Everyday Business Problems

Dave sits down with Wes Temple, Director of Growth at Gorilla 76, a B2B agency that works exclusively with manufacturers and industrial technology companies. Wes owns the marketing strategy for every client they sign, which means he has traced a lot of lead flow end to end and found out exactly where it stops. In one case, the leads were arriving, they were logged, they had real six figure values attached to them, and nobody was touching them. This conversation goes at the part of the funnel most manufacturers have never mapped: what happens between a lead landing in the system and somebody actually owning it. What You'll Discover: • Why the fight between marketing and sales exists at all, and what Wes says is really underneath it • What he found when he traced a client's lead flow end to end, and the value that was sitting untouched in their CRM • How a few changes to a sales process can be worth one, two, or three more closed deals a quarter • The difference between owning a CRM and actually using it to sell • Why so many manufacturers pay for sales software they never configured to match the way they sell • The exact sentence a marketing leader can use to open the conversation with their sales leader • How to route leads, trigger follow up, and run a weekly review that makes dropped opportunities visible • Why three to five priorities beat thirty, and what happens to the companies that refuse to choose • Where the cheapest growth in most manufacturing businesses is already sitting, and the exercise that finds it • What Wes tells people to go do Monday morning, which has nothing to do with marketing at all If your quotes go out and follow up happens sometimes, or you are about to spend more money generating demand that your current process cannot hold, this conversation is about a gap you have probably never measured. The fix is rarely more leads. It is almost always knowing what happens to the ones you already have.

Dave Crysler answers the question a client asked him in the middle of a gap review, the one everybody in the room was already thinking. There is no clean line between tribal knowledge and a work instruction, so most teams stall at the question and write nothing. Dave lays out the two questions that break the tie, the cost of leaving a gap undecided that almost nobody counts, and why a step that is already documented can keep failing anyway. This is the episode for anyone staring at a list of process gaps trying to work out which ones are actually worth doing something about. What You'll Discover: • Why nobody will give you a straight rule about what to document, and who benefits from that • The two questions that decide it: would this work at double the headcount, and what does it cost every time somebody gets it wrong • Why exposure decides what gets documented, not completeness • The hidden cost of a gray area, and the private calculation your team runs several times a day because of it • Why the person who knows the process best is the worst judge of what needs writing down • The billing step that was in the work instruction the whole time, and still kept getting missed • Why writing it down does nothing when the step depends on somebody remembering • The difference between a training problem and a system problem, and the one question that tells them apart • Why operator error, operator retrained is a prediction rather than a resolution • What designing it out actually means, and why building the tool first just automates the wrong process faster • The third answer nobody talks about, and why deciding to write a document is not the same as fixing anything If your team keeps working around the same thing, or somebody just told you the fix is a new SOP, start here. You have more than two options, and the one everybody reaches for first is usually the third best. Dave closes with four questions you can run against a single process on Monday morning.

Dave Crysler sits down with Glen Antwiler, founder and CEO of Right Fit PEO, who built, ran, and sold his own PEO before moving to the buy side of the market. Glen explains what a professional employer organization actually is, where the savings really come from, and why only about 50 of the roughly 600 operating in this country carry the IRS certification that determines who is liable when payroll taxes get misfiled. The conversation gets into admin fee spreads, the widely repeated myth that PEOs stop making sense at 100 employees, and a renewal timing play most owners have never heard of. What You'll Discover: • What a PEO actually is, and why the shared benefit pool, not the bundled services, is where the savings come from • The difference between a certified PEO and a non-certified one, and why the IRS treats the two completely differently • Why only about 50 of roughly 600 PEOs carry that certification, and what Glen found when he pulled the report on who recently lost it • How admin fees range from $85 to close to $300 per employee per month for the same 25 person company • Why the rule that PEOs stop making sense at 100 employees does not survive a simple follow up question • How carve outs let a company keep an existing broker or workers comp policy inside a PEO relationship • Why one bad year on a level funded plan can quietly close the door on the option you would want next • What actually changes for multi state hiring, state unemployment accounts, and compliance when your people are spread across the country • Why switching providers is half of Glen's business, and what that says about how the first decision usually gets made • The renewal timing move Glen calls a double dip, and why the weeks before a January renewal are the leverage point Most owners inherit their payroll and benefits setup from a warm referral and never look at it again until the renewal shows up. If you are heading into Q4 with a renewal on the desk and no real idea whether what you have is competitive, properly certified, or priced anywhere near the middle of the market, this conversation gives you the questions to ask before anyone tries to sell you anything.

Dave Crysler breaks down Overall Equipment Effectiveness, the traditional manufacturing KPI that gets sold as a solution far more often than it gets used as a diagnostic. After a call with a machine monitoring vendor, Dave lays out what OEE actually measures, why two plants with identical scores can have nothing in common, and why a high number can sit right next to a growing backlog and shrinking profitability. This is the episode for the operator who has never tracked OEE and is being told they should. What You'll Discover: • What OEE actually measures and the three factors that multiply together to produce the score • Why the metric follows the problem, and what goes wrong when you pick the metric first • How two plants can both hit 85% while having completely unrelated issues driving the number • Why a metric that can be influenced without solving anything becomes a vanity metric • The blind spot nobody mentions: OEE never asks whether anybody ordered the parts • What happens when you drive up efficiency on a machine that is not your constraint • Why elevating a constraint usually takes ingenuity and conversations, not capital • The three conditions that make OEE genuinely worth tracking • How your lens of experience decides which solution you reach for, including Dave's own bias • The legal pad exercise you can run Monday morning without buying anything If your backlog is growing, your capacity feels constrained, or somebody just put a capital request for new equipment on your desk, this episode will save you from measuring the wrong machine. Before you buy sensors and software, there is a two week exercise with a notepad that will tell you more about your operation than a dashboard will. Dave walks through exactly how to run it.

Most manufacturers did not decide to be invisible. They grew on referrals, landed a handful of customers who covered the bills, and never had to explain themselves to a stranger. Dave Crysler sits down with Curt Anderson, founder of B2Btail and author of Stop Being the Best Kept Secret, to talk about how that quiet approach stopped working and what to do about it. Along the way they get into the part most marketing conversations skip: what happens when the phone finally rings and the shop cannot carry the work. What You'll Discover: • Why "we're the best kept secret" started as a badge of honor and quietly became a growth problem • The buyer who flew in to tour a plant, loved it, and admitted he almost cancelled the trip because of the website • How the Digital Game Plan actually starts, with strengths and opportunities rather than a new website • Why "we can do it for anybody" is almost never true, and how to find the niche a shop is already in • The rounding the bases exercise, and the contract manufacturer who learned half their customers added up to less than four percent of the business • What "out-teach the competition" means in practice, and the football coach line that answers the secret sauce objection • Why a 40-person steel company outside Buffalo is building a real audience on Instagram • What happened when Curt turned the marketing on for a manufacturer whose office could not absorb the RFQs • The teeter totter effect, where cutting lead times and freeing up capacity can feel exactly like failing • The first thing to do on Monday morning if you already know you are the best kept secret in your market If you have ever looked at a slow quarter and realized nobody in the building knows how to make the phone ring, this conversation is for you. It is also for the operations leader on the other side of that problem, the one who knows what happens when demand shows up before the shop is ready for it. Curt and Dave work opposite ends of the same growth problem, and this episode is about where those two ends meet. Connect with Curt Anderson: b2btail.com | LinkedIn