Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E5 Keegan Schoch | Pro Tips on Creating an Engineering Consultancy
In this episode, Keegan Schoch shares his journey into engineering, the importance of soft skills, the origins and philosophy of Poindexter by Design, the tools and technologies they use, strategies for building client relationships, trends in engineering like AI integration, advice for aspiring engineering consultants, and highlights of successful projects.
Main Topics:
- Keegan's path to becoming an engineer and the importance of soft skills
- The story behind Poindexter by Design and its unique approach to engineering services
- The tools and technologies used by Poindexter by Design, including onshape and AI integration
- Strategies for building meaningful client relationships and growing the business
- Trends in engineering, such as the shift to remote work and the rise of AI
- Advice for aspiring engineering consultants on starting their own business
- Keegan's experiences with successful projects at Poindexter by Design
About the guest: Keegan Schoch is a dynamic mechanical engineer, leader, and entrepreneur, and the co-founder of Poindexter by Design, a cutting-edge engineering services company delivering on-demand mechanical engineering expertise to support innovative industries. With a career spanning nearly a decade at Aerotech, where he progressed from Mechanical Design Engineer to Mechanical Component Assembly Supervisor, Keegan honed his technical and leadership skills before launching his own venture.
At Poindexter by Design, Keegan combines technical ingenuity, creativity, team building, and business acumen to help clients tackle mechanical engineering challenges with a holistic, web-based approach. His company focuses on developing meaningful partnerships and championing innovation in industries ranging from robotics to manufacturing.
Keegan’s educational foundation is equally impressive, holding dual bachelor’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Nuclear Engineering from Penn State University. With a vision for bridging technical problem-solving with bigger-picture thinking, Keegan is an inspiring example of how engineers can impact not only products but also teams, systems, and industries.
Links:
Keegan Schoch LinkedIn
Poindexter by Design - Website
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
But at the same time, if you, if you wait until you're you've got the perfect time and perfect situation, you'll be waiting the rest of your life.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer podcast. Today's guest is Keegan Schoch, a mechanical engineer, leader and entrepreneur who founded Poindexter by design, a company delivering on On Demand mechanical engineering services to support innovation across industries, with nearly a decade of experience at Aero tech and dual degrees in mechanical and nuclear engineering from Penn State. Keegan blends technical expertise creativity and leadership to tackle complex engineering challenges through Poindexter by design. He's refining redefining how companies access cutting edge engineering solutions. Keegan, welcome to the show.
Keegan Schoch:Thank you so much, Aaron. It's pleasure to be here today.
Aaron Moncur:So what made you decide initially to become an engineer?
Keegan Schoch:Yeah, I really, I really appreciate this question. I think it's a super important question to ask, especially for any in your audience that are haven't, haven't pursued the degree yet, and they're thinking about it. You know, something to really dwell on and ask yourself before you commit those resources. And in my case, I had a couple of main drivers. You know, firstly, and at the risk of sounding somewhat campy, I love the idea of being able to create, design, improve, really, affect change. So you mentioned the nuclear engineering degree. And that was, that was actually my initial interest, more so than mechanical. I meant to go for nuclear. That's, they had this awesome dual degree. So I pursued the two. It seemed like bearing in mind, this was early 2000s we were, you know, possibly on the verge of this nuclear renaissance. This was pre the Fukushima disaster and things like that. European pressurized reactors projects were in full swing. It seemed like a really important part thing to be a part of for important progress so but by the time I got those two degrees, had gotten out, done some internship work, and one of my whatnot, my interests had really shifted, and I started to be a lot more drawn toward that me world, and for obvious reasons, there's, there's a lot more creativity, flexibility in that realm, and that that really appealed to me. So that's, that's kind of the first driver. The second driver is, I'm sure a lot of you out there have experienced this. You know, engineers have always been presented, at least to me, as essentially, wizards, right? I'm thinking Gandalf of the calculator. Yeah, it was something super cool, and
Aaron Moncur:it came to appreciate the nerdy Lord of the Rings reference, yeah,
Keegan Schoch:I actually have in the background, and they guys can't see it. He's back there, backing me up every day. So, but it came with this, this level of academic prestige, at least, that's, that's how I perceived it, and that really resonated me, and I wanted that challenge. What kind of interesting side note that goes along with that, though I was, I was solid in STEM, you know, of course, but I was better. I was actually a lot better in areas like writing, debating constitutional law that that type of Avenue. So I don't think loving math, for instance, is necessarily a great reason for being an engineer. You have to be proficient in those areas to get the tools and those skills that you need. But it doesn't produce, in my opinion, doesn't always produce that long term drive to become an excellent engineer, some of those softer skills and a clear why are just as important in my experience, I'm curious if that that's kind of been your experience as well.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, I love what you're saying there. I think the soft skills are often underrated and are super, super important. We have a volunteer organization called CAD Club, where we teach middle school and high school kids how to how to use CAD and some simple engineering principles. And we we talk about kind of a life skill. We call them our CAD club tenants, one of them, we talk about each each class, and one of them, in the very beginning, the first couple of classes, I think, is this idea of soft skills and how, if you are the best person in the room, technically, but your soft skills are garbage, there's there's a ceiling. There's a pretty definitive ceiling to how far you can go in your in your career. But if your soft skills, you know, communication, negotiation, getting along with people, if those are really, really good, and even if your technical skills are just, you know, kind of MVP level, minimum viable, there's almost no limit to how far you can go. So I think being able to get along and talk with people, those soft skills are super, super important. Yeah.
Keegan Schoch:Yeah. That's. Completely been my experience. And you know, if you're absolutely terrible at math and science, it's going to be a long haul, right? There's some baseline there, but, yeah, those soft skills just invaluable, and they can't be, you can't be overstated. Yeah, definitely. I think the other kind of interesting follow up to this and maybe targeting the engineers that are people that are are listening to this, that are already engineers. The Great question is, why do you continue to be an engineer? Right? What am what motivates us today? And this evolves over time, at least, at least in my experience, in the 20 odd years since I decided to pursue it, and way back in early high school. And for me, it's, it's a simple answer, I love to build. I do enjoy. What does that mean? Build, right? I do enjoy hands on work. I think that that's, that's super fun and hobbies, but it's, it's much broader. For me, personally, building means building teams, building businesses, skills, goals, autonomy, systems, processes, well designed things, right? All of these are applicable. And I also like to point out that I don't necessarily think building always is synonymous with scaling, by the way, building can be optimizing, not numbers or growth for their own sake. So I think that's another really important question. As you grow in your career, and I'm still growing, so now
Aaron Moncur:I feel the same there as well. I use the word create, but I often say what I really love to do is creating. You know, there are different kinds of engineering. There's sustaining engineering. I don't think I would enjoy that very much. And honestly, I'm not the best engineer out there. There are. Most of the people on my team are better engineers than I am, maybe all of them, but I'm really good at creating new processes and creating new ideas and new paths to pursue for the business. I've really enjoyed being a business owner, because it kind of does take me out of the engineer role, and allows me to create, at least commercially, a little bit more, which has been a lot of fun, absolutely. Well, tell us a little bit about Poindexter by design. I'm curious to hear where the name comes from. It's very distinct, memorable name, yeah. So tell a little bit about that, and what, what Poindexter by design, is,
Keegan Schoch:sure, yeah. So just starting with the name itself, Poindexter, if you look it up, you know, this cartoon character, some, some may know that just this super nerdy person, you know, I say that we're very fondly, you know, considering myself definitely a nerd and a lot of ways. So that's a really positive as a really positive connotation. So, you know, we we love what we do as engineers, we love being business owners, but we also like doing the work ourselves, and that's that's been a we're still a small team of three engineers, and that's been a big part of why we've kind of maintain that smaller size, because we get to do both, right? We get to be entrepreneurs. We get to build a business and do interesting things, but we also get to do the work ourselves. So we really enjoy sort of that, that that nerdy aspect, being able to do that professionally. And so that point, extra guy and our little logo that kind of goes with it, sort of says it all right. This guy's got his little pocket divider. His pocket, you know, is, is little engineering tools and things like that. So we wanted it to be, we wanted it to be fun. And kind of allude to the fact that we're, we're fairly different from a traditional engineering service provider. So, and, you know, as far as what made us kind of go after this, by the way, I did, co found this with my really good friend John Massa, and we kind of came up with that together and why we wanted to do it. You know, in a word, I would say freedom, using brave hearts rendition of William Wallace is like famous line, right, freedom. But in all in all seriousness, it kind of goes back to that whole creating or building something that we we wanted. It made a lot of sense for us to double down on building a business that was based around these marketable skills that we had acquired over decades of industry work. We loved engineering, and we have developed that history there, particularly for us with our background and particular engineering interests that that was industrial machine design, analysis and drafting, that type of work in the beginning, just kind of as an interesting side note as well. We the beginning, we tried a lot of ancillary services. We tried to provide pretty much everything we could think of when it came to mechanical engineering services. And that's, I think, a pretty rookie mistake that a lot of people would make. It makes a lot of sense try to try to be everything to everyone. But in the end, you know, we're learning that focusing just. On this core competency really ends up being a much more clear and attractive value proposition and interest it interests the right clients. In the end, some of the things kind of separate us to a little plug here. You know, from this, traditional engineering services are really kind of one more flexible, and we're a very low friction to engagement. So we're we're really willing, and we furthermore excel at integrating with existing engineering teams. So that kind of sets us apart. This is a this is a combination of both tools that we use, which we'll probably touch more on, and our mindset, right? So the more traditional engineering services provider typically receives a really well defined scope of work from a prospective client. They go off and do this work in relative isolation, and then they come back with these predetermined deliverables. And we can and sometimes we do work that way, but that's not always going to deliver the best result for the client. Sometimes it's working within the organization itself and that that's been our niche and kind of our size. And like I said, some of the tools we use allow us to do that really well. Another, another thing that's a little bit different from your traditional approach is just being like, super adaptable, different. You know, we offer a wide range of softwares and things that we work in. We our niche is on shape. I'm sure we'll, we might touch on that again. And then just having that broad industry experience to be able to to switch gears, to have a lot of different solutions and things, and then, and I, again, this is something we'll probably touch on more, but building the meaningful partnerships. So, you know, rather than, you know, larger services provider, they just want that kind of one off large project, and they're happy to get that, and they move on. You know, we're thinking, what's, what's, what's the best interest of the client here? How can we perform our work with that end in mind, even if that puts more burden on us in the short term, and we're always thinking long term relationships instead of one off projects. So long spiel there, but that's kind of how we got started, some of the ways that we've evolved in our offering and kind of the niche things that set us apart from traditional companies in this space.
Aaron Moncur:Let's talk about the tools that you use for a bit. I mean, one of them is onshape, and I would love to hear more about that. How did you get into onshape? Initially, for those who don't know what onshape is, maybe just a quick 32nd plug for them. And what other tools are you using that allow you to work so seamlessly with other engineering teams?
Keegan Schoch:Yeah, absolutely. So onshape is a cloud based CAD system. So they they were originally founded, I know you've had some of the speakers on this podcast. You could talk to this in much more detail. The founder, you know, John her stick that that could talk to in a lot of detail here about this. But what's really beautiful about it is, you know, think never hitting the save button again on your files or crashing or anything like that. It's, it's beautiful. It's really this cloud storage system that has CAD and CAD capabilities in front of it. And it's, it's really fantastic for a company like ours, where we're trying to go in work remotely, 99% of the time with other companies, and in a lot of cases, we're working within a company's enterprise system, just a type of system within onshape, and going In and doing work right inside of their infrastructures with whatever kind of restrictions and safeties they want to put in place to prevent us from getting into intellectual property that we don't need to see. You know, this all that, but that allows us to just sort of jump in work right alongside their engineering teams in a way that really wasn't, isn't possible very you know, not to the same level of ease where you've got a you've got static files that you're passing back and forth and things like that. So we actually started, we came from SolidWorks, which we still use. By the way, we have a lot of clients that still use SolidWorks, and we like it a lot. It was, was something that we use for a long time. Had a lot of experience in it. But when we were getting started, it just the cloud based nature on safe just seemed to really align with, kind of our long term vision for how we would operate. You know, we wouldn't be on site. We wanted to kind of work within companies in a lot of cases. So that really lent itself some of the other tools we like to use, and this has been an evolving process of how to how to manage our juggle a bunch of different projects, clients, tasks, in those projects, without getting mired in really big Gantt charts and these big timelines and like complex there's a lot of. Rate software out there, it was just too far for us, or a lot, you know, sticky notes just weren't enough. So we've actually been using a really great application called one IPM integrates with onshape, so we're able to stay within the CAD system we're working with. And it's designed by engineers, for engineers kind of thing. And we really love it because you can, you can link your tasks directly to your park studio or your your assembly that you're working on. You can create tasks for other users in your company. So it's great for the project manager. It's also great for the frontline engineer. So those are just a couple of the tools we like to use as far as communication goes. You know, we have to be, and this goes back to being adaptable, because we're working with clients very closely. Instead of just sort of siloing the projects on our own, we're, we're having to acquire pretty much every form of communication application out there. So we're daily using Slack teams, Google, meet, traditional email, like any format that you can imagine, just so that it's really easy to use us and it's really easy to get a hold of us. So that goes back to that low friction thing. So those are some of the, I'd say the key tools on the analysis side. We do a lot of FEA work. We've also done some CFD work, pretty extensively. We use both solid work simulation and we use sim scale, which also ties in with onshape. So those are a couple of that's another kind of cloud based application out there that we really like.
Aaron Moncur:I think onshape is so wonderful. We use it in our CAD Club program because, you know, there's nothing to install. It runs just great on a crummy public school issued laptop, right? It's free for students anyway, and even for non students, I think they have a free version. So there's a lot of great stuff behind onshape. And I really think that they're kind of the up and coming. I think solar works better. Watch out, because onshape might start eating their lunch. Yeah,
Keegan Schoch:it's really interesting, because we're, like you said, we're seeing sort of the transition in some companies to things like onshape. It's really great when you you have a lot of employees that work remotely as well, or, you know, during COVID, it was a really attractive software. I think you still have these really big companies that have used SolidWorks for super long time. They have so much infrastructure built around it, or or other similar CAD systems, right? It's going to be hard to see this change, but for for a new startup that wants to be super flexible and get going or, you know, I'm not saying you can't convert as a big company, but yeah, we, we really, we've really come to love it. We were skeptical in the beginning because we're, you know, hard to SolidWorks users. It's hard to change. But, yeah, it's fantastic for a lot of reasons, and they're just constantly rolling out improvements, even in the last several years, since we started using it. It's just, it's a pretty impressive, it's very impressive how much has improved, and a lot of the functionality and thinking about like sheet metal and cut lists and things like that that have come so far. Yeah, it's a very competitive CAD system, and it's been a great niche for us, because there are very few consulting companies in this space, very few. So I guess I shouldn't say that
Aaron Moncur:too loud, yeah, I'm kind of, I'm curious about how many companies out there are using onshape. Obviously, there are, but SolidWorks is the incumbent. Has it been challenging to find companies who are using onshape where that niche really comes in, valuable for you
Keegan Schoch:guys? Yeah, so onshape is very, very, very careful about keeping their client list very safe. Which I would do the same thing if I were them, of course. So it's been a little bit of a challenge. I think there are a lot of companies out there. They both are very high, millions of users. I don't know how many of those are paid, of course, versus some of the like the free accounts that are public, all of your data and creations on their public if it's a free account, but i There are a lot of really good companies, certainly way more companies than we could support on our own. So it's, it seems like it's really growing. It'll be very interesting in the next, you know, 1015, years, how much market share they have. One
Aaron Moncur:of the things that you mentioned earlier was connecting on a kind of not personal, but establishing meaningful relationships with your customers is a way to build a relationship and develop business with them. I'm going to take a kind of a tangent here, and then I'll come. Fact, really the question I'm going to ask you is, what are some of the strategies that you've done to do that? The tangent here is that years ago, pipeline attended this event, and the event was kind of unique, where the event organizers, they brought in hardware startups, and they brought in service providers. So there was engineering that was pipelined, there was marketing, there was finance, there was, you know, graphic design, right kind of all the stuff, ergonomics, people, all the stuff that hardware startup would need to get moving in the right direction. Anyway, the event was just a day long. So it's not like, you know, we're going to have a final product or anything, but we at least it was enough time to start pushing them in the right direction. And the format of this thing was the service providers didn't charge the startups anything directly. I think the startups, they paid something to the event organizers, but the service providers didn't charge anything. We showed up and we solved a real problem in real time. So pipeline got paired with this medical device company, and we we did some cad concepts to date. They had, they only had kind of back of the neck napkin sketch. They didn't have any engineering in house. And so we put a CAD concept, couple of concepts together. This is what your back of the napkin sketch might look like in 3d and they were able to spin it around and see some details. And all of a sudden this started coming to life for them, right? Like Finally, they could start seeing their vision in digital reality anyway, and it was super valuable. And we got to know know them a little bit. We gave them something for free. And then after that event, they reached back out to us, and they said, Hey, what you guys did was so great. Now we know you, we like you, we trust you. We'd like to work with you. And we ended up working with them for for years after that. And we're actually organizing an event, a quick plug for PDX 2025, right now, where we're trying to create that same environment where we have providers coming in to exhibit. It's kind of like a trade show, where they have a booth and they're showing their products and their services, but a requirement for all the exhibitors is that they provide some kind of meaningful value for the attendees, and meaningful to the level of like you would typically charge for this level of value. But at this event, they're not charging the attendees anything could be some kind of training, maybe real time, consulting on something, whatever it is. And the idea is that you're doing that now the attendees, they know these exhibitors, they like them, they trust them, and so hopefully that leads to business afterwards. So anyway, I found that to be a really great strategy in terms of developing relationships with with companies that we want to work with. That's just one way, of course. So I'd love to hear a little bit about some of the strategies that you guys have used to do that. Yeah, that's a really,
Keegan Schoch:that's a really interesting event, and I definitely want to follow up on that for,
Aaron Moncur:hey, yeah. We'll talk about that after, yeah.
Keegan Schoch:So, so that. That brings up some really, really good points about this, and that's been, we knew it was going to be a challenge from the onset, and it has proven to be part of what's what takes a while to build that foundation of clients, that client base, acquiring clients. You know, there, there's so much opportunity out there in industry. There's no shortage of need for high quality engineering work. You know, even at a contracting level, not necessarily employed, it's just getting in the door, right? That's, that's been, that's been one of the harder things, and a lot of say the vast majority of our clients do come through. They have to come through some kind of direct referral. It's word of mouth, some kind of organic reference that's that's really critical. And I think what the event that you mentioned really highlights is that, in the end, people are very social beings, and we need that kind of initial trust. Even when it's a very technical, very business sort of transaction, you still need that sort of like face to face, okay, we trust you. We've seen firsthand. You can produce nice work. We like working with you. I think it's really important. So on the front end, in our case, you know, we haven't actually attended any kind of event like that, but what we do on the back end, when we've gotten that opportunity is we're really, really careful about doing exactly what we're saying, what we say we're going to do. So once you've gotten that opportunity, it's really critical that you're just you're super consistent, you define and understand, you perceive the client expectations, and then you eat to find those really well. And I don't mean it like a slow, sort of rigid statement of work kind of thing, just like, what do they really care about? What are the key. Drivers for the project or what they need done, you know, and then, and then nailing those, right? So if you promise a certain cost, you gotta stay within that cost, barring some, some catastrophic scope, or something scope creep. But, you know, lead time if they, if they need this within two weeks, you gotta, and you say you can do it, you gotta do it, you know. So that's, and it's surprising. It sounds really simple. A lot of companies don't do that, right? They win the work, and then they're they run over by two months, or 2x the budget, or something like that. So for us, you know, we have a very high retention rate we shoot. You know, the last few years it's been, we are seeing repeat clients of like, 75% of our work continues to be from kind of this returning client base that we have. So I think what we're doing is working. And for us, the challenge is, you know, getting in the door for the most part. I think the other thing I say, it's, and this highlights again, what you guys did was it was an in person event, correct? So where possible, even though it's less comfortable trying to still have in person meetings or where that's just that's not feasible for you or the client. You know, having video calls, right? Is better than just a phone call, but a phone call is better than just slack messaging or or an email, right? So trying to, trying to work in this personal forms of of communication, because ultimately, people are very social creatures, fundamentally, and that's that's really critical to building trust. I think so, yeah,
Aaron Moncur:I agree in person is always better get in person, face to face with someone, yep, all right. Well, I will take a very 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. We've got some cool case studies there to take a look at, as well as some funny videos about here at pipeline, we don't do pipelines. The podcast is also sponsored by the wave, an online platform of free tools, education and community for engineers. You can learn more at the wave dot engineer, and today, we have the privilege of speaking with Keegan shock today. So Keegan talk a little bit about, are there any any trends that you have seen in the engineering space recently that you're particularly excited about.
Keegan Schoch:Yeah, I see that there are kind of off the cuff here, two things that really, really stand out for me. Number one, and especially as it pertains our business too, because those are the things that really catch my ear. One is the shift in the last few years to that remote working you know that that's not a new thing, but it was an enormous benefit, like I mentioned, to our web based engineering services. And one of the couple of interesting things that come along with that, though, are that that this higher level requirement to be able to communicate quickly through various channels that was this very different than it was even 10 years ago, right? Just prevalence of being able to just message somebody and you're seeing their green status and things like that. It's a very different world in that regard, and it comes with this heightened expectation of just super fast response times. And that can be it's a positive thing for us. We get the chance to show how responsive we are to our clients by always, you know, getting back to them very quickly, very professionally, in whatever format they prefer. But it can also be something to manage where you're you're having to to kind of silence a lot of that when you need to get into that deep work, you know, Cal Newport's deep work state, right? That's really important for getting that high quality engineering output completed. And then, you know, comes back again to with that remote working, I think that CAD systems like onshape and what they're doing, or sing scale, that's really going to be super important, especially in the engine. In the engineering world. And then the second trend, of course, in the obvious buzzword of the day, is AI, right? I think we're going to see this, a tremendous reshaping and optimizing of engineering workflows. Information is just is so accessible, synthesized, streamlined, it's just going to continue to be better and better, which is, it's exciting to me, and I think that some of the specifically, some of the ways that we've interacted with CAD or even some of the more advanced analysis tools, I think, long term, are going to be more intelligent. They'll be more semi automated. Kind of smart processes within those things. It's still going to require creativity, at least as far as I can see. But for me, this is a, this is a as an engineer, this is a really exciting progress. You know, we like to see progress and optimization as engineers, so it's something to embrace. And I, I really get excited about the idea of these types of tools allowing us to spend more time doing this. There's high value creative tasks that require both hemispheres of our brain and less of that sort of stringent, well defined, repetitive task work that comes comes along often with a lot of engineering. So those are the two I would really point out. Yeah, follow
Aaron Moncur:up on the AI, how are you using chat GPT? I'm always interested. I think for the most part these days, it's not, are you using chat GPT? Pretty much everyone is. It's how? What are some of the ways that you have found to use that effectively?
Keegan Schoch:Sure, so we're still trying to figure out how to, how to best use it in an especially in a way that's that's careful. So, you know, we're, we're cautious about doing anything that could lead to, you know, a breach in the confidential information. We have a lot of very sensitive IP in our possession, and interacting with any of those is not something we have to be really careful about. Same time though, we've, we've used some, some really cool tools to to generate some images and things like that that have been really helpful for presentations or developing concepts that can be really, really powerful. And that's something that we're, we're we're trying to figure out how to incorporate even better. You know, can we, can we train tools like this to to just help us really speed up that, at least that rough brainstorming or trying to come up with a solution? There's going to be a lot of work there to do that, but I think there's a lot of opportunity, rather than having to literally hand sketch, or you get into do a lot of time consuming CAD work to develop concepts that are ultimately thrown out, right? So if you can kind of shortcut that get what's in your mind, you know, into the like a chat, GPT or whatever, to to help you generate those ideas really quickly. I think it's a lot of cool opportunity there. And then, on the like, the business side, we haven't implemented this. We were actually just talking to one of our clients who's found some really interesting techniques for for automating a lot of their their emails, right? So they they were finding they had a lot of kind of repetitive sales emails that they were sending or follow ups that they needed to send, or sending invoices or anything like that. And they've gotten it down to a science where they can just kind of drop, drop files into this repository and it spits out. And they hit go, and they said, this is this beautiful email. So that's it's pretty exciting, and I think we need to keep finding ways to try to bring it in. But in our case, we're really we have to be pretty careful. So
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, same here. Customers are very, very concerned about confidentiality, so you have to take that very seriously. That's cool to hear that you've been able to use chat, GPT, I guess, Dolly, probably, or whatever implementation you're using to create images for for, like, concepts, concept design, that would be a an interesting thing to try that I haven't thought about doing. Yeah,
Keegan Schoch:we haven't had great results yet, but we haven't also put a lot of lot of effort into it, but it's been especially for creating images of a very general idea that are high quality enough to put into, like a client for presentation or something. It's just, hey, this is a very rough it's cool. It generates this cool kind of artsy image. We've done some to that level. I'm saying, what I what I find really exciting, is to think about spending the time to teach these types of tools to get to the point where we can help it can help generate real concepts for us. Or say it's still sort of wacky, but it's like, oh man, it brought in this element I wasn't really thinking about, and that from there, it gives me this other great idea, you know,
Aaron Moncur:yeah, I've used it a lot for writing proposals. Again, obviously, we're not putting confidential information in there, but, you know, there, there might be a data sheet for a pump or something, and, and instead of opening up that data sheet, what was the flow rate with this pump, or what were the power needs, I can just type in the jeep. Hey, tell me what the flow rate is for this pump. I can't remember what page that was on, right, instead of looking through 50 pages of a PDF, things like that has been really helpful. Well, let's see, for younger engineers who might be interested in starting their own Engineer. In consultancy, what? What kind of advice would you give them? Sure,
Keegan Schoch:yeah, I have thinking, thinking about this, this question, this, there's a lot to say. And I said, so here we go. First thing is, I'd say, especially if you're, if you're thinking about doing consulting or or engineering contracting, in particular, there's no replacement for that in industry. Experience. Really need to spend some time in industry, in my opinion, gaining that, that how to knowledge you know that you just can't learn in school in a lot of cases, no matter how great the school is. Like, obviously, I'm a big proponent of education, but there's just that real world industry experience. Go out, get some of that, you know. And the best way that you can accelerate the benefit of that is to give every task, every assignment, everything you've got right? Doesn't matter if you're interested or not, figure out how to make it a really worthwhile endeavor, and it benefits you, because you're going to learn more and you're going to perform better and you're going to get more opportunity a lot faster. And some of these like, again, sort of soft skills, right? Being proactive in a professional, non pushy way, trying to find those those opportunities, being curious, reading broadly, being hands on, respecting everyone within the company, right? Secondly, I'd say, in terms of, especially like, developing up the business side of things, that business acumen and whatnot you would need. There are lots of ways to self educate. Again. Really can't emphasize enough basic accounting, even if you aren't the finance guide, running the business right. You have to understand how cash flow works. This is, this is the lifeblood of business. You need to be able to model it, forecast out of budget, interpret basic financial reports and things. A lot of great books, the accounting game, profit first. There are tons of them out there. And then I'm also just to use the phrase, pretty big fan of sending it where possible, though too. There's no like faster way to expedite learning rather than just trying and failing, right when it comes to business. And you've got to do this, of course, in a way that considers your specific life stage context. You gotta, I have to say this. You have to build in those contingencies and mitigate risk, right, to an acceptable level, make sure your fundamental needs are covered. Don't, don't just, you know, sink the house and family doesn't have food or something like that, to go after the business, right? But at the same time, if you, if you wait until you're you've got the perfect time and perfect situation, you'll be waiting the rest of your life. So and then I would also say, you know, thirdly, especially when you're combining the technical with business, it requires, like, we've talked a lot about collaboration and networking. Don't neglect the relationship. Building things like emotional intelligence, integrity is a really, really important, right? And you mentioned this earlier, and I've experienced this as well. Where I've, I've met these fantastic technical engineers, and they're they're super talented, they're really brilliant. They're great at what they did, but they just unknowingly stymied their own career growth by being just horrible to work with. Nobody likes a condescending engineer. Don't be that person, right? And then, kind of from pulling from my experience, from from Aerotech, actually, when I managed a group of Manufacturing Engineers, and specifically that that particular group, they would get two books for me when I would hire an employee, they would get the machinist handbook, which everybody's gotta have right, and then they would also get the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. And we would actually work through that book and our one on ones together, because I think it's just so incredibly important to have somebody who's self aware and driven and well rounded. It's just this. It's just as fundamental to their careers, all the the other skills, the technical skills, right?
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, great book. Do you have a favorite habit?
Keegan Schoch:The proactive, being proactive. You know? It's just it kind of is really defined, defining, and it leads to so many other areas, right? I
Aaron Moncur:love that one we have. I talked about CAD club. We have tenants. Well, we have our own tenants for pipeline as well, and one of them is be respectfully aggressive. And I think that's along the same lines as be proactive, right, right? Don't. If you need something from a vendor, don't just send an email and hope to get back to you in time, or actually say we can't, we can't deliver something for three weeks. Don't just leave it at that. If it's really critical that you get it in two weeks, right? Call them up. Hey, I appreciate that you guys have your schedules. Probably no way you can help us here. But what would it take to get it to us in two weeks? You know? That is there any way we can speed this up at all, be respectfully aggressive. Someone told me the other day that maybe I should turn that change that to be respectfully assertive, because it sounds better. I kind of do like the word assertive, so maybe we'll see. Yeah,
Keegan Schoch:yeah. I think, I think the the ethos there of the phrase is, is perfect, though, yeah, you gotta, you've gotta, gotta do it in a way, right? That you're, you're considering the relationships, because whether you think you're gonna need that person, and that's not a great way to talk about like, I need this person or not, so I'm gonna be nice or not. You gotta be, gotta be kind and considerate of everyone, regardless whether they can reciprocate or give you anything, right? But it's very possible that they, you know, if you treat them well, they're likely to treat, you know, well back and then that's just, that's just something that that's important, but at the same time, you don't want to be, you know, doormat, and you want to, you want to make sure that you're, you're being proactive about, and that can be, it's just such a great, such a great mindset to have. And it doesn't mean necessarily, like you said, being aggressive in a non respectful way. It just means, you know, not waiting for things to happen to you. Yes,
Aaron Moncur:absolutely. What is, is there a project that you've worked on, it at Poindexter, that you can share, obviously not giving away anything confidential, but something that you're particularly proud of. Maybe it was a design solution you came up with, or it could even be a business solution you came up with, but a project that you worked on that you're particularly proud of. Sure,
Keegan Schoch:yeah, this is a tough question. Like even, even in the last year, you've gotten to work on a variety of just awesome projects, from a major FEA project and space industry to completely ground up, designing this, this giant industrial automation machine from scratch. But I would really point out, and I have permission to mention these guys, this, this ongoing multi year project with a company called hyphen. So they're a food service automation company. Chipotle is publicly announced that partnering with them to some extent to bring automation to their some of the new restaurant locations and things. It's super exciting company to be, to be working with. It's an exciting look into the future, just to see how automation can positively transform and enhance almost any industry, right? And we've gotten the opportunity to work with them, like I said, for for a number of years, and it's a great example of building a great long term relationship, right? And we're, I like to point them out, because we're integrating with their team. We're not just doing siloed projects, like I said. We're working alongside their engineering team to work on a huge range of things to support their work, from robotic subsystems to, you know, from scratch through DFM components, almost any manufacturing process you can pick up sheet metal weldments, Precision Machine additive, injection molding, you know, over molded, injection molded parts, vacuum casting, precision casting. It's just been super exciting. Done a lot of analysis work for them as well, both CFD and FEA. And so it's just been a it's been a real pleasure to see how that that's developed. And it's a really cool product machine, so
Aaron Moncur:amazing. What a good feeling. All right, well, Keegan, actually, let's do we'll do one more question, and then, and then wrap this up. What's one thing that you've done or observed to accelerate the speed of engineering? Yeah,
Keegan Schoch:so a couple of things. Again, this goes back to being willing to adopt new technology and engineering tools that's picking up on shape when you're not you're not necessarily interested in picking up a new CAD tool, right? But it made a lot of sense for being able to quickly engineer for other companies, right? I think another thing, like I said, is, is and often overlooked, it's not super flashy, right? Is how you manage your projects, how you deal with tasks, and how you how you handle that task organization. I mentioned one IPM. I think that that's something you can spend a lot of time managing your work, especially when you're in a situation like us, or trying to service a lot of different clients, a lot of different projects, a lot of different tasks, even within those projects. And you can spin your wheels for a huge percentage of your time, the slack time in between, in between these projects. And so having a really clear roadmap of these are the tasks. These are the items in a really clear kind of we like, like a kanban style, you know, application that that's been, that's been huge. And then, specifically, you know, for our company, some of the other. Uh, some of the other ways that we we we speed up our ability to engineer for clients is again, lowering that engagement friction, having very flexible terms, you know, not requiring these really lengthy, formalized statements of work that are kind of prevalent in traditional settings. So those are just a few of the ways, I think. And then, like I said, we see opportunity looking into the future, for using some of these awesome AI tools to help us concept more quickly or even offload some of the repetitive tasks we identify. It's exciting,
Aaron Moncur:terrific. All right. Well, Keegan, thank you so much. What a fun time this has been getting to know you. Absolutely some of your stories and backgrounds. How can people get in touch with you? Yeah, absolutely.
Keegan Schoch:So there's, there are a few different ways you can get in touch with us. So feel free to reach out on either my personal LinkedIn page or our company LinkedIn page, or through our website at Poindexter by design.com you can also feel free to email us. I'll give you our company email. That's info at point Dexter, by design.com that'll make sure that either me or John see that I'd love to chat. You know, it doesn't have to be business related. It can be, you know, where you're at in your career and things, and always looking to to network with with new engineers. So it's been a real pleasure. Aaron, I thank you so much. You're
Aaron Moncur:so welcome. Right back at you. Keegan, thank you. I'm Aaron Moncur, founder of pipeline design and engineering. Thank you. 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.
