Being an Engineer
Being an Engineer
S6E13 Geoffrey Huber | Bespoke Ladders, Communicating Through Drawing, & Having a Big Customer
Geoffrey Huber shares his journey from art school to industrial design, discussing his expertise in creating custom access and safety equipment for industries like aerospace, aviation, and manufacturing. He reveals insights into building a successful custom manufacturing business and the importance of hands-on experience in engineering.
Main Topics:
- Transitioning from art to industrial design
- Building a custom equipment manufacturing department
- Developing innovative safety and access solutions
- Challenges of scaling a small business
- Importance of hands-on manufacturing experience
About the guest: Geoffrey Huber is an experienced industrial designer and entrepreneur with over 20 years of expertise in safety and access solutions. As Co-Owner and Manager of SAFE-T-FAB, he leads the design and production of innovative, code-compliant fall protection systems, ensuring rapid delivery and market leadership. He also operates GAH Enterprises LLC, a consulting firm focused on product design, prototyping, and engineering solutions. Previously, he held leadership roles at Ortho-tag, Inc. and Tri-Arc Manufacturing, Inc. Geoffrey holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Design from The Art Institutes and is recognized for his commitment to efficiency, innovation, and excellence in the industry.
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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.
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Try to gain some sort of employment in a physical, tangible manufacturing space as soon as you possibly can.
Aaron Moncur:Hello and welcome to the being an engineer Podcast. Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Jeffrey Huber, co owner and manager of safety fab, a division of industrial products limited with a background in industrial design. Jeffrey has dedicated his career to developing innovative safety and access solutions ensuring workplaces are both efficient and secure. Jeffrey, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Well, how did you decide to get into the field of design and
Unknown:You know, it kind of found me more than I found it, engineering? if you will. I actually, I was always involved in, very interested in the arts in general, lots of drawing and tinkering and things that nature and I was always kind of like a maker before a maker was a thing. And that, like when I was a kid, I was always just tinkering around and just holding the flashlight from my dad, you know, that kind of thing. And, yeah, while I was in while I was in school, the closest outlet were the things like, you know, wood shop, machine shop, you know. And then so I gathered those up. I always like to be interfacing and touching feeling with my work and so forth. So then I, then I went down some did a lot of art school, really things as far as drawing and painting and sculpting and stuff while I was in high school. And that actually led me to getting a scholarship to the Heart Institute of Pittsburgh while I was still in in high school, and I I really gravitated toward the Art Institute because they had industrial design, which is really like that Tinker's kind of curriculum, if you will. I mean, you're really kind of creating and designing and inventing, you know, items or or modulating and taking what an engineer has created that works and then turning into something that's a little bit easier to interface with as a human being, you know, and making that experience different. So that's the way I kind of, like, you know, gradually, kind of like, I say it kind of found me for lack of better terms.
Aaron Moncur:yeah, you put that very, very kindly, taking something from an engineer, I, I would say, making it look like an engineer didn't design that thing, right? You industrial designers just have a way of making things look so beautiful. And us engineers are, yeah, it works, but it's like this boxy, clunkyyeah, you put that thing that looks awful.
Unknown:It's funny that you mentioned it too, because i i Actually I COVID that skill on both ends of it. I'm fascinated by the elegant, the elegance in a simple design as no you know, esthetics to it at all, but just okay. I love the sparseness and the, you know, something that can be a very spartan and basic design. The beauty of it is how it works sometimes, but then, you know, when you get into the more of the commercial environment, where you need to take a piece of equipment and and make it not only what will work, but look nice too. That's, I'm always fascinated by the cutting edge of the industrial designer. Like you said, they're like magicians. They can take something that you would think has nothing beautiful behind it and turn it right, something elegant, you know. And I'll be honest with you, I'm always chasing both of those aspects, the elegant design and the beautiful design, and they're difficult to achieve.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. They are. Tell us a little bit about your journey, your history. So your your co owner and manager of safety fab right now, and maybe tell us a little bit about that. But also, where were you before safety? Fab, what were you doing?
Unknown:Yeah, so as I mentioned, I went to, I went to the artists in Pittsburgh. I literally left high school, and the next day after I graduated, I moved, just moved out to Pittsburgh and started immediately, because I had a year round curriculum. Had a year round curriculum, and that was very intriguing to me, because I didn't want to waste any time. I wanted to get to work when I got to school, I had to start, you know, figuring out how to pay some bills and things like that. So I got involved in trying to get in the jobs placement program at school to see that, see if I could use any of the things I was learning at school in the evenings, you know, paying for school effectively. And I did just that. Ended up getting not a scholarship, but I got some internships and some things. I worked at aluminum foundry for a little while prior to 911 because I went to, I started school in 98 so I started to work a little bit in the industry 99 2000 and I was working at the the aluminum foundry. And then 911 happened. And like that business really, really took a hit because it was, it was primarily an import business. Realistically, we made, like, we made giftware, effectively, like wind chimes, gauntlets, things that nature. And it was really like old school. We were making sand casted molds do all this. Oh, wow. So we were used, you know, doing match plate making and things of that nature. So it was a really good hands on experience again, while I was in school, and actually hadn't been exposed yet to the 3d side of technology yet in my curriculum at school at that time, I was still hands on, because my initial time at school, I was actually going down the special effects track for 3d movies. Model making. And then I turned my course about a year and a half into the curriculum, and then started to focus more on industrial design, largely because I felt a I had a certain knack for it. And then the other thing is, I just felt like it was more marketable. I felt like it was a lot, it would open me up to larger opportunities than a little bit more of a pigeon holed thing. Maybe I made the right the wrong decision. Who knows, but at the end of the day, what that did lead me to is, after I lost employment at the aluminum foundry due to the economical circumstances and whatnot, I think we all experienced things during that time. I was able to gain employment through a temp agency outside of school. It was literally just me finding a job at a factory. I wanted to work at a place that made things because I knew that I could figure out how to get myself to be marketable. I could figure out how to be make myself. I could both market myself and I could make myself valuable in a place where they were making things whether or not, whether they knew it or not, effectively. So I took that approach, because I took a temp job that was not engineering based. It was not design based. I was literally filling out work orders, you know, for people. And it was at a ladder factor. That's the key. The that's the long way to go around, is that that's my first foray to working in a manufacturer of climbing and access equipment effectively. So interesting. Yeah. So while I'm there, I'm working, I'm learning about how they make these ladders, literally at the baseline level where, you know, Bob comes in says, Hey, Bob made 17 ladders today, you know, on line number two, and I plug it in. Learned a lot about manufacturing, though it was, it was a really, really nice way to learn about we really were making bespoke ladders. We're making things handmade effectively. You know, hand bending tubing, welding things together, bringing in some sub assemblies and so forth, but largely turning piles of metal into completed products, or our customer base, which their customer base largely the company's name. I'll leave it out of the equation for now, but it's one of the large manufacturers that makes rolling ladders that you see at places like Lowe's home, Home Depot, Walmart. They're not the ladders that they sell, they actually use them for like inter store operations, such as stocking shelves, picking and pulling pieces of equipment for customers, things of that nature. But because they had such a large footprint in the ladder industry, they had a very large catalog with 1000s of SKUs and things of that nature. The by and large, you'd be amazed, with 1000s of SKUs. There's always a guy who wants something that's not in a catalog. And they did have a small, small quasi custom department that, if they were like, not busy or or they got a really nice, juicy inquiry that they thought they could turn into some money, they would take it, and then they would design a really, really customized piece of equipment for accessing a piece of aerospace equipment, an aircraft. It could be at space capsule. I know that we did things for, like, we made a bunch of custom movie scaffolding for Burt Reynolds home in, like, in the Palisades or something like that. At one point in time, because he had, like, a whole, like, movie theater. He wanted to have his own, like, stainless steel scaffolding equipment. Oh, cool. So, like, those are the type of weird, unique, niche things that we would get. And I was kind of sitting on the sidelines as a designer who wanted to design things, but was filling out work orders. It was a small enough company that I could go and knock on the owner's office and say, Hey, I'd like to try to design some of those things. Because, like, they would turn them away if they were busy, and they would get an inquiry for something that was custom. They would be like, Yeah, we don't do that. And then next month, they would get an inquiry and they weren't busy, and they'd say, Oh, yeah, we'll take that. And I thought maybe some consistency would make a little more sense. So the Cliff's Notes are, is that after about six or eight months of me knocking on the owner's door and him finally kind of saying, all right, you know, shut up and go quote some stuff, they gave me the opportunity to give it a shot. And that was around the time that I was starting to do some 3d modeling in college. So I think we were, at the time, we were using a package. Most people don't even know it's called form C, so it's a really, really old school nerves type of modeler is really bad, but it's what we had at the time, you know. So what I started to do is everything that they did the factory when they would, in fact, interact with customers, quoting them custom pieces of equipment would be through AutoCAD, primarily. So I obviously knew a little bit AutoCAD and touched up my skills. But I started to bring the 3d to work, and I started to present my designs to customers in ve and the conversion rate between quote to sale became very, very high, because there was no one in the industry that was showing a piece of equipment to this level of detail, okay, prior to it existing, you know, it was all interesting. It was all verbiage, quotes, maybe 2d line art drawings that not everybody really understands, you know. So we were able to transcend a communication barrier that really yielded in a high sale result. And it turned what was like a little bit of an every once in a while, they take an order here and there, it turned it into a we should focus on this. And then, amazingly. The company and myself, and from a career and inflection points perspective, the next crisis that happened with 2008 2009 the whole home crisis. And as I mentioned, that specific company very tied into the retail business, Lowe's Home Depot, Walmart. These are all companies that, if they're not doing well, our company is not doing well, and none of those companies were doing well around the homing home and housing crisis time. Now, what was amazing, though, is that, remember, I started working there in 2001 2002 ish right after 911 and I had had about eight years to build up that custom department. That custom department had now taken over from a profitability standpoint. So when the housing crisis hit, and the rest of our business fell out. That custom business had inflated. The margins are higher. We didn't have to push out as much volume, and it helped save the business. A lot of the bladder companies went out of business during that time frame or got really hurt. We were able to sustain it through diversification. And it really turned it turned my light bulb on, is that, like, hey, maybe I'm not, maybe I'm going down a good direction here. You know, there's, there's a lot of merit to it,
Aaron Moncur:that that is fascinating. So you said something that strikes me as very interesting, because I have always assumed the opposite was the case. You mentioned that the off the shelf ladders, the I guess their margin was, you know, whatever it was, but these custom ladders, the margins were much better. Did I get that right? Yeah, okay, yeah. So we make custom equipment, and I can tell you that our margins are not huge, and we just developed a product last year, and the margins on the product are much, much better. So how was it that the custom stuff you were doing, the margins were better than the off the shelf products?
Unknown:You know, I think it really comes down to a scarcity equation effectively, because there's no one out there that could do there's a small collection of manufacturers out there who do what we do make make custom fall protection equipment that takes into account code, human factors, ergonomics, and do it well, package it up in a frame for a customer that any one of your customer bases can understand. It doesn't have to be an aeronautical engineer. If you're working with NASA, can be a safety professional, our specific and I think it was twofold, to be honest with you, I think that it was both the the the way that we were willing to offer some immersive design experience to the customer base up front. And then I also think that the other thing that I forgot to mention is that, as I built out the department, as you can imagine, trying to scale this, you know, you have to be doing bespoke, one off designs for more and more of your clients. You need more you need more designers. I went back to the Art Institute and found more and more of my former colleagues that I either went to school with or whether I knew them or not. I knew that they had the appropriate pedigree, because all of the things that I learned were I found essential to my day to day operations. I need to be able to draw, I need to be able to sketch. I need to be able to communicate my ideas to a customer or a potential customer, and I needed to do it skillfully, not like not in a way that they would be able to understand. These are all things that we learned to do while we were in art school, because we were largely responsible for being our own advocates. In art school, we had you come to art school and design class. Yeah, you're bringing a design. You're you're you can't cram, you can't fake it. It either works or it doesn't work. You know, it either is doing what you're supposed to do. If it was designed where we were given a parameter as a set of students and we had signed around it, you either followed those rules or you didn't, you know, and you had to be able to communicate how you followed those rules. And I found that to be it gave us any a phenomenal skill set for that customer experience very different. And I think that's the that's the way that we're able to ratchet those margins, because that experience becomes much better, too. And the other thing to keep in mind is that the general place where customers were going before they found a specialized company who really did it like we did, was like a fab shop, you know, they would go to, like a guy who had, like a pile of metal in the back. He had welding torches, maybe a, you know, he had a press break, a couple iron workers, and he knew what he was doing. And I have no doubt those guys are amazing. Those guys can build anything. However, they don't have any of any of the certification behind it a lot of times, or any of the engineering behind it. So we brought that to this to the table as well. So a lot of times, customers were striking out. Going to a ladder manufacturer, wouldn't do a custom piece of equipment. Then they went to a local fab shop, and he couldn't do it because he didn't have all the appropriate engineering certifications so forth. And by the time they come to us, we can embrace them, bring them in, give them an immersive design experience, give them the certifications that they need, give them the accreditations that they need to, give them the confidence that they know that they're in the right spot. And I think all of that lends itself to that recipe where you could actually, you know, squeeze a little bit more out of the deal, but everybody's no one's getting hosed here. I mean, the bottom line is that, yeah, they haven't found any place you can do what we do. And the reason why we do what we do is because we've dedicated ourselves to it for the last, you know, better part of two decades, and now we know how to do something uniquely, uniquely positive. For a customer, our customer base, it's a very niche thing. That's the important part. I mean, it's not for everybody. There's, I know a customer who's calling me, who they just want a ladder that's a little bit taller than a ladder they can get out of a catalog for 700 bucks or something like that. I'm not your guy, but if you're Blue Origin, and you're looking for a piece of equipment that can service a space vehicle in between turns, and you need to do it in, you know, X amount of hours, and this amount of time with grounding lugs and all, you know, all the other accouterments that you can think of, power, near plump, the system, led, lighting, these type of things. Now you've come to the right spot, you know, and granted, what I described were of widely contrasted products. Will we're happy to take everything in between what I just described as well, and we can support those. But there's a there's a sweet spot for our customer base, and there's a time where we tell our customer, hey, listen, I think what you're actually looking for is something that you can get. We can get them into something that's that makes more sense for them when we're not the right source for them. Yeah. Terrific.
Aaron Moncur:Okay, well, tell us a little bit about safety. Fab. At some point you you left that company, and I think there may have been some other companies in between, but eventually started safety fab.
Unknown:Yeah, there was so yeah, the long, long, short of it is that I had kind of hit my runway where I was at the former company. I left to go explore a different space. I actually got involved in a small startup company. There were some medical design, medical device involved, some medical device design involved. And I was the designer who was hired to micronize some equipment that had already been benchmark created, make it so that it was able to be commercially developed and then sold off as technology. That's the Cliff Notes on and that's effectively what happened. That was about a year runway or pass. Learned a lot during that process as well. And then when the the technology effectively sold, and I was looking for what was my next step going to be, and I decided that I wanted to get back into the industry. And I actually went into business with what a former employee of where I worked before we had a great run for about three or four years, and then just things didn't work out. Personalities, you know, business, everybody's got different ideas about where things are going. And I had a different trajectory about where the business was going than maybe he did. And, you know, long and short of it is, we separated. Wasn't as wasn't as pleasant as you would have liked it to be. But things happen. And long and short is, is that that was the beginning of safety fab, basically. So safety fat was my own personal venture in this fall protection space, leveraging all of my experience over the years and bringing it probably to the best form of it that it is existed in this state today.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific. Okay, what are one or two products at safety fab that your team has developed that you are most proud of? You? Have you ever wasted weeks fixing a design issue that could have been caught early or struggled to find real, practical answers to manufacturing or tolerant stack up problems? PDX 2025 is not your typical trade show. It's a hands on engineering training event built for problem solving. Learn advanced CAD surface modeling, Gd and T, DFM, adhesives and bonding techniques, metrology and much, much more directly from subject matter experts in the industry. Bring your toughest engineering challenges, get live expert advice and see real world solutions in action. PDX 2025 is happening october 21 and 22nd in Phoenix, Arizona, walk away with new skills that make you more valuable help you grow your career faster and even increase your earning potential. Spots are limited. Sign up now at the wave.
Unknown:Boy, we've, we've got a that's a great question, and it's a harder one to answer than you would think. We build about 250 to 300 pieces of equipment a year, okay? And they range in size, scope, complexity. The customer base is all over the place too. I mean, I talk a lot about aerospace, those are our Meet marquee projects, and that's really where we we get a chance to use everything that we know in our repertoire. But we do things for like food service environments where they need to have, you know, clean room environments where you have to design equipment in a certain way, where it can't proliferate bacteria and things of that nature. So there's, there's just a litany of things that I could say I'm proud of that we worked on, because there, every time the customer calls, it truly is a unique problem for us. And then we just use all of these different solutions that we've used over the years with other places to massage them and bring them up and distill them out to see if they can be used and unearthed for, you know, today's problem. Couple projects that I think I that I am really proud of, that I can, you know, give you a little bit of background on is amazingly when early on in my career, I had designed some preliminary. Area. Prototype stands for what's called the CH 53k heavy lift aircraft. It's Sikorsky now owned by Lockheed airframe, but, um, it's a heavy lift program. And back 20 years ago, I was designing the prototype, stands for them to make the first aircraft, basically. And that's when they were tweaking the avionics on that first one. And then all of a sudden, there was two or three airframes, and they needed to get one more set of stands. And we're talking about stands that are like, Oh, 20 foot to the platform. They're approximately, like, 40 foot long. And they go on either side of a heavy lift rotor aircraft. And they have all sorts of different features and cutouts on the sides of the work surface of the platform so they can fit close to the aircraft. There's bumpering and tool trays and laptop stands. And, I mean, it's a real piece of equipment. It's like a working environment, more than just a platform. And as those aircraft started to roll out during the prototyping phase, they built about 18 of them before they went into production, and we had about 12 sets of stands that we built for those prototypes really servicing that program. And the where the pride comes in is now that piece of equipment is in production, and they're building, they have the the government has orders for 1000s of these aircrafts, you know, so they're making them. And I don't believe that they'll every one of those sets of aircraft will get a set of stands that we build, but I can tell you that most of them will, and I don't know that we'll be able to build them all, to be completely honest, because there's more aircraft than I think that we have a factory space to build, but I feel very, very happy to be part of that program every time I see one of those aircrafts flying around. A little party. Feels like I kind of helped, you know, keep that thing up there, because all those aviation maintenance techs who are up on our stands keeping that aircraft checked out, and, you know, all up to snuff, they're using our pieces of equipment. So it's cool. That's it gives you a little bit of pride, I guess, what
Aaron Moncur:a great feeling. There really is something unique about seeing your design, or something that was, you know, associated with your design out in the wild, right? Yeah. I mean, what a cool feeling. I remember when our second child was born. In fact, maybe it was both our first and second child. Anyway, we were at the hospital, and the nurses walked in and they had this, this badge on, and it's called the Vocera badge. I don't know why they call it a badge. It's like an electronic it's kind of like a little telephone strapped to your neck that that is always on speakerphone, and, you know, push a button and you page, dr, so and so, or nurse, so and so, or whatever. It's a communication device for medical professionals at hospitals. And the nurses were all wearing these, these Vocera badges. And I was like, I designed, like I can point right now to the parts on that device that I designed, and it's this part here, and that part there in the back. And it was so neat, right, seeing that out in the wild, people actually using it. So, yeah,
Unknown:that's cool. I mean, we, for instance, we did, we did a bunch of work for Southwest Airlines many years ago, and we allow into stands. We built a their, they called it their Provo stand, which, then it was a, you know, abbreviation for provision stand. So basically, their fleet was a 737, basically, and they would bring those in and their their their claim to fame was turning and burning, getting those aircrafts in and out as fast as possible. So this provision stand was a specific stand designed to go up against the rear of the aircraft, where they bring in all the ice, the pop, the soda, the water, all that stuff. And then they also deplane all that the old garbage off the old aircraft, so that the Provo stand actually had, like, a laundry chute designed into it so they could just throw all the garbage down. And then, like, then had an elevator to bring all the other stuff up in it. And like, we were, like, responsible for helping Southwest Airlines keep their like rates lower effectively, because, like, we had designed equipment that allowed them to turn their aircraft seven and a half minutes faster, you know, or something like that, which that's big dollars in that industry. You don't realize that's an industry of dollars and cents, but it's also an industry of seconds, a lot of ways. So, yeah, fun little things. And then, you know, when you're at the airport and you see these stands out there on the right, being my factory, I remember designing that wheel and that tow bar.
Aaron Moncur:How cool. How cool. Well, let me take a very short break here and share with the listeners 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, 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 at the wave. Dot engineer, we are privileged to be speaking with Jeffrey Hubert today. So Jeffrey, you started a couple of businesses. Now tell me what are one or two things that you know now that you wish you had known before you started your first business. Yes, I would
Unknown:probably want to be warned how much of an animal you're turning on when you turn the lights on, you know, because I think when you as me, personally, I always wanted to be in business for myself. I never really knew how I was going to find a pathway there. And it found me in a lot of ways similar. And as I mentioned to you, when I when I took that year off out of the industry, and I was working in the medical design space, I ended up getting thrust into a position of more of a management position and more of a business ownership position, because of some very quick, I won't get into the details, but there were some very quick administrative changes in the at the company that forced me to take much more of a role than just the designer aspect, which was a great thing. It forced me to do a lot of things that I was afraid of, like setting up payroll and, you know, doing things that, like, are just very, you know, innocuous, but they're, they're, they're intimidating sometimes. And, you know, I'm a little bit of like, I have a little bit of a left and right brain thing going on between being an artist and also, kind of being like a quasi engineer, you know. So, oddly enough, the whole payroll and, like, you know, paperwork side of business aspect things is, was not something that was always I felt I was very intimidated by that, for lack of better terms, but baptism by fire, I was thrust into it. But what I wasn't prepared for, though, is just how much, like, once you dabble in the the idea of owning your own business, I was fascinated by, like, how much it takes control over you. After you, after you turn it on, you're along for the ride more than you are necessarily in control whether you are the head of the business or not. Because as far as I'm concerned, every one of my every one of my clients, is my boss. You know, I so I have, I've got plenty of bosses. I've got more bosses than most people do, and I'm self employed in a lot of ways. But look at it, I don't look at it that way, because I I look at my clients as as my superiors. I look at them as, you know, the paramount of making them happy and and that in and of itself, that can be a lot of pressure at times, you know. So the scalability of your business as it grows is being being prepared for that. Scaling is a tricky thing to prepare for, for lack of better terms, I was, I was unprepared for the scaling of the business as things took off. Just the amount of time and the amount of effort you got to put in, not in a bad way, never got away from us or anything like that. I just mean, you're you can easily underestimate what goes into making a successful business maintain its success, because a lot of times special sauce that got you to the dance in the beginning slowly gets distilled out as you grow. It's important that you never forget what got you to the game, and that's the relationships with the customers. It's your ability to not just be a yes man. You have to be a yes, because, man, you know, you got to show them why, even if you sometimes, you have to deviate, you know, from your customers wants and your needs. And that's not always easy, but you have to have a good way of communicating that, and just all of those things I was, I think I was unprepared for, or I would have loved to have been more prepared for the the tiger by the tail nature of running your own business the way that can be. I mean, it sounds like you could probably share a similar story with me. It seems,
Aaron Moncur:well, the buck stops with you, right? As the business owner. I mean, if, if something, there's a problem and it needs to be solved. I mean, we have a wonderful team here, but, but the fact is, as an employee, you can leave, right? You can just go somewhere else if you don't like what's happening at a company, but if you're the owner, it's much, much harder to do that right? And some people might say, Well, I mean, if it's a really big problem and you're really unhappy, just shut the business down. Easier said than done, right? Shutting a business. I've never shut a business down, but I've thought about right? I've done just, uh, what's the word? I'm looking for, thought experiments, I guess. What would that look like? And there's a lot that goes into it, right? That it's not as simple as just flicking a switch or something. Anyway, the buck stops with you. And there's just a lot of responsibility and pressure there is to handle. There
Unknown:is for sure, and, you know, and to speak to that, I did, in fact, sell my business safety fab. I did sell my business in 2022, to one of my larger customers, and it's a customer that I had been working with my entire career. I had been, basically, he'd been buying equipment for me for my entire career, and had been supportive of everything I'd ever done. You know, he's supportive when I started in the customs business and helped get the customs business off the ground at that former employer many years ago. And then, you know, continue to express and sell our equipment. You know, he was basically reselling our equipment. Did such a good job. And then whenever I went off on my own with my other former business partner and let him know that we were turning our lights on, he immediately supported us. And so I knew in the same thing, like, whenever I left that partnership and started safety Fauci, not only did he show interest, but he showed immediate interest in acquisition too, and I wasn't the timing wasn't right, so I ran the business for about five years independently, and then I actually as part of a equity and sale, I took a small ownership stake in industrial products, who's now the parent owner. Of safety fab, who I now run as a division of industrial products. So that helped, that helped me. I was at the point where the scalability, I knew that I needed some additional help from the resources a larger company. And my colleague, his name is Phil summer narrow, phenomenal guy. I also have more of a silent partner named Sam Saxton, who's involved in the business as well. Both phenomenal business acumen. I feel very blessed to be surrounded by these guys. Sam's a little younger than me. Feels a little bit older than me, so the seasoning and the blend that we have, there's a lot of energy between the two or the three owners, rather, and it's just, it's been a really good
Aaron Moncur:but you mentioned this, this big customer that you had kind of throughout your entire career. I think it's super important for especially small businesses, to have that whale of a customer. Of course, it can be dangerous as well, right? Because if they ever turn things off, then you're really in big trouble. But having a big customer like that that just sends repeat orders, you know, over and over and over is so beneficial to growing a business. It makes it so much easier than, you know, getting 10% here and 5% there. And you know, it
Unknown:really is, and it's not just about the revenue either. It's also the ability to point to that customer and to leverage that relationship and use them for referrals to, you know, and to use some of the equipment, you know, anything that we build and design and sell, we try to document as much as possible, because we want to, like, leverage it to be able to sell to other customers, you know, by by putting it up on the website or sharing it with other customers during meetings, to show them our capabilities. Unfortunately, because a lot of the work that we do do is in, is in the dark aerospace, you know, black projects and things. A lot of times, we never get a chance to see where this stuff goes. And that's a that's a tragedy, but it's also fun. We know that it's working around some really cool stuff, and that's cool. We don't get it. We don't get to leverage that for our business operations as much as we'd like to. And until, like, literally, like, for instance, I wouldn't have been able to even talk to you about that ch 53 program that I mentioned to you earlier, a decade ago, when I was working on the prototype stands. There's NDAs in place, that sense, sense is all gone away, but that's the type of thing where it can take years to before you can even talk about some of the pieces of equipment that you build or some of the customers you work with. So when you have a marquee client that you can really leverage, it's really important, not just for the financial stability, but also for operational stuff.
Aaron Moncur:One thing that we are learning right now, we're very new to the product space. We have this we have a few products, but one in particular that we're really pushing and trying to get some traction with, and we have had some traction with it. This is something that surprised me. The easy part was developing the product. The hard part has been selling that product. What? What has been your experience in that space? What? What have you found to be effective tools for for selling a product? And have you found the same to be true, or, once you had your, you know, first few SKUs designed was it pretty easy to start selling them
Unknown:so that that's that's an interesting it's an interesting question, and it's an interesting answer, because we really don't have SKUs, you know, we have quote numbers. Basically. Everything we do is start from the scratch, only recently, and we can get into this, if you'd like, but only recently do we start using some configuration based modeling, where we're not starting from a clean sheet as much, because there's some type form products that we make a lot of. One of the things that we make, things that we make a lot of, because there's not a lot of customers who are rather companies who do is what's called a cantilever ladder. And a cantilever ladder is simply, it's a rolling staircase. So you think of a ladder as a 90 degree back, and that's a staircase that comes down, and that staircase rolls around on wheels. There's usually wheels down here. Well, a cantilever ladder has a platform that hangs out the back so you can get over top of an obstruction. Okay, sometimes they're supported, where there's legs that go underneath and support the load, and then sometimes there's just a big counterweight back here. But there's a lot of engineering involved. I mean, there's not a lot of engineering, but there's companies are like, we're not doing that. That's tricky. There's tipping moments, blah, blah, blah, like a local fab shop would over engineer something like that. We can design it appropriately, but we do a ton of those, and we've designed a configurator for our configuration, or configurable cantilever ladders now, where I'm not designing it from a clean sheet anymore, I'm plugging in some, some, some, you know, values, into a module, basically. And we're doing that for a number of our type, form products, fixed ladders that go outside of buildings. There's 90 degree ladders. That's a real basic dimension. How tall is your building? And then code figures everything else out, 12 inch centers for rungs, 18 inch wide rungs. Blah, blah, blah, so. But as far as like selling for us, our selling tool has been expediency. How quick can we gather the customer inquires with us? How quickly can we push back a drawing and a quote front of their face? Because most of the time, by the time they found us, somebody who could make something that was a little bit one off, they've already beaten the streets for a couple weeks, and they're out of time, you know. So usually, expediency is our biggest quotient to be able to help conversion. I. Yeah, you know, because we don't sell SKUs, we are, we're selling more of an experience. So like our website, we've had to break our website into kind of like product families of like, cantilever ladders, fixed ladders, dock stairs, you know, mobile platforms. We have a whole space on our website dedicated to aviation maintenance and that, we segregate that into two groups, rotorcraft. So that's anything like helicopters, for instance, and then just fixed wing aircraft, because those are two wildly different experiences when you're designing equipment, largely because of the rotors. The rotors want to interact with a lot of like the handrails and guardrails. So you have to make handrails and guardrails that are dynamic and or talk about moving the blade from the aircraft and so forth. So you can probably just hear the nuance and like some of the way that we're discussing this, the sales tool is getting our customer when they reach our website, the comfort level and that we know what we're doing and that they came to the right spot. And we found that we do that through a variation of, you know, both the appropriate that language and verbiage lets them know that we're using the right keywords and we understand these spaces, and then we do it through leveraging as much of the design work that we've done in the past visually on the website, so they can see just the litany of what we can do. Because I could tell you until I'm blue in the face, all the different things we can design, and you'll be a skeleton and bored when I'm done, but you don't love to roll through a whole gallery of these things and you can see them. Some of them are there in their application. Unfortunately, most of what is on our website is, in fact, renderings, because of the nature of the proprietary nature of where a lot of these things go, but there's a consistency to it, and there's a real good feeling of like these guys know what they're doing. And you can the the imagery that we do have that are photographs of our true equipment. You can see that it's an 88 relationship. I mean, there's no there's no difference that we don't leave anything to the imagination, from the presentation to what we show you to what you get on your stock when it gets, you know, arrived. So that's pretty powerful, compelling story, but it's been, it's taken years to aggregate all of that data and all of that information and all those customer experiences, we have some case studies and things like that on the website that are very helpful in helping to tell a story from start to finish about how we work with our customer base. So I mean, we're a relatively small crew. There's only three guys who are dedicated to our division, and then we have our fabrication shops that are actually out there building it, all the equipment that we sell and so forth. But with that small team of multidisciplinary guys, you know, we've been able to put a bow on the the experience that we provide to our customers, and we kind of put it in the form of the website effectively, and that's really been our calling card. What
Aaron Moncur:advice would you give to young engineers who want to develop a career in designing and developing hard goods products? Yeah, I
Unknown:would get involved in trying to gain some sort of employment in a physical, tangible manufacturing space as soon as you possibly can. I learned so much in what is really a dirty industry. It was just a weld shop. That factory that I worked at, that ladder factory those weld shop. I mean, they had a couple robotic welding cells that barely worked when they did, you know, but by and large it was, you know, clenching, bending, bringing in raw material. And one built one store, you know, one door of the building and staking it through the building and work in progress, and learning about walking times, learning about manufacturing. I mean, I know that a lot of that manufacturing type is going to go away with automation and so forth, but there's still a lot of it out there, and I feel like you can really learn a lot about how design products if you understand better about how they're built. Because there's a big I've noticed there's always a big deficit, specifically when I was going to school, between kids who would design things, and kids who could design things that were actually buildable and could actually be made in a kind of cost effective manner and things, and I noticed that chasm got greatly shortened by any one of those, basically people who worked in manufacturing, as long as they got a job where they were touching feeling something get built, They that would close the loop, and that kid and that student would become lethal engineering space. But boy, without it, you are really floundering. I can tell you that I went to school half and half. I went to school not working at all in a manufacturing space and then working in the manufacturing space simultaneously. That's a phenomenal combination.
Aaron Moncur:Yeah, yeah. I without naming any names. Of course, I remember a young engineer I worked with who did not have any background, like hands on, working in a manufacturing space, you know, building, I don't know, fixing cars, fixing bikes, things like that. That just wasn't his, his background, which is fine, right? We all come from different backgrounds. There was a task I gave to this individual and said, Hey, I need you to disassemble this, this product, so we can do whatever it was we were doing on the project. And instead of, you know, finding some precision tools and carefully taking this thing apart. This. I remember hearing in the shop, bang, bang, bang. And I'm like, What is going on out there? And I walk out and this individual literally has a hammer, and it's just Whack, whack, pounding this thing, you know? And I'm like, oh, man, I did not even like, realize that I would need to explain we don't use hammers to take things apart,
Unknown:yeah, for real.
Aaron Moncur:But, yeah, that hands on experience is so invaluable. All right, with just a few minutes left here, if you're okay with this, let's see, if I'm not mistaken, you have a hobby and bodybuilding, is that, right? Yeah,
Unknown:I've been a little bit on the sidelines because I had a neck injury that happened last year. Okay, Danny has put, yeah, it's put me in a little bit of a pickle there, but, but, yeah, that was something that was always in the background. That was something that I was always involved in. I had played sports when I was in high school and so forth, but when I knew I was going to art school, I bet you're not surprised to hear that the art school didn't have any school sports, so I needed to figure out something to keep me busy physically, because that's always been a big aspect of my life. So I had always reacted well to weights. I was kind of, like a late bloomer. So when I was playing hockey, I had to, like, build myself up with weights, because I started, well, as you started to get into contact. I took hockey to a pretty, pretty deep level. I was playing up into like, you know, bantams, did you Junior, stuff like that. So there's pretty physical presence in that sport at that time. Yeah. So I got into bodybuilding after I quit playing hockey, because I was like, Alright, I'm always lifting anyway, and I react well. So I always like to take everything to the fur the six step. So basically that was bodybuilding. So I did that for, like, for like 10 years. I did like 15 shows. And I just wanted, I just wanted to win my week. Yeah, it was, it was a, it was a big Odyssey. It was fun between the ages of, like, 17 and 27 basically, okay, I did, did bunch shows. I just always wanted to win my weight class in an amateur contest. I finally did that, and then I glad, gladly retired, but I still, to this day, I still train with weights, you know, regularly and so forth. It's just a bit, it's kind of like how it's like how I start my day, and it provides the scaffold for just the rest of my life, effectively, just gets my body working right, because my mind opportunity in the morning just to get the day set ahead, just almost a meditative thing. To be honest.
Aaron Moncur:I was just going to ask, do you find it to be therapeutic? And sounds like, yes, absolutely,
Unknown:yeah. I find that. I find that I'm a pretty energetic person. I need to get extra energy out of me, so me starting empty in the tank first thing in the morning allows me to be a lot lower baselines for the remainder of my day. And I find that putting myself through willful you know, trouble is sometimes sometimes better. Because if you if you put yourself through willful hardships, sometimes the things that come down, down the pathway are not quite as hard. You know, it's true. It's true. I've willfully put myself through hard things.
Aaron Moncur:That's right. You know, there's a part of the brain that grows when you do hard things that you don't want to do, but you force yourself to do them anyway, and non preferred behavior, I believe they call that. Yes, there you go. That's it. Yeah, right. Okay, all right. Well, Jeffrey, what a pleasure it was speaking with you. Thank you for taking us through your journey and sharing some wisdom and insights with the listeners here at the being an engineer podcast. How can people get in touch with you? Yeah, LinkedIn is the best way to get
Unknown:ahold of me. And obviously our website is www, dot safety, fab.com, it's just the way it sounds, S, A, F, E, and then the letter, I'm sorry. I mean, I'm gonna start over again. Www. Dot S, A, F, E, hyphen, the letter T, as in Tom, hyphen, and then F, A, b.com, so safety, fab.com, and then our parent website is industrial products.com that's the the parent company who owns us, and we're a large distributor of all sorts of construction, goods, manufacturing, goods, production equipment, things of that nature.
Aaron Moncur:Terrific. And we'll have those links in the show notes as well. Jeffrey, is there anything else that we haven't talked about that you'd like to bring up before we end?
Unknown:I just really appreciate the opportunity to speak with you and just kind of share it, whatever the story is that I have on my side. It was so it was real pleasure.
Aaron Moncur:Awesome. Thank you so much.
Geoffrey Huber:Yeah, take care.
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 and 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.
