#411 – An Interview with Chris Denney

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, released October 14, 2018. Episode 411, an interview with Chris Denny. Welcome to The Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Chris Denney: And I'm Chris Denny from Worthington Assembly.

Chris Gammell: Welcome, Chris. How are you doing? I am great. How about yourself? Good. I feel like I want to say that again. How are you doing? Not, how are you doing? You know, I feel like I kind of mumbled much of my words together there. Yeah, it's good to talk to you. I mean, we've talked, we've talked a bunch on email over the years. Yeah. And, and, but, you know, it's good to talk to you in person and I'm sure we'll actually meet

Chris Denney: crossing each other's paths in, at events and stuff. And, oh, you were there? Yeah, I was there. I didn't see you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's how it goes in the industry. So, so you are the CTO of Worthington Assembly. Yeah. That's a made up title, but we'll use it. Oh, is it really?

Chris Denney: Oh yeah. It was like when they hired me, it was like, well, what should your title be? And, and I'm like, I don't know. Call me CTO. That way there, if vendors want to know what I'm doing, they can just assume I'm important.

Chris Gammell: Right. I'm like, I'm like an important, but like a nerd, you know? Exactly. Exactly. You got it. Okay. So like, what is your story there? How did you, maybe, maybe even further back, what is your background and how'd you get into this, this life?

Chris Denney: Oh, I fell into it. I, I was working at, you know, as a teenager working at like grocery stores and working for my dad and doing different sorts of things, but then just always loved electronics, always loved computers and things like that. And I had a family friend who owned a, uh, electronics manufacturing contract manufacturer and, uh, seemed kind of cool. And I applied and they were hiring, uh, even, uh, kids who didn't know anything, which I was very appreciative of. Uh, and yeah, I just loved it. Enjoyed the work, enjoyed working with machines, uh, like the people I worked with and stuck around throughout college, worked my way through college there. Um, and then after college, uh, after I graduated, I wanted to move to, uh, new England and to be near family and, uh, was looking for a job and, uh, uh, a manufacturer of a piece of equipment I was using at that shop, uh, was hiring. They were young at the time. Um, they're called yes tech. They make AOI equipment. And, uh, I was emailing the guy for tech support and I'm like, you know, uh, crazy question. Um, you guys hiring? Hey, it's always good to ask. You're not going to get the job if you don't ask, right? Yeah, totally. He's like, he's like, as a matter of fact, I have to be in New Jersey tomorrow. Can you meet me at the airport? And, uh, I met him at the airport. Holy crap. Yeah. Yeah. It was

Chris Gammell: super cool. Uh, and. Okay. So the first CM you worked for was not Worthington you're saying?

Chris Denney: Oh no, no, no. Oh, sorry. I should have said that. No, I was working in New Jersey, uh, at a company called, uh, ACI applicat. Great, great company. Huge respect for those guys. But anyway, they, um, uh, so yeah, I met him and got the job and, uh, traveled all over the country. Got to visit all kinds of people. Can you meet me at the airport? Yeah. That, that is a hell of a line. That's just like, yeah. All right. Who needs HR, you know? Like, yeah. Well, at the time he was like this, the first or second employee of the company. Uh, he, you know, and I was within the top five hires. Um, everybody else who worked at the company, they were in some way investors, you know, maybe one guy put in the million bucks and everybody else put in their 10 grand or something. But, um, I think I was like the 10th or 11th employee, uh, if you include all the owners and, uh, yeah, it was super cool. I mean, I just, it was such an awesome job. It's like, if anybody's curious about having like a fun job and has the time and has the, uh, um, has the resources in their life, not resources, but like, you know, doesn't have kids that they have to be home for. Yeah. Flexibility. Like, especially if you're single, it's such a cool job. Cause you get like as an applications engineer for honestly, for anybody, but especially for equipment, um, you get to travel over the, all over the world and just, you get to see so many cool things. You get to

Chris Gammell: work on so many cool things. You get to be in customer facilities at midnight while they're

Chris Denney: still yelling at you. Yes. Yeah. That is, uh, stress control. I'm sure from that. Right. Oh, absolutely. Are you kidding me? I, I still had a lot to learn, but totally, you totally learn how to like, yeah, like just manage yourself very well under pressure because like, I almost wonder if you work in the same environment all the time and like you get under pressure and you're comfortable with the people around, you could totally just like snap and freak out and be like, no, I don't, I don't know what you're talking about, you know, and get all upset. But like when you're at a customer and you're the representative for this organization and they're, you know, you don't know these people and you want to be polite and respectful, you learn self-control real quick.

Chris Gammell: Oh, you're saying just because of that, like that, uh, because they're like strangers in the

Chris Denney: first place. Right. Yeah, totally. Exactly. You're just more on social niceties than the, than, than a workplace might afford. Exactly. And exactly. And then all of a sudden you're like, Oh, this is how human beings are supposed to, uh, respect each other. Great. I will, I will remember this life skill. Yeah. So I, uh, but that was a great job. I loved it, but I was newly married and adored my wife and, uh, was really sad not to be with her all the time. So, uh, uh, got a job. Yeah, that's a flip side to travel is the, is the being away. Exactly. Exactly. So I got a job at another local CM here in new England that did not work out. They shall go unnamed because, uh, that was a horrible experience, but, uh, I worked there for just a couple of years or, uh, excuse me, a couple of months. Uh, and then I got a cool job as a manufacturer's representative. Uh, I don't know if a lot of your listeners would be familiar with kind of like what they do, or if you're familiar with what those guys do. Yeah, I think that's,

Chris Gammell: so John's going to kill me if I, if I get this wrong, but John Davis, who we've had on the show, uh, I believe is a manufacturer rep. Oh, beautiful. Uh, and he does it for like, uh, machine building and things like that. It definitely in the industrial space. But so if, if, if I could take a guess at it, it's when you're, you have multiple manufacturers you're representing and basically you show up with a line card and you say, I can help you with all these things. And then as it's kind of like quasi sales,

Chris Denney: but also kind of quasi support, right? Yes. Oh, you hit the nail on the head, especially, you know, it is the best reps are quasi support. Uh, and those are, those are, you know, you, you gotta be technically astute. You gotta know what you're talking about, but yeah. So you're, you're independent. Uh, a lot of times these guys own their own companies. Um, sometimes they get a little bit larger and they hire people and I'm one of the people that they hired. Uh, so I covered, uh, parts of new England and sold equipment and that was super cool. Um, you know, what kind of, was it industrial as well or, or it was all related to circuit board assembly, right? So it was all, yeah, it was like stencil printers and pick and place reflow, wave solder, AOI conveyors, solder. You basically, someone could phone you up and be like, Hey,

Chris Gammell: I want to start a, a, you know, assembly house. And you'd be like, boy, can I help you?

Chris Denney: Yeah. I would, I would, uh, probably, uh, if, even if it was two in the morning, I would get in my car and go see them immediately. Right. And start drooling and show up covered in drool, right? Because nobody starts an assembly house anymore. It's all, it's all existing. Yeah. I mean, well, maybe in certain areas of the country, but not in New England. It was super, which brings me to Worthington assembly. It was super stagnant. Um, it was a really tough time. It was 2008, 2009, 2010, uh, just not a lot going on. Tough to sell anything. I didn't have any skin in the game. Uh, so I didn't really have a huge reason to stay. Um, and I could just sort of see the writing on the wall, especially with how much, how many resources you can put on the internet. And it's like, okay, how much value am I really providing here? Like, like I remember I got a sale for, you know, we sold like a million dollars worth of, uh, some pick and place gear. And I got like a really nice check. And I just remember thinking, I like, didn't work for that at all. Why didn't, why didn't they just order it? Like, this is silly. Yeah, exactly. Like I, I didn't like, I just showed up and you know, the, the manufacturer and their sales team did all the work and they did all the quoting and they did, you know, they worked out all the logistics of delivery. And I, I just kept thinking like, what the heck am I doing? Like, how is this sustainable? There's no, there's no way I can survive doing this because there's no true raw value to what it is that I'm doing here. It just felt very, I don't know. I was a little uncomfortable.

Chris Gammell: Well, that's interesting to me though. Like, I always think that the manufacturer rep though, they kind of maintain relationships as well. So like when someone does need a piece of equipment that they, that they at least know who to call, I mean, I guess for sure they could go and fill out

Chris Denney: a form on a web somewhere. And you know, the crazy thing is, um, I, I don't think it's self-biased. It could be self-biased, but that's what I do now. It's like, okay, I want a 3d AOI. I'm going to Google 3d AOI and see who comes up now because my background, I'm familiar with most of the 3d AOI companies. And, and, uh, but regardless, it's like, yeah, I gotta, I'll figure it out. And a lot of times I'll like reach out to Ko Young and then I'll be like, you know, like, Oh, you're my rep for that. I didn't even know you repped them. You know, sometimes you feel bad. You don't even realize they're line cards, but yeah, that kind of stuff happens. Um, but the best, the best reps do actually provide some pretty good value. So like we work with some folks, um, these guys, you know, they, they really know their stuff and they really help you like, especially when you're in a jam, um, um, like you're dealing with some kind of like, um, like, Oh, we got this crazy chip scale package. That's 0.35 millimeter pitch. And, uh, how the heck do I process this? You know? And, uh, the best reps will be able to like, Hey, you know, uh, I don't know, but I know who does know, and I'll put you in touch with them. You know what I mean? So they can be a good liaison to get you connected with people that can get you answers and stuff. So yeah, providing that connection is

Chris Gammell: important. Yeah, totally. Totally. And it's like, I mean, from a, from a, the other side, from the sales perspective, it seems like the companies are paying that premium to have you as a sales, you know, like whatever the margin you get as the salesperson or as the rep person. Right. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean,

Chris Denney: they want to know exactly when you're there. Yeah. Their national sales manager might be in Chicago and it's like, Hey, I'd really like to talk about this machine. And they're like, Oh, I can get to you

Chris Gammell: in July. So you're saying that the, you know, the, the, the sales model didn't, didn't make sense to you. But then how did that end up translating to Worthington? You were already at Worthington. You're like, sales is like not a thing or that's why you're getting out of sales.

Chris Denney: I was trying to sell to Worthington, but they weren't buying anything, which I'm not sure what exactly what that says, but yeah, but they were great guys. Uh, the owners of Worthington assembly are, uh, Neil and Rafal. And I just love visiting them. And, uh, they were always just honest and fair. And, you know, when they didn't buy something, they would actually tell me why, which was pretty cool. Uh, most people don't do that. And, uh, and yeah, so, um, for a number of other,

Chris Gammell: Should you tell salespeople why you didn't buy? Yes, absolutely. Well, you should, that's like a kindness for them, but I don't think it's a

Chris Denney: mandatory. So here's my opinion on that. So like you, it's not a mandatory, absolutely not. But my opinion is, uh, and the reason I continue to do it this day, like when I don't buy somebody's equipment and I buy somebody else's equipment, I go, here are the reasons why we decided to buy X, Y, and Z. Um, they have this, this, and this, and you don't, uh, and I value these things. And, uh, you, you, you do have this, which I'm disappointed I'm not going to get, but I don't value that as much as this other thing. And I don't know. I think it builds the ecosystem a little bit more because then they're getting this feedback like, Hey, we lost the sale because this customer is telling us that we don't have these things. Should we be looking into getting these things? Should we be throwing our engineers at this kind of a thing? Um, I don't know. I think it just kind of enhances, uh, enhances everything, you know?

Chris Gammell: That's true. And then I guess, I guess the rep then also keeps an eye out for you. If they do see it, then they're like, Oh, well, Chris really cares about ABC. Who knows what it is, but totally a good salesperson will definitely keep that in mind.

Chris Denney: A good salesperson. That's the key, right? So there's some salespeople we may not necessarily, uh, say why we didn't buy their equipment because we know it's just going to fall on deaf ears and they're just going to be upset. They lost the sale. Uh,

Chris Gammell: but you know, some of them are just at the end of their quarter, right? Some of them are. Oh my God. Absolutely. Yeah. Oh, and I hated all that. I hated all that. Especially with capital equipment. I'm sure that's a, that's a different thing than like, so like for me, it was always salespeople were like, I want to get the design when I'm going to get, I'm going to win the socket. They always talked about, but for capital equipment like that, I mean, first off, it's like you said, a million dollars is not uncommon and yeah, that's very common. It's like a big deal. Like what is

Chris Denney: the sales cycle time for that kind of thing? All right. So let's say you are like, you, uh, let me, let me put it this way. So like we went through that at Worthington assembly and we, um, we had a quad pick and place equipment, which is super old and just, yeah, don't, if you're interested in buying pick and place equipment, don't buy quad anyway. So man, right there, you're going to get some hate mail. Oh, I'm going to get it. I'm going to get it. But, uh, as with everything, it all depends on what you're doing. So we actually have a shop not far from here. Who's an OEM and it's perfect for them. Absolutely. Perfect. You know? So it always depends on what your goal is and for what our goals were, it didn't line up. But anyway, so like, I think we spent probably close to a year trying to figure out what equipment we were going to get. And so you're spending a lot of time with these sales people. And so these sales people have given you, you know, uh, 10 plus hours of their, of their time. Uh, some of them much more, uh, especially if they're traveling. Sometimes lunch. Uh, yeah, I am not opposed to a ham sandwich here and there, but, uh, yeah. Um, shouldn't make any million decisions based on it, but yeah. Oh my God. I got a funny story actually. So this, this reminds me of something. So when I was a rep, we always had our trade shows, our big trade show, Apex in Las Vegas. And, um, we had this one, uh, potential customer. I can't remember the name of his company. It's probably good that I don't remember the name of

Chris Gammell: his company, but anyway, he, um, the story type that I'm guessing is coming. Yeah. I'm guessing

Chris Denney: give him names. Yeah, exactly. So he, uh, you know, he's shopping for new pick and place and his shop is big, right? He's going to buy, he's that guy's going to swing a lot of lumber once he makes a decision. So, um, that's a baseball reference for all of you nerds out there like myself. So we, uh, uh, I'm so glad you got the reference. So, uh, yeah. So we were like, Hey, let's take you out to dinner. Now it's Las Vegas. Right. And have you ever been to Vegas?

Chris Gammell: Uh, unfortunately, yes. All right. Yeah. I'm out there for DEF CON every year. Yeah. All right.

Chris Denney: So not, not an awesome town, but a town, uh, uh, you can have a lot of fun in and you can eat some great food and you can eat some expensive food. You can spend so much money. So he, so we take him out to dinner. And at the time I was representing Panasonic and, uh, Panasonic had money to spend, especially for potential customer like him. And they wanted to take him to this restaurant that was, you know, um, what do they call it? Uh, a la carte, right? It's, it's, you order your steak and your side. The steak is $120 by itself. Yes, exactly. Kobe beef from Japan, uh, flown in that morning. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. So, um, so the meal alone probably would have been expensive, but anyway, he's like, I want to get some wine. We're like, yeah, of course, gotta have some wine. Right. So he orders a bottle of wine, first bottle of wine, $250. We're like, whoo. Okay. $250 bottle of wine. Yep. Next bottle of wine, $500. Like really, really, you're going to be just messing with you. Oh God. You know? And so then, uh, we had a great dinner. It was like $2,000 for like six people. Um, yeah, well you buy $750 worth of wine. So, uh, and, and that wasn't it, you know, it was, uh, there was more bottles after that, but those are the two Opus one bottles that stood out that night. So the next night he's there with Samsung and the next night he's there with Fuji and the next night he's there with Steven. He's just playing everybody. The guy's getting a thousand dollar meal every night. He's drinking a thousand dollars worth of wine every night. Oh my God. I mean, that's, uh, yeah, that's, that's not great. So yeah. So you get that kind of stuff, you know what I mean? But that was, uh, that was kind of the fun side of being a sales rep because then you get these big companies like Panasonic who are buying you, uh, you know, thousand dollars worth of wine. So, uh, yeah, I didn't complain about it. I mean, what is the scale of like,

Chris Gammell: like those kinds of sales too? Like what, what, what was the scale of those?

Chris Denney: So the initial sale would easily have been a million dollars, probably one and a half million dollars for that initial sale. Um, but then after that, it's all the feeders. Yeah. All the add-ons. Well, nickels and dimes. Yeah. So the feeders, including the feeders and the software, probably a million and a half. And then, but then over the period of time, that would have been easily a million dollar per year account. Um, so you're looking at, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah. You're, you're looking at literally doing, you know, just showing up once a month and, uh, you know, buying some people, some donuts and collecting a, you know, $50,000 check, uh, $50,000 check a year from that. You know what I mean? So you, you don't screw around with that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean sales that like, like I said, capital expense stuff too. It's just like, that is big money. It's big money. Yeah. It's big money. I absolutely love it. I

Chris Denney: really do love it. I miss, I do miss being a rep. Like I really enjoyed being a rep. Um, I would, I would probably be willing to go back to being a rep if, if I felt that the, that it was really there, you know what I mean? But I, my heart's just not in it. Like, I just don't see the, I don't see that sales model working.

Chris Gammell: The value you would provide.

Chris Denney: Yeah. It just, it just, I always felt uncomfortable with it. Like how am I, how, how can I justify collecting a $50,000 check a year for doing, you know, just buying a couple of cases of donuts every now and then, you know what I mean? Just felt so gross. Just felt gross. Um, I prefer to work all the way to the bank. Yeah, exactly. I prefer to work like ridiculously hard and, uh, get paid reasonably well for it. Yeah. That's, that is the engineer's motto right

Chris Gammell: there. Exactly. Yeah. So, okay. So then how did this transition? So, so you found, you found, uh, Worthington cause you were trying to sell to them. Yeah. And then you show up and you're like, Hey, I'd like to nerdify your process. Is that kind of the, it's so true. That's so true. So it was

Chris Denney: like, they, they, they wanted to go from where they were to something significantly different. Right. And, um, so when Neil and Rafal bought Worthington assembly, Worthington assembly was founded in like the seventies, 70, uh, 76 or 77. I can't remember exactly. It's actually a really funny story that was founded by a husband and wife who, uh, they were, uh, living on a hippie commune, and basically growing, uh, growing apples. Um, you can't see my air quotes, but you can,

Chris Gammell: you can hear my air quotes. Right. Right. Some kind of, some kind of, uh,

Chris Denney: crop. Yes. Cash crop. Exactly. Yeah. You grow apples so that, uh, you can provide. So anyway, they, they had a friend who moved out and he started, uh, he was working in medical device companies like, Hey, I need these circuit boards built. And the owners were like, well, you know, the people who went on to own Worthington assembly are like, we don't know how to build circuit boards. He's like, nah, it's fine. Here's a soldering iron. You'll, you'll figure it out. Oh my God. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Man. And this is like Marvel when certain, some companies are just founded on like that. What could possibly go wrong? And then everything goes wrong, but still at the end, there's,

Chris Denney: there's a company. Totally. Totally. So, so they, they named the company moronics because they were a couple of morons and they were making circuit boards. No, absolutely. Are you serious? Spell it for me. M O R O N I C S. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, they were growing apples.

Chris Gammell: Jesus. So they, they started calling up and be like, yes, I, I didn't, I needed to do a reorder of a solder, please. So yeah. What's the company name? Yeah. Yeah. Moronics. Yep. So shortly after

Chris Denney: that, they realized they should change it to something more professional and they named it after the town they were in, in Worthington. So they named it Worthington assembly. And, uh, you know, it was just a awesome, cool little mom and pop shop with just local family friends and people in town. And Hey, this is a circuit board and this is a soldering iron. And here's how you put this stuff together. So job creators. Oh, it was super cool. Yeah. It's just what an, that's great. An awesome, awesome couple, uh, Tom and Barb just can't say enough good things about them there. They wanted to retire. They wanted to volunteer. Um, and they do volunteer, they do so much stuff for local community or super cool. Um, and the guys I work for now, they were outsourcing to Worthington assembly where they were, uh, and overheard that the owners were interested in selling and they're like, Hey, yeah, let's, uh, let's talk. So they bought the company. Um, I simplified that greatly, but, uh,

Chris Gammell: yeah, no, and that's the other details are more business podcast. Exactly. So they bought the

Chris Denney: company and ran it for a few years through the really hard times, you know, like 2006, 2007, 2008, all those, all those tough years. And, um, they, they did pretty well. So that's great. Uh, what they, uh, were interested in doing though, is kind of bringing it to, you know, um, the 21st century, so to speak. And we met each other at a trade show and stayed connected and they knew I had a lot of experience and equipment and process and technology. And, uh, eventually, uh, I agreed and, uh, it worked for myself, worked for my wife and, uh, it was, it was, it was great. And it's been so much fun. Uh, really honestly has been a lot of fun. Um, kind of taking it from where it was to where it is today. And we have just had a blast and

Chris Gammell: absolute blast doing it. So I want to hear the specifics about Worthington eventually, but I'd actually like to get a commentary because you've, you know, because you've seen across the industry too. What is the state of assembly houses in the U S right now? I mean, I could have given you a

Chris Denney: really good answer seven years ago before I worked for Worthington assembly, because I was in them all

Chris Gammell: the time. I mean, that's okay. I mean, you could start there. I mean, I'm sure you have a feel for it now and you, you're obviously in it. So you see other, the other sides of it. Yeah. And I'd be interested in that too. But like my site on all this stuff, it's just that it, they're there, but they're, you know, they're not advertising as that much. And when they are, it's for big jobs to try and get, because like, that's what actually pays the bills. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, you hit

Chris Denney: the, you, you kind of hit the nail on the head. I would agree with that. It's, um, you know, we always say around here, like you want, um, a lot of these shops, they're looking for two or three big accounts, you know, that is 80% of their business and they just keep those people happy. And whatever floats in on top is great, you know, and they're, they're maintaining their 50 employees or whatever it is. And they're just, you know, living the good life. They're cranking boards. That's, and that's the main thing, right? Cranking boards. What do you mean by cranking boards? Exactly.

Chris Gammell: Like, like just churning out lots of boards. 90% utilization and, uh, not a lot of line changes and that kind of thing. Is that, is that? God, no, not at all. Oh, okay. Then I, I thought that was, so that's good. That's my misconception. So what is it, what is it actually like that?

Chris Denney: Maybe automotive, right? So like, maybe if you've got some automotive suppliers, they might be doing that kind of stuff, but no way it is all it, at least from my experience and what I've seen, it's, it's short run stuff. It's, you know, so even though, so even though you do have those two or three cush accounts, um, they are, um, you know, they may have a hundred bombs. And so you're constantly, you know, like, yeah, we need 50 of these next week and we need 25 of those. And you're just kind of keeping them afloat. You're never building 25,000 of anything,

Chris Gammell: you know? Uh, so, oh, and so rare to see that. So when you say that two or three accounts, you're saying that those, those aren't necessarily the, the only accounts that are running 80% of the time. You're saying that that funds, that's more like that's funding the company. Oh yeah, exactly. Okay. Okay. So I, I took that to mean 80% of the time they're running those machines,

Chris Denney: they're running their machines on those. Oh no, no, no. I just meant like if they're, if they're making $10 million a year, 8 million of it is coming from three customers.

Chris Gammell: I see. Okay. And so they might only be running a month out of the year, but they still might be making enough money to, to cover costs or whatever, whatever it is. If you, if you're talking line

Chris Denney: utilization, no, no, if you're talking line utilization, you might be right. It might only be, you know, one month's worth of how, however long that equipment could actually run. Yeah, totally.

Chris Gammell: Uh, you're not far off the mark. So why is it like that? So maybe I don't, I mean, so I, I should probably give my background here because it's pretty lame. Uh, so I was at Keithley and they had onsite CMs. They, they, the CM was, they, they did all their vertically integrated. That was great until, until they stopped doing that when they got bought. And that's when I left, um, because I was, I was doing manufacturing stuff. I didn't want to do outside of that. Uh, and then ABB did outsource. Um, and then I didn't work for hardware companies anymore. And so then my own stuff, you know, like I've done, uh, I've done some short run stuff, but nothing, you know, nothing super huge. So yeah, I mean, yeah, I, I, I, I guess it's kind of foreign to me.

Chris Denney: Yeah. So I can give you an example of like where Wyrlington assembly was before, um, you know, a few years ago. Um, it was really like two or three really good customers and you were working on those two or three customers products pretty much 80% of the time. Um, but it was never like big volumes, right. It was, it's always like, you know, 15 of those and 50 of these, and maybe, you know, you get a 200 piece order. Oh my God. How are we going to handle a 200 piece order? You know? Yeah. Yeah. And, and, uh, I mean, those were, that were a very different company today, but I mean, but yeah, that was kind of how it was. And honestly, so when I was a rep and when I was selling equipment and stuff, it was super common to go into shops and just like never see anything run. Like, like, Oh yeah. I would go in there and I'm, and I would think I would walk away going, how, how do they survive? How are they making any money? How are those lights on? Yeah, seriously. Like, you know, you roll up and there's a BMW in the parking lot and you're like, who, what, what equipment is running to pay for that BMW?

Chris Gammell: Well, that's, that's, they threw that in with the, with the huge purchase of the picket place,

Chris Denney: you know? Yeah, exactly. So, uh, yeah, it was just, it was so strange. I, I, I would leave places all the time and go, man, I don't understand. And by contrast, I would go to places and they'd be humming. Right. And I would never see anybody. I'd see like one guy and everybody else was working their tail off. You know, they were all stuck in corners and they were doing stuff. And it was like, Oh man, like these, these guys actually have stuff moving. You know what I mean? Like they, they know what they're doing. And it was, it was awesome to see like the good, the bad, the ugly. So what was the difference between them though? Yeah. So just really thoughtful sort of, uh, a really thoughtful process with everything that they did. Right. So like, rather than just like, boom, here's a new machine. All right, guys, figure it out. You know, they would like, all right, if we're going to buy this machine, how are we going to use it? Like, and, and how are we going to put it in our floor and how, and how are we going to feed the machine? How are we going to unload the machine? Uh, you know, like, so they would just, they wouldn't just buy a machine, but they would buy all the automation around the machine because you would go to shops. I can't tell you, I can't, I've probably literally been to a hundred different, uh, CMs and OEMs in my career and at least a hundred. And I would say I have seen maybe 15, maybe 20 of those companies had something besides a table or a cardboard ramp catching circuit boards out of the reflow oven. Oh, wow. Right. You were like a person who's going, or a person. Ooh, hot. Yeah, exactly. No, no joke. Absolutely. And, uh, and it was like, it blew my mind. I remember the first time I actually saw something catching boards out of the reflow oven. I was like, Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Like, you know, I was like, that's really, yeah, exactly. And, um, and then I remember, I remember going to this one shop in Connecticut and like, I just, every time I went there, machines were running and nobody was in front of them. Right. Nobody, nobody was near the machine and the machines were just running. And you're saying this is a good thing. Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Uh, cause machines aren't expensive. People are expensive. Right. And, um, and I just remember always being blown away. Like, okay, these guys know what they're doing. And I would just, you know, I love to spend time there to just kind of see how they did stuff. And they were just smart about like, yeah, we're going to, we're going to load this machine with our 15 boards. It doesn't have to be 5,000, right? We're going to, we're going to have a buffer before this machine with 15 boards. And, uh, we're going to have an unloader for this machine that can hold those 15 boards and we're going to hit go and we're going to walk away, you know? And it was like, Oh, come back after a sandwich. Yeah, exactly. It was like, Oh, that's, that's how you do things. You know what I mean? And then you go to another shop and they had conveyors loading and unloading the machines and people were walking around doing other more value added stuff and machines were working away. And you're like, Oh yeah, that's how you do stuff. And you, you'd go to, I would go to so many shops and you would just see people manually doing everything, manually loading and unloading machines constantly. And it just sort of was like, I, I don't, I don't get it. Why job creators, Chris, come on, man. There's better jobs than that, man. There's better jobs than that. I know. Well, that's, that is the argument for automation in the first place. Totally. Oh, I'm, I'm a, I'm a firm believer in, uh, please robots take my job. I'm a

Chris Gammell: firm believer. That's right. Um, so, uh, so, well, so the way you were talking about it though, is the way it sounds to me is that utilization in my experience, it was utilization is more of a sales issue and more of a scheduling issue than it is just a equipment piece. Is that, is that a, another bad assumption on my part? No, that, that can definitely be true. I mean,

Chris Denney: sales are, you know, um, for most companies, sales are, are your bottleneck, right? You're always hurting for more business. Um, and scheduling too, like, you know, you can't start building something unless you have all the parts and you have the stencil and you have the circuit

Chris Gammell: boards, right? Exactly. Right. Yeah. You need a hundred percent of the parts usually, not, not always, but you, in a best case scenario, you have a hundred percent of the parts and they're all being placed at the same time. And so if digi-key is backordered on a resistor, it's like, well, that's right. Wait until that resistor gets here. You got it. Yeah, totally. Otherwise you have expensive, uh, you know, meat based, uh, life forms, uh, doing, doing the, doing the assembly instead.

Chris Denney: We like to call those people, Chris. That's a, we call them our people, our team members.

Chris Gammell: I'm, I'm definitely, I'm regularly eating human food and I am a human myself. So,

Chris Denney: yeah. Uh, but totally like, so you're, uh, yeah, you've got to, so you've got to work like the office is a, uh, uh, you know, a really important part of that whole thing, like scheduling, making sure everything's coming in and, and, you know, we're, we're going to be able to build all this stuff on time, making sure your suppliers ship when they say they're going to ship. Cause believe it or not, not every supplier does. And, uh, you know, it's, it's, it can be tough. Like, and I, when I say supplier, I don't mean like, you know, Joe Schmo's a wire shop. I mean like your digi keys and your arrows and your avnets, you know, like, Hey, um, remember when I ordered this three days ago? Uh, why hasn't it shipped? Oh yeah. He was, uh, he was on vacation. Uh, and, uh, so normally he processes your order and it's like, what, but you're, you're a multi-billion dollar company. What do you mean he's on vacation? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the problem. The, you know,

Chris Gammell: the, the, the, the meat controllers again, you know, people in the loop. That's, that's never

Chris Denney: a good thing. Oh, absolutely. And which is why, uh, uh, uh, you know, uh, I know you have certain sponsorships, but I will, I will give a shout out to digi key as being an incredibly efficient and just like mind blowing company. Um, but they, they, we love, we love, we love, we love them all, but I have, I have a special place in my heart for digi key. We, we went to visit them a couple of years ago. Oh yeah. Wow. Deep river, deep river falls. Yes. And, uh, middle of nowhere. I've never felt so, uh, claustrophobic in my life from the expanse of, uh, nothing, nothing, nothing, and then thief river falls and then nothing, nothing, nothing.

Chris Gammell: You get that too. Like I get actually from the, the nothingness, not that's what I'm exactly what I'm talking about. It's like creepy. It's like, I just imagine myself running across

Chris Denney: a empty field and never move. Exactly. Totally. So, but no, what, uh, is a beautiful town, a awesome little town. And we heard, we got a chance to talk to some folks and they were saying, yeah, like, um, I forget who it was. If it was like Panasonic or Xilinx or somebody, or, you know what I think, I think it might've been like microchip or somebody like that. They, uh, digi key killed their numbers. Right. And so they're like, Hey, we want to buy the sales team some pizza, you know, just to thank them. And, uh, the ownership or the leadership I should say was like, um, they're like, yeah, great. Um, but you got to buy everybody else pizza. And there's hundreds of employees. There's a lots of pizza and you're in thief river. Right. So it's not like you can pull from, uh, it's not like you're in Manhattan and you can pull from like 20 different pizza shops. So Pizza Hut had to shut down for like three days to prepare. Oh my God. I don't know if it was three days. I could be exaggerating, but I think, but whatever it is, that's enough to make a story. It was like a legit, like a full day. Pizza Hut just like accepted no order so that they could deliver everything to, uh, so much cheese. Totally. So they, uh, but that, yeah, I, and I, I, you know, that's a cool thing that, you know, wow, that's what a cool company that they would be like, yeah, sales team killed it, but everybody else benefits from it because at the end of the day, why did the sales team kill it? Well, it's because everybody else made sure this stuff shipped, you know what I mean? And they, they built that reputation that everything else shipped. Um, and just, man, that place, oh my God. They basically built a conveyor, like a massive, massive conveyor, like rectangular shaped conveyor. And then they built a building around it. That's digi key. Nice. It's unbelievable. Like, oh, and more buildings I hear too. More. Yeah. They're a huge expansion, which, uh, yeah, but they, it's unbelievable. It was what a cool tour. It was such a cool tour. Um, but yeah, so making sure you, you, you, okay. Yeah. Come back down, Chris. We're down here. Come on. We want to talk about your company. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Uh, we're pretty boring compared to digi key. Plus me, trust me. So we just, you know, just for now you, you, you work up to that. So I think, I think we're pretty cool. I think we're pretty cool, but, uh, digi key is real cool. So, um, but yeah, so we were saying the importance of suppliers, the state of, well, yeah, that,

Chris Gammell: and I, I think just more generally like the, I'm trying to just get a feel for CMs in general, right? So kind of framing the state of the world as it was and, you know, and things are always changing in all those states. So I think it's interesting to hear, maybe if you can give a quick picture of what Worthington was like when you got there. Yeah. So like, so what was the

Chris Denney: everyday there? Right. So the everyday was, there was, uh, 11 people, maybe 12. Um, and we had a couple of pick and place machines and we had like a little clamshell reflow oven and, uh, like it was

Chris Gammell: a nice reflow oven. Like it was a nice big industrial. That means that it, it folds open basically when

Chris Denney: you need to service it. It wasn't like an inline or service it when you load boards in it. Yeah. Just when you're like loading boards, you load them, like the clamshell opens pneumatically, you put the boards in and you hit a button, the clamshell closes pneumatically and Oh, no conveyor, no conveyor. No, no, no, no. So, uh, it was funny the first year I worked here, they w they're like, all right, uh, we got to get a reflow oven. And, uh, so I just had the utmost confidence in the company I represented and their reflow oven. So I bought that reflow oven and, uh, as it, once it arrived and we got it all hooked up and everything, I looked at Neil and Raffaello and I said, all right, guys, it's been an inside job, but you guys would never buy anything from me. I figured I had to get hired for you guys to buy a piece of equipment. I'm out of here. No. So, um, but yeah, so then I was expecting it was going to like go the other way and like, it just, you're like, Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. So it was funny. The true story, the, the reflow oven that, um, we, we have, uh, and probably not many people know this, but it was more or less designed for Apple. Um, you know, with their, with their kind of expectations and demands. Um, and they bought lots of them, lots and lots and lots of them. I know because I was trying to sell them and I'd get 50, 50 week lead times. Like, what do you mean? I can't deliver a machine to my customer for 50 weeks. They're like, well, we have a customer who's, uh, tied up. It's just a big pizza oven. Come on, man. Apple comes in. They're like, how many of, how many of these can you build a month? And they're like, Oh, I don't know, maybe 30. They're like, we'll take 40. You know, that's how they roll. Yep. Right. So, uh, so anyway, um, but yeah, so we had a couple like, and then manually loaded, manually unloaded, pick and place machines, manually loaded, manually unloaded, reflow oven, a manual stencil printer, meaning, you know, holding the squeegee blades with your hand and drawing it across the stencil, you know, aligning it by hand. Okay. So not repeatable as well. Right. Not,

Chris Gammell: not repeatable, um, repeatable as the operator. Uh, wait, so I missed the part about, you said pick and play or sorry, the pick and place is also manual. So like it just, you just had like a jig

Chris Denney: that was set up in there. No. So it was manually loaded. So you had to, you know, there's no conveyors. There's no automation around the pick and place machine. Right. So he's, he's taking the board and he's plopping the board on the conveyor and then hitting a button and it, it draws it in and

Chris Gammell: builds it. Um, Oh, I see. I see. So you're just saying between machines, it's still on,

Chris Denney: it's still on rails. It's still being pulled out. Yeah. So, and then it was just sort of a spaghetti diagram of, okay, then it goes over here and then it goes over here and then it goes over here and there was no real flow to it. Um, and so the first thing we did is we just redid the floor. We got a good, we got a good flow and then we bought some conveyors and we tied things together. And then, and then just, you know, seven years later, you buy another pick and place, you buy another stencil printer and you buy another oven and you buy another selective soldering machine. And you just, you know, you, you are where, where, where we are today. Um, you know, more or less doubling our revenue, keeping head count, um, less than double, um, uh, which is important, right? Cause that means you're more efficient and, uh, yeah, still a small shop. Uh, but very, very, very, very efficient shop.

Chris Gammell: Like, could you give us an idea of, of what? So, okay. So you said, and I believe that you guys are working towards this, um, or are already there, but like what it was, so then what is, what is the best case scenario for CM? Like, what is, what is the best CM in the world look like? Because I think a lot of people, so like, I'm just trying to kind of give a picture for the people that are listening who have never been in or near one as well. Right. Yeah. So maybe a best case scenario as well. I mean, I know that we're, you know, 40 plus minutes in now, but what is, what is the best CM look like?

Chris Denney: Um, a long rectangular building with a, with receiving on one end and shipping on the other and no bends and turns or walls in between, right. And parts go in one side. Exactly. And finished parts and PCBs product comes out the other. And what you, uh, do you want like, so, you know, okay. So my audience right now is, yeah. Step us, step us, step us through. I mean,

Chris Gammell: like step us through what are the stages as well. Cause my audience right now is Chris Gammell,

Chris Denney: who's been to CMs, but I forget that not, not Chris Gammell's audience may not have been to a CM before. Right. So, uh, apologize for assuming too much. Um, so typically what will happen is all the parts come in the door, somebody in a receiving department kits, all those parts so that they're coming from all kinds of different suppliers, they're coming through all different shipments at all different days. And then at the end of the day, they need to put all of those parts into a kit. They need to release that kit to, um, uh, you know, say, okay, green light, you guys can build this. And so what'll happen is in one section, you'll have an area where they're actually loading these parts onto feeders, which we discussed earlier, right. Feeders are the biggest expense. Um, and they're, uh, those feeders go into a pick and place machine, but, uh, you got to get that done ahead of time because the pick and place machine is still running right. Ideal. And a feeder as well is

Chris Gammell: basically something that takes the parts off the reel on the component, the components that are on a reel and then actually advances that reel as well. We should also say that.

Chris Denney: This will work great if I describe it and then you be the glossary. Okay. That's good. Perfect. I call myself the foil or the dumb person, but yes, we can also call me the glossary. It's perfect. I love it. So, um, so, but the pick and place machine's got to be running while you're doing that, right? You don't want to be like stopping your machine so that you can load feeders. That's kind of crazy. Why would you do that? Right. So you need to have plenty of feeders so that you can load two or three jobs ahead of time.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. Right. And when they're 500 to a thousand dollars each, right. Cause they're pretty advanced

Chris Denney: pieces of machinery. They are their own little machine. A lot of them have computers built into them that are communicating with other computers. Oh yeah. Um, it may, I suppose if one jams up,

Chris Gammell: it's worth it to have a computer in there. Right. Cause if one jams up, you take down the whole

Chris Denney: machine and then everything gets screwed. Yeah. So a lot of times they, they may just be sort of the cartridge, right? So like the Nintendo, the Nintendo is not complete until you put a cartridge in it. Um, and so the feeder is sort of the same way. This feeder sort of completes it. And it says, yeah, I'm, I've got all the information in here. It may not necessarily have a microchip on it, but it's got something that says, you know, this is what I am and this is what I'm doing. Um, but anyway, so yeah, you're loading all those feeders. Uh, and then when you actually are ready to run it, um, you have a stencil printer, which I think everybody is familiar with the concept of what a stencil is. If they're not necessarily familiar with what an SMT stencil is. Um, but you have a stencil printer that automatically aligns, uh, the stencil to the circuit board. So you have all these tiny little fine pitch parts and everything, and you've got to get all your little aperture cuts in your stencil lined up over the copper where you need everything. Um, and so you, uh, you get your stencil loaded in your stencil printer. You put your circuit board in there, you print the solder paste onto the circuit board. Now you've got, I'm going to run through this really quick. Now you, now you've got, uh, now you've got solder paste on there. Now paste is a slurry of, of kind of tacky flux and, uh, powdered metal, uh, powdered solder. And, uh, then that stencil printer feeds a pick and place machine, which uses a vacuum to pick components out of those feeders, out of those reels and places them onto the paste. And the paste is sticky and tacky. So those parts don't go anywhere. And when it's done with that whole process, it goes into a reflow oven, which, um, melts all that solder in place at a very, very, very specific and very tightly controlled rate. So you don't destroy your board, uh, more importantly, destroy your components. And out the other end comes your assembled circuit board. Now there's always through hole and stuff like that. But so you were asking about like an ideal CM, like, like what is the pinnacle that we're always trying to achieve? Um, the pinnacle that we're always trying to achieve is that all those processes happen without people having to do anything. Right. So, right. So literally the truck shows up and then the truck shows up again and there's no demons. Yeah. That would be, that would be a miracle of innovation,

Chris Gammell: but, uh, you should, you should do that. You know, if you get that figured out, you know,

Chris Denney: that would be great. I, I think, uh, uh, one Mr. CTO, I'm just saying. I think one Mr. Foxconn is

Chris Gammell: probably the closest to that than anybody. Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Um, but in the United States

Chris Denney: where we're not building cell phones, you know, a million a week or whatever, uh, come on a million a day, a day. Yeah. And, um, we're, you know, we're doing lower volume stuff. Um, and, uh, so we just want to keep those machines running as often as possible. And so what you really, really focus on all the time is what can I do off the machine versus what do I have to do on the machine? Right. Because if I have to do this on the machine, that means I'm interrupting it from doing its valuable work. So how much of this can I pull off the machine? How much work, how much prep can I do elsewhere while the machine is running? And so you're always focused on that. And then you're always focused on never letting that machine stop running. So what does that mean? It means you're, you're, you've got automation built around that machine to feed and unload that machine, right? So that can be bears, that can be magazines, that can be buffers, that can be all kinds of things, but you just want to keep those things flush with stuff all the time. And then you, then you want to have like a rolling changeover. So, uh, you know, you may have, you know, some of the bigger ones, they may have 10 machines in a row. Well, uh, the first machine. And when you say

Chris Gammell: that you mean 10 pick in places in a row, so you still put the stents, this solder paste on once, but then because you have a limited number of cartridges on each pick in place, you might have to run for a board that has what? 800 components with a hundred uniques. You might have to do two or three.

Chris Denney: Were you, were you standing over my shoulder a few minutes earlier? Cause that's exactly, almost exactly the numbers of the job I was working on. I did not. Yeah. Yeah. It's like 105 uniques and like 850 placements or something. So, um, but yeah, so what, so what you're trying to do is while those machines are still running, the machines upstream have finished, right? The stencil printer's done. He's already printed all your boards. So now you're trying to change that over while you're picking place machines are still running so that by the time you're done changing it over, you've already printed your next job. And you're changing over your pick and place while the last pick and place is still running and you're building your next job and the machines never stop. Right. That's kind of like a, like a

Chris Gammell: formula F1, like pit crew kind of thing. Absolutely. We talk about it all the time. The one person, the one person who's just unscrewing the tires. That's all they do. That's it. And they do it as best they can. That's it. You hit the nail on the head. We actually

Chris Denney: use that illustration all the time. The formula one pit crew or the NASCAR crew, depending, you gotta, gotta speak to your audience, right? You know? So, uh, some guys around here like the NASCAR, some guys like the F1.

Chris Gammell: I was going to say, well, I was going to say, I don't know if, I don't know how much for the either crowd is here, but you know, welcome to all of our motorsport friends.

Chris Denney: And if you're into lawnmower racing, I'm sure you have tire changes there too. So, so, uh, so yeah, that's the ideal, but that is the, that is the airbrushed, photoshopped, perfect, you know, it's never realistic.

Chris Gammell: And in order to do that too, you also needed to have all those parts set up. You also needed to have the next client set up. You also needed to schedule it so that, you know, everybody's ready to go. And so you got it, that is a best case scenario. It seems like that is the best case

Chris Denney: scenario, but that's just one small aspect, right? But this is going to lead me into something else. So that's, that's a factory, right? So that's like the operation, that's the actual physical building of it. But like I said, there's everything all around it, right? So you can be the most efficient company in the world. Like, and so Chris, you can say to me, like, Hey, I've got, you know, the next, uh, Arduino I want to, you know, I want to make, um, how much is it going to cost me to make this? And I'm going to be like, I'd love to tell you, uh, you'll hear from me in two weeks. Right. Right. Exactly. So that's part of efficiency, right? Wouldn't you agree? Like at the end of the day, that's part of your efficiency because, because what the, what you want to know, Chris, what the engineer wants to know is I'm okay. I finished my design. When can I

Chris Gammell: get boards in my hand? Right. You don't care about it. And also how, how, how, how few, how few people do I have to talk to? No offense to your former sales salesiness, but, uh,

Chris Denney: Oh no. Yeah. I don't want to talk to a salesperson. Please don't call us. Like totally. Like if you call us, you're going to catch us in a grumpy mood because we don't want to be on the phone. We want to be like getting stuff done. Right. Well, yeah. You're saying that as Worthington, but I'm just saying some places are like,

Chris Gammell: no, no, no, you have to call us to get set up. No, don't call us. Please. I'm like, I don't want to, I don't want to.

Chris Denney: Yeah. Yeah. Some places they may want to know, please, for the love of God, just email us. Like, just don't, you know, text us, just don't email us. Um, or just don't, just don't call us, I should say. Uh, but, and that's, yeah, that's us. That's Worthington assembly. But yeah, so you have to be efficient on that end. Right. So you've got to be very efficient at quoting because at the end of the day, how fast your CM is at giving you a price matters to how quickly you're going to get that board. Right. Cause you don't care about everything in between. You just need your finished

Chris Gammell: circuit board. Well, and also there's also the, uh, I was of course, peeking at the, uh, you know, the page for Worthington and, uh, you guys say we make stuff, mostly circuit boards, but also anything that needs to go with that circuit board, which means that from a quoting perspective, that makes it even tougher because now it's not like, Oh, I have 800 placements, a hundred are unique. I know how many feeders I need. I know how many parts cost, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now

Chris Denney: it's like, and there's a cable drawing. Okay. Yeah. A lot of good luck. When you come to us and you say there's a cable drawing, we say, okay, do you need a thousand? Cause otherwise we're not interested. You know what I mean? But when it comes to circuit boards, because we're so efficient at it, we're like, yeah, we'll build one. Yeah, sure. You need 10, you need five. We'll build five, 10, one, whatever. Yeah. Uh, that's fine because that is our bread and butter. That is what we do. But a lot of times, like we said earlier in this conversation, we have two or three big accounts and they need wire harnesses and they need box built and they need testing. And it's like, yeah, we're going to do all those things for them because we get a million bucks a year from them. That becomes a customer

Chris Gammell: service at that point. Right. I mean, you're like, yeah, keep the, keep the customer. Exactly. It's,

Chris Denney: it's exactly, it's just servicing a greater cause. You got it. Do you guys need a BMW? How about pizza for your whole staff? Absolutely. Uh, but yeah, so, um, it's so funny that you even mentioned that because, uh, the, we've been talking internally about how, like, yeah, we really got to update our website. We don't want to tell people we do, we do cable harnesses in box builds and stuff. We just want to do circuit boards, but yeah, it hasn't been updated in a long time.

Chris Gammell: And that's an interesting thing for, um, for, for young engineers as well is that like, I think it's, it's also important to understand certain CMs want certain types of business. Like I think, you know, I don't think you're a salesperson, but at certain CMs that I've talked to in the past, the salespeople will say, yeah, we do everything. And then the answer is, well, the price is going to be for the cable is going to be a lot different than whatever they want to be doing, you know? And then like, you got to go to a cable manufacturer, but like, again, as a young engineer, I didn't know any of these things. I'm just like, I'll just send out my quotes, see what happens. And it's like, everything's so expensive. Why? It's because you're not going to the right people, right? You're not going to the, you do have to kind of split up

Chris Denney: your work and it's part of not going to the right people. It's part of exactly like you said, it's partly not going to the right people, but it's partly like you're just in a, you're just in a weird place. Like you only need 15 of that. It's, it's really tough to hire somebody to make 15 of that. You know what I mean? Um, that's true. And, uh, yeah, you're willing to pay for it for a circuit board because it's hard to make a circuit board, but a lot of times it's been on the wire harness. You can probably bang that out yourself. Like it may be honestly, it's super valuable to make stuff yourself initially. Like our best customers, our best customers are people who have actually made a few prototypes on their own because then they're like, Oh yeah, that Oh 603 footprint was horrible. I need to fix that, you know, before we get stuck with it and we go, Hey, by the way, uh, we're spending hours fixing all these things because your footprint was horrible. Oh, you mean, Oh, you meant actually like in the, in the layout itself, it was bad in the layout. Exactly. So, um, but yeah, so we're, you know, I'm, I'm using this whole idea of like all these other things being, um, important because it segues into what really changed Worthington assembly. And if you don't mind me talking about circuit hub and that partnership.

Chris Gammell: Well, but I don't, I, uh, first, before you do, I'll, I will make a call back way, way back

Chris Denney: when Andy said it was on the, it was on the amp. Exactly. I, I, he was, he's been on and, uh, and oh my God, how things have changed. So I think I have, uh, uh, Chris Gammell to thank for connecting us. I think, uh, he was, I was wondering about that. I remember a conversation.

Chris Gammell: I think I was talking to you in a parking lot when it was pouring rain in Cleveland.

Chris Denney: No, it wasn't me. No, I wasn't in Cleveland. I've been in Cleveland once in my life and I was 21 years old. No, no, no, no, no, no. I was on the phone. I was on the phone. Right. And I think I was talking

Chris Gammell: to you and I don't remember why, why I think Andrew may have asked for an intro or you asked for an intro

Chris Denney: or something, but I, Andrew, Andrew probably asked for an intro. Um, and then he called me. Uh, and at first I was sort of like, yeah, that sounds cool. Like I agree. We should, you know, that kind of thing needs to be done and I would love to do it. And, but cause here's the thing, you get people calling us all the time being like, yeah, I got this great new thing. And you just get jaded, right? It's just like, eventually you're just like, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, you're like, I got work to do. I got it. Yeah. It's like, that's the great, that's the next great new thing. Okay. You're like, you get, you totally get jaded from hearing all these things, but Andrew like had a legitimate pitch. He was like, this is what I think we need to do. And, and I was like, yes, absolutely. That must exist. Um, and if you're going to do it, we'd love to be a part of it, but I never thought it was going to go anywhere. Um, and then one day he called us and he's like, yeah, uh, I got my flights booked and just want to make sure I got the address, right. I'll see you guys on Tuesday. We're like, Oh yeah. Uh, sure. Uh, yeah. Come on out. And at first we're all like, this guy's just going to show up and like, like I got crap to do, man. Like I can't just be like hanging out with him, like talking about stuff. Like we got to get work done, but you know, uh, it was hard at first to believe, um, uh, it's hard at first to take a lot of people seriously. Cause like I said, you get jaded over time. Uh, but he was, he was totally legitimate. And, uh, um, should I explain a little bit about what circuit hub is your, is your audience? Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. So, uh, I, that was like seven years ago. That was probably, so our partnership with them, I think began in 2013, 2014, something like that. Um, so yeah, about, about that long ago. Um, but basically what they did is they said, yeah, you know, those, the two weeks it takes to get that quote. Like Chris doesn't care that it takes two weeks for his CM to quote him. He just wants the circuit boards. Um, circuit hub said, well, we have figured out a way to get that done immediately. Right. Like just that, that's, that's, that's a problem a computer can solve. We shouldn't have humans in the way of that. Um, and he did, I mean, it was just fricking like he showed it to us. He showed us a demo and we were both like, Oh crap. We were like, we're sort of thinking like we, it's just that sort of moment. Like, um, I imagine, uh, a lot of people experienced when they first saw, you know, uh, uh, a car or something. They're like, you know, say you're a furrier or something and you're, you're, you're, or a farrier, furrier. What's a horse guy. I forget what they're called. Uh, let's say farrier.

Chris Gammell: Let's say farrier. Say yeah. Furrier is someone who dresses people in fur. I don't know.

Chris Denney: A guy who works on horses. Uh, say you're a guy who works on horses for a living. I see where you're going with this. Yeah. How about a blacksmith? You see a car for the first time. You're like, Oh crap. I I'm in trouble. Right. And that's sort of how we felt was. Yeah. But you might also say, I'm going to go make some wheels. Exactly. Exactly. So we saw what circuit hub was doing with their quoting and we're thinking like, Oh my God, we spend hours doing this and this computer is doing it instantly.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, okay. So quickly explain that. So explain the way things were and, and in for quoting, because that's another big, like you said, it's a big piece and it was two weeks before.

Chris Denney: So what, what was happening when you guys were doing that? So, uh, we would tell you like, uh, Hey, uh, how do you pronounce it? KiCad or KiCad?

Chris Gammell: Oh, touchy, touchy subject, man. I know. That's why I think this interview is over. I'm sorry.

Chris Denney: We got it. We got it. So anyways, so say you're using your EDA tool of choice and, um, you're, you're, you're, you're used to your docs, right? You've got your PCB doc and your, your schematic doc. And, um, and then you say, Hey, I need to get this board built. And you're like, sure. Send us the Gerber's the bomb and the X, Y. And you're like, yeah, no problem. And you hang up and you go, what, what is Gerber's X, Y? And like, what are these things? Right. You have to learn. I'm numb to that stuff. You have to learn what those things are, right. You have to, or, and you have to learn how to export them and you have to learn how to sanity check them because you could have bugs in your exporter and. Oh, even worse when you start messing with your

Chris Gammell: own bomb, right. If you're using the bill material as a control document versus a schematic at the

Chris Denney: touch point of mind. Absolutely. Uh, so, uh, so then you would send that to us and then we would take your bomb and we'd go to all our vendors, um, you know, electronically and we would say, okay, how expensive are all these parts? And, you know, we'd ask you, okay, you want a hundred. All right, great. Um, what color circuit board, what kind of silk screen, what kind of copper weight, you know, what, you know, all this kind of stuff, excuse me. And, um, it's a standard, the standard process

Chris Gammell: of going out and just getting quotes, right. So you're saying by email and the thing that I think of is just spreadsheets, spreadsheets. That's what's crazy to me is like everything was spreadsheets. Yes. You send it off to four different distributors. They're all getting spreadsheets. They send it back. You then say, Oh, well the best prices for components one through 10 are from distributor a and 12, 11 through 20 are from just distributor B. And then you actually split them out too. That's another crazy thing. Like this is, yeah, yeah, we will. I mean, especially if you,

Chris Denney: if there's cost savings, you split them out. But if like, if like, you're only going to spend an extra a hundred bucks, you probably just all buy it from one source, you know, sure. So much easier. So, so that's how it was always done. And it would take us, you know, we'd have a queue and there's, you know, there's only so much a guy can get done in a day. Right. And so just, you keep putting everything on top of the queue and eventually you, as they trickle to the bottom, you send out your quotes. And, and that's still how, I mean, a lot of this stuff works. Right. But circuit hub said, yeah, yeah, yeah. Gerber files, whatever. That's not important. We just want your, your native EDA files. And so just upload those native EDA files. We'll do all the rest. We'll fit. We'll, we'll do all the, we'll figure out all the pricing. We'll figure out how expensive the boards are, how much the assembly is. Now you got to think about like, how, how exactly do you, do you solve that? Because you know, five years ago, five, six years ago, how do you get pricing automatically for all the components? Well, you have to have some kind of electronic API that goes out and does all that. Well, the timing was right because you had companies like Octopart starting. They gave you an API to be able to determine how expensive all the parts are and where they were and whether they were in stock.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. And it didn't, didn't matter though. Like, so, and I guess this is another question about like the, the, the, the mode of it. It's like, that was meant for relatively low runs still.

Chris Denney: Yes. And it, uh, I mean, what's relative, but I mean, there's limits. I mean, there's just limits.

Chris Gammell: Yes, of course, of course. But I'm just saying that like, if you wanted to get like special pricing, which is what a lot of the, the old school style methods are based on, it's like, Oh, I need a discount on, you know, this TI part because I'm buying a hundred thousand of them. Like that's still

Chris Denney: different. That's, and that still happens all the time. That still happens all the time. So yeah, we're talking lower volume stuff. We're talking when you need your prototypes or your short runs, or, you know, you only need a hundred pieces or whatever or less, but, uh, yeah, you still get that. Like we'll still have customers that will send us material. Cause they said, Hey, we got special pricing and we had to buy a full reel, but we only need 10 built. Here's our full reel. You know what I mean? Can you hang on to that for us or something? We go, no, please God. Right. Don't, we don't want to manage your inventory. Um, right. Uh, but yeah, you have to do that kind of stuff. So, um, so yeah, so they figured out like, okay, here's how we quote parts instantly. And that's, that's the key, right? Because Chris wants his boards tomorrow. He doesn't want his boards in three weeks. Chris is delusional if he wants that, but he still wants that.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. Everybody wants it. Right. Yeah. So it's just about squeezing. It's just another efficiency. It's efficiency because you've, you've already made the line efficient. Now you have to

Chris Denney: make the, you gotta make, you gotta make everything else efficient. Right. So, um, so then you got to figure out how to price your circuit boards. Well, the only way to do that is to just, you know, basically take a gamble, like, okay, I think circuit boards are going to cost this much. And so you have your computer automatically calculate the cost of those circuit boards. And then over time, after you've ordered, you know, hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of circuit boards, you build a computer model that says, yeah, this is how much circuit boards cost. And you can pretty much immediately know how much these boards are going to cost now because you've built this enormous database of things, but that takes time. Right. Initially circuit hub was just like, ah, finger in the air. I think they're about this much, you know? And then the assembly side was absolutely the hardest part, right? It was like, how the heck do we figure out the cost to assemble stuff? Um, and, and that's what we, and so how the heck do you, well, that's, so that's why you needed to have Andrew come visit Worthington assembly. We had to sit down and we had to figure out how are we going to build this automatic assembling quoting thing? You know, like how, how can, how can he get a reasonably close number using his computer that matches how much we're going to bill him? Right. And, uh, I can't get into the details of exactly how we worked that out, but we worked it out. And that was like the key thing, right? That was the key thing that made circuit hub work. Um, and well made it work for customers, obviously just like hundreds of hours, thousands of hours of engineering made circuit hub work. But, um, you know, without that sort of partnership, uh, it would have made it really, really difficult for circuit hub to exist and to get accurate pricing. Um, but now, so Chris needs a, he needs a circuit board tomorrow. He can't get it tomorrow, but he can get it in three days, right? So literally from the time you're done designing, you can have a board in your hand in three days. And now that's not possible with a traditional CM because they can't turn a quote in, in an hour. You know what I mean? Uh, it's just, it's just unreasonable. Now I know your listeners are going to say, well, I know one guy who turned a quote in an hour and it's like, well, yeah, but he can't do that for everybody. Right. Like it's yeah. Right. Exactly. And if,

Chris Gammell: and if the word got out that that person was that good, then he'd take over the world. It's going to increase to the amount. Well, I just mean that their business is going to increase to the point where it's no longer, uh, that's no longer. Yeah, exactly. Eventually that

Chris Denney: queue is going to get so big and he can't hire and train people fast enough to, uh, fulfill that queue. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So, uh, so that was super cool. And I mean, um, so is this, is this a solved problem

Chris Gammell: now though? I mean, like that's, doesn't still seem like it, this seems like it took another, uh, you know, it improved, it's a process improvement, but it's not like it didn't solve everything.

Chris Denney: Right. I mean, no, no, I mean, uh, we're engineers. We can never, we can never use, uh, absolutes can we? No. So it didn't solve everything. And it's a, yeah, you're always working on it, improving things. And, but like the quoting system, uh, you know, it's, uh, it's solid. I mean, and people use it all the time. We get, um, orders all the time. You know, I, I can't say to numbers cause I'd be betraying, you know, important information, but we get lots of orders every day for thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. And so, so how does

Chris Gammell: that change then? So how does that change the CM side of things then? So, okay. So now you have, you have this new pipe of, of orders, right? You don't have to talk to people on the phone because obviously you, you, you do not like that. I found out. Phones are the devil. No phones. Um, I'm sorry that we're talking right now. Oh God. Uh, this is a micro phone. It's okay. Cause it has micro in it. Exactly. Yeah. So, uh, so then how does, how does it change? Right. So, so does that allow you to then change that efficiencies like that, um, to do, to do that, that pit pit crew kind of thing, um, like you talked about? Absolutely. So, um, you know, I,

Chris Denney: I can't get into a lot of specifics, but I can give some examples like of how, so now you, you've got your, our customers have, uh, given us all this data, right? You've given us your PCB, you've given us your schematic. Now we have a computer that has normalized all this data and can do awesome stuff with it and can export things in exactly the format we need it to be exported in. Right. So we're not scrubbing Chris Gammell's information and Dave Jones information and John Doe's information. We're all the information is being pre-scrubbed by CircuitHub, right? We don't have to, you know, open it in a spreadsheet and delete this and trim that and, you know, make it all line

Chris Gammell: up to exactly the way you need it for our machines. Standardization you're saying?

Chris Denney: Standardization. It's all being done by a computer, right? So that's one example. That's one example of further efficiencies on our end that CircuitHub gives us, not just the customer facing side of

Chris Gammell: things, right? Can you explain why that was necessary before though? Like what, what, so you're just taking headers off and is this because you're then sending the quotes out again or what?

Chris Denney: Oh no. For like programming machines, right? So you've given us XY data, right? You've given us XY data, but the XY data might be in inches or it might be in millimeters or it might be in thousands or it might be, you know, and it's like, well, all right, we got to translate all this. And, you know, you build macros and you build software and you build all these things to do some of the heavy lifting for you. But at the end of the day, you got to deal with mistakes. You know, you're like, Hey, your bomb says that there should be an R3, but your XY has no R3. Can you tell us what's going on there? You know, that's, that all is eliminated with CircuitHub because everything matches. It's all, it's all being done right from your data, you know?

Chris Gammell: So just the prescript. Okay. Yeah. I see what you're saying. So just really data sources. Yeah.

Chris Denney: Cleaned up data, but then, you know, not just cleaned up data sources, like, like so many other things beyond that. Just think about the fact that now you've got all this data and you've got computers churning on it. You can really do some awesome stuff with it. And you can just really eliminate whole steps from your process because that used to, people used to have to do, and now we don't have to do it anymore. You know?

Chris Gammell: Is this things like, I know you said there's some of the stuff that's sensitive, but like, is this like a jelly bean component? Like, so jelly bean components would be one thing I think of. So if I order a board.

Chris Denney: You mean like R's and C's, jelly, like resistors and capacitors. Okay. I've never heard jelly bean components before.

Chris Gammell: Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. Jelly bean. Yeah. Jelly bean op amps, jelly bean resistors. Yeah. Anything that's like, that's a, you know, a common brand or, you know, like a, you know, TLO 72 or, you know, just a standard. LM370. Yeah, exactly. That kind of thing where there's, you know, 14 vendors for it. Yeah. Um, so does that mean now that, that Worthington now understands from like a higher level analytical perspective of like saying, oh, well, we just got 20 orders in today. A bunch of them have components that are like 18 of them have 10 K resistors on them. We can now bulk order all that stuff and split it out. Is that kind of what you're talking about?

Chris Denney: Or so you, you, you could, um, I don't think I'm betraying too much to say we aren't. Uh, but now we have the ability to, right. It just depends on getting a software engineer to like, Hey, this is what we want to do. Now sit down and figure it out. You know what I mean? Because all the data is there now we can, we can make that happen. Um, but yeah, that's, that's one example. But, um, like I said, there's other things that we do internally. Like I gave you the example of like, we don't have to scrub the XY anymore. The XY just comes to us exactly the way we need it. We can just import it right into our machine. We don't have to like, you know, uh, do any little processes. And yeah, that little process maybe only took 10 minutes, but 10 minutes times, you know, 500 different orders that that adds up to a lot of time. Right.

Chris Gammell: Sure. Sure. Sure. And actually that's a good point too. Cause another thing that I didn't quite realize it like, uh, a lot of pick and place machines, at least the ones that I've seen, uh, they're kind of standard of their own. It feels like, like they need glue on the software side as well.

Chris Denney: Yes.

Chris Gammell: So like if I go now I've been working on a Neodent, so it's kind of its own sweet beast of, uh, well, it's the open source software running on it and everything. No, no. I'm running the native, uh, stuff.

Chris Denney: That is something, any, anybody who's working on the open PNP, I would love to talk. I think that is like a super cool project, but anyway.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. Same here. Actually. I'd like to talk to them.

Chris Denney: Yeah. I just, I, I, well, I think it's cool because I'm sick and tired of paying a thousand dollars for a feeder when I can just 3d print one. Oh, well, yeah. I don't think it's going to be at the same, the same pedigree of what we're used to, but no, but, but there's a, there's a place for it. Right. I mean, there's totally a place for it. Maybe not for Wordington assembly, but maybe, you know, I mean, I just think it's super cool. I, I, I just think it's awesome. Anyway.

Chris Gammell: So the, um, the, the thing I was thinking about though, was like you put in, you load in X, Y coordinates like you're talking about. Yeah. And, uh, but then there's also other things in there where it's like, oh, this is a new type of component. You need like component libraries for each type of pick and place as well. You need to have like calibration of, you know, it's, it's a robot at the end of the day. So it needs to have calibration around component types and all the other things that are in there. Absolutely. And, um, so if you now, so I imagine if you get a file from, you know, some new part that you haven't seen before now that actually hits your machine and it's like, I don't know what that is. And there, that just puts a kink in the process. It feels like.

Chris Denney: Yes, it totally does. And that, and that's still, um, a manual process because it still requires you looking up a data sheet and determining what size that component is and all that kind of stuff. Um, we haven't solved that particular problem yet. Um, but you know, there's, but you, you'd be surprised. There's things like, there's things in receiving that you, you can eliminate because a computer can handle stuff for you. There's things in shipping you can eliminate. There's things in just clerical, like putting the order up, right? Like, like putting the order on the schedule. It's just so many different things that they're all just, maybe it only took 30 seconds, but now you don't have to do it anymore. You know what I mean?

Chris Gammell: And when, and when you're talking about deficiencies, just deficiencies, it's just all these tiny little

Chris Denney: things that just add up to huge efficiencies. Totally. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So what's the next step then? Like, what is the next like step function for CMs then? Like what is, what's going to, what's going to make it so that I don't ever have to talk to a human again?

Chris Denney: Uh, uh, I'll tell you what I would, I would say easily 80% of the orders that come through circuit hub. We never talked to anybody. Like we never talked to them. Really? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Absolutely.

Chris Gammell: What about on the testing side of things? Does that change stuff too? Testing is hard. Testing is hard.

Chris Denney: Testing is, I, I agree. Testing is hard. It's, it's, um, yeah. I mean, in theory, you've got the schematic now and you could, uh, you could really do some cool stuff there, but you got it. You're going to have to throw a lot of engineering at that to figure that out.

Chris Gammell: Um, uh, but yeah, right now it's like, if there was like a way to just mark voltages or something like that, but again, at that point, like you might need firmware on board. You might need a bunch of other stuff that's in there. Exactly. Like, yeah.

Chris Denney: Yeah. So there's, there's a little bit of that. Yeah. We do a little bit of that. You, you, you like, if you order enough, then it makes sense to do programming. Um, a lot of times it doesn't make sense to do programming. If it's just, you know, maybe 50 boards, it's just, doesn't really make sense. But if you're saying, yeah, we've got 500 boards, uh, yeah, it probably makes sense to, um, to do that because now we can automate it. Right. And it always goes back to automation.

Chris Gammell: Um, and now we can, I mean, best case scenario is when you get a part that's pre-programmed. I mean, those are the, that's really the best way to do it. That's what we're talking about.

Chris Denney: That's what we're talking about is pre-programming the chip and, and then soldering.

Chris Gammell: Oh, I meant from the vendor even like, like, uh, you know, some of the vendors do pre-program. You can just like, like, if you go to like microchip direct, you can get a pre-program part.

Chris Denney: That's what I'm talking about too. Yeah. And you know, what's funny is a dirty little secret. There's basically one shop in the country that does that for everybody. Oh yeah. They all outsource it to this one shop that we use to learn that real quick. I think there's a couple, but there's one kind of dominant shop that does, that does a lot of it. I'm sure, but I, I have seen at DigiKey, like I've seen the programmers and, and I've seen people, you know, loading, loading reels onto the programming machines. And then, you know, those are getting loaded into tape and reel machines. So it is happening at the vendors, but, um, a lot of companies are outsourcing it to the same shop. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Interesting.

Chris Denney: There's so many, so many weird things like that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, and I think one of the things that you pointed out was the, uh, the smallness of the industry, even though it's a big industry, it's like, there's, there are certain providers that are doing certain things and it's kind of crazy that they're, I mean, so I guess a CM is kind of a more general category, right? But if you need something very specific, usually there's only a couple providers.

Chris Denney: Yeah. Yeah. Um, like you could give, for example, conformal coding. There's not a lot of like dedicated conformal coding shops. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like a lot of CMs have their own, like, so we'll have our own service for providing conformal coding, but like, um, you know, if you needed a ton, it's usually just me with a spray can, you know, just, what do you think we're doing? Yeah. Right. Right. Um, but, uh, a little bit, hopefully a little bit more controlled process, a little bit more, right. Yeah. You know, getting it even and consistent, but yeah, if you, if you need to do like thousands of them, there's not a lot of shops that can do like thousands and thousands and thousands of, of, uh, you know, conformal coding and then to do the automation, to inspect conformal coding. And, you know, unless the CM has it themselves, if you're going to outsource it, there's not a lot of shops that are dedicated to doing just that.

Chris Gammell: Uh, you mentioned inspection. I mean, is that, uh, is that been changed as well by these, you know, in the automation, the world of automation? Well, I'm glad you asked Mr.

Chris Denney: Gamble. Uh, uh, as a matter of fact, uh, yeah, there, there's been kind of a game changer. So I worked at an AOI company, an automated optical inspection company. Um, when I got out of college and, uh, and now back then it was kind of like a 2d inspection. So you'd have a camera that looked at the finished circuit board, um, and it would take a picture of it and then it would use software to compare those pictures against other things that you've taught the machine to look for. Right.

Chris Gammell: And, uh, whenever I hear, uh, fancy software engineers talking about machine learning, that's what I think about, even though it's like, I've seen it on machines for years and years. It ain't machine learning. Yeah.

Chris Denney: I mean, it is like, it's super rudimentary machine learning.

Chris Gammell: That's what I think of actually, but I think about like machine learning. It's like, usually that's what they're actually talking about is like the AOI type stuff. Yeah. You know, like, yeah, yeah.

Chris Denney: Like, yeah, we're not, uh, it's, it's not the robot that's taken over the world just yet. Right. Exactly. Uh, but yeah, so this picture a square, right? Yeah. Um, but what, so what they're doing with AOI now is rather than a 2d image, a flat image, they're, they're able to measure a third dimension, right? So they're able to measure the height of everything and then overlay the 2d image onto that height. And then it looks like you have this really fricking cool, uh, three-dimensional like circuit board that you could hold in your hand. It's, it's honestly like unbelievable. You're, you're measuring the height of things at seven microns. Like that's the resolution of these things is seven microns. So you're able to measure the 008, 004, uh, chips.

Chris Gammell: I actually didn't even know those were chips. So now I've learned that.

Chris Denney: Please, please forget you even knew about them. Oh man. Not interested.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Chris Denney: It gives you heartburn. Imagine trying to assemble things with that. Yeah. Right. Right.

Chris Gammell: No, I know.

Chris Denney: So, uh, so yeah, now they have these 3d AOIs and we are super interested in that technology and we will be, um, you know, uh, I'm, if anybody's going to Chicago, I'm hoping to be there next week, uh, October. Um, I don't know. What is that? You can never have a calendar in front of you when you need it. 16th and 17th to go to the SMT AI show out there. I happen to know somebody who lives. Yeah. I happen to know somebody who lives in Chicago if he feels like joining, but he may have a full-time job. Sort of. Yeah. Yeah. So, but we're, so going to look at 3d AOI, I think that's super cool. Uh, that technology is kind of changing the way that inspection is done because inspection largely is still done by people. Um, and fallible.

Chris Gammell: Right. So they, they, they look at like, they're like, oh, well, R13 is always, it always tombstones or something. They always just look at that. But, but a machine will look at everything, right? A machine will look at everything.

Chris Denney: Yep. Yeah. And, uh, you'd be kind of amazed that what people can catch though. It's like, sometimes the girls are showing me stuff and I'm like, how did you see that?

Chris Gammell: Like I never would have noticed that. Humans are meant to be pattern matchers, right? And it's like, if anything looks out of, you know, out of ordinary, then you're, yeah, you catch it.

Chris Denney: It's so true. It's so true. It's unbelievable. Um, and our, but like, so, so like the people we have in inspection are like unbelievable. They're like rock stars, but like, can we get a machine to do a lot more of that work and we can open up those rock stars to do other things? Cause like, we'd love to have them doing some of these like more value added, more difficult things. And, you know, right now they're just staring at circuit ports. Right. Right. So, so that's really interesting from, from our perspective. And something we're super interested in. And, and, and, and if a CM is listening to this, they're probably like, oh my God, Chris, we've had that for three years. Are you finally getting around to it?

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, I mean, that's another thing though. Like I, CMs are not, uh, you know, I don't know about your specific business, but I've never looked at a CM and been like, oh, there's a high margin business. You know, it seems like it's, it's better than being a distributor, but it's not like,

Chris Denney: right.

Chris Gammell: I mean, so it's not, it's not like you have like cash flowing, like crazy to, to do that next capital investment. That's what I'm saying.

Chris Denney: No, no, but you got to price yourself right so that you can, you know? And so like, honestly, when customers start to beat us up on price, we're like, yeah, I hope you find somebody who's willing to do it for less. Like it's just because we know our numbers, we know we need to make money and we're just, you know, we're not interested in, in getting beat up on price. And that's never a good, like you never have a great relationship with a customer who's really price sensitive.

Chris Gammell: Right. Um, do you have any like high level, uh, so like design tips for people that are listening that are like, so like, how, how do I get my costs down?

Chris Denney: Yes, I absolutely do. Oh my God. I'm so glad you asked. I've actually been meaning, I've been talking to another one of your guests, uh, Zach and, uh, Spencer from, uh, the public radio.

Chris Gammell: Oh yeah. We should. Yep.

Chris Denney: So Zach, uh, both independently we're on the show now. Yeah, I know. And I love their interviews. They were, they just loved it. Another great interview for your listeners. If they never listened to it with Ben Einstein, that was just a fantastic interview. Ben's like a wicked smart guy.

Chris Gammell: And yeah, I was hoping you'd say wicked. Yeah. Oh yeah, man. Yeah. Living in the, you know, Northeast.

Chris Denney: You got to say it, you got to fit in, right? I don't.

Chris Gammell: Can you say a little bit more, like a little bit more like.

Chris Denney: Wicked ass. Yeah. Now I grew up in Jersey, so I don't exactly have the accent.

Chris Gammell: You just picked up the lingo, but not the accent.

Chris Denney: I picked up the wicked, but I'm still a giants fan. I can't be a Pat's fan.

Chris Gammell: So that is.

Chris Denney: Um, uh, so anyway, the, uh, uh, yeah. So like I've been talking to Zach and he's over at Kickstarter and I've been telling him like, I'm like, I, there's so many things I want to tell customers, but I don't have the time to tell him. He's like, well, you should write a book and you know, maybe raise money for it on Kickstarter. Yeah. Like, oh yeah, maybe I should. Oh, I, I've been, I've been, I've been writing so much stuff down, but I'm like, this is going to make a crappy book. I don't know. We'll see. Stay tuned. So how about some, how about a, how about a preview here? But a preview. So like silk screen matters. It matters. Like take your time with it. It matters. Like it really, really matters for what though? Because people are building your circuit boards, right? Keep in mind.

Chris Gammell: You just, you just spent an hour telling me the robots are building my circuit boards.

Chris Denney: They totally are. But what happens is robots are being programmed by machines or the, the meat, the machines are being programmed by the meat. And, uh, and, uh, so, but so we're, we are having to figure out how all this stuff goes together so that they can build it. Yeah. And if we can't tell what polarity your led is supposed to be, we're, you know, we're, we're going to spend a ton of time trying to figure that stuff out. And then we're going to, I'll give you an example. A potential guest, if he's been on your show, Joel Murphy, if he hasn't been on your show, you've got to get this guy on your show. Uh, he makes these like incredible devices that attach to your head and then you can like control computers with your brain. And it's fricking amazing. It's all open source and you're, oh my God, super cool. Anyway. So, so right now I've got 600 bill boards to build for Joel, but he switched a ceramic cap to a tantalum cap. And I can't get ahold of the guy to figure out what direction to put this thing on the board.

Chris Gammell: It'd be really crazy if he was listening to this. I hope so.

Chris Denney: I hope so. I, I DM'd him, I emailed him, I called him, left him a voicemail, sent him a text message. I hope he's like climbing Mount Everest or something. But anyway.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure he is. Yeah.

Chris Denney: So, uh, but like if he had silkscreen that said, you know, this is the anode.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Done. Right.

Chris Denney: He'd have the board sitting in his, in his shop right now as we speak. Um, so silkscreen matters. It really, really matters.

Chris Gammell: What about broader things about like, uh, like components on one side, right? I used to have an engineer I worked with who was like, yeah, if we only put components on one side, it would be half as much. And I'm like, yeah, I don't think so.

Chris Denney: It would be, it would, you would get it, you'd get it twice as fast, you'd get it twice as fast. And it could be, it could be maybe not half as much, but a significant, uh, significantly less expensive. Yeah. It matters because at the end of the day, you're building two circuit boards, right? You really are. You're building two circuit boards. What you're amortizing is your pick and place setup. You're amortizing your, um, receiving, you're amortizing your quoting and you're amortizing your shipping. Everything else is two circuit boards. So it is a significant percentage, right? Um, so yeah, if you can get it all to fit on one side, that's huge. Speaking of double-sided circuit boards, my number one pet peeve, number one, are you ready for this? You ready for this? Put your heavy components on one side.

Chris Gammell: Oh, the top side. Yeah.

Chris Denney: Oh my God. I don't care if you call it the top or the bottom, but put them all on the same side because, and especially like if you have, so we have a one job we build pretty regularly that has this tell it module on it. Uh, it's like a, Oh yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Cellular. Yeah.

Chris Denney: And it, and it says can only experience one reflow. Right. And so he puts it on the bottom side of the board with all his other chips and then he puts all his big inductors and aluminum, uh, capacitors and all these other heavy things that are going to fall off during secondary reflow. And so we got to glue all those things down.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. So they don't fall off. I always think about that when I, when I see the glue layer on KiCad, uh, I always think about like, Oh yeah, I remember that. You know, it used to be the, the glue layers were more common as parts were heavier, right? 12.06 components are more likely to fall off. They don't fall off. They don't fall off. When they were big caps or whatever. Anyways, uh, I used to work with glue layers and not a big fan, but it sucks when you have to use glue.

Chris Denney: No, don't bother with glue layers, but just tell, you know, just be mindful of the fact that if you're going to hang something heavy upside down, you're going to, somebody's going to have to glue that, you know, uh, you're going to have to program a machine to spit out all the dots and you're going to have to make sure the volume is right. And you, we still might drop them because we didn't put enough down or, or it was crooked. And so it didn't, it didn't have an, you know, enough of a hold on it or, you know, all kinds of stuff goes wrong.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, totally. Right. And either way, it's going to be more expensive.

Chris Denney: So that's, uh, don't you, don't use online repositories of footprints. Um, but use them, go ahead and use them. But verify them, verify, you know what I mean? Trust, but verify. Trust, but verify. Like, like there is an 0402 footprint in the Eagle library that haunts me. It haunts me. Um, because everybody, everybody uses it and we get tons of tombstones and head and pillows because of it. Wow. Oh, it's awful. So I literally, it was so bad. It got so bad to a point that I, I finally just wrote an article. I designed an 0402 footprint. I had somebody make one for me on Twitter. I was like, Hey, can somebody actually like make this 0402 footprint library for me so I can give it to people? And then every time we got a bad footprint, I would just send them that article because I was like, please fix your 0402 footprint.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. That's crazy. Um, so what about, uh, what about sizes of components? So like, does that affect cost at all? It does.

Chris Denney: Yeah, totally.

Chris Gammell: Um, so which direction though?

Chris Denney: Yeah. So if you, if you can stay in the middle, that's the best, right? So like, um, a 402s are super easy, but oh, 603s are even easier. Right. And, and that does matter because at the end of the day, remember what the, what'd you call them? The meat machines? The, people are building these things and things get screwed up, right? Robots aren't perfect. And so you got to make a little tweak and a little nudge and a little, you know, there's just little things you got to do. If that component's a little bit larger, it's way easier to fix. Um, and it just makes everybody's life easier. Yeah. Less time on a microscope. Totally. Totally. And, or, you know, we'll get the, we'll get the thing where like, you know, somebody will send us, we've had God. I, somebody will send us like all these tiny little strips of parts, a supplier, you know, not, not consigned material, but like a supplier will send us all these tiny little strips. And it's like, well, guess what? We're going to place that by hand. And if it's an 0201, that's really going to suck. Um, uh, we have ways of picking from tiny strips, but you get, you get my drift, like have sizing your components. It really does matter. So, um, you know, if you've got, there's nothing more frustrating to me than when you've got a, uh, you know, a 12 inch by 10 inch circuit board, and you've got a tiny little four pin micro CSP voltage regulator that could easily be an SO8 or something. You know what I mean? Like we sell this.

Chris Gammell: Could have had two, four, seven. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Denney: Exactly. We sell this voltage regulator in a SO8 and SOT 23 and in this tiny little CSP. And it's like, you know, the engineer goes, well, I've already drawn the CSP package footprint. I may as well just use it on this design. It's like, Oh God.

Chris Gammell: So do you, I mean, but you guys charge more for that though? I mean, like, is that something where, so if someone's listening and they're like, Oh, well, is it cheaper to use the SO8 instead of the CSP? Yes.

Chris Denney: The answer is yes. Uh, do we, do we realistically scrub things that closely? Probably not, but we're going to look at, uh, we're going to look at your, your, your, how fine pitch everything is. And we're going to look at sort of like, you know, you're going to sort of sanity check the design.

Chris Gammell: Assigning like a, like a difficulty rating for each, for each kind of component.

Chris Denney: Maybe not each component, but we're going to look at your overall design. And if we're going to see some difficult stuff, we're like, okay, we're going to have to charge more for this assembly. Yeah. Got it. Because we're just taking greater risk. It may go totally fine. It may go totally fine. Stencil printing is fine. Picking place is fine. Everything comes out fine. We don't have to touch a thing. It ships out the door and we just made greater margin, but we have, we have risk. We have increased risk. Sure. And so you have to charge for that increased risk. Um, which the smaller, the component, the more difficult it is to print solder paste, right? You can't use a jet printer. You got to use a stencil and maybe you have to use a really expensive stencil because you have really tiny apertures. You know what I mean? So that's going to cost you more.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Anything that's out, that, that is something that I kind of tell people when, when designing circuit boards, if you start going outside the norm and it's tough when you don't know what the norm is, but when you start going outside the norm, that's usually when you really start to incur costs. You know, I mean, they're honestly, but they can't call you. So they can email me. They can email articles and all that stuff too. Yeah. So not enough. Oh my God. I wish I wrote more, but yeah. Writing that book. Well, that's good. Uh, how can people email you? Cause we probably should be wrapping up here and, uh, uh, and, and you wanted to mention something else as well in case people want to email you about that.

Chris Denney: Yeah. So, uh, email me, you can go to our website, which is Worthington assembly.com and you'll find my email address on there, but it's C Denny, C D E N N E Y at Worthington assembly.com. You can reach out to us on Twitter. I kind of am the only one that manages the Twitter account, which is W assembly. A little bit easier to type than Worthington, just W assembly. And, uh, I try to respond to everything we hear on there. Uh, not super active with it, but I mean, I check it regularly. Uh, so you can reach out to us there and, uh, um, we are hiring desperately. Like, please, if you're, if you're interested in working for, I think a super cool company, uh, with great people. So, so what kind of work is it?

Chris Gammell: Software work or actually assembly work or what?

Chris Denney: No, not software work. I mean, if you're a software engineer, um, and you, you think you'd be interested in some of this stuff, by all means reach out. Like we're not opposed to, um, hiring software engineers. Uh, and we're probably going to get your hands dirty for a while. I was going to say, put them, put them to work with some honest work. Absolutely. So see, I can totally see, like, it's my dream to hire like a great software engineer. This truly, truly hire a great software engineer and be like, you're not going to write software for a year. You're going to sit in our factory. You're going to do this. You're going to do this. You're going to do this. You're going to, you're going to learn this whole thing. Now you're going to write software because now you've got the experience. That would actually be great. Now, you know what you're working on.

Chris Gammell: That's like a apprenticeship anyways, right? I mean, that's just like a good, and it sucks that first, I remember like I started in repair and I was like, oh, I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. And then I, I learned everything about the product because you see it fail so many times. Right.

Chris Denney: That's it. I did too. I started in test, test and repair. Totally. So, um, but yeah, but like we're literally just looking for, you know, just boots on the ground, so to speak, looking for people who are, uh, willing to actually build stuff. Uh, nice. Yeah. You don't necessarily need experience. If you have experience, it's awesome. That's a total bonus, but you don't necessarily need experience. We'll train you. Um, uh, but we have like, we have, if you go to word and 10 assembly.com forward slash join us, um, we put together a pretty cool video with circuit hub. Some folks from circuit hub helped us put it together cause they're awesome people. And, um, it kind of talks about who we are and who we're trying to hire and why it's cool to work here. Um, and yeah, like would encourage anybody to please reach out to us. Obviously we're in Massachusetts, so you might need to be willing to move to Massachusetts. Uh, but, uh, it's a great place to live. I like it here.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Awesome. Well, Chris, thank you so much for coming on and talking about working at CM, working in the industry. And, uh, yeah, I think we'll probably call you back when we have questions about that kind of stuff. By all means. People can find, find you at this, uh, trade show this week as well. So keep an eye out if you're, if you're at the, uh, SMT AI show.

Chris Denney: Well, hopefully this gets published in time. Otherwise it's going to sound pretty silly. Oh yeah. I think it will. I think it will be. Yeah. Oh, beautiful. But, uh, but yeah, seriously, this has been great. I, I loved, I love this industry. I love talking about it. Um, and, uh, I could talk about it for days. Trust me. So by all means, if anybody's interested in just talking shop, we love it. So yeah.

Chris Gammell: 413-397-8260. That's the number on their website.

Chris Denney: So call them up. You'll get, that's for Chris. Yeah. That is the number on the website. You're willing. You, you, you are absolutely allowed to call it, but you may have trouble getting some, somebody on the phone. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Email, email first.

Chris Denney: No, no, you, you will pick up. We'll pick up. But yeah, email me, email me. I will. I, I, I, I'm a prolific emailer. I will get back to you.

Chris Gammell: Awesome. Yeah. All right. Thanks again, Chris. We'll talk soon. Sounds great.

Chris Gammell: Bye.

Speaker ?: We'll see you next time.