GA 444 | Navigating Volatility with Patrick Dippel

How do you deliver on those operational KPIs better than everybody else in your industry? And that's where the role of sort of the CI folks and the OPEX leaders and the culture that these manufacturing companies are building makes that that much more important and it should be high on everybody's list.

Today I'm excited to welcome Patrick Dipple to the show. Now, Patrick works for a company called Variable, or Variable is how you spell it out, that towards the end of the meaning of the name and whatnot. But Patrick's got a really interesting background. He worked at GE for many years and then he went out and did a few other things. But it's always been sort of in the manufacturing world and that's where his background is and continuous improvement and that sort of thing. And so today we talk about just the whole idea of this being obviously a very volatile world that we're in. And in particular it can be volatile for folks in the manufacturing industry. It's volatile for everybody, but in particular it can be for the manufacturing world. And so we talk a little bit about what you can do, what manufacturers can do to deal with that volatility. And then the latter part of the show is largely focused on Variable and what they're doing. I didn't mean for it to come off like a big commercial for them or anything, maybe it does, but I was genuinely interested because it's a super interesting business model. So Variable is basically on demand operators. And so if you're a manufacturer and you need some help, you can basically like an Uber app, you know, go find someone to help you with your, your manufacturing or some aspect of your business. And so we talked quite a bit about that because I was just genuinely interested. I, I wasn't familiar with the company and, and honestly wasn't even familiar that something like this existed. So I was, I was just genuinely curious was where all my, my questions were coming from. So Patrick is also going to be, they're, they're, I believe, a silver sponsor. And so they'll, they'll have a nice presence there as well. Gemba Academy. So if you haven't signed up for the AME conference, it's coming in October here in Dallas, please do. Gemba Academy. We're going to be there. In fact, we're going to be doing live podcasts. We're going to have one of our, we have three booths there and, and one of them is just going to be dedicated to the podcast. So already got several folks lined up to interview. And so if you're if you're at the show, you'll be able to swing by and see us doing podcast right there live. So. And if you want to save 15%, use Gemba 15, just 15 when you sign up. And we're not making any money on that. We're just passing on a discount to. To our listeners. So, yeah, go to ame.org and. And you'll see the links there for the. For the conference. Okay, so show notes for this episode can be found over@gembapodcast.com just look for episode 444 and. And, yeah, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Patrick, welcome to the show. How are you?

Great, great. Thanks for having me, Ron.

Yeah, man, thanks for. Thanks for coming on. I'm excited to. For today's podcast. I know we're fellow AME sponsors and everything, so excited for the show coming up in. When is that? October.

October, yeah, it's October. We're excited. I mean, embrace disruption is a pretty exciting topic, and I know that's going to drive a lot of good discussion with everybody who's there and presenting. So, yeah, we'll be at the show.

Awesome. Awesome. We'll be there, too. If people haven't signed up yet, use Gemba 15. You'll save 15% unless you get a better discount code. Do you get a better discount code?

No, I think we got 15, too.

Okay, you got 25, man. Let's give them that, you know. All right, well, good stuff, Patrick. Well, I know you've listened to the show. We do like to get things going with our guests sharing a quote. So you got one?

Yeah, I think I got two. They were tied neck and neck, and I think I've used and relied on them quite a bit. So the first one just came back from my GE days. One of the guys that I worked for, we were working on, I got tapped for this large international project, and little overwhelming at first, but he just sat me down and said, listen, any good ops manager really just needs to figure out how to solve complex problems, and then to do that, you just need to break it down into manageable and measurable pieces. So I don't know if that was his saying or somebody else's, but that sort of stuck with me throughout my career. And then the second one came from a book I read called the Oz Principle, and it was about accountability. And frankly, it had the best definition that I've heard of, which was accountability is just a personal choice to rise above one's circumstances to demonstrate the ownership necessary to achieve the desired results. So there's a lot to sort of unpack in that one. But I think those two quotes sort of go hand in hand. As ops leaders, we are challenged and part of our job is to solve complex problems and once we break those things down, we've got to hold ourselves and our teams accountable to go deliver those. So sort of exciting two things that work together and I've sort of carried with me throughout my career.

Got it, got it. All right, well, speaking of career, tell us about your background, tell us how you first got involved in all this continuous improvement stuff and then what you're up to these days.

Yeah, so I think I was one of those lucky individuals that sort of always knew what I wanted to do when I grow up. Grew up. So I think even back in, when I was 16, trying to figure out the most optimal way to sort of drive to and from school, I just felt I was always sort of an industrial engineer at heart. So I am an industrial engineer by degree and that's sort of what pulled me into GE and manufacturing and my passion for manufacturing, really living on the floor and being able to see the impact that you have on the line and you know, in output and KPI metrics and on the pnl. So yeah, I started my career with ge, had a variety of different roles, all sort of leading to that, that plant manager role. I got tapped and pulled away and I spent some time at Express Scripts where they were trying to infuse operational leaders into a PBM and looking at how we fulfill prescript to the masses in mail order, so sort of prescriptions on demand. Spent a little bit of time leading an entire sort of supply chain organization for a semiconductor business. So a lot of good experience just sort of dealing with international teams and we had sites all over the world and you know, I think everybody should, should serve a stint in a commodity based business. You've really got to try to optimize everything just to, to make a. Did a lot of exciting cool work with them and then came in full circle back to some GE folks that I worked with in private equity where we were taking these middle market businesses and really a true operational focus on turnaround and growth. So that was exciting to be able to take a business and quadruple the size of it in a handful of years and really do that the right way. And all of those discussions sort of led me back to variable. And I say back to Variable because our founder was from ge. We actually worked at that first plant that I started Straight out of school with him. So I'd say my career and the people that I've worked with have sort of all been tied in together. So yeah, that's where I'm at now. Variable. We're working on operations and with manufacturing and distribution and logistics companies all over the country.

Okay, well, very good. I'm curious, at ge, did you kind of go through any of their sort of continuous improvement training or programs or anything like that, or how did that look?

Yeah, I did for a while. I was lean leader for several of our North American sites. That project I was talking about with my quote, we actually very large project and that entire project was looking at how do we reduce the size of the plant by 80%, how do we cut whip by 60%, how do we really cut our lead times in half? So it was an entire lean approach to how we were going to accomplish those goals, how we were going to reduce batch sizes, how we were going to leverage some of those improvements to be more competitive in the marketplace. So yeah, that was really exciting. And then when I was. But I took not only that, that project on later on, I owned that plan from a continuous improvement perspective too. So I had to live with, with what I designed, which is, you know, I think, always a great experience.

Yeah, yeah. GE was interesting back in the day as far as still is, obviously, but I remember working with a lot of. I worked at, at Nokia cell phone company. You know, remember those guys for, for many years and they were real big on kind these old former GE like master black belt guys and whatnot, you know, to sort of help us. We were very Six Sigma oriented in those early years and, and then sort of transitioned to lean. But it seems like GE had almost a. I don't know from my perception, I could be wrong. Started more on the sort of the traditional Six Sigma side and then, and then got into, I mean, always had a little bit of lean, but then got far more serious with lean as it went on. Is that, was that your perception as well?

Yeah, it was. I actually got my black belt at GE too. So sort of several different tools to arm ourselves with. But yeah, our focus was on lean and sort of the deployment activities and really trying to build a culture within the shops that valued that continuous improvement. You know, there's the entire spectrum of lean practitioners out there. The, you know, the truth and the gospel and then sort of more operationally focused. I think we were a little bit more on the operational side, but a ton of good learning, met great mentors that I still Talk to today through that and we, we bounce ideas off of each other. So yeah, it was a great experience.

Yeah, yeah, fantastic. All right, well, so today, Patrick, we want, I want to kind of dive into this topic of, of manufacturers and, and, and obviously we're in a really interesting time in the world, you know, to say the least. You know, whether it's just, you know, it's inflation or just uncertainty of what's going on and all the rest of it is highly volatile. So I want to maybe just talk a little bit about that whole concept of volatility and I'd like to hear your take on what that means. What does that word mean and maybe some examples.

Yeah, no, that's a great question. I mean, I think you were spot on with these times that we're living in. It is highly volatile, but when I look at what it is, it's just a tendency to change quickly and unpredictably. And I think manufacturing leaders are used to dealing with that. You know, there are, you know, sort of those traditional challenges we all face all the time. You know, how do we scale our businesses to grow revenue, how do we make sure we're utilizing our labor appropriately and generating year over year productivity, Just sort of access to that skilled labor, just the cost pressures and outsourcing challenges that, that's sort of what we've been dealing with for decades and decades and those will continue to be there. But there's even more pressures and sort of emerging challenges that are hitting manufacturers now. There's a wave of sort of technology innovation and that can be both good and bad. You know, I think what can be distracting sometimes is when there's so many options, but they don't really have a convincing sort of like value proposition, spot based solutions that don't tie into a bigger picture without that plan increasing customer sort of demands. I mean, I think Amazon's changed and reshaped. Everybody's thinking, you know, everybody wants it tomorrow and they want it their way. That's always sort of been our focus in manufacturing, but it's become expected all over the place. And just as supply chains get more and more complex, you know, it makes that, that much more impactful. Workforce demographics. Obviously those have changed, especially if we sort of gone through Covid and throughout this pandemic that was changing anyway, but that accelerated a lot of that change of what people are looking for and just geopolitical concerns. We see that in Ukraine, we see that in tax and regulation and all of those changes. So all of those things are things that are sort of increasing the volatility that manufacturers have to deal with now. You could almost look at it another way, sort of macro level, you know, Covid potential impending recession, industry specific, like with automotive and chip shortages and sort of the bulwark effect throughout the supply chain. And then just general businesses, you know, you've got bottlenecks within an operation. You've got incoming orders that as we're doing this more and more real time with what customers want. There's volatile volatility in those orders and just sort of work center to work center changes. Mix the typical one. So a lot going on in manufacturing.

Right. Right now something else that we're hearing a lot about is the so called great resignation. I'm curious to hear your your thoughts on what you're seeing manufacturing as far as labor. Manufacturing labor. And is that playing into any of that volatility?

Yeah, that's making sort of the environment right now that much more challenging. I don't really know what caused it. I could tell you that turnover in general has sort of increased year over year. I think if I look back at those trends, when Covid happened, everybody sort of stopped exiting. Everybody wanted. There was a lot of uncertainty, so they sort of held onto their jobs and the stimulus checks and other things came out and there was less uncertainty. People sort of reevaluated what they were looking for. That did create an environment where a whole lot of people left at the same time. We're seeing that across every industry. I can't go to Buffalo Wild Wings, you know, without flipping a coin on whether they're going to be open or not because of people.

Right.

We have seen a larger exit out of those lower paid sort of retail service environments. And that's actually brought some of those people to manufacturing for the higher pay, the higher skill development, more of a career path. So we've seen that sort of change all over. You know, I think a lot of people talk about it in manufacturing with respect to sort of like the traditional white collar, blue collar roles. What we're hearing out there is manufacturing's hard anyway. What we do is hard day in and day out. And it can be frustrating for those frontlines, supervisors and ops leaders to not have the tools and the resources they need to do their job. And so sort of you put it in a pressure cooker of, you know, needing to deliver and customer demands and not having the tools and the support that you need. I think that that's a big reason for exodus there. And then in general, with what we're Seeing on sort of the manufacturing and frontline workers, you know, there's two things they want. They want flexibility and they want pay and they want to be in control of what that looks like.

So everything's tough right now. And you know, I mean, not just for manufacturing, just really any industry. Like you said, Buffalo Wild Wings, you know, trying to go in there and, and you know, eat dinner and they're short on staff. If you think about back to manufacturing, which is obviously your, your passion and your background, you know, do you have like, what, what can, what's a manufacturer to do, you know, in these situations? Like what can they do to, you know, not only survive but maybe even thrive?

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, sort of alludes back to the early quote of how do we break this complex problem down and look at it? And I think it comes down to, you know, a couple things. Sort of flexibility and agility within your business. How quick can you react and respond to some of those changes? You know, fundamentally, nothing's really changed in manufacturing. There's really only a couple ways to win, right? You gotta satisfy the customer, you know, give them what they want and when they want it, that really hasn't changed. And you need to be able to do that in a productive way. Sort of how you look at your business up against your competition and how you continuously improve to drive those results back to the customer. So back on the sort of delighting the customer, perfect service, mass customization, giving them exactly what they want. That's hard to do in a volatile environment. Level the playing field. I think it comes back to opex. How are we driving our businesses forward? How are we looking at cutting lead times? How are we delivering for customer? That creates quite a bit of opportunity. I think those businesses that can do that have a lot to gain in this environment from sort of a stealing market share perspective. So how do you deliver on those operational KPIs better than everybody else in your industry? And that's where the role of sort of the CI folks and the OPEX leaders and the culture that these manufacturing companies are building, it makes that that much more important and it should be high on everybody's list.

Now I know something that you're passionate about also is. So called on demand labor. What's that all about?

Yeah, so on demand labor is. I mean, so I work for Variable. That's sort of what we offer. That's what we've. That's what we said.

You're probably passionate about it, at least I hope you are.

Yeah, yeah, no, but I think what we're trying to do is we're sort of trying to give those operations leaders the tools and the resources that they need to be able to do their job. So we have an operations tool that those operations leaders can leverage. They can monitor their performance. There's a variety of different things that they can do on. But that that tech actually allows them to tap into a labor marketplace for people who want to work in manufacturing and distribution and logistics can come to. And it's sort of creating that match between what the business needs and what the operators want, which has been, you know, pretty exciting to look at some of the impact that we've been able to have on some of these businesses and how they've been able to tap into a platform to really gain access to unlimited labor capacity.

So I mean, just explain your business model a little bit so folks can get a better understanding. Is it like I'm sitting at home and I'm a CNC machine, like I know how to run a lathe or something like that and I just log on and see what jobs are available today or is it like how does it work?

Yeah, it's just that it's a marketplace. So I mean, I guess to set the stage from the easiest of a little cliche analogy is sort of like the uber of manufacturing is and logistics. Labor business will say I need help here, here and here for these days and with these skills. And they'll post that out there. That'll go to all of the operators on our network. They'll get a push notification on their phone and on their app. The operators can see what those opportunities look like and bid on it. So this marketplace helps facilitate sort of that matchmaking. Businesses are looking at the different operators, the skills, where they've worked. It's basically shows them a blue collared LinkedIn resume of what they've done and where they've worked and what their rating is. And businesses will select those operators. Operators will come in and perform that work. The next day, the business rates them and then sort of wash, rinse and repeat. And when you can do that and you can bring operators into your business, they've done a good job. You have the opportunity to create your labor pool which is like a favorites list. And that's really the asset at the core of our business model that these businesses are building. You think of it as sort of a rated bench strength of operators. Not to replace your full time employees, but to sort of support them so businesses can get a little bit more Aggressive in taking that order or working their backlog down or adding a shift to really draw down lead times and be more compelling competitive in the marketplace.

So like, so, so an operator bids on a particular job and gets it and they go in and they do a great job on Monday, are they able to come back Tuesday? Or is it you just gotta wait and see or.

Yeah, no, it depends on the need of the business. And that's sort of the, the beauty is we want the business to use this platform when they need it and we want the business not to use the platform when they don't need it. And when you've got that pool of experienced people who've already been into your business and know how to do the work, you can use that to bring people in to solve your call in issue or to take that big order or to, to keep from slipping on, on your, your service metrics. So yeah, we, we encourage sort of daily ops. You know, we, we operate from a thought perspective of a purely unconstrained model. So if you look at, we've got over 600,000 operators engaged in our platform across our entire market. If you were to post an opportunity for three weeks, well that might severely limit that down to maybe a thousand people who, you know, that works for their schedule. So the smaller increments of the work that you can create enables your business to sort of use that in a more real time manner only when you need it. And it actually exposes you to more operators, more skilled operators to be able to come in for the, that type of opportunity.

Wow, that's crazy. You have 600,000 operators in your system and growing. So yeah, that's insane. So like what I don't get, like I'm trying to put my mind in the thing of, of the operator shoes. Like they don't necessarily, are they staying busy? Like are they working every day, these folks, or working as much as they want? Or some of them like, oh my gosh, I need a gig?

No, that's a great question. And I'd say we've got a variety of different stories across our operator pool. The majority of operators that are using our platform are using that as their sole sort of way to curate their own schedule and to build out their work sort of around their life, which is pretty exciting for the operator side of that. But we've got a gentleman who works down in Texas who's passionate about his YouTube channel, an extremely talented welder and there are businesses that will bring bring him in to solve very extensive and sort of Save scrapped parts and. And he can curate sort of his work a couple days a week to be able to go do that work and then invest the rest of his time in his YouTube channel?

Or is he bringing his camera with him while he's working and saying, hey, I'll come?

But yeah, we've got a ton of stories like that tool and I. Folks who are retired who want a couple bucks in their pocket and sort of stay engaged, you know, parents who are people who are taking care of aging parents or might have kids at home and. And can't work, you know, during the day, but can pick up some shifts and bring the experience that they've sort of curated over the past, you know, 20 years with them and do that work. So, yeah, it's an exciting concept and model. And when we look at it at a macro level, you know, there. There really isn't a labor shortage. And that might sound crazy, especially in this type of environment, but when we see, you know, 6, 7, even 15x bids per opportunity, depending on the market and the maturity of that market, you know, I think that that's a message to manufacturers is, you know, there isn't a labor shortage. You just have to think innovatively and how to go out and tap into that. And that's what really what we're trying to sort of facilitate here. Here.

What's an operator do for, like, health insurance and stuff like that? They just get it on their own or.

Yeah, they are 1099 contractors. You know, on our platform, we've got a variety of different sort of tools and benefits that they have access to. But, yeah, they're an independent contractor. They're their own boss. You know, they're. They're sort of figuring out how to continue to develop their skills to use the ones that they've already had. They're in control of what they think, you know, they're worth in this marketplace. On the flip side, businesses are in control of what that op looks like and how much they're willing to pay. And that could look different on a Monday from. From Friday if we're trying to salvage this order and pull this back in so that we're not late and potentially lose this business with one of our customers. You know, I might pay $50 an hour to get the help that I need to get that out the door. So. So all of these things are business decisions. And that's sort of the beauty of this marketplace is, you know, it's just facilitating that conversation and enabling both sides to sort of work together.

Yeah, yeah, no, that's cool. That's cool. I'm curious to hear your perspective on it. Sounds like if you think about this sort of on demand labor concept, it's very sounds feels similar to like, you know, just in time or something like that. You know, as far as, you know, having, having, you know, inventory arrive just when you need it. Do you see parallels between these two concepts?

Yeah, we do quite a bit. I mean, we've got all the people in our company, we're all ops folks. We've got a ton of sort of lean practitioners, we've got a lean center of excellence who's really sort of carrying the torch on new and innovative ways to think about lean. You know, our intent isn't to upset any of those pillars or the fundamental of lean. You know, that's how sort of we've operated and worked in these environments. But yeah, there's a lot of parallels to just in time. You know, I think the whole point of lean is highest quality, lowest cost, shortest lead time. And in essence that removes waste cost, improves customer satisfaction. We're sort of doing the same thing. I do think that we have an opportunity to sort of rethink high junka in level loading when we can shorten that demand horizon. We can make that in more real time. You know, we can be more responsive to our customers. Traditionally, I think why we level outed that is because we've had these sort of rigid constraints around equipment or we viewed labor as sort of a fixed level that, that didn't react as quick as everything else did. And because of that, we had to sort of level everything out. What we're trying to do is saying, let's rethink leveling. Let's look at smoothing. How do we react in real time with our customer needs and the orders that are coming in? And when we can really do that, when we can tie labor to the incoming orders, you can optimize cost, you can really reduce those lead times. So a lot of parallels in just in time. You know, just like you wouldn't want to pump a bunch of inventory and tie up a bunch of cash, we're sort of doing the same thing. When we, we have more people or more workers than we do work, you know, they're, they're pushing a broom and we're paying them for that. That really impacts site level productivity. And on, on the flip side, when there's more work than we have people, you know, what's our options? We either disappoint our customer with poor service rates or we Throw a lot of overtime at it, which eats into our margin too. So when we can react up and down with what that looks like can be very, very competitive.

Got it, got it. Very good.

Yeah.

But maybe to wrap things up, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on just, you know, even someone who isn't, doesn't have a demand for on demand, you know, employees or something. They have, they have a team of whatever they got. Do you have like any advice or practical tips for them? You know, maybe staffing isn't an issue for them, but they're still dealing with the volatile work environment and uncertainty and all the rest of it. Like, do you. What kind of best practices or tips do you have for that? That, that leader?

Yeah. You know, fundamentally from my position, it's, it's impossible not to have a need. Right. Like you, it's hard to optimize your cost and your speed with a purely fixed labor model. So what I would challenge people to look at is, you know, look at your volume, look at your demand, look at when you're over and understaff and understand the impact of that. That's why. So work we do is with CI leaders in these businesses because that's what they're charged with. They're charged with moving their business forward, doing that in a way that hits the bottom line as well as improves sort of their KPIs. This is a, a brand new tool. I mean, we've been around for, for six years, so it's not brand new, but it's gaining a lot of traction and generating a lot of results for businesses. So more and more people are coming to us to, to help understand this tool and how they use it. So one, I would say, I would challenge you to look at that. And the second thing I'd say is you sort of have to build the arc before the flood. So if you get, if you're in a position where God forbid, we move into a recession and demand drops severely, how are you going to protect your employees? We see that quite a bit and people are using our tool to help sort of, I don't want to say recession proof, but build more flexibility into their business. And the sort of key case around that is what you'll see in any of those sort of down cycle environments is the volume will sort of drop and we won't take any action on the labor side of things. And that generates a ton of cost for the business until volume continues to drop. Where they might go through a hiring trip and try to see what attrition can do to help that. And if volume keeps dropping, then they've got to sort of take action on big layoffs. And those things are hard to recover from in any of these environments. But you know, necessary to sort of lay out their cost structure in a way that protects the business. At some point, you know, that downturn bottoms out and then it springs back into action. And business owners and business leaders are sort of a little hesitant to pull that trigger. And by the time they do start trying to hire, they've missed some of that rebound. Those traditional practices of hiring and bringing people into the factory can take four to six weeks, so they miss even more. So you sort of get hit both ways. You've got the unnecessary and excess cost on the down cycle piece and then the missed opportunity and the missed rebound down on the upswing where if you've got a portion of your workforce that's flexible, you just don't use it in that down cycle and you tap into that to scale up even quicker and grab more of that market share when rest of your competition's just sort of standing still.

Yeah. Is there ever a situation to where a variable on demand associate goes into a company and does a great job, they both love each other and that person gets hired? Is there like, does that ever happen? Or, I mean, maybe it's frowned upon. I don't know. How does that happen?

Yeah, well, that's a great question. That, that happens from time to time. And a lot of people will say, you know, well, you know, what's the conversion fee? That's, that's not even what we're focused on or we don't even care about it. It's a drop in our bucket. If it works for you and it works for that operator and we wish you the best of luck. But one of the things that I caution businesses with are these operators are coming to our platform because they want control of their schedule, because they want control of their skill development, because they want to do a couple different things, especially in this environment. If they wanted a full time job, they'd have the pick of the litter. They could do whatever they wanted. But they're coming to our platform because they want to be in control of that. So nine out of ten times, you.

Know, may not be the best is what you're saying. Right, right.

And then they're back on the platform. Platform. So, you know, we're not a staffing company. We're, we're not a temp agency. No conversion fees. We're, we're not Trying to broker bodies. We're trying to teach businesses how they could tap into unlimited labor capacity and what that does for their business, what that does to change their thinking, different ways that they could use that as a competitive advantage.

Yeah, I got you. Do operators just work in sort of their, Their. Their neighborhood, their town, their city, or do they travel or how does that work?

Yeah, I mean, we have seen some travel. I mean, we are operating this, this marketplace across, you know, 28 different major markets across the US and the Southwest, Southeast. I've been brought on to take that to the Midwest, and we just launched the. The Northeast. So we've got a tremendous amount of data on both the business and the operator side. So we see operators travel, but the majority of them like to stay within 10 to 20 miles from their home. And, you know, they've got push notifications from a variety of different companies, and they're sort of looking at what's required, their skills, whether they can do a good job, and they're bidding on the ones that they're interested in. And that's one of the. Part of the beauty of this platform is we've. We've created this meritocracy where every single OP is rated by the business. So there's sort of. There's no hiding. And while people will be people, you know, there's going to be somebody who doesn't show up to an op, you know, you're not going to pay them for that. But arming the business with the data on the app to make some of those decisions and creating an environment where operators want to do a good job and they want to be part of your labor pool and they want to be invited back. That's a, That's a powerful tool. Much better than the initial interview character assessment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you use the, the Uber analogy in the beginning, and I think that's great. But it's also. There's also a little mix of a dating app in here. You know, that's the other tech that.

That we get referred to a lot. You know, trying to make the right match, but.

Yeah, right, right.

Yeah.

Very cool. All right, well, hey, man, thanks for coming on. If folks want to connect with you, Patrick, or learn more about your company, what's the best way?

Yeah, I'd say the best way is just to reach out to me via LinkedIn. You can find me Patrick Dipple. Check out variableops.com spell variable.

Is it just like the word variable or very able?

V E R Y A B L E Ops. You can learn more about the concept. You can learn what markets we're in, learn more about sort of what we're doing to revitalize manufacturing in the United States.

So what was the, who was the branding guy that came up with that early on? Very able. That's interesting.

I mean, it's a great concept. I love it. Yeah. I have no idea.

It's cool.

It's awesome.

Yeah. Very, very, very variable. Variable, right.

I mean, we're trying to variableize labor costs, so there's, there's a ton of different ways to read into that.

So, yeah, your people are very able. You know, I like it. Very good, man. All right. And, and, and your last name is D, I, P, P, E, L. If folks are just listening for, for LinkedIn. Correct. Yes, perfect.

Perfect.

All right, well, hey, man, thanks for coming on. I look forward to seeing you. And you, Dallas, here in October. Stop by the booth and we'll, we'll say hi. And I assume you'll have a little setup there as well.

Absolutely. We've got a booth. We'll have a ton of people there. Silver sponsor. We want to make a big impression down here and, you know, help people sort of embrace disruption. So.

Yeah, well, it'll be a great time. I look forward to it.

Great. Well, thanks a lot.

All right, take care.

Take care.

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