How to Create Organizational Systems for Success

Introduction

A behind-the-scenes look at Raen Frick and Bare Iron Works, a small American manufacturing company built on grit, lean systems, and a journey from construction to contract manufacturing. From a college side hustle to a nationwide supplier, the story highlights problem-solving, family collaboration, and scalable growth.

From Garage Experiments to Nationwide Manufacturing

Raen’s early experiences with heavy equipment and a college-side project sparked Bare Iron Works. By simplifying overengineered excavation tools, the company created affordable, premium products, expanded online, and diversified offerings while leveraging customer-driven R&D.

Systems, People, and Future Growth

Lean operations, ERP integration, and disciplined hiring enabled scalable logistics and production. Mentorship, family collaboration, and a focus on automation position Bare Iron Works to navigate American manufacturing challenges and explore AI-enhanced engineering.

Transcript

00:00
problems are really what help drive a solution, right? Cuz you have to have a problem to have a solution for it. And I think that's really where innovation kind of comes from. And you you find a lot of successful entrepreneurs, they don't work in the industry that they may have started in. You know,

00:18
I'm one of them. I got a degree in construction, was going to go work in construction. Now I'm working manufacturing, making products. And you'll see that across different industries. [Music] Today's guest grew up where hard hats and heavy machinery were just part of the family scenery. By 16, he was

00:44
leading construction crews in Colorado, and he hasn't stopped building since. With a degree in construction management from Colorado State University, Raenfrick turned his passion for civil construction into Bare Iron Works, a company crafting rugged 100% Americanmade equipment for contractors

01:02
by contractors. From managing multi-million dollar school remodels to streamlining manufacturing with lean systems and ERP tech, Ragin blends old school grit with modern innovation. He's

01:16
also a self-taught tech junkie, fluent in everything from engine repair to web development. Proving that curiosity, when paired with capability, can build just about anything. Get ready to hear the story of an entrepreneur who's as

01:29
comfortable behind a welding torch as he is behind a business plan. Let's unravel the fingerprints on success of Ragenfrick. Hey everyone, welcome to the show. Today we're joined by Raen Frick who is the founder of Beare Iron Works. Raen, welcome to the show. Thanks, Bill, for having me.

01:48
Yeah, it's great to have you on. So, you know, I'd love to start out with you telling us your story. Tell us about Bear Iron Works. You know, what what do you do and a little bit about your journey on on on how this business got started? Yeah, so today Bare Iron Works is a

02:04
we're a company that makes kind of the forgotten about products for excavation. Uh, we started with what's called a grizzly rock screen. It's just a a simple tool for separating rocks from your soil. And when I started it out, it

02:19
was a side business. Now it's grown. We have different products that we're bringing online and we're starting to work towards getting attachments uh for excavators and loaders uh onto the market and just kind of anything that

02:33
excavation contractors need that isn't like the actual piece of equipment itself or like the dirt material. And when I started this out, I started it out when I was a freshman in college. I was 18 and I needed just I needed a

02:50
garage because I ride motorcycles and I wanted a place to work on my motorcycle. My dad, he had taught me how to weld growing up. Um I had a big background in in working with him and he was an entrepreneur my whole life and so I

03:02
learned some skills and one of those skills I learned was welding. And so, uh, he he actually had the idea to make these screens. And so, I went and I rebuilt a motorcycle, sold it, and got enough money to pay for one month's rent in a shop. Got in that shop, got some

03:18
money together, um, borrowed some so that I could get some steel, and I made some Grizzly Rock screens, and I sold them. Well, pretty soon, here I go. I have an employee, then I got another

03:30
employee, then I'm in a bigger shop, and all of a sudden it's getting a little too much to juggle because I'm trying to take a full course load at the same time for construction management. And so, I was at a at a pivoting point

03:45
where I was like, I need to shut this business down or I need to drop out of college or do something here. And then life kind of made the decision for me. I had a motorcycle wreck that I it didn't injure me bad enough that like I

03:59
couldn't recover, but it injured me bad enough that I couldn't be lifting heavy steel anymore and building these. And so I was like, that's a sign need to continue with college. So I shut the business down, continue with college,

04:11
got a degree. My dad was working for a major construction company at the time and about the time that I graduated and he was kind of getting tired of working 7 days a week, 13-hour days cuz they were it was a very demanding company that he was working for. And he was

04:29
like, "What if we went all in on the manufacturing business together as a team?" He's like, "I'll help run the operations and you do the marketing." Cuz I was I had built a website. Um, and that was kind of part of the success I

04:43
had with the growth of it all of a sudden early on, like the surprising growth that I had was from the website that I built. And that's where we kind of discovered that there's a demand for these products and we just happened to kind of stumble into a niche.

04:55
Yeah. Were there other people making these screens? Were there other people that, you know, was this like a novel type of product or it was one that was out there? But, you know, was there kind of a a spin on it or something that you

05:08
did unique that unique that was different from others? So, ironically enough, so these things any any welder really can make them and if you go on YouTube, you'll find plenty of people that have a a way to make them. People build them out of 2x4s and

05:21
fences. That's how bad they can be. And but there are established companies out there that have been around for a long period of time. And the funny thing is is they all tried to innovate it so much

05:33
that they put all these extra features on there with the self-cleaning rails and adjustable rails and their overengineering parts of it that pretty soon this simple simple tool was then all of a sudden very expensive. You know, they're 20 30 $40,000 for one of these screens. So, we actually

05:54
went back to the basics and we went and started manufacturing just a simple, strong, durable one. Um, kind of using the simple principles that they were kind of founded on. We figured out what

06:06
worked and what didn't. And then we actually made an more affordable one. And so, we're able to manufacture them for a fifth of the price. like the $30,000 models that some of our competitors use. We make one for $5,000,

06:20
all Americanmade, and we can ship that all across the country. And so it was really just the market was kind of just over complicating the product itself. It was too simple and nobody was filling that need. So um that's where we stepped in and yeah, we've had a lot of success in that area.

06:38
So I derailed your story. you were about to tell me about kind of the progression from your dad comes to you and says, "Hey, I have an idea. Maybe maybe you should re reinvigorate and and light this back up, so to speak."

06:51
Yeah. So, he was cuz he had some other ideas for other products because his his main uh career was excavation. That's where he kind of had the ideas for these products. So, I'm not the idea guy, but I'm good at helping build processes and

07:06
marketing and doing things like that. um and just kind of making things happen. So he came back to me and he wanted to quit his job, move back home and start this up. So he started up the operations. He got a couple welders, got

07:17
a shop, and he kind of started at about where I had left it off at. And I started working on building out Google ad campaigns, improving the website, getting pictures, and improving our product lines, and starting to launch a couple of the product lines while he was running the welders in the shop.

07:37
Then we started hiring out. You know, it's kind of always like this little stepping stone with building the business, right? You start to find out, okay, what do we need next? One of the moves that we did uh was we hired a

07:49
general manager for our company to help manage the operations because one of the problems that we had was shipping these products because these are big pieces of equipment that are used with heavy heavy machinery. So trying to get that on a

08:03
truck and shipped across the country is something that's very challenging, especially because there's not really enough demand in one area to sustain this business. It's something that needs to happen. I have to take advantage of

08:16
the whole country to be able to sustain it. And so we hired a guy that wasn't even an expert in running a fabrication facility or have any experience in manufacturing. We actually hired him because he had his experience in logistics and being able to move the products.

08:33
We hired him online pretty soon. You know, I'm quitting my job at my general contractor that I was working at and coming on full-time and just really expanding out our store, making our presence known and expanding our offerings. And now we're shipping our products nationwide, Alaska, Hawaii,

08:52
Guam, we've got them all over the place. And it's really it's been a great journey and I'm really really happy with it. So now how many different product offerings do you have now? It was did

09:03
you develop products, you know, because you always kind of had an idea in mind of of what would be logical or was it the kind of thing where you you you saw demand and met it? How how did you kind of diversify into more products?

09:16
You know, it's a little bit of both, right? We have some experience of things that we've seen on the job sites of okay these are steel products we could we could make these they don't really require too much engineering and we could start figuring that out but then

09:29
at the same time we also have customers well you can make that can you make this and so they kind of give us ideas too because there's plenty of these little niches out there in the market that

09:39
aren't being fulfilled and I think that's across all industries and the customers will tell you what they need and so we've got um we've five product lines online now and we're working to expand to some more product lines and more offerings and we also are doing some custom work as well because you

09:57
know that seems to be kind of where the R&D side is coming from. Somebody calls us ask for something custom and we'll see if we can make it and then see if we can take that and turn that into a standard product and standardize it that

10:10
we can sell across the the industry. Yes. So, you know, I um having been a lawyer to entrepreneurs through throughout my career. One one of my clients is a a major um excavation contractor and I remember years ago um he kind of invented a tool out of

10:28
necessity and it just you remind me of this story because he would talk about how when you had a big piece of equipment on a job and the tracks and everything would get filled with mud and debris and everything else. He said,

10:40
"Then you know, you always have to clean your equipment at the end of every day." And and a regular standard shovel didn't quite work with the what he had to do to clean it. So, he went to the shop and fabricated like a unique shovel that was perfectly sized and built to perfectly

11:01
clean in between all all the tracks. and and um you know at that time actually this is going back quite a few years ago went to try to patent the the concept because to the best of his knowledge he

11:14
didn't see such a product anywhere everybody would just have shovels on the job and try to use them as best they could so he made a tool that perfectly fit you know the process of cleaning these tracks out so um I guess similarly you know necessity is the mother of

11:30
invention I guess right right yeah you I I I can relate to that cuz I've cleaned out equipment tracks plenty of times and doing it with a shovel is not always fun, especially if you can't get in those spots. And if you work in cold weather, it freezes

11:43
and can break your tracks and stuff. So, it's like problems are really what help drive a solution, right? Because you have to have a problem to have a solution for it. And I think that's really where innovation kind of comes from. And you

11:56
you find a lot of successful entrepreneurs. They don't work in the industry that they may have started in. You know, I'm one of them. I got a degree in construction, was going to go work in construction. Now I'm working manufacturing making products. And

12:11
you'll see that across different industries. Yeah. Well, maybe at a later date I'll have to connect the two of you. You guys could be fabricating his unique shovel, right? I'd be happy to do that. So,

12:22
very cool. Um, so tell me a little bit too as you have you grown the business um and and you continue to grow and and scale your company and you've been doing it very successfully. Have you found that there's certain kind of philosophies or mindsets that you've had and um or that you know that you've

12:42
implemented that when you reflect on it you say you know this has made a major difference for me or has been a contributing factor to your success? Yeah, I would say that systemizing things and being really organized is something that's very important and it's

12:58
in every that's something that's in every part of our business. Um, and a lot of it like it starts in our shop floor. We're very organized with all of our tools. Our housekeeping in our shop,

13:10
it's very clean. You go into a lot of metal fabrication shops and you'll see tools laying all over the place, tripping hazards, extension cords. We're very organized in our shop because safety is the number one priority in our shop. So we keep everything organized in

13:24
there. So we don't have any incidents, don't have any downtime. And then we have organizations on our management side as well. We have systems in place where we can track our inventory where we can track our time onto each job so

13:39
we know exactly how much it costs to make a product, how much time it's spending to make a product. That way we can charge the right amount and know how we can be competitive. uh we have systems for our R&D process so that we can improve the products and reiterate them over and over again. And so the

13:57
because the organization is very important because if you don't know what's going on or you're kind of all over the place, then you're not going to be it's not going to be as easy to be competitive, right? because the guy that

14:10
knows he's going to know where he can take advantage and leverage something to win in the market uh as a competitor. And so that is one of the biggest things that we did was the was the system that helped schedule and manage the inventory because we were doing daily checks

14:29
uh had to count all the steel every single day and it was just a waste of time to try to keep up with it all and now it's automatic. Did you um build out like a technology for that or custom build something or or did you just use

14:43
like things that were available to to you? I used I did a lot of research on ERP systems that could be kind of put into place. Now something I've learned a lot I do consulting a lot on ERP systems. I've had a lot of experience launching. Yeah. Now for those of our listeners who

15:01
don't know what is an what's tell us what ERP is? tell the audience what ERP is. So, it's a enterprise resource planning system. And so, what the and they're they're going to be different for each company. And you have some that will do everything like you have Microsoft

15:19
Dynamics, which is something that can do construction and manufacturing and warehousing, but then you have these little niche ones that might be good for construction such as Procore, where it manages the construction process. I use

15:32
one called Fulcrum for my manufacturing process and they all have different little things and it's pretty much just a software tool that you log into and it has different features that help you manage your process depending on what

15:44
you need cuz every industry is different. And so one of the biggest things for mine is that it helps me manage my inventory and helps me schedule my jobs and track my time. And even a tool such as QuickBooks is still can be used as a very simple. You have

16:01
to find the one that works best for you. And I can guarantee you that no matter what solution you pick, it's going to have something that it doesn't do or something that you're going to need to integrate. And so there there's always little hurdles that you have to jump

16:12
over with them. Interesting. So as you built the company um and when now when did you how how long has it been since you went like full steam, right? where where you were all in. I guess your dad was with you in

16:25
the business. Um, how long has it been since you went all in? We've been doing it for 5 years all in now. Okay. And how many people have you had to add during those five years? Let's see. We've got I mean we've added on about eight

16:44
employees full-time that work for us and then we've contracted out a full marketing agency to do a lot of marketing work for us. Um, and then I find people on Upwork and kind of like fractional part-time people to do some of the things that I don't have a full demand for, but it's enough work that I

17:05
can't do it myself, such as like the drafting of the drawings and um maybe editing some marketing videos and things like that. So, to fill in the gaps. And what do you look for, you know, as you're growing and scaling and you know,

17:18
I would like say you're you're like in that first phase of growth, right? you you you you had your entrepreneurial idea and vision. You turned it into a success. You you know you're adding you know a couple of of people a year uh you know consistently which is you know

17:35
obviously consistent con you know sustained growth. Um what do you what do you look for in a team member you know when you're when you're scaling and growing which is what a lot of our

17:46
entrepreneurs love to talk about. Have you had successes and failures, I guess, in that regard? And and what do you how do you find that ideal team member? Yeah, you know, I spoke on it earlier. When I hired my general manager, I hired

18:00
him for his logistic skills. And so, one of the biggest things that I look for when I'm hiring somebody is, can I turn a weakness of the company or of my team into a strength by hiring somebody out? Shipping was a horrible

18:14
weakness for me. When I very first started, I was doing deliveries myself. I was driving them like across state lines. And then when we did it again, you know, we're we had like five people

18:24
that we knew with pickups and trailers that we were paying quite a bit of money to haul these across the country back and forth. And so we identified that as a huge weakness in the company. So we hired the guy that can solve that problem because I have the strength. I know how to run a manufacturing

18:44
facility. I know how to do fabrication. I know how to do all the parts of the company, but I didn't know how to do the shipping. So, I can teach him how my principles of how to run a manufacturing

18:55
shop. We can teach them th those things, but we need him to teach us some. So, look for somebody that can help strengthen you is my biggest advice when hiring somebody out. Or if there is something that is just like you might have a strength in certain areas but it is just something that is

19:13
not important enough for you to get done but if it can be hired out it can help you grow. That's something else that can do that uh that is important as well because you can only wear so many hats and you can only get so much stuff done in a day. And sometimes some priority tasks just

19:31
still get knocked down the list because there's something that's even more important that always comes up. Yeah. What would you say during the last you know five years as you've been building the company if you were to give me two points like

19:45
the what would you say is the the best advice that that or the the the most successful idea or thing that you had that you did and and and also on the contrary you know what would you you

19:56
know tell yourself okay that I wouldn't do again or that's a a mistake I would tell other entrepreneurs don't do what I did what give me give me an idea of kind of like your high and your low piece of advice, so to speak.

20:08
Okay. Yeah. So, I would say my high was trying to build a system and organize it and automate as much stuff as possible. Um because when I'm automating things, especially if they're redundant tasks, then I don't have to do them again. If I can just automate it once, it's done.

20:28
That was a huge piece of success. And I I found that with the software and integrating all the software with the other parts and components to create a nice smooth workflow. That way information gets to the right people at the right time to keep everybody working efficiently.

20:45
One of the things that I've learned in the past five years, um, and I hate to say this, but it's like when people start to fail you and they start to let you down, you need to be ready to cut your losses. I've always been somebody that's always wanted to give people the benefit of the doubt,

21:04
give them more chances, and keep on going on. And sometimes it's just better to cut it in early on. Um, and I'm not saying just like, you know, fire somebody right after their first mistake, but there is a point where, you know, you need to be

21:22
realistic with yourself. And firing somebody's not great, but if they're hurting the company or putting other people in harm's way, then it's something that you have to take seriously. Yeah, I think uh it's a great point um that you make there and you know I've

21:40
always said to people over the years that you know when someone first starts with you in any job any profession you know in theory the early stage of the relationship they should be at their best right they're trying to impress it's a brand new opportunity and if the

21:59
hair on your neck is standing up that they're not very good or that they have the wrong attitude or whatever it is and it's and it's early. That's a giant, you know, warning flag. And I've always subscribed to the concept um of hire slow, fire fast. You

22:20
know, take a lot of time and trying to find the right fit person, the right team member. And when you know in your heart, your gut, your mind, it's it's not going to work out, it's better to cut ties earlier. So I I think your your

22:33
wisdom on that is is spot on and and very much appreciate that. Um tell me a little bit about you know it's an interesting journey that you've had right where you went to school you started the business you had an idea you you put it

22:51
on the shelf you you restarted it you know throughout the the journey have you had mentors or people who kind of whether they gave you the courage to go forward or or kind of ideas or principles that that you learned from mentors that that you want to share with us? Maybe tell us a little bit about

23:11
some of your uh mentors along the way. Yeah, you know, I did happen to work in a in general contractor for just a short period of time and so I was exposed to the professional industry and I did get

23:25
a little bit of mentorship and I feel like that was really beneficial for me because I really started to get some eyes on how bigger businesses work cuz I've always just been working with my dad's smaller companies and so having

23:36
exposure to that was helpful. And you know, one of the things that stuck with me from one of my mentors, he was a project manager, this general contractor I worked at, and I worked under him for a handful of years, is we would always

23:48
come to these meetings every week about the status of the construction pro project. And there would always be problems because it's construction. It's just how it goes. And people would immediately try starting point fingers at each other. You did that. You did that. It's your fault. and his wisdom

24:07
that has always stuck with me is when there is a problem and you're faced with a problem, do not focus on whose fault it is. Figure out what the solution is and get to the other side of it. And if the

24:20
problem and the end result after it's been solved is bad enough that somebody needs to be blamed or somebody needs to be held accountable for it, then you can focus on that. But immediately try to

24:32
focus to get through it because sometimes it might not even be that bad once you correct it that it's not even worth pointing fingers. That's that's a great piece of advice. Yeah. Yeah. Um it reminds me of a of a of a of a of a poster that my dad used to have that was like called winners

24:52
versus losers and it talked about, you know, a loser um finds a problem with every solution. a winner finds a solution for every problem. Um, you know, but interesting, you know, focus

25:04
on the task at hand and, you know, uh, it's not going to get better by figuring out whose whose fault it was. So, uh, very interesting. So, you know, are are you still in business with your dad at this point?

25:18
Yeah. Um, he's he's kind of shifted. So our operations team, they run pretty effectively. And so he's kind of shifted into more the R&D and coming up with the new product lines that we're going to launch. And then I've been focusing on

25:33
growing the brand presence and growing the marketing and task with the our e-commerce store and just building that out because we want to just be able to offer a lot more to our customers even more than uh what we offer now and maybe even more than what we manufacture. Maybe something from some other

25:52
companies as well. Well, so what's it like being in business with your dad? You know, share that with us. you know, you know, it uh family businesses can be hard. Um, you know, I I also do a little

26:04
construction. I help my brother out with his construction company as well. And emotions can be high at times. But something I think that I'm very fortunate about, which uh I'm not sure if most father-son relationships have this dynamic, is that my father will listen to me. he'll

26:26
um he'll step back and he'll listen to what I'm saying and he'll consider it and he'll understand the points that I'm trying to make and he's actually cuz he didn't quite understand like the whole ERP system when I first was bringing it

26:39
out. I was like this is very important. He's he didn't understand it but he trusted that I knew what it was. and he always likes to bring up this story about Henry Ford and his son and when the Model T came out that his son was trying to innovate the car. He's like, "Well,

27:00
the Dodge brothers, they're adding all this stuff to the car. You know, they've got the headlights and windshield wipers and all this stuff." And Henry Ford was he was adamant that the Model T was perfect and that it didn't need to

27:11
change, right? because he didn't quite understand where the market may have been going. And so being able to let go was something that is important for the growth because I mean we can see what a car is now today. And that's a story my

27:25
dad's always talking about is how he's very happy that he's able to let go and understand some of the new perspective that I bring to the table. Yeah, it sounds like it's a collaborative relationship versus uh you know, I don't

27:38
want to use the word dictatorship, but you know, more of a collaboration and you you know, each lending your your talents or what you do best, you know, which which obviously is, you know, a good recipe for for success. I love that

27:53
story, by the way. That's very interesting about about the the Model T and the Dodge brothers versus the verse the Ford. Very cool. So, tell me about what it's like to be a manufacturer in the United States. You know, I think that that's a worthy a worthy discussion point. You

28:11
know, I'm sure that you're proud of that. Tell us a little bit about that and and how you what's your take on on the market, the competition, and you know, tell us what you think about that. Yeah. So, I mean, luckily, I'm in a the

28:27
barrier to entry into the type of manufacturing I do is a little bit lower. So that's the only reason I was really able to get into it. um I was able to be competitive with my product lines I think because the competition doesn't understand lean management

28:43
principles as much which lean management principles if your listeners are interested in learning more about that is um it's all about uh cutting away waste bringing things in just in time and trying to make your process as efficient as possible while not like building up too much inventory

29:01
and having too much raw material And it's something that Toyota is has kind of pioneered and it's something that I learned in construction management. And so I put those principles towards my own business. And

29:16
that that's like one of the ways that I've been able to drive the cost of my product down so low is because of those principles. And as I've been researching more and more about manufacturing in the US and learning more about different processes and different things like that is I've

29:32
really learned that we have a huge dependency on our competitors overseas. And it's not in the ways you think. You might think that it's oh, it's making the product that we're dependent on them, but it's actually in the way that the our

29:50
engineers make like the tools to do the process. So like if you're going to do like plastic injection molding, I have learned that the um to make the molds and stuff, they rely on China to actually make the mold a lot of the time that you actually inject the plastic

30:08
into. even if somebody's an American um manufacturer in a a plastic mold injector. And it's very interesting like how we're dependent on different things overseas in that way. And so I'm lucky because my process is very simple. I use

30:26
pretty much one or two raw materials for my input and the output is going directly here and it's not a lot of assembly. It's mostly just like fabrication that's been streamlined. But I still do see a little bit of an impact with tariffs because you know your

30:43
supply and your demand. Well, if the foreign steel goes up, well then the demand for the domestic steel becomes higher and then the mills here in the United States are going to charge a higher price because they need to pump out more steel. Same with if we don't have as much steel to recycle into it,

31:01
right? If we're consuming more steel from the US mills, then we're recycling and scrapping and putting back into them. that's going to cause our prices to rise. And so I have seen input costs go up and down a little bit. Um it fluctuates all over the place. And even

31:18
though my products are 100% Americanmade, the sales are still up and down depending on what happens with the tariffs, even though I don't depend on importing anything. And so the market is very tied together. And it's all just because of how the money flows across

31:35
the market. And it's very interesting to see that effect. So that's a interesting point that I I've never really thought of, which is what you're saying is even if you're manufacturing here and getting your raw materials here, the kind of the global impact of tariffs

31:52
and other things still still drives in essence cost issues here. By creating more demand for the domestic raw material, you're effectively raising the price anyway, right? Yeah. And you know, because we're not fully, we've been so used to not being sufficient on ourselves, right? We

32:13
don't rely on ourselves to make our goods. we've been relying on cheaper alternatives and so we've gotten accustomed to this lower price level where if we make that shift back into okay, we're going to be fully self-sufficient again and everything like that, well then we need to find a

32:31
source for that raw material to come from if we're not going to be relying on others. And we can mine it or we can recycle it depending on what it is or maybe we can farm it. But those are about the only ways that you can get a raw material uh input into

32:43
manufacturing. Yeah, very very interesting. Um, so tell me a little bit about, you know, a hot topic right now that as an entrepreneur is is on your mind. you know, things that are um, you know, that you want to share with our

32:56
audience, something that's, you know, got your focus or your attention these days, you know, AI, I mean, everybody's talking about it and figuring out how to leverage that in the best way possible, uh, while at the same time not overdoing

33:12
it or compromising on quality and stuff and figuring out like how can I incorporate that into my business and you know, simply chat GPT helps us a lot with just reading documents, summarizing

33:24
things, going through a lot of data and analyzing a lot of data, but I know that there's a lot of different opportunities out there. Um, and some someone like me who's, you know, I've been a hands-on

33:37
person and now I've been kind of pushed into this role of where I need to use my computer skills more and I need to do like more software integrations and things like that. Even though I don't have an education on that, AI has been

33:47
super helpful in that sense because I don't know how to write code in in an advanced way. that's meaningful. I can understand it a little bit just from self-eing, but like the AI has gotten good enough that you can generate your code, integrate your platforms together

34:04
without paying somebody to do it. There's a new product out there called uh base 44 and it's simple as typing into chat GBT what you want and it will develop an app in front of your eyes and

34:19
it it'll be functional. It'll have some bugs, but you can just sit there and tell it what the bugs are and it works through it, which is just insane to me because once I started learning like what it takes to code and develop software, I was just overwhelmed and now it's

34:37
something that I can do just by describing it, which is very impressive. Do you think that, you know, for manufacturing businesses like yours, do you see AI injecting into like the the engineering aspect of the things you're building like where where maybe it's going to replace or

34:55
supplement, you know, people that are currently engineering those products? You know, I I foresee it because really the limiting factor is how fast can we train a model, right? And so we've trained these large language models on

35:12
this just like basic stuff on the internet and how we communicate with each other and human history and arts and different principles like that. But when it comes down to like CAD files and you're talking about 3D models, well pretty soon those files are substantially bigger compared to like

35:31
you know one CAD file is going to be a lot bigger than um you know 10 pages on Wikipedia. So then you're going to you have to have the model has to read through multiple iterations of different 3D models of of CAD drawings and parts and pieces and what they go for and all this data,

35:50
right? And that's a large amount of compute power. And so you need to have large server farms that can read and understand that. You need to have a lot of electricity to be able to train those models. And I think it's something that

36:05
can happen and I think it's something that they're working towards, but it's something that's going to be limited by resources and that's going to be what dictates how fast that can happen. So, what what do you love most about being an entrepreneur? What would you say? What's

36:21
the thing that you love the most about it? I mean, the the one thing that's nice about being an entrepreneur is that you have the flexibility of time, right? I think that's something that everybody

36:33
looks at, but that also comes with responsibility. You're responsible for scheduling yourself and you're responsible for getting your own tasks done. Um because I wasn't too happy working in the 9 to5. Uh because I'm

36:46
somebody that's I'm very good at getting my work done and I didn't like when I got all my work done and I still had to be at the office and even if I didn't have anything to do. So that's one of the biggest things that I liked about being an entrepreneur

36:58
is I can once I get all my work done for the day and I I get it done like early, I can leave and I can go do something. But on the flip side, my success is reliant on myself. So if there's so much

37:10
work that has to be done that I have to stay and do it, I have to stay and do it no matter what I have to sacrifice. Yeah. freedom, freedom of time and uh uh you know freedom of time and your purpose is uh a certainly a driving force. Um so listen I I have to say very

37:29
fascinating. I'm always amazed at at when I talk to people like yourself, the the little areas or niche areas of business that people discover and turn into thriving companies is uh is is really incredible. And you know, Robin,

37:47
I want to thank you for for taking time to come on the show today. tell our listeners to check out Bear Iron Works and and the the great work that you guys are doing manufacturing in America, which is great. Um, and just really want to thank you again for taking the time to be with us.

38:06
Yeah, thank you for having me on the show. I always like having conversations like these because it lets my brain kind of think and engage in different ways. Thank you. Hey, hey, hey.