GA 425 | Lean and Racing with Beau Briggs

I just, I can't do it anymore. And it wasn't until then where you decide, well, you don't have to do it anymore. This isn't just about you. There are ways to engage and involve and empower problem solvers on the floor and to educate them, to make them part of the interaction.

Today I'm excited to welcome Bo Briggs to the show. Now, Bo was able to visit us here in Keller, Texas. And so we actually were able to record this podcast face to Face face here in our audio room. So that's always super fun to do just to see the person sitting across from you and. Well, Bo's got a really fascinating background. He is a, oh, he's a race car driver. He's, he's, he's just, he's a, he's a, he's done all kinds of racing, I guess you should say. And he explains it at the very beginning. He's raced everything from go karts to motorcycles and cars and pretty much everything in between, including an Ironman. And so he's got a, a really interesting background. Which then leads into their story.

Lean.

Bo is part of a family run business that his grandfather started. And as you'll hear, they've been practicing the whole concept of continuous improvement really all of Beau's life, ever since he was a young 6 year old boy learning how to race cars and build cars. And so they've learned how to break problems down and make improvements along the way. And so now they're really translating this into implementing Lean there at their company. And so, yeah, just a really fascinating story and Bo's got a really awesome disposition about them and I think you're going to enjoy this episode. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 425. Again gembapodcast.com and look for episode 425. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Oh, welcome to the show. How are you?

I'm good. I'm honored to be here.

Yeah, man, welcome to Keller, Texas. And it's good to have you here in the studio. And we, we don't get to do a lot of these in person, but man, the ones I do are so. They're so much better, you know, because you can see the other person and.

The preferred conversation method.

100%, man. 100%. So. Well, I know you've listened to the show. You said you were doing a crash course on your, on your flight over here. Where are you from?

Southern California, Fontana, California.

Nice, nice. Beautiful part of the country. So we do like to get rolling with a quote. So do you have one?

I do. Marcus Aurelius, one of the stoics. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. It's spoken to me on many levels. And as a cyclist, race car driver, business leader, you can look at the hill and you can go, well, I gotta find a way around the hill. The hill is work, the hill is hard, but really, at the end of the day, the hill is the way. You have to get over it. You have to break it down into chunks, you have to pick waypoints or get a plan together and get over the that. So whatever stands in the way is typically the way to your goal, to your finish line, to your objective.

The hill is life, man.

Right. Especially these last couple years.

Yeah.

What a hill.

Yeah. For real? For real. Awesome. Well, hey, tell us a little bit about your background. I know you've got, man, we've had four. This is the 425th podcast and I have never had someone with your background on. So I'm super excited. So who's bo?

Bo is. Well, a crash course in. BO is somebody who's always looking to make something better and that bred itself into many different facets of my life. So I'll speak to kind of my racing background, if you will. I started racing when I was six on a Suzuki 50cc quad over at Glen Helen in San Bernardino and just couldn't go fast enough, couldn't get enough of it and did everything from go kart racing to junior drag racing to motorcycle racing to. And that was on dirt and off dirt. Now we are into cars because I turned 40 next month. I have a wife and four kids now and so a couple bad accidents on a motorcycle led me into car racing with my dad. Actually, I've done most of this racing with my dad. So it's kind of a special relationship. We share, we work together, we train together, we race together. So we're really, you know, close in a lot of aspects in our life. So, yeah, gosh, just a lot of. A lot of racing. Very blessed to be able to do so much of that. I've driven everything from a Lexus to a Miata to a Pontiac Fiero to. This year we're going to drive prototype cars, the single seat center cockpit prototype cars, mostly carbon fiber construction. I've raced in the desert, I've raced in motocross, I've raced all around the country. Wow. And tell us about Your company, My family business was started by my grandfather 40 years ago. In 1981, he and a couple partners, after he was fired from his air louvers sales job, noticed that there was a market for components of doors and frames. So if you're on a job site, you're in a hospital being built and someone crashes into an installed door frame and wrecks a strike jam, the customer there or the contractor there has to then buy a new door frame, an entire neely new door frame. There wasn't anybody who would supply just the strike frame. So my grandfather, in his travels around the country and doing job site visits, noticed there was a need. And so he bought a couple rollformers and made the need or fit the need. So over the years he would get calls from customers that said, hey man, it'd be great if you took those sticks and punched hinge preps in them or strike preps in them. And so they bought the punch presses and did so. My dad came along a little bit later after that. My dad's former repo man. And then when he got married, my mom was an Orange county sheriff working at the women's prison. So you've got a sheriff and a repo man.

Wow.

Yeah, that's my family.

That's interesting.

So he decided he needed medical insurance, he needed something a little bit more stable. And frankly, he was tired of repoing cars from, you know, single moms who were just trying to get by. There's a difference between a guy who's not paying his bills and being kind of a, you know, poor about on time bill payment. But there's something else about someone who's just struggling and trying to get by. He's like, I can't do that anymore. So benefits came with a job. So he took a job working for my grandfather basically. And he still at 65, owns and operates a business, is a daily participant of it. And he is the driving factor really in our lean transformation because as I referenced our racing background, he and I have been building go karts, race cars, sand cars, dirt bikes my whole life. I sent you that, that video of us racing. We built those cars. My dad built the first off road stadium car that Jimmy Johnson got started in. NASCAR champion, seven time NASCAR champion Jimmy Johnson, the Nature's recipe racing team. So my dad built those cars in our garage in Fontana, California. So the ones you saw are kind of a later iteration. But my whole high school career, or lifetime was racing on the weekends, tearing the car apart on Monday, putting it back together by Wednesday. Loading it on a trailer on Thursday and Friday after school, we were off to the next race. Kept me a lot out of trouble. Yeah, but it taught me a lot about, you know, the mechanics of a car. Toe in, toe out, camber, cylinder compression, all the things, suspension setups, valving and all those. But it taught me really how to break down a problem and even if there's not a problem, to look at the scenario, to look at the situation and say, that was good. How can we make it better? And so there's a lot there. But we did that at work. And at work it was the same scenario. We manufactured doors, for example, and our custom steel doors are made anywhere between seven to 10 days. So a customer calls, places an order, it ships within about 7 to 10 days. Right now we're making 275 doors in an 8 hour shift and about 400 frames. Same on an 8 hour shift in the same facility. And that is the result of years of how can I make this better, how can I change this? How can we do this a little bit faster and certainly safer. Right. So same mentality, just in different facets of life.

All right, so I gotta ask, what's it like racing against your father?

It's intimidating. It's also a huge blessing and a lot of fun because if there's a guy on the course that you know, you can trust to take the right line to not, you know, shut the door on you, it should be your dad. Maybe not always.

Do you remember the first time you beat him?

I remember the first time I beat him. It was actually in a triathlon, in a full distance Ironman triathlon in Phoenix, Arizona. I finished just before him.

That's a different kind of racing.

It's a different kind of racing. Yeah, we've, we've really done it all. That's the 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike followed by a 26.2 mile run. And so he had done the LA Marathon one year and we just kind of progressed from that to a half marathon, half Ironman to a full Ironman. And I beat him that first year by I think just a couple minutes. But it was, it was a big moment because it was kind of a. I did it, finally beat this guy because he's a competitive, competitive individual.

What about racing like cars or vehicles? Do you remember?

Yeah, I've gotten better because I'm always kind of tailing him. He's been driving since he started racing when he was six as well. And so I'm always kind of Tailing him in progression. But when I can put down the fastest lap time of the team for the day, I make sure to rub it in, make sure he's aware I beat you.

And he still races at 65?

Yes, sir.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, he's heading out this weekend. He's actually racing for the next five consecutive weekends.

Golly, that's incredible. Well, let's talk a little bit about your lean journey at your company. Like you mentioned, your father kind of got going like, so what was the. I mean, sounds like you guys have been practicing this concept of continuous improvement ever since you've been six. Right. And so it's probably one of those deals with sort of in your DNA, I guess. But you know, as it relates, just formal lean, what we call lean, like how did that get going?

So ours is a very grassroot lean transformation. Ours, you know, my experience is going to be beneficial or my, you know, my testimony here is going to be beneficial for anybody. Getting started but not knowing where to get started. We took a lot of that to work and all the struggles that came with it, we tackled one at a time. My dad, we had tried several different consultants. Like a lot of businesses do. Many of them kind of missed the mark. Give you the consultant bill of goods and then fail to deliver. But it wasn't until we hired our most recent director of operations who really began to invest real time and real training into us to give us the tools to transfer what's in our DNA of trying to make things better and then how to see it and then apply it in the business world. It started with the book the Machine that Changed the World and for a lot of us, that put together the missing pieces of how do we get from where we are to where we want to be and getting everybody on board along that process or along that journey. So the machine that changed the world for us was kind of that aha moment.

Yeah.

To where we go. Okay, I see it, I understand it, I think we can make this happen. And then it just fueled the fire more. And so we've gone through many different readings and books and as an organization, as a group of leaders and yeah, I mean, just if you can find a problem, you're going to tackle it. We start with a low hanging fruit, but then we also have now advanced into larger team meetings and without a lot of lean specific training, which is why I'm here to look into options and things of that nature. We've just tackled one problem at a time. Yeah, but it was that one book and that one defining moment that set us down this course of really being all about continuous flow, constant and continuous improvement, engagement really. Because prior to the machine that changed the world, it was a one man show. My dad had come home when I was still living at home, many times exhausted and frustrated and said, I feel like I'm the only one at the end of the rope pulling a boat. I just, I can't do it anymore. And it wasn't until then where you decide, well, you don't have to do it anymore. This isn't just, just about you. There are ways to engage and involve and empower problem solvers on the floor and to educate them, to make them part of the interaction. Because like we were talking about, we've got it in our DNA. But how do you translate your racing experience, your car building experience, your family legacy, if you will, to someone who's never done that before, who might be interested in soccer? They don't. They don't. There's, there's, there's similar team building aspects there, but the mechanics are different.

Right.

Or somebody who doesn't enjoy sports at all. They like gaming. You know, everybody's got a different flavor in life and he and I kind of the top level of leadership. Speak. Race speak.

Yeah.

So we, we can lose people pretty easily otherwise. So through this lean journey, slowing down and, I don't know, not meeting people where they're at, but speaking to them in terms that they can understand that don't have to do with corner entry speed, corner exit speed, things like that.

Yeah. So talk a little bit more about. It's interesting, these grassroots kind of approaches, I suppose they probably have some advantages and disadvantages. Talk a little bit about that from your perspective.

Disadvantages are many. We've made a lot of mistakes. We've probably spent more time learning lean than we would have had we had either the knowledge or the resources to do so quicker. So outside training is a big missing puzzle piece to our framework right now, and that's what we're looking into now. So could we have done it better, faster, more successfully in the past? Sure, but I think that's probably everybody's situation. You could always do better in hinds. Right. Continued disadvantages being, you know, as I listen to many of your podcasts, there are a lot of smart people that come into this room and sit where I'm sitting and they have all the acronyms, they have all the teams, they have all the tools at their, at their disposal and we don't. And we, we put together Small teams. We're very flat. Our company employs roughly 300 people across two different states and four different facilities. And the flatness of our organization helps us to be flexible. So there's no bureaucracy here. So I'm kind of transitioning into the pros. There's no bureaucracy. There's no levels of very flat organization. If I need to go to the president or if I need to go to the guy in shipping, I can. I can put them in the same room, and we can have a conversation about how to make the shipping process better and go through a kaizen. What's our process, what's going wrong, and how do we fix it? Thankfully, my dad's still engaged. At 65, he's still very much engaged. He's a brilliant fabricator, and so he can break things down and think things through in a process and give valuable input and give good ideas. And so we can, you know, from the top of the organization to the newest guy on the floor, we can work together to make a problem go away, to solve a problem. So as many as there are, you know, casualties along the way and headaches and, you know, the reason for this aerodynamic haircut that I bring into this office today, there's been a lot of failures, but there's also been a lot of fun and a lot of successes that I don't think would have come with a traditional organization structure. Because I don't, you know, I don't have to ask permission to go start a kaizen. I can just grab guys and go. And the same is true for my production team leads. If you see a problem, stop the line for 10 minutes. Fix the problem. The line's better off. Better to stop and fix it than to struggle with it for two months while we wait for, you know, say, an engineering resource or a sales resource or somebody to come on board and help us out. If you see it, fix it, jump on it, attack it. It's fine.

Yeah. See, I mean, the fact that you're making that statement leads me to think, like, you guys are so far more advanced in your. What we call lean thinking than you give yourself credit for. Because I can tell you there's a lot of companies out there saying we're lean, who are like, keep that line going, man. You know, and.

Right.

You know, having the courage and the. Have the strength, if you will, to just stop, you know, because that's scary, right? It's scary.

It can be. But again, we're all about it, and we don't just say it. We live it. We breathe it, we're fully supportive. If a lead stops a line for 10 minutes, that's the equivalent of five doors. And we're doing 275 doors a day. And that's a big loss in a given day. But if we've solved a problem, that's been a persistent problem, whether it's low hanging fruit or it's a process issue and the business is better for it and our customers are better serviced because of the improvement, that's a win.

Yeah.

You don't look at the five doors that you lost and go, man, when are we going to get that back? We got to work the overtime to make that, you know, quota or whatever you may manufacture by. We say no, man, good job. Right. Good catch, good observation, good effort, good work.

Yeah.

So it's a lot of fun that way.

Now, I sense in you, Beau, that you're pretty competitive and perhaps your father is as well. Safe to say.

My mom and my wife would probably agree with you. Yeah.

So what's that like then, when you're trying to, you know, lead others and try to lead, you know, just movement, how is that working? Is it helpful? Is it hurtful? Both.

So if I go back a few years and I kind of revisit this quote about the obstacle is the way I think both my dad and I have had to face the fact that the obstacle is our competitive nature and how it can really turn people off. There's a difference between being a race car driver and a race team owner. There's a difference between being on a team and a team captain. You can show up and be competitive as an individual, be the fastest guy on the track, but the rest of your team hates you. I won't name any race car driver names, but they're out there. And then, same thing. In the sports world, you could be the best football player on the team, but have everyone else against you. And then there's that graduation level from player to lead. And that's kind of where we got stuck is I'm, we're, we're great race car drivers. We're very highly competitive individuals. Leave us alone and we can do great things together. We fight like dogs. We're so alike and we're so similar that together doesn't quite work. And so we hashed out a lot of our own competitive nature and ability to communicate on each other, thankfully. And then we were able to understand that I'm actually in the way. This competitive nature of mine is in the way. Yes, I still want to accomplish things Yes. I still want to drive to improvements, but I have to be able to do it with a team. I have to be able to do it in a way that others can understand and then replicate. And for a race car driver, that's really counterintuitive. You want to hold your secrets in. You want to hold the line. You're driving as secret as possible. Yeah, because they're going to figure it out and then they're going to beat you. Well, okay, you have to break that down and go, listen, you got to calm down. This is not what this is about. This is about the team, the business, and ultimately the customer. You gotta service the customer and you can't do that alone. So getting a team mindset out of what has otherwise been a lifetime of individual sports has been tough. Because same thing with triathlon. You know, you're gonna go out and train for an ironman. You're gonna do six hours on a bike on Saturday, unless you have a friend who is sick and, you know, twisted as you are, nobody's gonna go with you. Right. And then a four hour run on Sunday, it's like, no, nobody's. You're a solo sport. And so it's been a disadvantage of mine to not have that team building background in football, sports, whatever, to kind of break that back and go, I'm in the way. I'm trying to be too solo or drive this thing on my own, at my own speed or my own pace and leaving everybody behind me.

So how did you break through that though? I mean, because I think there's probably somebody listening right now that are like, yeah, that's me. Whether it's not necessarily from a sports or competitive nature, but sometimes people struggle with involving other people because I'm like, listen, I can just do it and I can do it better than you. I'm sorry. So just let me do it.

Sure.

Right.

Very, very common.

Right. So like, how did you break through that though?

Well, I wouldn't say it's still a bit of a work in progress for me. I do find myself at times still repeating that tired cliche of, you know, you want something done right, you got to do it yourself. At some point you have to throw in the towel and say, I am now working 16 hours a day and I'm hardly home. I'm stressed out, I'm burned out. I have to recognize that I am the obstacle. I am what's holding back this team or this business. So no matter how competitive I am, how great a job, I think I can do I am now. What's holding everybody back? And so until you come to that point of recognizing you are the obstacle, you have to get out of the way of your team, you're going to be in the way. You have to relinquish that, control that aggression, if you will, because for us highly competitive individuals, it's not so much about, I have to do it my way and only my way. It's, I have to get it done. I cannot rest until this is done. This project must be completed, and you just have to kind of, I don't know, not slow down, but in a way, you kind of have to slow down because you have to recognize that you're in the way. And then not everybody is going to move at the same speed you like to move at.

Well, yeah, and maybe it's even one of those deals to where it's like, yeah, you're really good and you're really fast alone. But, you know, if you do allow others to build others up as good, maybe not quite as good as you because of your experience or your background, but you get 10 other people who are right up against you.

Sure.

There's no way that you can outdo those 10. Right, sure. You know, and that's hard for. Because, you know, I mean, in the similar way, in a way, you know, like here at Gemba Academy, like, I've had to learn how to. Now it's like, I, I don't even know what our sales team is. Like, I could probably figure it out, but I don't. I truly don't even know, like, how they're kind of operating. Whereas back in the day, it was like, hey, boy, once you buy a subscription again. But, you know, like, it was me, you know, and so I can, I can relate as well. It's. It. But it's pretty, it's pretty cool to see you recognize, call your, Your own self the obstacle. Right to the, to the. To the ultimate, you know, finish line, if you will.

Right, right. And it was never about ego. It wasn't anything about pride, at least, you know, not that I'll admit, maybe it's a pride thing, but it was just about recognizing these guys are smarter guys, gals, smarter, better than I give them credit for, than I recognized at the beginning, because I was just looking at me. I gotta look for their strengths. I gotta look for their compatibility, their ability to work together and really just give them the power to go and then make mistakes.

Have you ever coached people, like, as far as racing?

I have. I mean, so I have my 12 year old son, my 8 year old daughter and my 6 year old daughter who drive go karts now. And it's a constant coaching experience, not only through life and through, you know, the transition into eventual adulthood, but on the track. It's the same kind of coaching process. You have to be able to sit down and calmly break down a problem. You're not, you're on the brakes way too early going into that turn. Here's the point you need to look for, here's where you should turn in. Here's how to apply the pressure to the brakes. You don't just stomp on the brakes, you got to feed the brakes in, begin the turn, let the brakes off and get back on the accelerator about these points with these visuals, then walk them through it. So you give them the tools, you give them the breakdown to be successful and then you let them go and attempt to do so. It's the same thing with, you know, God forbid my daughters ever take up dating. But it's going to be the same.

Trust me, it's going to be the.

Same kind of deal. Here's what you look for, here's what your expectations should be.

Here is the break.

Right here is right both feet.

Yeah, exactly. Oh no, that's so good. I guess what I was getting at almost with thinking about your children, you know, think about, you said your son, you have a son.

You said, I have two sons.

Two sons. What's the oldest age?

12.

12. So you know, I don't know, four or five years. He's throwing down. Let's go, dad. Oh yeah, you know, and he takes you out, you know, like one day, like that'll be, I don't know how. I have a 15 year old son who's now like taller than I am and I'm still stronger than he is weightlifting, but he's like, yeah, dad, I just squatted 225. I'm like, okay, I gotta go to the gym tomorrow, you know. You know, so I know he's gonna pass me.

Sure.

You know, like physically. But in a way it's like, it's beautiful, you know, it's like I made that, you know, and helped him. And so it's an incredible feeling. I feel like I now I see the same thing with people that we coach here, Gemba Academy, when you're, when you're coaching people at your company, you know, it's like you see that in these people. They're not your sons and your daughters necessarily, but it could be one day.

In Many respects, they are a family. They are looking up to you like they would a father figure. One of my best mentors at our business. I do look at kind of as a father figure because of his mentorship to me. And so they are very much the same.

Yeah. So it's, it's cool just to see, you know, to win and win together.

Right. You know, you can get in a car and be fast, but when it comes into pit stop time, because you gotta change tires and fuel up, if you're alone, you're parked, you're done.

So you've, I'm sure you've seen the video that everybody uses in the whole world, like on their when they're teaching quick change over single minute exchange of dies of the I don't even know what kind of some big fancy race car flying in.

Formula one, probably.

Yeah. And he's gone, you know. So, like, I bet that concept was pretty straightforward for you guys to figure out, right? Just the whole quick changeover kind of concept as race car drivers.

Absolutely. So nascar with their single lug nut, now can I think, do a pit stop for. I think it's a 15 gallon fuel stop and four tires in. I think they're about to get under five seconds because they went from five lugs to single lugs. But Formula One, the Red Bull team, got under two seconds. They don't do fueling anymore for safety reasons, but they can change four tires in under two seconds. But it takes 12 people, whereas NASCAR, I think has five. And so you kind of take that approach and you apply it to work and say, okay, it takes two hours to change this die. How do I get to two seconds or two minutes or whatever big, hairy, audacious goal you're going to shoot for. How do I make it as minimal as possible? It comes down to, well, how prepared are you? Where are the tools? Are they nearby? Are they prepped? Are they ready? Because if you ever go to a NASCAR race, these guys with those high impact air drills, they're airing them up and lubing them up to make sure that they're functional well before the race starts. So you can hear these things take off like go kart motors as they're warming these things up. And the same thing with Formula one, everybody, if you watch the race, they're seated in their chairs, they're in an organized fashion, they've got their helmets on, they're ready to go, they're prepared. And through, I don't know, millions of dollars of these teams time and investment to get These teams prepared and practiced and vetted, they can now do these tire changes in five or under two seconds because of the time and the investment and the practice. And it takes everybody's hands on. I mean, they hire linebackers to hold these gas cans because they are stronger and these gas cans are heavy. And they hire the more nimble and agile guys to change the tires. And so it's a lot of thought that goes into that. And it's no different than whether I'm going to put the strike on the door skin first or the hinge on the door skin first. It's what makes the most sense. Where is this person best suited? Not just on physical characteristics, but on strengths, on core characteristics and things of that nature. Once you start to understand why people do what they do, why teams do what they do, and how they got to where they are, you kind of unpack every other thing in your life and say, okay, okay, how do I do that? Yeah, how do I get my team under two seconds?

Right?

So it's, it's a lot of fun.

So cool. Hey man, what's the best way for folks to connect with you?

Anybody looking to connect with me can email me. It's first and last name. It's a bit of a mouthful. So it's Bo Briggs cihollow metal.com or I am on, on LinkedIn. I don't have any other social media. At 40 years old, I'm a bit of an anomaly there, but I am on.

No, you're not. I'm right there with you, man.

Good for you.

Oh my gosh.

Enough distraction in the world as it is already.

100. 100. Well, we'll, we'll link to everything up on our show notes. So this is episode 425. So gimbopodcast.com look for episode 425. Hey man, it's been fun having you in in the office and I appreciate you sharing your story, man.

Absolutely honored.

All right, take care.

Thanks.

Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years, or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 lean and 6 Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.