Tony shares his career journey from plant engineer to leadership roles and offers advice on developing soft skills, gaining diverse experience, and keeping highly skilled engineers motivated.
Main Topics:
About the guest: Tony Dedeo is a mechanical engineer with over 20 years of experience in operational strategic planning, manufacturing, quality management, supply chain, and team leadership. Tony has held positions throughout his career, from consultant to director to VP as he has helped organizations drive improvement.
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
Tony shares his career journey from plant engineer to leadership roles and offers advice on developing soft skills, gaining diverse experience, and keeping highly skilled engineers motivated.
Main Topics:
About the guest: Tony Dedeo is a mechanical engineer with over 20 years of experience in operational strategic planning, manufacturing, quality management, supply chain, and team leadership. Tony has held positions throughout his career, from consultant to director to VP as he has helped organizations drive improvement.
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
Getting custom manufactured parts can be a difficult task. Some local shops are great, but some require order minimums or just won't pick up the phone if you aren't a large company. That's where xometry comes in. Xometry is trusted by engineers and designers at NASA, BMW Bosch, and more. Simply upload the design file you want to be manufactured and boom, in a matter of seconds, you'll get an instant quote and access to dozens of manufacturing processes like CNC machining, cheap cutting and fabrication, 3d printing, injection molding, and more. Plus, you'll have plenty of delivery window options and prices available to suit your budget, worry less and get the parts you need manufactured with Xometry. So you can get back to building. Xometry where big ideas are built.
Tony Dedeo:Not a lot of engineers maybe think about those soft skills. But it does come in very useful especially when you're talking up and down the hierarchical chain of a company.
Aaron Moncur:Hello, and welcome to another exciting episode of The being an engineer Podcast. Today we're speaking with Tony Dedeo, who is a mechanical engineer with over 20 years of experience in operational, strategic planning, manufacturing, quality management, supply chain and team leadership. Tony has held positions throughout his career from consultant to director to VP as he has helped organizations drive improvement. Tony, thank you so much for being on the show with us today.
Tony Dedeo:Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Aaron Moncur:Tell us a little bit about why you decided to become an engineer in the first place.
Tony Dedeo:I you know, originally I had no visions of becoming an engineer, to be quite honest, I had visions of becoming going into sales and so during my when I graduated college from Purdue University, I started with Chrysler out in Detroit there and started with their sales and service program. Unfortunately, in the 2000 2001 timeframe, there was a big hiring freezes, the automotive market had kind of taken a turn. And we had an internal job board that one of my friends was looking at and saw a plant vehicle engineering job back in my hometown in Illinois and said, Hey, you're an engineer, right? I said, Oh, yeah, he said, he should go applied for this. And so out of, you know, just dumb luck I applied and they brought me in. And so that was my first real foray into you know, vertically integrated manufacturing at an non automotive assembly plant out in Belvidere, Illinois there, which is just still running today.
Aaron Moncur:That's great. So that set the trajectory for where you are now. And maybe you can give us like, you know, 60 second overview of some of the things that you've done throughout your career. And then after that, talk a little bit about how you were able to grow into this leadership position now, because you have come to a pretty high level leadership position. And I think a lot of engineers listening to this would be super interested to hear about, like, what were some of the most influential, influential factors that allowed you to to achieve that position?
Tony Dedeo:Sure. Let's see, some of the things that I've done throughout my career. Obviously, as an engineer focused on, you know, whenever you're not in a manufacturing setting, you know, quality and cost are the number two targets. So a lot of my or most of my background has been focused in improving quality and reducing cost. And sometimes those go hand in hand, you got quality problems that are costing the company money, and you go solve those. At bowl. You know, there's a lot of cost prevention that was that was in hand as well. You know, I think, as I look back on my career in in the things that I've done, I never said no to an opportunity. You know, when opportunity knocks, or somebody asked, Hey, do you want to be part of this program? Do you want to take this training? I always said yes. And I thought that, as I reflect back those, those were things that built out a toolkit, I would say, whether it be going through the Green Belt, Black Belt programs, you know, doing SolidWorks training going through, you know, the companies you no supervision and managerial training programs, conflict resolution, all those things. You know, I think you got to be open to, regardless if you want to be, or stay in the engineering track, or move into the managerial roles. You know, obviously, those soft skills, and even those technical skills will, you'll keep with you, you know, throughout your lifetime. And I think having those, having a backbone in those early years, really set me up for success, I would say, not only that, but you start building different relationships with the people that you're going to meet in these, these training groups, or cohorts. And it does take you out of I'll see your comfort zone quite a bit. You know, beyond that, you know, I you can look at my resume, I bounced around industry quite a bit, you know, automotive, DOD, you know, missile defense, heavy industrial, and then medical device in life science. So, there's not much that I can't say that I have not seen, whether it be soft, you know, software all related. You know, there's, there's really nothing that I haven't touched, or experienced in my, you know, I guess it's going on 24 years now. You know, beyond that, I think, getting into a leadership role. You know, I saw other leaders that I admired, and would try to emulate how they handle their situations themselves, how they manage themselves, or different groups and situations. You know, I think he learned a lot from that, I think he learned a lot from seeing other people not doing it as well. And you can spot those, I'll say, missteps. Were when those opportunities come around, you choose the better path. And I think that is that is something that, you know, as people grow in their career, they really need to be conscious of it. They've got books out there on emotional, emotional intelligence, that I've read, I've taken a test, and it does help. So I know, you know, not a lot of engineers, maybe think about those soft skills on how to deal with those types of situations. But it does come in very, very useful, especially when you're talking up and down the hierarchical chain of accompany. You've learned quickly how to respond, discuss different situations, depending on who you're talking to you. So that's, that's been highly beneficial.
Aaron Moncur:Now, I couldn't agree more in regards to the soft skills there are really critical. Have you ever felt, especially as you've grown into higher and higher leadership positions? Have you ever felt a sense of imposter syndrome? Or have you always felt like 100%? I got this confident, no problem.
Tony Dedeo:I would say 100% of the time, it's impostor syndrome. I think that's absolutely the case. You know, I if you're not nervous going into a new situation, you know, maybe maybe you're not challenging yourself enough. You know, I think the things again, I've transferred industries and jobs and move states. You know, there's always that that feeling, but even when you're with a company for, say, five years, and you take a new role, or, you know, again, you're going into the pulling you into a different, uncomfortable situation, I think the best thing I've been able to do is ask questions. You know, not be, try not to be the smartest person in the room, even though there's times to speak and do that. You know, but take a humbler approach, ask questions when you're really trying to figure this this new thing out, because people like that. Because then you're more approachable. If you're asking questions, you're not telling somebody what to do. And you're, you're just having a discussion. And I think that really helps alleviate the anxiety of the imposter syndrome, which you're gonna have every day, release it, I guess, I can find find opportunities to
Aaron Moncur:You and me both. I feel that all the time. And I don't think it's ever something that you get over. Like you said, as long as you're putting yourself into new and challenging roles and positions, you're going to feel that and maybe that's even a good thing, right? It's a indication that you're stretching yourself at growing. Oh. So you're working at a company called Nano strings right now. Can you tell us just quick overview What do you do there? And then that's, I don't know if you would call it medical devices or more like life sciences Biosciences company. But what what kind of trends are you seeing in like the healthcare medical device Biosciences realm these days? Yeah, I
Tony Dedeo:can. So I just started with NanoString, a couple months ago. And they're a senior director of manufacturing. In their life science company, they focus on life science tools to basically map the genome of the body. It's, I want to say I know everything about it, and I don't have but what we do is we make reagents and instrumentation that go hand in hand, that find different bar biomarkers in proteins or RNA that give researchers the ability to discover more about what's going on to the body to combat things and develop drugs for things like cancer, and that's the big market right now, is cancer research. And so it's a research company. They are a globally distributed worldwide company. But that's essentially what this particular company does. And I've worked for a company called Rare site. Prior to this, that was my first foray into the biologics. And I was the VP of operations there. In between I was with a company called Magnolia medical single use blood diversion device that was very useful in reducing sepsis, misdiagnosis, for false positives, to almost zero. So a single use gamma and Auricchio, sterilized type device. I guess the trends, the trends that I'm seeing in the field, at large are, I can speak to the to both in some regard, there's a lot of outsourcing a lot of contract manufacturing that occurs. And then on the medical device field, specifically, it's all moving toward single use. due to cost and due to the need not to have to sterilize it within a hospital. It's there's lead time, it's costly, people don't want to do it. And the equipment, the capital equipment is expensive. But with that, we've seen large influxes of single use devices now coming on the market. And it's clogging up the sterilization cycles. There's really only two companies that do this Steris and sterigenics. And there's, they're really at capacity as far as ethylene oxide sterilization, and shortly gamma, they're just not building many plants, there's been a lot of regulation with the EPA does not like EO gas, which, you know, is that, you know, obviously a value but the, they're running into very long lead times and increase costs on those two fronts. And so there's companies that are trying to figure out okay, what, how can we better design this device to either not use EO or to use gamma or, or what are the other it these, these sites, just art, they're not large enough, and they're not building more of that right now. So and if they are, it's going to take quite a few years to get it up and validate it. So that's, that's kind of what I was seeing. You're also seeing new trends in bedside diagnostics. point of use care. You know, Pocus is a big is a big term out there. For point of views care, the bedside, not bedside diagnostics, if you can get a quick blood draw that can give you information within 1015 minutes for directionally correct. Diagnosis, these are game changers compared to taking a full blood draw sending it to a lab and then having to wait you know, potentially 2436 hours, at which time you can get quite quite a bit sicker in that time. And so there's there's just a lot A lot of interest in those particular in those particular fields that point of views care in the bedside diagnostics. That's
Aaron Moncur:very insightful. A lot of answers that I hadn't actually heard before. outsourcing a lot the point of views care, single use devices. Have you seen a growth in reprocessing companies, I know that's becoming big business in medical devices these days. And if you're seeing a lot more single use device manufacturing out there, I wonder if there's going to be a correlation with the growth of reprocessing medical device reprocessing companies?
Tony Dedeo:You know, I haven't had a lot of experience in the reprocessing area. So I'll have to take your word for it. But yeah, I think, you know, by and large, the hospitals, the clinics, they're all under a lot of cost constraints right now. The nursing staff, you know, COVID really took its turn. With the nursing staff and the help it it really is it overstressed it the system in total? You know, a lot of people quit, they have not been getting paid well, for many years. And what we started to see at least was a lot of the traveling nurses were coming in and in to replace a lot of the attrition that they were freezing. And so I don't know if I'm answering or answering your question or writing additional commentary on the side. But as far as reprocessing, you know, I would have to say that, with the changes in the clinic and hospital system, I could see that becoming a bigger market, just because a lot of these people probably don't know how to do it. Very
Aaron Moncur:interesting. Okay. Well, let me change direction just a little bit here. Let's talk about engineers that you've worked with to date. And teams of engineers, what what are some of the traits or habits or behaviors that you've seen in the best engineers, and then if it's a different answer, and the best engineering teams, the
Tony Dedeo:best, so the best engineers I've worked with, are multi disciplined. And what I mean by that is, let's say you want to be the best, you know, research and design are just a designer yet, and I'll just stick to hardware, because that's what I'm most familiar with. The best ones I've ever worked with are seeing them design things very well. If they cut their teeth in quality in or manufacturing engineering, where they were getting, they were solving the problems of poor design. And so when you get that frontline experience, and then you get to go do these designs, you carry with you all those trials and tribulations of redesigning that you had to do. And so these designs that they come up with are, are much better. They're more cost efficient, more cost effective. They they really take to consideration, Howard, how are the users? How are the assemblers going to put this out? How are they going to service it? Because it's going to cause a quality issue? Is there a stackup issue here? And it's not to say that designers that automatically go in don't have that in mind, but they also don't have the I'll say that the scars, ones having of having to get yelled at maybe three or four times a week, from unhappy assemblers or line managers or quality people that need a better design to satisfy the requirements.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, going along with that this might be a pretty similar as her but what are the most valuable technical skills that you see in your engineers? And are you seeing enough of them these days? Or do you think that there's, there's a dearth of these skills? Geez,
Tony Dedeo:I've, I think it depends. You know, I worked with a very well rounded individuals. And I, I start to see engineers kind of in two camps of skill set. One being, and I'll just speak to the medical device, side of things. engineers that are really good with documentation, and process and technical writing, and asking questions And then on the other side of it, is the actual design word, or IQ OQ, pq use or, you know, designing a fixture for assembly, you know, you see that more in, when your company does a lot outsourcing, where you have engineers that are just reviewing and approving documentation and doing technical writing, versus being, you know, on the front lines. So I've seen that dichotomy a bit over the past, you know, 10 years where you've got titled, and well paid engineers, but they're only doing in my mind half of the job. So that's, that's what I've seen. And so I think, again, I think it goes back to some earlier comments that some of these engineers really have to consider the experience that they're getting, and then what does it mean to grow? And if you're not going to get that other half of that experience within that company that you're with, you may have to have some introspection on what you're
Aaron Moncur:what I've seen in the companies where I've worked is that the engineers largely want to design new products, and do not love doing the documentation that I have with your experience, I
Tony Dedeo:can't see that that's a new thing.
Aaron Moncur:That's yeah.
Tony Dedeo:Yeah, it's that's just, that's just the nature of being an engineer, you know, yeah. Nobody wants to do documentation. Again, that's, but the documentation is the output of the design. Right? So yeah, that's, that's a hard, that's a hard swallow for engineers, but it's a must swallow.
Aaron Moncur:There's a old engineer that I worked with a while back. And he used to say the documentation is the output of engineering. Yeah. That's, it's true. It's just part of what it is to be an engineer.
Tony Dedeo:Ya know, it's tough. And you know, that. It's also tough for engineers that are on the sustaining aspect of that, right. So, you know, you're not always getting to design the new whiz bang thing. You know, there's still legacy products out there that need to get supported, loved and, you know, kept on the market. Ya know, you've got, you know, some people that really love the sustaining people that will only want to do the research and new thing. So I think there's, you know, there's struggles there, I think this with a bunch of engineers that have to either do one to one or both?
Aaron Moncur:Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, let me take a very short break here and share with everyone that our company pipeline design and engineering, develops new and innovative manufacturing processes for complex products, then implements them into manual fixtures or fully automated machines to dramatically reduce production costs and improve production yields for OEMs. And today, we're speaking with Tony Dedeo. Tony, what, what are a few of your biggest challenges as an engineering leader?
Tony Dedeo:Hi, in recent past, it's when I've had some very competent engineers. You know, quite honestly, some of these engineers, it's, it's sometimes hard to keep them motivated. You know, if they're very highly competent, and efficient, it can be hard to keep them fed with things that will will keep them interested and motivated. You know, there's, there's not always money to go do the next generation thing. And I think, you know, that's, that's been certainly hard, hard for me. And that's when I, I start to look for other opportunities within the company that they might be able to provide value. And that can take a variety of different things. But if that particular person wants to lead a team, or become a manager, or you know, or maybe just go out in the field and see what the customers are doing, how are they how are they using our product or their features, you know, feedback that we need to bring back that we're not getting otherwise? So I think that's been my personal struggle is there's there's going to be times that an engineer is going to look around and say is this it, and it's, it's up to the manager to keep them fat, and it's going to take some creativity to do that.
Aaron Moncur:I've had similar experiences, and I think that's a really insightful piece of information there. I think it's maybe certain industries or maybe at certain levels of and industry, there is a tendency for some workers to look for excuses to maybe not work right to sit back and twiddle their thumbs for a little bit. In my experience, that has not been the case with engineers, they want to be challenged, they want to be really busy. And they, like you said, they start getting bored, when they're not busy. And when they get bored, they're going to start looking for other opportunities. So to keep really talented engineers on your team, you need to keep those challenges coming all the time, what what have been some ways that you've addressed that you mentioned looking for other places in the company for opportunities, are there any pro tips or creative solutions that you've hit upon
Tony Dedeo:ha pro tips, I wouldn't call them pro tips, but you know, things that things that I will engage them on is, you know, I will get them involved with just other facets of the of the company, whether, you know, if its supply chain, or their due diligence trips that we can put them on, you know, go go on a, an audit with a QA person to a supplier, or just go visit the supplier base, and see what, you know, see, if there's anything we can we can glean from them. As far as you know, our own designs, or maybe there's things that we can do a lien event on. You know, I've I've sent engineers out with clinical staff, you know, to go to hospitals and clinics, just to see how our products are really using the field and see what kind of struggles they're having. And all those kinds of activities, while it's not, you know, sustained over time, you know, they are sprinkled throughout the year where, you know, they do look forward to it, they do see value in it, in those potential, you know, sloughs of, of workload. You know, being an operations like, you know, I can always poke at something and say, Hey, this needs to be cheaper, go design something new. Or, hey, this whole thing is great to design something new, but sometimes they're just not funds to, to go do that work. And so, you know, I think my only tip is, you know, pull them out of the engineering box and, and get them experience in the other departments. You know, maybe there's QA work, or maybe there's some finance work, you know, there's, there's always something to round out an engineer. You know, and if they certainly want to be a manager, they're going to have to step out of that comfort zone and get experience and first hand experience in other departments. So that's what I would do with them. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:I really liked that. We've done similar things where we'll all of our work is project work. And so we do love a lot of quoting on these different projects. And historically, there have just been two or three of us that have done all of the quoting. And more recently, the past six or 12 months, we starting pulling the engineers in to help with all of that quoting. And it's been terrific. Not only does it teach them a new skill, but it lightens the burden for the two or three of us who were doing all of that quoting in the past. So that's been a really great, great way to provide engineers with something else a new challenge, right to learn about. Oh,
Tony Dedeo:absolutely. Yeah, there's probably fun for for a little while.
Aaron Moncur:That's the key word right? For a little while, everything right, it's for a little while, then you get good at it. And then it gets boring. And then it's on to whatever the next thing is. So we talked about some of the challenges that you face as an engineering leader, how about for the medical device industry as a whole? What are some of the biggest challenges that you see facing the medical device industry?
Tony Dedeo:You know, we talked about the sterilization, bottle bottlenecks. You know, I think in the macro economic and the political environment that we're in, I think companies are going to have struggles in the OUs market, especially, you know, some of these conflict areas, I'm just going to call it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens over the next you know, 12 months here luckily, some most of the things that I'm involved in we don't have you know, a lot of Oh, US componentry but I think that's going to be very interesting to see what happens and I hope everything works out but I think there's gonna be some some next level supply chain issues going on, you know, beyond Yeah, that I think, you know, we've got interest rates that have gone of the the roof or at least, you know, for people who have been used to it two 3% interest rate, you know, the cost of manufacturing, you know, that just gets passed on to the customer. And so that's, that's really hard to keep your, you know, purchase price variance where you want it, you know, your gross margin where you need it. So I think those are, there's a lot of macro economic and political environment, issues that are going on that are going to make it very hard to, for some of these upstarts and maybe even some of the well seasoned, you know, 50 year companies. You know, there's, there's, there's going to be trials and tribulations here. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:belts are getting tighter and tighter, it seems like these days. Well. So given that, there are some challenges, there are always some challenges, but what's a tool that if it existed, what would help your team perform dramatically better, you know, 10 times better than they do today, whether that's better quality, or faster, or whatever it might be. And this tool, you know, it's a magic wand kind of thing. So this can go outside the limits of known physics even, but what's, what's something that you think if if it existed, if you had it, your team would just be, you know, 10 times more productive 100 times more productive?
Tony Dedeo:You know, I think it's not a it's not a widget, but it's a system. There is not an ERP system out there that I that I've seen or liked, or anybody has, in order, like they just compromise and then deal with, but, you know, these business processes is what bogs everybody down. You know, it's that administrative work that, you know, quite honestly, the engineers don't want to do. And so if we can speed that up, that's amazing. You know, and so if I had, if there was a company, and I it doesn't exist today, even though some may claim they have, it doesn't work. You know, a very well integrated ERP PDM II QMS MES system with backbones a Power BI and, you know, AI tools, you know, something that is the Apple interface, I would say, of, you know, a manufacturing company, that would be that would be amazing, something that just works and is super easy to use, and it easy to set up. And, you know, it's it, that would be amazing, I think. And so if somebody has designed that, I just haven't seen it.
Aaron Moncur:That does sound incredible. That's just the golden,
Tony Dedeo:that's the golden egg of efficiency is, as far as I'm concerned that I think what I've seen is companies create something, and then they buy other companies or different applications, and then none of them really work together. It's just kind of hodgepodge together and that it's just a marketing job to get everybody sold on whatever they Cluj together. And so that's, that's what I think frustrates everybody right now is a we've got all these things to go do. And yet I'm stuck doing four hours of admin work, because the systems are terrible. Yeah,
Aaron Moncur:that is frustrating. Well, let's say that you had unlimited resources, whether it's time people money, whatever, what is, what's the one thing that you would do for your company that that you think would have the most significant impact on achieving its business goals? Maybe it's the same answer.
Tony Dedeo:I would honestly if I had unlimited resource time and money, I I'd start vertically integrated, vertically integrating everything. You know, it's that it's kind of that Toyota model where they they hold their supply chain very close, and they have a lot of control over it, but they are able to control all the costs there as well. You know, if there's very few companies that do it, but then if you are able to do it and be successful, you could also open up a different, you know, business opportunity to do contract manufacturing for others. So, I mean, you look at the bicycle company giant, they make really good bikes, but they also make everybody else's bikes. And a lot of people know that. But, you know, there's there's a business model there that have I've seen work.
Aaron Moncur:Great answer. How do you see the medical device industry changing over the next five years? That's
Tony Dedeo:a good, it's a good question. I really don't know, outside of, you know, some of the topics that we touched on, you know, we'll see what happens, you know, with the political and economic environment we're in, but I do see the medical device going war. Continuing, I'll say, the single use, as well as getting into more faster diagnostics. I think the diagnostics is, have come quite a long way. But I don't think we're, we're near what it can be yet. And I think that's just gonna take investment. So we'll see, I'm excited to see what the future holds in that arena. But it's, that's, you know, those are, those are million dollar programs that you got to start seed funding. And so I, I just don't see a lot of people doing that right now with the in the economic situation for sure.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah. Well, just one or two more questions, and we'll wrap things up here, specifically, within the context of your role as an engineer, what is one thing that frustrates you? And then conversely, what's one thing that brings you joy?
Tony Dedeo:In context of an engineer, you know, I think I kind of touched on it with the the burden of admin, you know, outside of the business processes and things of that nature. You know, I think you're an engineer is always going to be frustrated with, I'll say, other engineers, and what I mean by that is, you know, you're buying, you're buying something from some other company, and then neither can variably, it's going to be going to have problems, you're going to have something wrong. And so you got one engineer catching another engineer, you know, doing something wrong. Oh, you know, I think that's shit that just goes with the territory of being in business, and specifically manufacturing and design. So, you know, those are, those are two that I see it every day. The other thing, honestly, that brings me joy is seeing, you know, people, people getting excited over things they've done well, or figured out. Yeah, no, it's quite something that gives somebody a task, and then see them figure it out for themselves or, you know, ask the right questions, or go seek the information, or go or go learn or take a class in, in get the job done. And it's, it's pretty awesome to see people grow in that context. Not only technically, but, you know, especially on those soft skills that we talked about, you know, I've seen engineers, you know, become very astute business people, and they become managers, directors, and it's, it's really awesome to see that, you know, some of those people happen to work for me. And so it's, that's what brings me joy. That's why I go to work every day is, you know, it's not necessarily only the company and the fact that they're paying me to do that. But it's, you know, it really is seeing the people grow in and start to lead and take charge and, you know, work me out of a job or get me into my next thing. And so that's, that's what excites me every day.
Aaron Moncur:I certainly echo that we have a couple of philosophies, we call them our tenets at pipeline that are hung on a wall, and two of them are persistence, beats brilliance, and be respectfully aggressive. And I was I was listening to one of our very young engineers the other day, on a phone call with a vendor, and it was clear from his side of the conversation that he wasn't getting what he wanted. And, and he kept pushing. Respectfully, you know, he was looking for different avenues. And can I talk with this person there? No. Well, what if we did that? And I was just so proud of him, you know, to hear the persistence and the, the the respectful aggressiveness that he took his he talked with his vendor. It was just really cool. Seeing the growth, like you said, you know.
Tony Dedeo:Yeah, it's it's pretty amazing to see it. Yeah. All right,
Aaron Moncur:Tony. Well, this has been such a terrific conversation. Thank you again for taking some of your time and sharing your your wisdom and insight with the community here at the being an engineer podcast. How can people get in touch with you?
Tony Dedeo:Ahh LinkedIn is the best way? My last name spelled D E D E O, and it's pretty easy to find me.
Aaron Moncur:Wonderful. Thank you so much, Tony.
Tony Dedeo:Thank you for having me.
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 turnkey equipment, custom fixtures and automated machines and with product design, visit us at Team pipeline.us. Thanks for listening.