GA 058 | Fueling Your Lean Journey with Rick Egelin

You're listening to episode 58 with Rick Eglin.

Welcome to the Gemba Academy Podcast, the show that's focused on helping individuals and companies achieve breakthrough results using the same continuous improvement principles leveraged by companies such as Toyota Del Monte and the U.S. department of Defense. And now, here's your host, Ron Pereira.

Hey, there. This is Ron Pereira with Gemba Academy, and I'd like to welcome you to another edition of the Gemba Academy podcast. Now, I also want to give a special shout out to everyone that stopped by our booth at the recent ASQ World Conference in Tennessee. Now, I wasn't able to make the show this year, but I did hear that many of our podcast listeners stopped by to say hello, which is so cool. So thank you to each and every one of you that listens to this show. We deeply appreciate each of you. Now then, today I'm excited to welcome Rick Eglin to the show. Now, Rick, who is the CEO of a company called Fireblast, will give a more thorough explanation of what they do. But basically, Fireblast built fire training facilities, which I have to say, has to be one of the coolest jobs I've ever heard of. And as you'll hear, Firebush has just recently started their lean journey. So Rick and I explore why they got started, what they've done, what's gone well, what's not gone so well, and what their plans are in the coming months. And as you'll hear, Rick actually opens himself up quite a bit, explaining how he has personally grown as a leader of people, which was pretty special to hear. Now, show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com 58 and that's 5, 8 for 58. So gembapodcast.com 58. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. All right, Rick, well, thank you so much for coming onto the show. Where are you calling in from today?

Corona, California.

Ooh, Corona, California, I'm sure. Let me guess, it's 75 degrees, sunny, something like that.

75 would be cold here, here. It's about 88 today. Yeah.

All right, quit revving it in. All right. We're having a good day here in Texas, so I can't complain. All right, well, Rick, tell us about. Normally, we start with folks background, but I want to start with your company, Fireblast, which. Which may be the coolest named company I've ever heard of. And. Cool. It's kind of weird because it's fire, but. But what do you do? What's Fireblast all about.

Well, you know, basically we build training equipment for fire departments and the military. And it's all first responder type training. But the coolest thing about it is it is all. It's not all live fire, but a lot of it is live fire. So we're actually putting people inside training buildings. We have a computerized system that catches the building on fire. It's an environmentally safe atmosphere. So we're burning propane and natural gas and using fog machines to simulate smoke so we're not polluting the air, we're not polluting groundwaters. And we're global, so we're shipping products all over the world. And it's just a really neat thing. It's just really neat. The fire blast name actually come from, from everybody saying they had a blast after they came out of it.

So, I mean. So your product is like units that catch on fire, is that right?

Yeah, there's a variety of things that we build. We build mobile units. So it'll be like portable trailers that have a variety of different props that can either roll off and catch on fire and. Or some of them burn inside. Like it would simulate a house in a large structure that's mobile and can go different places. Some are building collapse, some are search and rescue type atmospheres or confined space. And then on the other side of it is, we have a design team. We design, we work with architects and engineers to design large scale training centers. And then we implement props into the building like a kitchen stove, a bedroom setup, dressers, whatever you might find in a normal house. We make them of heavy gauge steel. They have electronic equipment and sensors in them, safety devices that monitor for safety for the firefighters within the room. And then we implement those into the building and create these large burn houses. So it's. It's kind of like you're, you know, you're. You're going to an amusement park and seeing all these things they do in movies and everything. It's very, very similar to a special effects company, but for the fire service and emergency services.

Man, that's incredible. All right, well, let's get into the kind of your lean journey. Why don't you tell us about your, I guess, your background and how you were first exposed to lean thinking.

Well, I mean, if we want to go way back. I actually worked at McDonnell Douglas years ago.

Okay.

And transitioned into Boeing. And I. I left Boeing to start my company. And so I was familiar with the TQMS program, if you want to call it familiar with it. You know, the process at McDonnell Douglas, which I think was part of the failure, now that I understand Lean, was they took us into an hour class, everybody that worked there, and basically said, we're going to do this TQMS thing and put some posters on the wall. And after the hour, you went back in your work cell and you just did what you did. And then I worked my way up into a lead position there and it just never. You saw the posters, but you just never saw what was actually happening. And then in transition, when Boeing came in, I actually went to the Seattle facility and they were much more organized and advanced and you could see that we didn't know what we were doing. So that was my first real exposure to some type of process like that. Then about then, I ran my business for years and. And you know, we felt that we were successful. I kind of laugh and say that we were always clean, but never lean. I was always that guy that wanted my shop to be clean and wanted these guys to make sure that we were presentable for customers coming in. So it was clean, not Lean. Our only version of Lean was I think we shut the light off at the end of the tunnel so we could save energy. And that was about as far as it got. So. But what I ended up doing about three years ago is we realized that year after year our sales were increasing, but our revenue wasn't. We couldn't get it out the door. And as my sales team did a much better job of making us successful, on the one side, we were failing them. And I think when we realized our customer was our sales team and those guys were taking a beating because they couldn't get products to their customer. So we implemented, we started to implement a Lean process and we basically had a false start. We had three people that engaged. I had 30 some people that not only were resistant, they actually worked really hard to go in the opposite direction. And so after about four or six months, we just kind of threw our hands up and said, it's not going to work here. This isn't for us. And then jump to August of last year, I was out of the country on business. I came back and there's an annual occurrence that started drawing me back to the manufacturing floor because we were behind and I had to go out and try to help us get out of trouble, meeting end of the year deadlines and stuff that were coming up that we were going to fall behind on. After doing this almost annually or somewhere, every 18 months, having to go out there and kind of bail out where we were at I had decided that this just wasn't going to work anymore. And I pretty much had decided after the two biggest sales years that the company had, I was teetering on and had discussed with my wife about, I think I'm done. I think I'm just going to walk away from it and we're going to close the doors and be done. And it was really, really tough because I've never been a quitter. And it just got to the point where I realized that I didn't have the capacity to take it where it needed to go. And I didn't have the surrounding cast that was willing to do that, or I felt I didn't have the surrounding cast is probably a better word. You know, I realized along the way that I needed to do something different. I hit just about rock bottom. It was around Thanksgiving. I think my wife was completely frustrated with me. You know, it wasn't very nice in the afternoons when I was home. So I was working weekends just trying to make figure out where I was going to go. And I just happened to be on YouTube, popping around on some videos, and I ran across which this is your pitch, but it's the honest truth. I ran across one of your videos on YouTube and it was a video of Kaizen or one of the videos. I don't even remember which one it was because it was so far ahead of where I would have been looking anyway. But I thought, that's interesting. I wonder if he has some others. So I looked at a couple others. What I found myself doing was bouncing around on YouTube between your stuff and anybody else that had stuff out there going, hey, this is interesting. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. The long and the short of it is it came around Christmas time or right before Christmas, and I had introduced it to a couple of people on the floor. I go, gotta look at some of these videos, man. We can do this. And I have a couple of guys that were very anxious to make things improve. So they looked at it, and the next thing after Christmas, they came in And I said, January 5th, we got to start doing something different. We're going to stay with a new direction. And what they did was they go, hey, have you seen this FastCap thing? We were looking at the Gimba videos, Gimba Academy videos. And we found this FastCap company. Man, this place is incredible. So I went on and I looked at it and I thought, wow, that's pretty impressive. And they're a company about our size. And I go, we can do something like this. So I had Sent Paul an email, and I just said, hey, you know, I'd love to talk to you at some point. We're going to start. We're starting to go in this direction. And you know him, he Skypes me from. Where was he? Costa Rica. Surfing with no shirt on. On the beach as I'm sitting here on a Sunday.

Yeah.

And going, this is just not right. And then. So. So basically, you know, that that was the beginning of us going. We need to go in a different direction.

And I bet you. I bet. And I bet he made you turn your video camera on, didn't he?

Oh, he did, yeah.

He has to see you or he won't talk to you.

Yeah, he absolutely did make me. And I had to sit there and look at him with no shirt on, on the beach and, you know, having a good time. So.

So, yeah, that was your lean penance, right in the beginning.

So that, I mean, that, you know, it was the need to do something different and not knowing really what to do. But I did understand lean. I had some education. I actually have two guys here that came from an extreme lean company. And I mean, Extreme lean.

Yeah.

And there was, like, three of us that were on board.

Yeah.

Do it in the first time. We had the false start. And it's, you know, it's the same guys. Now that we're going, we can do this. So that was really the beginning of understanding that we needed to go in a different direction. And I knew the company wasn't going to succeed any further than we had gotten to unless we do something different.

Yeah. All right, well, hold that thought, because I want to really dig into your journey here and kind of walk people through the progression that you've gone through. But as you know, Rick, at the starts of our shows, we like to have our guests share a quotation that possibly inspires them. So do you have a quotation that you like?

Yeah, actually, when we started on the. About. Or about a year ago, some of the guys in the shop started putting up motivational things from the day. You know, word of the day or speech of the day, quote of the day. And what we did was I read it every day, and it was inspiring. So when we came in January and decided we were going to do something different, I actually asked everybody how many people actually read the quote of the day. And everybody, you know, pretty much raises their hand. They look at it, and I would see people at the Greece board laughing. So they do that. And I said, well, how many of you guys actually understand what it means? And some of the guys raised their hand, some of the guys didn't, but a fair amount. I asked them how many actually applied it to the day or how many of them really tried to put it out to the work floor. And they. Nobody raised their hand. And so it was kind of disappointing. So what I did was I said, how about if we make it a little bit simpler? Let's go for a quote of the year. We'll all stick with one, so we can engage every day and try to do something that's. That's uniform and we stay on track. So what we did was I pulled out Einstein and I said, you know, insanity. Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. You know, that's the definition of insanity when I did that. We recite that every morning in the meeting now, and we're trying to just keep them focused. So we want to do something different every day. To have constant improvement, you have to do something different.

Yeah, no, I love that. All right, so let's really get into your journey. So you talked a little bit about why you wanted to do it. It sounds like there was even some motivations to help you as a person in your family life and so forth, which obviously is a very powerful thing. But let's talk about the beginning. Like, what did you really do to get the journey going? So you found some Gemba Academy videos, Paul, and that sort of stuff. But what did you do?

Well, the first thing I did was I started talking to just people on the floor and said, hey, you know, I think this is the direction we need to go. I'd like to show you guys some videos. And what I did was I tried to engage people that I felt were eager to change. They're the guys always asking questions. They're the guys that always going, hey, can we do this? Can we do that? And there wasn't a lot of them, but there was a couple. So what I did was I went and started talking to them. And what I really found out was interesting is that I had an individual from every division of my company. I mean, we have systems guys which a lot of people would call plumbers. You know, in plumbing that you do gas, gas systems. We've got electricians or controls people, programmers. We've got engineers, welding fabrication guys on saws, cutting. I've got admin sales, everything. What I found was I found one person in every single division of the company that had interest. So what I did was I formed a Lean Leaders group, and I said, here's what we're going to do, we're going to meet once a week and I'm going to let you guys pick the training avenue that we go. We're going to sit down, I'm going to show you. I showed them some FastCap videos. I showed him some Gemba Academy videos. I showed them some just random videos off the Internet. We decided to have some open discussion about the things we watched and how we could apply them here. Basically every Thursday after our morning meeting, we come in here at 7:30. We start at 7, we have a morning meeting. Then we come in here at the. At 7:30 and we sit down and we watch a couple of videos. It's all. There's an agenda for every day of what we're going to do. We discuss it. We try to watch some video from a company that is lean, where there's a factory tour of some type, no matter how short or mid range length it is, to make sure we spend an hour and a half.

Wow.

And we did that from the second week in January and that was the beginning. So in the first day when I came in, I showed all these different videos from different places and I said, what do you like? And this is where your head swells. Everybody liked you. And I think the thing, I mean this is very sincere when I say you're very easy to listen to, where a lot of videos from a training perspective are very dry and you know, you're right to the point. The videos are high quality and we enjoyed them. And everybody said, let's follow that. So that was the week, the first week that I joined the Gemba Academy. I think we started the trial and then we went ahead and joined. And every week we watch some of yours, we watch some of some other different things that are going on. And that was the beginning. And this meeting has taken place every single week since the second week in January, whether I'm in town or not.

Wow. Wow. Well, thank you for the kind words. You didn't have to do that. And I guess I'll have to send a check later. But we really do appreciate your business. But it's really awesome to hear when your product helps people, as I'm sure you can relate to with Fireblast. So it's the same thing. So, Rick, I wanted to get. I know it's not been all roses. It can't have been easy to do what you've done so far, but. So let's talk a bit about what's the hardest part of the journey or what's Been the hardest part of the journey.

Hardest part of the journey. Well, there's a couple pieces. I think one of our big challenges was communication. We have multicultural languages here. I have a large volume of staff that speak Spanish. There's not a lot available on the Internet. I bought the FastCap Spanish book so that they could go through the 2 second lean in Spanish. That, that was a help. They actually. We have a group of Spanish speaking that meet for an hour every week and we have a bilingual girl in the office that, that works through that with them and she's helping train them. She's part of our Lean Leaders group and that has been tremendous. The guys are starting to become very engaged because they're starting to understand. So that's worked out. Really. That was a tough thing. That was tough. The other thing I think is just trust and transparency. It's hard to tell someone, I need to know what's wrong and how I can fix it because they're always worried. And from the past I was your typical push manager, push it out the door, got to get it done, got it. You know, got to pay the bills and that kind of stuff. So I don't think I, I think they were always scared to say, hey, I made a mistake. But you know, I think the one thing that I've heard in one of the videos is I from someone said I look forward to a mistake every day because I know that I can make an improvement. And I, and I don't think I ever looked at it that way. And I think that they've been, they've been reluctant to give me the information. So the transparency has been very difficult for them to say, hey, yeah, we have rework here. Off the start it was terrible. But the way I bridged the gap, and I actually bridged the gap here about a month ago is I went out there one morning, morning meeting and I started off the meeting and said everything around here that's wrong is my fault. I haven't put in a process, I haven't allowed you to put in a process. We haven't given good direction if our drawings are wrong. I haven't done the right things to make sure that you've got quality drawings to build from or whatever it was. 100% of what's out here is my fault. So now I'm going to take 100% responsibility for what's going on out here. Please tell me what I'm doing wrong so I can help you. And at that point the morning meeting I think changed because that's when people started saying, okay, it's your fault, here's.

What you did wrong.

But you know, we started seeing more and more people say, yeah, we had this for rework today. You know, we were at waste. We were standing over here doing nothing because we didn't have the parts we needed. And we started seeing that it really spiked for a while. We were starting to get, the meeting got longer and longer because guys had all kinds of waste recently. I've seen that taper off a little bit. And we actually had a discussion about it yesterday and again today that we felt that it's kind of flattened off now. And so we got to figure out how to rejuvenate that and keep that going. But those have been my biggest challenges.

I'm curious, how did you feel when you told everyone that the mistakes were your fault? I mean, you yourself, how did you feel when you said those words?

You know, I said it to myself probably for three days prior to that because I needed to be make sure that I understood that it was my fault. And it was hard, it was hard to stand up in front of 40 people and say this place is a mess and it's my fault. And so it was a hard one to gulp down. I think. You know, I, I tried it on the Lean Leaders group before or I mean the day or day before or the Thursday before and I basically asked, I saw a video with, it was one of the gimbal live. I think it was Steve Kane.

Oh yeah.

And somebody was asking a question about, do you. What about a lot of turnover in a company? You know, if you have, if you have a large amount of turnover. And he said basically, if you have a lot of turnover, I would say that's poor leadership. People leaving here or there, that's just normal growth. People want to expand their horizons and people are going to move. That's just typical. But he said if you have a lot of turnover, he would blame it back on leadership. Well, the interesting thing about us is here I stand here reassuring myself, or not reassuring myself, but telling myself that I have not been a very good leader. I've been a manager. And in that same sentence I'm going, I've got long term employees, they haven't left. And in some cases we've had several people leave and come back. So I fly out the Lean Leaders groups first. I started with them and said, why if I've been such a poor leader, which I'm not saying you guys said that. I'm just saying I know I've Been a poor leader. I'm not taking you guys in the direction we need to go. Why are you still here? And it was emotional for me because they all said, we love our job, we love who we work for. As far as our end customer, we're building things to keep people alive, learn how to stay alive. We know the company has great potential. Our paycheck's here every Friday. Everything is solid about the company. One of the guys said, all you need to do is back off and let us help. Yeah, you know, so it was. And that was, that was the point when I took it to the floor and, you know, basically said, okay, it's my fault. Let's. Let's fix it, you know?

Yeah, that's pretty powerful, Rick. That's pretty powerful. All right, what about a success story? Do you have any that you can think of? Maybe if you can tell us this, bring us through that journey. What was the problem? How did you approach the problem and what was the result?

Well, you know, I mean, there's. From a success story, we're still early on. So every little thing is a success. Any continuous improvement is a success. I think two things kind of stand out in my mind. And I talk about the morning meeting, and believe me, this isn't rocket science. I basically watched some morning meetings on the Internet. I started having them. We used to have a morning meeting, but it wasn't a morning meeting. It was a job assignment. You got down, you got what you were supposed to go do, and then you went and did it. And we went away from that because we figured it was just wasting our time to sit there and tell the guys what they needed to do. Because we have long term projects. We only build 30 to 40 projects a year because they're big projects. It's an assembly line of massive stuff. It just didn't seem like a good idea. Well, then when I started watching the morning meetings and I saw the morning meetings have a lot of value, a lot different than what I saw. That's when we changed and went to the typical morning meeting that I saw from FastCap or Xylem or any of those guys. What I did was I just modeled it off of them. We came in and we talk about, you know, we kind of set up our own thing, you know, what new sales activities have happened throughout the week. Was there any shipments that happened through the week? You know, we put some new things in this week of, you know, anything that's behind that we owe the customer or something that's not on schedule. We Talk about eight wastes. We talk about the waste and we have somebody recite the eight ways somebody gives the meeting different every day. That'll happen within about four weeks. I mean, it was like just within a month's time. I thought it was gonna be like pulling teeth to get somebody up there to stand in front and talk. And what we found was. And I said, you know, backing up to the earlier question about, about the communication and the language barrier, I had one of the, one of my Spanish speaking guys come to me and go, can I, you know, he had it translated. He goes, can we. I'll do it. If I can do it in Spanish, yeah, absolutely do it. And so the days that our Spanish speaking guys will step up and do it, it's translated back to us in English through one of our translators. So, I mean, it made them part of the group that they felt they weren't part of. So now it changes every day. I've got what, 30, 38 to 40 employees in here, and then I've got staff that's outside the company too. But these 38 people, it's rotating through here daily. And I think we've come a long way in three and a half months.

Yeah. Oh, that's fantastic. I especially love hearing a story how a Spanish speaker got out. I mean, how empowering and how awesome did that person have to feel after they did that, you know, and these.

Guys are so quiet, you know, normally, because you just don't hear them say a lot for them to get up there and they volunteer and get up there and I mean, we ask for a volunteer to do it every day. We, we want to get down to where it's structured and, you know, we know who's going to do it the next day, but we ask for a volunteer and we get a volunteer every day.

Yeah, fantastic. All right, so what are your plans for the next six months as it relates to your lean journey?

Well, we actually put some goals up on the board for a one month, a three month, a six month and a one year. And you know, those. We got through the first month and we hit everything we wanted to do. We're working on the. We started the goals a little late because I didn't get them up on the board when we officially started our journey. So we just passed the one month of the goals being listed about a week and a half or two weeks ago. We hit what we wanted to do in the first month right off the bat. Now we're on the three month path and working, I think One of the things that I want to do is I want to make sure that I can gain their trust. You know, that's not an easy thing when you've been a push manager. So, you know, I think my personal goal would be to gain their trust and let them believe in me and, you know, give me the opportunity to lead them and teach them the things that I know and hopefully that they can teach me the things that they know and we can grow together. You know, from a dead six month goal sheet, I, you know, I. I'm looking more at the one year mark of having one piece flow functioning, having our Kanban system in place. We're working on that right now. I want to have our facility at the one year mark to be a tourable facility where someone can come in and we'd be proud to show it to them. And obviously, and then from the customer side, I want my customers to have their products on time at the highest quality. And you know, one thing that we've always been known for is our customer service. It's made us successful. The customer service on the outside of the company is very well known. I like the customer service from the inside of the company to match that.

Nice. Got it. All right, the last question I have for you in this section, Rick, is if you could jump into a time machine and go back to the beginning of your lean journey and give yourself one piece of advice, what would you say, if anything, you should have did.

This a long time ago. Can I go back farther than when I started?

Sure.

Can I go back to when I started the company?

Yeah, absolutely.

Years ago.

Absolutely.

I think if I could go back and do it all over again, I don't know on this particular path being so short in that I would do anything different because I think the results that I got in this amount of time after this is right about the time last time where I gave up. So to look at it now and go, it's moving forward and we're dedicated to moving it forward. And I've got. Last time I had three people. This time I've got, I probably have eight or 10 fully engaged. I have probably four or five more that are pretty heavy participants. And then I've got a mixture of the rest of them that are starting to come around. So I have no and 38 people right now. I don't think there's one person in the company that I would look at and say they're resistant. I think all of them are just waiting to see what's going to happen. But nobody's pulling back. Everybody has been very supportive. So that was something I didn't expect to see this quick.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. All right, Rick, let's go ahead and transition into what we're calling the reflection section. And so the first question is, you know, we lean thinkers spend a lot of time talking about continuous improvement and respect for people. Continuous improvement. Pretty easy to kind of put your fingers on and touch and understand. But respect for people can be a bit harder. So what does respect for people mean to you?

Wow. Respect for people. It's going to be about accountability. Accountability for my leadership. I think, you know, I need to. I need to learn. I need to learn how to be a leader, and that's going to respect my people. And I think that when we, you know, that's a tough question because I don't think respect for people, it's interpreted so much differently from a lot of people. But, you know, I think it's basically, I need to be accountable for my actions. I need to be able to be a mentor to my people. I'm responsible for teaching and raising their morale. I mean, I've read lots of things on this over time, and I think ultimately it's just really, it's being accountable for my actions and helping to improve everybody.

Well, and I think the story of you standing up in front of your people and saying, it's my fault, that's a perfect example of respect for people, in my opinion. So, yeah, so I think you're doing a great job with that, Rick. All right, next question. What's the best advice you've ever received?

You know, Paul Akers told me in the first call when he was sitting on the beach in Costa Rica, he said, I want you to think about what you think you're your best at. And then I want you to think really hard because you're probably not that good at it. And I went, I'm not sure what that means. It was really funny because whenever I go out in manufacturing, I feel at home out there. I've never really felt like a CEO on the administrative and management side. That's just not really been me. I've always been. I like to be on the shop floor, I like to have my hands in everything, and I like to work. I'm a hands on type guy. I was out there for the wrong reasons. But after I really thought about what he said, it kind of made sense. When you think you're good at something, there's no reason to continue to educate yourself to be better. You find Yourself in that comfort zone of going, I can do this when I sleep. And you just don't try harder. And you don't even focus in on where your mistakes are. I think the things that you're not that good at are the things that you continue to try to hone your skills and improve on. And I think after I had a time, after I hung up and realized he's on the beach on a Sunday and I'm not, I think I realized that I needed to spend more time on what I thought I was good at, because I probably wasn't that good considering the fact that I was saying I should close the doors because I'm frustrated. So that's when I really, really poured into the education of it. And I make a commitment right now to spend at least one hour, but most of the time, I spend about two hours a day educating myself on building a lean culture. Every single day. Saturday, Sunday, I get up in the morning, I watch videos, I read books, I do everything else. But I commit one to two hours a day religiously since I started.

Wow, Fantastic. Rick, do you have a personal productivity habit that others might benefit from?

I don't know that I do. You know, I'm. I'm always straightening up. I'm just a clean guy, you know, I mean, I like everything to be nice and neat, but I don't know, you know, I mean, I think right now it's my daily commitment to learn.

Yeah, well, the thing that was popping in my mind as you were talking on the last one, I almost didn't ask the question because it's really the same thing.

Since the beginning of the year, I would say it's definitely changed. It's my commitment to learn.

Yeah. Fantastic. So is there one thing that surprised you during this last year or, you know, since you've begun practicing lean.

Like I said earlier, is how quickly the morale increased. And it did. Maybe I didn't say that. I said it was my responsibility for their morale, but the morale increased. It was actually. I had people telling me that it's much nicer around here. Even people that have been with me forever that would never have said anything to me about that it was rough around here at some points or whatnot. They said, man, morale really has increased and it became a lot more light hearted. There was a lot more laughing going on. Even the morning meeting. You know, there's some funny things that go on here and there. And there was really no comedy or joking before. Everybody was really tense and uptight. So, you know, I Think that was it really? It kind of surprised me. I didn't expect to see that.

Yeah, fantastic. That's a good surprise. Do you have a routine or ritual that you follow when things aren't going well and you need to personally recharge and refocus?

Well, my whole life it's been being on the water. Whenever things were really bad, my wife would always say, we got to go on vacation. We go to the river and go on the boat or something, because I had to just. It was about the only place that I would clear my head. Now I find myself on vacation. My wife and I recently celebrated our 18th anniversary, and we went to the Bahamas for a week, and we came back and she said, you worked all week? And I said, I worked all week. And she said, yeah, all you do is read books on lean and everything else. So, you know, it's. My recharge right now is if I have a bad day, which yesterday wasn't a great day, you know, everybody went home and I popped on and I watched some FastCap videos, and I try to watch their funny ones that I've seen before so I can laugh at it and just go, it's not that easy. It's not that hard. It's really easy. You know, those are the things that I try to do, is just look at something positive and it works.

Yeah, fantastic. All right. Do you have a knowledge or skill area that you feel you need to improve on in order to become better at practicing lean?

I just need to learn to be a better leader. I need to continue to focus in on the respect for people. And, you know, I think for a long time, I didn't even know the term respect for people. It was a matter of I was the boss and they were the worker, and I just expected them to do their job for eight hours, get paid for eight hours worth of work and do it. I think as I continue to educate myself on all the wrong things that I did, I just need to continue to stay focused and improve on that and improve their experience and make life better for them, ultimately making it a lifestyle for them, because it's a lifestyle for me. And my lifestyle has always been whatever I do here, I do at home. I mean, you know, I'm leaning my house now. And it's, you know, I just need to continue to be. Work towards being a better leader and continue to make it a lifestyle, promote it as a lifestyle for everyone, because, you know, there's nothing better than improving your life.

Yeah, fantastic. All right, last question. I have for you is really not a question. I just want you. Let's wrap the show up with you sharing some final words of wisdom, Rick. And then why don't you tell people how they can connect with you and your company on social media?

Final words of wisdom is, you know, the journey is going to be long. It's never ending. You have to just be persistent in choosing your path and what's going to lead you in the right direction or you feel is in the best interest of your culture that you're trying to build. And stay the path. Don't turn your back on it. I turned my back on it once before, and it's put me three years behind where I really should be. And you just got to stay focused. It's not easy. You have bad days, you have good days, but stay focused.

Yeah.

And then as far as getting a hold of us, our website is FireBlast.com we can be found at Twitter, AirBlastGlobal, Instagram, FireBlastGlobal, Facebook, just FireBlast Global and YouTube. FireBlast Global. And there's a variety of videos and different things on there. And you can. You can follow us. I'm not the big social media guy. I've got a lot of people in here that are big on the social media stuff, but you can always get ahold of me through those things. Or it's my email. Same. You know, you can get it. It's R eglin E G E L I N.

Nice. All right, well, I did lie. I do have one more question. So when can we come in with our video cameras and feature Fireblast in a Gamba Live episode?

You know, you can come whenever you'd like. You know, it depends on if you want it in early stages or in a year off stage.

You know, what would be kind of fun is something we've always talked about is, you know, coming in and kind of, you know, documenting, you know, a company that's just starting their journey and then, you know, come back in nine months or a year and see how you've progressed. So that might be kind of a fun way to approach it.

You know what, the doors are always open. You know, I think we have a very tourable facility. It's not a real lean facility. We're working at that. We got a long way to go. We're barely scratching the surface right now. But I think the one thing that is amazing for us is that the people that come in, our vendors and different things that come in, they're in and out of fabrication shops all the time and they just say they can't even believe how clean we've always been. So we have a nice looking facility inside but efficiency we don't have yet. But if you want to come in and look, you're welcome to come anytime you want.

Alright, well we might just take you up on that Rick. All right, well thanks again for taking time out of your day. I know you're super busy so. So let's stay in touch and keep up the good work my man.

All right, thanks a lot Ron. I appreciate everything.

All right, take care.

Thanks for listening to the Gemba Academy podcast. Now it's time to take a free no strings attached, fully functional test drive of Gemba Academy's School of Lean and Six Sigma over at Gembaacademy.com gain immediate access to more than 500 Lean and Six Sigma training videos free of charge at Gembaacademy.Com Sam.