Tom Jaynes

@tjj357

Father of 2, Sharer of stories, especially while pouring wine.

Chicagoland

Joined September 2009

178 Following

47 Followers

260 Posts

tjj357 retweeted

Russell Winter

@MFG_SMB

7 months ago

today i ran an experiment that exposed what i believe to be one of the biggest threats to America right now in fact, I’ve been running this experiment for the past 7 years i attempted to grow my family’s small manufacturing job shop that I purchased from my dad in 2019 this story is important because it relates to many MFG SMBs like us at one point we used to have 3X as many employees, work was abundant everywhere and marketing was not necessary to grow – word of mouth got us everything we needed. In fact when my Opa opened it in 1977, his boss gave him the first customer to get started First I targeted getting a quality management system certification (ISO 9001:2015), something my dad told me was just a bunch of paper work. His words were “Just say NO to ISO.” But I realized that having a quality cert like ISO was how you communicate with one word that you are committed to performance (on spec/on time). Next was diversifying the customer base. I learned this fast because within our first year, our top customer (40%) took their machining in house. The plan was to get into the defense market. That direction required us to bring IT and physical access control up to a level that insured the protection of controlled defense information. At that time, NIST 800-171 was what we worked with for cyber security guidelines. CMMC was still in the works. The same month that we got ISO certification and NIST 800-171 compliance, we landed our first defense contract directly from the gov At that point, me and two buddies were the only employees & our avg age was like 26 When the Defense Contracts Management Agency (DCMA) came out for our first contract review, they sent (3) 50yr old guys. When they saw us they asked if this was everyone?Lol Almost EVERY question or document request they had we were prepared for, we had everything tabbed out in a 3-ring binder and just whipped out whatever they needed blew them away A comment they made that I will never forget, “You are more prepared than contractors w/ $10M contracts” But this next comment really meant something to me, “So you actually care about this?” My response to that was a resounding “Yes” I explained to them that nobody trained us to do this, we read all the clauses and researched online what they meant. Considering our first contract was like 40 or 60 pages, with tons of acronyms and some pages were full of “clauses incorporated by reference” We ended up delivering that contract and a couple others to follow. The rest is history. Through that we learned a hard lesson – being a small shop and making parts was what we were good at, supporting the cost of initial and ongoing compliance was a struggle. Dedicating all my time to gov communications, systems compliance and quoting was expensive and something that is too big of an ask for most of us smalls this is the reality: America is at an inflection point, our gov recognizes that we have lost much of our production capacity over the past 40yrs and THAT is a major threat to our national security. They want us to reindustrialize, in fact they NEED us to. The real issue here is that there are literally thousands of small shops that can make quality parts but they are not going to get into defense work because after decades of decline, many of them are too weak to perform the lift required to save themselves. Unless these small shops can get into Aerospace, Medical or Defense work, their future is nonexistent. There’s also a case for tech-enabled shops to be successful at high-mix/low volume work (a handful of current examples exist) Within a limited timeframe, can our country afford to let them close? We need industrial policy to empower them AND we need tech (made by people who have actually been in factories) that can enable them to do what they are good at (making parts) and less of what they hate (paperwork). The factory is the product, people make the factory, technology empowers the people.

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Tom Jaynes

@tjj357

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