Chris Basgall is the CEO of Catamount Machine Works, whose 10 year plan, covered in this video, has secured their AS9100 Certification, their ITAR Registration, their JCP Certification, and are CMMC 2.0 Compliant. This conversation covers this 10 year plan, incorporating automation, the value of certifications, the role of leadership in implementing the plan, and how they create the incentives necessary to maintain compliance. This is an amazing conversation anyone can learn from!
Watch the full interview on YouTube!
Interview Chapters:
- 00:00 From Music to Machining: Chris Basgall’s Journey
- 02:43 Strategic Business Acquisition: Choosing the Right Market
- 06:08 The 3, 5, 10 Strategy: Planning for Growth
- 09:20 Building a Strong Team: Culture and Collaboration
- 11:59 Embracing Technology: Automation and Robotics in Manufacturing
- 17:04 Navigating Change: Employee Adoption of New Technologies
- 19:03 CMMC Compliance: A Necessity for Competitive Advantage
- 24:17 Getting Started with CMMC: Practical Advice for Shops
- 28:23 The Importance of Digitization in Modern Manufacturing
- 31:40 Standardization and Efficiency: The Key to Success
Nate Wheeler is the owner of weCreate, a nationally recognized marketing agency that helps manufacturers grow, save money, and become more efficient.
Nate Wheeler (00:01)
Welcome to manufacturing insiders. Today I Chris Basko with me. is boy, he took a very interesting journey to running a very successful machine shop. I think any machine shop owner is going to learn something today. He’s got a lot of insights. I love the way that he thinks about, you know, picking a market, picking technology, just doing all the things right. Welcome to manufacturing insiders, Chris.
Chris Basgall (00:27)
Thank you, Nate. It’s pleasure.
Nate Wheeler (00:29)
Absolutely. So you took a very interesting route to machine shop ownership. From what I understand, you were a professional musician, you were a teacher, and then you were an executive at a Fortune 500 telecom firm?
Chris Basgall (00:49)
world’s third largest telecom.
Nate Wheeler (00:50)
Wow. So and then you decided to a machine shop. So how did that come about?
Chris Basgall (00:58)
Yeah, so my career path is not necessarily the typical one, but you know, when I was living in Africa and I had a little boy and he was three years old at the time and I was never home. And when I was home, I wasn’t home. so I decided with my wife that we wanted to repatriate back to the States and buy a business so that would be close to home so I could come home and have dinner with the family every night.
Nate Wheeler (01:30)
Yeah, absolutely. Which makes a lot of sense. I would love to talk about your experience in Africa. don’t know if we have lot of time to get into that. So how long were you in Africa anyway?
Chris Basgall (01:47)
Let’s see, it was 2015-16.
Nate Wheeler (01:50)
Okay, so it wasn’t a super long stint there. What part, like what country?
Chris Basgall (01:56)
I was stationed in Kenya, but worked
Nate Wheeler (01:58)
Okay.
Chris Basgall (01:59)
across Sub-Sahara, had 21 countries there.
Nate Wheeler (02:04)
Did you like it? Did you like what you were doing there?
Chris Basgall (02:07)
I love supply chain. Supply chain is a lot of fun and I had spent 14 years in telecom and it was a good experience. you know, having a son, we had done well and having a son had changed my priorities and so I wanted a little more
Nate Wheeler (02:25)
Yep.
Chris Basgall (02:26)
work-life balance.
Nate Wheeler (02:27)
Yep, good. running a machine shop is not exactly an easy load either. I’m sure you’re probably working a lot of hours there too, right?
Chris Basgall (02:38)
Yes, but it’s a lot of fun.
Nate Wheeler (02:40)
Yeah. So how old is he now?
Chris Basgall (02:44)
He’s 13 now.
Nate Wheeler (02:45)
Gotcha. Does he come to the shop and kind of help out sweep floors or does he find it interesting?
Chris Basgall (02:52)
He comes every now and then and he does find it interesting. You know, when he was nine, I trained him how to run the robots and other
Nate Wheeler (03:01)
Yeah.
Chris Basgall (03:01)
activities and he thinks it’s fun.
Nate Wheeler (03:04)
Yeah, awesome. So I liked what you know, kind of how you decided to pick, you know, to buy this particular machine shop, or just in general, like, you know, you got to manufacturing is kind of what your target was. And then you decided on a machine shop. And then you decided on a specific, you know, market segment that you want to go after kind of talk me through that thought process.
Chris Basgall (03:29)
So I knew I wanted to buy a business rather than start one from the ground up. And I had a broker and had looked through many different industries, thousands of listings. And I took it by industry by industry and kept narrowing it down until I narrowed it down to manufacturing. And within manufacturing, I brought it down to CNC because it’s a very interesting.
industry and the particular business that I decided to acquire. I saw a company with a great reputation that had a lot of real estate, which was good for expansion. And then also it had an opportunity to increase efficiency and output with technology.
Nate Wheeler (04:27)
Right.
Chris Basgall (04:28)
So I saw it as a good target and it was in driving distance of home.
Nate Wheeler (04:32)
That all worked out well. It’s good that you’re also already thinking about expansion. I assume you’re thinking if I can get some automation in here, some technology, can gather more market share, can grow the business, we’re going to need to grow the physical footprint at some point too. So have you grown the facility?
Chris Basgall (04:55)
So we have not grown the physical facility, but we’ve made a lot of changes in the last five and a half years. And that was all due to the strategy that I had set up pre-acquisition. I set up a three, five, 10 strategy for looking at bringing in on the foundation, technology, automation, and certifications with employee health and wellness. And security over the top of that. And because we’ve brought in so much automation and because we’ve standardized it, mean, we stand where we’re 100 % Haas CNC shop, we’re 100 % Mastercam, Verisurf, HiQA, ProShop, ERP, everything follows on standards because it makes it easier to operate. In addition to the robots, we also had bar feeders, but weren’t using them very much. We increased that and with the automation, we were actually able to bring down the head count quite a bit. There are times when we run the robots 24 seven, when we have the right production work for those machines. And we still do actually quite a bit of prototyping, one Z, two Z type jobs, but also with the automation, can run thousands. And so it’s a mix and haven’t had the need to do the expansion yet, but. We’ve been working on multiple prototype programs and I do see in the future because of the contracts that are likely coming out of those that it will require physical expansion.
Nate Wheeler (06:38)
Yeah, absolutely. mean, that’s amazing. So tell me about the 3, 5, 10. What exactly is that? How does that work?
Chris Basgall (06:45)
Yeah, so for years one through three, it was focused on the technology, the automation and the certifications. during that time, you know, for automation wound up bringing in the robots, started using the bar feeders more appropriately. Also with on the technology side with Mastercam, we upgraded to 5-axis and we also bought some 5-axis trunnions on the hardware side and it opened a lot of different work that we didn’t have the capabilities for before and then for the certification, know, AS9100 was a goal that I put in there and that was because I went and did some data analysis on the market. If you’re in the United States and not a certified shop, you’re essentially, for anything that’s type of production and doesn’t have a local need, you’re competing with the whole world. People can outsource to other countries. If you are certified, you’re competing with shops that are only certified. And that was about 13 % of the shops at the time in the United States were certified. And so it’s a barrier to entry and an opportunity to garner longer term relationships and work that fits this company very well. And so that was years one through three. Three to five were about taking all that technology and automation and applying it to scale so that we could grow. we, in addition, wound up making some additional technology moves just more the standardization, more for driving standardization, efficiency, etc. We did have HiQA in the first three years, but in second year, years four and five, we added Pro Shop ERP. We also did our CMMC 2.0 compliance. We’ve got an audit coming up for that later this year. And then we also got JCP certified. So all these things for, for new opportunities to scale and years six through 10, we’re initially focused on, either acquiring or creating a product line and having that as a different revenue stream. But based on how phases one and two of the strategic plan went, we’re not going to have time for that.
Nate Wheeler (09:35)
Right.
Chris Basgall (09:35)
Yeah, for it with the expansion that’s anticipated. it was, you know, and that’s part about being a business owner is you have to have a plan, but you also have to have flexibility and be able to judge and monitor to changes that you’re envisioning. and years zero through five went well. And so just made a little different turn on what we’re doing for six through 10.
Nate Wheeler (10:05)
Right. Yeah, I mean, it’s a very intelligent plan you put together for, you know, the initial three years and then the five. You know, not having the experience specifically in the machining space, was there somebody that kind of helped guide you there and put that, you know, helped you put it together and understand what the needs were going to be?
Chris Basgall (10:28)
So this was an operating shop at the time they had been in business for 15 years. And the founder helped on a part-time capacity or an ad hoc capacity over a year. And the shop foreman had remained on and he remained on for several years before deciding to retire and move out. But…There were a lot of lessons learned as well. And yeah, it would have been better to know a little more about the industry. It would have helped. But hey, in business, you never have perfect data to make perfect decisions.
Nate Wheeler (11:11)
Yep.
Chris Basgall (11:11)
And you calculate risks associated with them and make your decisions. moving on gears. last two and half years, we’ve had the same team in place now for that time period. A couple people are from the original team and all the others are new. And we’ve got a team now that’s very familiar with our process. Our process is mature at this point and they’re all marching to the same drum and it’s a team environment where we help each other, help each other learn. People care about what they’re making. They want to get better and better and feel good about what they’re doing at work. And so with the team that I have in place now, they’re constantly helping me. We’re AS9100 certified and we have a robust quality statement, but we have a simplified version of it too, which is the customer’s king, make good parts, get better and better. And that last item, get better and better, is what we embrace every day. And because I’ve got such a good team, they’re… regularly pointing out things for me to consider and helping to make the organization more streamlined or more efficient and helping with, you know, we’ll get a new project and we’ll bring in team members to say, how do we want to approach this project? We work on it collaboratively. So I’ve had a lot of help and there’s also some other shop owners and companies that I interact with regularly, it’s great group of people. It’s kind of like a community. There’s a lot of in Florida. It’s a great place to be. So I’ve
Nate Wheeler (12:52)
Yeah. Right. Yep. Yep.
Chris Basgall (12:56)
had a lot of help.
Nate Wheeler (12:58)
Yeah. I actually just flew in from Florida this morning. had a 650 flight out of Tampa and got back here and came into the office. Got a little tan going on. But we have some customers down there and a lot of people in the aerospace. So how do you How do you incentivize, I guess, or what sort of culture are you setting up there and how are you doing it to encourage the employees to bring these ideas for improvements to the table? Because a lot of people just come to work and put their head down and do what they’re told and get the job done. But it’s almost like a sense of ownership that leads someone to say, hey, I think we should try this or we should do this differently. How do you foster that?
Chris Basgall (13:49)
So it really is a culture. It’s about. Say, we got a project and let’s get some buy-in on this. Let’s get some ideas. know, two heads is better than one, the old adage, but we’ve got very experienced people here and they care a lot about their work. And, you know, if, if everything is top down, then they’re not going to feel they necessarily have the freedom to participate in decision-making and it can hamper. Know, the morale and the output of the product that you’re doing. So we have regular meetings. I’m active on the floor talking with the team members. We have subgroup meetings for different projects, just coordinating together and say, hey, maybe we should try this instead, or let’s go do this instead. And it creates that environment of teamwork. And they help each other learn, you know, like, we have Mastercam and I mentioned we went to Five Axis and there was some of our team members, we’re not familiar with that, of the programmers and they needed to train. Plus there’s new things that are coming out all the time and rather than sending them off to classes, we take different parts either from our local support or from online or the online through Mastercam or through the web and the knowledge bases. And then people help teach each other what they learned from it. And it creates a team environment. There’s no competition here. People with competition that seek competition, and I understand and respect that, but it’s not what the culture we have. And they usually don’t feel comfortable if they come to work in a place like this because it is such a team environment.
Nate Wheeler (15:44)
Right, so the technology improvements, the automation, robotics, those sorts of things, how much of that was you’re looking at the work that you guys are already doing and you see that you could take an operator off of that and replace it with a robot, for example, or perhaps… you can see that adding this piece of technology is going to dramatically improve profit on a job. How much of it was that? And then how much of it was like just knowing that this is kind of the way of the future and you’re almost taking a chance that it’s going to work out? Does that make sense?
Chris Basgall (16:28)
Yeah, so I don’t think there was much chance involved with, well, we did used to have, you know, a large order quantity for us used to be 200 pieces and 200 pieces is borderline for whether or not you would use a robot. You’d prefer 500 or more, depending on the part. And robots are mature.
Nate Wheeler (16:47)
Right.
Chris Basgall (16:47)
They’ve been around for some time and we’ve got the Haas robot package one. We started, we were an early adopter. We were number two in Florida for getting that package and we bought,
Nate Wheeler (17:01)
wow.
Chris Basgall (17:02)
we got one and then two months later I bought two more because they were working so well and because we could attract new business for larger quantities as a result of it, it was a combination of not only the reduction in labor, but also employee satisfaction. First of all, you get new toys to play with. right. Everyone likes new toys. Secondly, though, instead of having to do the mundane tasks of loading and unloading parts, that’s taken away, which frees them up to do higher level skill and higher level thinking tasks on the job, which they enjoy. And so it was… Also an opportunity to improve customer service and satisfaction because we can, you know, part of it might an order that might normally take six weeks to deliver. We can deliver in a week. And so it helped on multiple fronts in going with them and you know, and looking at the return on investment, I will tell you, there was definitely a learning curve because we were a first mover with them. We worked out the kinks and we pretty much have them mastered at this point. And, you know, you look at a robot at the time, I think the cost was about $55,000 and, you you advertise that over 10 years, that’s $55,000 a year. The labor savings on that are significantly higher than that as an X factor. And so it does help with profitability as well.
Nate Wheeler (18:43)
Right, right. So with the addition of all this technology, do you run into situations where you struggle with the employees wanting to adopt and learn new stuff? Do you ever run into that?
Chris Basgall (19:00)
Well, I’d say to a minor extent, but the team when we are going to make a decision to bring something new in, this is not a decision I’m making in a vacuum. Many of the team members or all of the team members sometimes are weighing in on the decision because, you you asked me about the culture before and I think having a management philosophy is important for that. said, you can’t do top-down. My version of management of a leader is somebody that has a vision, can communicate it to others clearly to see it come to fruition without leaving a mess in the wake. So having a vision, communicating to the team, letting them have the opportunity to buy into it and participate and… team comes up with great ideas and we’ve gone different paths sometimes because of those ideas. But then see that plan come to fruition because they got to be part of it and they understand why it’s important that we’re bringing something new into the shop. And that helps a lot with adoption. Now, resistance to it, sometimes things are difficult. Especially on the IT side. IT is changing so fast and we went from having a very small IT budget to having a very robust IT managed service provider and CMMC compliance and many new software tools. And it’s only natural for people to…not want to openly resist against it, but to struggle with some of the change. Even though you change, it’s just a lot to bring on.
Nate Wheeler (20:48)
Right. Just fatigue. Yeah. Right. Yeah. You know, in CMMC is something that, you know, it’s been sort of this gray area for a number of years, but now it’s like black and white. Like, you need it if you’re going to be doing aerospace work. Is that right? Your government work?
Chris Basgall (21:10)
So if you have flowdowns from your contract from the customer to the OEM, they flow down to you and you’re required to do it. We have three of our customers that said that we need to be certified by November of 26 as a result of flowdowns.
Nate Wheeler (21:30)
Gotcha. Yeah, and that’s just another thing that kind of plays back into what you were saying about 13 % of the 10,000 some shops in the country having AS9100. You’re shrinking your competition pool. And I think that that is such an important way for machine shops and just manufacturers in general to think. Because I think too many of them are trying to be everything to everybody. And instead they’re nobody to nobody. And I think about that from a marketing perspective too because it’s a lot easier for me to get in front of, you know, someone searching for AS90 100 certified machine shop keyword set than it is for me to get in front of someone across the country searching for machine shops. It’s just a totally different search scenario. So, you know, what works from a practical standpoint competing with other businesses works up for a marketing perspective as well. Same thing with CMMC.
Chris Basgall (22:35)
So. I completely agree. to cut you off there, but I completely agree. So, you know, when I was setting up this three, five, 10 technology was at the core of it. And I saw this CMMC moving out there, but it’s not like it was today. Things have advanced a lot and now the requirements are actually coming down. And I did see that as an opportunity where the market for the vendor pool would shrink which means more opportunities for this organization and similar organizations that take the time and expense to get certified. And it is time consuming and it is costly, but it’s worth it because it safeguards the data for national defense. the, so we, didn’t originally when I acquired the shop, there was no website. And so I built a website. And then last year I switched over to WordPress so that we could start getting backlinks because we had a lot of videos and marketing come on. You know, we’re, uh, we did a video on an article for IMTS for 2026 Rockstar for that. We did a video with Haas on the robots, MSC on their, and Kenamental on their tools and their tool crib and several others as well. And that with that comes back links, which drive new traffic. And so I set up the website, moved to WordPress, got it set up, not where it needs to be yet. It’s a lot to learn going from doing Google sites to doing WordPress, but I’m getting there. But we used to, when we got certified, we started getting contacted because companies wanted companies that were either ISO or AS9100 certified. Now, since we’ve updated that and we are CMMC 2.0 compliant, we finished the project last May and now we’ve got the audit coming up so we can be certified. We’re starting to get a lot of traffic.
Nate Wheeler (24:46)
Sure.
Chris Basgall (24:47)
Companies contracting us because they have the same requirement to work with companies that are currently compliant and will be certified in November.
Nate Wheeler (24:57)
Yep. Yep.
Chris Basgall (24:59)
So it helps from a marketing standpoint. I’m not really doing much marketing. We’ve been fortunate that we’ve got the the articles and videos and blogs that are out there and they’re with the backlinks it drives traffic to the site and brings on new customers then we evaluate it because you are right you cannot beat everything to everybody. We know our niche here and we when we see something that’s outside of that we decide okay this is something we want to step to or stay within our wheelhouse and and new customers or prospects appreciate that transparency. If you say, well, hey, we’re not comfortable with this because this is what we do, but we could work towards this if you’re interested, or maybe you’ve got something else you want to do that fits within our wheelhouse.
Nate Wheeler (25:48)
Right.
Chris Basgall (25:48)
And that means that that keeps things a lot more controlled here from a production standpoint.
Nate Wheeler (25:54)
Right. Yeah, I really do love the way that you think about things from the business planning to, you your obvious you’re more knowledgeable just in what you said. Just in knowing the term backlinks, you’re more knowledgeable than 90 % of machine shop owners. yeah, I mean, you’re thinking about everything correctly. So, that’s awesome. And by the way, as far as learning it, you don’t need to learn it. All you need to do is work with somebody like me. But at any rate, what advice would you have for someone that is kind of kicking around the idea of CMMC? How do you get started? What sort of expense are you going to be looking at? What kind of things are you going need to put in place?
Chris Basgall (26:39)
So my situation was probably a little different from most machine shops in that I had some experience and background and knowledge in IT. I’m not an IT person, but I worked on a lot of projects in the past and, uh, and learned a lot about how architectures work because your IT is an infrastructure that’s interconnected. And so what happens in one system affects what happens in other systems. And you have to be able to see that to make decisions. And so I had that, plus I had an employee that had an IT degree and a Microsoft certification from 20 years earlier. And the two of us put the foundation in for the CMMC. And then I hired a, we put in a full Fortinet stacks. Of course, there’s many other brands that we did that. We had the local servers, the basic controls in place. And then we hired a ITMSP, NTG, Northern Technologies Group. I had contacted Fortinet. said, who does support for your systems? And fortunately, NTG was actually in Tampa and now they have offices in the Pentagon and work with many different three letter acronym agencies and they are fantastic. And they did a project to help bring us to the finish line on CMMC 2.0 compliance and they’re helping as we’re getting ready for the audit as well. And you know, I think that if you don’t have experience and you’re going to go into this, understand that. It does take a significant amount of and picking a company that has a very good reputation to work with that will give you a firm fixed price contract to put CMMC 2.0 compliance in place is probably the most important thing you can do. But before doing that, you got to do some prep. It really helps to do some prep. For example, we scanned files for two years so that we could go digital. And we went digital. put two monitors at every workstation and in most instances, compact computers that are each workstation, set up the servers, did controls on access, and had the team so that they could all access the same files for the job that they’re working on from any workstation. So having things digital was important.
Nate Wheeler (29:36)
Right.
Chris Basgall (29:37)
Then setting up a network so it’s interlinked was the next step on that. Then we started using spreadsheets and primarily spreadsheets to help control production flow, et cetera, so people could access it, see it. And from there, we put in the CMMC foundation and then hired…NTG to come in as the IT managed service provider and they’re still my aunt. They take care of the issues we have when they come up and the that was a progression that we took and if you don’t have that kind of an IT background and if you’re not that familiar with this because it is complex, you know, we’ve got this audit coming up and we have a pre audit consultant radical helping us and then we’re using for our C3PO. We’re using A-Line and we need the prep consultant just to make sure our t’s are crossed and our i’s are dotted as we go into this audit because it is complex and trying to learn that on yourself I think would be overwhelming for any individual that doesn’t have any experience with it. So hiring good professionals and getting a firm fixed fee contract in place for compliance would be my recommendation.
Nate Wheeler (30:56)
Gotcha. Yeah, and then start with the digitization because a lot of shops haven’t really done too much along those lines either.
Chris Basgall (31:04)
Yeah, we, you know, we used to have travelers and we, we tracked that, that parks could be anywhere of one of 22 places inside the shop or outside of the shop. And if you’ve got one paper traveler, what’s going on at the other 21 places. If they don’t have a copy of the print, of the drawing, the work instructions, how are they working? And so that’s why we moved to digital. It really made it a lot easier and the team enjoyed it very much.
Nate Wheeler (31:41)
Yeah. Yeah. is kind of mind blowing to me all of the different processes and technologies and software and vendors you need to have all of these things in place. It’s a huge maze. If somebody is just getting started out with it, I’m always trying to kind of like draw out where they would start just because I don’t own a shop but I can only imagine how overwhelming it might seem. Chris Basgall (32:09)
It could definitely seem overwhelming and the expense and the time is major as well. It’s definitely material. It’s not something that you’re going to put in place in three months.
Nate Wheeler (32:24)
Right.
Chris Basgall (32:24)
We’re probably $250,000 into setting it up at this point. And we’re going spend a lot of money on IT this year because of the audit. you know, I interviewed quite a few companies for it and the just just for the audit itself, same scope discussed out. had the cost ranging varying by more than three X. That’s very significant.
Nate Wheeler (32:55)
Wow. Wow.
Chris Basgall (32:57)
And when we’re tens of thousands of dollars on the low end, it’s pretty significant on the high end. So there’s a lot of range.
Nate Wheeler (33:05)
Right.
Chris Basgall (33:05)
So shopping around helps too.
Nate Wheeler (33:07)
Yep. Yep. Yeah, and you know, expense that is a lot of expense, of course, you know, for any small, medium sized shop. But the perspective is just that what is $250,000 when you can now get a $2 million contract from SpaceX like one of my customers did the other day, you know, like when you can get in front of these sorts of deals from that investment, it makes perfect sense. Think a lot of shops question whether they will get in front of those opportunities if they do incur the expense. And I think you’re proof that they will if they not only do the right things in terms of technology and certifications, but if they have some level of knowledge of how to get in front of potential customers.
Chris Basgall (34:01)
Well, this is, you know, I think the, if they, this does go through as has been stated publicly with it being required, it’s going to shrink the base very significantly. And so it does mean more opportunity. And if you do have a website or some opportunity for marketing, can attract new clients that it could be, significantly beneficial. So I definitely recommend it.
Nate Wheeler (34:31)
Yeah. No, I think it’s great advice. Well, we are just about out of time for this session, but I feel like we could cover a lot more ground because you’ve done so many things right. We could dig into each one of them. So maybe we’ll have to revisit this another time. But I really appreciate the time you did spend with me today and the knowledge that you share with other owners.
Chris Basgall (34:55)
Well, I appreciate it very much. do we have a moment to touch on one other topic briefly?
Nate Wheeler (35:01)
Yeah, for sure.
Chris Basgall (35:02)
So talk about standardization and efficiency, how we’re 100 % hot shop. You the benefit of that is a machinist can move from one machine to the next, to the next, the next, using the same controller, maybe slightly different changes, but as opposed to having a shop with five or six different brands of machines.
Nate Wheeler (35:21)
Right.
Chris Basgall (35:21)
The training is difficult. The stress that comes with it can be a lot to take on. And so looking at that kind of standardization is something that I drive in the business to make it simpler and help the team enjoy their work and be more focused on their work rather than figuring out how to use tools. I talked about too, how we went to five axis and, and there was, we used to have MX eight, 2d and then three axis on X9 and Mastercam and a part like this we did for years in We call it the telephone. It’s actually an auto part, but we for years in three axis and and then we in four ops and we switched to two axis and five because You know, we’ve got this we’ve got a hole here. We got a weep hole Here on the bottom. We’ve got a cut here and a thread here
Nate Wheeler (36:20)
Yeah.
Chris Basgall (36:20)
Right. We could move it in five axis and do it. Then we could take that to the next level and put it on a robot and let it run itself. Let the tools come in and, you know, use your tool pre-setter every few parts and check the tools to make sure nothing broken. So you don’t have a bunch of scrap when you come in in the morning, and just let it run. Having a tool grip with standardized tools so that we can go and use the most common tools from machine to machine to machine and job to job when we’re programming helps a lot. Having the Mastercam as our, whether it’s lathe, mill or wire EDM is one platform to work from. And so all of this helps on training. It helps on getting the team up to speed faster. It helps with morale, helps increase the quality of products that you’re putting and you spend a lot less money on training. You know, we also went with Verisurf for the inspection that sits inside of Mastercam, which makes it easier to learn that. So these are many different ways in which you can help operations for efficiency, standardization, throughput, output, and while growing a pleasant culture to work at.
Nate Wheeler (37:42)
Yeah.
Chris Basgall (37:44)
And because of the automation, it allows opportunities for bonuses and compensation for a team that does a good job. all that’s part of that strategy that comes together. And throwing in, these were a lot of projects over five and a half years,
Nate Wheeler (38:06)
Yeah.
Chris Basgall (38:06)
and ready to finish up with CMC and then. Bring on that scaling that was part of the six through 10 strategic plan. Well, the shift to the, to the six through 10. So very excited about it. Excited about the future with AI what’s going on. Well, it’s going to programming as well. just.
Nate Wheeler (38:23)
Yeah. Yep. Quoting and all that.
Chris Basgall (38:28)
Yes, we’re using it in different parts of our business now. And it’s, it’s exciting. So I’m really appreciated that you took the time to talk with me today and get to share some of the story.
Nate Wheeler (38:39)
Yeah, it was super valuable. Yeah, and I mean, I’d love to learn about it. We know how you’re thinking about using AI and all that. But that’s a whole other conversation that maybe we can get into another time. But yeah, thanks a lot for coming on. It was a pleasure. And I’m sure anybody that listened, you know, gained some knowledge from it.
Chris Basgall (38:58)
Thank you, Nate. The pleasure is mine.