Fully Threaded Radio

Episode #138 - Direct Connections

March 13, 2019 Fully Threaded Season 2019 Episode 138
Fully Threaded Radio
Episode #138 - Direct Connections
Show Notes Transcript

When precision fastener manufacturer and conversationalist, Charlie Kerr, of Kerr Lakeside, crashes onto the scene, the discussion topics carom from the master distribution model to blockchain to baseball (13:03). Then, in their direct fashion, Bob and Rob Reynolds of INxSQL Software explain how they connect fastener distributors to an array of business solutions that every thread merchant should hear (1:41:23). Würth senior VP, Marc Strandquist, joins fastener industry newsman Mike McNulty on the Fastener News Report to offer analysis on the latest sagging FDI numbers (1:11:01). Plus, MWFA board member Paula Evitts previews FastenerTech 19 (1:02:21). As always, industry guru Carmen Vertullo presents the Fastener Training Minute, this time discussing the often misunderstood material, Grade L9 (1:33:42). Hoping to make new connections of their own, Brian and Eric get an uncharacteristic jump on the fastener trade show season. Run time: 02:38:32

Speaker 2:

it's time for fooling.

Speaker 3:

It is fully rented radio, but we saw VFC h sourcing network. If you buy cell manufacturer import, covet or otherwise fetish industrial fasteners as well. This is the podcast for you. Let you flicked in. You're a dude is here and the cohost of fully threaded is here with us as well. He's fashion maven and fastener tech Santa missed extraordinary. Brian Musker. Hey Bryan, good doing all right. I have a, you got the thing right? That's the fashion Maven as Bob Beer. I can, I don't even try and get near that episode after episode. We go over it.

Speaker 4:

I know you get it wrong every time. Other than that, I am great. Had a great workout and then I cook breakfast stuff to that. So everything's pretty good.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. It sounds like you're in a good mood. Did you by any chance have waffles?

Speaker 4:

I did not, but I know why you're asking the question that's still have some of that lift.

Speaker 5:

Oh yeah. I told you all about this weekend. It's maple syrup season here in northeast Ohio and I tell you they make some great stuff around here. And we went out to an old heritage style farm and watched them producing this stuff and then got to taste it and all my gosh, it's good. You know, reminds me, last season we received some maple syrup from Ralph Lamanda over there at bell metric. Yes, we did. Over at Belle metric, correct? Yeah. And Man, that stuff was good too. Now he produced that stuff, I think it was in Connecticut. Yeah. And he's very proud of it. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

Justly. So actually, and it tastes very, very good.

Speaker 5:

Oh, at your house? I had it on the Waffles, but at my house I use that Syrup to cure some bacon, which I eventually smoked over applewood and it was wonderful. But you know, bright. This is not a cooking show. Oh, okay. Sorry. Yeah. I'll type my front off. I can't, sorry. You did do that to you folks. If your stomach's growling.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, fastener related will. The relation is through bill metric and Ralph Lamanda giving us some great maple syrup.

Speaker 5:

Yes. Thank you for making that connection Brian and fully threaded radio is a great way to directly connect to all things fastened related so once again everyone, welcome to episode one 38 of the podcast. This time we're publishing just a little early on March 14th, 2019 we have a full episode in store for you, everyone to actually another one of our double feature side. Say we sit down and talk with Bob and Rob Reynolds of in sequel software now. They've been longtime partners of the FCH sourcing network and sponsors of the podcast and we wanted to get them on to really discuss the subject of online fastener sales. This is a piece of the in sequel Erp platform that a lot of their customers are asking for and using, but there are some lessons to be learned from this conversation. In general, if you're a fastener distributor and you're doing business online or if you're thinking about it, which many of you probably should be if not everyone there. There's also some discussion of the in sequel direct connect system, which many of you know the FCH scrubber plays a part in our second big feature of the episode is a far reaching conversation with Charlie care of current lakeside as usual. It's a far reaching talk and we cover a lot of topics. Some of them planned, some not and it's, and we certainly went over time on this one bri. So the easier it was Charlie, it certainly is, but I think you'll enjoy the conversation. Everyone. It's predominantly fastener related. Plus we spoke with Paula evets of the MW IFA. Hopefully you're all attending fastener tech 19. Paul has got the overview of what's in store for this year's rendition. As always, Mike Mcnulty has all the fastener headlines this time he's joined by Mark Strandquist of worth and they take a look at sagging FDI numbers. Don't worry folks. It's not a real sad story, but uh, you definitely don't want to miss the analysis there. Plus Carmen for too low has the fastener training minute and he speaks about Il nine bolts, which is a material that a lot of people hear about and not too many people know much about. Well, listen to this and you'll be ahead of the game.

Speaker 4:

Good. Okay. That's what Carmen's good at, right?

Speaker 5:

We've got a full lineup of sponsors for this episode to Bri. Help us out there.

Speaker 4:

Yes, we have the title sponsors of fully threaded radio still fast and Brighton based International. Still fast for service you deserve and people you trust. And Brighton best international tested, tried and true. Also sponsoring fully threaded radio, a Buckeye fasteners, BTM manufacturing in sequel software, Euro Link Fastener, supplier service, Mack Brooks, fast snuffy USA indie industries, Parker fasteners, volt, industrial plastics, the worth and solution and the street home of solution men. So thanks to all of you.

Speaker 5:

Yes, thanks to all our sponsors and to every one of you for listening. And you're a big piece of the equation as well. We always enjoy hearing feedback. So please don't hesitate to email addresses ftr@fullythreaded.com on Twitter. The handle is fully threaded.

Speaker 4:

They don't be frightened to make a comment. We actually, we've got very thick skins and I'm quite happy to hear suggestions. Okay, well they're not that thick. Yeah, Bri, don't go open yourself up for punishment. No, I know that's silly. I'll stop that.

Speaker 5:

Fortunately most of the comments that we receive are pretty productive and sometimes pretty humorous. Keep them coming, everybody. I'll tell you if there's another thing you can do to help us out, tell your friends and your associates about the podcast and make them aware of who's talking about what. It's amazing how many times we hear people that just picked up the show and if you're a new listener, by the way, welcome. Yeah, we have a huge archive of back episodes as well. When we come back from the break, we're going to jump right into the conversation with Charlie curse. So since we just tip the hat to some of our sponsors, might as well point out that I received an email here from Craig Penland over at year old link. He wanted everyone to know that he's put a new sales manager in place and that's Josh Winkler. If you're looking to make contact with euro link, give Josh an email@joshateurolinkfss.com until you, every time I turned around it seems like there's another inquiry flying across the FCH sourcing network heading over to year old link. So I think business is pretty good over there these days.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, maybe uh, metrics as a whole actually.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. Well we'll touch on that during the conversation with Charlie today. All right, so if you are a new listener, let's also point out at this moment that we're the people who bring you the FCH sourcing network found@fastenersclearinghouse.com it's a huge online resource for you. Whenever you need to find a fastener or locate a vendor for a part, it's free to use and it's a commodity driven. So you basically type in what it is you're looking for. We show you who's got it out there, then you can get in touch with them directly. On the flip side of that, if you're still dragging your feet, getting your company on to FCH, it's a great time. If you go to fasteners clearing house.com we've revised the membership programs and we tried to make it a little bit friendlier in terms of suiting various kinds of distributors. So take a click out there and jump on soon because we're still running that spring cleaning special and that basically waives the setup fee FCH sourcing network and of Commercial Bri.

Speaker 4:

Oh, okay. If fashion is pairing house.com with an s okay. After a fastener.

Speaker 5:

Yes. It's so important to this podcast and to the website. Thanks once again for joining in. There's a lot to cover today, so we'll play a couple of messages and we'll be right back to put a wrench to this one. It's fully threaded, right? Yeah,

Speaker 6:

Brian and Eric, you're online fastener talk radio, brothers in thread, fully threaded radio,

Speaker 7:

top quality and outstanding service or at the top of your list and fastener suppliers turn to spell fast. Since 1976 still fastest room to become an industry leading importer in manufacturer of the highest quality industrial fasteners. Specialty items. Automotive parts are a ray of facilities across North America and in Asia along with full quality control labs and ISO 9,001 2008 certifications ensure the highest quality parts and it's still fast. They were delivered with undisputed service excellence. We're family run dedicated to your success. Our customers have come to depend on the expertise of our staff and the quality of our products. Do you also offer a wide range of secondary services to meet some of the toughest requirements? You might have contacts still fest today or website@wwwdotstillfast.com and put us to work for you. Still. Fat Service. You deserve people you trust.

Speaker 8:

Yeah.

Speaker 9:

At Brighton best we continue to expand our wide range of products including stainless steel and metric fasteners. Our family of brands include preferred us anchor and iron clad performance where BBI has been a trusted partner since 1925 with award winning hand tools, gloves and drywall screws. Bvi is the largest master distributor of fasteners in the USA. Tested, tried and true. We are brightened best to learn more about Brighton. Best visit brightened best.com

Speaker 6:

Parker fasteners is your premier cold heading. Manufacturer forging the future with precision and quality is our top priority. When you think of domestically produced sockets and tamperproof screws from loe and stainless including eight to 86 think Parker fasteners. Our lockout line of security fasteners feature high Torque Oval Center Pin Design and unique lobes that provide one of a kind security for your customers. Our in house three d printing capability makes the prototyping process fast and affordable and we're ready to produce your large or small run orders with highly competitive pricing and unbeatable lead times. So forge the future with Parker fasteners. Visit Parker fasteners online today@parkerfasteners.com

Speaker 8:

yeah. Okay.

Speaker 10:

Hey mate. Brian Moscow, regardless of the required size material or finish European as the European resources to meet your demands for hard defined metric fasteners. We're the one stop source for all of your metric meets, saving you time and money searching for these parts or fulfilling all of your requirements. How do we do it? You rolling off his access to more than 100,000 quality c class parts with the ability to solve your toughest metric faster supply issues every time. Hard defined metric fasteners do you live in? Just think of us as your heavy metal rock stars doing more about how we can rock your world or a request or hassle free quote online. There's a euro link[inaudible] dot com that's you rolling. If s s

Speaker 2:

hi, this is David Wood MD industries. You're listening to fully threaded radio, no bright

Speaker 11:

great things about being a part of a fastener association. Like we're, everyone knows part of the MW FFA but we're also part of the end CFA among others and uh, you get to go to these great plant tours.

Speaker 4:

I know, I agree.

Speaker 11:

That was so glad that you were in town when we went last week over to Auto Bolton. We got to check that out. Real stalwart here in Cleveland and they produce amazing products and they have a great facility. It was one of the most interesting of all the plant tours that I've been on.

Speaker 4:

Actually the level we are, the industry we're so removed from anything that like the mechanical part of it and to see yeah, as we've seen before, once and then one of our visits and Cleveland, these machines just making bolts is really amazing to watch actually. I mean if you go to the panicle yeah,

Speaker 11:

yeah. It's, it's, it's absolutely incredible. Everyone who works in this industry needs to get into a facility like this one. And uh, I guess that's all that needs to be said. Well, anyway, so we're standing there in the lobby of auto bolt getting ready for this tour. We're checking in with the receptionist and she waves us through the door opens. Who's the doorman there that morning? None other than Mr Charlie cur of curoil lakeside. And he's with us now. Hey Charlie.

Speaker 12:

Hey, how are you doing today? We're doing good. I wish more than happy to open the door for you and only you because you and only you are wearing the premium quality Kearl Lake[inaudible] 70th anniversary commemorative base.

Speaker 11:

Oh, you saw that? You saw that.

Speaker 12:

Oh, I don't miss anything with you.

Speaker 11:

Well, I'll tell you what man, it's, it's a good looking hat and a, not only that, but it's a very, very good fishing hat and I wear it a lot. So I was, I was really pleased to run into yet. Are you moonlighting there though? I mean, what was, what's going on? What, what were you doing?

Speaker 5:

Their job. A snake. And you look at some of the machinery.

Speaker 12:

I signed up for the tour and then a subsequent to that I got invited to join my son in Chicago. So I basically came and shook hands with all the people in as the tour groups started forming up, you know, hit the road. I've been through the auto book two or three times that, so it wasn't like, it didn't appreciate their hospitality. I think touring anybody's facility, whether it's a manufacturing facility like there's for ours, the heat treat plant or a plating shop, it's just, you know, they say a picture's worth a thousand words. I think a plant tour, it's worthless, you know, a five day seminar in some cases there's no such thing as knowing too much about all the different processes in our industry.

Speaker 5:

Hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, and actually my first experience was that two or three[inaudible] actually a couple of years ago. Um, and um, they said[inaudible], you know, they were doing different stuff actually. Yeah, you put on a great show too and you're very generous with your hospitality. We've discussed that before on the podcast for sure. Well, lots of questions we can talk about, but put it this way, anytime we invite you on the podcast and you grace us with your presence, the ratings go way up. So, uh, you know, the fastener industry needs to hear the voice of Charlie curve. We got a few questions for you. So thanks for coming in.

Speaker 12:

How long ago was the last time he had me? It seems like it was a short time ago.

Speaker 5:

Well we did that little blurb when we were doing the plant tour with the uh, training institute. But a proper segment. It's been a few months. Charlemagne's time flies when you're having fun. Yeah know. So I'll tell you one of the other reasons that I was thinking about you actually is because I had kind of an inter, I thought it was an interesting experience this week I was helping a consulting company who is researching the fastener industry and I was giving them the lay of the land in terms of the master distribution model in our industry and the state of it, know how it works and all that. And I started thinking about my visit to Auto Bolton to your facility, other manufacturers and they started wondering about the way that you guys sell into the market now. I guess we have a bunch of questions on that. How do you sell into the market and in Dsl into different markets in different ways. But, uh, you are at the Vegas show and at fastener tech and uh, I guess now probably you'll be out there in Detroit at passenger fare, but, uh, do you do a lot of other trade shows too that are industry specific?

Speaker 12:

Not the only show that we regularly send it at just a Vegas show. We want the Cleveland show and after walking realized this was when they brought the show Detroit for 2019 it something that we needed to have a booth at. Basically we saw a lot of stuff in Michigan, so we be conspicuous by our absence depending on which customers have our showed up.

Speaker 11:

Sure. I got that. But are you doing any other shows?

Speaker 12:

Not Exhibiting, no, I'm not a real big, I mean I kind of think of how to explain this without sounding down on these people that, you know, run the shows. But now obviously Vegas is a major offense and we would be conspicuous by our absence if we did an exhibit there. But some of the regional shows that the more regional associations put on, uh, it's almost like I feel we'd be going to it for the sake of going through it. And you know, as you get further and further away from Cleveland, this saturation level, if you want to call it that, of you know, what we sell and who we sell it to starts to get thinner and thinner and thinner. Uh, I wouldn't exhibit at a show in California that wouldn't exhibit at a show in Seattle. I wouldn't exhibit at a show in New York City. Not that I think there's, I'm just throwing some cities out. Uh, it's expensive. You know, you get the booth space, the transportation costs, uh, the lodging, you know, shipping the exhibit out. And now for instance, Vegas, the short, you know, I mean, depending on, you know, not just the floor traffic but you know, for the cocktail hours and some of the other, you know, nine exhibit networking. If the customers we see in two or three days would probably take six months if all you did was drive around a call on these people. So there has to be a reasonable expectation that a significant part of our customer base is going to be represented in the floor traffic. And if the answer, if we asked the question internally is as they're going to be a lot of people in our customer base and then the answers and that really then we won't go.

Speaker 11:

Well yeah that's just good business though that, I mean that's just good business. So that makes total sense. And like for us it's stupid for us not to be at these shows because the majority of the people in the aisles are people we need to be aware of what we do. But, but that's really not the main question going to shows. You know, I mean the main question is the way manufacturers like curl lake side and auto bolt and others are selling into the markets were fasteners are used. Right? Because you go to any of these shows and there's lots of major manufacturers you never see at a show. So I guess the main question is how are you grading the market?

Speaker 12:

Well we sell our standard sack. It's screws through distribution. We will not knowingly sell an end user. Correct. And it's, you know, it's a little easier to figure this stuff out. You know, back in the old days someone would say, yeah, I'm a distributor, you know, located in some obscure city in you took their word for it. So we saw our standard sac, it's through distribution. Now you use the term earlier in a discussion master distributor. I'm not really sure. Uh, you know, we sell to people that sell them in order to advertise themselves as master distributors and we also sold a feeble, they're just what I'll call regular fastener houses. We don't have a master distributor except there's one exception. There's a outfit up in Canada that is our master distributor in Canada. Then because it's cross border, it makes sense to do it like that, that we've never given anybody in exclusive distribution. Like this is your territory and all the you'll distribute for us in this part of the country. We've never done that. And quite frankly, I don't see any circumstances in the foreseeable future where we would seriously entertain doing that. I mean, you know, if I can expand on one thing, over the years there were a couple of sockets, screw manufacturers that I'm not going to name. Just, you know, cause when you name other people, sometimes if you're a little bit wrong you can start arguments, you know.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, don't do that.

Speaker 12:

There was a couple of domestic manufacturers that have master distributors. So if you were say a small two or three person operation and you had end users that wanted to buy, you know that particular name brand, your distributor had to go to the master distributor who got the stuff from the uh, manufacturer. And I think one of the differences is if you're going to use master distributors, they got to commit to some mammoth inventory levels and very few people then, because you start thinking about it, if you're going to be a master distributor, you're going to do sockets, you're going to do hack sets, you're going to do knots, a 12 points. You can have a couple of million dollars tied up in inventory. Well because we sell to distributors without the master distributor necessarily getting in the middle, we carry the inventory in any given time we probably have, you know, put this in, you know, take the dollar value out of it. If you wait every part we got in the wreck, we got between three and a half and 4 million pounds of screws ready to ship the day of their order. And you know, that's how we go to market. Give us an order, unless it's 50 line items long, we'll ship it the day you order it in the, our inventory service level right now is about 98% and you know, I know that it's kind of like we're doing a master distributor function in some ways, but it's working for us.

Speaker 11:

Yeah. I was really surprised to see racks and racks of fasteners there in your facility when we visited and uh, you're obviously doing it that way. Do you think that's typical? I mean, are there guys in the industry who do what you do that are the same way?

Speaker 12:

Is that kind of common? I'm not sure. I was, once again, I'm going to be vague about naming people, but you know, over the years I've gotten to know some people that work for, and I'm talking domestic competition primarily and we're talking and I said, yeah, you know, we ship, uh, you know, we try to ship 97, 98% of our catalog, you know, from stock. And they looked at me like, are you nuts? You must have inventory all over the place. I said, we do. And so anyhow, 15 years later I run into this fellow that I'm thinking of at the assembly show in Chicago and we start talking about that. You said everybody thought you guys were crazy for Kerry and all that inventory. You said, that's why you've moved into a market position that Jack, you pieing now because you've recognized the other domestic Sackett manufacturers weren't doing it. And it wasn't a strategy necessarily based on Justin time or, uh, anything like that. It was, my father had a very simple philosophy. If you take a shopping card into a grocery store, you're not going to buy what's not on the shelf. And even though we're not in the grocery business, he felt that if people had a list of items they needed to buy and there were a number of them that we habitually couldn't ship, they would probably move all the business somewhere else. So he wanted to be their grocery store that he had everything on your shopping list. Now you know, there's no secrets in this business. You saw the inventory we carry, we probably turn our inventory once every eight or nine months. Uh, turn a police over to a CPA for six months and they'll say, you should be turning the inventory three times a day. That would put us out of business. We're not afraid to carry inventory even though the Tux books say it's a bad idea to do it.

Speaker 4:

Clearly it has worked for you. So it can't be a bad idea. But it's an interesting difference. I mean, I guess it's all sorts of things are different. If you were the one of the giant manufacturers, then they couldn't afford to do that. I mean, what's the one of the big ones in Fastco or something? I mean if they were carrying nine months, it would be millions and millions of dollars.

Speaker 12:

We'll see. We've run families of parts, so more on in quarter inch socket screws. We're going to run all the different lengths short to long in coarse thread. And then we change over to find thread and then run all the water links work back to the shorter legs. And that could in some cases be a run of over 3 million pieces. But I'm trying to think, I say this without getting too deep in the weeds, the machine's not making any money for us when we're setting that up. So you combine these families to avoid setups, but you know, you know, we might be on that diameter for a total of 200 production hours and depending on that worthy and machines running two shifts or one shift, that could be, you know, three in or maybe up to six weeks. But as far as back to the original question, I don't anticipate any changes in the way we go to market. We're certainly not, you know, contemplating any changes. We have a very large number of distributors that you know, with the exception of say maybe 15 don't buy huge amounts of parts from us, but we still are very grateful for their business because collectively they're probably, you know, 75 80% of our sales. Yeah. I wouldn't want to get into a situation fit that got approached by somebody wants that is a master distributor and they wanted to buy all of our screws from us and be our master distributor and it's like we're going to basically put our viability into the hands of one company that he has a four or five key people and fault in their marketing. There's no way I would do that. Well, you gotta be careful with all those exclusivity arrangements. Yeah. You let someone else control your destiny. Now one thing, if I could segue into one thing, because this ties into what we're talking about. I went to a presentation at John Carroll University a couple months ago and the a person speaking it was a woman named Laura shared and she said something that, you know, at first I thought I'm wasting my time being at this meeting because it sounded so inconsistent with what I've always thought and believed, but after she started working their way through the presentation that made sense and I now buy into this idea, you know what she said was what your customers buy from you is not what you sell and you think about that. Okay, I have distributors to buy socket head cap screws. They gave me a purchase order, I give him a shipment with a packing slip and an invoice, but at the end of the day, that's not what we sell. Kearl Lake sites sells machine time. That's a mentioned a little while ago. I'm not making any money when the machines and set up, and this is an important concept because right now, and hopefully it will stay this way for awhile, machine time is in greater demand than there's a supply of and that goes into the labor force issues as well. You know, there's a shortage and machine operators, which means there's a shortage or production times when we've had a couple of customers for make the print parts come to us and say, Hey, I need you to cut the price. I said, Nah, not happening. That demand for my machine time is such that I have to cut the price on anything. And I know it's, it's hard to do, but when you think in terms of what you sell is not what your customers are buying and you can differentiate between what's in the box that they buy versus what is it that you sell. It gives you a whole different perspective about, uh, you know, going to market and you know, pricing strategies. Like right now we're not thinking about and anything drastic, we're going to stay in the sockets. It's group business. Uh, there are some make the print parts that I might want it to be a hard exit. Like I'm not running these in anymore. Like I said, we had a couple people say, you know what, I need you know, you to cut the price, blah blah blah. And it's like, you know, it didn't make sense.

Speaker 11:

Yeah, I could see how you might want her to think about your businesses, the machine time versus the actual product. But I mean at a certain point, to me it kind of sounds like management consultant bullshit. I mean the people are buying the stuff that comes in little boxes and goes in things ultimately. And I mean you have to look at it that way at a certain point. But you know, I, I don't know what the really the benefit of looking at it that way.

Speaker 12:

Well, like I said, when she first said this, I was like, hmm, this sounds a little off to why I sat there the same way for an hour. And obviously we're not going to take up much time getting into, you know, some of the concepts on that. But the point that I wanted to make is that if you've got$1 million piece of equipment and you're making nails that can be imported for China for less than your raw material costs, you need to look at our Mc in the nail business or am I in the manufacturing business and you know, I just thought I'd throw that out there because it doesn't change the way we're going to do things in a, you know, it's not like a paradigm shift or anything like that, but there is some business that we've had over the years that sometimes I wonder if we're really making any money running it, but it's legacy business after listening to the, what I sell isn't what they buy. If I don't think I'm making money, I'm going to raise the price to the point where I think I am and if I lose the business, if that tell you, you know, a quickie year in our fiscal year ended on October 31st and we had our net profit as a percentage of gross sales was a record and there was some business that we didn't do a lot of during that year. And that tells me what my gut feeling is. It's not profitable work. We look, you know, we've got sales coach for different types of product and some of the sales quotes for this marginal business, they had small numbers next to them. I don't think it's a coincidence that we had a really good p and l when these sales coats that I've been suspicious about had small numbers attached to them. No contribution to profit. I mean when machine is sitting there with no work like it was back in 2008 you take what you can get because some machine time that you sell is better than no machine time unless you're selling it at, you know, a substantial loss. So, I mean, it's a seller's market right now for certain items. I don't think people should get greedy or stupid, but I also don't think people should be reluctant to say, Hey, look, I'm worth more than I've been selling my stuff for for the last four or five years. That's basically what the steel companies did when he's tariffs went in and said, look, you know, we can get more money for our stuff. Market forces are at work.

Speaker 4:

Yup. That's right. And it's just ordinary business logic though, isn't it common sense. Um, uh, one question I'm going to ask you Charlie, when w we would on a tour of old oboe, which very well done and it was, we saw lots of machinery. I was really amazed by the amount of metrics specification bolts that were being made. I was sort of, I guess I just didn't really conceive of the fact that, yeah, my thinking is, oh, well these are made overseas and then I saw bin after bin of metric carriage bolts and all sorts of things. I mean, really a lot of stuff. I was just amazed by it. I mean, is that a central part of your business?

Speaker 12:

I can't specifically comment to, you know, the parts auto bolt makes cause I'm not familiar with, you know, who they are specifically making them for, we do a fair amount of standards and metrics but it's still a relatively small piece of our sales pie. But auto bull I'm guessing makes more make the print parts, you know, that are, you know, like application specific. If you're making a device, whether it's a machine tool at automobile, a photo cap, you're and you want to sell that all over the world, it's going to have to have metrics, grew threads and the fasteners I guess, uh, you know, it's the in series or fractional series, you know, there's some people call it, we still sell a lot of that. And actually if you'd asked me 25 or 30 years ago, I had a thought that the market would have shifted to the point where inch series Sackett screws would have gone the same way as the 36 series. You know, almost nonexistent. But they're still holding a place in the market. But if you're doing special, make the print. In fact, I can tell you that just, you know, running a couple of items through my head right now, some of the special make the print fasteners that we do make, I think most of them have metric threads on them anymore. And I'm not talking about, you know, special and like the thread length is a little different. I'm talking about like things that are like not even sack, it's screws like 12 point a flange bolts. Uh, things like that. That's, that's all metrics Rhett's now. So I'm not surprised that if you would, you know, tour other factories in addition, audible, unless they're making consensus standard parts like SAE j for 29 grade eight heck sets were asts[inaudible] 74, you know, socket product. You're going to see a lot of metrics. I think as time goes by it's going to become even more prevalent.

Speaker 4:

It's a good comment. I was just sort of amazed. I'm not amazed. I'm glad I was very, very good to see. I just was sort of surprised to find things that I would have thought really were manufactured in Taiwan or China. They actually were being made in factories and Cleveland, which surprised me. I'm sort of glad about it.

Speaker 12:

Well, it's nuts. Like I said earlier, it's not the fastener itself that drives the threat style. It's the end use. And like for example, I'm just bringing this up because I was waiting for you guys to get me on the show here. Uh, I was doing my spring tuneup on my trek, seven 30 21 speak bicycle that's got 25 sack it hit camps Cruzan that's why I bought the bike. By the way. They're all metrics and the reason for that is while trek is an American bike manufacturer, they sell their bikes all over the world. They would have a hard time selling their bicycles in Europe or Asia. If they had inch series saccadic cap screws out,

Speaker 4:

except then everyone would have to tighten them back to the dealer to get them repaired. Which is a lot of the logic used with some of the machinery coming out of China, which has British standard Woodworth raids on it.

Speaker 12:

Well that's a term I haven't heard in forever. Brian loves it

Speaker 4:

or BSF for the standard fine. Okay. Things that I grew up with.

Speaker 11:

Well Listen Charlie. So getting back to my original question to you, from your perspective, doesn't sound like there's too much that's influencing master distribution, again from your perspective, but is there anything on the horizon for the fastener industry that you see that's out there that's really gonna make an impact perhaps that isn't beaten to death already conversationally? What's out there awaiting us? Well,

Speaker 12:

you know, it's Kinda tough tail. This sense of the distribution. The answered your question is block chain. And once again, you know, I went to a presentation that was put on by a gentleman named shink Bigelow. If you're from the Cleveland area and they Bigelow is known because big alo is a family that's so car dealerships and uh, the car dealerships in the Cleveland area are really big in the blockchain. They put this presentation on the analogy that I would use as to why people in our industry need to know more about this. It might not directly affect the way you do business, but if it does, then you find out about it after the Horse is out of the barn, you're going to be in a bad way. And this is comparable to a North Coast fastener association event that I want to probably in the late 1990s Ken Graham, who was president of the Association at the time, brought in someone to talk about this really bizarre concept. It was called search engines. Wow. Now I had heard a Google and Yahoo and AOL, but I didn't know, you know, the search engine function. And as the presentation started I thought, well I know how to do that. I can cite been like, you know, someone's address, whatever.

Speaker 13:

But that wasn't the key thing. The key thing was how do you get people looking for, you know, product that you have available. If they type in, you know, grade eight hex sets or sack it, hit cap screws for the name of your company that come up. And certainly it never would have dawned on me that someone could, you know, know about my company because they typed down, you know, fasteners or dowel pins or something like that into the search engine. You know, to me this was like a toy. So I walked out of there realizing that this has a fairy real application to our business in a very real negative potential if we don't understand how it works and how to make it work for us. I think today say 20 some odd years later, uh, you know, maybe even blogger in this meeting can't put, I could have even been more like 1993 or 1994 now they think about it. Block chain is going to be for some industries like the Internet was back in the early nineties going forward for like, you know, Amazon wouldn't exist if it wasn't for him.

Speaker 11:

Okay, hang on, hang on. Because I know Brian's going to want to jump in on this, but just in one or two sentences, what is it going to do for the industry that's going to make that? So

Speaker 13:

let me tell you what this guy said and this is why I think this is something faster people need to know about. You said the big advantage of block chain is it eliminates the middle man in this industry. Yeah. I'm a manufacturer who's the middleman and the faster business.

Speaker 4:

Well to you it would be distributed as I guess.

Speaker 13:

Exactly. And if blockchain can be applied in our industry and really eliminate the middle man, I mean it was always going to be distributors. There's gonna be a lot of people that you could put out of business because they're not aware of this particular methodology. Now, it might not, you know, apply to our industry. I'm not an expert on this and I'm not going to try to represent myself, but I really think anybody that doesn't take the time to educate themselves what does is and how it works, and then make some decisions about how it could be applicable to their business model. They're setting themselves up for really, really bad to say. Ask Her.

Speaker 4:

Okay, now I'm going to make my comments. I think, I'm not sure about the comment of it getting rid of the middleman. It just means that the middlemen can be an integral part of the whole transaction because I never thought of it as a way of getting rid of the distributors, but I thought of that as a way of allowing distributors to make the knowledge about the product available to all stages of the supply prices, which is where blockchain has its forte. In other words, it's basically meant to be this giant like shared database that sits somewhere in the cloud or whenever that each person in a stage of the prizes, it could be from when a person calls a distributor order delivery of some bolts to when those bolts are being um, packed into a case. Um, and that information usually sits in the um, yeah, the distributors computer system, then it gets picked up by some shipping company, then it goes into another computer system. But in blockchain that stays in the chain and that chain could be run by IBM. I mean IBM has released an IBM blockchain, which is a cloud service probably worth looking at very, very, very, very carefully. Um, and so people in the chain itself can see where these boxes and boxes because they don't have to be able to get into your computer system or the distributors computer system or the shipping company's computer system to find that out. That's all in a like a ledger that can only be affected by certain people at certain stages.

Speaker 13:

We'll see. One thing that I mentioned, the seller that put this presentation is the car dealer business. He used an example of why when you buy a car, it takes almost a month to get the title or memorandum of title because seven or eight different people, government agencies, banks, garb, dealership, they get their fingerprints on this transaction. You said Blockchain, when it's fully integrated into that particular industry, you'll have your car title the day after you drive the car home. That's how streamlined that process is going to be calm. So once again, I'm not an advocate for this. I just think that if this is a game changing technology, the people that are last to find out about it are probably going to be seriously disadvantaged because of that.

Speaker 4:

Well, I'll be less competitive then the people who have embraced it, but it requires the demand. I mean it's going to take a while to get through into this industry especially, but it can provide great visibility into the process of, you know, materials handling throughout all the stages of it. I think it's very, very important.

Speaker 13:

I mean that was some of the stuff that the speaker touch that you mentioned visibility, real time data and he's, you know, didn't get real specific, but he insinuated that this is not very costly, that it's going to be affordable for even small enterprises to, you know, participate in. Now obviously it's in its developmental stages right now and you know, it's kind of like, okay, I want to do black chain. If everybody that I do business with from suppliers and customers isn't involved, there's nothing for me to do. So I'm at a little bit of a loss as to how this actually gets integrated, you know, based on some of the different players that would be involved.

Speaker 11:

Well, let's just say it this way. You've got your marker down. The Curl Lake side is got a tie on blockchain and I think you're right. At a certain point there's going to be some application in the fastener industry that's going to make an impact. I think we could probably all agree on that. You were talking earlier while we were speaking about machine time and all that about labor issues and that's a recurrent theme that you're dealing with. So is there anything current now that you're working with or that you're noticing any trends that are changing or is it pretty much same old, same old in that area?

Speaker 13:

Well, it's, you know, I mentioned, you know, it's a seller's market. If you're a skilled machine operator, you're in a seller's market, you could sell your skills. Uh, there's, you know, wage pressure, you know, there's, we compete for customers in this industry right now. I think the competition for help of the skilled nature is even more intense now. But the couple things I'll tell ya, you know, Kearl Lake side, cause we do have a lot of inventory. We've got a, you know, large warehouse staff and they're not our highest paid people. They're not making minimum wage by any stretch of the imagination. But Amazon opened like a million square foot warehouse, literally walking distance from our plant that was going to employ a thousand people. I saw that as a direct threat. Uh, all the, you know, the discount supermarkets, they're sending postcards out, hey come work in our warehouse, you know,$17 an hour, all this paid time off. So people are getting very aggressive for what I'll call entry level help or help. It's closer, you know, to entry level that it would be for, you know, like a skill that would take several years to learn. So here's something that really knocked me out of my chair when I heard this, I went to annual economic presentation that was put on by fifth third bank. That's our bank. And they typically talk about all this stuff you'd expect the bank to talk about interest rates, you know, investment markets, you know, by you know, other equities. The speaker did probably two minutes talking about that and he spent the rest of this hour and hour and 15 minutes talking about labor force issues. And he first got into, you know, defining the difference between the unemployment rate and workforce participation, which led into the meat and potatoes of his talk. I keep in mind, this is an economist with fifth third bank. It. The economist, he's their head guy. He said, if you have a hard time hiring people, there's an untapped market out there and it's got above 15 million people in it and they're not all employable, but many of them are there. People with criminal records came from mine. I met those guys with the pain. You know the last thing I expected, the ranking official with any bank to tell me there's people that serve time in prison or we're lucky enough to avoid perusal but were on probation or something like that. If you've got an empty jabs and you've never considered these people, now's the time to do it. You start ticking off some of the reasons for it there under control of some sort or supervision. They've got a parole officer or probation officer. They have to have a job as a condition of them that being locked up. They have to regularly be drunk. They had a stay out of trouble. They got to do a lot of things. You as an employer could never impose upon your workforce, but it is imposed upon them by the Department of correction of this war. The Parole Board or the probation officer or whatever. Now there's a downside to this. Uh, you can't just hire anybody with a criminal record because depending on what their criminal history is, like a, say you're a bank and the person went to jail for embezzling money from her previous employer, probably not a good idea. But if you know to see the person, you know, it was a street level marijuana dealer and that, that that makes them, you know, a model citizen. But it's possible if they spent a little bit of time behind bars, they might make an honest living as the way to go. So I found that to be, you know, I mean I've had people suggest to me to consider people that have a criminal history as possible employees. It never dawned on me that our bank would say your key to growth is to be able to hire people to make your business run. We're going to tell you about this market. It could be about 15 million people in the last thing that the goal one. What? That you just don't hire someone off the street like that. There's organizations like the Salvation Army that run these people through a qualification program. So if you do hire them, they've been screened and tested the, you know what I mean? You kind of get work or they'd been qualified. So the risk is there, but it's not like you're hiring the people today. They walk out of the Sally Port, the state pen. It's an interesting idea. Right?

Speaker 11:

Yeah. I would have been nice to had I walked into a bank meeting and had that advice, but you know, it makes sense and I have to say it this way, I support the idea behind helping along specially

Speaker 5:

people who have made mistakes and so forth. It gets a good idea. You know, I'm smelling here a business opportunity though. Maybe maybe there's a specialty HR type of a business that could develop out of something like that because it does sound like kind of a specialized area.

Speaker 13:

Well, there's another one of the temporary staffing agencies that we use. Some other people to Puerto Rico scoured the country side so to speak, rounded up about a hundred people that they thought they could place know, brought them to the United States. They are in the United States, brought them to the mainland because you know that hurricane, even though it's been over a year, a year and a half already, half the island is out of work, so whether it's an x scan or someone and devastated piece of geography, there are some people out there that are coming up with some, what I'll call it, very out of the box ideas that we can benefit from. I think the good news is as you mentioned, business opportunity. There are entrepreneurs out there that are looking for ways to help solve this problem, not just for us in the fastener industry. Anybody that employs people regardless of the industry.

Speaker 5:

Well there's an added bonus from episode one 38 people have a new thing to consider in terms of the labor pool. Just got a bit wider. Yeah, deviating from the normal fastener fair.

Speaker 13:

You know, one thing is just a side note, and this is probably 25 or 30 years ago, one on Braco was owned and operated by sps technologies. Puerto Rico. There's could be some people on the islands that have marketable manufacturing related skills cause there is some industry, not like you'd find in a city like Chicago or Cleveland or Detroit, but they're hopping on an airplane, a Sandal, Juan looking for it or operator tomorrow. But this is something I never would have considered.

Speaker 5:

Well we have some friends down in Puerto Rico, some listeners down there and there's hard working people, hardworking fastener people down there. But uh, yeah. Well Charlie, we're going to wind this up, but before we let you go, I can't not ask you about your take on the Indian chances this year. Do you have anything that you want to put out there? Put a marker down for the 2019 season? Well, I'm comfortable projecting they will win the division. I think they'll win 92 or 93 ballgames. The royals, the Tigers and the white sox. I just don't think have enough pitching or other offense to challenge the Indians for the division. Uh, the twins there maybe that they've, that they've improved, they add to Nelson Cruz, which is a good acquisition for them. But the bottom line is the Cleveland Indians have the best

Speaker 12:

starting rotation in all of major league baseball. That's going to keep them competitive. Now, if they win the division, what happens in the postseason, it's anybody's guess. I'm kind of resigned to this. They don't win the world series in 2019 or 2020. I might not live long enough to see him when it ever, I'm 63 and if they don't do it in the next year or two, they're probably going to go into a total rebuild mode then for a market, you know, the size of Cleveland that could be, you know, eight to 10 year undertaking.

Speaker 11:

You see that talent pool waning a little bit. Huh? Well, I tell you what, I wouldn't mind seeing a rematch of the cubs and the Indians. Of course. You know, where my heart lies in that one. But, uh, hopefully we get an opportunity, Charlie this summer to head out to the ballpark maybe with the NCF Fay split a bag of peanuts and discuss it further.

Speaker 12:

Well, you mentioned the NCF fe. That's the social, it's a tribe game that that's against the New York Yankees. And if I could walk that, that is, uh, 18th of July, seven o'clock Thursday against the New York Yankees. Huh. Another mistake. The Tigers. You're going to have to ban me from the show off Keith. This sort of the edit buttons for, okay. Yeah. Okay. Here's the deal. It's a seven o'clock game. Thursday the 18th of July against the Detroit Tigers were there. Oh, I'll be there.

Speaker 11:

Well, you never missed the NCF a night at the ball game, that's for sure. So it's a good networking event. Well, you'll be there yet. You have to get a break in all these seminars that you attend. I mean that you're at ball games, you read all these seminars, you're opening the door for auto bolt. You never know where Charlie curve will wind up. But we're glad that you wound up on fully throated radio this time around. Thanks again for joining us. You never asked me why I was in such a hurry to get to Chicago. Okay, go ahead.

Speaker 12:

I hit fifth row seats to see kiss at the United Center

Speaker 11:

and you bringing this up now. Oh my God. So what were they in full regalia?

Speaker 12:

Oh yeah, it was, that's another show for you. It's like, you know, they put on a show to give you your money's worth for the tickets and I liked it so much. I'm going to be seeing them this Wednesday night in Detroit.

Speaker 11:

You're amazing. Ladies and gentlemen, it's Charlie crew with Kurt lakeside. They are pursuing machine products manufacturers who've been around for years and years, seven years actually.

Speaker 3:

Oh anniversary. They just had. And uh, get out there to curt lakeside.com for more information or maybe you want to reach out to Charlie[inaudible]. Thanks again for coming on again. My pleasure. I look forward to the next time you put me on the air with, yeah, we did too. It's fully threaded

Speaker 9:

at Brighton best. We continue to expand our wide range of products including stainless steel and metric fasteners. Our family of brands include preferred us anchor and to iron clad performance where BBI has been a trusted partner since 1925 with award winning hand tools, gloves and drywall screws. Bvi is the largest master distributor of fasteners and the USA tested, tried and true. We are brightened best to learn more about Brighton. Best visit brightened best.com

Speaker 8:

okay.

Speaker 14:

Btm Manufacturing. He's a domestic ISO 9,001 manufacturer of threaded fasteners and bent wire products from anchor bolts to studs to u bolts. BPM is committed to making your per print special with the highest quality standards while meeting your on time delivery schedule. Since BTM began in 1961 this family owned business has remained focused on providing exceptional service to their customers centrally located in Kansas City, Missouri. Btm recently expanded into a 100,000 square foot facility which allows for the production and manufacturer of many projects simultaneously, both large and small quantity btms website@btm-mfg.com allows you to submit custom quotes quickly and easily and once you do a BTM team member will contact you as soon as possible to discuss your needs. Are you ready to get started? Btm is visit www.btm-mfg.com today

Speaker 15:

Buckeye fasteners and the Oh hell nut and bolt company had been servicing the passenger community since 1905 an employee owned company for 33 years. We take great pride in the quality of products we sell, offering outstanding customer service from our very knowledgeable sales team members. Our standard product lines include graded welds, grooves, resistance, wealth, fasteners, leg levelers, tube inserts, clevis pins and various other fasteners. We have complete custom manufacturing capabilities and low carbon, medium carbon and stainless steel materials and our quality systems are registered to ISO standards. We also have an entire team of sourcing specialists able to locate those hard to find items with typically smaller minimums and shorter lead times the net of our competition. We offer same day shipments from one of our warehouses strategically located throughout the United States and Canada, enabling us to fulfill all your fastener needs in a very timely manner. To find out more about Buckeye fasteners, please call us@eighthundredfourthreesevenonesixeightnineorvisitusonthewebatbuckeyefasteners.com Buckeye fasteners, product support from development to implementation

Speaker 16:

in this academy. I need to cut cost in freight or I'll lose my customer solution. Man Can. The more you order, the more you'll save with free freight on orders over$1,000. See the solution industries website for details. That solution I n d.com solution man, you're my fastener hero just doing my job, ma'am.

Speaker 5:

That's so well. You too, y'all. Y'All went so will you too.

Speaker 17:

Hi, this is Richard Rodda with leopard and multifaceted and you're listening to upgraded radio,

Speaker 5:

Brian and Eric back with Ya. Well Bright. After talking with Charlie curd almost seems like we should be winding up the show, doesn't it? Yeah. X but we just don't have to deal with the whole issue of employment. And we'll get back to that later. I think another episode I think. Yeah. Well my point was you always get more than you bargained for when you get Charlie on and it was really cool. I mean it's another double feature episode I guess is what I'm getting to right. But now we're at the long awaited news portion of the podcast. Everybody thanks for clicking into fully threaded radio. Hey everybody. It's springtime and that means that all kinds of good things are happening in the fastener golf world and we want to let you know that coming up May 10th the PAC west is once again sponsoring the 2019 Mil Kirschner memorial golf outing that's happening out there at West Ridge golf club and that's in La Habra, California. Details are available@thepetwestwebsitepack-west.org. It's a good cause. It's a lot of fun. Who knows? Maybe you'll be able to beat team in sequel this year. That could happen. Not Likely though, although I'm sure they have a good second place prize spray. Okay. Of course the Pacific warehouse sales girls are always right there too. So I, I guess it is a contest. No, if you are hitting out to this event, everybody, the PAC west is asking that you please wear a Hawaiian shirt because of course smell was a huge Hawaiian shirt fan and that ought to be really funny seeing everybody out there playing golf, wearing Hawaiian shirts and uh, all part of the fun. Just that means you won't be attending Brian. I don't think I've ever seen you wearing a Hawaiian shirt. No, I might've had one once about 40 or 50 years ago in New Zealand. But it's not something you sort of were in Chicago that much and that's the only reason you won't be attending. Right? Right. Yeah. Otherwise you'd be there. Well I know where you will be heading Bri and that is fastener tech 19 cause that's happening right in your backyard and it's a great show. Is that true or not? That is true. Yep. Good. Cause I'm planning on shipping the booth out there right after fastener fair. But more to the point fastener techs happening. And fortunately for us we have someone who knows a whole lot about that. Paul Evans has been a member of the Nwf a board for as long as I've been associated with that particular fine association and she's working on fastener tech 19. She joins us now. Paula, thank you for hopping in with us.

Speaker 18:

Well thanks for having me.

Speaker 5:

That's all right. You guys have been super busy on fastener tech. Tell us all about it. What's going on?

Speaker 18:

It's going to be this year, June 4th and fifth, but we have events starting on the third and the sixth as well. So we're excited about this year show. We have a lot of new things coming up, but uh, explain that in a minute

Speaker 5:

now. What organizations are supporting the show this year? Paula,

Speaker 18:

well we're excited to partner wants again with faster technology's international and uh, we welcome international fastener expo as a partner this year as well. Um, cool. Yeah. Yeah. And also want to mention too that we're co located with the surface people, which are uh, they bring in a great show. So we're expecting a lot of cross traffic as well.

Speaker 5:

There were a lot of sure Finn, people walking the isles last time they called located. I think that added a lot to the show. Yeah. Yup. Details for all of this. Folks are available at either the website fastener, tech.com or m wfa.net. So tell us why anyone should really want to go too fast. And I take, I mean we know the answer, but you're going to tell other people.

Speaker 18:

Sure, sure. You've always promoted that our shows in the industry and it's for the industry and we're very proud of the fact that proceeds from our shore put back into the industry through educational programs that are offered by the Nwsa. Another thing is we make our signup process real simple. You know, we offer a complete booth package and streamline the process to make it really easy to sign up for a show.

Speaker 5:

So what new things you adding this year? I mean there's always something new and we all know it's a great show cause we'd been going there for years, but what are you doing this year that's different?

Speaker 18:

So this year we have a new product showcase, which is going to get accepted her as the opportunity, you know, to show off new things that they're offering. Um, that'll be at the entryway of a, the show. We also have added a keynote speaker. And lastly, we've had, um, an addition to our all industry reception. We've added an after party after the second day of the show.

Speaker 5:

Okay. So now who's the keynote speaker to us?

Speaker 18:

So we have, um, Bill Strauss from the Federal Reserve. Oh yeah. He's a fantastic speaker.

Speaker 5:

Yes. Eric and I have both heard and a couple of times actually, and we've interviewed him on the show long time ago. Okay. Yeah, he was the FTR guest at one point, right? Oh, he's a speaker.

Speaker 4:

If you want to know anything about the workings of the Federal Reserve and where they think the economy's going, he's a great fountain of Knowledge.

Speaker 18:

Absolutely cool. Interesting to listen to. And he brings a wealth of knowledge.

Speaker 5:

Once again, Paula, what are the dates for fastener tech? 19

Speaker 18:

all right, so it is June 4th and fifth. We have a, we have move in and I'm on the third and our fastener a training institute. We'll be starting off our uh, seminars on, on that Monday with why fastness fail. And then also the show will be Tuesday and Wednesday and then Thursday we will have our annual golf outing, which has always been well attended,

Speaker 4:

very well attended except by me who doesn't pretend even to play golf. Okay, well I know lots and lots and lots of other people then. Yes,

Speaker 5:

right. Hawaiian shirt or not. Once again, everyone, this event is happening in Rosemont, Illinois, which is basically Chicago right near O'hare airport. So it's convenient to get to, it's at the Donald East Stephen's convention center and that's a very, very great place to be.

Speaker 4:

Tons of parking just over the road. Easier to get to from to 94 the other road that comes from the airport. If you don't know that.

Speaker 5:

And lots of great opportunities for after hours entertainment. I mean it's really a pretty world class kind of a place. So tell us a little bit about this after party though. You kind of skated right over that Paul in his, you know, fully throated listeners or you know, their ears perked up when you mentioned that.

Speaker 18:

Oh for sure. Oh, it's um, you know, we're all about providing as many network opportunities and making it a more personal experience and um, that's why we decided to add, you know, the after party in on an opportunity for people who have just, you know, Matt others to sit, you know, engage in a longer conversations and you know, just had the opportunity to, to talk more.

Speaker 5:

So where is this event?

Speaker 18:

We have shown that the exhibit hall, so I believe it's just outside the show.

Speaker 4:

Okay. I just saw the entry right?

Speaker 5:

Fastener tech 19. It's a biennial event. Everybody. So or do you say biannual but mean the same thing?

Speaker 18:

Whatever works

Speaker 5:

well, listen, before we cut to the next kind of portion of the conversation, we should probably put it out there. I mean, you folks had been working very hard. You've been putting the show together, it's by the industry for the industry, but there's a lot of competition out there for trade show attention these days. So how are you approaching that? I mean, what are the reactions of the show organizers to all of this competition these days?

Speaker 18:

That's a good question. You know, we're aware of is say that there's a lot of other shows out there but uh, we, we really try to make it a unique experience by, you know, going back to making it more personal in a well, technology has been fantastic and a lot of ways, yeah, I feel like a of people have lost touch, you know, with being able to see people face to face and um, you know, just having more opportunities to network with others as a has always been important.

Speaker 4:

Well has always been a super networking shy, that's a very tight sort of community than the Midwest I guess. And that its um, place where everyone sees all the friends and competitors but the competitors are still live friends.

Speaker 5:

Get out to fastener tech.com get yourself signed up. I'm sure there's still a few booths, spaces open. So if you're late to the game, don't worry. Give Nancy Ritchie call over there and she'll find you a good spot. Who knows, maybe it'll even be next to the FCH sourcing network and boy, wouldn't that be great. You'd be very lucky. We always have fun with our neighbors at these shows. Yeah. Paula, listen, I saw on linkedin something fly by that, uh, maybe you can help us to understand you have a new gig going. What's going on with you?

Speaker 18:

The opportunity to start my own company. Looking forward to 25 years of experience, you know, just partnering with our customers and helping them to grow their businesses.

Speaker 5:

And what are you calling this new enterprise?

Speaker 18:

So my new company's called Avante needs to move forward in Italian. That to use my Italian roots, they're a little bit, so that's good. Yeah. So He'd been off to a good start and I'm excited for the year.

Speaker 5:

Good. And what types of customers are you hoping to attract?

Speaker 18:

So we sell only to distributors and manufacturers. We can provide a wide range of fastener. As you know from all the standards to a lot of specials, you all different types of materials, you know from steels, alloys, breasts, they less so. Yeah, we've, we've got a good lineup of suppliers.

Speaker 5:

Well congratulations on the move and good luck on that. We'll be watching and um, you know where we live. If you need to reach out, if we can help you. The passenger news report is coming up momentarily. Everybody and of course that sponsored by volt industrial plastics, the title sponsors of fully threaded radio are still fast and brightened best international will. Paul, it was great to have you jump in with us to tell us all about fastener tech 19 but as you know, the fastener news reports coming up and we always like to invite our guests to do the honors.

Speaker 18:

Absolutely. Please do. All Right, here's Mike Mcnulty.

Speaker 5:

I can.

Speaker 19:

Thanks Paula. This is Mike Mcnulty from fastener technology international magazine bringing you the fastener news report, which is sponsored today by volt industrial plastics, makers of the world's finest plastic. We're closing in on the return of major league baseball to America's great ballparks as well as the advent of clean records on opening day, but we're also embarking on a full slate of industry events inside and outside of the USA. So I am still focused on fasteners and ready to deliver today's fastener news report. In this episode Mark Strength West of the worth group joins us to reveal the latest results of the fastener distributor index, also known as the FTI. Also in today's broadcast we have our top story on Arconic and newsmaker headlines from Brossard beacon fastener, Jergens Phillips Screw, sc fastener and Vulcan steel just to name a few. On the back page report we're going to talk about the world's largest fastener show. We will get to all of that and the latest FTI results right after this.

Speaker 20:

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Speaker 8:

Okay,

Speaker 14:

big t m manufacturing. He's a domestic ISO 9,001 manufacturer of threaded fasteners and bent wire products from anchor bolts to stoats two u bolts bpm is committed to making your per print special with the highest quality standards while meeting your on time delivery schedule. Since BTM began in 1961 this family owned business has remained focused on providing exceptional service to their customers centrally located in Kansas City. Missouri. Btm recently expanded into a 100,000 square foot facility which allows for the production and manufacturer of many projects simultaneously, both large and small quantity btms website@btem-mfg.com allows you to submit custom quotes quickly and easily and once you do a BTM team member will contact you as soon as possible to discuss your needs. Are you ready to get started? Btm is visit www.beattym-mfg.com today. Yeah

Speaker 18:

honey, quarter 20 by two zinc plated socket, head cap screws asap. My customer has a line down and need Saturday delivery. Hello

Speaker 16:

Solution Man. Can I have over$1 million in zinc plated sockets in stock and I'll gladly drop shipped directly to your customer on Saturdays. Visit the solution industries website for details. That solution I n d.com

Speaker 18:

is there anything you can't do solution man,

Speaker 16:

when it comes to fasteners? Nothing I can think of ma'am. I'm not too good at bowling though. So well you to Jojo went so well.

Speaker 17:

Yes.

Speaker 19:

The seasonally it dusted. FDI for February was 52.5 decelerating versus last month's 56.5 reading and consistent with the deceleration and last month's forward looking indicator. Fastener distributor index data is collected and analyzed by the FCH sourcing network, the national fastener distributors association and Baird the FDI seeks to identify demand pricing and outlook trends within the American fastener distribution industry to get some insights on these results. We talked to mark strandquist or the worth group or mark, thanks for joining us on the fastener news report. Good morning. It's good to have you back. What can you tell us about the latest FDI results, which are still in the expansion area but dipping dipping slightly as we head into the end of the first quarter of this year?

Speaker 21:

Yeah, not for me. Not a surprise. I think, you know, if we start first more on a global basis, you know, we know China is a, is slowing down and has been slowing down and uh, uh, actually just recast their numbers within the last week or so. A predicting a much slower growth rates than what they're used to. Right. And then we look at, uh, just yesterday the European Central Bank came out with an announcement that they see Europe as slowing down and there's, there's a potential of a recession and there's, they're trying to find stimulus of funds to put into the marketplace that are going to be able to, uh, to, to get things going. So, and then the subset to those two areas is, we know we've got these tariffs in China and our federal government is threatening to put tariffs on, uh, in Europe, especially on Germany with their cars that they export into the u s so between those two things of that further degrades what's going on. And then you look at the u s and I think we have a tenuous situation that we were, we had excellent economic assigned for two years. I think we're starting to see some things that are a r d stabilizing. I think the complete lack of effort from our federal government to deal with issues that create jobs, deal with issues that build our infrastructure. I mean that should be a topic that everybody agrees with, you know, and they're not dealing with it. They're dealing with, for me, non added value issues that are, that are not taking the company or the company, the country forward. So, you know, that's all, that's all. Uh, that's all going to have an impact. You know, if the three largest economies in the world by continent or I'll looking into a slow down, you know, I think it's time, you know, the US companies need to really look at this and make some decisions in terms of looking into their business, making sure they're blocking and tackling and doing things the right way. And A, I analyze there's a lot of smart people in the fashion industry and uh, I'm sure that people are going to start to sit there and I'll be a little more tentative on making decisions about expansion and growth and adding branches and adding inventory. You know, not knowing what this next 24 months is going to show us. And we're seeing the same thing. While we have some companies that are enjoying some, some great sales. We had a small company, uh, within the work group that in February, their sales were double the February before, but we also have some other companies where sales are stabilizing and there's no growth. So we're seeing a mix and in a variety industry. So I, I do think that, uh, the, these, these, I thought this was a very accurate a report.

Speaker 19:

Well, I mean, that's good to hear that the FDI is reflecting what's actually going out there and you know, business cycles do move in. You have accelerating growth and slowing growth and things like that. And I was at a economics presentation last month and it was saying, you know, this year is a, uh, there's going to be a year of slowing growth, but still in the growth phase, they're not predicting a recession. But, uh, so we're down in, in the, I saw the sales number was a big drop. It dropped down to 51.3 this month versus 62.2 in January. So, I mean, that's obviously one of the main reasons why the, uh, the FDI and aggregating indicator came down. The, uh, the big news I guess is a for the second straight month, a forward looking indicator was below the 50 point growth mark 49.6, just a touch lower than last month's reading of 49.8. So would you concur with that indicator as well?

Speaker 21:

I agree to completely, you know, I think there's a lot, as I said earlier, there's a lot of smart people in the fastener industry and people are looking at all these things and starting to become a little more, you know, tentative in terms of making decisions. So, and as they look to the future, like I said, I mean a lot of it drives off of what's going on in DC and the, and the non nonproductive non added value activities that are going on that have nothing to do with building our country up and creating jobs and doing the right thing, you know, and uh, for the American people, you know, that was, everybody's got up and they're all priced political thing. So, and I and I really predict it. We don't get the China trade a deal that we think we're going to get in the month of March. I bet you this number will go down again the next time we do the survey.

Speaker 19:

Yeah, I would expect that.

Speaker 21:

Then there's some kind of resolution with the trade thing as, as my expectations and, but I agree with you. If it doesn't get resolved, it'll keep bringing things down. And uh, you know, earlier I think inadvertently mentioned that the government was accompany and I think that's probably part of the problem is if they're, they're doing things to try to benefit the government as opposed to benefit people and industry and jobs and things like that. And as long as that's the case, I agree with you. It's a, it's a drain on, on the rest of us. Yeah. It's just party politics.

Speaker 19:

Yeah. It's crazy. Somebody once said it's theater, so, okay. The, uh, let's see, we respondent comments that was noticeably more cautious this month. What reflects the results in several respondents noted a softening of market and conditions and things slowing down. Also the, uh, the six month outlook is, is kind of tempering itself. Only 24% expect better results six months down the road and 62%. The vast majority of people think that, uh, the results will be the same as they are today, six months down the road. So that kind of says, well, things are slowing down, but they not expecting it to go into the, uh, negative growth territory. Do you, uh, agree with that even though, you know, with all the slow down, do you think will stay above the, uh, the growth line?

Speaker 21:

I think we're two to 2019. Yes. What will be curious to me is the election year in 2020, you know, normally in an election year, right? The current government will do all, they can stimulate the economy so they can go into the election, had a credit hour and brag. But I don't know if that's going to happen this time. I don't know if there's going to be that because, uh, you know, Congress is controlled by one party, the sentence controlled by another party and you know, the, the party that controls congress has no interest in having any success stories that the, the current administration can talk about that could help him in the election. So they may actually, you know, it's always ironic to me is they're going to sit there and to skate and delay and everything else. And then when things do tank, they're going to blame the administration versus their activities of getting in the way. And you know, they're going to screw things up enough until finally it does happen. And then they'll sit there and put the blame on the current administration instead of the fact they didn't do anything for two years. So, um, so that to me, 2020 is going to be a nurse and I think we'll have some growth. There won't be the same as the last couple of years unless of course we just have some tremendous breakthroughs with this China thing and they, they're going to buy$1 trillion worth of goods from our US companies. I mean, obviously that would have a tremendous, yeah,

Speaker 19:

no, that's a wild card.

Speaker 21:

Well that's a wild card, but I think as we move forward 19 it will still have a positive about 2020. It's going to be really up to what the government does is in preparation for the 20, 20 national elections and are they really gonna make an effort to make things better or are they going to deliberately try and make things worse in order to help them win the election?

Speaker 19:

Well, separate from all that, the fastener industry is going to keep moving on. We get a lot of events coming up in the, uh, in the weeks and months ahead. A next step as the, the joint meeting in California, the NFTA m WFA PAC west joint meeting, and also we have fastener fair USA in Detroit and the fastener tech in Illinois. So a lot, a lot going on. Also international people are getting ready for fastener fair stood guard. Are you a heading to any of these events?

Speaker 21:

Yeah, I have one in California next week. So looking forward to that. The joint conference. I will not be instant cart though. I don't typically go to that one because there's hundreds of people and you're going to go to that and so it's kind of non added value for me. But um, I for sure it's a big deal for word. Yeah, sure it is. No, no, I mean that's their, they're obviously their dominant time that they do business. It is Europe. So, um, but no, I'm a big supporter of NFTA. It's a wonderful organization and I think it has tons of benefits for people and, and uh, so no, I'll be there in full fledge support and uh, anxious to see people

Speaker 19:

yeah. That, that joint meeting. Personally I won't be there, but our magazines and newsletters will be there. It's an, it looks, I looked at the attendee list and the agenda, it looks pretty good and I respect everybody doing is going to have a productive and enjoyable time. All right, good. Well. I appreciate you taking the time to join us again and talk about the FDI and uh, wish you the best of luck in the spring and out in California.

Speaker 21:

I sure appreciate it. You guys have a great day.

Speaker 19:

That was mark strength list or the work group and the NFTA less immediate past president. The FDI number four February was 52.5 versus 56.5 in January. Visit FDI survey.com to participate in the process and get a detailed pdf copy of Baird's monthly analysis on the FTI. Now for today's top story, Arconic has announced a portfolio split and spin off as well as cost cutting measures and potential sales of assets in particular are kind of games to reduce the operating costs by$200 million this year while at the same time splitting the company into two businesses. First engineered products and forgings which includes fasteners and second global rolled products which does not. One of these two will be spun off and Arconic will consider the sale of other business units that do not fit into either of the two afer mentioned businesses. The company has also entered into an agreement with JP chase Morgan to repurchase$700 million of our conics. Common stock are conex decision to separate it's portfolio comes on the heels of it rejecting a$10 billion offer from a private equity firm for the entire company or conic chairman and CEO John Plants said quote, after a rigorous and comprehensive process, we did not receive a proposal for a full company transaction that we believe was in the best interest of our shareholders. The board sees more shareholder value creation through a restructuring of the company and quote, this whole process will take nine to 15 next up. Today's fascinating newsmaker headlines and acquisition and expansion news. The bizarre group is taking over German fastener supplier, Roomish, rob and dre technique distribution company when supply incorporated has opened four new companies when supply of El Paso, when supply of San Antonio, when supply of Frederick, Maryland, and when supply of North Canton, Ohio, and beacon fasteners and components has announced that Rick Rudolph associates will represent beacon and the New England states as well as in the Greater Albany, New York area. And personnel news. The Jis Division of Jergens incorporated has added in a Shell Walker to the js customer service team and Stephanie Stinson to the Jis warehouse team. Scott Fillion is the new president of the Phillips Screw Company while Ken Hurley will continue to serve as the company's CEO Neil Mark. Chuck is now executive vice president human resources that are conic Anixter international has added Bill Simon and Charles Swoboda to its board of directors and Anders. Nice traume has been appointed as the new president and CEO of Bolton and 2019 milestone anniversary news s sea fastening systems LLC is celebrating its 20th year of distributing hardware and industrial supplies and March 15th marks. Brewster washers 100th year of making washers or Shims, disks and spacers and international trade news. New USA antidumping and countervailing duty investigations were filed by Vulcan steel products incorporated against imports of carbon and alloy steel threaded rod from China, India, Taiwan, and Thailand. You can get details on all of these stories and more and fastener technology, international magazine and the Fastener News report newsletter both available@fastenertech.com finally, let's turn to the back page to talk about the world's biggest fastener show, the eighth international exhibition for the fastener and fixing industry. Also known as fastener fair stood guard is being held this month in three separate exhibit halls of the Stuttgart exhibition grounds in Germany. More than 960 exhibitors from 44 different countries are presenting their latest innovations from all areas of fastener and fixing technology held every other year. This is the flagship fastener fair for the folks that also produce similar events in the USA, Mexico, India and Italy. Just to name a few besides Germany, which comes in as a biggest exhibiting country, major European exhibitor countries at Fastener Fair stood guard are Italy, Great Britain, France, Turkey, the Netherlands and Spain. There are also sizeable Asian contingents coming from Taiwan, China and India. The net exhibition space is around 235,000 square feet, which is more than twice the size of the Las Vegas fastener show. The show is quite impressive and the February march issue of fastener technology international has a 20 page preview of the exhibits. Upcoming issues, we'll feature reports on the show, so if you have never attended I suggest you check out our fastener fair strip Gartner articles as well as the online preview available@fastenerfair.com slash stood guard. This has been Mike Mcnulty, a fastener technology international bringing it up.

Speaker 7:

Fascinating his report. Please send your news pictures, comments, corrections or complaints to me at the McNaulty at fastener tech dot yeah, Bob Reynolds and Rob Reynolds pub in SQL software are up next discussing a direct connection of a different kind. Thanks for listening in everyone. It's fully ready

Speaker 14:

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Speaker 7:

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Speaker 6:

He fastener professionals. One of the most anticipated events in the fastener industry is just around the corner. Make planes today to attend Mac Brooks Basner Fair USA which takes place in Detroit. May 22nd and 23rd 2019 over 300 companies from around the world will exhibit at Fastener Fair Usa in 2019 showcasing the latest solutions for key industries like automotive, aerospace, construction, power, gen, Mro and more. In addition to exhibits during two full days on the show floor, you'll find plenty of topical information and technical and distribution conference sessions and networking events such as the opening night reception, no matter where you fall in the supply chain. Fastener Fair USA is your opportunity to join more than 2000 manufacturers, suppliers, distributors, and end users in the heart of the Midwest at Detroit Cobo Center May 22nd and 23rd 2019 for more information and to register today, go to www.fastenerfair.com/usa Cua

Speaker 8:

Matt Brooks fastener pair USC.

Speaker 22:

Well hey everybody, this is Carmen virtue low with the fastener training minute coming to you from the faster training institute and aim testing laboratory in beautiful El Cahone California at question came up recently regarding a product we all know as grade nine grade nine bolts. What are grade nine bolts and where do they come from and how do we use them or misuse them and what do you need to know about grade nine volts when we return? I'll tell you what I know.

Speaker 23:

Thank Carmen is Joe Morris with a Master Training Institute? All right. Am I allowed to say welcome to spring or were like Jesus back to a few more weeks of freezing cold weather if seems at the entire country was hit with historically cold temperatures this winter. We'd like to take a break from Nicole and thought, add a little bit, come out to sunny warm California and joined the faster training institute for some faster product training. On March 19th we will present product training, part two in Costa Mesa, California. In this class, students will learn about screw threads, headstyle coatings and finishes plus hydrogen embrittlement. Part three will be presented on April 16 covering topics on metrics, rivets, pins in acres. Each one of our product training classes are beneficial on its own. They don't need to be taken in order, so if you'd like to learn more about the products that you buy, sell, warehouse and ship, please join us. Part one did sell out, so don't delay and register soon. All right. If you really can't get on a plane and just fly out to sunny, warm California, you can certainly still train with us. Join us for one of our monthly webinars and watch it from your laptop anywhere that's convenient for you. On March 29th Carmen were too low. We'll present hardness testing and fasteners. This is really a great webinar because understanding hardness and fasteners is the key to understanding strength and performance. We're also getting ready to host our first fastener training week for 2019 April 1st through the fifth at the IFI headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. This is the class that you need in order to become a certified fastener specialist. He will spend one full week learning about fasteners with hands on demonstrations and instruction plus plant tours were really close to selling this class out so if you don't register soon you may miss out. We will offer faster training week three more times in 2019 so check our website for dates and locations throughout the year. Lastly, you just want to remind you all our online learning library is now open and ready. We have over 30 fastener training videos available for rent. Please visit our website@fastenertraining.org for a full list of topics. Would you have annual subscriptions available in packages to meet any size company? Thanks everyone. Now back to Carmen.

Speaker 22:

Well thank you Joe and welcome back everybody to the faster training minute. This is Carmen Vertu low and today we're talking about grade nine bolts. Well when I first came into this industry, I won't tell you how long ago that was but it was a while back. We sold a product calledF nine 11 bolts and they were made by a company called foremost. They actually were sold by for most, they were made by Lake Erie and they were very popular because they were stronger than grade eight bolts. In fact they were as strong as an alloy steel socket, head cap screw and the inch world. Now a grade eight bolt, the strength is a 150,000 psi. A socket head cap screw is 180,000 psi in the smaller sizes and 170,000 psi and the larger sizes and that f nine 11 product or grade nine was advertised to give you a bolt, actually a heavy hex head cap screw with the same strength as an alloy steel socket, head cap screw. And it was very popular amongst those applications where higher strength was desired racing car builders like them, certain types of heavy equipment folks like them a lot. Now if you've been in any of my classrooms, you may have heard me sort of speak out against this product because it doesn't meet any particular fastener specification and there are lots of different versions or private label brands of them. And if you look around, I don't think the f nine 11 been around for a while, but now we have uh, the l nine product, we have the g nine product. I'm not going to necessarily endorse her, say anybody's name who makes these, we have the PFC nine product and we have bone Malloy and bone Malloy probably was the original version of this product. And actually bone Malloy advertises up to 200,000 PSI tensile strength. So these are basically higher strength versions of a grade eight bolt. And if we were uh, going into the metric world, we would have this product automatically available as a property class 12.9 is one of the reasons you've probably heard me say that our metric fastener design superior to inch in some regards they are, and this is one way they are because the steel fasteners specification for metric product allows for a high strength property class 12.9 which is the equivalent of 180,000 psi. So we don't need this product in the metric world. We only needed an inch world. Now recently a s t m has developed a few higher strength products there. No one's manufacturing them, but there are some specifications available. So here's my opinion, and maybe this might not be an agreement with everyone, but if you need a product that is higher strength in grade eight and the different between a grade eight and grade nine, there's no such thing as a specification grade nine. That's just what we call them. If that makes that much difference to you, you probably ought to be looking a little bit closer at that design. It might be better to just use a larger grade eight bolt as well. Most of these products come zinc plated and anytime we zinc plate a product that has that high of a tensile strength under an 80,000 PSI, we have a hydrogen embrittlement risk. Now, this is a fairly sophisticated product, so the manufacturers probably do everything they're supposed to do to mitigate that risk by properly baking and testing the product. But if you are going to use this in a critical application, and I would assume it would always be a critical application or you would not be concerned about that extra margin of strength, you would want to make sure that the product was properly processed. So if you're going to specify it in, find out from the supplier, how are these plated? How are they bake tower? They tested to make sure that you don't incur a hydrogen embrittlement risk. It's a very good product. If you're a fastener supplier, there's good margins, there's good money to be made. It's important though that you also know that generally are sold as a system so that you'll be buying the bolts, the nuts and the washers as an assembly because for a higher strength bolts we need a higher strength and nuts. So the standard grade eight and would not be appropriate for this bolt. Well that's what I know about the PFC[inaudible] Neff nine 11 bone Malloy. If I left your favorite one out, I'm sorry about that. There's multiple different versions of these and uh, if you're using them, you know how to get ahold of me, Carmen v@aimtestlab.com and I would love to talk to you about your experience using grade nine. Well

Speaker 5:

this has been Carmen ver too low with the fastener training minute. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2:

This is pan bearing with advanced components. You're listening to fully threaded radio, most fully threaded listen

Speaker 5:

nurse know that in SQL software's been a longtime friend and sponsor of this podcast and joining us now it's Bob Reynolds and Rob Reynolds. Hey guys, good to have you on the podcast. You with the second time, Bob, thanks for having us. Yes, thank you Eric and Brian. Okay. End of the listeners. Yeah, it's been too long. Well, how long ago was that, Bob, that you first made your appearance here? I think it was probably about three years ago. Three or four. You guys been doing it that long? Oh, it's, you know, it's been longer than that. It's uh, oh probably about five or six years. Well, we've been associated now for a lot longer than that too, so yeah, time does fly. Actually, we have a lot to cover, but we wanted to get you on because of a couple of conversations we've had in recent episodes and lot of you heard the episode was Steve Dunham from Sashco fasteners and we talked a little bit about direct connect and then on episode one 37 in general, we were talking about ecommerce and getting people to click on stuff on line. Brian's find that story of when we first started with FCH, people said, oh, you're never going to find anybody who would want to start buying fasteners online, which we laughed at the time, you know, and of course these days it's even more of a joke definitely. Right. So in sequels dipping its toe in a big way into ecommerce right now, or should I say in squeak wall? Hey that works. Yeah, that was pretty satisfying add that uh, rob had put together and uh, we got some really good feedback on that. You've gotten a lot of mileage out of that Ad. Yeah, I like that. It's pretty true. I think it hit home, um, if he calls in squeak, well that's not the first time we've heard it. So no, it's SQL. Everybody. That's, that's the real way. It's a kind of a funny ad, but it's a serious piece of software.

Speaker 24:

And I think I'm just touching on the ecommerce that you just brought up. Um, we are starting to see quite a few of our customers move to an ecommerce shopping cart platform and just across the faster and the tree. I think one of the big parts about that is not just the shopping cart but um, enabling your customers to go online and um, use the customer portal. And that's really a big part of what our customers like about our websites is being able to go on

Speaker 1:

there and pay any open invoices, um, take care of those non revenue producing tasks that don't necessarily have to have a salesman involved with. You can check your aging or reprint packing lists, stuff like that. So our customers are really pushing their customers to use that functionality on the websites. So let me get this straight in. Sql software is an ERP platform. Okay. Most people know that in the web you econ or let's say it this way, the shopping cart module that we're talking about, no, that's an add on to your main Erp. Is that true? And if so, is there a name for this module that you, that you call it? I mean, how are you, how are you packaging it? Yes, the website is an add on and it's just an in sequel website. We have a base template that we build out and works really well for our customers. They can pull it up on their smart devices as well. So it was responsive and as far as marketing it, a lot of our customers, you know, they, they, they want to keep it customer driven through the customer portal but then other fastener companies don't mind, I'm having pricing out there, you know, for the general public to biproduct online. So for it's pretty flexible. Yeah.

Speaker 4:

So you have, this is more than just a click here and buy it. This was actually extends right into your, the customers of your customers being able to find details about their open invoices.

Speaker 1:

Yep. And that's all part of the a customer portal. Their, they've got their own dashboard where they can go in and view an open and closed borders. Um, reprinting certs, track their shipments, stuff like that. Check and previous sales being to reorder off of all of the previous sales. Um, similar, similar to how when we go to pay our, our, our bills, our electric bills from her, there's an account dashboard that you have where you can take care of the, a lot of that just simple work. So this is a fairly fully featured module and a, you've been at it for a little while so I'm pretty sure a lot of the basic bugs were worked out and you're pretty stable now of course, that's subject to specific configuration issues that different distributors would encounter as they're deploying this. Let me ask you this, Bob Reynolds, you've been at this game for a long time. When did you first start getting your customers asking for this kind of capability? In other words, how long has ecommerce really been in the zone? For a lot of our, our listeners, a lot of our customers spend about 10 years since the first customer that asked me about it, um, kind of pushed us in that direction. We did try and partner with an outside company, actually a couple different ones over some time off or recommended by existing customers of SQL at the time. And they looked promising. But not having control over the programmers at the third party made it difficult for us to maintain the level of quality that we have coming on it, you know, for and, and SQL within with our ERP solution. And also the need tie the two together, the Erp one database and having the knowledge of course that what the customer's doing with the data once they get it over the internet, whether it be an order or the customer we're looking through to actually look at quantities to be able to like rob mentioned to get certs, um, to get their invoices or reprint them and even to take a credit card and pay for orders. So after spending pretty good, fair amount of money looking at third party solutions, we hired our first web programmer and I think that was probably about eight years ago. And since then we've put together an entire division that handles the, the web and a, and we've seen multiple companies that event what I would term a pretty good amount of money, you know, 30,$40,000 with a third party to go outside for them. And the customer has to maintain a separate database. It doesn't really tie in directly to their ERP solution or to us. And we've dealt with somebody and over the years we've just taken over the whole process.

Speaker 4:

You're right, you can spend a lot of money on setting up a wave system and it still doesn't have necessarily work. Okay. As we've known and we have many instances of, everyone's got some horror story of them and actually not even getting into the delivery of anything.

Speaker 11:

Well the philosophy of the Erp to begin with is that you have a unified system and everything integrates with it. And so this is a logical extension for a lot of companies. But you said basically that it's been 10 years now. Those were the early adopters. You know, I'm, what I'm trying to get at is, is the trend here in the industry and as you see it, you know, so out of all the distributors that you work with, I mean, how many of them do you think are actually looking to get online or our online, I mean, we're in the trend, are we? Well, I mean it's still, we're, we're beyond early adopters now, so we're in the trend. Would you say we are,

Speaker 1:

we've got 300 plus distributors that run in seagull software, different sizes, different scope of work. But I'm rob, how many would you say we have a website?

Speaker 24:

Off the top of my head, I would say probably about a hundred of them. Maybe about a third. Wow. That's actually quite good actually. Yeah. Well I, and it started like Bob mentioned probably somewhere near about eight, 10 years ago, but really in the past couple of years it's really, it's picked up four is pretty good. We're typically have about 20 to 30 different web projects going at a time. And that's just because it's kind of an ongoing process. It's not within sequel, it's not, we set up the website and that's it. Um, we continually work with our customers to just update their website. There's constantly new product going on, new pricing, being pushed back and forth. Um, and that's what's key about having the one database. Our websites use the same big databases, our software. So that way as far as the maintenance and upkeep go, once you get your website set up, it's pretty, it's pretty minimal upkeep and maintenance within sequel. Yeah.

Speaker 11:

Do you have a feel for the target markets

Speaker 5:

that most of these guys who are already online that, what are they looking at? In other words, you, you, you mentioned before that some of them are really still going distributor to distributor but others are focusing more on endusers OEMs and so forth. Is Do you have a breakdown on who's doing what at this point?

Speaker 1:

I think mostly the customers, Eric are looking at a B to c four, um, Jenner if, if they're looking at B to c to generate new leads, new customers. So they're more tied in with Seo and trying to get, you know, above the watermark, you know, in Google, um, which, you know, if it's below the watermark, a lot of times people don't look, then they have the paper click ads that are above their, you're speaking to the choir and this one bottom. So, you know, bottom line is you have the people that are more oriented that way and they want to have a sticky site. You guys know what that means. Somebody finds your site, they stick on it, you know, the programmers called that. And so, you know, something that they find that it's easy to use, that's appealing to them, you know, appealing to the eye but allows them to move around quickly and generate their order and get off of the system. And he started talking millennials and you start talking about websites typically. And I think, you know, a lot of the old sales guys like myself, you know, lament, kind of the thought process of we don't do as much of the, you know, go see the customer, talk to the customer relationship management with the customer. As you know, today, mostly because people have the computer and you look at, you know, BBI and you look at, well even, you know, every master distributor that's out there, you know, it has a very nice website, but BBI in particular, um, you know, gives a discount to the customers that buy on the website. They realize and they're smart and doing so that if they have less people talking to these people on the phone, then they can actually put the product out there at a more competitive price and they can utilize those people more for sloughed, say, quality control shipping and whatever. So the long story short is everybody's moving to it. You know, it used to be that you had just a few people out there that we're pushing the envelope, but today we see that everybody wants to have a web presence, even if that presence is that they're partnering with any Ebay or an Amazon and getting orders sent to their system through those larger companies.

Speaker 5:

That's true. You'll comment about maybe I was a good one, which is that it's so useful for them to encourage people to use the website. They give a discounted price. Yep. We a SMA. It's since you, there's, there's

Speaker 1:

a number of things that actually, I guess if I can give us a little of a pat on the back here, I don't have a number of things. Yeah. The number of things that we've done in the industry that were kind of first, um, dealing with, uh, Bob and Barry Porteous to generate our direct connect. You know, that was, that was done by us. It was the first web based solution where you could literally have our users, the distributors look into their supplier's inventory and logistically order a product, get it shipped in and not have to do anything other than work inside of their ERP solution. And today that's actually been copied by multiples our competitors. Um, and we've also put it into play obviously with many other companies. Bbi of course, bought Porteous. So that's, that was our link into a working with BBI. So they're the, you know, the largest company that we have out there, I don't know as far as the number of users in, in sequel that actually buy product from Bbi, but I bet it's a pretty hefty number. And what we do is we take the mundane paperwork, faxing orders over that type of stuff out of play. And they're working on the same screen that they work on day in and day out entering orders. So very quickly, you know, you don't have to go to a website, log in, go find the product when you're on a product that literally will pull up that product on the suppliers server, check for quantity, give them a price. And I have to say like when Stele fasts tied into the direct connect and they're now a part of Linstrom, of course everybody knows that, but the bottom line is FCH did a hell of a job. Can I say that in Scrapie, in scrubbing their, their data for them with the FCH scrubber to bring all of the cross references together and basically to get the parts out there so that their customers could dig deeper easily. And you know, we're proud of the fact that we have an interface to FCH and for any of our customers that run our website and want to have that scrubber Builtin, which is amazing, by the way. Um, we have that ability. So bottom line is, and, and we've run that and it's, uh, it's, it probably makes a website twice as effective as any other website that's out there.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. The interesting thing is that you're right, because you can do the transfer. So someone gets ABC company sends their inventory to stow Fosto BBR and they get a lip heart and I'm as matched up and that's only valid at the moment it was done. And then you know, so Lindstrom comes along or BBI adds a whole socket line and all of a sudden there's no, there's no part numbers for any of that stuff. Right. And so the benefit of being able to just have this thing that sits there and looks at parts on the fly means that you can stay in touch with your supplier all the time. And Yeah. Thank you for, yeah, thanks for the great plan. That wasn't in the script XLE over. I don't think it was.

Speaker 11:

Yeah. Thank you for pointing out the integration there with the scrubber. You know, you guys, we, we actually, we've covered a lot of ground here, right. And I want to just point out for listeners that these are all related subjects because everybody wants to get online in one way, shape or form. And of course just using in sequel to organize your business with a basic Erp is is another point to consider. But again, we're, we're traversing a lot of subjects here. So we started with web interfaces. We kind of talked about the direct connect system, which, which is a great system. But uh, but again, um, slightly off on a tangent and then moving off to the scrubber part of it. So different topics but all related. Eric, are you accusing me of moving on to tangents? You know, you are, you are the master, you are the master Bob. That's why you always have so many people in your booth there in Vegas. I be, because you can really cover a lot of ground and you do your, you're good at it. Selling ice to Eskimos. You, I've spent a few, I've spent a few hours of[inaudible] hours in your booth over the years and uh, yeah, I've kind of come to that conclusion. I'm sure it's the ended up to hours anyway. Right? Of course. You're a pioneer in another way that a lot of people remember you for two. And you ever since we first started working with you, you always had a couple of kegs available and I think you, you did it, you said a trend because you'll walk around now out there and uh, you know, other, let's say it this way, everybody doesn't have one, but a lot of guys are, and your lead there too.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. Well we found that, uh, there were many people with parks throats that we're very happy to partake in a beer while they listened to me drone on today. You know, we, we have a pretty comfortable booth so you can come in and sit down, grab a beer or a water for those that don't drink and uh, take a look at the software one were in the show, but a kind of moving back towards the website. If we have a third of our customers roughly running websites, my prediction would be that within another 10 years we would probably have as much as 75% of the customers on websites. This is going to be certain people that have small businesses that deal in a local geographic territory and they're not going to want it. But anybody that's really looking to grow their business and exponentially and and not have to spend, you know, and in order to amount of money to do so are gonna add this because it's basically like adding salespeople without having them sitting in there and without paying them money. Wow.

Speaker 4:

I should be using that when our people come to see me. Why would you want a website and said, well, yeah, okay, where do I start?

Speaker 1:

I mean, it's kind of true, right? Brian, when you, when you take a look at it and you look at how do I organically grow my business? This might be a segue for another topic that I'm kind of hot on his fee, the inorganic growing by buying other companies. But you know, long story short, we basically look at how can we grow our business without spending dollar for dollar? You know, having to have a person sitting at the desk answering the phone or having to have outbound sales people. Can we generate more business? That's where Seo comes in. Search engine optimization so that when I log in and I go look for the FCH scrubber, I, I find it and I find it like I mentioned above the watermark, which means I don't have to take the cursor and go or the mouse and go down the page and look through, you know, the 57 different, you know, searches you're right at the top. So, you know, those are things that I think people are more and more getting. Um, and it kind of amazes me cause I used to call this industry low tech high tech, meaning we kind of had a high tech product, but we are selling it to a low tech industry. And you guys have probably seen that's, that's changed quite a bit in the last 10 years.

Speaker 4:

Oh yeah, no, it's um, um, in a lot of the users, sort of a anonymous in many ways. And we don't, you know, we have people using us like 60% of distributors and 40% are OEMs or fascinate users who just went searching, say went searching on Google. I think that's probably 50% is all the uses come through Google or bing or something like that. They're just searching for something that an ordinary distributor would never dream of searching web for. Um, so if you don't have a website, they're never going to find it.

Speaker 11:

Okay. So let's rewind. We talked a few minutes ago about the challenges of deploying this. And Rob you can probably chime in here because as you work within sequel software users, you're involved in the deployments of these and there are sticking points sometimes or let's say it this way. There's areas that you want to be very careful about so that you have a successful deployment. And over the course of your experience, what areas can you recommend our listeners pay attention to is they're getting into this SEO we know is a big area. What are some of the others share? Um, and I think the major sticking point or hurdle is with any website, regardless of who you're building it with, is the initial setup. Um, making sure that everything is going to look good when it gets pushed out to the web. As far as your items go, your pricing. Um, and one of the key areas, it's a lot of work that we've noticed in the setup is having this search capabilities, um, making that easy. So when our customers, customers go online, it's very easy to find products and the setup for all of, on the items,

Speaker 24:

there's a hierarchy where the categories are created along the left side of most websites. And when you hover over it, it breaks down to another category, a subcategory, and then a third sub category. And within sequel we have a parametric search as well. People can search based off of the item specs and getting all of those items, specs, whether it be the thread that pitch, the w if it's plated, all of that into your database. So when it pushes out to the website, it's organized, it's easily searchable. That's, that takes a lot of work and um, could take months. And we've actually started working with those guys over at the FCH fastener clearinghouse. They, uh, oh yeah, those guys. Yeah. They have a scrubber that they have a scrubber that works very well for our fastener companies. Um, as far as helping set up those items. So what could take, you know, two, three, four, six months depending on how much time our customers have to put into the, the, uh, item setup. It's what, five minutes with you guys if, if they run it through the scrubber, so can be very powerful tool that helps. One of the big hurdles as far as the setup goes and that it comes back to having one database after that. If, if you're working with an outside third party, the upkeep on that, it's going to be difficult. Well, if it, if it's all set up, for example, on our websites, it's all set up and in sequel, um, yeah, there's a little work at first getting it set up and with the help of a scrubber that that's huge. But having it be one database, the go going forward, it's very minimal upkeep and just makes it well worth your worth the time to have everything integrated like that.

Speaker 11:

Right. Thanks for mentioning that. We're working along with you in some of these deployments and getting that data. Colin's, um, I will see this, both of you, Reynolds, you did very well in bringing Diana into your organization because she's working, I know with a lot of your customers in this area and she knows fasteners, so it's good to see that an Erp vendor is got real fastener pedigree in the organization and that is not hurting you. So what you're saying there rob, is that the categorization is one side of this that is a kind of a strategic decision that's made in the early stages, but then there's a phase that's just simple data cleansing and then there's ongoing maintenance. Is that true?

Speaker 24:

That's correct. I mean once, yeah, once you get the majority of your items set up, that's most of the work in the beginning because if you, yeah, if you want to check out and have frayed, add it, you need the weights, you need specific pricing for each customer. And that's v Yeah, that's very hard to keep up if you're working off of two different databases.

Speaker 11:

Yeah. When, when a company sets out to do this normally or could you give us a range? I mean, what's the say the, the shortest critical path in terms of a, how long does it take? Okay, that's what I'm asking. And then on the other side, have you seen some companies that for whatever reason they just dragged their feet and it and it really dragged out? I mean

Speaker 24:

what's the, what's the range here? The range typically. Um, we just had one goal I have that was a couple months, two months that was on the, on the quick end, a website ready within a few weeks. Um, if all of the item information, if all of this setup is already done. So I mean in a couple of weeks I think on SQL side, so the majority of the time it takes is based off of how much time our customers have to put towards the project. And I'm making run out. We've seen them, we seen him run out maybe six months, six months is probably typical. However, it depends how they want to do at some of our customers start with maybe their top 10 selling items and then just continually add as they go, which makes it a lot quicker. You know, to get going. Um, so depending on how long they want to do it, usually two to six months for a website, some fake longer just, yeah, some drag out if, if, if they get busy and can't put the time towards it.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. And I haven't put it as their top priority because you have to be prepared to spend the time and effort. Exactly.

Speaker 1:

Well, Eric, you mentioned Diana and Diana deal is, uh, actually the project manager for all the companies that go live with an SQL website. So we found that, you know, that's uniquely different than the project management that we have for the ERP solution. It's more focused of course. But the bottom line there is that, like you mentioned her background in the industry and uh, having come from THB and she, you know, has great knowledge of fastener products does help because as rob mentioned, we keep talking about one database and the reason that that's important is you literally in, in SQL can go into the item screen and check a box that says, put this on the web and it's on the web, you know. Good. Brian, you've probably seen people that have multiple databases trying to do that.

Speaker 4:

I'll have, you mentioned the maces have seen and I'm not, and so the ability I was, we're going to ask you that question. So that's pretty cool actually to say. So you can actually go to the fair for some people would be that they wouldn't want some things to go on the web because they might be specific parts they are holding for specific customers. So they wouldn't ever want those to go near a web unless it's only their customer.

Speaker 1:

Right. And of course we can take care of that too. Cool.

Speaker 11:

So in terms of the Ui then that's all we're talking about. The back end with all this data scrubbing and everything, which makes a lot of people's eyes glaze over because they never touched that part of it. But on the front end you were mentioning stickiness and how to keep people there. And this was exactly what we were talking about in episode one 37 when I, when we scratch your head. And so we got to get the SQL boys on here. What do you do to make sure that you have a sticky site? How do you keep people there once they hit the page and then keep buying from that shopping cart? Well, what's your approach to that?

Speaker 1:

Well, first it's understanding your customer for, you know, for the distributor or our customer. Understanding the customer and what they want. And of course now that we've got a hundred of these out there, the bottom line is that we, we do see trends and what people want and the way things are laid out and the search and capability, et Cetera. So it is that stickiness that needs to be there. It needs to, you're a fastener customer, Eric, and you go online and you're looking for a product. So the Seo puts my company in front of you. You Click on my website, you go there and you'd go, what the heck? I can't get around this website. This doesn't make any sense to me. What are you going to do? You're going to leave. So yeah, competitors, just a click away. Yeah. Then you're going to find, let's say you find Brixton's website, one of our customers that we've built a website for and Brixton, you know their website is pretty easy. You see a bunch of pictures of different categories. You go select a category, you go in and then there are different parameters as Robin mentioned, to be able to dig down and find the exact part that I want and I can go in and see the quantity they have on hand at the different branches. I can look and see if they have enough for what I want. I can put an order in, I can then build an order and the shopping cart will allow them to take that order and send it in. Or just ask for verification on pricing. So asked for a quote on those items and then they're done with that process. Next time they go to bio fastener product, they're going to go to that bricks and website because they're happy with what happened before.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, so sounds simple, isn't it?

Speaker 1:

Well that's what we try and make it

Speaker 4:

right. It's a lot of crap that she behind the scenes to make, make all that stuff happen. But if you can do, if the customer can do all the things it needs to do on one place, why would you bother going somewhere else? Absolutely. That's incidentally the, one of the things, the right fee is that used to get proposed to me whenever someone would look at me showing all the stuff on the FCA site and that say, well I mean, so I couldn't put my stuff away cause it means my competitors, customers would see my competitor's stuff. I said, yeah, well if you've got great customer service, why would one of your customers go anywhere else? If you have a terrified the customers are going to leave, you know you've got a bigger problem in the pricing structure.

Speaker 1:

I agree with that.

Speaker 11:

Yeah. And we've come a long way as an industry. I mean I think, uh, we haven't really mentioned too much the Amazon effect during this conversation, but it's always looming in the background. And I think there's a lot of companies that are feeling the heat. They might just be thinking about getting online is a, is a defensive maneuver, you know, without thinking too much about it. But the fact of the matter is, is that it's, it's just the reality now. It's that your competitor is online or he's going to be soon and it's just a fact of life. You can't cry about it. You have to face it and do something about it.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. And your customer wants you to be online probably more so now because they, it's just an easier for them to click through things and find out status of orders and calling up to find out on the find way something is.

Speaker 11:

Do you guys over at in sequel, I mean, do you have any kind of an idea about what the Amazon effect is going to bring to the fastener industry in terms of what you're hearing from your customers? Perhaps? Are you being requested to add functionality in for integration with Amazon or, uh, you know, what, what are you hearing?

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 24:

It's becoming more of a request, especially I'd say in the past year. Um, and that's not it, that's not an issue. We, we've tied in with, um, multiple different web platforms for our customers. I think that it is interesting too because some of those, some of the companies that we've started working with, maybe there's one or two people, but they're doing massive amounts of volume. I'm just strictly Ebay, Amazon, um, at sea, whatever, whatever platform that they want to be on. There's API's and we can tie into those so we can take care of them.

Speaker 4:

Oh, interesting. Okay.

Speaker 1:

Well the next one, this next, next one is going to be Alibaba, right?

Speaker 11:

Yeah, that's a good point. Have you heard anything? Have you, I just, have you had any requests for Api? So Alibaba,

Speaker 1:

uh, not yet, but I just saw this morning that, uh, one of the major retailers is tying in with them and going to be their distribution arm in the u s so you'll see it. It'll happen.

Speaker 11:

Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. You know, our servers are, we have attempted hacks all the time that come from, Oh, let's just say that part of the planet. Frankly, we're both kind of surprised that we haven't had any acquisition offers from those guys or companies like them too, you know? But, uh, but I think you're right. I mean, stuff like that. So it's going to come and sit right on the horizon if not here already.

Speaker 1:

Yup, Yup. Speaking of acquisitions,

Speaker 11:

yeah. You mentioned everybody knows about Linstrom and Fez, which is true. And I guess being in this industry you can't really, uh, you can't really operate without taking notice. I mean, how's that affecting in sequel? I mean, what do you, what do you see coming down the road?

Speaker 1:

Well, I think as long as money stays cheap, uh, you're going to see more consolidation. I think there are companies that didn't have great succession plans that are maybe being bailed out, uh, which is good for them really. And, or they skipped for the succession plan. They had it in place because there's enough money for them to retire. Now it's been quite an interesting time, Eric. I see. Because of the amount of money that's out there and available the lent at pretty cheap rates. You know, historically at this point in time there are many companies that are borrowing and going out and acquiring other companies. Those companies in the fastener industry, a lot of those are our customers that are either staying on SQL software or have to move over to the parent company's software. So that does affect us somewhat. And then some of them are our customers that are out doing the acquisitions. I do find it kind of interesting that when a larger company buys a smaller one, the end, the smaller companies and entrepreneur that's been successful are fairly successful. They go in and change a lot of the business practices and say, Hey, you got to mold yourself to what we do. That being said, of course they bought the company so they can do whatever they want to do. Uh, yeah. But uh, for us it does make it an interesting time because you know, we could sell a customer, have a good customer that we've had for say 10 years running in sequel. They're very happy and they, they, you know, unfortunately I have to switch to whatever other, you know, Erp solution is being used by the parent company. And it also affords us opportunities to sell more licenses when our customers are out there doing the acquiring, you know, and they bring in other companies that they want to have on the same software package as the rest of, of their branches and divisions. So it cuts both ways for you guys. It does, yes. And uh, you know, if I had a crystal ball, I just want to see, I just want to go out and sell it all the people that are growing their businesses instead of the people that are going to be acquired.

Speaker 11:

Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about it. I go fishing you occasionally with a guy who's responsible for snapping up a few of our customers here and there over the years. Fch users and they, that's a frequent topic when we're out there cast in a way, you know, hey, we should just quit buying up all my guys, you know? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I could understand that. It's all part of the game. It does make it interesting. So well some of the ideas that we've discussed during this conversation apply to any fastener distributor who's looking to get out there online and sell on the web. Others of course it's going to apply directly to in sequel users. But uh, I think any fastener distributor take value out of today's conversation for sure. So we thank you for discussing everything with us guys. And uh, of course the big fastener show fastener fair. Is there a terming? It is happening in May in Detroit. So you guys are based in Detroit. He must be looking forward to that finally a show in your backyard.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. I had it, I had a great time last year and in Cleveland it's coming to Detroit this year and we will be there. We've got a booth set up and looking forward to seeing many of our customers there is as well and, and new business. So she'd be a good,

Speaker 11:

are you going to be able to do demos of some of these web capabilities at your booth at the show? We can usually do that right?

Speaker 1:

Depending on how busy the booth is. We, we have in the past if, if someone wants to, a lot of times people are okay, um, you know, meeting after. But we can certainly do it there too, Eric. That's probably the easiest thing to be demonstrated. All you have to do is have a connection to the Internet and uh, you know, showing web pages is actually pretty easy and quick. As long as the connection is there, then then we can do it. The wifi, I don't rely on that.

Speaker 11:

Yeah. Brian for years is insisted that we bring our own web server, which we have cleverly hidden under the fastener tron at all the shows we did 10. So we're, we're not wifi dependent, but I guess at this point, right, we could probably drop the security blanket because it's fairly dependable, but it's, I guess you're going to persevere with that, aren't you?

Speaker 1:

So real. I feel for you guys, I've gone through all those years as well. So bottom line is, uh, yeah, it has become certainly easier and with, you know, your own Wifi cards and whatever. Um, more reliable, trying to rely on any show a comedy to provide new Wifi. It's been interesting over the years. An expensive by the way. Yeah.

Speaker 11:

Okay. Well, but the point is you're going to be there at fastener fair in May. You'll be at fastener tech in June. And then of course everybody, we'll see you in Vegas once again in September. It is this year. So in 2019, what's your big new feature that you're selling aside from web related stuff, if there is one?

Speaker 1:

Well, I don't know if we have a big new feature. I think that I can tell you that recently, uh, we're, we're actually going through an upgrade to our quarters in the Detroit area and uh, we've doubled the size of our building as we've continued to grow. And you get, as I've beat it into everybody's head in the industry that, you know, we want to be the leader in support and you know, have the right amount of people for the customers that are out there. You know, we've grown to the point where I wanted to have a building that will carry us through the next 10, 15 years here. And so, uh, we are going through that. So there may be a little bit of pain for our employees, but in today's Day and age, of course, you know, we can send them home for the week if it's too loud and using the same type of tools that we're using right here today for this. Yeah, we have the ability to, uh, you know, have him answer phone calls from customers anywhere in the country.

Speaker 11:

So you're saying that the build out of your office is not all dedicated to your,

Speaker 1:

I mean, office, wait, I'm confused. Oh, actually we, we, uh, we've added a gym, a gym, the small gym for our employees. There'll be a couple of treadmills and rolling machine and a yoga area and some weightlifting and, and a shower and changing facility. And, uh, so we, it, it isn't all four employees, but we also added four new offices and 10 new cubicles. And so we were giving ourselves the ability to, um, well pretty much a double the amount of people we have in the office at this point in time. And, and it's, that's our support office. You know, we let rob, you know, have an office there too cause he's in the headquarters and Eric, uh, we let the storage closet, we let the sales guys have a little room, you know, every once in a while a we look in there and throw a steak in forum and shut the door, you know, so

Speaker 11:

yeah. So just head over to the president of the universe desk and go down the hall, take a left and, well, that's cool. That's cool. Congratulations on that expansion and a, yeah, good for you for really building out that kind of life work experience. I mean, it's the trend and I'm sure you've heard a few of our past episodes where we describe what's going on or actually happened now and in a few years ago with the field and some of our other guys that we've had on. I mean it's always seems like it's a great success when companies do that. So good for you.

Speaker 1:

Yeah. The standup desk are all the rage now, you know, and colors and light and trying to make sure all the ergonomics are there for the employees and you know, the happy employees and happy customers. Are there bean bag chairs? Um, no but every chair we have in the office for an employee is an air on, um, which I'm sure you guys have probably heard of there. Yeah, they have lumbar support there. You can, you know, adjust an 18 different ways and uh, no complaints from the, from the employees. They'll give away too many secrets. Know about. Tell Eric is Tom am I going to need to know yourself over there?

Speaker 11:

Okay guys, what we're going to wind down, we want to thank you Bob Reynolds and Rob Reynolds from in squeak in CQL software. Everybody you can get out there and connect with them online. Of course. Big surprise. www.inxsql.com. It's a little bit of a funny name. It's serious software in sequels, a great partner. And longtime friend of the podcast and thanks guys for coming on line with us. We'll see you for sure in person in May.

Speaker 1:

Thank you Eric and Brian. Looking forward to it. Cool.

Speaker 6:

Brian and Eric, they're online fastener talk radio extremist, your right on with fully threaded Radio Harry now that you use in sequel software. How do you like it?

Speaker 25:

In sequel has delivered, they truly are written for fastener distributors. It's affordable and their support staff is great. We found in SQL support staff has depth. They know our industry and they certainly know their software. I see they've helped you pronounce in sequel. Yes, but what does he seek will mean? Is it written in sequel? Is the data stored in sequel? Are they located in sequel in sequel uses the industry standard Microsoft sequel database, which is why it's so powerful and easy to use. All the database is stored in sequel. I don't even know where that is. I hear it's a nice place. Perry in sequel uses a SQL database because it's current technology and your data is completely accessible. No more expensive customer reports. That why and sequel is so easy to use. Where is sequel on the map? One of their many support members will help you answer that. Go to their website www.inxsql.com or call toll free(877) 446-9775

Speaker 15:

since 1905 Buckeye fasteners Elio hell nothing bold. Company had been supplying the world with high quality fasteners. Our Standard Product lines include weld fasteners, graded weld screws, leg levelers, self flinching hardware, clevis pins, rivet nuts and various other fastener lions allowing us to support virtually all types of industries. We have complete custom manufacturing capabilities and low carbon, medium carbon and stainless steel materials and our quality systems are registered to ISO standards are on staff engineering department can assist you with product development and provide total technical support. Our knowledgeable sales team members offer superior customer service and are here to answer any questions you may have regarding our products. Having a hard time finding apart. Let our sourcing specialists do the work for you to locate those items. We offer competitive pricing with typically smaller minimums and shorter lead times. To find out more about Buckeye fasteners, please call us at(800) 437-1689 or on the web at Buckeye fasteners Dotcom Buckeye fasteners more than just weld

Speaker 6:

Parker fasteners is your premiere cold heading manufacturer forging the future with precision and quality is our top priority. When you think of domestically produced sockets and tamperproof screws from alloys and stainless, including eight to 86 think Parker fasteners. Our lockout line of security fasteners feature high Torque Oval Center Pin Design and unique lobes that provide one of a kind security for your customers. Our in house three d printing capability makes the prototyping process fast and affordable and we're ready to produce your large or small run orders with highly competitive pricing and unbeatable lead times. So forge the future with Parker fasteners. Visit Parker fasteners online today@parkerfasteners.com

Speaker 2:

come in.

Speaker 26:

Do you live from a much larger desk drawer there? Jake Davis with BTM manufacturing. And you are listening to my friend Brian and Eric on fully threaded, right?

Speaker 2:

Yep.

Speaker 5:

Brian and Eric, you're online fastener and he goes back with Ya. Well bright was it good to have Bob and Rob Reynolds from in sequel on the podcast? And I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised and grateful that they were so generous in their recommendation of FCH part of what they do. I mean it's a great connection that we have with them. Uh, albeit a small one given in SQL is a pretty serious piece of software to software platform actually. And um, yeah, it was good conversation

Speaker 4:

and the reality is, you know, we, we talked too fast people every day and um, the usefulness of really big al to use direct connect and how it really can save work. In other words, you can just be sort of, you know, looking at an item and realize you need to order another$500 and just click a button and then see the, you know, still fast or baby I or someone has got how many thousands of[inaudible] that line at their various different locations and then place an order that doesn't, you know that's the order goes off to Bvi are still fat or whoever it isn't blue numerous other people, they don't have to Redo anything. It's all there and done once, which is, you know, one of the great things, it's a very really, really good piece of functionality.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. People joke about the fastener industry being low tech or behind the times, and let's say it this way, it's not a bleeding edge kind of an industry, but systems like this, it can really move a fastener distributor up a couple of notches in terms of efficiency, profitability and so forth. So hope you got something out of that folks, that conversation and I think it was applicable to SQL users, but any fastener distributor who's looking to get online or move with the times. Right. Well we're moving with the Times folks and we're kind of winding down episode one 38 here. I'd like to thank all of our guests, Bob and Rob Reynolds from in sequel software most recently but also Charlie curve from lake side as usual. I've got like four or five different things I want to talk about next time he's on. You should have heard this stuff. We had to cut out folks. Also, Mike Mcnulty from fastener technology international along with worth VP. Mark Strandquist. They covered the fastener distributor index numbers. Mike had all the headlines. Thanks gentlemen. Yup. Paula evets of the Nwf a gave us the rundown of fastener tech 19 coming up in June. Don't miss it everybody. Right? The social event of the year of the F and the fast industry in Chicago. Oh, clearly any might to some business to most assuredly. Andy as always, Carmen for too low brought us the fastener training minute. Nicely done. Once again, carm, the title sponsors of fully threaded radio are still fast for service you deserve and people you trust. It's steadfast and brightened best international tested, tried and true. Fully threaded radio is also sponsored by Buckeye fasteners, BTM manufacturing, euro link fastener, supply service fastener, technology international in SQL software, Mack Brooks, fastener fair, USA in d industries, Parker fasteners, the worst group volt, industrial plastics and solution industries. Home of solution man, will you say it every episode folks, but we truly do appreciate you listening in to the podcast and sharing it with your friends and associates and we want to hear what you have to say or suggestions that you can provide. The email addresses, FTR it fully threaded.com and Twitter is always an option. We're out there under the handle, fully threaded. Eric most is Twitter a little more carefully than I do. Okay. Oh please. Okay. A lot more carefully. You've been out there a little bit more lately. We've seen, you know, I look mainly I'm a lurker. Yeah. What am I doing? I'm not advocating social media, but it does have its use as, I'll have to say that it is, but one way of making connections with people. But there's another way to make a direct connection and that's through trade shows as we've talked about today and in many past episodes and a, I guess what Bri, I got us lined up with our, our booths for the big shows this year. Wow. We're way ahead of schedule this time. Okay. Everyone else has had the solar that for months and months and months. But this was pretty good for us. Okay, well good. It's always a crap shoot every year bri where we're going to be, I know you can't really, and you sort of look at these giant plans and try and work at well where would people be going? And then you, sometimes it's just you don't know how people are going to really walk through the isles. Well anticipating the traffic flow is definitely a science. But all the big guys, you know, they know and they, they sign up for a couple of years in advance usually and they're right there in the front. So that's where you want to be. But that's not to say that there aren't other places and you can't get activity in other places, but I have to say it this way. There are a place a few places that you probably, they're not as desirable. Right. Having a giant column right through the middle of the booth. That would be one of them, I of which we've also had, how are

Speaker 4:

we going to fit anything here.

Speaker 5:

That was really a crazy year. I think though I got the reservation that year, like a week and a half ahead of Vegas and that was many years ago before I kind of knew the ropes a little bit. Anyway, I'm looking here at fastener fair in Detroit coming up in May and um, it looks like we're in pretty good location right across. Especially for you bri because right across the aisle is that our friends over at Buckeye fasteners and you know what that means?

Speaker 4:

Oh yeah. Nice. Very nice. Okay. It means that the end of the day when you sort of lost your voice, you'll get a rusty bolt broad over just when you need it.

Speaker 5:

Your old friend Larry Kelly will personally handle liver, an old rusty bolt to the booth. You can always count on him for that and look, it saves them the walk this year, Bri.

Speaker 4:

I know Larry looks after me. He's very good. Okay.

Speaker 5:

Yeah, so that's pretty cool. And then right next to them solution industries. Oh Wow. So that's going to be a happy corner of the show. I could tell you that right now folks. We're in booth 1103.

Speaker 4:

This is where everyone needs to be at. Okay. This is the biggest group of friendly people around in the show. I could tell you that

Speaker 5:

actually looking across the floor plan, there's a lot of friendly people going to be at this show and uh, yeah, ours is going to be a very happy corner, but it looks like it's filled in quite well. There's still a few empty booze on the one far wall, but my guess is that those are mostly reserved by now. And, uh, well we'll see. We'll all be in Detroit. The find out. Yeah. Now fastener tech, which we were just talking about with Paula earlier in the show, wouldn't miss that one either. Wouldn't advise anyone to miss it, but I don't know where Nancy's going to put us this year other than she always takes care of us. So we're in Nancy's good hands.

Speaker 4:

Yeah, we were. We're frequently and she's good. She's a very good looking as for us. Okay. Yeah, she follows you if you haven't been to fast and the tick it's um, it's just where people meet all the people they sort of known for years and they come back to it. And those are the, um, social two hours at the end of it is, um, uh, worth. Absolutely. Okay. You need to cram and,

Speaker 5:

well, plus I think this year you're going to see a lot more people head over to that bar across the way and do the Karaoke. Now last time, it wasn't in last year, it was in 2017, because again, it's by Amiel everyone. That was a lot of fun. So I think a lot more people are going to head over to that next episode. We'll share the name of that place with, I can't remember it off the top of my head.

Speaker 4:

I'm sure baron baron knows it off by heart. Yeah, he was a hit right

Speaker 5:

now I'm looking here at the floor plan for Vegas. That's the big one. Everyone this year we're in booth 1871 and I'm looking right across the way and one over. This is going to be Deja Vu. Bri who was last year's neighbors, Chicago hardware and fixture little were, it looks like we're both playing that same game of Roulette. Yeah. We actually get to usually get to know your neighbors pretty well and um, Chicago had way people got to spend a lot of time talking to you. Well, we've known him for a long time. It's just that, what are the odds of being right across from him again or right next to them anyway, they're our neighbors now. I also noticed that just down the aisle from where we're at, there's a vacancy Bryce, so you might be able to get some quality sunglasses or perhaps a cell phone case depending on who takes that, you know, or a mess or a massage. A neck massage. Yeah. You never know. That's the wildcard in the aisle. The one on the end there, eh? Good. The other thing that I notice about this year's Vegas show floor plan is that there is no steadfast listed. So obviously Linstrom has a booth there in 1831 I'm imagining that Lindstrom install steadfast. We'll have a combined booth this year. Oh, you'd have to imagine it would not be possible. Still fast not to be there. Okay. No, no, no. They're going to be there. I guess it's just on the floor plan here. It will be combined, but it's strange to not see them with their own name there on the footprint. Yeah. We, so we have to find out, is it going to be the Lindstrom monkey? We don't know how it's going to happen here. We'll to be revealed. Okay. Yeah. Even more suspense than usual. This year, Bri, not only is what color it is is what's it called. I'm guessing they're not going to be leaking any information either on that one, especially given the fact that I haven't been able to really get very much detail out of what's going on over there, you know, through our usual sources. So they keep a tight ship there. How bright and best international they've got. I think it's, well no, I could see here they've got the biggest footprint on the floor plan and what are they going to fit? Like 80 90 BBI people in there. It's going to be a sea of red and black shirts, right? Yeah. I mean it's that Rosa Hernan is going to be rushing around organizing invitations to the BBI, um, afternoon reception if history serves as a lesson. That's correct. Right. Bbi never fails to bring a full lineup of fastener industry superstars, so Cmr with the Vegas show folks. It's a good chance, as we said, to make a direct connection. Again, clumsily lead developing and the theme of today's Podcast, Brian done very well. Direct connect and direct connections. That'd be you need to quit while you're ahead. Yeah, close enough. And I think we will. I'll think we'll call this one and episode. Don't Miss Episode One 39 folks when our very special guest. Well, maybe I should keep it a surprise or I'll just let the cat out of the bag now and build anticipation. We've been planning this for awhile folks, but we'll have an interview with none other than Brian Musker. Don't miss it. Well, who's going to interview me? I mean there's a few details you haven't really filled me in on here. Yeah, I think we'll keep that part of it a secret for now, but let's just say it isn't going to be me. So there's the cliff hanger. It's going to be good though. Oh, okay. Is it Brian? Yeah, I mean I should be asking you that. We're good to go. The answers to these and many other questions will be revealed when we connect again next time. Fully threaded radio. Thanks for listening everyone. Yes, thank you.

Speaker 27:

And I will know more than two for Brian Musker. This is Eric Buddhists. Get out there, sell some screws to the friends. Yeah. And we'll talk to you next time.

Speaker 28:

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