Dave Campbell and Josh Borrow are veteran leaders at Fontana Gruppo, a global fastener manufacturer. Dave brings 23 years of company experience, while Josh has risen from an entry-level parts sorter to managing operations for two separate plants.

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, Dave Campbell and Josh Borrow detail their approach to solving the industry’s persistent labor shortage. They explain the practical strategies they use for recruitment and retention in a competitive market. The conversation reveals how they moved beyond simply increasing wages to building a stable and engaged workforce.

This conversation provides a guide for creating a culture where people want to stay and build a future. Dave and Josh reveal how they broke down communication silos between the operations and production control departments to streamline output. They share the specific leadership tactics used on the factory floor to keep the entire team aligned and transform entry-level positions into rewarding, long-term careers.

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WeCreate (00:01.038) Welcome to Manufacturing Insiders. Today I have two really cool guests with me: Dave Campbell and Josh Barrow. They are collectively members of Fontana Grupo, which is a global company and global OEM that services a lot of the main government contracting, aerospace, and some of the tier one OEMs out there.

These guys have a ton of experience in this company. Josh has grown up in the company and really took a leadership position, starting with sorting parts. Dave has been with the company for 23 years. Both of them have a lot of leadership experience, and I just wanted to pick their brains today about what it takes to manage operations in a company of this size.

How do we navigate some of the challenges of employees and communications and tariffs and all the things that are going on right now? So welcome to Manufacturing Insiders, guys.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (01:06.626) Thanks.

WeCreate (01:08.93) So I’ll start with Josh since I haven’t had the opportunity to talk too much to him. But from what I understand, you started kind of at the bottom in this company and now you are in charge of 130 employees.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (01:24.334) Correct, yeah. I started in 2011 at our distribution center as a hand sorter. Then shortly after that, I was transferred to the North Holly facility, running machines – tappers to begin with – and then worked my way into cold nut formers. From there, I went into supervision. I did supervision for about four to five years. From supervision, I moved into the production control side of things.

I did production control for another three to four years and then got into operations. I’ve been in operations ever since. I took over North Holly in February of ’24 and then I just took over Fenton in May of ’25.

WeCreate (02:07.545) Wow. So how would you say – I guess what’s your profile? Because you’re what a lot of companies would like to replicate, right? You bring somebody in at the ground level, and they stick with the company and advance. How do you model that? Did you go to a tech school, or how did you end up in the job in the first place?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (02:28.142) It’s kind of a funny story. When I first started at the North Holly operation, I was running tappers like I said. The plant had a large backlog of work. I was working seven days a week, and one day it was a Sunday – me and one other gentleman were in the plant running tappers. It was 90 degrees outside, beautiful day, all my buddies were out on the boat hanging out on the lake.

I thought to myself, this isn’t what I want to do. I need to find a way to not have to work weekends and be a little bit more free. At that time, the company did provide tuition reimbursement. So I started going down that path into a business degree. Eventually, over the span of about six years, the company paid for my entire bachelor’s degree. So I graduated debt-free with my bachelor’s. At that time, I decided to go back for my master’s. I was already in the swing of school, so I kept going and graduated with a master’s in 2019.

WeCreate (03:29.325) Yeah, I mean, I think that’s – if a company really wants somebody to stick with them, it almost seems like that’s a necessity to offer tuition reimbursement. Do you have any idea what the cost of that is? Like if a company wanted to implement that, what would that cost?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (03:45.102) Well, I’m not sure of the total cost. Our program here allots for I believe $7,200 per year. So working a full-time schedule, you don’t want to take four classes per semester – one to two classes per semester, depending on the level, usually worked out pretty well for myself. And I did a lot of it remotely, which was nice.

WeCreate (04:08.641) Okay. So where did you start? Did you just join the company straight out of high school or what was your entry point?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (04:17.222) Actually out of high school, I did a couple odd jobs – lawn mowing, stuff like that. And then I got into Delphi up in Saginaw, worked there for about three years until the 2008, 2009 recession. At that time they were offering a buyout. So I took a buyout and got out of there. My cousin actually worked for Acument or Fontana at the time.

He told me about some openings in the North Holly facility. So I actually applied through a temp service named Manpower. Manpower sourced me to the distribution center as a hand sorter, which was not something I was overly excited or interested in. Just so everyone knows, you’re taking one screw at a time, looking at it, looking for defects. It’s not fun. It was a very mundane, boring job.

I did it for about two weeks before I finally got the call to go over to the North Holly facility because I had a pretty extensive background in machining at that time with Delphi. I ran Detroit Cargills and a whole slew of other CNC machines.

WeCreate (05:16.707) Gotcha.

WeCreate (05:22.947) Yeah, I’m actually surprised that you took that even temporary sorting job, given your experience.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (05:31.682) You’ve got to get your foot in the door somehow. And I knew that if I showed up every day and performed well that I wouldn’t be there for too long. So I gave it a run, and about two weeks in, I got the call. The rest was history.

WeCreate (05:44.353) Or you run the risk of doing too good at sorting and they’re like, “Yeah, we got to keep you.”

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (05:47.31) Yeah, at that point I’d be hopping back on Indeed or something.

WeCreate (05:55.712) So, Dave, do you have any thoughts on this? Because this is a problem we’re trying to solve as a country. We’re looking to bring manufacturing back to the US. And I have some concerns about, number one, the willingness of a younger generation to work in this space, in the medium to low skilled manufacturing jobs.

But then I have a bigger concern – we have a baby boomer generation, which is the largest generation our country’s ever seen, that’s aging out of the workforce. And the generation that we’re replacing it with is much smaller. So even if you did have the same percentage of people that are willing to work in these jobs, you still don’t have enough people for the jobs. So how do we navigate that?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (06:50.126) Well, that’s definitely been a challenge for us for a long time. It used to be a lot easier to find people. We would utilize agencies like Josh said – Manpower – and they would send people here. They had stacks of people that were looking for jobs, and we’d bring them in and put them in entry level positions. Generally that’s driving a hi-low forklift, moving things around the plant.

Generally if you got good at that, then we could use you to run machines. We could move you up to different levels inside the company where you can make more money and be more valuable. But it seemed like after COVID, everything kind of changed. And then when everybody was having a hard time finding people – grocery stores, fast food restaurants – couldn’t find anybody, everybody started paying more. We started having a harder time finding guys that wanted to work these types of jobs.

So we ended up having to increase our wages to attract people. So we did that and we were able to attract more people, but still, even with the increased wages, it’s still difficult. Because people just don’t want to come in and work 50 hours a week in a factory that, granted it’s pretty clean in here for a manufacturing facility, it still gets hot in the summer – it’s not air conditioned. It’s hot and it’s noisy.

And honestly, the pay is better than it used to be, but you’re not going to get rich. So it’s hard to find guys. I’ve had far more success with referrals from people that already work here. So I have some guys that are good employees, and when they bring me resumes for people they know – relatives or friends – that’s generally where we have the most success.

WeCreate (08:40.697) Do you incentivize that in any way?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (08:44.812) When we started after COVID, when we were starting to ramp back up and having a hard time finding people, we started to incentivize. We increased our referral bonus program to where it was very lucrative for the employees to find somebody to come in here. They would get a certain amount of money upfront, and then after the employee was here for a certain amount of time, they would get more and that employee would get a signing bonus. So that helped a lot.

That signing bonus and then the head hunter fee for bringing people in – and honestly, I’ve had far more success with referrals than I have with just going through manpower.

WeCreate (09:28.983) Josh, what have you seen as a successful strategy other than the referral incentive for recruitment?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (09:38.83) It’s similar to Dave. I’d say the referrals are probably our number one source. One thing that I try to look for when hiring people into our plants is generally just an interest or a background in some sort of mechanical hobby. Growing up, I was always wrenching on stuff, so it made it a lot easier coming into a manufacturing site, knowing that a nut goes to the right to tighten it, left to loosen it.

Big things that I look for are job history – is someone bouncing around every three to six months or are they looking for something longer term? I’m looking for that employee that I can invest in. Put six to 12 months of training into the jobs that we hire for – running a nut former takes a minimum of 12 months training. Large investment on the front end.

So attendance is very important. We usually, similar to what Dave mentioned, we’ll start them out in a material handler role for two to three months, just to make sure that they’re going to show up to work on time and be here. And then from there, we’ll kind of test their mechanical aptitude and then decide which department they’re going to be best suited for. The big drive is to pay people fairly for the work that they’re doing and look for somebody that wants to work on equipment, work on a machine, somebody that’s interested in metal flow or designing parts.

And you’d be surprised – one of the biggest hurdles is just finding somebody that is willing to be here, that can show up every day on time.

WeCreate (11:15.286) Yeah. What, I guess from a cultural perspective, what do you think the reason is for that? Do you think that’s different? I know every generation wants to say that the last generation or the next generation is worse than theirs, but do you think it’s worse or do you think it’s the same as it’s always been? What do you think’s contributing to that attendance issue?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (11:41.486) Well, personal opinion, I think there’s like what Josh was saying – people with a mechanical background, people that work on cars and motorcycles and things like that. They’re familiar with mechanical things, wrenches and whatnot. I think there’s less of that in the younger generation. Even now, I have a car that I look under the hood and as long as it has an engine, I don’t know what else to look for anymore.

It used to be normal to work on cars and things like that or bicycles. There’s probably less of that, I would think. So less interest in mechanical things. I don’t want to sit here and say this generation is terrible – it’s just changing.

WeCreate (12:26.775) Well, yeah, no, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. And you used to be able to work on cars. You can’t work on them anymore. They’re all computer driven and there’s too much. You need specialized equipment and stuff. So I think having those mechanical skill sets used to have a function and purpose, but now it’s almost like unless you’re in this job, it doesn’t really – generally speaking, you can’t fix a car other than change the brakes and the rotors.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (12:59.822) Yeah, from a cultural perspective, I don’t know that manufacturing is super attractive for a younger generation. Everybody wants to be an influencer, work from home type thing. But I think there are still people out there that drive or succeed in that structure. I know that I’ve recently hired several employees that are much younger in their 20s, early 20s, that are thriving in this environment.

They’ve got mechanical aptitude. They like wrenching on things. They like working on stuff. Problem solving type work – that’s pretty much all we do with the equipment here. So I think there’s still people out there. It just takes the right mindset.

And I think that we as a corporation or a company need to do a little bit better job of putting the word out there that we’re looking for that type of thing – going to job fairs, going to tech schools, things of that nature. Looking for people in the right spots.

I don’t think that you’re going to find somebody that’s mechanically apt from a temp agency 90% of the time. You’re going to have a lot better success going to a tech school or a high school and showing people what we actually do, showing them the equipment and advertising the mechanical side of it.

WeCreate (14:24.109) And I think in general, manufacturing does a pretty poor job of marketing itself. I think most people still kind of have this perspective of this really dirty, unpleasant sort of working environment. And really, that’s not true for most manufacturers anymore. I mean, there may be some obvious exceptions if you’re working in a forge or something to that effect. I worked a very short stint at a coke plant, the steel production type of coke, and that was literally the most miserable worst job that you could probably ever imagine.

But generally speaking, I don’t think manufacturing is like that. I’m making the argument regularly that our education system does a very poor job of exposing kids to the attractive aspects of manufacturing early enough. By the time we’re hitting them, it’s usually high school, where you’re kind of saying, “All right, you’re a loser, you’re going to go this direction over to manufacturing, or you’re a winner, you’re going to go over to college.” I just think it’s all wrong. I don’t think it should be done like that.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (15:33.038) Yeah, I agree completely. Like Josh went to college. I went and I was like 27 when I started, I paid for an associate’s degree myself. Then when I started working here, this company paid for my bachelor’s degree just like Josh, which was great. But I did not go on to get a master’s, but I’m glad I went to college and it was at that time a barrier to entry to any management job. But we’re getting to the point now where we’re hiring managers that don’t have college degrees.

And I think that’s the right thing to do. Life experience and work experience is more important. But I do think that we should stress, even in the high schools and stuff, a strong mathematics background. I know people talk about algebra – “Oh, I’m never going to use that in real life” – and I say, “Well, man, I use this stuff all the time.” I don’t use calculus, granted. But just having a mind that’s able to figure out a few numbers, I think, goes a long way in a lot of different aspects of life.

WeCreate (16:35.085) Yeah, absolutely. And there’s definitely kind of a de-incentivizing of a lot of these more advanced degrees. I mean, I see a lot of kids going to college and they’re taking these degrees that, it’s like, what are you ever going to do with that? It’s just another four years to party and kind of delay getting into the real world and accumulate a bunch of debt and you have nothing to show for it. With your pretty good size workforce…

How do you, and I see obviously the one key aspect to retaining that workforce is having a clear path to advancement. And then Dave and I talked about the cultural aspect of it because a lot of these guys are not the college educated sort of refined, let’s have an educated conversation. They’re kind of a locker room sort of vibe. How do you maintain the kind of everybody getting along and working together and being productive and not letting petty issues kind of destroy the environment?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (17:51.266) That’s a tough one. I think I mentioned to you before, I think it was our VP of quality, Paul Parsons said to me one day that we’re not in the screw business. We think we are, but we’re actually in the people business. Trying to find these people like we just talked about, and then once you find them, keeping them happy so they don’t leave – that’s a big part of the culture. So I try to drive home every day with our team the importance of cohesiveness and working together and having each other’s backs, so to speak, and not throwing people under the bus and acting like a true team, or else it’s very hard to be successful.

We’ve had in the past problems with our operations department not necessarily communicating really well with our production control department. And if those two departments are not really linked together, it causes all kinds of issues. So breaking that barrier was tough, but we did it. And the team that we have now…

WeCreate (18:53.689) Can you discuss that a little bit? What’s the important aspect of the communication between those departments?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (19:00.994) Yeah. So you have an operations team, which is basically they own the whole production floor. They’re responsible for making the screws – turning wire into screws, leaving the door. And then we have a production control department where Josh worked for a while that takes the orders that come from our customer service reps that come from the customers. They basically tell us what parts need to be made and when they’re due.

So from their standpoint, or from our production control standpoint, they know why they need these parts and they know when they need them. But from the operations standpoint, they know that I can make different parts far more efficiently, let’s say. So the operations team wants to do one thing for the good of their department, and the production control team wants to do something else for the good of their department, which both makes sense, but both departments can’t have everything they want. So having them to work together and coming up with compromises on what parts are to be made when…

It’s like, we’re still going to protect our customer, but we’re not going to sacrifice it for a bunch of efficiency and extra labor costs on the production floor. Having those two departments talking daily is just paramount to keeping the product flowing properly and keeping our customers satisfied with the parts that they want when they want them.

WeCreate (20:25.837) Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Because when you’re kind of switching between products that you’re making, if you have 10 different products, you’re better off running as many as you can of one if you know that you’re going to use them before switching over to something else to make the operation side happy.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (20:45.824) We’ve put a lot of work into really dialing in our lot sizes. Like you said, we want to make as many as possible because we don’t have to set the machine up, but then we have to store them. And then it’s possible the customer doesn’t want them anymore and we’re stuck with them. So if you make too few, then you’re setting up the machine constantly. So you have to find that sweet spot between not overproducing, but not wasting time setting the machine up.

And then there’s also the aspect of going from one part to another – going from part A to B might be a 10 minute setup, but going from part A to H, let’s say, might be an hour and a half setup. And that’s something that the operations team is very familiar with. So production control, maybe not so much. So they might ask for a group of parts, but the operations team is gonna decide which order to run them in for the most efficient changeovers.

WeCreate (21:40.109) Gotcha. How do you determine that efficiency? Is it just a kind of trial and error, or is there some sort of mathematical way to do it?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (21:49.996) I think it’s both. We start with a mathematical equation that’s in a computer somewhere, it spits out a number. And we have in this plant anyway, the guy that schedules our jobs. So he sees every job that comes out every day and he schedules it. So over time he has knowledge of, “Okay, this part pulls, let’s say it gets an order to build three times a week,” and he sees that.

So he’ll bring it up in a weekly meeting with our production control and they’ll say, “Okay, well maybe we should,” they’ll look at it and they might bump up the lot size so we’re only making it say one time a week. So it starts, I think, with math and then we use real world trial and error to dial it in. Would you agree with that? For the most part. So you have more experience with production control than I do.

WeCreate (22:39.651) Well, I want to talk a little bit more about that because I’ve always been a little confused about the push-pull conversation in lean manufacturing. So I kind of want to learn a little bit more about that. But I wanted to jump back to Josh real quick and hit a little bit harder, dig a little bit deeper on the company culture in addressing interpersonal issues with employees that are inevitably going to pop up with this type of work. Like how do you navigate?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (23:11.02) Yeah, so prior plant manager, good friend of mine, he kind of started the mantra of “preferred place to work.” And I’ve run with that. One thing that we do at North Holly that’s been very successful is we drive home the idea that we’re all one team. We’re all working towards the same goal. When I have to ask somebody to do something, I’m pretty sure they’re not going to want to do, as long as I give them the reasoning behind it, the transparency to it, 99% of the time they’re on board.

We try and drive a culture of teamwork. Obviously problems come up and when they do, you pull people aside, have a conversation, work it out. But yeah, one thing that we do over there that I think really stands out is we don’t use the word “can’t.” So “can’t” is something that more or less we outlawed for lack of better terms. It’s “what do we have to do to make this happen?”

And it’s the North Holly dream team, if you will – that team is capable of doing anything. They can move a mountain if they need to. Everybody pulls together and pulls in the same direction – production control and operations working hand in hand with maintenance, trying to solve a maintenance issue or get a machine back up and running. Really, there’s no walls as far as departments go over there. Everybody works together, and if somebody’s struggling, there’s five people in line to help them out. So it’s a very team driven culture and it’s worked very well for us.

WeCreate (24:49.389) Yep. Yeah, it’s always helpful to add the word “unless” after “can’t.” If someone wants to use the word “can’t,” you can’t unless what? Work towards a solution. So when you’re talking about kind of like everybody understanding the goal, we’re on the same team working towards that goal, is there like a kind of a global lofty goal that you can usually fill in that blank with or is it just sort of case by case basis?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (25:21.224) I’d say it’s usually case by case. A problem or a fire, if you will, will pop up. “Hey, here’s what we have to do or here’s the end goal. Here’s where we need parts and by when, what do we have to do to get there?” So then we start throwing ideas around between the teammates. “We can do this, we can do that,” and then collaboratively, we make the decision, drive forward and communication obviously is key through the entire operation.

Bigger picture, I like to tell people, “Listen, they can make these screws basically anywhere.” We make them in Mexico, you can make them in China, you can make them in India. The only way for us to continue making them here in Southeast Michigan is to be the best in the world at it. And we have to push world class to be able to keep having a place to come to and making these screws because they can be made elsewhere, but as long as we’re the best at it, we’re gonna be able to continue doing it.

And that really drives people, I think. We have to perform.

WeCreate (26:27.319) Yeah, I do like that concept. So when you are driving this culture, this team-oriented culture, what’s the physical structure of that? And what I mean by that is, is this a daily team meeting that involves everybody? Is it signage? Is it kind of you’re walking around the plant spreading this message? Like, what’s kind of the mechanism to do that?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (26:58.19) A little bit of everything I would say. So we meet as a management team in the mornings, kind of review the prior day’s problems and wins. From there, we go out to the floor, do what’s called a Gemba walk, walk around, I try and make a point to stop, talk to operators, just casual stuff – “Hey, how’s it going? Is everything all right, or anything you need?” Really the hierarchies from the floor up. A lot of people may think that I’m just telling people what to do. It’s really quite the opposite. The floor tells me what we need to do.

And from there, we work with the departments or the resources at hand to try and make everybody happy. Yeah, really the production control is what I would call the central nervous system. So they’re the ones getting the information from customer service or from the customer. From there, they kind of lay it out. “Hey, here’s what we need to do.” And then operations are the hands or the body of the organization – they go out and build the plan and achieve it.

And then if anybody needs help along the way, we call in maintenance, we call in engineering, we call on whoever we call. I call Dave, I call our plants. We loan out employees back and forth. Well, it’s nice that we have these two manufacturing plants right next to each other.

We have a plant in Fenton, which is just one town over, and we have a plant in Sterling Heights, which is only 40 miles away. So it’s easy to ship. The maintenance guys at Baldwin here, they go to all the different plants. They even travel out of state and everywhere to help. So even outside of the plant, within the North America team, we work pretty well as a team trading guys here and there where needed.

Going back again to culture, I think a big thing for guys on the floor to keep them engaged is knowing whether they had – we talked about in the morning management meetings whether we had a good day or bad day the day before, but the operators knowing whether they won or lost I think is good. So they know what they’re doing.

We have targets and we post them every morning whether they hit them or missed them. When a guy comes in today, he knows yesterday if you won or lost. And I think guys knowing, having a target to strive for and not just making an endless number of screws – it lets them know, “Okay, I had a good day and feel good about it,” or “I had a bad day, what can I do tomorrow to make that better?” That’s the communication.

WeCreate (29:30.263) Yeah, that does make sense. So are you kind of, is there like a screen somewhere that’s displaying these metrics that they’ll kind of check out before they start the job that day?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (29:41.582) We have some screens. Unfortunately, in the environment we have the electronic screens only last so long. I’m kind of old school. I still like paper. So we print stuff out and hang them up, or we have a blank sheet that somebody takes a Sharpie and just marks it in every day. And we update it that way. But it’s whether it’s on a screen or it’s on a piece of paper somewhere posted, it’s where everybody can see it.

Do you have something similar to that? Yeah, I mean, we’ve got a conglomerate of different ways of spreading information. We have some screens. We do monthly plant meetings kind of laying out how we performed the month prior versus goals. And then the daily communication between the operations team, the leaders, production control – it’s very well known. Everyone kind of knows what their daily targets are. And then, we go from there for, if we continue to fall below the daily target, they know that there’s a good chance we’re probably going to have to run a weekend in the near future, depending on demand.

WeCreate (30:49.177) Gotcha. So when you’re doing the, and I’ve heard this term in the lean groups, it’s called a gimbal. What’s the walk you do?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (31:10.98) Yeah. I think we got you back. GEMBA. G-E-M-B-A. I think that’s a Japanese word that just means the actual place. They say go to the GEMBA.

WeCreate (31:45.882) So when you’re doing your Gemba walk, are you talking to everybody, or are you talking to group leaders? What’s your target there? And then I kind of want to know, like, how does that conversation go?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (32:17.582) It’s a little bit of both. So at least at North Holly, our GEMBA includes operations, production control, EH&S and HR. We try to hit one segment of the plant per day. I’ve got a schedule laid out, so we hit the entire plant over a five-day window. Generally, we’ll stop, talk to the leader and then they get more in the weeds with the production control and operations manager. Myself, I usually just kind of wander around, talk to the employees, look for 5S improvements, things of that nature. But I let the day-to-day activity be driven through the ops and production control manager.

WeCreate (33:02.467) Gotcha. So when we were kind of talking about the employee issue, the labor shortage issue, I think that over time it’s not going to get better unless we can do something drastic from an education standpoint. But I think we need to kind of be mentally prepared for the idea that it’s not going to get better. So what sort of technology are you looking at, whether it be using some sort of AI technology to evaluate parts as they’re going into the bucket and make sure there’s no defects or using some sort of robotics to load or unload machinery? What kind of things are you looking at right now? What are you using?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (33:54.798) All of our parts are basically checked by a human with a set of micrometers, gauges, etc. to make sure that the parts are correct. But I believe our quality VP Paul was telling me that he was looking into technology to check parts real time, one at a time, like some kind of a laser system that will read all the attributes of a part and say whether it’s good or bad.

You can do that right now, but the hard part is doing it in real time when the parts are coming off the machine at 300 a minute. That’s where it becomes tough. But with technology getting better and better, I could see that being an option at some point. And that would be great, because then even if we still use people to set up the machines, it takes human error out of checking the parts. Even when you’re doing this job over and over, it’s easy – guys will miss stuff once in a while that a computer wouldn’t miss.

And as far as AI, you mentioned that – I’m kind of excited about utilizing that for our production control, our market calculations at some point, basically taking the data that our customers, the parts that they buy, inputting everything and then spitting out what we’re doing now as far as how many parts to make and when they’re due. But I think that an AI program could probably do it far better than a human.

WeCreate (35:41.805) Yeah, I was thinking that when you were talking about that before. I use an AI tool called Perplexity, which basically integrates all the main AI models. So you can switch between ChatGPT and Claude and a whole bunch of different ones. And they all kind of have their own specialty area. But yeah, it seems like it would be really interesting to kind of plug in all the data and information that you know and say like, “What’s the best way for me to organize a production workflow?” And I bet you probably get a pretty damn good answer.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (35:52.95) Yeah, but then I also worry, I don’t know where this is going in the next five years. AI, who knows man? Robots might be doing me and his job, we’ll be moving boxes.

WeCreate (36:05.655) Well, I mean, I think that a lot of people kind of have that fear, but I truly believe that the people that can manipulate these programs are going to be the big winners in the long run. And so I think the more that you can learn it and start to utilize it, the more successful you’re probably going to be as opposed to losing your job. You’re probably just going to be in charge of more because then you can do more. That’s kind of my take on it.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (36:34.626) Yeah, that’s the optimistic take. What other choice do we have? It’s gonna be – I think we’re living in an exciting time, I think.

WeCreate (36:49.997) Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s a little bit scary, a little bit exciting. Somebody was talking to Elon Musk about the idea that AI could potentially try to just completely eradicate humans because it would just decide that we’re pretty much worthless. And so they asked him, “What are the chances that that’s going to happen?” And he said, 20%. I’m pretty sure that was the percentage, but just like without hesitating, just like he calculated and like if these things happen, it’s going to take us over, if these other things happen, it won’t.

But it’s like it’s a real possibility. I mean, obviously, I think it’s a long way out. But when you get to the point where AI programs can write better AI programs and become smarter without our input, then all of sudden we’re like, “Oh, shit.”

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (37:47.822) Yeah, I read about what they call the gray goo theory where you make all these nanobots and then they start reproducing on their own. And then they run on – they just eat us all basically, turn everything into goo. So if it’s 20%, I really don’t like those odds. Better chance of hitting a flush.

WeCreate (38:06.633) No, I don’t either. Yeah, I think it’s – so are you guys seeing any of the effects of some of the geopolitical turmoil that we’ve seen over the past few months? Has it affected your business?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (38:23.19) Yeah, it’s slowed things down a bit. I think there’s a lot of speculation, a lot of just unknown for all the consumers out there, which obviously impacts the automotive industry. I’d say that we’re pretty steady. It’s nowhere near COVID era, but definitely a little slower than we’d like to see it. It’s good and bad in my opinion – we’re not seeing the sales dollars that we want, but it’s given us an opportunity to really drive some improvements.

I preach to my team, “Take advantage of these slow times because when the work picks back up, it’s hot and heavy and you don’t have time to work on something or improve a process.” Now is when we need to make those improvements, trial some stuff, maybe take a little calculated risk, try something that we may not want to try when we’re running behind or right on schedule.

WeCreate (39:16.865) Yeah, that’s an excellent perspective. I’m the exact same way. My first few years in business, kind of getting towards fall, getting closer to Thanksgiving, all of sudden, nothing’s coming in. And I was like, “Man, what’s going to happen?” And pretty much until January, the second week of January, you’re not really seeing much business activity, at least in my space. But now I just kind of like, “Okay, this is the time where we do some internal projects. Let’s fix up on our own website. Let’s build out some planning for our marketing campaigns next year.” But yeah, I think that’s really important is to kind of take advantage of those slow times instead of sweating it.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (39:59.32) Yeah. We’re at a point right now here – we’re still pretty busy, but what’s nice is we’re pretty stable. It doesn’t go up and down a lot. So what’s nice is I can manage the ups and downs basically with overtime voluntarily. So when we get a little bit behind, I usually can make it up with just taking voluntary overtime and not forcing people to do it. And when it gets slow, we’re to the point where I can just move everybody to 40 hours and I’m not laying anybody off.

And that’s kind of where I like to be. I don’t want to lay people off and I don’t want to make mandatory overtime. That goes a long way to keep people happy. So the people that want to work the extra hours generally can and the people that don’t generally can work them 40 hours a week. So that’s where I like to live right here, because it’s hard to lay people off because you put a lot of training into them and then you lay them off and then they don’t want to come back.

WeCreate (40:53.571) Yep. Yeah, they kind of lose faith in the company, too. When they get laid off, it’s usually the beginning of the end, even if you do bring them back in, because then they’re kind of like, “That’s going to happen again, and I need somewhere that is not going to lay me off.” So yeah, I agree. That’s a tough thing to do. So I just have one little quick question about your market. So you guys primarily sell products to US manufacturers, or are you selling to overseas plants as well? How does that break down?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (41:33.134) For this plant our top three customers are GM, Ford and Stellantis. So they used to be the big three, now they call them the Detroit three – those are our main customers and then the rest of our customer base is made up of tier suppliers. So almost, I mean pretty much every part we make ends up in a vehicle eventually, either directly to Ford, GM or Stellantis or through a tier supplier. I don’t know how you’re set up over there? Yeah, we’re about 85% automotive with building and construction being the other 10 to 12% and then maybe a handful of just random things.

But we do ship internationally. Some parts go to China, Mexico, wherever, but mostly I’d say 85% or better is automotive here in the United States.

WeCreate (42:30.435) Yeah, I recently was really unaware of how big automotive was in Canada as well. I was talking to a Canadian manufacturer that works in the automotive market. Do you ship stuff up there too?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (42:43.638) Yeah, a lot of Stellantis and GM, all of them. And we actually get for us here, we get a lot of our steel – our raw material comes from Canada. And that whole tariff thing was an issue a little while ago, threat of that. So that’s something that we’ve been dealing with as far as all the steel. Yeah, it’s settled down.

WeCreate (43:07.011) Has that kind of settled down? I don’t really know what the status of the Canada tariffs is.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (43:13.134) I don’t know 100% the status of it right now. It seems like it changes a lot.

WeCreate (43:16.845) Yeah. It sounds like China’s tariff has been kind of pushed back to, I think, 90 days or something, pausing most stuff. So markets liked it.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (43:30.811) Yeah, I think all this uncertainty when things are changing day to day, I think markets don’t seem to like that too much. But my 401k finally bounced back.

WeCreate (43:38.028) No, I saw some good buying opportunities though. I bought it at the lowest point that we’ve seen in a couple minutes. Like it was down 1200 points the one day and I was like, I was in cash and I was like, “All right, I’m going to buy some stuff. This is perfect.” So I bought some automobiles.

I bought some oil and gas. I’m trying to remember what else I bought. Some Nvidia and I made 10% in like two weeks and then I kind of sensed that it was gonna go back down so I got out and it did go back down for a day or two but now it’s been like skyrocketing ever since and I’m like, “Damn it, why didn’t I just stick it out?”

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (44:22.894) Yeah, I bought Nvidia a little bit high because I, but then it, I don’t know, but I’ve made money on it so far, but I’m still in it.

WeCreate (44:34.679) Yeah, it’s kind of been hovering between that 100 and 110 point for a while. But it’s fun to play with. I try not to get too wrapped into it, because I’ll get stressed out, and I’ll be thinking about it all day long.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (44:48.31) Yeah, I try not to look at it every day either, because I’m not actively trading constantly. I buy a bunch of stuff and let it sit.

WeCreate (44:57.165) That’s the key. So being in the automotive market, give me a hot tip. What do you buy when you’re buying automotive?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (45:08.337) Well, I’ll tell you, I’ve notoriously driven old cars. I’ve made fun of Ford because I would always make sure my wife had a better car and then my kids started driving and it’s like, “Oh, I don’t want them to break down somewhere.” So they’re driving nicer cars and I’m driving the beaters. I bought a 2023 Mazda CX-30.

I was just looking for a cheap, reliable, all-wheel drive car and it’s been great. But I come from a UAW family, so I get made fun of for buying a Japanese car, but it’s like, it’s a great car. I love it. All I can tell you, I mean, cars are prohibitively expensive in my opinion.

WeCreate (46:00.054) Yeah, they’re getting insane. But in terms of supplying components to automotive, does that ever give you a little bit of an idea of, “Wow, we’re getting a lot of orders from Ford or whatever?” Does that ever play out in investment?

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (46:20.202) No, I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t really get any info that I think would really benefit me too much, like stock market wise or anything like that. It’s generally pretty consistent. When we see big swings, it’s usually driven by something that’s already been in the news that everybody already knows about. I am, sometimes I do wonder though – we’re shipping 4.2 million screws out of here a day, I mean every day, I do wonder, “Where are all these screws going?” It’s like, “Thank God people must still be buying new cars because we sell a lot of screws.”

WeCreate (47:01.463) Yeah. Well, you guys are both doing a pretty impressive job. You have a big challenge that not a lot of people I think would be qualified to navigate effectively. I can’t imagine personally having 100 employees or 130 employees to worry about, but I really appreciate the insight that you guys gave us today and kind of it was fun to learn about what’s working for you and the strategies that you’ve used for retention and for recruitment and things of that nature. So thanks a lot for the time.

Dave Campbell / Josh Borrow (47:36.812) Yeah, no problem, man. I appreciate it. It’s fun.