How I 10Xed My Wire Harness Manufacturing Business

Video Transcript

Speaker 1  0:00  
I'm a regular guy. I grew up in the wire harness industry. I joined my father when I was basically 15 years old, helping him build a company which he knew not, not a lot about. He bought this company, LCOM systems, when he was 50, almost 55 years old, and needed help, and I joined him, and spent most of my life in wire harnesses. And looking back at some of the things I learned and experienced, good and bad, I just feel that there's an opportunity to share. And if there are, if there's a way to help any of you, please make sure to ask questions. Contribute. It's really meant to be a collaborative discussion. So the topic here today is the strategies that I use to 10x the value of my wire harness company. And this is not meant to be just a buzz statement. It's actually what happened, and that's what I'll share. I'll share in my story, and hopefully some of these insights will help you do the same, or at least make your business better. So my name is Eric Robel. It says that I'm an industry expert, but I don't think you can ever really become an expert in the wire harness domain. It's so nuanced and complex, but I've spent over 35 years in this in this domain, so just so I know who I'm talking to, there's a lot of people in the room. By show of hands, can you raise your hand if you are a wire harness manufacturer? Holy cow, it's almost everyone. Can you raise your hand if you're not a wire harness manufacturer? Okay, a few. It makes sense. So yeah, so a little bit about me. As I said, over 35 years in wire harness manufacturing, my former company was called LCOM systems, and over my time at LCOM, we became one of the leading supplier of wire harnesses for the aerospace and defense domain, and more specifically, for the space, commercial space segment. When I finished my work at El con we had four plants over 500 employees, and we operated at an extremely high operational efficiency, meaning we were able to turn our business from a commodity business to a very high profitable and operational excellence business, and maybe five years before, I remember a conversation with my CFO who sat with me and looked at the numbers and told me, Eric, you can make more money selling white rice than making wire harnesses. So that really upset me, and we were able to do something about it. So I led my company to a very successful sale to aptiv in 2021, and it now operates as a division of Winchester interconnect. It's the Winchester EC division engineer cables divisions. This is my talk to my team when I announced this transition. And as I reflect back, there was a statement that I made, the comment that I quoted Steve Jobs, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something, your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. So when we're in the thick of things and it's an ongoing fire, it's hard to really know where are we going. Are we doing the right things? Where is it leading us? And if you stick through it and you believe and you're doing the right things for the right reasons, there's always something positive at the end. So in 2015, not, not that long before I sold my business,

Speaker 1  4:55  
I did not believe that it was possible to survive a. As a wire harness contract manufacturer in California, remember that talk with my CFO who told me, you can make more money selling white rice than making wire harnesses. And I was thinking to myself, Oh, my God, I'm making wire harnesses that go into, you know, missiles and and ships and weapon systems. How can you say that? But I actually thought that it was true. There's no way to succeed in this kind of business. So we went through and we we made a lot of changes and had some initiatives, starting with saying we're going to open another plant, right? We got a problem making money in California, so we'll open a plant out of anywhere, Puerto Rico. Why Puerto Rico? Well, we needed to be a US based manufacturing company because we were selling to the fence. And I thought that Puerto Rico is going to be a low cost factory. My thought was, we're going to wind down our California operation and really lean into manufacturing in Puerto Rico for our customers. Well, two years later, there was a hurricane in Puerto Rico, and it wiped out the island and shut down power. And I thought at that moment that my life ended like, how am I going to survive this? Where do we go from here? Most of our, you know, our business has got to shut down. And it was really like, there was no way out of this black hole. And some ideas started happening, and some connections, and we had to think really quickly and make a lot of very fast decisions about, how do we move work? How do we support customers who are not getting their product? This was 2017, right? Well, we did some things, right? We were able to partner with other companies. We were able to reshore, unsure, some work, and sort of survive these two years, but it was still very much a survival business. You know, we didn't quite see what, what that end? How do we connect those dots? But they did connect, and they connected, you know, fairly quickly after that. So I'll get to the I'll get to the house, but I'll start with, you know, what's really challenging. Why is this domain of wire harnesses so hard. Why is it hard to be successful in this domain? So first, for many of us, we build very complicated products, and they're very critical. They can't fail no matter what the application is. It's very, very important for the end product and our customers expect near perfection from the product that we deliver. Seemingly it's delayed the day that the customer places it on order, right? They take forever to make a decision. A few get few are smiling. So I know it resonates with some of you. They take forever. They quote, they re quote, they don't place the POS, you follow up. And then all of a sudden, a PO comes in. And then people are saying, hey, you need to deliver it. Like, when are you going to deliver it? Well, my lead time was 16 weeks. Well, that's not good enough. I need it in four, right? So a lot of time is wasted, but then they push on you and they beat on you. I'm glad, no, not a lot of OEMs are in this in this hall, in this hall today, but that's really what happens many contract manufacturers service a very wide range of customers in numerous industries, and each industry has different needs and demands and materials and workmanship standards and tooling, and even each customer in the same industry wants to do it differently. So every time we would bring on a new customer, it felt like we were losing money for six months to a year until we figured out, how do we work with this particular customer? What's missing for them, for in their designs or requirements that we don't know, how do we train for that was very, very challenging, and I think it is for many of you as well.

Speaker 1  9:46  
Another big thing that I'll spend some time talking about today is that the OEMs, your customers, don't complete the engineering, so they give us work that's sort of incomplete. But yet they expect us to do it perfectly, for it to work perfectly the first time. And as I said, they expect you to deliver very, very quickly, almost irrationally quick, right? And then we're in an industry where seemingly everything is manual. Certainly the production, it's mostly manual labor, manual processes, but even the data and how we get it and how we process it through the organization, it's all manual. So we need to work quickly. We need to work with a wider range of industries and customers. We've got data at various levels of quality, and we've got, you know, customers that asked us to do it quickly, and it's all manual, and how do we scale from there? So, you know, I like to say it's sort of like a sea of red against an ocean of blue, right? And it can sometimes seem like that's where you are, and there's opposing forces, but there is purple in this story, right? And it's a combination of red and blue and and so this is a story of, of how I was able to transform LCOM together with a great group of people that, you know, we came from, you know, being opposite to our customers, to being a collaborative force with our customers, and how that led to a success, my Success in 10 XM, the value of of my business, but also my customers success in their mission. And then after my business was acquired, the people that acquired it continued to reach that same success, because they were able to maintain the same processes and the culture i I'll start with really how we started this work. What was our first step into transforming our organization? So as I told you, in 2015 there was no money to be made. In 2017 I lost a lot of money, and I didn't think I was going to be able to keep the doors open. And then we had a hurricane, and it was like there's no way to produce this work. And then in 2019 I read a book. The book was is called Scaling up by Vern Harnish, and it sounded really nice and even a bit corny, but I said, You know what, I'm not ready to scale up, but maybe if I start thinking as a company that's scaling up, I'll sort of lead this organization away from the day To day fires into a more strategic company. And so after reading the book, I looked out and said, Is there someone that I can reach out to that can help train the system and see if it can really shift the organization? So we did that. We found a consultant, we brought him in, and we said, Okay, this resonates. How long is it going to take? Oh, it's a forever process. Great. Let's start and see what happens. So the first strategy, it's people right. You got to get the right people. You got to have them work together and have the right mission. So how do we do that? We I had people working for me for 30 years, right? And they've been in that business forever. They had a lot of knowledge, they had a lot of opinions, and they were the asset of the business, but they were also the challenge of the business. They were doing things their own way.

Speaker 1  14:00  
And even though they were working together for a long time, they seemed like they were working separately from one another. So how do we get them really aligned? The first thing we did was we shared the good and the bad. So the first thing the consultant said is, are you sharing your financials with your employees? And it started with the management team, and I said, Oh, my God, no way I would share that. It's kind of scary. You know, if I make too much money, they're going to ask for a raise. If I don't make enough money, they're going to think I'm just kind of crazy. They don't even know how to read financials. These guys, like grew up as operators on the floor. How can I help them do this? But he convinced me. He said, what's the risk, right? Let's get your team open it up, share with them. And I remember going back, you know, we still had our. Puerto Rico operation. We survived the hurricane and and the consultant look at the Puerto Rico profit and loss statement. And he asked me, Why are you keeping this plant open? You know, you're not. You're not a really good businessman, you know? Why? Why is this plant still remaining open? And I said, I know they're going to get it like I believe in these guys, there's something there, and we're just around the corner. I this is going to happen. So I had to share, you know, we kept financials of each operating group, and I sat with the team and I shared the results, and with my California team, they were a bit better. And again, I was nervous that they're going to ask me for a raise or not really see the big picture, but they learned and they understood. And then with my Puerto Rico team, I was afraid to show them how much money we were losing, because the next thing is they're going to look for a job elsewhere. But they also took that in and learned and it created a common purpose, right? It sort of like aligned everybody to what is really going on and what drives the value creation of the business. We do a lot of work in our businesses, small businesses, and in these kind of bespoke shops, we do a lot of work that has value, but we do a lot of work that does not add value or that our customers are not paying for, but require of us, right? And I wanted my employees to understand that the other thing that was really important with the employees is, is there a purpose for what we do? Yeah, we build important things, and they go into important projects and products. But what's really our purpose? And this, the consultant said, you got to think about a really huge thing, something that people can rally about. Well, that was kind of easy for us, because our main products were going into space, and our main customer had this crazy mission of putting people on Mars. You probably have heard this statement before. So for us, it was easy. We wanted to enable our customers to get to Mars. People really connected to it, and then we involved everyone, everyone into what a good month looked like and what a bad month looked like. And for and for us to make that happen, not everybody can read a financial statement. So what's the one metric that would make a difference in the business. And that everybody could understand, for LCOM, for my company, it was how many hours we produced every month our customer, our main customers, were paying us for our hours produced. I think that's this is the main thing in this business. That's what we get paid for, right? And so as we grew our productivity, as we improved our productivity, we could really easily measure, are we at 6000 7000 10,000 12,000 and when we reach a number, that was our goal, we celebrated. We brought in food trucks, we we made a big deal. We gave people gifts, and they really enjoyed it, and so everyone understood what a good month looked like and what an unsuccessful month looked like. And they didn't need to hear about it two or three months down the road. They knew it the day that it had, the day that the month ended. Yeah,

Speaker 1  18:44  
the second strategy was really, like figuring out what we do best, and this is really, really challenging in my nature. I'm a very opportunistic guy, and I connect to a lot of different people. I talk to a lot of different people and have ideas and sort of bring them to my team. But that was also the problem in our business. So before 2015 I like to say we are a one stop shop for electrical and electronic systems. So what we had at my company, we had a machine shop. We had a sheet metal shop, very complex welding. We bought these companies over time, we would do PCBA assembly, special testing, environmental stress screening, like all these really complicated products. And they were really interesting and exciting to talk about, but they were really complicated for people to build, and as projects would turn over from one customer to another, these are really specialized projects that. Change was very challenging. And as I said, in 2015 our customer concentration sort of shifted, our customers projects shifted, and all of a sudden we found ourselves to be in somewhat distress, and we said, we can't keep this going. We can't keep a machine shop and a sheet metal shop and like, how do I make everybody busy? And not every project aligns? So out of necessity, we said, Okay, what do we have to kill basically, and what do we have to invest in? And we decided we're getting rid of our mechanical fabrication we're not a mechanical fabrication shock. We're getting rid of some of these complex integration projects. That's not what we do. We're going to do wire harnesses, and we're going to figure out how to do them best. We were not very good at wire harnesses, even though we were doing them for 20 or 30 years, because we sort of lost it. You know, I spread my team too thin, and so this change was really scary, right? And remember, I was worried about California, California costs, how to how to stay competitive, but I didn't have a choice, right? I wouldn't be able to sustain it. So that's, let's bring it down. Figure out what we can do best, what we want to do best, and then find the right markets and the right customers in those markets. So we did well. We aligned with commercial space in 2015, commercial space was not a huge industry, but what I saw in it is an industry that's focusing on electrification, an industry that has a high level of complexity and that values performance over anything else. So prices matter, but performance, getting the right product in time, mattered most. And the good news is there's a lot of industries today that still prioritize the same things. You just need to find them and speak their language, right? And by moving from doing all these production processes to really wire harnessing, and then within wire harnessing, finding a market segment that we can learn do a better job in understand the workman's workmanship specifications, and, most importantly, understand what those customers Don't do. Well, we built a successful and a winning strategy. So the next step to that is we said, Okay, what those? What are those customers struggling with? And how can we complement them? And so we created a model. It's really simple, one by name. It's called being an engineering partner. I told my team, don't spend any time talking to the buyers. Spend the time talking to the engineers. Show the engineers the value of the company, so that they recommend us to their purchasing team, and that the purchasing team as good of a job as they do negotiating pricing they're not as good as finding the right supplier for the problem. So we said, Okay, how do we become an engineering partner?

Speaker 1  23:38  
Well, as I said, find the problems that your customers have and be proactive in solving them. Okay, what did they need help with? Where do they struggle? Where do they struggle? And what do I need to do to connect to that? You then need to ensure that you're building trust with those customers, because they're giving you their most precious resource engineer. They're very protective of their domain. Often they don't think they need help. So they need to approach it from a place of some humility, and they need to believe that you can do something that they can do, or do it faster or less expensive, or that you have the resources to do it, and in order to do it, you've got to have very open communication, right talk about problems, whether they're your problems that I my team created, or their problems, be able to have this conversation around the table with an open culture of transparency, both internally and externally. We I call it carefrontation, right? It's a term that I think I coined so some of my customers didn't love to hear what I said, and I taught my team to do the same. Tell it like it is. We. Whether they like it or not, as long as it's constructive and as long as you finding you're approaching it with a solution oriented mindset, not Hey, customer, here's a problem. You designed it. It's your problem. Let me know when you fix it, and I'll work on your product. It was very much. Here's a problem. It doesn't work, and here's how we propose to fix it. Maybe we give them a few choices and alternatives, and what that enabled us to do is transition ourselves from being a commodity supplier to becoming this engineering collaborator I no longer had to compete with a dozen companies that are selling wire harness manufacturing. I was seemingly the only one supplying these products, and the customers would come and basically say, Can you do it? And certainly, if we could not, they had maybe one or two other choices. But we moved ourself away from from competing on price to competing on the solution. And the biggest thing here is, by doing this, we reduce their time to market. So our customers prioritized a very, very rapid time to market and a very rapid response to change as their missions and needs changed, and they often came to us and said, Can you deliver in four weeks and then in two weeks, and then in one week, and sometimes in 72 hours. And I'm talking about some very, very complicated products. So this is going to be hard to read. I'll read it. This is from one of those customers, the main engineering manager, when we used to quote harnesses with LCOM, Eric's team actually caught mistakes in their review prior to beginning manufacturing, I remember turning to the team and being like, this is why we go to them. So this is their internal team. They're not just a labor force that's going to pump out and discover problems along the way. They're the complete package that is going to review our designs and provide input, and even on future iterations of harnesses, they were providing input to have our designs better. So very much. We didn't charge for this. For this partnership, we realized the benefits in our production, and we realized we were able to become a premium supplier to these companies.

Speaker 1  27:57  
So one challenge that I'll get into, which is something that's sort of near and dear to my heart in this engineering process, is that the customers, most of them, don't enable the manufacturers, you guys, to do your job as effectively as they should, right? And so what I like to say is, everyone designs in digital creates digital twins. Paul is here with Siemens right capital does digital twins and digital thread. And then when they go to the suppliers, they print the PDF, scan it and send it to the suppliers to work on right so that digital process is broken at the customer, at the OEM, and then stuff has to be recreated. And that is very, very challenging. It's a huge cost in the domain. Makes it difficult to process the OEM data. Definitely not do it quickly. There's a challenge in sort of standardizing. Every drawing is different. It's drawn in a different format. The quality of the drawing is different, the standards that they use to create it is different. And often what we see, I saw with my company outcome, and I talked to a lot of you guys all the time, what we often see is that the OEMs are designing with a low fidelity design level, so they're missing a lot of information in the designs. When we talk to the OEMs, they say we don't have time to do it the right way, the perfect way. We let our suppliers figure it out, but that's they're not paying for that. And then this leads to errors. There's errors in the design data. There's a need for you all to sort of validate the design and. Often, a lot of this is not found until it goes to the production people, right? This is the lowest process, and the production people look at the product, and they go, Oh, this does not work. The parts don't fit. You're missing the parts in the bottom. Nobody caught these until it's hitting production. And so it's really a challenging domain from an engineering standpoint, and what we had to do, we didn't have magic tools at.com we had really good engineers that really spent needed to spend a lot of time up front and alongside our production to find these problems, identify solutions, work with our customers on it. But as our customers wanted to drive our turnaround time from, as I said, 30 days to 14 days to 10 days to three weeks to quoting to support that sometimes as quickly as one day, we figured out that this is not sustainable And it's very difficult to scale.

Speaker 1  31:19  
Something's not working. So we talked about people, we talked about focusing on an industry. We talked about becoming an engineering partner. The next thing is, what do we do about our production? So we were building many of these harnesses are very complex, sometimes taking 100 hours for one harness, and we had to build basically bespoke production batches of one of a lot of different harnesses. They were very complicated, and as we needed to sort of scale, and we got we did all of these other things right, and our customers said, we need you to double your production over the next 90 days. We said, Okay, how do we do this with our team of people? You all know you can't just hire people from the street to do wire harnesses, and certainly was very, very difficult for us. So as we looked at our people, we said, Okay, we've got, really only a small group of operators that are true experts in wire harnesses, that can read a schematic and a blueprint, that can build the entire process start to finish, right as we got more product, these people were really busy, and they were just busy supporting the rest of the team. And as we hired more people, it would take us six months to 12 months, six to 12 months to train and onboard new people, and that's if they last. Right? A lot of people would fall away in the process, so we were investing a tremendous amount of time in trying to onboard new operators, and it was not successful, right? And so what we figured out is that we can create a different process, and it's really specialized work cell manufacturing. So we broke our processes into four or five main segments. We did some time studies, and we said, Okay, this process is taking 20% of the time. This other process takes 30% of the time, the harnesses we were building were really big. They were not moving off of their foam boards, the tables they were being built. There was people moving to the harnesses. But we said, we can create a system where we've got a specialized team that does process a, a specialized team that does process B and so on and so forth, leaving our best people for the most critical process, and then putting in one expert in each one of those processes. And then, as we were hiring new people, they were only trained for a specific process, so they no longer needed to learn a to z, what it is to build a wire harness. They didn't need to know all 14 modules of IPC, 620, right? They needed to only know module three and four, right? And so the training became that much easier, the onboarding became that much easier, and we went from a six to 12 months onboarding process to a one month so we were able to get productivity in one month. And we increased our cup, our in in one plant. We increase our operator count from 50 to 100 to 200 People in less than, less than one year, we did it very successfully with this system. So it was it, it was one of the secrets of of our success and how we were able to grow so quickly that in again, in three years, we were fan ex ing, the value of our company. Yeah. So the last main strategy to talk about is, you know, really, how do you manage for scale, automation and efficiency? And this is where my journey at LCOM stopped, because I never got to automating or creating these special processes to really scale what we were doing. I had a lot of ideas. I wanted to do a lot of things, but I was too busy, busy making the numbers, busy answering the customer calls with can you increase production, right? And busy just fighting the fires of my people. Some people are coming into work. Some people are not, you know, product issues and so on, and I didn't have the right team around me.

Speaker 1  36:17  
But, you know, we had a lot of great ideas. We wanted to automate the administrative tasks, eliminate repetitive tasks, enable our best people to focus on the high value work, the things that our customers are paying for, get rid of the non value creation work, and then use the use the right tools for the job so that we can strategically maintain our margins as the business grows. So this moves us to the story of cable tech, sort of my next, my next thing, which is what, what I'd like to share about. So I think that today's time, as challenging as it is, as difficult as sort of the rising tides, I think there's a great tailwind for what I like to call the Agile contract manufacturers. First of all, there are tariffs, right? And we all know that the impact of tariffs, as much as it's sort of creating an instability in our environment, there's sort of an there's a need and an expectation to unsure work, to move work closer to the OEMs, to move work into the US, so that it's, you know, the OEMs are not experiencing the impact of the tariffs, and there's just a lot of change in supply chain. Change is an opportunity. Okay? Companies that are agile, that can respond quickly to their customers, that can anticipate their need, that's an opportunity for you. And where we're focusing today is really in the responsiveness at the front end of the process. The front end end of the process is a den is quoting quickly having the right solutions. When you quote, enabling the scaling of production, enabling you guys to sort of adapt to new business opportunities and new segments, and then managing very complicated supply chain. So as the tariffs happen and as products are moving, it's not only impacting the assemblers and the manufacturers, it's the supply chain. And how do you find the right partners in the supply chain and the right materials where you need it and when you need it.

Speaker 1  38:46  
And so I'll recap the things that we talked about. You know, how do you transform your company? One start with your people and the culture, right? It's not just having good people, because we all have them. It's putting the right people in the right seats. Sometimes it means we gotta, we gotta move on from people that were really good for our businesses, but are stifling change and are stifling the sort of the entire organization for moving forward. And I had to make some of those difficult decisions with people that I really cared about, and it ended up being a really positive for the business. Make sure you're clear on your strategic market niche. We are in a niche business, right? Know your customer segment. Focus on it, even if it's a slower segment, because the economy is sort of slowing down in a certain area, the people that do it, that do it well, that understand the customers well, will do well. Make sure you have a engineering partnership capability. Move yourself away if. From just being a commodity supplier if you want to drive commodity value, so think about how you can help customers solve their problems, streamline operational complexity. We're in a complicated environment. We got complicated requirements from our customers make enable your people to have as as much of this simplified work as possible. Not everybody should read a drawing and interpret all of the notes of the drawing, right? Not everybody needs to understand the quality documentation or the workmanship specs figure out. Use your resources that the knowledge base to simplify work downstream, and then find the tools that can help you simplify that work and scale in a practical way. So again, that leads us to what I've done since selling my company. I'm very much passionate about the wire harness industry. As you can all tell, make wire harness is great again. I really believe in that. I mean, I think it's a domain that's so critical to everything we're doing in technology, and that it's not well appreciated by all of our customers, and we certainly can change that together. So after selling LCOM, I invested my money in my time to fund a company called cable tech. We have a team of close to 50 people, and all we do is is develop solutions that help wire harness manufacturers process your work better, simpler in a more scalable way. This is our passion. We like to say old challenges, new tools. So we have a application which we call quotec, which helps to automate the quoting, the RFQ handling, supplier sourcing and identification, and really soon, tariff mitigation. We have an application which we call Pia predictive interconnect Analytics, which deals with both error checking, which is something that created a lot of value for my business, but also enhancing the data of the of the cusp, the customer inbound data, the things that are missing in the in the designs that you get to build, that you are expected to complete and sort of enhance with your engineering team. We're created. We're creating automated tools to do that for the for the industry, and then in our upcoming roadmap, things like identification of mating connectors for testing or providing recommendations for tooling and applicators, all in an automated way. So I'll go back to the quote from the same engineer, and that is for a harness shop that doesn't have a strong engineering team if they run a cable tech report and find mistakes and feed that back to their customers, all of a sudden they look like a genius, right? So these tools are meant to make everyone look like a genius without having to find and develop a team of engineers that are doing this all

Speaker 1  43:40  
themselves, and you all have those smart engineers. We want to, we want to really scale that knowledge across the company. So we call this the purple revolution. Right? We are connecting between the red and the blue, between the OEMs and the CMS. We don't have to be in a fight against each other. We can collaborate. And our goal is really to transform how wire harnesses contract manufacturers operate through digital innovation. We want to enhance the collaboration between the OEMs and the manufacturers, so that there's better synergy, better transfer of knowledge, better inputs and better collaboration. We want to enhance the engineering expertise in your organizations and help you scale. Bring on new people, give them the same tribal knowledge that most organizations have, only a few people know we can scale that across the organization and really together address industry pain pain points that address a wide range of issues compliance and. That's for you, Steve, compliance and tariffs and so on. So summary, you know, I shared five insights. I hope it was valuable to you all happy to have conversations with anyone about my past, about my experience selling to a strategic or about, you know, my outlook for this industry, or about how to use these tools to help everyone succeed in their business. Thank you for your time, and if there are any questions,

Unknown Speaker  45:48  
any questions or comments, I'm happy to take them.

Unknown Speaker  45:50  
I'm curious, why did you sell your business?

Speaker 1  45:53  
Good question. Why? The question is, why did I sell my business? I wasn't trying to sell my business. Okay, I was it wasn't for sale, and I knew that at one point I will sell it. I grew up in this business. All my life I spent in this in this business, I felt that there's a limit to what I can do. I had great people, but the culture of the business was so strong at that point that the things I wanted to do, I felt like I was sort of running uphill and that I wasn't able to change and create the things that I wanted to create. I didn't know what I was going to do, but I just thought it was time, and I'm 51 years old, and here's an opportunity for me to start new and find what drives my cash. And I was doing it for a long time. I was ready for that change. Any other questions, do

Speaker 2  46:54  
you see opportunities also to help your your vendors, connect the manufacturers and other companies like that do their job better to partner up line with harness manufacturers. Is that part of cable tech

Speaker 1  47:15  
as well? Oh, that's a great question. So the question is, I'll rephrase it or say it again, do we see opportunity to get the suppliers, component suppliers and vendors, in better collaboration with the contract manufacturers, so that there's a better ecosystem? 100% yes, we think that there's a lot of opportunity in the data that we can generate together. There's a lot of challenges with alternates and obsolescence, and one company is buying an MOQ and another company is buying an MOQ, and nobody quite knows, and there's a lot of inefficiency. And so we created a platform that we believe optimizes that brings a lot of data together. We're happy to work with distributors and share those data, share the insights. Hey, if one company is looking for the same components across multiple requirements, why isn't somebody stocking it right? If there's five OEMs, fan CMS that are looking for the same part. Maybe a distributor would benefit from having it in stock so that we can move faster and support the end and customer. And so we're creating a data platform that's able to provide this data. We get a lot of very varied requirements from a lot of industry. And so we can, we can glean insights and share that with with the distributors and the OEMs. Great question.

Speaker 2  48:48  
Thank you. Very impressive. We appreciate you coming in, sharing this we I know it took some, some guts, to get up there, cocked out

Speaker 3  48:59  
this Saturday. Yes. Thank you. Taste Eric was active Winchester, a customer of yours?

Speaker 1  49:08  
No? Was aptive Winchester a customer of mine? The answer is no, I met the Winchester sort of the M and a team in 2015 I took a call because I was always curious, and I said, Okay, it's not not the right time. I wasn't ready, and that my business was not ready. And then they called me again in 2017 and I took a call, and I took a meeting, and I said, I love my business, and I'm not ready. Anyways, I've got all these problems. And then, as I said, we really struggled, hurricane and whatnot. They called me again in 2019 same kind of question. And then in 2021 when they called, I said, Okay, let it's interesting. Let's see what what this looks like. And I got four. There were four. Four companies that contacted me within 30 days. I don't know what list I was on, because I wasn't in a process, and the process sort of led to this excitement, and I wasn't ready, but it got really exciting, and they really saw the vision. They bought into our vision of how to change the industry. And you all know, aptiv is an automotive supplier, and so when they saw this different approach to the space industry, interesting, exciting domain that operates in a completely different value stream that got they got really excited, and they got me excited about transitioning on my team. Remained in place. Nobody from apt or Winchester came in to run the organization. I just moved their responsibilities to the management team that was developed, especially over the last few years. And it was, it's been a very successful acquisition for them. There they would, I think it's, it's almost like a Cinderella story. Any other questions? So thank you guys for being here and sharing this with me. Appreciate that.