Everyday Business Problems

Dave Crysler breaks down why a growing backlog so often gets mistaken for a capacity problem, starting with a client whose estimating queue hit 40 lines while everyone assumed the answer was another hire. He explains how one static process ends up carrying several different types of work, what he learned the hard way training an entire new customer service team, and why an express lane changed how...

In this episode, Dave Crysler breaks down why most software purchases fail to deliver on their promise. Drawing from a recent conversation with a sub-million-dollar business owner evaluating an $8,000 MIS, Dave unpacks the Tool Trap: the pattern of buying technology to fix problems that are actually process problems in disguise. The software cannot create clarity, and if the underlying process is...

Ask most leadership teams what they're working on and you get the whole list: an ERP optimization, a new CRM, a quality initiative, process documentation, maybe a rebrand. Every one of them is in progress, and none of them ever seem to finish. Dave Crysler explains why that's rarely a project management problem and almost always a clarity and leadership problem, and why the real unlock is having t...

Dave Crysler starts with a loop every operations leader knows: something goes wrong, the team runs a five whys, everybody gets retrained, and you're sure it's solved until it happens again. In most shops he walks into, the tool has very little to do with why the problem keeps coming back. Dave walks through a recurring finished goods problem that came back for nearly a decade and got solved with t...

Dave Crysler takes on one of the most repeated lines in business, what got you here won't get you there, and argues the other side. The quoting, scheduling, purchasing, making and shipping that built a $1 million company are the same work a $100 million company does. There's just a lot more of it, and the handoffs between people are what break. Dave walks through a custom manufacturer that ran eve...

Dave Crysler walks through a client call that started with one boring question, what happens when you click new invoice, and ended up exposing a couple thousand customer records with no payment terms at all. Every decision that led there made sense the day it was made, from the net 30 default to a finance team adjusting terms to quiet a noisy aging report. Dave uses it to show how a default system...

Dave sits down with Wes Temple, Director of Growth at Gorilla 76, a B2B agency that works exclusively with manufacturers and industrial technology companies. Wes owns the marketing strategy for every client they sign, which means he has traced a lot of lead flow end to end and found out exactly where it stops. In one case, the leads were arriving, they were logged, they had real six figure values...

Dave Crysler answers the question a client asked him in the middle of a gap review, the one everybody in the room was already thinking. There is no clean line between tribal knowledge and a work instruction, so most teams stall at the question and write nothing. Dave lays out the two questions that break the tie, the cost of leaving a gap undecided that almost nobody counts, and why a step that is...

Dave Crysler sits down with Glen Antwiler, founder and CEO of Right Fit PEO, who built, ran, and sold his own PEO before moving to the buy side of the market. Glen explains what a professional employer organization actually is, where the savings really come from, and why only about 50 of the roughly 600 operating in this country carry the IRS certification that determines who is liable when payrol...

Dave Crysler breaks down Overall Equipment Effectiveness, the traditional manufacturing KPI that gets sold as a solution far more often than it gets used as a diagnostic. After a call with a machine monitoring vendor, Dave lays out what OEE actually measures, why two plants with identical scores can have nothing in common, and why a high number can sit right next to a growing backlog and shrinking...

Most manufacturers did not decide to be invisible. They grew on referrals, landed a handful of customers who covered the bills, and never had to explain themselves to a stranger. Dave Crysler sits down with Curt Anderson, founder of B2Btail and author of Stop Being the Best Kept Secret, to talk about how that quiet approach stopped working and what to do about it. Along the way they get into the p...

In 2009, Dave Crysler was a brand new general manager who had just cleaned up the worst quality problem of his career. He got his boss on the phone, walked him through the investigation, the retraining, the new documentation, and the signed training records. His boss asked four words in response, and Dave didn't have an answer. In this solo episode, Dave breaks down what happened when they finally...

Dave Crysler welcomes back Damon Pistulka, co-founder of Exit Your Way, to cut through the noise around AI in small and mid-market businesses. Damon downloaded and tested more than 50 AI tools before landing on what actually changes an operation, and it wasn't any of the apps filling his Instagram feed. The two get into where AI genuinely expands what a business can do, where it is flat out the wr...

Dave Crysler sits down with Mike O'Neill, founder of Bench Builders and host of the Get Unstuck and On Target podcast. After 25 years in corporate HR, Mike coaches senior leaders who need more than a sounding board, and trains the first-line supervisors most companies promote without ever preparing. Together they dig into why the top of the org chart is the most isolated seat in the building, and...

Dave Crysler has walked nearly a hundred plant floors over the last 30 years, and most of them have the ghost of a dead 5S program somewhere: faded tape outlines, a shadow board missing half its tools, an audit sheet nobody has touched in years. In this episode, he breaks down why these programs die at the Sustain step and why the failure has almost nothing to do with your team's discipline. Both...

Dave Crysler unpacks what really determines the price of a business at exit, drawing on years spent on the buyer's side of acquisitions. Two owners with the same earnings can sell for wildly different numbers, and the difference has nothing to do with product, customers, or market. It comes down to whether the business runs without the owner, and buyers price that risk before the offer ever hits t...

A client of Dave's had an incredible first quarter, then one of the worst months on their recent record. In this episode, Dave Crysler breaks down what almost always happens the week after a bad month: the panic pivot, where leadership changes everything at once and calls it decisiveness. He unpacks why changing too many things simultaneously destroys your baseline, why constant course corrections...

Every operator says they want to be more efficient, and Dave Crysler argues that's exactly the wrong goal. In this solo episode he unpacks the one-word distinction that quietly holds most operations back, the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and why nearly 30 years on the shop floor taught him that the two are not the same thing. He walks through why the localized efficiency we're...

Every business is already running on a system. The only question is whether anybody actually designed it. In this solo episode, Dave Crysler breaks down the difference between running by design and running by default, and why the problems that keep coming back are not bad luck or bad people. They are the designed output of a system nobody chose. Dave explains how default systems quietly accrete ov...

Dave Crysler sits down with Greg Harrod, a 30-year manufacturing leader and Certified Working Genius facilitator, to unpack a pattern that quietly drains operations teams: the most dependable person on the floor is often the closest to burnout. Because leaders trust their best people, they keep handing them more, until reliable becomes overloaded and the resignation nobody saw coming lands on the...

Before anybody on your team makes a sale, builds a product, or delivers a service, they are logging into tools, running reports, and trying to piece together what to do next. Dave Crysler calls this admin overhead, the hidden time tax of figuring out what the work is before anyone can actually do it. In this solo episode, he breaks down how to flip the model: instead of making people pull informat...

Every operations leader has heard the advice: capture your tribal knowledge before it walks out the door, write the SOP, get it out of people's heads. Dave Crysler breaks down why that advice keeps failing, and it is not the part you think. The hard part was never writing the document. It is pulling the knowledge out of the person in the first place, and that is the gap nobody talks about. Dave wa...

Dave Crysler built his own AI email tool. He also tells clients not to build their own software. In this episode, he resolves the contradiction and lays out the honest skill ledger behind a build that costs three dollars a month to run, processes fifty to a hundred marketing emails a day, and required twenty years of self-taught coding background plus the one skill almost everyone underestimates:...

A couple of weeks ago Dave Crysler sat in on a monthly leadership meeting where a metric on the dashboard was lying. The team caught it in fifteen minutes and changed how they measured. That moment is the entire problem with most manufacturing leadership dashboards. In this solo episode, Dave breaks down the difference between metrics that report the news and KPIs that drive action, why most weekl...

Most leaders feel capacity tight and immediately start writing a job description. Dave Crysler pushes back on that reflex in this solo episode, drawing on a recent client engagement where synchronizing manufacturing flow more than doubled throughput, cut lead times from weeks to four days, and dropped work-in-process to almost nothing. The team got smaller during this period, not larger, because n...