Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E34 John Lembke | Best Practices for Hiring Engineers
Join us for an in-depth conversation with John Lembke, a manufacturing engineering manager with over a decade of experience in factory digitization, lean manufacturing, and ERP integrations. John shares his proven strategies for hiring high-performing engineering teams, scaling production rapidly, and building effective manufacturing processes. From his early days around ice-making machinery to leading 60% capacity increases, John offers practical insights that engineering managers and job seekers alike will find invaluable.
Main Topics:
- Hiring Best Practices: Use skill histograms to identify team gaps and write focused, targeted job descriptions.
- Interview Strategies: Ask questions that evaluate both technical skills and cultural fit.
- Common Hiring Mistakes: Avoid hiring people just like yourself and using vague or generic job descriptions.
- Candidate Advice: Use the STAR method to structure responses and present your experience clearly.
- ERP & MES Systems: Understand the role of enterprise resource planning and manufacturing execution systems in operations.
- Production Scaling: Apply practical strategies to rapidly increase production capacity.
- Manufacturing KPIs: Track key performance indicators to monitor quality and efficiency.
- Leadership Philosophy: Leverage lessons from endurance sports to build mental resilience and lead with intensity.
About the guest: John Lembke is a manufacturing and operations leader with a track record of scaling production and driving process excellence. At Scythe Robotics, he boosted production capacity by 60% in 16 months and led ERP implementation to streamline operations. Previously, as Director of Manufacturing and Scaling at Phantom Auto, he built prototype production systems and integrated advanced hardware into partner vehicles. His earlier experience at Seagate, Ensign-Bickford, and GE honed his expertise in process engineering, KPI development, and cross-functional leadership. With degrees from CU Boulder and RPI, John is committed to continuous learning, mentoring, and applying innovative approaches—balanced by a passion for backpacking and endu
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About Being An Engineer
The Being An Engineer podcast is a repository for industry knowledge and a tool through which engineers learn about and connect with relevant companies, technologies, people resources, and opportunities. We feature successful mechanical engineers and interview engineers who are passionate about their work and who made a great impact on the engineering community.
The Being An Engineer podcast is brought to you by Pipeline Design & Engineering. Pipeline partners with medical & other device engineering teams who need turnkey equipment such as cycle test machines, custom test fixtures, automation equipment, assembly jigs, inspection stations and more. You can find us on the web at www.teampipeline.us
You don't want to be using a jack of all trades tool. It's like, No, you buy the specific tool that does this specific thing for this process. And doing those at this scale goes a really long way without spending a lot of money.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast today, we're talking with John Lemke, a manufacturing engineering manager at sites robotics, where he leads the implementation of mass production capabilities. With over a decade of experience driving new paradigm, factory digitization, lean manufacturing and ERP integrations, from GE and honeybee robotics to phantom auto and Seagate, he excels at building high performance cross functional teams and scaling production rapidly. He also holds advanced degrees in mechanical engineering and engineering management and outside of work, finds joy backpacking through Colorado and tackling endurance challenges like the triple bypass bike ride. That sounds like a lot of fun or torture, depending on your perspective, but John, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being with us today.
John Lembke:Yeah, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
Aaron Moncur:All right, so you and I got connected initially. I was doing this. I still am actually doing this outreach, trying to research hiring, how engineering managers are finding pre qualified candidates and going through the hiring process. I think there's an opportunity there to make that process better, specifically for engineers, hiring engineers. But we got talking, and you had so much really great insight to share on the topic. I thought, man, he'd be a great guest on the podcast, and let's just get all this information out there and share it with everyone. So John graciously agreed to do so. And and here we are. And so I'll start with the same question I always start with with all of our guests, John, which is what made you decide to become an engineer?
John Lembke:I would say that I'm really fortunate and different from a lot of my friends that I knew since I was in high school that this is what I wanted to do. I really loved my technology classes in school. I spent a lot of time building things. My dad was a tech teacher, so he did a lot of woodworking. We had a really good wood shop. So we also had my parents owned an ice making business, and we had a lot of machinery and equipment that I was around every day. So it was a very natural and very, I would say early that I knew to that I wanted to go into mechanical engineering
Aaron Moncur:that's that's cool and ice making this no pun intended, when you were around all of that machinery, did you have opportunities to, like, fix or maintain things.
John Lembke:Yeah, we it broke down all the time, and since it was at the same place where we lived, we did a lot of repairing broken equipment,
Aaron Moncur:very cool, almost, uh, like living on a farm where you've got all these equipment that you have to fix an ice farm, I guess.
John Lembke:Yeah, there's a there's a picture of me when I was, like two or four years old, holding a bag of ice, walking around with it. My parents have
Aaron Moncur:slung over your shoulder some child labor going on. All right. Well, you have quite a bit of experience hiring engineers, and so I'd like to start there, and then we'll branch off and get a little more general, maybe the second half of the interview. But let's start with the hiring, speaking of recruiting and onboarding, and just like finding good qualified engineers, what are some of the best practices that you've come across for building these high performing teams,
John Lembke:I was fortunate and that I had a really good professor had really good insight at CU Boulder. His name was Professor Moore, and one of the things that I do every time that I learned from him is to if you can imagine putting together a histogram of of all the skills of your team and all the skills that you need. And, you know, draw up a bar of like, Hey, I've got a lot of CAD design capability, and we've got people are good at project management. A lot of people are good at designing production lines, but we're weak in, let's say python programming that you really want to have across your whole team, the proper level of skill for each of the things that you need. And when we go into hire somebody, the first thing you do is paint the picture of what this person needs to be. Good at with if we look at where we're the most efficient, you say, All right, I need them to be good at designing a production line, or I need them to be good at developing test equipment. And that helps you write up your job description and and, you know, get Canada the right people to apply, and then when people start to interview, it's really clear. You have your ideal for everybody to think about. And you'll interview people and and people that aren't a good fit. They may be like, Oh, that person's awesome, but all these things, but it's not what we need. It helps us very quickly say, I know they're really good at these things, but that's not what we need, and it feels okay to do that, because they're not the person that you're looking for right now.
Aaron Moncur:So it really starts with defining, being very clear and intentional about the skill set that you're looking for. And then, as you come across the engineers, you compare them against that, that skill set really looking at, you know, what's the impact that the individual can have on the organization?
John Lembke:Yep. And one of the things that does go a long way to is motivation. People that are self motivated is that is very hard to find.
Aaron Moncur:And I can see how that would be a really effective tool, because I've been in plenty of interviews myself. And sometimes the people I'm interviewing, I like, on a personal level, you know, they they just seem like someone I'd get along with, I'd have fun working with. And I think if you're not being really clear and intentional on those specific skill sets that you're looking for, it can be easy to fall into that trap of, like you said, Oh, this person's great, you know, he or she would be really fun to work with, even if maybe they don't have exactly the skill set that you're looking for.
John Lembke:Yep, absolutely,
Aaron Moncur:yeah. Do you think that there are unique challenges associated with hiring engineers specifically? Or is hiring an engineer like hiring any other of the, you know, 10 million jobs out there?
John Lembke:I think, you know, like any job you can hire for you're going to run into things that are unique. I if I'm going to be over if I'm going to over generalize, especially when you have engineers have just come out of school, they've been conditioned to have a problem, work on it by themselves for several days, and then turn it in and it's it is definitely hard to say, is this person going to be able to stop doing that and work collaboratively, or have they learned how to, if they're later in their career, they learned how to to work well with people, and it can be pretty tough to tell how well they work with other people in the interview process,
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Aaron Moncur:Are there any pro tips that you've developed or learned over the years to at least get an inkling of how well these candidates are going to work with others.
John Lembke:I always ask for specific examples. It's like, give me a specific example of a time that you did this particular thing. And I'm really looking for when they give that specific example that they did a thing. I think that it come it comes out when they're like, Oh, I had this problem I had to solve. I knew the person I needed to go talk to, scheduled a meeting. We talked about it. I learned the things I needed to learn. That's a very telling example of they go and work with people really well. I. Gotten. I've gotten responses where they're like, Well, I just went on the computer and Googled this for several days until I learned everything I needed to know, and then I went and did it. And I've gotten those, those answers in interviews, and I think they're pretty telling to the way that the person operates.
Aaron Moncur:This is a great segue into the next question that I have. I think that, in general, we as human beings would do a lot better at asking questions and listening than we would at talking, even though, arguably, a lot of a lot of us are better at talking than we are listening and asking questions. That's even more true. I think in the context of interviewing, are there any go to questions that you always ask, or usually ask engineering candidates?
John Lembke:I have a couple, what I would call like soft pitch questions. What motivates you and can you tell me about an interpersonal conflict you've had, the what motivates you? One I've had a few people trip up and have no idea, like, what to say. And, you know, I've also asked people like, what's the thing you're the most proud of? And when people can't answer those, it really makes me wonder. They seem to be such easy questions to answer, and the interpersonal conflict question for me is also really telling, because I've had a surprising number of people who say they've never had a disagreement with anyone in their entire life, and they're in their 40s or 50s, and it's hard for me to believe that they're being entirely honest, whereas a lot of people will be like, Oh, listen, I've got, I remember this time I had, you know, really bad interaction and really struggled, and then talk through, like, a very challenging thing, and it's like, if you can talk through how you resolved a really difficult conflict, it goes a lot further than you telling me you've just never had an argument with anyone.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I find that hard to believe as well, that anyone, even you know at two years old, could live without having an argument. Either that or there are total pushovers, which you also probably don't want on the team. Any other questions that you commonly ask, or are those kind of the main ones
John Lembke:I like to, I mean, I do like to ask people why they like this specific job or this specific company, what interests them. I i, since I'm often the first person, I ask a lot of interpersonal questions, like, Tell me about a time you received feedback you've disagreed with to see how people take that. And I leave the more technical questions, and at least our first round of phone calls to the person after me, because if they can't prove that, like interpersonally, they're going to get along, it's I don't think it's worth diving into the technical questions.
Aaron Moncur:I think the subtext of what you're saying there is that your engineering team members have to be I don't know if good people is the right word, but have good communication skills. Have good soft skills. Have be easy and pleasant to work with before you'll even consider hiring them as an engineer. It's almost, I'd say, as, or perhaps even a little more important than the technical skills. Am I saying that right? Or how would you put it?
John Lembke:Yeah, in my first phone call, I only ask usually one technical question. In the most recent ones, I just asked them to tell me about a thing they designed in CAD everything else is interpersonal. So I'm trying to make sure that they're going to fit with the people they have to work with. We have a bunch of techs they have to work with, and we have, you know, engineers they have to work with. And I think it's, it's the quickest way to reduce the the sort of selection of people, in my opinion, because if you could be super brilliant, but if you can't work with the team, you know it isn't, you're not the right person. If you can't work with the group, I
Aaron Moncur:agree 100% everything that we do is with and through people, and so if you can't get along with people, chances are you're probably not going to be very successful in a team environment anyway. What are, what are some of the common mistakes you think that, especially newer, less experienced hiring managers make
John Lembke:the big one that I see is people hire people like themselves. It's they're like they have all the same strengths as me, all the same weaknesses, and I really like that person. Another one is they have very bad job descriptions. They. Can't they can't explain what they're looking for. It's like, what do you need the person to do? And if they can't tell you, and you're their coworker very well, and it doesn't reflect in the job description, because we had an issue with this where it took us a very long time to hire someone, and the people applying were did not have the skill set we're looking for. That is a that is a tough one when you're not really sort of casting the net in the right place to get the right candidates to apply.
Aaron Moncur:That's a that's a great point. So looking at it, not so much from the candidate side, but from the hiring manager writing the description. Are there any tips that you can share or strategies that you found effective to very clearly, concisely define the skillset or the impact or the role that that you need filled? I think about
John Lembke:naming a specific project, you look at a thing where you know you're deficient that needs to get completed, and you this. This is what I did with the engineers and my team. It's like, we walk the production floor and it's like, well, what are the one to three projects that are most important. It's like, we need this is must do. This is must do, and this is must do. Okay, what is the what are the skills this person needs to have to get those done? What are the most important skills? And then we went and wrote the job description and had a meeting discuss like, this is what the person has to be capable of, because we need them specifically to do those.
Aaron Moncur:Oftentimes, when looking at job descriptions, there's the ideal right? We want the ideal candidate to have this and this and this and this and this and this and this, this, this, so on and so forth. How often do you find that? You find someone who like, really, really. You know, 95% matches the ideal candidate that has been defined in the job description. Or is it more common that, typically, you're going to have to make some concessions and settle for, you know, 75% fit.
John Lembke:I think you're you are always making concessions, and which is why I think it's important to rank what's most important at the top so that you can see like is this person's top skill the same as the top skill that I need? Because you're you're always going to find that there's nobody that has every single skill that you could possibly need. I I have not found anybody that has fit that bill, yet, it's
Aaron Moncur:probably the same person who never had an argument with anyone. Yeah, yeah.
John Lembke:I went to be fair, though, not that I was hiring, but I knew one guy in college who could do more things extremely well than anyone else I had ever met. And but those
Aaron Moncur:people are very, very, very rare. That's a special, yeah, a special person there for the engineers listening to this who maybe are preparing for an interview right now, or know they will be in the in the near future. What can you share with them? What kind of advice can you share with them to prepare yourself and present yourself in the best possible light, and then on the flip side, what should engineers definitely avoid? What should they definitely not do during an interview? These
John Lembke:are maybe just like the very basics of interviewing. I'll assume that these are kids fresh out of college, but your responses really only need to be 90 seconds to two minutes. I'm a big fan of the star interview method, where you describe the situation, task, the action you took and the result, and tell me that in two minutes. That really concisely sums it up. And then, if I have questions like, we can dive into a deeper conversation. And I think, you know, making sure that you can talk specifics is pretty, pretty key, that you're doing that and not just generalizing. Well, you know, in that situation, this is what I would do. You got to make sure you you're specific, terrific
Aaron Moncur:anything on the flip side of that that maybe you've seen candidates do that is a big turnoff or a red flag. I
John Lembke:have had a few people who talk a lot like I've asked a question and they'll spend 10 minutes and not answer the question. I actually find it fine. If you give a short response and be like, is this what you're looking for? To clarify, like, Am I on base? I find that really refreshing. I think some of the others are, if you, if you don't know anything about the company at all, that's not. Good. And if you can't really, if you don't have any questions, either, you should want to know something more at the end of the interview. Because if you have no questions, it's, it's kind of like you don't seem to be very interested. People are really interested. They'll answer ask a gazillion questions at the end of the interview and just keep asking you, and that's how you can tell somebody who's really interested,
Aaron Moncur:the product development expo or PDX is your chance to learn from subject matter experts providing practical, hands on training for dozens of different engineering topics, Gd and T advanced surface modeling, DFM, plating and finishing techniques, programming robots, adhesive, dispensing, prototyping, tips and tricks and lots more. PDX happens October, 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more at PD Expo. Dot engineer. That's P, D, E, x, p, O, dot engineer. That's a great tip, right there. I bet that's one that a lot of people don't think about but, but they should. It was funny listening to you talking about candidates that go on too long. I interviewed a guy, this is quite a long time ago, maybe eight or 10 years ago, and I asked him a question. Can't remember what the question was at this point, and he started talking. And he may have answered the question, but he just kept talking and kept talking and kept talking. And at a certain point I I looked at my watch, and I just thought to myself, I'm just going to let this guy go, because I'm interested to I already know at this point he is not a fit, but I'm so curious about how long he'll keep talking until he talks himself out. And it was, it was 20 minutes. This guy talked non stop for 20 minutes, didn't pause to ask if I had any questions or clarify, just non stop rambling for 20 minutes, and thanked him for his time. And that was, that was the end of it. But it was incredible. I remember being so shocked that anyone could do that.
John Lembke:There's a few people, yeah, that I brought across like that. It's
Aaron Moncur:funny engineers usually don't have, you know, the gift of gab, but yeah, every now and then you run into someone. Well, let me take a short break here and share with everyone that the being an engineer. Podcast is brought to you by pipeline design and engineering, where we don't design pipelines, but we do help companies develop advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. You can learn more at Team pipeline.us The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers. Learn more about that at the wave. Dot engineer, so today we have the privilege of speaking with John Lemke. So John, I'm going to take the conversation a little more general now go go beyond just the hiring topic. Let's talk about ERPs a little bit. First of all, can you tell us what is an ERP and how is it used by manufacturing teams?
John Lembke:Sure, it stands for enterprise resource planning. The big, super famous one is SAP, which I don't know what that stands for, but it it covers finance, the purchases orders from customers, purchase orders you send to suppliers, manufacturing. It can handle shipping and quality and field service. It's really the heart of what runs your company. So, I mean, you get money from customers that place orders, right? So, like, that's how you get your money in, and then you send money out when you place purchase orders. And they are definitely like huge behemoths to implement, because it touches so much, and the financial information in them is really what you get audited if you're a publicly traded company. So they have to follow a lot of rules and laws. So it's, it is a lot of a lot of important things that need to be done right when you implement them,
Aaron Moncur:and I'm assuming that ERPs are generally used at larger companies where there's a significant operation occurring, not, you know, mom and pop, Job Shop type areas. No,
John Lembke:I have a friend who runs a Swiss machine shop, and he's one person, and he has one I just think it's. Called Pro Shop, but it he's like, it makes my life so easy. It's very inexpensive. They're not all big and full, full blown and expensive. His is, is specifically made for tiny machine shops that are just a few people, but it's terrific. Takes in orders and sends out purchase orders and runs his production for of just
Aaron Moncur:machines. Okay, oh, that's great. I didn't realize that actually, whenever I've thought of ERP in the past, I thought of a large corporation. Within the world of manufacturing acronyms, there's also mes the manufacturing execution system we've worked a lot with those integrating custom pieces of equipment and automation. So MES is typically dealing with data acquisition. It's looking at uptime downtime of different machines and stations that's completely separate from the ERP. Or are there connections in between them? There's
John Lembke:definitely a connection, but they ERP companies will tell you, we don't do that. You got to get an mes. Usually they will have like, so the one that we implemented has basic functionality. It's very manual, but you can make stuff on the production floor and process it. But when you go with an mes, like, you get screens and barcode scanning and all sorts of intelligence and recording capability. And then there's, you know, you write code so that they talk to each other well, but they're two distinct pieces of software, and the people that make them are usually two different software companies. They don't play in each other's sandbox.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, yeah, at sites where you work now, you've led production scale ups, and I think if I read this right, achieved a 60% capacity increase in just 10 months, which is super impressive. Can you talk a little, you know, without sharing anything confidential or proprietary. Of course, talk a little bit about that. What were some of the strategies that you incorporated, and how did you increase capacity 60% in just 10 months?
John Lembke:When you're really small and low volume, it's easy to get big percentages. We went from five robots a week to eight robots a week. So the percentage looks really exciting, but it is really tough to be honest, increasing quality is in the is one of the two top things you have a lot of quality problems right in the beginning in a startup. And it was, we don't know how deep to get into this, but had one of our data engineers pipe information into a tableau, dashboard so we could rank all of our quality problems. You look at the biggest one, put in a concerted effort, you solve that. Look at the next one. Solve that, and a few months of knocking down the big quality problems made a huge impact. The other thing, we had a vendor supplying sheet metal parts that just didn't have the capacity. So I helped, went out to a vendor I've used in the past, helped onboard those guys and then specializing the workstations and buying specialized tools. You don't want to be using a dual jack of all trades tool. It's like, No, you buy the specific tool that does this specific thing for this process, and doing those at this scale goes a really long way without spending a lot of money
Aaron Moncur:as you've scaled up production, whether at your current company or previous roles, can you think of either a failure or or a roadblock that you encountered and and how you responded to it? You can use the STAR method here, if you'd like. Yes.
John Lembke:So I will use an example from an aerospace company. We were making rotor shafts, and you have to grind the rotor shafts to a very precise diameter, and it's like two tenths of an inch diameter. And we had to make a choice, because we went to buy a machine, and they were sold out by the time we got the PO. And they're like, Oh, we don't have that one anymore. We have one that's the size up, or it's it's a nine month lead time because it's custom made in Japan for the one that you really wanted. And we decided to take the not correct one right away. It turns out that machine wasn't capable. We spent months trying to use it, and it just couldn't do what we needed, and we ended up having to replace the machine. Thankfully, they they did a swap. They're like, well, we won't charge you any more money. We will take back the one that you didn't actually want and give you the right one. But that fixed the problem, and in hindsight, you should wait for the right piece of equipment and not take the. Wrong one, because it was just a long time of it took us even longer than the nine months, because we struggled so long making parts incorrectly.
Aaron Moncur:That's a great story. Thank you for sharing that one. Are there times or how have you built flexibility into production environments, automated environments. Is it worth doing that? Or, as you mentioned before, is it typically better to just find the tool that does exactly what you want, not try to build a lot of flexibility into the system and just use that very, very specific tool for a very specific purpose,
John Lembke:I think so I'm gonna throw my definition of flexibility, because this is what we did at General Electric we built many production lines that were short and specialized so they were inexpensive because they didn't do a lot of different things, and we would just not every production line was staffed all the time, so we would just move people to whichever production line had demand, and that was the cheapest way to go. The plant had flexibility, but each particular line was specialized and not flexible, and that was the cheapest way for us to meet demand and be flexible plant wide.
Aaron Moncur:So instead of building a giant system with 1000 knobs that you could all turn on or off, that would have been very expensive and maybe cumbersome to use instead, the approach was, let's build a group of much smaller, dedicated, specific lines, and we'll just turn them on as and off as needed. Yep, yep, exactly. Nice. That's great when you are managing a production environment. What are some of the manufacturing KPIs that that you look forward to understand how well production is going
John Lembke:once you get up to bigger volume. You know, units per labor hour is a pretty standard one. At how much time does it take per unit in order to get out. I think that when you're small and you're trying to grow, a lot of it is, I would say the most important one is defects per unit. Because we were in the beginning, you end up having more than one defect per unit. Once you get big, you're like, Oh, I get one defect every 100,000 pieces or something, but you really need to fix your quality problems first. And there's a lot of quality problems when you're small, and it's pretty challenging, because at low volumes, it's hard to tell if it's a one off or if it is systemic. And that figuring that out takes a long time, because you're not making many and so you have to, like, spend several weeks to build 20 units to figure it out.
Aaron Moncur:Is that the solution? Then to figure out if it's a one off or a systemic problem, just build more until you have enough data. Yeah,
John Lembke:that ends up being what it is. If you're familiar with Edward stemming, and you know, the quality principles that he teaches you do have to determine if things are one offs or if they are systemic, and the words he uses are like type one and type two failures. I i Don't quote me on it, but those are John's like words, because I can't quite remember the words that that Deming used.
Aaron Moncur:Sure, yeah, okay, just a couple more questions here, and we'll wrap things up. Let's talk about your joy of backpacking and endurance biking. Maybe give us a little background there. How did you get into it, especially the endurance biking, and have they had an effect on like your leadership style at work, or do you see them as just completely separate parts of your life?
John Lembke:Well, biking is interesting because I bike to work most days, even in the winter, I bike probably, definitely more than 50% of days I bike to work, it got into backpacking when I was in college. I was a member of the outing club, so I did a lot of rock climbing, ice climbing, backpacking, uh, cycling. I didn't get into until I came to Colorado, and my wife and I did that. Interestingly, that was our first date. I think that was really what kicked it off. Is like we went on a date, on a road bike ride to train for a triathlon. And so, like, ever since then, that is, like, our thing. And so, like, when it's the thing that you and your you know life partner do, because you both enjoy it. I mean, I think it really is really great to have a thing that you both really like to do together. And I I would say that it is also really helpful to have something that you do that's extremely hard because the triple bypass, for people have never heard of it, it is 120 miles over three mountain passes in Colorado. So it ended up taking us, like, 14 hours to complete. And there's five, eight, big eight stations where people stop. This is not a race. It's like sort of a casual ride. There's several 1000 people that do it, but it's really long to bike for that distance. That's definitely the biggest, hardest thing that I've done, I would say, but it helps you see, I would say there's a direct correlation that people that do hard core stuff like that outside of work, when they come to work, they bring the same level of intensity.
Aaron Moncur:I very much relate to what you're saying. I've never ridden 120 miles on a bike, but I do Jitsu, and it is one of the it's probably the most physically demanding thing I've ever done, and part of it is mental, right? You're someone's trying to choke you out, and it's uncomfortable, but you can still breathe a little bit and convincing yourself that you can not tap out at that moment, but that you can, you can push through it and maybe even get out. That's really tough thing to do, and I've found that just my mental toughness in general has really benefited from that. Going back to your biking experience, I'm just, I'm curious, when you're riding 120 miles, how are you fueling your body during that time?
Unknown:Hmm, it's
John Lembke:probably like a product plug, if I say it, but that's okay. Yeah, hammer, Nutrition has, like, stuff you mix it with water that you know provides fuel. And I would definitely say that stuff has been fantastic, because you need something that you can digest quickly. And I think my watch, or whatever, Strava said, I burned 6000 calories that day, which is, like, really difficult, like, you can't eat, you can't easily eat real food and eat that many calories, especially while biking. You have to, like, cheat and and eat stuff that's different. So you end up eating, like, the goo that's just like sugar and like gooey format. You know,
Aaron Moncur:how did your body feel at the end of that 1415, hours? Uh,
John Lembke:we, to be honest, I it was not I thankful. I did not feel like absolutely awful, right? Like we stopped at the at the break aid stations, where they have food for like half an hour at a time, and relaxed. So you're really doing like, two hours at a time, then taking a nice, big break. So I felt really tired, but thankfully, I was not, like, injured in any way. You know. I was not like, unable to walk for the week or anything nice, just like I'm gonna sit on the couch for a while after this.
Aaron Moncur:Did you ride your bike to work the next work day? No little break, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, John, thank you so much for being on the show today. This is great. I appreciate and I'm sure everyone else who's listening appreciates everything that you shared, all the insights about hiring and manufacturing and scaling production. How can people get in touch with you?
John Lembke:They, they can look me up on LinkedIn, if you look for John Lemke, J O, H N, last name, L E, M, B k e, or you can email me if you'd like at John, J O, H N, dot V as in Victor, dot lemki, L E, M, B k e@gmail.com,
Aaron Moncur:terrific. All right. Well, thank you so much again. John.
John Lembke:Yeah, thank you so much.
Aaron Moncur:I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. If you liked what you heard today, please share the episode to learn how your team can leverage our team's expertise developing advanced manufacturing processes, automated machines and custom fixtures, complemented with product design and R D services. Visit us at Team pipeline.us. To join a vibrant community of engineers online. Visit the wave. Dot, engineer, thank you for listening. You.
