Manufacturing Talks

Send us Fan Mail Gail Robertson is Chief Curiosity Officer at her own manufacturing-based PR firm, GailNow. She also calls herself a recovering journalist, and is deeply concerned about where that profession is headed. But for our Episode 53, she joins us to tell her whole career story, and to encourage the rest of us to act like the real journalists of old, and challenge the orthodoxy that's...

Send us Fan Mail After reading the immortal Gary Paulsen's childrens' book *Hatchet,* Phil Rink's daughter couldn't find anything else good to read. And that's because far too many modern kids' books are politicized, vulgar garbage. So Phil took matters into his own hands and began writing them himself. His are not politicized, are not vulgar, and are not garbage. Qui...

Send us Fan Mail Matt Croson, President of the American Gear Manufacturers Association, jumps on with us for Episode 51 to tell us all about what his outfit does. Come for the education about gear-making standards and education, and stay for the discussion about heavy metal music! Oh, and if you think gears are a thing of the past with high tech taking over, think again. Matt fills us in on all th...

Send us Fan Mail It's Episode 50!! To celebrate, we've got our first return guest. Eric Starkman is one of the most courageous voices out there in journalism, bucking the narrative to fill us in on what's really going on in the world of business and policy and so much more. He talks about the rapidly approaching energy crisis and how the reliable electricity we've become accust...

Send us Fan Mail Jake Bernal joins us for Episode 49. He's an engineer who works for Hyundai's New Horizons Studio on their totally cool concept car, the Ultimate Mobility Vehicle (UMV). Jake also teaches at Montana State University in Bozeman. Tune in and hear all about this insanely awesome piece of design and engineering: how the company chose Bozeman for its new R&D facility last...

Send us Fan Mail For our Episode 48, Mark P. Mills joins us to chat about why one of the biggest bottlenecks in the "energy transition" is mining, metals, and minerals. He gave a very lengthy and detailed talk about it at the beginning of the year (see link below), and now he chats with our host Jim Vinoski to tell about some of the basic problems we're already starting to run into....

Send us Fan Mail They make the coolest product ever manufactured. Therefore, it was destined someone from the company would make an appearance here on Manufacturing Talks! For our Episode 47, Doug Peters, Regional Sales Manager at the Zamboni Company, joins us to fulfill that destiny. He tells us all about the history of the company and its iconic products, his favorite moment of his career, and n...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 46 features our host Jim Vinoski telling why things are getting critical when it comes to reliable and affordable electrical power. For manufacturing, this is the #1 risk in the medium to long term. You need to understand what's happening, and get involved in driving a major policy course correction. Here's some reading on the subject: https://www.manhattancontra...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 45 features photographer extraordinaire Viktor Mácha from Prague. When he was still a youth, his parents stopped on a trip to show him some of his country's steel industry, and from that moment he was hooked. (A student of religion and theology, he describes that moment as "a religious experience.") As market downturns and globalization took their toll on st...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 44 features the co-founders of Red Land Cotton in Alabama, Anna  Brakefield and her dad Mark Yeager. Mark is a longtime cotton farmer who built his own cotton gin years ago and was looking for a way to get more money for his crops. His daughter went to school for marketing and was good and ready to go into business with her dad, so they founded their company back in 2015....

Send us Fan Mail For our Episode 43, we chat with Melissa McMinn, Master Engraver at Melissa M Studios. She tells us how she got where she is, the tricks of her trade and the tools she uses, the kinds of work she does, and yes, the story of those fabulous dueling pistols! She's just one of three female Master Engravers in the whole United States.

Send us Fan Mail Episode 42 is a very special one, featuring yours truly, Jim Vinoski! I recently was invited to speak at the Manufacturing and International Trade Day in Helena, Montana. I spoke about the state of manufacturing in the world and in the US, and why I think Montana is positioning itself extremely well to compete for manufacturers looking for a good place to settle. Many thanks to th...

Send us Fan Mail For Episode 41, we're joined by Cedrik Neike, CEO of Siemens Digital Industries and Member of the Board for Siemens overall. He has two vital messages. First, if you're in manufacturing and you're not working on digitalization, you're getting left behind. And second, no matter how big your company is, Siemens is here to help, with a new modular product offering...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 40 features Lance Neirby, CEO of Montana Silversmiths in Billings. Learn how he went from undergrad in Minnesota to a Master of Fine Arts from Rochester Institute of Technology to Tiffany to Montana! It's a heck of a story. Lance not only knows the ins and outs of metalsmithing and jewelry making, but he's also doing a bang-up job running the show at his small ou...

Send us Fan Mail Want to learn what's going on in the world of 3D printing (a.k.a. additive manufacturing or AM)? Nadav Goshen is the CEO of UltiMaker. They recently merged with MakerBot, and now the combined companies are off to the races expanding the market for their existing printers, and looking to the future at new opportunities. Nadav joined us to tell us all about his fascinating back...

Send us Fan Mail Are US automakers headed back to the bad old days of the 1970s? Journalist Eric Starkman joins us for a special episode of our show to drill into that question. Eric worked in Detroit (among other places) years ago, and he still regularly covers the big stories from the Great Lakes State. Nowadays he exposes the warts that ought to be exposed at his own outlet, Starkman Approved (...

Send us Fan Mail Paul Van Metre had his own machine shop, and learned along the way what he really needed when it came to business software. That's why he shifted hears and helped found ProShop, the ERP solution for machine shops. His software is focused on giving machine shop owners, managers, and workers exactly what they need to maximize the efficiency of their operations. Tune in and list...

Send us Fan Mail The #1 middle- to long-term risk to American manufacturers is our increasingly unreliable energy supply. So this episode diving into the reasons things are headed the way they are, and what we can do about it, is our most important one so far. David Blackmon has been warning us about this for years. It was incredibly educational to hear him talk about how really awful policy decis...

Send us Fan Mail Montana may not be a state that, when you first think about it, has manufacturing come to mind for you. But there are plenty of reasons it should be. So it was great fun to chat with Scott Sehnert about his adopted home state. Scott is a VP at First Security Bank Montana in Bozeman, and he also serves as President of the Montana Manufacturing Association. Tune in and hear him chat...

Send us Fan Mail Gabe Draper is a self-proclaimed failed machine shop owner. Now he's in another business to help manufacturers avoid the mistakes he made. He's co-founder of Factur, his company that hunts customers... for their customers. They're all about lead generation, using their specialized tech and tools to generate high-quality sales. Tune in and hear Gabe talk about how yo...

Send us Fan Mail Melissa Martin has a whole lot to tell you about what we all need to be doing to rebuild our nation's pipeline of skilled workers. She has not just one, but TWO jobs where she does her part for all that. She's Director of Marketing at LAB Midwest, a distributor for the whole upper Midwest of training curricula and equipment for the workplace and for STEM materials for sc...

Send us Fan Mail It was such a lot of fun hearing from Kerrie about everything Epicor has going on. Epicor is a software development company specializing in its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) suite that's designed specifically for manufacturers. As I mentioned in our chat, I know a lot of you out there get a bad taste in your mouth anytime you hear "ERP." But if you haven't...

Send us Fan Mail It's all too common in manufacturing circles to hear about the operations improvement projects that didn't pan out, the Lean transformation that sputtered, or the cultural reset that never got off the ground. Making sure those kinds of failures don't happen is Dan Burgos's stock in trade. It was lots of fun chatting with him and hearing his thoughts on what bot...

Send us Fan Mail Neil Friedman has done a lot of cool things in his time, but maybe the coolest yet is his company's still fairly new product, the circul+ fitness ring. It's got so much going for it: it's unobtrusive, it works for general condition monitoring, exercise, sleep monitoring and improvement, and even help with treating Long Covid. Plus it doesn't have the skin pigme...

Send us Fan Mail One thing it's pretty common for manufacturers to miss the mark on is marketing. Especially today, when just about everything marketing-related is changing so fast, though, it's a critically important topic. So it was a treat to host Aaron Marks, who founded Aspire Marketing Group because of the opportunities he saw in this particular vein. Aaron has nearly two decades o...