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Filip Valica: Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast, podcast that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product designers, and other industry professionals. This podcast is run by Mako Design

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Filip Valica: + Invent, and hosted by Filip Valica. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to putting your product on the shelf. We're taking you step by step to build a functional product and scale your product business. Now onto the show.

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Filip Valica: The Product Startup, Episode 14. Welcome to the Product Startup Podcast. helping you turn ideas into successful products step by step with your host,

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Filip Valica: Filip Valica.

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Filip Valica: Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Product Startup Podcast.

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Filip Valica: In the last episode, we talked with Kelly Costello, the owner and founder of Puppy Cake. She created an all-natural cake mix product for dogs in November 2007, and it quickly became the number one selling cake mix for dogs in the U.S.

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Filip Valica: She sells both direct and wholesale, and we talked a lot about lowering the barrier to entry to buy for both types of customers. She was super transparent about the nine years it took her to get to where she is today, and I know you'll be able to put some of her advice to practice right away.

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Filip Valica: And now on to the show. So in today's episode, I'm joined by Mickey Swortzel. Along with her husband, she owns a small business based out of Ann Arbor, Michigan called New Eagle. The company specializes in creating

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Filip Valica: custom control systems, the automation of tasks using electronics, mechanics, and software. So we really have a two-for-one deal today, right? We get to talk to a successful product founder and small business owner, and we also get to see the process that they use to develop their own

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Filip Valica: custom products. So let's get started.

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Filip Valica: Hi, Mickey. Thanks for coming on the show today. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. So your product is a little bit unique. We don't usually have products as complicated as this, but I think it's really interesting to have you on the show. You have a

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Mickey Swortzel: hardware and software solution that's custom created for your clients. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure. So we are control systems engineers, which for those of you like me who aren't engineers,

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Mickey Swortzel: let me give you a 30 second explanation of what a control system that you might interact with. And that's for those of you who have ABS brakes, analog brake system on your car.

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Mickey Swortzel: When you drive and it's rainy outside, the sensors and actuators, which are the hardware within the brake system, works with what's called an electronic control module that has software on it, an engineer's

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Mickey Swortzel: program, to sense and act a certain way to allow you to stop your car. If you drive in a sunny warm day, it senses and acts differently according to the software that has been programmed on it.

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Mickey Swortzel: So we do that kind of control system most often to determine an efficiency for someone.

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Mickey Swortzel: We want to take fuel that is expensive and utilize less expensive fuel.

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Mickey Swortzel: So we've worked in the alternate fuels industry, taking gasoline vehicles and making them liquid propane, compressed natural gas, electric hybrid.

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Filip Valica: So trying to use the technology and know-how that we have to make something both cleaner and efficient. And then for whomever is producing this, a cost savings in the long run. That makes sense.

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Mickey Swortzel: So can you talk a little bit about how you got started? So back in 2008, you and your husband, Rich, decided to create this company. Was it a consultancy at the time, or did you already have a product that you were selling?

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Mickey Swortzel: Actually, we go back a little further than that, and a key to bring that up. So in 2000 to 2003, we had an engineering consulting company around control systems only.

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Mickey Swortzel: And in that time, we created a in-house tool called Rapid Hawk that allowed us to do that software programming more efficiently and more cost effective than our competitors in the same

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Mickey Swortzel: space. That quickly became our secret sauce and the reason people came to us because we were literally cheaper, faster, better. That got the attention of Brunswick Corporation in 2003 who had

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Mickey Swortzel: a hardware supply chain from electronic control units and they wanted to put that software on our, on their hardware. So they purchased us in 2003 and we worked for them for five years. And then in

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Mickey Swortzel: 2008, we, when the economy went down, Brunswick was looking to shore up their cash position and

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Mickey Swortzel: they laid us off. And they also sold that division to their biggest customer. So we had an

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Mickey Swortzel: opportunity to restart our company, basically. But having, so to answer your question, we, we knew the consulting world, but we also knew the challenges of consulting. And we had seen the benefits of

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Mickey Swortzel: having hardware and software and consulting altogether because we felt like we were a full solution to a customer. And we were also, we often say we're on the same side of the table. With the

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Mickey Swortzel: consulting company, oftentimes you're asking for money and they're trying to save money. So with offering

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Filip Valica: a full solution of hardware and software and consulting, we get them where they want to go. So we had seen that model work, and that's what we wanted to do this time around. Kudos to recognizing that this was an opportunity.

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Filip Valica: That would be a frightening time for anybody to say that, you know, your company was basically sold to another. How did the IP work with that? Was it sold along with the division and you basically had to start from scratch and create a new product? Absolutely. Wow.

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Mickey Swortzel: So that's a ton of work too. But at least now you had this deep understanding of the problem. And so you're able to maybe do things differently the second time around. Oh, oh my goodness, yeah.

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Filip Valica: We often say that we went through the school of Hard Knocks and learned. And in fact, it was very difficult to make the decision to restart a company because we knew how hard it was.

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Mickey Swortzel: It was not a decision we made lightly. Right. Yeah, but I guess the alternative was having a full-time job working for somebody else. Exactly. That maybe was worse. Well, not really worse. It was very different. And we had done it for five years.

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Filip Valica: And but we had great bosses and had at Brunswick and they've given us a lot of latitude knowing where we'd come from. Sure. So we didn't think we could find that opportunity again. No, that makes sense.

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Filip Valica: And so now it was a chance for you to rebuild it the way that you saw it should be built. That's very interesting.

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Mickey Swortzel: So can you talk about that process where you had an idea and then you created a prototype or a concept? You do that in your day job now as well. So maybe you can give people. a little bit of insight, how to go take those three or four baby steps in the beginning.

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Mickey Swortzel: For us, it always goes back to the customer. We are a sales organization at heart and not the we're going to push something on you sales organization, which is often what people think with that word, but a true, what is the

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Mickey Swortzel: customer need? And we're going to find out how to meet that need. So going back to our first company in 2000, that Rapid Hawk product was purchased in 2003

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Mickey Swortzel: with our sale and Brunswick developed it to a point in 2008 and then the subsequent buyer bought it

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Mickey Swortzel: without valuing it. So we had an opportunity to say this is a great product, but it's not been

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Mickey Swortzel: developed fully. And honestly, we went many times to the new buyer and said that our customers want this, this is what it needs, et cetera, et cetera. So 2012, we got serious about, we saw,

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Mickey Swortzel: There were too many opportunities in new industries, primarily electric and hybrid vehicles. That was the industry that really started us the second time around.

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Mickey Swortzel: And we saw that the current hardware and software wasn't, we were putting square peg in a round hole. Right. So taking what we knew, that's key to any development. Don't go outside your wheelhouse here.

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Mickey Swortzel: Taking what you know and what we knew. And again, listening to the customer, looking at what the industry. industry trends were, again, wanting to be that full service solution.

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Filip Valica: So working with a myriad of vendors to not recreate the wheel, right? There's value in knowing what you do well and value in saying, we're going to just buy this.

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Filip Valica: The buy make decision came into play over and over again with us. There's a lot of good tips there for people that might be starting out and they feel like they need to compete one-on-one with everything else that's on the market.

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Filip Valica: I think that's an interesting point that you made because as an outsider looking in, and I have experience with control systems in the subsea space with the remote operated vehicles

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Mickey Swortzel: and some of the equipment, you would think that the automakers and some of these other product creators have started to solve these electric control systems issues. Like what made you think that you knew more about it than they did? I have two answers to that question.

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Mickey Swortzel: One, I always think if there aren't any competitors in the space, you have a bad idea. Right. I agree with that. Competitors, yeah, competitors don't scare me. And number two, we absolutely solved a different problem.

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Mickey Swortzel: We don't serve GM for Chrysler because, one, they're either doing the development and from ground up or, yeah, I should add Tesla to that, right? They are literally recreating everything. They're not buying. They are creating.

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Mickey Swortzel: So we knew that wasn't going to be our market. Our market has always been the lower volume production.

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Mickey Swortzel: customers. So the customer that wants to take a medium-duty van and make 10 of them a year. GM wants

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Mickey Swortzel: to create 100,000. We served at such a different market. We knew that those smaller volume

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Filip Valica: companies didn't have the resources to make, and they didn't have the resources to buy in the quantities that the current vendors were offering. They didn't need a palette of something. They needed

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Mickey Swortzel: too and we could fill that great so how did you identify those people like to me that's just a sea of mid-sized businesses that do you just start from the yellow pages and look to see who's selling

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Mickey Swortzel: electric vehicles and then knock door to door and again in my mind the yellow pages is where you would start if you were outside your expertise sure again driving back to our expertise taking

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Mickey Swortzel: you know, a 15-year career in and around control systems gave us a nice industry cross-section. And again, going back to that, talking to your customers, if you talk to your customers and find out

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Filip Valica: what they're doing and what they know, they're your best referral sources. And again,

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Mickey Swortzel: answering that question. So we were always in trade shows. We were always in trade journals. We were always online. We were always working to find out. and learn and then meet the needs. That's really good advice.

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Mickey Swortzel: Otherwise, how can you advise your customers if you don't know more than they do? Exactly. And what we've also done because we are, our mantra is service with the sales. Oftentimes happens all the time.

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Mickey Swortzel: Actually, we get phone calls asking for advice from us about what we see in the, you know, electronics and software and what they're coming to us as industry experts.

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Filip Valica: And then two and three and four, ten years later, they're calling us and saying, now I have a project. But they took something free from us first, and then we got the business. So you can call it marketing.

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Mickey Swortzel: You can call it whatever you want, but it's providing value. Well, so let's talk a little bit about the next stage in the process. You have an idea. You create a concept prototype. You've developed this rapid prototyping tool to help you go to production.

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Mickey Swortzel: faster. What is the next step in the process to creating a product? So in 2012, we knew we needed to accelerate this development to meet the market demands

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Mickey Swortzel: we were seeing quickly. And honestly, we're very adverse. We're not to external funding. We're not VC funded. We are minimally debt funded. So we really were challenged to

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Mickey Swortzel: accelerate our development without funds. We were very thankful that the state of Michigan had a loan that we could get matching funds with with a couple of investors to do that, to accelerate our growth.

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Mickey Swortzel: So the state of Michigan basically helped fund this and we began to take the best of what we knew and again ask questions and realize that rapid prototyping and was, you know, the software side of

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Mickey Swortzel: things needed to meet, you know, 2012 and beyond standards. And also it needed to have new hardware on which to sit. So we began internal development on the software side. We added to

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Filip Valica: our software team. We did a lot of internal meetings and development to figure out what we wanted and that's now become the Raptor platform. So it's far above what we started back in 2000 with.

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Filip Valica: it's a platform of products, but at the same time, we were working with hardware vendors to find the best solutions on which to put this software.

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Filip Valica: So, and that's an interesting point, because now your business is basically dependent on someone else's product.

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Mickey Swortzel: How were you able to make sure that you get consistent quality from some of the suppliers that you depend on, or maybe even take it a step further back? How did you do an evaluation to make sure that they were supplying you the right product,

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Mickey Swortzel: especially in your industry now where you don't deal in commodities, you can't just pick up the phone and get the same exact product everywhere else. It's very tailored to your solution, I would imagine. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, honestly,

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Mickey Swortzel: looking back in hindsight, my quick answer is a lot of hard work,

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Filip Valica: a lot of communication, a lot of prayer, a lot of, I don't even know. Now,

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Filip Valica: we didn't choose people that are working out of the back of their car, right? We chose Parker, Hannafin, and Robert Bosch. So two world-class organizations who, again, this is what they do, and we had long-term

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Filip Valica: relationships with both of them, so basically. Based on that prior history, it wasn't just a roll of the dice.

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Mickey Swortzel: It was an educated decision. Correct. You've chosen your products now that you want to come to market with. I imagine there's a lot of pressures there between pricing. Do you find that a lot of your decisions were based on how it technically performs, or did you

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Mickey Swortzel: have to kind of balance that with cost and what your customers were willing to pay? Absolutely. It was an open conversation then with some of your suppliers to say, hey, listen, this is kind of where we need to be at. Absolutely.

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Mickey Swortzel: So when we looked at, and Parker and Bosch were very different in how they approached these relationships. So with Parker, they wanted our software.

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Mickey Swortzel: they saw the benefit of what we were developing on a software platform. So they worked with us to provide the development knowing that on the back end,

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Mickey Swortzel: the pricing that we're going to pay for their products was going to be higher. Robert Bosch was the opposite. We needed to pay them, but on the end result, we were going to get a cheaper product for the market.

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Filip Valica: So knowing that there's a tradeoff, If you can put a lot of money up front, you're probably going to get your production item much cheaper. If they're paying for it, you're, you know, it's just an inverse relationship. Sure, sure.

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Filip Valica: And always knowing that what the market was going to drive, again, we're on the same side of the table. We both want to win.

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Mickey Swortzel: We both want to get them to the market. So, again, the good suppliers understand that and they want to work with you.

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Filip Valica: Especially if they see that you're basically creating another avenue for them to sell their products through. So hopefully it makes them a little bit more amiable to striking a deal. Correct. So that's really interesting.

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Mickey Swortzel: So now you've moved on and you've chosen your products.

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Filip Valica: Did you consider patenting anything during this process or do you have any patents? We do not. Software is difficult to patent. It is typically a trade secret and copyrighted. So we've done that.

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Mickey Swortzel: I guess someone would have to reverse engineer it in order to duplicate it. And really, they would have to be a specific niche solution because you provide a really niche product. Correct. So it's probably not worth the level of effort. Well, and it's very difficult with software.

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Mickey Swortzel: So if a customer approaches you and says, hey, I've got this idea, you know, we have this piece of construction equipment that we want to help automate. Can you walk us through the process that you go through? Sure.

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Mickey Swortzel: There's, gosh, there's just so many ways to go with this. at that juncture, we're trying to find out why,

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Mickey Swortzel: what their ultimate goal is. So, again, are they trying to get to the market quickly? Are they trying to make a big difference in a current product's efficiency?

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Mickey Swortzel: So kind of a retrofit. Are they a new company and they don't have a lot of money? I mean, so the, sorry, your illustration left me wide open there. But let's assume their goal is to get to the market quickly.

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Mickey Swortzel: So that's right up our alley and we will work with them. So our company has design engineers and then hardware software, right?

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Mickey Swortzel: So typically we act as an augmentation to their own engineering team. Sometimes we are their engineering team, but we're working in tandem to design the control system to achieve whatever outcome they want.

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Mickey Swortzel: Typically then a customer, that's in what we call the prototype stage. So they're trying to, for lack of a better way of saying it, they're doing a science project. So they're trying to see if the science project is going to work. Yes, their hypothesis is X.

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Mickey Swortzel: If they throw the software and hardware at it, will it work? Yes, it works. Then they, often they go away from us at that point. That process can be a month or it can be two years, right? It just really depends on the scope.

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Mickey Swortzel: They go away from us and they get, they need a customer. They need someone that's going to buy this or fund it or whatever and say, yes, I want more

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Filip Valica: than one of these on the planet. They then come back to us and say, yes, we're funded. Yes, we have an order for 10. And at that point, my engineers typically get back involved to make it ready for

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Filip Valica: production. And then the hardware and software team, the distribution side gets involved because we have built in the software and specific hardware that we can sell in production to them.

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Mickey Swortzel: It's a timeline business that we realize we can't speed up oftentimes. We're at the customer's timing. So in a way, you're creating a roadmap for them or maybe even a top-down view of what

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Mickey Swortzel: their system would look like and asking them to do some validation of their market. Then maybe you proceed and create a functional prototype. Correct. And so do you have like little bits and pieces now that are more or less interchangeable

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Mickey Swortzel: where you can just kind of plug them in and just test that it works?

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Filip Valica: Or are you basically creating a new? custom prototype from the ground up every time? Both. We have what we call software libraries, and we're able to use those because you're right. We're an eight-year-old company, and we are well known in certain industries.

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Filip Valica: So people come to us because they know we can make a car or electric. We say electrify a vehicle.

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Mickey Swortzel: They know that, and we have some canned hardware, or excuse me, software that we can utilize. It's far more cost effective for the customer than starting from scratch. but that's only the beginning. There's always customization involved.

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Mickey Swortzel: Sure, they've got custom sensors or ways that they want things to operate that maybe you haven't necessarily done before. So you have to maybe source that hardware and make sure that it works well with your software. Correct.

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Filip Valica: So you get to the point where you've created a functional prototype and then what's the next step? Do you validate that at all? Does the customer come out and see it run or do you fly out to the customer site and install it and drive it around an empty parking lot? Absolutely.

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Filip Valica: Sometimes it's in our garage, sometimes it's at their site, but absolutely we help. Or sometimes they've engaged us on a more limited scope, right? So the customer's validating it.

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Filip Valica: But at some point, yes, this prototype has to do what the hypothesis is. Yes, it has to work. So that's a lot of fun.

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Mickey Swortzel: I've done a few factory acceptance test before, and you're literally doing the job that the product will have to do, but it's in a simulated environment because, let's say in this case with construction equipment, maybe you won't be able to go to a demolition site.

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Mickey Swortzel: And so you're basically simulating that in a junkyard or something.

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Filip Valica: Have you seen some products, and maybe not with your direct experience, but have you seen some tests that maybe it tested okay, but then at the end of the day, maybe it didn't work the way that people expected, maybe because the test wasn't written in a way that it simulated

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Filip Valica: things properly, or maybe people had the wrong expectations going into the testing phase?

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Mickey Swortzel: You know, I know that we have customers that have not gotten out of the prototype stage for whatever reason. It didn't work, like you said, as expected or as planned or as required. And so it sort of died in the prototype stage.

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Filip Valica: But I can't really speak to much more than that. Well, that's fair enough. So there's probably a lot of things that maybe you can't plan around and it sometimes it happens. Sometimes customers, they have their funding pulled before they could get all the way to the market stage. Absolutely. So let's assume everything tested okay.

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Filip Valica: maybe the next stage is to ramp up production or do you go through maybe doing a custom design specific for that customer so it's it's packaged a little bit better absolutely we call that

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Mickey Swortzel: pre-production so we're getting them absolutely ready for production at that point because sometimes you're scaling things down you're expanding technology whatever it things have changed from beginning

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Mickey Swortzel: to that point basically just making sure that you're using your resources effectively in terms of

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Mickey Swortzel: you're like you said you're scaling things down maybe looking at packaging looking at the cost of some things and at that point the customer

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Filip Valica: comes in with their funding I imagine that they've already given you some upfront funds to get to where they are now and then you start production for them do you collect all the pieces of the puzzle for them and then ship them out as one system

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Filip Valica: well we've done both there are companies that they do that better than we do or the system is The scope is such that it's just not our area of expertise.

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Filip Valica: So we're literally shipping a small, you know, a couple ECUs to them or sensors, injectors, et cetera. But yes, we have ship and or installed entire retrofit kit.

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Mickey Swortzel: And I guess that just depends on whatever the client feels that they're comfortable with. Like if they want a bolt-on type solution where they just get it and they pull out the getting started guide. Correct. And they can just kind of bolt it up to their gear.

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Mickey Swortzel: or if they're just looking for a piece of the puzzle for them to integrate into a much bigger system. Correct. And all of this goes back to listening to your customer and making sure that you're giving them what they're looking for. Right. How do you weigh that with maybe sometimes the customer isn't always right?

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Mickey Swortzel: That's a loaded question. It is. I'm an engineer too, and sometimes people will ask you a question. And part of our job is to help educate the customer about the solution and why a particular direction is more viable than the other. Absolutely.

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Mickey Swortzel: This is where our company value of integrity comes in. We don't tell people what they want to hear oftentimes. We tell people the truth. And sometimes the truth is you have a really bad idea and that's not going to work.

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Mickey Swortzel: But if you want to pay us to prove that, we'll take your money. I mean, we're not, you know, we're in business, but we're going to tell you right now that it's not going to work and we're not going to spend your money forever. You know, we're going to make this a very short project.

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Mickey Swortzel: and then we're both going to sit down and look at the results because if that's what they need,

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Mickey Swortzel: then that's fine. We can't, you know, honestly, if we tell them no, most likely they're going to go somewhere else.

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Filip Valica: But we have had people that have said, no, no, no, we're going to make this happen. And, you know, I can't say we've always been right, but customers have come to appreciate our honesty.

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Filip Valica: And again, we get the phone calls asking oftentimes, hey, what do you think is this going to work?

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Mickey Swortzel: And that is fascinating and valuable knowledge that we're learning what some of the out-of-the-box industry drivers are thinking. There's no other way to get that information oftentimes.

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Mickey Swortzel: But those conversations where somebody has some crazy idea and maybe the crazy idea won't work, but it connects the dots to other things that will work. Sure, it gets you thinking.

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Mickey Swortzel: I mean, they have all this industry-specific knowledge that maybe you don't, you know, you know control systems really well, but they understand the construction industry better than you do. Correct. And so they'll come in and just bounce a bunch of ideas off the wall and hopefully you can come to some happy medium.

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Mickey Swortzel: That's interesting. So do you help at all after you've shipped the product?

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Filip Valica: Do you provide any customer support? We do. Typically,

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Filip Valica: that could be twofold. One, it can be pretty formalized engineering contract, right? They want some consistent help. They know that Gen 1 of the system is going to do this, but they know Gen 2 already has changes.

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Mickey Swortzel: And so they need us involved, you know, to understand Gen 1 to make Gen 2, et cetera. But there can also be we shipped, you know, we ship a box to them or we ship a pallet of something to them. And the ECU doesn't boot.

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Mickey Swortzel: They don't know which side of the harness to plug in. I mean, you know, very basic kinds of things. And so that support is much less. And those are obviously customers that are, you know, more established, larger, but we do both. Sure.

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Mickey Swortzel: Again, tailoring your solution to your customer. Right. So once you ship the product and you've done your customer service portion of it, do you ever kind of loop back around and say, okay, you know what? This is what we've learned from this process and how can we use that for the, like, let's

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Mickey Swortzel: say future products that we develop or is the way to integrate all the lessons that you've learned

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Filip Valica: back into what you're doing in the future? We know that is so valuable and that that makes us a better company, but I have to admit we don't document as well as we like to document.

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Filip Valica: I think that's an engineering law in general, writing it up. And we often say if you can't write it, it's not, you can engineer something beautifully, but if you can't write about it and document it, it didn't, it's like it didn't exist.

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Filip Valica: So that is, we've just literally a couple weeks ago had that conversation. On the commercial side, everything I've discussed, there's a, there's a lot of paper that goes with making a customer successful.

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Filip Valica: And we've done that very well. But we absolutely need to document both for the customer and internally better. And that's a goal that we have. And that's really hard.

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Mickey Swortzel: And I didn't mean to put you on the spot there, but all the companies that I've worked for as an engineer, that's probably that's the portion of the project that always runs lean because you're under a lot of pressure to kick out new product or as an engineer you get pulled

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Mickey Swortzel: off to get put on another project or maybe you're not that detail oriented and you haven't taken the notes during the project as much and so now you face this huge wall of

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Mickey Swortzel: text that you have to document and it's just a chore and so it's really difficult to capture that and learn from each other and as the organization grows,

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Mickey Swortzel: I've, you know, certainly been, I've worked from some really small companies that had maybe two or three other engineers, and I've worked for some that had, you know, hundreds.

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Filip Valica: And it's hard either way, because you don't know what the other person is doing. And then it's kind of hard to learn from each other.

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Filip Valica: And other than just having to be kind of forceful about it and create some tools that will kind of help you document and make it easier. Exactly.

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Filip Valica: And I always say, and this is probably a poor stereotype, but people don't go into engineering because they love to write. Right.

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Filip Valica: No, for sure.

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Mickey Swortzel: And I mean, there's exception, but by and large. And so as a result, that's that is, that's the weak link. We try to try to facilitate talking. I mean, it's as simple as that sounds.

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Mickey Swortzel: Because if nothing else, at least hearing what other people are doing through our weekly stand-up meetings, our weekly company meetings, hearing the other projects and opportunities that people are working on.

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Filip Valica: at least facilitate a little of that. Sure, absolutely. And you're creating a culture of learning and sharing. Right. That's super valuable. I've worked at places where people hoard their information.

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Filip Valica: That's probably some of the worst places that you can work at.

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Mickey Swortzel: So actually, maybe you can talk a little bit about polling your customers after the sale to see how you get some of that feedback. Do you do any of that where you're following up with clients to say, did we meet your needs and what could we do to improve the product in the future?

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Mickey Swortzel: We do it very informally. We have asked for case studies and asked for the opportunity to write things up from a marketing perspective or highlight in an e-news or use a video.

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Mickey Swortzel: But generally,

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Mickey Swortzel: we know that our best opportunity for increased sales is a happy customer for referrals or continued work. So we stay hopefully appropriately connected to them in an informal manner.

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Mickey Swortzel: Right, because the cost of acquiring a new customer is much greater than it is to, I guess, keep your existing customer happy. Right. You mentioned really briefly that you do stand-up meetings. Can you talk a little bit about that?

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Mickey Swortzel: I've heard of that where you, I guess you just conduct the meeting while everyone is standing and that hopefully makes it go more efficiently. Exactly.

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Filip Valica: We're following the trends and sometimes they are beneficial and sometimes they're not, But we think this one is, as a small company, we don't like meetings for meetings sake,

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Filip Valica: but we see the value in accomplishing some tasks, assigning tasks, understanding what everyone's doing.

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Mickey Swortzel: So my engineering team, they break up into disciplines and have stand-up meetings, 15, 20 minutes to talk, tasking, questions, needs, roadblocks, and then they're done.

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Mickey Swortzel: And then we have a weekly all-company meeting that is stationally focused. making sure they're hearing things from, you know, directly from me and department heads,

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Mickey Swortzel: et cetera. But then followed on is what we call a luncheon, a technical lunch and learn. So again, presenting the lessons learned from projects, product development, updates, teaching.

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Mickey Swortzel: So keeping our knowledge fresh. And having those three different kinds of meetings makes each grouping much more efficient and focus. Sure.

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Filip Valica: That way, at least people have a chance to. to be heard at some meeting and they feel like they maybe don't need a grandstand during another meeting. Correct. You've talked about now that you've got multiple sized teams. At some point, you had a really small team.

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Filip Valica: Can you talk a little bit about the process of hiring people and maybe what you feel that you look for as a owner? I'm very involved in the hiring by choice. It's a part of the job of my job that I really like.

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Filip Valica: I like getting to know people I learn a lot. I think, honestly, a natural curiosity and a desire to work with great people is the first thing.

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Mickey Swortzel: I'm not filling slots.

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Filip Valica: I'm building a team, so attitude has a lot to do with it. Some technical things, we do background checks. I do what's called an AcuMax Index, which is a psychometric survey.

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Mickey Swortzel: I go through telephone screening, a technical screening, a team-based interview, and sometimes a writing or presentation assignment. It's an extensive process that we don't try to rush.

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Mickey Swortzel: Here, you have to be a little broader in your desires. So I look for that. Yeah, you end up wearing multiple hats. And sometimes you might need to help out people on the production floor if you're an engineer or whatever it is.

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Mickey Swortzel: And you won't need that desire to do that or that drive to learn something new. You talked about that you tend to hire sometimes past the point when you really need the person. I've definitely been in most of the companies that I've worked for, especially the small ones.

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Filip Valica: You're in that boat where you're waiting to the last possible moment to hire. Can you talk a little bit about that balance? And as an engineering manager, I can speak to you're either always underfunded and undermanned or the other way around.

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Filip Valica: There's never that happy medium. Yes, you were accurate.

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Mickey Swortzel: How do you balance that where you might have too many projects going on this month and the next month? It might be the other way around. And how do you plan for, okay, now I think we're at a point where we grow.

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Filip Valica: and there's this department that needs another person. So on the engineering side, we have a really simple tool, Excel sheet that lists all of our projects and their current dollar balance.

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Filip Valica: So if somebody gave us a $10,000 purchase order and we've done $2,000 of work, there's $8,000 on that, right? Simple math. And we have learned over the past 16 years that if that number is greater than four, we need to hire.

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Filip Valica: If it's under three, we don't. If it's over five, you're going to burn out and lose your current team because they're overworked.

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Mickey Swortzel: So it's been a very simple tool that we've used for 16 years very effectively. Yeah. And I guess you could do that in a small scale for some of your other departments to to see what the load is on the department and what it's projected to be and then makes the call easier to hire somebody. Correct.

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Mickey Swortzel: That's always a difficult decision, though, because now you've got additional person on payroll and you need to keep them going. And that means you've got to bring in new business now. So there's pressure on the sales team, right? Right, but otherwise you close up. I mean, that's just part of the job.

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Mickey Swortzel: That was probably why we hesitated to start a new business. If you don't want to do that, then you shouldn't be in business. I heard from a mentor, a couple of companies back that either you're growing or you're dying a slow death. Absolutely. You believe that? Okay.

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Mickey Swortzel: Yes, absolutely.

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Mickey Swortzel: So as we're nearing the end of the interview, I usually always ask, do you have any tools or books that have helped you? along the way that you think would help other people. It's really hard.

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Mickey Swortzel: Sometimes you look down and you feel alone as an entrepreneur or a small business owner. It might be tough to get advice. Maybe friends and family aren't the best people to reach out to. What have you found helpful for you?

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Mickey Swortzel: I would definitely say friends and family aren't the people to reach out to. They're usually too invested in you personally and they are most likely risk adverse. And as an entrepreneur, if I'm not, I'm very risk happy or whatever. or content.

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Mickey Swortzel: So, yes, talking to family, they would totally tell you to go get a job. Lots of different resources have, I have found, as I have felt, very alone in this role. As a woman entrepreneur,

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Filip Valica: I found a woman's president organization, WPO, which is a national organization of women's presidents. And that has been an incredible lifeline for me to sit across from a woman who is going

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Filip Valica: through exactly the same thing, totally, you know, different company, different industries, et cetera, but handling all the same kinds of issues. So I would strongly recommend that for the women

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Filip Valica: in your audience. A book that really turned my thinking around a few years ago was Dave Ramsey's

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Mickey Swortzel: entree leadership. We actually attended one of his webinar or seminars also. That book was really a key for me to step into the leadership role that I have and take responsibility for it.

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Mickey Swortzel: instead of, and we were right at that tipping point of really growing, and I was moving from working in the business to working on the business, and that helped with that mindset. Most recently, I'm reading a book called The Science of Growth.

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Mickey Swortzel: It's a relatively new book, and it compares companies that have succeeded with companies that have failed. For instance, Facebook to Friendster, Tesla, the Fisker.

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Mickey Swortzel: And it's fascinating, especially from a product development side, the things that the successful companies did that allowed them to grow. I'm going to definitely have to check that book out. I find that very interesting. You see that a lot that it's not always the first to market company that succeeds.

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Mickey Swortzel: It might be the second. Yes. Fascinating. So do you have any final last tips for anybody? Maybe they're at the point where you were eight years ago where they're creating a new product

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Mickey Swortzel: from scratch or a new company from scratch and they just need a little bit of guidance to get to the next step. What do you think was the, was the, a couple of thoughts to keep in mind, maybe some advice for your younger self.

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Filip Valica: I don't know if I would have gone into business had my younger self heard this, but I had thought it would get easier. And it doesn't get easier. It gets different,

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Filip Valica: but it's never easy. Business ownership. And I've, I sent about five years in, I read that from somebody else who's much further down the pipe than us. And I thought, wow. So I've come to accept that.

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Filip Valica: I've also come to realize that I can't let that rule my life because I'm the leader.

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Mickey Swortzel: And it's not any fun to follow a leader who's not joyful, not determined, not a visionary, not positive.

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Mickey Swortzel: And so, again, the resources that I mentioned, the books, the mentorship groups, they aren't a luxury. you have to make time for those because you have to get,

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Mickey Swortzel: you will not find within your company the resources to do what you need to do for the company. When you work for another job, you can get coworkers that can help you. It would be very difficult in owning your own business to do that. You're seeing differently.

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Mickey Swortzel: Sure. So invest in yourself. I mean, you don't have the time. You don't have the money, but you have to do it.

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Filip Valica: That's very good advice. And that's interesting that you say that because I feel like a lot of people don't make the time or don't have the money because they feel like they constantly

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Mickey Swortzel: have to run the business or chase that next client or create that next new product.

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Filip Valica: And so in a way, they kind of spin themselves down into a hole because you're just working harder and harder and harder and maybe harder than you need to. Absolutely.

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Mickey Swortzel: Well, thanks again for that insight.

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Filip Valica: So talk a little bit about Raptor and New Eagle and where we can find you guys. We have three different websites that represent New Eagle. They're all New Eagle.net is our main site. We have a web store.

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Filip Valica: And then one of the value-added items that we developed early on is our product wiki.

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Filip Valica: And we offer that free, and it is probably utilized by our suppliers, our customers, and our competitors more than any, more than the value back we're getting. But again, it's an extensive technical repository.

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Filip Valica: about our products, about our products we supply, our vendors. And it really represents what I've talked about today in providing something for your

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Filip Valica: customers being seen as an expert and getting the customers built on that kind of a value. Yeah, it's funny that you say that even your competitors might end up using it. So you're not afraid of just putting everything out there and saying, hey, listen, this is

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Filip Valica: everything that we've got and whoever wants it. There are, I won't say everything. There are a handful of things you need to request. But 75% of what we do is on the Wiki. That's awesome. That's very transparent.

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Filip Valica: And hopefully that carries over to any new business that you get, people will take away that, hey, this is a company that I want to do businesses with because they're so up front. Correct. That's the idea. Well, Mickey, thanks again for coming on the show. It was a pleasure having you on.

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Filip Valica: I look forward to seeing how New Eagle progresses.

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Mickey Swortzel: And I hope that you guys are going to get into some new challenging markets as technology used to come into play and so, you know, some of the new drone technology. I imagine you guys have started working on some of that stuff. Yeah, we're doing some UAV work, absolutely. That's exciting. Well, thanks again for coming on the show.

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Mickey Swortzel: I appreciate the time, and thank you very much. And that's all I've got for today. Thanks for listening. I put all the links that we've covered under the show notes posted on the product startup.com slash episode 14.

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Filip Valica: Please join me next time as I talk to Dean Salakas of the party people.

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Filip Valica: So 30 years ago, his mom was Patches the Clown and she opened a party store. in Australia. Dean and his brother took over the family business and now they're the online market leader in Australia and growing their brick and mortar network. They've also appeared on Australia's

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Filip Valica: shark tank and they've worked with brands like 3M and Avery to introduce new products to the market. So tune in in two weeks to hear that episode. Have you brought your product to market? Do you know someone that has? I'd love to hear from you. Let me know by dropping me a note, go to the

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Filip Valica: product startup.com and click on Ask Philip. I'd love to have you on the show. If you like this episode or found it valuable and you wanted to see others like it, please let me know. Leave a review on iTunes

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Filip Valica: by going to the product startup.com slash review. I truly appreciate your support and I'll see you in two weeks. Thank you for listening to this episode of the product startup podcast with your host

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Filip Valica: Philip Belizea. For more great content and to stay up today, visit the product startup.com. Your guide to getting there.

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Filip Valica: Thanks for tuning into this episode of the product startup podcast. The show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the first firm in

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Filip Valica: North America to provide global caliber end-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product businesses. If you're looking for product development help

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Filip Valica: on your invention, head over to Mako-design.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako-Design for design studios from coast to coast. Thanks for listening. Thanks for and see you next time.