Aaron Dobbins is an electrical engineer and the President of Ellenby Technologies, a company started by his father. With a background that includes an MBA and experience at companies like Bose, he now leads Ellenby in manufacturing specialized electronics. The company focuses on two main areas: control systems for vending machines and secure cash management solutions like smart safes.

Nate Wheeler is the host of the popular Manufacturing Insiders podcast. He also owns weCreate, a nationally recognized marketing agency that helps manufacturers grow, save money, and become more efficient.

In this episode of Manufacturing Insiders, Aaron Dobbins explains how US manufacturers can thrive despite intense competition from low-cost foreign imports. He details a strategy that moves beyond price wars and focuses on delivering value through rapid innovation and superior design. Using his company’s smart safes as an example, he shows how staying ahead of evolving threats—like new battery-powered break-in tools—creates a product that importers cannot easily replicate.

Aaron shares his playbook for maintaining a competitive edge, from anticipating new product requirements to upgrading the factory floor to meet them. He discusses how to foster a culture that embraces technological change and reveals his method for strategically investing in automation without breaking the bank. Listeners will learn how to benchmark against industry leaders and use data to build a nimble operation that consistently outmaneuvers the competition.

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Nate Wheeler (00:00.739)
Welcome to Manufacturing Insiders. I have a very smart guy with me today, Aaron Dobbins. He is an electrical engineer who went to Cornell University and then got his MBA at Penn State. He worked broadly in the electronics industry for some very notable companies. I noticed Bose Electronics on your LinkedIn profile; I have some of their speakers in my house.

You have a lot of great experience in the field before coming back to your father’s company, Ellenby Technologies, which he started. You are making some impressive stuff there. Welcome to Manufacturing Insiders; I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.

Aaron Dobbins (00:42.678)
Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Nate Wheeler (00:45.769)
Tell us what you’re making, specifically about your vending and cash management solutions.

Aaron Dobbins (00:58.018)
These are the two major product categories we manufacture. The first is vending machine electronics, which includes the control boards for snack machines all over the world. We also make sensors that detect when products fall so you don’t get angry with the machine, along with the various displays and payment devices that are part of the vending machine ecosystem. We’ve been doing that for over 30 years.

That was one of the first parts of our business, formed in the late 80s. The other section of our business is smart safes and cash management equipment. These devices accept cash currency in retail environments like convenience stores, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants, and convert it into digital records.

It’s like bringing a small bank branch into the retail location, allowing them to deposit cash into the safe and have it collected as little as once a week. In the meantime, all the data from what they put into the safe is transferred to their bank account on a daily basis. This is a very popular product in the United States, and we’ve been doing it since 1995.

Nate Wheeler (02:17.686)
Manufacturing in that space has a layer of complexity that a lot of other manufacturing doesn’t because you’re expecting that someone at some point is going to try to destroy or break into an object. How do you manage all of these different components? Do you do a lot of it in-house, or do you outsource the work?

Aaron Dobbins (02:43.852)
This is such a specialized category of products that to be successful, you have to do all the design work as well. It’s not something where you can just grab an off-the-shelf design for a fortified cash management safe and begin selling it. You have to think about the mechanical design, the electronics you’re going to use, and the security systems you’re going to put into the product. You’re building very custom solutions for this interesting challenge.

Over the years, we modify our approaches because crime changes, the availability of power tools changes, and crime rates change. It’s a fun type of product to design and test. We break into our own equipment on a regular basis, but that’s what it takes.

Nate Wheeler (03:37.986)
Do you ever get to use explosives?

Aaron Dobbins (03:43.875)
We stop short of explosives, though in some parts of the world, that’s a much more common mode of attack. In the ATM space, they have their fair share of explosives being used. Outside of Philadelphia, they had a rash of explosive attacks on ATMs in past years. Thankfully, so far, smart safes have not gone that direction. That’s a very violent and intense form of attack that causes a lot of property damage.

We have our own attack styles to worry about, like chains attached to vehicles trying to rip safes out of the ground, or forklifts and construction equipment being driven into the building. There’s all kinds of craziness that causes so much damage. Designing for new attack styles involves having a very competent engineering group on-site, which is what distinguishes our products. We do just as much engineering as we do manufacturing to think hard about how these products need to operate.

Nate Wheeler (04:55.318)
What is an unexpected break-in method you’ve encountered that forced you to engineer a new solution?

Aaron Dobbins (05:11.566)
There are a lot of clever attacks out there. One of the big disruptors from about five or ten years ago is the availability of cheap, battery-powered tools from places like Home Depot and Lowe’s. For under a hundred dollars, you can get a battery-powered reciprocating saw or a grinding wheel. A lot of safes in the field were getting tested against this type of equipment.

Certain low-cost power tools, especially with carbide bits, are formidable, and there are no shortcuts to dealing with that. What we’ve had to do over the years is improve our electronic detection of their application in the field. We look for signatures of their operation, such as vibrations and impacts. We fortify our product so that the various cut lines that might be applied are not easy to make. It’s all about increasing the time it takes for the break-in.

If you can last 10, 20, or 30 minutes against powerful tools while local sirens are screaming and the safe is sending an alert to a server, then you have a much stronger, more resilient position. It’s usually a crime ring, and if you can stop them in one location, you’ll see crime drop off in that whole territory for months. That’s typically how it goes.

Nate Wheeler (07:03.936)
That’s amazing. It gives a whole new meaning to market testing. I can imagine when it comes to grinder wheels, inserting or sandwiching a fabric between two layers of metal would be somewhat effective.

Aaron Dobbins (07:29.474)
I don’t want to give away too many of our secrets. One of the fun parts about it is that our customers are always very price-sensitive. People don’t like to proactively spend a lot on security; they reactively spend on it, which is much more expensive. The types of countermeasures we include in the equipment have to account for this.

Nate Wheeler (07:31.16)
I think like an engineer; I’m always trying to figure out how I would solve this problem.

Aaron Dobbins (07:58.67)
These types of break-ins have to be addressed thoughtfully so that we give a lot of bang for the buck. If we just make our steel thicker or pour concrete in the walls like they do with jewelry safes and tool-rated UL safes, that would result in a product that wouldn’t sell. It would be prohibitively expensive and we wouldn’t be competitive with the rest of the market.

We have to combine our electronics capability with mechanical cleverness to keep the price in check and keep security in line with the threats we expect to see, without going overboard. Otherwise, no one gets the benefit of a safe that is too expensive.

Nate Wheeler (08:52.138)
That’s interesting. I feel like I would have a fun time in your brainstorming sessions. I’ve grown up using tools, so I’m pretty familiar with what breaks a grinding wheel; there are definitely some things you could do. One of the challenges we talked about in our intro call, which is broadly important in the manufacturing space, is how to stay competitive with foreign suppliers that can often do things cheaper. Now we have tariffs thrown into the mix, so there’s some confusion there too. How are you guys staying relevant in a field where you probably have a lot of overseas competition?

Aaron Dobbins (09:41.644)
Our entire industry is almost entirely importing products. Most US manufacturers in our industry are not manufacturing the way we do, where we’re building our own boards and designing all the different components. They’re mostly sourcing subassemblies, putting them together, and doing a final test. To stay competitive, you have to consider that when you import a machine in its entirety, you’re getting some amazing price points from around the world. China and India, in particular, are big import countries, as is South Korea. Some of these price points seem almost unreal.

The way we stay competitive is by sweating all the details. We have to think hard about where we’re adding value. If we’re not building something in a category that we feel will be the best in the world, we’re not going to waste our effort on it. When we build a product, we’re applying new techniques and approaches to solve these problems. We use new electronics, new mechanical designs, and a lot of patented methods we’ve come up with to distinguish our products from the more mature technology being imported.

When you import, your disadvantage is that you can’t change the design too frequently. You need stability, volume, and to avoid the risk of mistakes. If you make a mistake, you’re importing a container of mistakes. All your margin and advantage evaporate when you have to return the product to its country of origin to get fixed, or you lose your customer because of delays. This allows us to be a lot more bold with our designs and try out novel approaches, which we have to lean into hard. We’ve done that to establish our position in the US market.

Nate Wheeler (12:06.708)
I would imagine you’d have to have a strong feedback mechanism with your customer base to be able to responsively adjust your designs. How does that work?

Aaron Dobbins (12:20.416)
It works by closely collaborating with our customers. We don’t do a lot of sales here; we’re really a manufacturer and an engineering shop. We like to make the designs and build them. We get our feedback by working with our solution providers that sell our equipment in the field, understanding their pain points, and listening to their unmet needs or difficulties.

We go to trade shows to listen to the industry’s broader issues with crime, labor rates, monetary policy, and cash usage. Most importantly, we monitor data coming out of these machines, not just in the field, but also from our production, field service, and depot repair service. We have tremendous amounts of data generated from our own electronics. We apply various analytic engines to figure out which features are being used, which are not, and if they’re being used as frequently as we expected. This helps us work on the right problems.

A lot of times, customers don’t even articulate what they appreciate or don’t. People are very forgiving, and we want our products to melt into the background of retail establishments. We don’t want them thinking a lot about cash management; when they are, it’s usually because we didn’t do our job right and it’s slowing them down. We like to monitor how the machines are actually performing and what that life cycle management looks like, so we watch all the data.

Nate Wheeler (14:13.772)
When you said forgiving, I thought they’re very forgiving, but they’re also very forgetful. When you ask them what features they used, they’re like, “I think I use this or that.” I experience this in my space all the time. A new customer comes through the website, and I ask, “How’d you find us?” They say, “I think I googled something.” “What’d you Google?” “I don’t know.”

Aaron Dobbins (14:36.46)
Our products are obviously the center of our world, but for customers, they’re a periphery, an accessory. They have much bigger things to worry about, which is part of why our company exists—to take the hassle out of processing cash. Increasingly, there’s less infrastructure to support it. Banks don’t want to accept your cash anymore if you’re a merchant. They don’t want you coming to the bank every day to drop off cash, which is bizarre.

We’re trying to make cash just as easy to deal with as credit cards but with a lower surcharge. Credit cards are charging upwards of 3% these days, and the burden of dealing with cash can feel like it exceeds that if you don’t have a good way to automate it. That’s what this equipment is all about and why it’s so successful in the U.S. right now. There isn’t a lot of friendly infrastructure out there to deal with the cash that customers want to pay with.

Nate Wheeler (15:45.273)
It was on my mind that the dramatic reduction in cash usage since COVID would be a big concern for you guys. It sounds like there’s a bright side, though, where banks are also less willing to deal with the cash that’s left, which is balancing things out a bit.

Aaron Dobbins (16:16.268)
That’s exactly right, and that’s a trend that started even years before the pandemic. Banks have been offloading cash management to armored car companies. They don’t want cash vaults anymore; they have armored cars take in piles of cash on their behalf. They call them virtual vaults. The various banks of the country will say, “Okay, instead of bringing cash to one of my vaults and maintaining this large infrastructure, we’ll just contract with Brinks, Loomis-Garda, or other smaller armored car companies, and let them be the cash vault for us.”

They’ll store the cash, and the bank won’t even see the cash that’s in circulation. This offloads a product that isn’t always a high-margin thing for banks. Instead, banks can worry about loans, mortgages, and other financial products that net them a lot more revenue.

Nate Wheeler (17:22.7)
That makes sense. I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while that at some point, someone is going to push hard enough for a completely cashless society. Does that keep you up at night?

Aaron Dobbins (17:41.602)
That debate has been raging for decades. It seems like every year, there’s a new revelation that maybe we shouldn’t be using cash at all because it’s anonymous and gums up the system. Yet, it’s a publicly subsidized payment instrument. Everything else out there besides cash is pretty much privatized, with various levels of tracking and fee structures built in.

A lot of times, people believe cash is barely relevant because, in their personal experience, they may have used it very few times over the last month. However, a tremendous number of Americans are unbanked or underbanked, meaning they don’t have access to electronic forms of payment. That’s why you see state legislation coming up where it’s now illegal in certain cities and states to refuse cash payment. It’s a public instrument.

When people go to a restaurant and expect to pay with a $20 bill for a cheeseburger but are told, “No, we’re cashless here,” it denies service to those who don’t have access to credit or debit instruments. That’s the basis for this legislation. I don’t think cash becoming obsolete is a short-term concern. I also don’t think our company is too tied to just cash automation. We have a number of products that protect value outside of just cash itself.

Cash is convenient because you can validate it by scanning the notes to figure out if it’s real currency and then protect it. But there are plenty of other things in retail that need physical protection, like high-value inventory, that aren’t just virtual cash instruments. These safes have versions that are really just for electronic protection where you’re not necessarily needing the thickest steel and concrete reinforcement.

You can combine steel with intelligence to get a more balanced, affordable, and aware product—something that tells you what’s going on throughout the day, as opposed to just a brute-force safe. We have a lot of products in that space, and we also have portable management products to protect things coming in and out of safes.

Aaron Dobbins (20:59.864)
If you need mobile security, we build smart transport bags that can be used for cash, but also for non-cash items like pharmaceuticals or high-value merchandise.

Nate Wheeler (21:12.768)
So you’re pretty diversified. The vending space is huge. I even think about my manufacturing customers; a lot of them have tool vending machines. Do you guys get involved in that?

Aaron Dobbins (21:31.042)
Yes, we do. Vending is a very broad category. It used to be just snacks and sodas, but now it’s for first aid equipment, gloves, COVID vaccine tests, and tools. They are used on factory floors to ensure that items are taken out of and returned to lockers. They’re also used in locker systems, which is a category of vending. We’ve done things with Amazon self-service kiosks and smart carts in airports, vending pushcarts for luggage. Vending is a very broad category.

Some of the fun machines we’ve worked on are the ice cream vending machines with freezer lids, like the Mini Melts or Dippin’ Dots types. They have little cups of super-cold ice cream that come pre-sealed.

Nate Wheeler (22:38.838)
The one my daughter begs me for every time we go to a hockey game.

Aaron Dobbins (22:44.64)
Exactly that one. These vending machines open the freezer, bring a suction arm inside, grab the item, and then drop it off. We’ve made all the control boards for every single one of those machines in the country.

Nate Wheeler (22:58.304)
That’s fascinating. You guys could even diversify into robotics to some degree since you’re already incorporating some of that.

Aaron Dobbins (23:08.118)
Yes, there are some robotics in vending for sure.

Nate Wheeler (23:11.254)
It sounds really good. How does your business split between the vending side and cash management?

Aaron Dobbins (23:21.464)
From an electronic standpoint, vending and cash management have a lot of similarities. They both involve controlling human touch interfaces like keypads and displays. They talk to bill validators, card readers, and modems that connect data to be managed. The electronics involved in vending and smart safes are similar; they’re both forms of kiosks.

Notably, both products are usually installed, powered on, and never reset. They’re always running and expected to work, so you need long-life, high-reliability, workhorse kinds of circuitry. Smart safes, however, have the component where we build the whole thing. We need the mechanical design, the web services to support it, and everything involved in building it. It’s a finished product built from the smallest part up, receiving all these metal boxes. We don’t bend the steel ourselves, but we do work with domestic metal fabricators. For vending, we just send boards off to vending machine companies or operators.

Nate Wheeler (24:50.516)
How many employees do you have there?

Aaron Dobbins (24:53.486)
We’re just south of 50 folks here. We run a pretty tight operation with not a lot of management overhead, which I love. It’s about a third engineering, a third production, and a third operations and management. It’s a pretty lean ship, which allows us to plan how we take on projects. We can’t take on every project in the world, but we do try to get efficient software to accelerate our productivity and efficient machines for our manufacturing so we don’t have to keep throwing bodies at the problem. We spend a lot of time on the right level of automation and software support so that we don’t have to swell our numbers, which is not the best way to solve a problem.

Nate Wheeler (25:56.921)
It’s the challenge of every small business owner. You run into this cycle where you’re adding clients, revenue is getting better, and as soon as it improves, you need to hire another person to accommodate the extra work. That’s always the challenge.

Aaron Dobbins (26:13.517)
Remarkably, if I look at the trajectory of how many people we’ve had on board, it’s been stunningly flat over our history, yet our growth has been quite strong. The reason for that is we’re always looking at our manufacturing equipment and layout. In the past, we had more people placing parts on boards manually. When we moved to a surface-mount-dominated electronics manufacturing line, we saw a lot of acceleration just by using automated robotic pick-and-place equipment.

Even today, we’ve updated generations of that equipment, so we get additional throughput every five to 10 years by adding new investments to our line. I have employees who have been here for 30 years. With the same folks, they’re just learning other machines and interfaces.

The technology behind electronics manufacturing has been really helpful for us. Every time we get a new machine, it takes less effort to get up to speed because the software, data, and experience are improved. Early machines were tough to work on and required rigorous training, but it’s not as bad as it used to be. We’re doing a lot more with fewer people.

Nate Wheeler (28:03.198)
You’re obviously being very intelligent about incorporating technology. Many companies know in concept that they should be updating things—software, machinery, robotics. As president, how do you drive the culture of knowing what to look at and what technology to incorporate? Do you start by identifying a problem?

Aaron Dobbins (28:36.726)
It is tricky because a lot of folks in manufacturing, especially supervisors and managers on the floor, have an attitude of, “I can do anything with any tools. I won’t be the squeaky wheel. I’m a team player and happy to just push forward with whatever equipment we have.” You have to look and see if this matches where the rest of the industry is. You can compare benchmarks. If I don’t have a good benchmark in my own industry, I can look at what larger electronics companies are doing.

It’s easy to see now because you can listen to podcasts, go to YouTube, and see factories in action. You can see the state-of-the-art equipment available and then reflect on what we have and whether we’re too far from the optimal throughput others are getting. I can identify opportunities there. I want to have either higher quality or higher throughput; those are usually the two drivers for an equipment purchase.

For a company in our position, I almost never buy new equipment. I watch auctions all the time, even when I don’t need equipment, just to see the market value and get ideas. I might watch a few auctions selling electronics manufacturing equipment and see the price points. I’ll keep them in the back of my head and think, “That wasn’t as expensive as I thought.” Then I’ll ask around to see how we would incorporate it into our process.

The next time I see auctions coming up, I’ll know the value of a machine like that to me. The depreciation of equipment is outrageous, which is one reason I can’t bring myself to buy new stuff. We could be in trouble so quickly by buying all this stuff brand new. If you know what your needs are, you can get something that’s five or 10 years old and it will blow away the current vintage of whatever you’re using.

Nate Wheeler (31:06.496)
Benchmarking what the leaders in your field are doing sounds like a really important step. This is concerning to me because, having worked with a lot of manufacturers, “old school” is the best way I can describe the mindset. It’s, “Hey, we’ve always done it this way. It works. We’re happy.”

They apply that philosophy to their marketing, signage, machinery, and so on. The problem is, we’re always going to be more expensive than Mexico, China, or India. You need to be able to intelligently apply technology to get that extra value-add. You have to have the value-add; otherwise, you’re just another player in a flooded game.

Aaron Dobbins (32:03.81)
Yes, exactly. We study value in our finished product designs and in the equipment purchases we make to improve our manufacturing efficiency. This allows us to take the right steps to preempt change. For example, we’re changing some of our core circuitry in our smart safes, as we do every so many years.

To be ready for that, I’m going to need a little more sophistication in my manufacturing line. I’ll start surveying six months before we expect the new product to launch. I’ll talk to equipment brokers, look at auctions, and talk to my production staff to figure out what they would be comfortable with. I’ll tell them what I’m uncomfortable with, which is doing it the way they’re comfortable doing it today because that’s not going to work.

They don’t see it coming yet, but I’m telling them that the new parts, throughput, or quality standards we’re going to need are not compatible with what we’re doing now. It’s going to result in overly stressed employees. If you don’t do your homework far enough in advance, chaos ensues because people are thrown into building products they weren’t prepared to build, and everyone gets stressed out.

They want to build good stuff and have it pass cleanly, but if we don’t have the right level of assistance through automation, inspection, and testing, our production suffers first, and then our engineers suffer because they have to fix it and improve the tools. That just starts driving the culture south. I want to keep manufacturing, which is traditionally a stressful business, enjoyable so that people feel good about the products they’re building. It’s very easy to out-design your capability, so I try to stay on top of that.

Nate Wheeler (34:35.552)
What you’re saying makes a lot of sense. I’m trying to think from a leadership perspective how you create that mindset. Not everybody is building ultra-complex assemblies with safety features. What if it’s a level down from that, like building firewood racks? I was just talking to somebody who makes them. It’s an American-made company, and I assume it’s very difficult to have an innovation that would clearly differentiate you from a Chinese product. They can use more robust steel, but what’s the mindset in that company? Is it your next-level-down managers having a weekly or monthly meeting to talk about upcoming problems? What are the mechanisms?

Aaron Dobbins (35:40.364)
Every manufacturing organization has different crises and challenges. When it’s more mechanical in nature—as I mentioned, we don’t make the steel in our cabinets, but we work very closely with the companies that do. They’re our partners, and I visit them frequently. They might be in the category of making commodity-type racks and selling them in the U.S. How do they differentiate? I see what they go through as a manufacturer of steel products, like shelving.

It usually comes down to whether quality, throughput, or price is a problem. Price is always a problem when manufacturing in the United States because we have requirements to create a safe, healthy, and friendly environment for employees. That’s all expensive. Then there’s competition to keep employees in manufacturing instead of them going into retail or service industry jobs, which drives our labor rates quite high.

For shops doing more standardized product offerings with direct competition from foreign markets, it’s important to have a differentiated aspect. This could be outstanding quality, great follow-up customer service, or a flexible manufacturing line that allows for customization without incredible surcharges.

Those are all things that keep that tier of suppliers in business. It may not always be about the technology in the product or the most forward-looking design. Maybe it’s the design aesthetic that’s interesting. Manufacturers have many tools to differentiate outside of pure technology, and customization is a big one. Changes in taste and available finishes are constant.

Fabrication equipment has also evolved. Just as we modify our electronics manufacturing equipment, I’ve been floored by how many methods for adding automation to mechanical assemblies have emerged. You’d think these are mature industries, but lasers have come a long way. What used to be a novelty—laser cutting—is now a no-brainer because the economics and payback are amazing. The press brake tools available for bending steel with robotic assists and quick changeovers are incredible.

Just when you think welding won’t change—you have MIG, TIG, robots—they up it again with more tools. There’s laser welding now. It’s a remarkable time. You can go to YouTube channels to watch all these things in action, and there are impressive trade shows for fabricators looking for inspiration. I personally love Fabtech. If I were a metal fabricator, I’d go every year. It’s a playground for them where you see the best of the best. You don’t have to think about buying a new instrument for $2 million. The bigger fabricators do, but the depreciation curve is just as strong in mechanical fabrication as it is in electronics. You can just be informed about the technology so you’re ready to pounce when an opportunity presents itself.

Nate Wheeler (40:10.048)
I love that. I was going to ask how you keep your eye on these trends and new technologies. You mentioned trade shows and YouTube videos. Is there any publication you regularly look at to see what’s up and coming?

Aaron Dobbins (40:27.546)
I like to visit distributor sites. Since we do the design work, which is on the front end of our manufacturing, I go to our electronic distributor and component provider sites regularly to survey what’s new. Some of them send me junk mail about new parts. I’ll think about those parts as a creative exercise. I’ll ask myself, “If I had to use this in a new product, what would I do with it?” It may have nothing to do with anything I’ve pictured before, but if you put yourself in that mindset of, “Okay, here’s a new gadget on the market. How would I use it?”

Nate Wheeler (41:33.357)
I have one for you. I interviewed a guy yesterday who obtained a patent and has already manufactured some of the product with commitments from big electronics manufacturers. Essentially, it’s a material like solder that you can use in any 3D printing machine. It’s highly conductive, which is the big limitation right now with printable electronics; you usually need a $500,000 piece of equipment. This is something you can use in any of them. I think it’s going to change everything because all of a sudden, you can print any shape of circuit board instead of just flat ones. You can embed the electronics directly into it as you’re 3D printing. So I think it’s super cool.

Aaron Dobbins (42:33.09)
For sure. Things like 3D printers, especially ones that can handle all kinds of materials, are a game-changer. There’s been metal printing, but if you can print a highly conductive substrate, it allows you to compete with the biggest companies in the world that spend a fortune on tooling. For example, in a phone, you’re building these intricate stamped parts to be antennas that interface with circuitry. When you can print conductors nicely and arbitrarily in 3D, the first thing that comes to mind is a field day for RF. You could build really complicated antenna arrays that would normally cost a fortune to tool up or mold in place. You’d be able to do it at least for prototyping, though I’m sure it’s still an expensive technology at scale.

But you could iterate. The secret for us is to iterate, iterate, iterate. You have to build the product, test it, and even if everything technically checks the boxes, you have to put it in front of a few customers. Does it actually pass the utility sanity check? Did it solve the problem the right way? We’ve had many times where we’re racing to the finish with a great product, we give it to a customer, and they say, “Yeah, it does exactly what you said, but there are three reasons I can’t use it: A, B, and C. Go redesign it.”

And that’s what we do. That’s part of the reason it’s really helpful to have these tools in-house. 3D printers are valuable because people don’t have to use their imagination as much; you can actually create the product.

Nate Wheeler (44:25.994)
I think there will be a day where you don’t go to the store to buy a new iPhone. You just load the program and print it.

Aaron Dobbins (44:34.382)
It certainly could be like that. With the way tariffs have been going, I just saw this morning that iPhones are under the gun again for some kind of threat of a 25% tariff if they’re foreign-made. It’s insane.

Nate Wheeler (44:49.184)
Yeah, because they wanted to move everything from Foxconn to India, and Trump was like, “You guys still don’t get it. That’s not what we’re trying to do here.”

Aaron Dobbins (44:58.764)
I’ve seen a lot of our competitors move from China. Some are stuck there because China has a massive infrastructure, and it’s not easy to just say, “Okay, I was in China, let’s move to another country that’s under less threat of tariffs.” A lot of them have started a multi-year process of moving from China to India, which appears to be a favorite backup. Some are trying to use Europe more, although labor costs in most of Europe are quite high. Eastern Europe can be more competitive, but you’re just chasing a very volatile situation with world tariff threats at the moment.

It impacts us as well because when there are tariffs on things like steel and aluminum, it raises US index prices for those materials. Our prices go up a bit, but not as much as they would if we imported an entire assembly. Some of our electronics and components have to be sourced from these countries, but it’s still not as big of a hit compared to importing the whole product.

However, tariffs alone are not going to be the thing that protects American business. It sounds good to add 30% to an imported product, but if you were building the exact same thing in the US, you’d still come out ahead with the imports even with the 30% tariff. That’s why you cannot build the same thing here. A smartphone built in the United States is going to be a different animal. Maybe it will be that 3D-printed, customizable thing, and it’s going to be a higher-priced product. Therefore, it has to be a differentiated product, or customers just won’t buy it.

Nate Wheeler (47:00.47)
You’re absolutely right. Tariffs are not going to fix everything. It would be nice to see a 20-30% increase in US manufacturing, but you’re never going to move everything back here. It doesn’t even make sense to. The high-value-added manufacturing is what we need to be thinking about.

Aaron Dobbins (47:22.606)
That’s what we’ve always done. We’ve always been at a disadvantage, so we’d better not do the same thing people are importing. If we find that we are, that’s the time to pivot. If we haven’t done so years ago, we have to do it now. If we start seeing imports that too closely match what we’re doing, that means it’s time to get moving, run faster, or find another substantial value enhancer for what you’re offering.

Nate Wheeler (47:56.951)
Good. I like to wrap up every episode with a thought about what you could use in your business right now. Are there any resources or people you’d like to meet? The hope is that either I know somebody or a listener does. Is there anything you’re looking for?

Aaron Dobbins (48:20.408)
The biggest thing we look for are good paths to market. Since we’re so involved in our manufacturing and design, I like to think we have that covered pretty well. Steel suppliers are sometimes challenging to get our designs at the right price point and also domestically made, which helps me a lot because I visit them all the time to make tweaks and adjustments. We’re creating brand new designs and aren’t even sure if things will fit together quite right, so keeping an eye on metal suppliers is always a nice area for us.

But the biggest need is probably solution providers that can take these products and find sales applications for them. That’s one thing we don’t like doing a lot of. We love dealing with solution providers and distributors; we don’t do a lot of direct sales.

Nate Wheeler (49:25.964)
Can you give me an example of one of these solution providers? What type of company is that?

Aaron Dobbins (49:33.454)
These are generally companies like small or medium-sized armored car companies that are taking their pickup services with the smart safes. They’ll go to a retailer they’ve been servicing for several years and say, “Hey, let me put a smart safe in there. I’ll come less frequently, and you won’t have to prepare your deposit anymore. The safe will organize all of that.” That’s a big path to market for smart safes.

There are also companies that will source and provide contracts with armored car companies. They’ll take the equipment, field service, and banking credit, blend it all together, and push the product into retail on a national scale. These are big software integrators that provide a full experience using our equipment, so that’s a big path to market for us. Sometimes they’re just distributors of technology products trying to target retail and solve their operational problems.

Nate Wheeler (50:45.592)
And obviously, someone in the vending space who is developing a new vending machine and needs someone to provide the brains behind it.

Aaron Dobbins (50:57.326)
That’s a big area. A lot of vending machine companies, especially in the United States, don’t always have the on-hand staff to think through their next-generation vending machine controllers or execute their plans for unique features, robotics, screen interfaces, and payment devices. With decades of experience with all the various vending-specific specifications of the world and the array of boards we already make, we’re always happy to work with vending machine manufacturers that need electronic partners.

Nate Wheeler (51:44.119)
That’s good stuff, and I certainly have some ideas for you. If anybody is listening to the podcast and fits any of those categories, hopefully you reach out to Aaron. We’ll make sure to drop his contact info into the bio. Thanks a lot for coming on today, Aaron.

Aaron Dobbins (52:05.836)
Nate, thank you so much. It was fun.