then from my experience dealing with some of the people in Palmdale, you know, with scale being up the road, they all knew each other. That was, you know, and I thought, oh, they'd be intensely competitive, but not really. You know, there was, I won't say a uh an open door policy, but I mean, it was it was a bit more of a brethren than sort of cutthroat uh competitor view.

SPEAKER_00 11:57

Yeah, I think at that time in aerospace, I think, you know, we're all battling with the same physics. Uh, and you know, this is sort of right after the Cold War. So I think there's still the mentality of we're helping preserve our country's freedom through deterrence, uh, and you know, we're battling physics, right? So there's there's a natural camaraderie, even though we worked for different companies. I think some of that has gone now, you know, with kind of the arrival of VC money in aerospace over the last decade. So not quite the same as it used to be, but yeah, totally agree with you. If you were in Palmdale in the uh 90s and and early 2000s, uh it was a pretty special time to be there.

SPEAKER_01 12:29

And so this is where we were having a conversation about this earlier, and and composites were very, I would say, wildly popular during this period of time. As I would say then, still do. It's I remember my wife came to me, she's like, you know, our what do you know about composites? And I was I said, Oh, uh well, you know, what do you mean? She goes, Well, I've heard it's the material of the future, and I was like, Oh yeah, well, it always will be. Yes.

unknown 12:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

I'm always uh suspicious when somebody introduces themselves as a composites expert, um, because it it really is a very multifaceted set of material systems. And so, yeah, but it's it's it's really fascinating. I don't know if you want you want to go in that direction now and talk composites.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Yeah, I think you know, uh my experience was uh like I appreciated the material science piece of it, but really it it taught me a lot about mechanics design and almost you know, fracture mechanics of damage tolerance, uh, and when to use it and when not to use it. But what I learned, and I think we talked about this, is the reason the reason why we use composites isn't always for the same reason. You know, it wasn't it isn't always lighter weight. Sometimes it is the faster solution or it does other things. And I think that was kind of where we started this conversation. And then yeah, then you get into the the unspoken tooling word, and then everybody's head explodes.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Yeah, that is really where scaled composites uh yeah, my understanding of the business model, and it's in the name, right? Scaled composites, meaning if you want to build and demonstrate an aircraft quickly, um, we can do it often at a subscale size using soft tooling and using um, you know, composite, especially at that time, you know, wet layup. But the time the company was started, you know, it was a lot of the moldless construction from the long easy, and then moving into you know soft tooling with wet layup techniques used on that. And so, you know, the idea was, yeah, it'll be a little bit heavier, but we can build you something really quickly. It will not meet FAA certification requirements. It'll be uh, you know, part 21, 191 experimental, but we can get you down the road really quickly because if you know, if you're not familiar with aerospace, you know, the OML, the outer mold line, the outer shape of the aircraft is always in doubt to some point, right? We we we do our best, we do uh we do CFD, we do wind tunnel models. You know, wind tunnel models have their own problems because of the scale and the aerodynamics does not completely scale down to tunnel size. Um there's things called Reynolds numbers and just compressibility. So we do our best, right? And then it's time to go fly it. But you know, in order to make the leap to production tooling, you could spend, you could spend a billion dollars today um on production tooling. And and John, you're you're closer to this than me. You may spend more than a billion. So what if what if I'm not sure that this OML shape is correct or if I would want to tweak it? Um, that's where it's really attractive if somebody says, hey, I can build that plane in less than a year on soft tooling, your tooling investment will be uh, you know, maybe a million dollars instead of a billion, and you get a lot of RD done. And then once that is demonstrated at full scale or mostly full scale, you can go commit to hard tooling. And that's really, I think, where skilled composites added a lot of value. There were pluses and minuses to that business model, but you know, and then when I started Blue Force, you know, I tried to keep the pluses and and ditch the minuses.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

That was my learning at Lockheed Martin as well, which was uh there was a major airlift program. Um I won't mention the name, but when I went and did a case study on that for future airlift stuff, they spent a billion dollars before they ever made a part. Like it, like, no kidding, a billion dollars. And that was in you know 1980s and 90 dollars. So uh you can imagine what it was. But but with uh with Skunkworks, uh a lot of times just some of these programs were hot. And if you couldn't make a hundred of something in less than a year, then the need disappeared. So this this was a competitive advantage to be able to just generate something, the shape. That's where I got to, which was the shape of things, which is the thing we all like to look at. But then at some point it's what are you stuffing the shape with, which is actually the important stuff. And and that's probably what's changed in our lifetimes where you know it was about the pilot, and then it became definitely not about the pilot, not about the aerodynamics necessarily, you know, going from making an F-117 fly to then once you've done that, you can make anything fly. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

Uh I was gonna say, yeah, in you know, in aerospace, you know, we talked about the importance of the OML. I think the other important thing is, and it's obvious until you bump your head on it, um, you know, everything has to fit inside the airplane that needs to be in the airplane. Um, and so so often, uh, you know, if you don't model the systems well, if you don't model the if you don't do a space claim for hydraulic actuators or landing gear is a notorious one, right? Like you don't want to wait to find a home for the landing gear later. And if you can't fit it all in, the design doesn't close. You know, so the airplane has to simultaneously uh, you know, obviously be able to support its own weight. It has to be able to fly as far as you think it needs to, carrying, carrying the fuel. And so, you know, up front, there's a lot of basically sizing equations that have to get solved simultaneously with a with a reasonable degree of certainty. And, you know, before you commit billions of dollars to a program, it's really nice to build it uh at a subscale, make sure, you know, uh you just learn so much. And and so yeah, I think this is where scaled composites uh kind of cut our teeth. Um now, inevitably, uh when you become successful at that, people want uh to your to your point about Skunkworks, people will want a few more, right? So if I'm building one thing that worked really well, maybe my ultimate market is five or ten. So I'm still in that same conundrum where I'm not gonna hard tool it because I'm not building a thousand. Scaled, we kind of bumped our heads on that because we we sort of had a culture of not getting not being a slave to process. We we thought that process interfered with creativity. And therefore, we tended to not write stuff down very well the first time we built something. And then when we built went to build it the second time, guess what? We hadn't advanced up the learning curve at all. And you know, darn it, we bumped our heads again. And so, you know, when I set out to create Blue Force, I wanted to be able to capture that repeat business market, um, knowing that we weren't going to compete with Spirit Aerospace for a thousand aircraft, but we could darn sure carry our own weight in the sort of one to one hundred volume. And so that led us, first of all, like culturally, the way we set up the company, we remained project focused, just like scaled composites was. So we didn't have like departments at Blue Force. I would never let people use the word department. We had project teams. And if you were an engineer, you're on one project team today, you're gonna get moved to another one, you know, in a year or whatever. Um, same thing with the shop. So we didn't have these like standing departments. The other important thing that came out of that was the recognition that we need to go get a quality management system in place um as a small business. And uh yeah, so that that was that was really important to our success.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

I've never heard somebody say the QMS was was really important to their success. So we'll we'll we'll dig into that. But I think along the way from so you you went from scale to Gulfstream before starting your own business.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Well what how did that ladder so there's actually one step in between there, and I don't know if it's on LinkedIn or not, but I went to Icon Aircraft for about a year and a half. So that was the light sport aircraft, and uh it was really cool. It was a fun project because you know, as much as I like scaled, I didn't get to work the full life cycle of an aircraft that scaled. Um, I tended to come in kind of halfway through when the program was kind of like in the in the dark doldrums. And uh I was kind of like the guy who would help kind of run it responsibly the second half after the customer was was pissed about our performance and things like that. So after you know, doing four or five of those in in five years, I was kind of ready to just jump in at the beginning and do a clean sheet airplane and kind of avoid some of the mistakes that I was having to fix. And so uh myself and a couple of other guys went to Icon and um, you know, we helped build the uh the prototype aircraft. We did that uh in six months. And it was a I would not wish it on anybody. Uh it was a it was a brutal experience, but we had to make Hoshkosh in 2008 in order to kind of keep the company afloat. But you know, I kind of I went through the sort of standard, I would say, burnout of being at a mismanaged startup where everything is always a crisis and everything always requires heroic activity. And uh my wife, you know, you talked about being a girl dad, uh, had two daughters at the time, uh, on my way to three daughters. And so my wife and I, you know, started looking around, like, hey, let's move back to the East Coast where family is. And Gulfstream kind of popped up on my radar because they were working on a demonstrator for supersonic business jet. And so I was able to um pretty quickly jump into that team and go to Gulfstream. Yeah. And so that was that in Savannah? That was in Savannah. And, you know, I'll say Gulfstream, uh, it's an amazing company. Uh I, you know, I think in a lot of ways it was the best run company I was ever at. Um, maybe aside from Blue Force, I'm biased there. But uh, you know, I really learned a lot about how to it, it was a much more, I would say, genteel uh take care of people kind of culture. Um, maybe it's partly, you know, living in the south and it's partly just it's a very close-knit community. You know, we were kind of the only aerospace company in town. And so it was a great place. I will say that I think they're a little bit shackled by the fact that they make great products, right? It's it is the aspirational product of anybody, is to buy a Gulfstream business jet, right? But I think that did present challenges when we were on RD programs. And so I was entirely on an RD program. You know, I'd I would have a hard time pulling in resources, you know, technicians to work on my projects. Because if you can make 20% margin on a $50 plus million dollar business jet, you know, why would you pull a technician off of that and uh, you know, put him on this RD thing? So I kind of realized during that time that um being an outsourced RD shop, kind of like Scaled Composites was, was a good business model. Um, but again, I wanted to combine it with being able to pivot to production, which is something that I don't typically small businesses, you just lean to the we go fast thing, right? And I wanted to lean into we go fast, but we do it really well, and we can repeat it, but we're not the cheapest. That was kind of our lane.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

Yeah. So I can now now the path has become clear to Blue Force. So you at some point you convinced your wife or your wife convinced you to go do this this other thing.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

Yeah, I think I think I convinced her and and you know, to her credit, she went along with it. I had sort of seen the I would say quick and dirty prototyping model at Scale Composites, and I had seen the incredibly exquisite product model of Gulfstream, and I really was trying hard to marry both of those and create a capability. And I I finally I talked about that enough that I think she said, like, just shut up and go do it. Now, you know, one one wrinkle was uh she was like three months pregnant when I quit to start the business. So uh, you know, that was definitely, I don't always recommend that approach, but uh yeah, that that made that made for some exciting times. Actually, just to give a real quick story, we were we were making our first part for Boeing, and this thing's in the oven, and my oven was brand new, and I did not have a controller on the oven that could do anything other than the set point. So I needed to ramp three degrees every five minutes, something like that. And this was overnight. So I'm so my wife is calling me saying, uh, I'm having contractions, honey. Uh, you know, we were probably a week or two from the due date, and I'm like, just hold on to it until tomorrow because I've got to get this part out of the oven. So we we still joke about that now. But uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:01

I'm sure I'm sure your daughter appreciates that story a lot. Yes, yeah. Yeah, I I I didn't have that story, but that work stoppage that I was at, my wife was pregnant at the time and and there was uh not an ability, you know. When you're working on the F22 modline, phones were certainly not allowed right. Um I had a pager. So, you know, so was she able to page you or that that was that was your backup plan? Yeah, that was the backup plan. Yeah, I always joke about the the pagers because you know that that's that's how you could tell who who you know was actually on cleared programs. It was the this ability to carry a pager around. So it was like the 1980s called and they want their technology back.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Right. Some sometimes it was as simple as call this number and tell this person to go bang on the door. Right.

SPEAKER_01 24:52

So you guys work through that, and then for aspiring founders out there, you know, there it's one thing to have an idea, it's it's another thing to have a permissive environment, let's say, because the support is going to be necessary. And I always, you know, I I've now started two businesses and I always tell people like there are more questions than I ever would have had answers for. Like the questions that come at you are nonstop and infinite. Yes. And half the time you're just yes, yes, no, yes, no, yes, yes, no, yes, no. And then okay, you it disappeared for a while and maybe it'll come back. And and so I think certainly my wife was very supportive of me going to do something different. That was uh, as I always say, the universe told me to go do this. In retrospect, yours seems like a very logical progression.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

It seems like it it felt like I was doing it a little bit late in life. So I started it when I was like 39, going on 40, which is not the, you know, it's not the kind of model that we all see on you know Netflix documentaries and stuff, right? It didn't maybe it didn't make for good uh reality television starting a business at 40. I do think I probably would not have been successful if I started 10 years earlier, um, just because you know there's there's a lot you have to know and you know your network becomes hugely important. And I I know you know this, John. I mean, just the fact that like you you stopped what you were doing and you you tracked me down and engaged in this conversation. And I think if I can just really quickly jump over again to advise to younger engineers, you know, when you're in high school, when you're in college, go ahead and create a LinkedIn profile and anybody you work with, and and I tell people, find somebody who's doing something you think is interesting and hit them up on LinkedIn. You know, I occasionally get these messages from people who are 18 thinking about a career in aerospace. I cannot resist talking to that person. I'm sure you're the same way. So, like, don't be shy. Ask, ask for advice. Um, you know, people who are in the second half of their career, like us, uh, you know, we're we're happy to give it. And I think LinkedIn is an amazing tool that didn't exist when I was a kid. So I didn't grow up around aerospace engineers. I really didn't grow up around engineers. And so, yeah, definitely leverage that.

SPEAKER_01 26:56

Yeah, I agree with that. My daughter was at a admitted student's day for where, well, she's gonna go to Purdue in the fall. And one of the things the students said was, you know, have that LinkedIn profile because you'll meet somebody at the and just you know, they have an industrial round table, it's a big fair. And so resumes and business cards, you know, maybe useful, but you'll have a conversation, you know. We might be there one year, you might be a freshman, you know, we're not recruiting freshmen, but and and we may leave and change businesses. And so, but LinkedIn provides that sort of connective tissue. So I do think that again, we're not a paid LinkedIn paid nothing for this uh promotion, but it but it is important. There's there's a fine line between sort of being annoying and just being curious, and so I have always told people always be curious. Yes, you know, that's perfectly fine. Yeah, and because you never really know where that's gonna go. So you started Blue Force. Yeah, tell tell us a little bit about the early days of that. I mean, it sounds like you had a pretty well-formed premise. I mean, you were sort of creating a business segment in a in a way.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

Right. I was I was trying to hybridize, I think, between the pure prototype shop and the shop that can go to production with you, right? I was trying to hit that gap of we'll get you from one to a hundred. We might not get you to a thousand. You know, we did have programs where we were doing CNC machining where we did get into the thousands of parts, but um, you know, in general, like our our huge value add was in the engineering heavy um prototyping into kind of low rate production. So I think it, you know, in hindsight, it was a it was a decent business model. Um, I definitely, you know, I did not raise a lot of money around it. Um, so I definitely went into it kind of undercapitalized, which meant that we had to, we basically had to find work the whole way, right? So, you know, two or three months in, I got my first paid contract with with actually with Boeing, with BRT, building Chinook parts. And Boeing at that time was really fascinated with out of autoclave composites. Yep. And I don't know what your experience is with out of autoclave composites. I always thought it was funny because it's like saying I drive to work out of Ferrari. Like I don't have a Ferrari, so I never would think about driving a Ferrari to work. So if you're asking me to come to work, fine. So I kind of felt like out of autoclave composites was like we didn't have an autoclave at scaled. I sure as heck wasn't going to buy an autoclave at Blue Force. Uh, when I worked at Gulfstream, we had autoclaves, but I would um basically like not let my team use the autoclave, you know, because I did not want to become reliant on an autoclave. We helped Boeing develop basically an out-of-autoclave process that gave autoclave equivalent mechanical properties, which, you know, when you're at a big company or or any anybody who's certifying an aircraft, ultimately you have to develop what are called B basis um material allowables because that's what the FAA wants to see, which means you've done multiple batches, you know, the process is robust, you've you've characterized all these different mechanical properties. And John, as you know, I think a you know B basis program, they used to say it cost a million dollars, but it's more than that now. So Boeing, you know, I think with some with some army money was developing these out-of-autoclave processes. And so we were the perfect shop to help them with it because we were not a shop with an autoclave that said, yeah, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna not use the autoclave. We were a shop that like had no vision of getting an autoclave. And ultimately that led to us winning a production contract with Boeing. So, and you know, the now the Andorral team, uh, you know, they're still building parts for for Boeing on those contracts to this day. So it was kind of again proof. And I would imagine the park counts are in the hundreds by now. So it's it was proof that um a small business, if you establish good process control by implementing a quality management system early, you can grow into doing things that uh you might have thought that only big companies could do.

SPEAKER_01 30:46

Yeah, well, I I and I will say it's hard to shove a QMS into a mature system. It's it is easier. Uh, we're kind of living through this now, but my co-founder, Chris, had a QMS in mind the entire time. So knowing that we needed to do that. But, you know, kind of picking up on what you just said, so I think a lot of people don't really understand how I'll say the defense industrial base actually works. You know, there's the primes and love them or hate them, um, they they fulfill a certain role. But my role at at Lockheed Martin was even with Skunkworks, was we dealt with, I dealt, I had to go deal with companies like yours. I mean, it was it was always fascinating and amazing because I worked with a bicycle manufacturer because they had special welding and forming technology. Uh, they were making titanium bicycle frames that were bespoke. And so we needed some help in that area. We worked with a surfboard manufacturer, which was what now we know as uh JASM, which is the sort of low observable um cruise missile. We even worked with uh the high performance kite manufacturers for those textiles in the kites for P791, which was uh an airship. It's hard to imagine a flying wing concept of an airship, but you know, I'm told that it had some lift uh associated with it when it moved at its uh dash speed of 35 knots. So having access to your shop, there there aren't a lot out there. I mean, scale formed some version of that, but you know, like first or second to does it become a program, and then you kind of have to go through these things, a lot of which is characterized in that valley of death period, which is is the customer gonna buy this product? And we need to go from one to ten to hopefully something greater than a hundred. It just seems like it's lost on a generation that there is a dependency, you know, within with the industrial base, because there's all these very specialty things. So, like you mentioned, an autoclave is not something that everybody's gonna have. Even if you don't like autoclaves, at some point, you know, the technology it represents has to be replaced by something else. And of course, yes, the out-of-autoclave. And now I'm remembering all of the terrible acronyms that we had, you know, yes, Vardom and all of these things.

SPEAKER_00 33:07

So yeah, but you know, to but but to but to really quickly tie it back to like what our value was as a business and and the quality system, you know, when Boeing wanted to figure out how to make parts out of autoclave, of course, they had made some coupons. So they knew what their material system was they wanted to use. They were ready to go to the to the part level. And so we came in, we tooled it, and we built one part seven different ways. And so that meant I had to write seven unique work instructions that captured every detail. And if you're not familiar with composites, like the devil really is in the details with composites, you know, sometimes like the film adhesive has a poly side and a paper side, right? The the material that prevents it from getting uh contaminated. And so, you know, which side did you put up? Did you put the paper side up or the poly side up? Right. Things like that matter. And so unlike a lot of small businesses where, you know, they would just throw a guy at it and get the part made and hand it to you, you know, we believe that our delivery was um knowledge capture, right? That was our deliverable to you as a customer. Whether the part worked or not, you know, you would you would determine that through testing or whatever. But we could tell you each serial number part exactly how it was built. And I think that is where like process control at a young age in the company was was really important to us. You shouldn't have a different way of running the oven every time. You shouldn't have a different way, you know, you need you need to nail these things. Because if you if you make a beautiful part but you blow the oven cure uh a couple of times in a row because you were just it was written on a post-it note or whatever, you know, you're that you're living up to the stereotype of a small business. And I, you know, you were talking about going to small businesses, and I was thinking, I'll bet the the thing that would most assure you when you went into a small business to work with them is whether or not they had some sort of quality system. You know, whether it's ISO or AS or whether it's just 80% of the way there, are they writing stuff down? And, you know, those that aren't, it's like beware, right? Everything becomes a stunt.

SPEAKER_01 35:07

Yeah, I did an interview on this podcast uh probably a year or so more of this. Uh Paul Gradel works for NASA Marshall, and he always refers to a repeatable, reliable process.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 35:19

So it doesn't really matter what you're making. Your process needs to be repeatable and reliable.

SPEAKER_00 35:24

And in the beginning, guess what? It won't be. But if you're not taking the data along the way, it never will be. And so, you know, you're basically paying tuition, right? Every time you build a part, you know, a composite part can be worth anywhere from 10,000 to a million dollars, right? So if you're putting a million dollars in the oven, you you need to know uh whether or not it worked. And the way to do that is to capture all the processing that went into it and then evaluate it on the back end and and tweak your process. Otherwise, you're just lost in the wilderness forever. You know, if nothing's repeatable, you know, you're just you're not going to get very far.

SPEAKER_01 35:57

Well, you mentioned like a million dollars for the allowable. I would say that's just just for the allowables, like getting to the point of mapping your process to know that you can even be, you know.

SPEAKER_00 36:07

Right. But yeah, I mean, on the way to building a wing skin, for example, you put a wing skin in an autoclave, that's that's a million dollars right there. So if something goes wrong in the autoclave, you could be throwing away a million dollars. That's that's not fun. Process control all along the way is important. And I think, you know, for us, our quality system underscored that. And if you don't mind, I'll just I'll go into that a little bit. Sure. Because I think I think the way we did it was unique. I mean, I certainly had a lot of auditors scratch their head and tell us it was unique. Uh, you know, they they always approved us because we weren't weren't doing anything wrong. But I I had spent a lot of time working with companies where I noticed that if they had a quality system, they would spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get around it every time there was a defect, especially on a rapid program. So it's like, oh, can we call this a pickup instead of a non-conformance? And so I realized like the quality system needs to be really flexible. So I I created one and I wrote it myself. It, you know, first I got a copy of somebody else's, and I thought I'm just gonna put Blue Force on this. And I read it, and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is terrible. This will bankrupt us. So I completely rewrote it from scratch. Um, it was actually while I was home after my wife delivered our third kid. So I told you she was she was pregnant, so you know, it was kind of home on for a couple of weeks trying to help out with changing diapers, and at the same time, wrote our quality management system. So we literally implemented it the day I hired my second person. Uh, I hired a gentleman to be my plant manager, and then we got our audit the day after that, right? So we were two people, two people sitting across from one person at a folding plastic table. And he was like, Okay, this is interesting. I've never done this before. But to his credit, you know, like we went through the standard line by line and showed that we had been doing work on work orders and we had process control and we had training records for all of our employees and all that. And so that that allows us to grow from there. But the important part was we we we wrote it the way we wanted it to be. And I told people, this is our constitution, we're gonna follow it. And if we don't like it, we're gonna change it. And so, you know, probably by the time I left at year 10, we were on like Rev I or J of the basic manual. And then each of the subprocesses was a standalone document, and we would have different process owners who could change that. Um, but it it worked really well for us, and we never had a QA manager, we never had a quality department. Okay, so we did all this by using basically, uh I would call them like interlocking inspections, meaning if the engineer writes in the work order that I want to do a leak check after I've bagged the part before I put it in the oven, very standard thing to do. Um, who can inspect the the leak check? Well, let's get another technician to do that. So if you were at a certain level in your training records as a technician, you could go uh do a leak check for somebody else. That's a very simple example. But you know, so people were amazed when they would come in, especially when we got to NADCAP, which is kind of like a whole new level of process control. Um, the NADCAP guy was like, you should write a paper on this and present it at like a quality conference. And I was like, this is our secret sauce. I'm not sharing with anybody how we're doing this.

SPEAKER_01 39:09

Yeah, I you know, it's interesting. The uh it seems like at times there now it's uh the process needs to reflect the requirement. The process doesn't guarantee you that you know what you're doing. In other words, you know, you're not there to be captive to the process. The process is there to help your life become easier to do.

SPEAKER_00 39:29

That is that is a great point. And one of the things we put in our QMS is that we were we were a project organized company. So when we're work for working for Boeing on a uh I can't remember what the what the Boeing process number was, but basically, you know, we used an out-of-autoclave deviation to their autoclave manufacturing spec for composites. As you can imagine, that document plus all the documents it referenced probably totaled to 2,000 pages. That project had to understand that and use it. That doesn't mean that if I'm doing a quick one-off prototype that's gonna be an FA experimental for somebody else, I don't I don't need to use that. So we had some common processes, like here's how we're gonna vacuum bag a composite part. And then each project could tailor that as they as they needed. And so, yes, to your point is so correct. Like you do not want the process to drive how you do business. You know, you're you're fundamentally you're doing business to add value by either capturing knowledge or delivering somebody a conforming part and understanding what they value and putting that into a project with a charter, right? Each project had a charter. We said, like, who's doing design reviews, or we doing design reviews, you doing design reviews, you know, who has stress analysis responsibility. So we very, very um clearly spelled this out in the beginning, what the rules of the road were. And then that charter would kind of lead us through the rest of the design and development process. Because unlike most small businesses try to get an exemption for design within AS 9100, you know, and we we left design in there. So we were a full AS 9100, you know, design and and production kind of shop.

SPEAKER_01 41:06

I think what we see on the oh with TBGA, we we help a lot of companies with advanced manufacturing stuff. A lot of it's additive manufacturing. You know, so the the process of qualification is the process, it's it doesn't matter what process you're using, the details are different. But I think that uh what we what we found is most of us come from primes and tier one suppliers. So it's that intent versus box checking. Like there's if you understand the intent behind allowables and the quality system and you know the design process, it's uh much easier to figure out a path than oh, I've got a checklist and you know I'm just ticking boxes off. The the box checking doesn't guarantee anybody of anything as far as I'm concerned. Like if you don't understand the intent, then you're really just it's a very superficial activity.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

And I think you're you're hitting on something really important, which is sort of culturally the death of companies when the process takes over, and especially when the engineers are not allowed to deviate from the process for fundamentally sound reasons. And I'll give a good example. I won't name the company because I don't want to embarrass them, but you know, we went through qualification with a company. They actually gave us a supplier of the year award. So we were a really good supplier to them, but they had this crazy holdover from the autoclave, which is that you had to let the oven temperature get down to 100 before you could take the part out of the oven. Well, we're in North Carolina, we had an unair conditioned shop, you know, our clean room is air conditioned, obviously, but where the oven is is not air conditioned. So the ambient temperature could be 95. Well, that means the oven will never get to 100. We'd literally stick an air conditioner in the oven just to meet the spec, you know. And one time they came to us and said, like, hey, what are some things you're doing that are dumb and you know, cost us extra money? And we can we're like, well, this is a this is a good one. And we went round and round for months over this particular one, and they would not take it out. And I was like, guys, your spec says I can get the oven to 140 and do an oven abort. In other words, you know, I'm not holding vacuum, I don't like what I see. I can shut the oven down, I can take the part out at 140, I can fix whatever went wrong, I can put it back in the oven and start the process again. It doesn't even give me a number. I can do an infinity number of oven aborts at 139.9. So why the heck can't I take the part out of the oven before 100, right? Nobody can answer that other than we don't have test data showing it's good. Yeah, move along. Right. And I think this is culturally the death of companies, and it's the it's kind of the spiral that big companies get into, where instead of the engineers being able to apply first principles, they just interpret the spec in the strictest way possible.

SPEAKER_01 43:38

I was taught I was at uh at an event in February and we met a uh group captain in the RAF. We were talking about being able to use uh new processes and stuff, and he goes, Well, the difference in the RAF is we're much smaller, and anybody you deal with, uh whether an aircraft is airworthy, is an engineer. So I, as an engineer, can go to the group lead and say, Can I put this part on your airplane? And I was like, you don't have a smoke. So yeah, I don't know. That that part to me was fascinating. Yeah. Um in our prep talk, we had talked about I think this is an important point too. That this is advice for the younger engineers. We had a conversation about what failure means. And I think to unless you remember exactly what you said, but you know, failure in your mind was something the effect of when you don't know how you made it. And it's it's really that knowledge capture piece. I had an experience where I went to an innovative supplier and they had this very elaborate check-in process to get into their development lab. And the reason for it was is they had an engineer go in, didn't write anything down, got the best results they ever got, and they have never got them again. Don't know how they got there. And so this new process was you had to write stuff down, you had to hand it to a technician. The technician carried out the experiment. And I know that the second part of that story is, you know, that that was I was in a meeting once with the deputy undersecretary for industrial policy, and we were meeting with the head of Skunkworks and his lieutenant. He's like, you know, we're in Palmdale. He's like, I just went to Boeing, I'm here. Why are you guys different? And the fundamental, they said it in a much more eloquent way, but the fundamental thing was we allow people to fail here as long as they learn from that failure.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

Absolutely. Yeah, I used to tell people, you know, we're paying tuition, right? Like that bad part, we just paid tuition. So, you know, please tell me you learned something from it. And it's not just the I'm punishing you, please tell me. No, I mean, I literally mean like, can we go through and using design of experiments, can we tease out, you know, which factor you changed that um, you know, led to the part not working? Because that's that's really important. And we used to we used to have a joke, like, it's and I think I've heard this elsewhere too. Like, we're not, we're not the only ones who think this way, but you know, it's okay to make a mistake, it just needs to be an original mistake. Like it should be kind of interesting. It should be, you know, we one time we had a guy um drive a forklift at like full speed, you know, he had the the forks up and drove it like into the the pass-through wall and it just destroyed this. And it's like, we really didn't need learn anything from that. We just need to fire that guy, right? But you know, anything having to do with composites, you know, there's usually an interesting story to why the why the failure happened, right? Especially with out of autoclave, where out of autoclave is a very finicky process that kind of just barely works, even when it works. And so um, just understanding what that threshold is and being able to improve your process, right? And I think that's where by not having this departmental thinking, by just having like project-focused customer success thinking, um, you know, we iterated our processes continuously.

SPEAKER_01 46:45

I want to hit on what you're doing now. I think there's there's more we could have a series of podcasts. Maybe we should go find some other people to interview and we can just do that. But I would uh, you know, it's important. So you you did Blue Force, now you're doing something else. Again, for people that don't know the story of Fury, I I highly recommend that merge podcast because I I I thought it was uh pretty fascinating. As a portion of that, I think for younger engineers, it's important to know what are you designing for. So I teach a class at Carnegie Mellon once a year, just as a guest lecture on design for assembly or design for manufacturing.

SPEAKER_02 47:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 47:25

And so these things do make a difference depending upon what you're trying to achieve. And designing for 10 or 100 or 100,000 is a very different proposition. Yeah. Um, so we we could probably come back, but this is that system level thinking. Now you're going to do something even more interesting. So you have the the DOD accelerator fund, and then you also have uh this new endeavor with the stealthy secret sauce and clouds, clouds of mystery around it.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

Yeah. So so D DOD Accelerator, um, you know, so my partner at Blue Force, Joe Murray, um, yeah, when when he and I came out of uh you know came out of the acquisition by Andreil and we got the the sort of integration complete. Um a few months later we were having coffee and just kind of reflecting on on all the experience. And we we realized that we had met a lot of really viable, investable small businesses like Blue Force. Um, and we kind of wanted to put our money where our mouth was and invested some of these. Um and then Joe, I think, mentioned like, well, hey, I wonder if wonder if we should start a fund. And of course, neither of us knew anything about how to do it other than like people go to jail for doing it the wrong way. So um, but but you know, that's always rule number one. Don't go to the job. Rule number one, don't go to jail, yeah. And so we um so Joe had met uh Mark Dinatali and Vince Gubitosi, uh, who are uh, you know, just just for shorthand, I would call them Wall Street guys. I mean, they basically um you know grew up in the in the sort of uh I would say big Wall Street instead of big aerospace, and they had seen where value is created and where it's destroyed. And very much like Joe and I thought, you know, their heart was more in the smaller scale, more bespoke, you know, that's that's where the actual opportunities are. You know, by the by the time the billion dollar fund full of dumb money shows up, you know, it's it's it's already the value is already out of it. And so um, we just we just had like a natural liking to those guys and they know how to start a fund and do it legally, register it, all that. And you know, intentionally, the general partners, which is the four of us, you know, our money is like 40% of the fund. So um we're basically very heavily skewed towards we're investing our own money, but we're happy to have a few selected limited partners, you know, come along and you know, the limited partners we have are amazing. You know, they they are you know high achievers in their own right and and have a deep Rolodex. So yeah, we we started doing this a little over a year ago. We've made three investments and we've got three more in the pipeline right now. They're all pretty exciting companies, but they're all gonna be pretty high touch because just like this conversation, if you're a founder doing something in defense, there's no way you can know everything you need to know about, you know, I've got to get a DCAA audit, I've got to get a security clearance, uh, how do I implement a quality system without crushing my culture? All those things. How do I get on SAM? Yeah, how do I get how to get on the same?

SPEAKER_01 50:12

How do I get on SAM if I need a DUNS number, but I need a Dunes number to be, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:15

Yes, all those things. And so um we're able to help them through that. Uh, you know, one of our companies uh actually they've had a heavy surge in demand since since this thing in Iran started, and they need they need some working capital. So we're like, hey, we're gonna introduce you to some people at the top tier of a bank that we know. And if that doesn't work, we're gonna do a convertible note and just get you the capital you need. So we're kind of like in it with you, in it to win it. Um if we invest in you, it means we really believe in you. And we, you know, we're we're very selective because you know, the current VC model does pretty well serve the, I call it like five guys with a PowerPoint, you know, kind of startup. There's a lot of people with big ideas that sound really cool and it feels investable to I think conventional VCs. Um, we're not like that because we we've been around and we've seen where companies, you know, fail in the defense industry. And I think we're better able to evaluate kind of who has the X factor to make it.

SPEAKER_01 51:10

And so uh, you know, maybe just give us a if somebody has an idea or a company, what what what's the ideal or what's the character of the type of company that you would yeah, we'd like to see companies that have some operating history.

SPEAKER_00 51:22

I mean, my favorite kind of company is one that's been around, I would say, two to ten years. Um, they have customers, they have contracts. Hopefully they have some government contracts and some commercial contracts. So they're used to the basics. I mean, getting back to that process thing, right? I mean, a lot of startups don't even know how to negotiate a contract with a customer, how to, how to, you know, track your time, how to bill, all these basic things. So I want you to have that out of the way. And then I want you to have seen where you can add value in the system, right? So, you know, if you're a company that's making, you know, a certain type of sensor or transducer that's going into somebody else's product, you might look at that and say, hey, wait a minute, I could package it differently from how everybody's thinking about and just sort of revolutionize um some aspect of what the DoD does. And I think Fury, Fury is a really good example of that, right? So we had developed our own bespoke manufacturing methods that allowed us to get basically autoclave pre-preg composite properties on soft tooling using infusion, right? And so we said, where could we apply this technology? Well, you know, the Air Force and DARPA are talking about spiral design, iterative design. And frankly, they don't have any UAVs that can do what a fighter can do. So, like, let's kind of go in that direction. And so, you know, Fury was originally meant to be built on soft tooling and built in sort of batches of 12 to 24, right? So a squadron at a time. And if you wanted to iterate between vehicles, um, I'm sorry, iterate sort of have model years, we could iterate the design because our arrow and our stability controls and our flight control system tool chain was really tight and our investment in the physical tooling was really minimal. And so I think that's an example of where you know we were a company that had been in the industry, um, but we saw a niche that that nobody else saw. And so we were well prepared to go after that.

SPEAKER_01 53:18

Yeah. And I think it's it's uh as you were talking about it, I always think like the C 130, even now today, the KC135s, the B52s, like these are old airframes, but they're big, but they're very adaptable. So that's why you have I don't know how many variants of a C 130 there are out there now. Right. But but you're not you have real estate basically. You don't, you know, with a CCA, you have no real estate. It's that's right. I think it's pretty small.

SPEAKER_00 53:45

Yeah, I mean, my take when we were working with AFRL is you will never re-engine a CCA like you're doing the B-52. You'll actually re-airframe the engine that was in the CCA. So, you know, I had you know generations of future designs around the same engine in my sketchbook because you know it's very clear to me that like we we can design something for certain capability, but we shouldn't do this exquisite multi-role $100 million CCA thing, right? We should be doing these at like sub $10 million, you know, preferably like $5 million, where it becomes a almost a throwaway component.

SPEAKER_01 54:20

And so now you're doing something comp and now for something completely different.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

Yeah, for something completely different, yeah. Yeah. So um, yeah, actually uh along the way, I I um I've got kind of always had an interest in farming. Um, and you know, we picked up a hobby farm back in 2020 when everybody else was doing the COVID, let's let's do something different with our lives kind of thing. And um, you know, just through that and through watching how you know farming is done, I would say at the smaller scale, I realized there is just there's a lot of farms have been left behind by by John Deere and Case and all the bigs. And so, you know, there's obviously a lot of resonance there with the the big primes in the defense world. And so, you know, part of the recognition is that there's some equipment that's missing uh that would work well at small and mid-sized farms. Um, so you know, for first time ever saying this out loud anywhere, I've got a new company called True Field Systems, and we're working on a small harvester. Uh, you know, if you go look at combine harvesters, they tend to be uh anywhere from $700,000 to over a million dollars to get to get into a new one. They're very large machines. They're optimized for you know the Midwest, where you know, fields are you know half mile by half mile, and they work really well there. But that sort of eliminates the ability to do specialty crops at a smaller scale. And so we're working on both the equipment to make that possible for the farmer as well as um you know a digital platform to help farmers with that. So really exciting. It is definitely completely different, but you know, we are looking for manufacturing engineers, you know, CNC programmers, folks like that. Um, I don't really have the website up yet, but if you are interested, email me at careers at truefield.ag. Careers at true field.ag.

SPEAKER_01 56:06

Okay. Wow, I don't know that we've ever launched a company on the podcast. I know we haven't.

SPEAKER_00 56:11

So yeah. And this is a defense-focused podcast. So we'll we'll see how many uh people we find who are interested in crossing over. But you know, it's I I think there's a lot of, you know, we're obviously gonna lean more heavily into automated manufacturing with this. You know, composites is inherently a high-touch labor thing. So I'm excited about doing something where um the existing automation tools are are pretty well set for it. And uh I will definitely reach out to you because we're gonna have some 3D printed content. And I'm I'm gonna be looking to you for advice, John. All right.

SPEAKER_01 56:41

Hopefully you won't need B basis allowable. So well, uh I think that I mean, this is uh we could go on for another hour. Probably is there anything we didn't touch on that you wanted to, or last words, or I don't want to put you on the spot.

SPEAKER_00 56:57

I think we covered it really well. I mean, I would just make a pitch for for engineering and manufacturing in particular that, you know, if you're a young person, there are so many exciting things going on in manufacturing. And I I think unfortunately, you know, if you're in uh high school, you may not have been exposed to it because, you know, high schools, frankly, are a lot of them are more interested in preparing you for college than um sort of talking about real world things. But there's a lot of exciting stuff going on in manufacturing. And, you know, there's a lot of things that you can you can be doing at home, you know, between Raspberry Pi, if you're a computer nerd, or um, you know, 3D printers have gotten pretty low costs or pretty available. I just encourage younger folks to like indulge that that creativity because you can have a fantastic career in manufacturing. You can create a lot of value for a lot of people. You can you can create a lot of value for yourself and and and raise a family on the income. So high highly encourage it. And it's fun to make things. It is fun to make things.

SPEAKER_01 57:54

All right, Scott. Uh appreciate you being on the show. And uh one day I hope that we actually get to meet in person. Sounds good. Uh, probably won't be at SAMPY, but uh we'll we'll find some show that we both go to. Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, John. All right, thanks.

SPEAKER_02 58:09

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