Welcome to the top floor, the podcast where Charlotte Air CEOs get to tell their leadership journey. My name is Jeff Cass. I'm an executive coach and the leader of a peer advisory group for CEOs and business leaders here in Charlotte. And I'll be your host today. Happy to have a second generation entrepreneur who also happens to lead four different businesses with us today. Stefan, your arms is with us. Stefan, welcome to the show. Jeff, thanks for having me on the show. It was good to get to know you a little bit here before the podcast started, and super excited to help your audience get to know the community a little bit here. We're new to Charlotte. So super excited to make an impact. Yeah, great. Great. So the main company you're leading is Elnik systems, right? So you and I talked a little bit. You took over for your dad with this business and you also moved it from New Jersey to North Carolina here recently. So maybe just tell us a little bit of background. A lot of stuff in that story. So we'll try to consolidate it down as best we can. So El where basically we sell equipment to companies who make metal parts. So anybody who wears a pair of Raybans or Oakley's or has had dental brackets on their teeth or shoots guns or flies planes or has their knees and their hips replaced or has people in their lives that have fashion products like Louis Vuitton bags or special watches or anything like that. Anything that's a metal part that hasn't been machined but rather molded or 3D printed nowadays, that's what this furnace technology is used for. So super niche but a huge impact across the whole world. It's really fun to be able to step back sometimes and take a look at that impact we have in the world working with some of the largest organizations across the globe. And we've never been more than 45 people as an organization. Originally started this company. My dad started it 55 years ago up in New Jersey, moved himself through this entrepreneurial journey. And what started out is like a little electrical company who made electrical devices now makes these industrial furnaces that are positioned all over the globe helping people really transform people's lives, which is really cool. I've been in another business since I was a kid at 14, funny story. Actually, my dad told myself and his other three daughters, he said, "I will put the other half on the table of whatever you put on the table for your first car. All girls didn't put any money on the table. They might have put $1,000 or something like that if they had that saved up." And then me, the youngest came around and he's like, "Maybe I'll get through this without having to spend any money." And I worked my ass off and put $8,000 on the table for half of a Mustang, which was my first car. So I worked really hard through the business and learned every little thing that I could. And all the guys at the company really took me under the wing, which I'm grateful for. And I'm sure we'll get into a little bit later when it comes to leadership. So yeah, I worked myself through the business, worked in finance for a little bit and then came back to the company here when I was 27 years old. And it's been a journey and it's been a lot of fun. And the move down to Charlotte, which will unpack a little bit later, had a lot to do with just growth and giving people on the team also and the company a better future by helping to lower costs and getting to a more manufacturing friendly estate. I see, I see. Okay. Yeah, I think a lot of people are moving from kind of the Northeast down here. It's a lot personally, it's less expensive from a business point of view. It's less expensive. But let's talk about your dad first. So he, he came here from Germany, you told me, right? And was this something that, you know, was an idea that he had or how did how did that idea kind of start with? Yeah, great question. And me and him talk about this all the time. And he loves talking about it because he actually moved over here in 1962, which everybody that ever lived in the 60s and was like in their teens or 20s, they love talking about it, right? It was the greatest time in American history. Everything was cool. Everything was easy. You didn't have to worry about locking your doors, you know, as an easy lifestyle over here. So he was 21 when he moved over here, ended up going to the University of Minnesota for school. And at that time, the reason for the move over here was that was the time of the Cold War in Europe. And a lot of families that either ran businesses or had a little bit of money saved up were investing outside the country. So they founded a organization in Minnesota involved in the technical world and so forth that they invested a little bit of money in. So they sent my dad being the youngest over the United States to not just study here, but also look after the family investment, so to speak, right? So he got involved with that company when he was in school and really helped to kind of work through that business and help them grow in what they're doing. And then in 1969 is when he actually started Elnik as an offshoot of what his parents' business was. And it all really started from him being an employee at a company and doing a really good job helping to promote the business, bring money in, help the revenue the company grow. And he wasn't being recognized for that, you know, flat fix pay per month, no recognition for all the money that he helped this company grow. And he said, I got to take my life in my own hands. I got to go be the entrepreneur that I know that I can be. But he just didn't have, you know, all the strength and let's say, I don't want to say strength, that's not right. He didn't know exactly where he wanted to take it or how to make it all work, but he knew that he believed in himself. And that's the truth of a good entrepreneur. And the truth of a good leader is they might not have all the answers, but they're still ready to jump in the pool, right? They're still ready to go jump in. And they have confidence in themselves to figure it out along the way. Yeah. Yeah. And that's kind of the way he was. Okay. All right. Yeah. So for you, you said you went off and did a few other things, came back, I think at a 27. So why come back? Why, you know, what brought you back? It's kind of a couple things. So I had a lot of friends growing up that when I left the family business and went into the finance industry as a financial planner, which I thought was my future. I really liked the way that that business model worked. They all kind of looked at me and they're like, what are you doing, man? You got a family operation? Why aren't you working there? Like everybody goes back to the family business. So while that might have been like a 5% of the pressure kind of scenario, it was more along the lines of when I was working through finance, while I love working with individual people, one of the past I wanted to take was within their leadership and management role. And as I was looking to get into that, they completely changed the way people get compensated. They completely changed the way you lead your teams. And it just for a short stint during the time that I would have been going into it, I really, really didn't like the way that that structure was working. So I said, let me go back into the business that I'm, you know, trying to grow for myself here within just the personal planning. And I started to lose interest in the the an analytical finance side of things while I love money and I love numbers and I love all those kinds of things. I like to make things more. So I started to have this draw to want to go back and make things and do that kind of stuff. So I left the business in '07, sat with my dad and I was like, hey, is there an opportunity to come back? What do you think? So we created a role for myself within the organization, which was basically like a customer liaison. There was nobody like the customer service rep role. There were service technicians and stuff, but that speaking voice between two both between both parties was a role that was created. And then similarly, my dad kind of jumped into this business, I jumped into all these different roles within the company before I really knew what to do. Like I took over our shipping department because we were having all these issues and I fixed the systems, I built better systems and I built better, you know, paperwork trails and the way that's supposed to work. And we had a field service manager who left and went to California with his wife and took a job out there. We kept him on board as a technician because it was really good. And it was our senior technician, but we didn't have a person ready to take on the management of the team and the people that were in the department, while super good technically weren't the greatest people leaders. So I would just put my hand up. I was like, I can do this, right? I know people. I wanted to get involved in management. I don't know how to troubleshoot the equipment. I'll learn that along the way, if I need to help, but I know people and every single time I move myself through this organization, even into the seat that I'm in right now running the organization was, yes, I'll do this, but I know that I don't know everything yet. But I will figure this out along the way because I believe in me. And I saw my dad do a lot of this as I was growing up. So it was kind of inspiration that you can do it even if you don't know all the answer yet. Okay. Okay, that's cool. Is your dad still involved in the business today? I mean, he contributes a little bit here and there, but for the most part, I'd say he's retired. I still working to try to help him find a couple of hobbies, but he's, I think for 50 years of him just poured everything he has into this, you know, a couple of years of rest is good. I'm okay with it. Yeah, no doubt about it. Yeah, he deserves it. So is the family still in New Jersey and you came down here or did they come down here with you? Yeah, they're, they still live up there. My, I have a sister that lives up in New Jersey too. She's a, she's been in the animal industry for a long time. She started with a walking service, then she got involved in a grooming industry, then she got involved in training. And now she basically with a, with a girl that was also a trainer in New Jersey, they combined efforts and they're like completely dominating the Northeast area from dog training and they're training people on their training methods and all that stuff. And they've done a really great job. So another just, it actually makes me a little emotional. Think about it, but just an incredible, you know, symbol of entrepreneurship and running after something they have a lot of passion around. So she's up there. Um, you know, she has probably like three or four different four-legged children running around, which my parents love too. So they're, they're all living up in New Jersey. I'm down here. I think eventually what'll happen and, you know, as long as my parents want to, they'll probably get an apartment down here and, you know, do the back and forth because my sister's probably locked into what she's doing up there. Although she should come down here because, man, there's a lot of dogs out of Charlotte. Oh, man. So dog-friendly town, no doubt about it. Yeah. So, uh, talk a little bit about, uh, I want to talk about the four businesses, but first I want to talk a little bit about this move. Talk about why, right? And, uh, and then how it went because movement of business is not necessarily an easy task. Yeah. That's, that's a great question. So the biggest reason for the why was, uh, in 2018 and 2019, um, there was an industry that started to pick up a little bit and that's called metal 3D printing and metal 3D printing, just like metal injection molding uses metal powder and it's held together with some kind of binding agent, whether it's plastic or some other kind of polymer that they print down onto the powder to form this piece. So in the injection mold inside of the world, we've just made an incredible name for ourselves. We are the best at what we do for the type of equipment that, that's there and we are the benchmark for really what the industry wants. So as this new industry came in with similar needs from a equipment technology perspective, we just did a really good job of getting ourselves in front of every, every one of the right people and we really started to grow. So we went from like 9 million to 19 million in three years and completely outgrew our space within the place that we had in New Jersey. We were in a 20,000 square foot building, 15 foot ceilings and all we wanted was 25 foot ceilings and, you know, at least double the space. So we were looking within New Jersey and we either were going to get a second building, which means now I have to pay people to transport stuff between buildings. So that's to me a waste of money, right? Yep. While I love employing people, I'd rather employ them to learn to do cool shit versus just drive a car back and forth. So we said, okay, either second building or we're going to have to get a bigger building. And if we go with a bigger building, it's minimum 30 minutes away from where we are currently in New Jersey and it's south of where we are. That was the best location. So that means people are going to have to think about because most of the people live northeast and northwest of where the operation of the business was to go even further south, they would have to think about moving. So I said, okay, well, if that's the case, let me think about a third option to bring to the table. And I said, well, what about PA or New York, right? It's closed. People don't have to move that far and it's lower cost of living. So my, my drive went from the business needs a bigger location and we need to be able to grow into that location. And that's always the objective to moving directly to thinking about my team. And all I thought about was, okay, well, what would be a better move for them? What about New Hampshire? What about me? What about Virginia? What about Carolinas? What about Florida? So I cruised up and down the entire coast and I looked at all these different locations and tried to figure out a place that makes the business obviously have a good future potential. But what's the right thing for the people on the team? Because I'm a big believer and you're nothing without the people that are inside your building. I mean, yeah, as an individual, if you have a single person business, it's still within you. But if you want to grow a company with people, they're everything. If they're not respected, taken care of, led, trained, educated, how are we helping anything really go forward as an organization? And who are we in the fiber of who we are as a company? So I poured everything I could into the people side. And I use Charlotte as a location to kind of use as a hub and then go to a few times. And every time I came back here, I was like, man, you know, it's not as hilly as New Jersey, but it's just as green. You know, it's lower cost of living. There's a great amount of people moving here, meaning it gives you this diversity of cultures and people and food and everything like that. I just felt so comfortable here. And one of the things about New Jersey that many people kind of have the wrong vision on is everybody thinks New Jersey is like Newark, the beach or trend. Yet most of New Jersey is green and it's the garden state is what it's called. And when you drive around here, you don't know when you're going from one town to the next town. And that's the same feeling we had in New Jersey. So it just had the same feel. So I pitched it all to the team. I said, we can do two building strategy, we can get a bigger building or we can move. I have ideas what I'd like to do, but what do you guys want to do? And I literally put it in the hands of the whole team that if we have enough people that want to do this, we're going to move forward with relocating the organization. And we got 21 out of 40 people to move over 600 miles with us. And we kept another quarter, the team on board remotely working in New Jersey. Oh, wow. So that's so really you only have to hire a quarter of the workforce back once we got down here. Is that sound? Is that right? Yeah. Okay. That's significant. I mean, that's 21 people, half of your people moving down here, following the company. I mean, sometimes it's hard to get people to move across the city, let alone into another state. Yeah. And like I said, for me, it was everything. What is the right decision for the people? So as I was coming down here and driving around, looking at not just buildings for the company, but most people when they go to a new location, they look for homes, you would think I would go drive around and be like, I want to live in this house. I want to live in this house. I still haven't found my house or even the area I want to live in. I drove around me like, well, I could see Danny living over here. I could see Kyle living in this location. I could see Claudia living in this area because I think it meets what she wants to have. So every part of my intention was for the people on my team. And I think they really know when they feel that. And it comes out when I speak, and it comes out when we come into this building and you get a feel for what we're doing around here, we have a real family environment. You know, I don't care how big we get. I'm going to know everybody's name. I'm going to know everybody's family name. I'm going to know their dog's name. I'm going to know when their kids, you know, just hit a home run this weekend at a baseball game. Because I care about them so much because they're everything for me. Yeah, that's cool. That's cool. Okay. So the move you would say is successful or is it too early to say? I would say it's definitely successful. It took 10 trucks to move down here. I initially thought it was going to be three or four. Okay. A lot of lessons learned along the process. Initially, when we went to a logistics company to help us move down, they quoted us like a quarter million dollars to move everything. Like, it just seems really expensive. Like I'm going to do all the boxing and packaging and you're just going to put it on a truck and move it. Like that's, let's figure this out. So we ended up not working with a logistics company. We just hired our own trucks through relationships because we move equipment all the time. We got a good, you know, flat rate for a flat truck to go down here every time. So we did that 10 times. Half the team kind of moved down the rest of the half state of New Jersey, and we kind of moved them down over time because we still finished equipment in New Jersey and started equipment down here. So running two operations for a little while was what we were doing. And it was, it was interesting and stressful. And, you know, all the things you could possibly imagine for. So now that we're down here, it's been officially a full year. We don't have any operations going on in New Jersey anymore. So I would say it's widely successful in terms of being down here. We've hired some people back to the team. There's some areas that we're still struggling to find the right people, but we're very picky about who we want to bring into our fold because we're believers and cultures, everything, right? If you don't have a good culture within your organization, one person can ruin that and a heartbeat. So when we interview people, I have one question I love to ask. And I know if I'm involved in the interview, but I've coached my team to figure this out too, there's one question we ask in the opening of every interview that we know whether this person is going to be on the team or not. So Jeff, you've probably heard this before. Most people's favorite question to open an interview is tell me about yourself. Sure. Yeah. Right. So what you're looking for really is for that person just to kind of loosen up a little bit, right? That's the objective. And they can tell you a story and you learn a couple of things about that. What I like to do is to flip that a little bit and say, tell me something amazing about yourself. The reason I add that amazing about yourself is what I'm looking for is how does the person see themselves? Because if you know how somebody sees themselves, you know whether they hold confidence or they lack confidence. Whether they're more family oriented, whether they're more work oriented, or maybe they like sports or something, you can learn so much within five minutes of that question being answered, body language, how they could they be a person that could be in front of another customer or on a video explaining something or no, they're not that kind of person. So you know everything you need to know about how you're going to coach them, how you're going to lead them, what their shortcomings are. And here's the important thing, right? If they're family oriented and you're trying to lead somebody about a task or about a mission or about a project you're working on, if you can tie it back to family for them, now you're hitting their personal need versus just talking loosely. You're hitting them where it means most to them. So there's so much you learn about the way people answer that question that we're particular. If they don't answer that question right, we'll end an interview right after that question. Hmm, interesting. Okay. All right. Yeah, that's good. I mean, it sounds like, you know, from a people point of view that's been successful. And that's part of the challenge is kind of, you know, getting some of the folks to come down here. Now, I assume that your connection with the people you serve, your customers are just, it's just as strong. How did the move affect them or didn't it? I mean, did you were you able to kind of manage, you know, a both operations so that, you know, you didn't miss any service or deliveries or anything like that? Yeah, I would say we had about a four week total delay in equipment shipment. spare parts for the most part have been going pretty good. There's been a couple of issues, but it's more still off of leftover stuff from the supply chain issues that are going on, you know, still throughout the world in the country. The delay that we had coming down here, we were a little bit delayed in terms of when we could have put power onto the equipment that we had. And then we bought some new equipment. That was the other real drive of coming down here is we were able to invest in three new pieces of equipment, where if we stayed in New Jersey, I was only going to be able to invest in one because the rental rates are wildly different between down here and up there. Okay. So there was a piece of equipment that's pretty critical for us. It turns rings. It's called a vertical turret lathe. That piece of equipment really struggled to get online. There's a lot of equipment issues that luckily and good, you know, for the for the supplier and vendor, they really supported us, but it took a while to get that thing up and running. So that pushed them delivers out. There were a couple companies that, you know, they grabbed a little bit about it, but you know, we always do what we can to find ways to support customers. We have a separate business called DSH technologies, which is like a service and spare parts, but service and process engineering and process education side. And there we have equipment that we've made so that people can come and use it. So for some of those customers that were a little delayed, we just offered them time on the furnaces at DSH so they could get some parts out and still support their customer base. So we've kind of built an organization that we can find every single way to help you. And if there's something that we did wrong in one area, we'll find another way to make it up in another part of the business or an offering that we can do for you. Okay. Okay. All right. So Elnek is the business you moved. Let's talk a little bit about some of the other businesses. So you did mention one there, right? I mean, so that you're involved with four different businesses. So if you want to talk about those, yeah. So Elnek was the, you know, the original company. And then in 1999, so 25 years ago, my dad and the guy right now who's running DSH, he in the middle of his time with us kind of left and went into industry for a little bit, but he started that organization with my dad back in 1999 as a way to, as we got involved in this injection molding world, there was a, there was a knowledge and a need for education around the process. Because everybody came in and they're like, well, we want the equipment to do this, we want the equipment to do this and so forth. My dad's like, listen, I went into this whole thing because I want to standardize equipment. So I'm going to make one, I'm going to put it in my plant and I'm going to show you how it works. And now it's just a matter of how big do you want this thing to be based on the volume of parts you have. So this business started out as a way to demonstrate the equipment. And it's grown into access to equipment. So you don't have to spend money in the capital, you know, investment and the expense around all that and the infrastructure. And the biggest part of what's grown is the education side, right? So we kind of talked about a little bit in the earlier part of the call here, but it's one thing to have a really good piece of equipment like an oven at home or, you know, in our industry, a furnace for the metal part making industry, it's another thing to know how to use it from a process perspective, right? So how do you develop recipes? How do you, you know, if for some reason the cake comes out of the oven and it's not as fluffy as you want it to be, who do you call, right? You go on a Google, do you go to YouTube, in our case, if parts aren't coming out of the oven the way you want to, we're a team that you can call that will dig into the science side of it too. Okay, maybe we didn't hold long enough at this temperature so all the plastic didn't come out and you have a chemistry issue or we didn't go high enough in temperature so the parts aren't as dense as they need to or we use the wrong gas or really analyzing the process side to it to help the customer get so good at what they're doing that they're growing their business and they're going to come back for furnace two furnace three furnace four, my dad had an old famous saying when he was working with people in sales role, he said I'm not happy until I've sold you five furnaces because once I've done that I've known I've helped you grow your business. Okay, okay. And that comes through process that comes through education and so forth so that was business two. Elmick has a really big footprint over in Europe and in 2017 we realized that there's a need to have a presence over there so we open an operation there's four teammates over there two service technicians two office teammates we have spare parts we also have a furnace over there that people in that market directly can use because they can drive to it bring parts do some experiments and so forth and that's really both that organization in DSH gives companies the reason to say let me put it let me rephrase a little bit I'm a big believer in proof is in the pudding right I can tell you all day long why our furnace is the best the industry can tell you all day long why the furnace is the best but give me all the parts you want to process I'll put them in the furnace let the parts come back you do the analysis and you tell me whether they're the best and then go to the the other competitors and ask them to do the same thing and most of them can. A huge part of a marketing and sales branch of that organization so we saw a need there was a unique European market that you know they got a little tired of it's just after lunchtime and we're just getting up and coming to work kind of thing right so we developed an organization over there and then a fourth business I run it is a one-man operation right now it's a woodshop I've always been a woodworker my dad taught me how to woodwork when I was kid and then a really good buddy of mine his dad was an incredible craftsman he ran an HVAC business but at home he had one of the coolest wood shops I've ever seen so this dude made like cabinets and you know all kinds of high-end finished woodworking so every time I went to go hang out with my buddy Tim I would hang out with his dad way more than I would hang out with him so I learned a lot growing up so woodworking has always just been a little fun hobby for mine I look at it as therapy and back in 2021 you know everybody found this extra time in their lives because of COVID and stuff I just started making products and it started out as I wouldn't flags actually I saw a couple flags online I was like I want to make one of these things so I basically it's either pine or cedar and I you know started cutting all these things and I saw people beveling edges then I saw people burning the wood and staining it right and it's just turned into this super high-end you know piece of artwork that I've seen and sold to a lot of my friends and their workplaces and they hang them proudly where they are and I've built tables and shadow boxes and stored front signs anything that I can do where I have the time and the equipment to do it it's just another little business that I use for my own sanity but we put out some pretty cool product okay so it's more of a hobby almost than a business but it is still a business yeah I mean it's got an LLC and it's run like a business and so forth and luckily during COVID I think everybody not during COVID but during the move everybody kind of realized I was had a lot of stuff on my plate so I didn't get that many orders during that time thankfully so everything's good but I've had a couple of interesting projects come in I just built myself a really cool two-stage cocktail table on wheels that rolls around it's all made of at a really nice white ash wood so it's it's cool it's fun yeah fun that's cool yeah so you're juggling a lot of things and I think you know managing time sometimes is one of the biggest challenges for executives maybe talk about that how is that evolved for you over time oh dude time management time management is huge you know what's the most amazing thing is the amount of time we all waste in a day and I don't think anybody really understands I mean grab your phone and look at your social media time and you'd be shocked by how much time everybody spends on that right I've been a big believer in calendars and schedules I'm a big you know set week schedule kind of things I was just looking down to my calendar over here and every single day of the week I have a certain amount of things that I preset to do every day so because I lead the organization and a few different organizations I need always be reviewing financials I need to be reviewing the marketing because that's also part of what I do within the organization right now so on Mondays and Fridays the first hour of my day is reviewing the financials and the information that I need to to see whether there's any adjustments changes or work that needs to be completed there Tuesdays I spend time doing marketing for an hour and a half so it could be future flyers that I'm building future campaigns that we're putting together different you know reaching out to customers putting things together there on Wednesdays is typically my sales follow up so every Wednesday I have a set thing of things that I do and if for some reason I get through my list that I have for that day and I still have 45 minutes left I just found 45 minutes so I move something up from my calendar into that time and I move through that so I'm a big believer in using your calendar the other thing that I that really helped my time management and I don't know whether you have ever heard of this before have you ever heard of a program called 75 Hard? 75 Hard no I haven't yeah so we were talking a little bit earlier about another business development group that I'm involved in called RTA and one of the leaders of RTA is Andy Fracella and Andy Fracella back in 2019 2020 I forget exactly when it started but he started a program called 75 Hard and it's a some people look at it as a fitness challenge it's not even close to that it is literally a rewiring program for your brain and what it is is there's five tasks you have to do every single day the first one is follow a diet and there's no preset diet are you trying to gain weight lose weight eat healthy follow some kind of diet no alcohol no cheat meals though those are the key factors right so no sunday you know splurging on food no alcohol no ice cream one is say again no ice cream no ice cream oh man now you can switch that up and go do like some kind of protein based homemade ice cream that's a little bit healthier if that's the plan or if you're doing macro counting I mean if generally ice cream is not really good for you it doesn't have a lot of nutritional value right but if you're doing macro counting you can eat some things that some people would consider to be maybe not the right thing to do but the idea is just follow some kind of diet right okay okay second one is two workouts a day 45 minutes each wow one has to be outside okay be regardless of what's going on outside and not like under the awning or with the garage door open like outside okay um the third one is drink a gallon of water a day the fourth one is read ten pages in some form of personal development book or educational book and then the final one is take a progress picture of yourself every single day in the end through that program the first time I've done it I've done it three times now and I'm sure I'm trying to do it every single year it's just I'm actually sounding like a kind of like a like a baby right now but the first time I did it I traveled to five different countries in six different states and this year I'm sitting like man I got this travel coming up with that travel coming up like I'm gonna do it at this time so kind of crazy for me to sit here a bitch about it right now but um it's an incredible program what it made me realize is because you have to do all these things you have to get good at resetting what you need to do throughout your day and because it's like you're sitting there at eight thirty or nine o'clock or nine thirty and you're like shit I still have to get an outside workout in most people would just sit there on their phone for a half hour forty five minutes I put on my wait best I would go outside I would do my walk so while doing that program it really helped me understand how much time I'm wasting so that when I'm wasting time now I'm like nope go do something you have way more important things to do than where you're at so just a couple of things I've done over my life scheduling an calendar and that program's been huge but have a system right I think that's kind of what one of the things I would take away from this because a lot of people don't and you know I was talking to somebody the other day and I've certainly had this in my career when you're running a business everybody wants a piece of you they're all in if you're a calendar person they're always trying to get on your calendar right so how do you manage that do you allow open access to anyone for your calendar or how do you manage you know those those pools and tubs that you get from many many different people that's a great question I need company runs a little different right depending on the number of people you have in the way that you're on your operation for me I don't really I don't do scheduling into my calendar I will either take it or or not take it if I have something else going on but my I have enough open spaces in the calendar where I let people set meetings that they want to but for me what I really have is I have an open door policy so if people do need my time they can come in and they can talk to me but it's prefaced with what do we need to talk about right now and how much time do you anticipate we need to talk right so what I'm doing is I'm I'm building in the question to the people to be respectful of not just the time that they're asking of me but for them to start thinking about how much time does it take so I'm starting to get them to think about time yeah and how important it is because how many people in an organization run run a meeting and they just put it on the calendar for an hour because that's what the default is for most meetings is one hour but the actual context of what you're talking about is 15 to 20 minutes yeah so I tell everybody right now and going back to systems set your meeting for 20 minutes if it goes over 20 minutes ask yourself what what's the reason it's going are we fluffing around we start the meeting five minutes later people showing up late so this gets everybody back to some kind of structure and system and so to speak um I would say I'm not the greatest at telling people to walk away but I've got a lot better at telling people hey have you run this by your manager or your leader first have you run this by HR first you can I'm I don't want people to feel like I'm not here for them I'm definitely a different style CEO and president of a company but what I'm trying to do is get people to understand schedules and how good the use of a schedule and a calendar is by asking them to understand the amount of time it's going to take yeah okay that's good advice really good advice okay so let's switch gears here a little bit um outside of the move what's some of the toughest challenges you have in the business today well I think for any company one of the hardest challenges is is as an owner and leader and a creator of a company is to figure out how to get people to get to your level of passion and energy right so it's the people side to it um I don't think any company runs that doesn't have people challenges so understanding people understanding how to I think the biggest challenge for me is I have a certain way about myself as I've described a little bit in the beginning of how much I care about my team and the people that are here not everybody in leadership roles has that same level of care they all understand the basics and the standards we're trying to hold but it doesn't always come out that way people deliver things differently right so some of the biggest challenges when intention is right but delivery is not done right that's where things kind of go off the rails sometimes so trying to teach people about those kinds of approaches and understanding how communication can drastically impact how the end result works from a people perspective um we're having a little bit of challenge down here in the Charlotte area from an engineering hiring perspective there's two engineering roles that we've had open for a little while there's been two people that accepted the role one of them said he's moving to Illinois the other one basically ghosted us for a week came back and said he took another job after accepting the job it's just like that's thank you for showing me who you really are now right so again we're pechie we want to make sure we have the right people we have an engineering team and then there's me and our operations manager so some projects have just required us to get a little bit more involved so kind of muscling that through yep um the other challenges running out of business especially in the manufacturing world is just the the consistent inconsistencies within the supply chain um there are still random problems there are still every 30 days there's a price increase in product right so five ten years ago you could understand a price of a product was something like that for like about a year right maybe a year and a half but now it's like if you haven't bought it in 30 days you got to go back because the pricing of everything it's almost to a point where people are doing it just because they'd be programmed to do it in other cases the material costs are still going up but it's the material suppliers that are doing it so at some point it has to be some kind of give to it but i don't know i don't have the answer for where it really is going to come from and when it's going to do i mean personally as an organization over the last four years we've helped customers in some ways where i'll give an extra percent off a piece of equipment or not increase price if it's only a one or two percent change in my cost of the material because i'm not trying to make the customer's life that much harder right it might not have helped us as much but it's the right thing to do to grow you know business and grow a relationship with a company that we're trying to work with okay okay yeah the people issues i think are endless finding the right folks you know hiring i think those at all kind of be at the top of the list for most folks today and inflation as well right i mean when is it going to stop how's it going to stop i think you know those are all key things that most businesses are dealing with yeah so so as you think about all that you know what are your aspirations for Elneko over the next five years oh i mean so we want to we went from 10 million to 19 million or nine million to 19 million from 19 to 22 but 19 to 2022 my goal to have this business running is is in a 30 million dollar range that's going to be a big jump since right now this year things actually went in the other direction just because manufacturing the capital equipment world to slow down like if people don't buy more Raybans or they don't get as many operations or buy as many guns that have that hurts capital equipment guys and the people who make parts if they slow down i got to wait for them to pick up before i pick up so capital equipment is always a longer kind of swing in in the swings of the way the economy works and so forth so we didn't you know nobody really anticipates when slowdowns are going to come that much but it's allowed us to actually reinvest time into the building and the systems that we're trying to put in place here so sometimes guys are like oh man we're going to get slow what are we going to do is like we're going to get better what we're going to do right because once the business picks back up which i think 2025 is going to be really good in the manufacturing world regardless i think of which president uh or administration kind of takes lead um we're going to we're going to be able to come out flying and running with much better systems than we had when we moved down here right so i'm a believer in if you found time going back to this whole calendar schedule and what do you do to man your time if you just found new time there's two types of people in the world there's those that will sit back and relax and there's those that will take advantage and move forward right i'm gonna move forward kind of guy i'm a guy on a friday my favorite quote on a friday is champions create distance on fridays because most people that run organizations have checked out on thursday they're not doing much on friday and they're already thinking about the weekend so if you take friday and even saturday if you can and want to and your industry requires it if you take that extra day you just gained 50 days on your competition yeah yeah who wouldn't want 50 extra days of time to dominate their competition right yeah yeah that's interesting i've never heard that quote before uh champions create distance on fridays but it's true and i think a lot of people have put it different ways but that's a it's a great philosophy um so i've heard a lot of things stuff in from you that i feel like you like but what do you enjoy most about your job today um that's a really great question uh there's two things i really love about what we're doing and what i get to do here one is when i step back and take a look at the impact that my dad has created with the company that he started elnik and getting involved in this industry of making furnaces to help companies when i step back i had a tour probably about six years ago for a powder metal manufacturing plant in pennsylvania so taking scrap metal liquefying it and pouring it into something that blasts it with really cold gas to make little pellets of metal out of it sitting there and watching these people work in a huge three-story building it's super hot they're basically wearing spacesuits because there's freaking powder flying around all over the place sitting there and watching what these people are doing every single day to give companies an opportunity that we're a piece of the puzzle that give people at the end of the day something improving in their life whether it's a medical operation somebody puts on their pair of ray bands dude half the people that put them on they feel like they're a fighter jet pilot right it's part of the reason people buy ray bands sometimes because that's an aspiration of what they want to have so to step back and to know that we have a small piece of bringing joy to people's life is amazing to me i absolutely love that okay okay the other side the thing that i love the most and as we just said before the hardest part of the business is the people the best thing about my role is the ability to help make a difference in people's lives so coming down here we've been here for a year half the team's been here for probably seven months the rest of the team's been here for a full year some of the people on the team have already bought homes down here right so we made a move down here for the company to be better but for the people's lives to be better to see people actually do the things that we set up to do to change their lives to have an actual home that they own for their families for the kids to grow up in it's it's just warm my heart it absolutely warms me up and gets me going every single day it's another reason why i got to be here be the best version of myself is because i got to take care of all these people's lives you know i might not have kids of my own but i have kids that are out there in the shop and i got people's lives that i got to look after and i i while it's the hardest and most stressful part of my job it's the thing that keeps me going every single day okay yeah that's cool that's very satisfying no doubt especially with you know the people that feel like you're very close to i mean a half-year employees move down here it is the lower cost of living lower taxes i hear i hear a lot of people talk about that taxes are dramatically different down here than they were in New Jersey and the cost of living generally is substantially lower as well right so that's a big factor in one percent drop 20 drop for everybody yeah it was 20 to 30 but it's gotten a little bit pricier down here but also it has also in Jersey so when we initially looked it was between 20 and 30 percent depending on what category you're looking at yeah okay all right so a little bit different kind of question so you're talking to your about your dad a lot um you know and i think of mentors as being an important part you know of development of just about anybody maybe talk about you know your mentors that were most impactful for you if it was your dad or not and and why yeah i think it's a huge thing to find a good group of people in your life that you can look up to i think mentorship is huge i've had an opportunity in the last couple of years to have people come up to me and say hey man i look at you as a mentor and my call it crap i guess i've gotten it done something in my life but um as much as i want to continue to give out and be at that for somebody else it comes from what you've done and how you've looked for yourself so my dad has definitely been a mentor to me um he's he's taught me more by what i've seen than what i've heard from him and this is a true this is a true statement of life is if you think about it from a child's perspective children learn more from what they see than what they're taught yeah they will emulate you more by the things that you didn't even know that they saw then by the words that they are told that they need to do right so a lot of my mentorship while i have a couple of people in my life that i've visually or verbally told them that i would like for you to be my mentor a lot of the mentorship that i have is by the way that i'm wired by watching the people that i believe in and have faith in and see doing things that i feel like i want to do in my own personal life and i i take mentorship through the visual side of what i'm watching these people do and it makes me want to be better and through some of those people i'll take that time to go ask questions to them so earlier days in my life i was always worried about asking people questions i was like man these people don't want to help you people inherently do like to help other people especially people who have done something in their life they love to talk about it and help somebody else do something with their own personal life and if they don't you don't want to talk to them anyways right so my dad's been a great mentor i had a mentor in finance industry for a little while he really helped me understand communication to to customers and how to phrase things in a way where it's very much inclusive and collaborative versus directive right that guy's name was Ed DeMonico he was great and then you know i'm in an entrepreneurial group called RTA syndicate and the two leaders within that organization are incredible leaders and mentors and again a lot of it comes from what i've been watching them and learning from them and how they're sharing their knowledge and information to us in that group that's been awesome for me i've learned not so much well actually i've learned a lot of things but most of what i've really learned is the refinement around culture and core values and what it means to really be a good leader within an organization yeah yeah invaluable i think you know you can't you know you make a good point too about you know do what people what you see people doing right i mean because kids you know when they can't speak they learn a lot you know at that time just because you know they see you know they take so much in you know i think that continues you know throughout life so that's a great point now talk a little bit if you would maybe similar type question you know you've been a leader of an organization for quite a while what what does that talk to you about yourself and you're asked a good question Jeff i really appreciate it i try you know what is it's it's refined to me in a lot of ways i've always been a person that uh will just work through lunch just to get something done kind of scenario so great fortitude you know or things i've always had but understanding how to channel it as the leader of an organization because there's no one else that i can go to you know there's nobody that i can go to other than mentors and people i know and friends in other industries but there's nobody within the company that i can go to so i've realized how important it is for me to be the light in the example for the people on the team so i've really refined how to draw fortitude how to draw grit and there's one thing that i do every single day one of the coolest things about this business is we're at a 52,000 square foot building down here in charlotte we don't have a cleaning crew we are the cleaning crew we clean this place we vacuum the floors we clean the bathrooms we shop clean we do everything that we possibly can because for two reasons one i think it's a waste of money to have to pay somebody to clean after clean up after you you know that's kind of silly in my opinion but there's also people that run good services for janitorial and cleaning services and so forth so you know i kudos to them and there are companies that certainly need that kind of help and and and work but for me it's really i'm a big believer in exercising discipline muscles in the most simple form so when you need discipline you can draw on it when you want to the example i always use here is if you're going to go run a marathon right you want to go run a 26.2 you're not just going to go run that marathon you're going to work towards building up to how to run that marathon right so when you need to get to that marathon and you're on mile 20 and you're like shit i'm dead my legs are my shins are broken you found the discipline and the grit to push through it so for me when it comes to cleanliness let's just say and exercising discipline muscles is everywhere i go whether it's in this building or outside in the public if there's garbage on the ground i pick it up and i throw it away for two reasons one i think it's the right thing to do and i hate that people are so dirty and messy that they just throw shit you know away without thinking about it should go in a garbage can but two is the simplest task of picking up a little piece of tape off the ground and the shop floor that everybody else is walked by but i'm doing it one is the example of we need to keep this place clean but two if i walk by it i know i can't even i can't even get the discipline to do a very simple task so i'm exercising my discipline muscle so when i need to do something that requires a lot of discipline my muscles have been worked already just like running a marathon you've worked yourself into the readiness to do the big game when you need the big game okay so i'm a big believer in discipline and helping really show that and be in that example for the team as best i can yeah i mean you and i were talking before i think people that run businesses are very interesting people i mean they continue to refine themselves and that's a good way to put it i mean i think you know learning different things that you know you maybe need some work on you mentioned communication earlier you know how do you refine that so that everybody understands what your intent was you know when you're when you're talking about whatever it is i think those are all important things now um we're kind of running out of time here so i got one more question for you okay um think about a new executive or a new entrepreneur what kind of advice would you give that great question um if it's in whoever it is i don't care whether you're a new executive entrepreneur just general human is read books read books and learn from people about the things that they've done there's a book i'm reading right now called unreasonable hospitality and it talks about a person working through the restaurant industry and how he completely changed the game of one restaurant called 11 Madison Park in New York City and i mean hospitality wise as people are sitting there and a waiter walks by and they're thinking about you know there's they hear somebody say oh man we got to go pay the meter on the car or something like that like that waiter went outside and just paid the meter on that person's car came back and said hey you're good don't worry about it so doing things that are unreasonable from a hospitality perspective is going that extra mile this book is incredible so read books you will learn a shit ton if you just spend time improving your brain right again most people want to disconnect they go to tiktok they go to instagram they go to everything else discipline the right thing to do is to improve yourself use that discipline to read even if it's just ten pages a day right a little bit of improvement every single day is going to be huge for you so i would encourage people to do that move your body so keep your body moving stress you know all the things that come from sitting and being lethargic is really bad for you so i would say move your body as best you can but from a executive in an entrepreneur perspective i would look at a little bit differently an entrepreneur somebody starting something brand new i would say put your feet in step into the game and say yes before you know what it is before you know every little answer to every single question believe in yourself that you will figure it out because the truth is is the most skilled entrepreneurs and executives and people in their lives have developed the art of the pivot and i say it's the art of the pivot because whoever really put a plan together and it went a hundred percent perfect rarely right you always have to pivot a little bit it's like it could be hey this person got sick for three days i got to get this guy over here to finish this job and fit and move over there and it's it's those are the things when you step back and you look at the success of the project or the success of the sports team winning the championship or the lawyer you know winning the case they're great events but the things you remember the most are what you did in the in the in the weeds right it's it's you know the two a days or something like that when you're thinking about building up towards that championship game or the late nights for the lawyer ordering chinese food reading through bookcase those are the things that are vivid that they remember and it's not as much as the win that you're going to remember so realize that the art of the pivot is crucial and believing yourself and that comes from screwing shit up and if you screw something up it's okay just make sure you learn that everything you do in life has a lesson that you need to learn you just need to figure out what that lesson is for an executive coming into a company so somebody a little bit more seasoned especially actually it applies to every industry what i would say is if you're new to the business and you've not done what that business specifically has done take time to learn every single task within that organization at a minimum of the people that you're in charge of spend time with every single human and ask them day by day what is the task you have to do how do you actually do it and do the work because if that person leaves their role and they become something in a different role and you get new person in you're going to be a much better guide for them and how to teach them the role that they are now taking on it's more hey i need you to do this versus hey i need you to do this these are the resources these are the locations and these are the people that you can call this person's a way better guide you know for that leader or for that new person that's coming in so fortunately for me the reason i got here leading this team and the reason it works so well is every single job throughout the company i've done so when i'm asking somebody that i need them to weld together pipe or i need them to check a piece of equipment out i've done all those tasks so i know what they're going through so it's not like hey get this done in an hour it's like hey this is going to take you three days let me know when you're completed and let me know where i can help you get you the right resources and stuff so understanding the individual tasks as a new executive coming into a company is is crucial game changer yeah yeah you get the respect of the people also when you understand what they're doing right yeah no doubt about it yeah okay all good advice continuous learner hundred percent agree with that you know that that never ends i think you know and any job you have you know let alone executive position so so i think we could probably talk for a couple more hours i really enjoyed this uh you have a very interesting story welcome to north carolina i know it sounds like you're going to make a nice impact for the people you know that work for you and your customers in the state of north carolina so so welcome thank you jeff i really appreciate it this has been a lot of fun and i can't believe an hour's gone by already truly um there's so many more things i feel like i could talk about and if you want to ever do a you know a repeat we can talk about things like culture and core values and building all those kinds of things or maybe you and i like you said we just go grab a cup of coffee we we finish this great conversation because it's been fun jeff yeah or maybe we do both so yeah i'd enjoy that so listen thanks thank you for joining me today okay absolutely thanks jeff
