GA 514 | Turning the Tables on Ron with Clint West

Heroic human effort can only get you so far. And we. We knew that something had to change. And what we found was that if we were either going to stay at that spot or we were going to cataclysmically embrace a different methodology to how we were conducting our business.

Today, I'm excited to welcome Clint west to the show, and, boy, oh, boy, is this a fun episode. So, Clint, man, this dude's got some energy and passion for le Lean, for life, for business, and, man, it was just a ton of fun, and I'm still smiling. We just finished recording, and I wanted to record this intro right away, so. So Clint has actually been using Gemba Academy over the years, and he's gone through our Lean Practitioner certification program, and. And a bunch of colleagues have as well. And so he talks a little bit about that in the beginning. But what was fun about this episode is that Clint had asked before we came on if we. He could turn the tables and kind of ask me questions because, you know, there's. They're still newer in their lean journey, although they're. They're. They're doing pretty well, but super humble. And he had a lot of questions, and so, man, he just fired a million questions at me, and I. I did my best to answer, and it was just a ton of fun. And again, his. His passions are contagious and, yeah, just a great guy. So at the very end, I. It was not. Not our normal flow, and I kind of blew it. I didn't ask how people could connect with him, and all is all over LinkedIn and that sort of thing. So all the links are in the on the show notes here. So to scroll down on your app and go. Go connect with Clint because he's a great guy and doing some great work out there. So, yeah, get into the show. It's a little bit longer than normal, but just chip away at it. I think you. You're gonna really enjoy this one. Okay, enough for me. Let's get to the show. Clint, welcome to the show. How's it going, my man?

Yeah, buddy. Good to see you, Ron, man, I feel like. I feel like I know you really well, having consumed hours of your teachings.

Yeah, well, thank you, man. I appreciate that, man. I appreciate that.

I like the beard, too, buddy. I like the beard.

Yeah, you know, it's, you know, got the little Santa Claus thing going a little bit. You know, I'm not as young as I used to be, but, you know, it's. Yeah, my kids love it, so I. I'm not allowed to Shave it off. I never had a beer all my life. And then this last year, I, I grew it into. My kids won't let me take it off now, so.

Attaboy. Once you go beard, you never, baby. That's for sure. Right. Yours though, man, you know, beard balm, buddy. Beard balm. Is that it? Okay, that's it. Yeah. No, my. I actually shaved my beard a couple years ago and I, I, you know, that was the first time in many years that I had shaved it all the way off and one of my kids actually fell on the ground and started crying. Dad, what did you do? Just couldn't handle it, you know, it was just too shocking of a change. But yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's. It's fun to get. It's fun to, Fun to meet with. I really appreciate you and I honestly, I respect and appreciate all that, you know, Gemba is and has done for us. It's been a really transformative season that we've been into, and it really catapulted by. By, you know, by the Gemba. And you know what strikes me about that is, you know, Gemba started as a dream in your kitchen. Do I have that right? In folklore. Is that true?

I mean, you really do? Yeah, it's. So before Gemba Academy, I had my own personal blog. It was called wow. Well, I. The kitchen thing that you're talking about was even before I had this blog, but. But it's LSS Academy. Lean Six Sigma Academy was the, was the blog that I had, and I would just write articles and, and I had no idea about monetizing or anything like that. I just, I like to write, I like to teach people. So I was just started. I opened up like a free blogger blog template thing way back in the day and, and just started writing. And next thing you know, I had a little bit of a following. You know, people were like, come and see what I was writing about, which was sort of weird. And then, and then I was like, yeah, man, I should. You know, in that, the book Lean Thinking, James Womack writes about the envelope stuffing simulation that he did, you know, and he's proven to his kids that batch production was worse than one piece flow and all that. And so I thought I had never actually done it. So I was like, maybe I'll get my wife's little digital camera or whatever. And I had it propped up on some milk crates or something. I don't remember. I think I literally had like a Home Depot light clamped to a, to a kitchen cabinet and man, we were like gorilla back then, man, you know, and. And I made his horrible, horrible video quality wise, you know, on stuffing envelopes and one piece flow obviously wins, right? It's. It's just. It just does. It's always going to win. And so I made this video and somehow or another, I don't even know how I did it. I got it edited somehow on my little laptop I had back then. And I know nothing about editing video back then. It was horrible by, by the way. And YouTube wasn't even a thing back then. It was Google Video, if you remember. And I uploaded this dang video to Google Video and to put it on my blog. And it like exploded with like hundreds of comments. And I was like, man, there's something to this video thing. And so that was like the early taste of like, maybe we should try something with video, right? But yeah, then fast forward another year or so and Gemba Academy was born kind of thing.

So it's just a great American entrepreneurial story and I, I love it. And honestly, as somebody who's benefited from your investment during that time, you know, it started with dream. And I think to me that's, that's. That the, the Gemba helps dreams come true. And to me, I. I feel like that's, that's the reality of it because there's so many good ideas out there. But if you can't execute them with excellence consistently, those good ideas are just that. And they don't become the good reality that we need them to be. And so, you know, serious man, we, we appreciate you and we respect you guys, so thank you.

All right, well, I. Well, before we get into like, who you are, Clint, and who your company is and all that, we, we, you know the drill, man. We like to get going out of the gate with a quote. So what do you got?

You know, my, the. The quote that really strikes me with William, since the beginning is where there is no standard, there is no Kaizen. The reality is if you don't have any kind of expectation, you can never have a problem. But yeah, we're all surrounded by problems all the time that we're trying to fight. But if we haven't ever. How do you fight a problem successfully without having a standard to get to? It's impossible.

You have chaos, right? And exhausting.

You're right, it's chaos. It's exhausting. You're constantly fighting fires that are just impossible to ever fully contain. And so to me, that was, that was what has really stuck with me since the beginning. Of our Lean journey.

Yeah. No, that's awesome. All right, well, hey, tell us a little bit about Clint, man. Like what's your background? How did you get involved in all this continuous improvement stuff where you work and, and how do you know so much about Gemba Academy?

Yeah, that's good. No, I started actually this week is my 25th anniversary at McDonald and on lumber. I. Wow. Started just 10 years old or what? Yeah, no, I wish I actually came out of college and I didn't know anything about anything. I had a degr that nobody cares about. And, and, and I, and I got an opportunity, entry level sales at this little lumber company in small town Wisconsin, January 11, 1999. And it. I was employee number six. Wow. And the company was doing about $10 million a year in sales. And it's been an unbelievable ride for me, Ron, because we just find great people and try to teach them the business and great things happen when you bring great people together. And you know, thankfully last year we, we did over $100 million in sales last year. Oh my gosh, dude. Less? Yeah, less than 25 years. You know, we, we 10x a really, you know, slinging commodities is not for the faint of heart. You know, very volatile. And so for us to have that.

Kind of favor economy with, it's not like the, you know, housing markets like explosion exploding or anything.

So.

Wow, that's incredible.

Yeah, it's been a fun ride. And there's 206 people now company wide. We have multiple manufacturing facilities and, and it's, it's in what we found ourselves. We had this explosive growth over the last 25 years and we found ourselves in a spot where we were becoming our own limiting factor. And that heroic human effort can only get you so far. And we, we knew that something had to change. And what we found was that if we were either going to stay at that spot or we were going to cataclysmically embrace a different methodology to how we were conducting our business. And that was where we stumbled into the lean, the, you know, the Gemba Academy Lean training. And Steve Kane, who is a hero of mine, actually, we, I don't know if you know this, Ron, but we brought him in to speak to our team at a corporate event because we just had been so blessed by. Yeah, he's amazing gem of a guy and really just. He's just a, he's. He's just fully devoted to Lean and I call him my Lean coach because he always is. Is Lean Kata coaching me all the way through this Whole process, we, we had 35 people who went through the Gemba Academy lean training and that was really great for us. We knew we needed to put a certain amount of people into the training to get enough inertia and enough buy in and to get a tipping point to, to make sure that all of our key people understood what we were trying to achieve and how it was going to be different than we have in the past. And so for us, we've been, it's been a few years, we're a few years in and we've seen results in, in employee engagement, up productivity, up profitability, up you get customer feedback is up a positive customer feedback, up credits and returns down. In almost every metric, the lag in almost every lagging metric you can find. We've seen improvement. And that to me is what the, that's why I'm here talking to you today, because if there's anything I can do to help the world become a more sustainable place in a more, you know, just get rid of the frustration, get rid of the concerns, get rid of the tension. It just makes everything better for everybody. And yeah, so we, we're still on the front end. We haven't arrived, but we're, we got a lot of good inertia going, man.

That's awesome. Yeah. I've heard so many awesome stories from Steve about you guys and because it's fun when cohorts like, like you guys have, go through that Lean Practitioner certification program and that's always the best. You know, some, you know, some people will send one or two people through, which is fine. But man, when you get a decent group moving through together, that's when the magic happens, man. Yeah.

So, yeah, you're right. And for us, the lean, we've had to adapt. And Steve always asked me this question, well, what tra. What problem are you trying to solve? You know, drives you nuts A little bit. Because I just want, I just, you know, I just wanted to take, Yeah, I just want to take the Pythagorean theorem and apply it and go. And, and he, he forced me to think different, you know, and I think that was really very, very, very helpful. You know, but applying the lean to our business is a little bit different than when we run an assembly plant or. And when you're dealing with commodities, they have a seasonality to them and they've got, you know, we have, we have to run batches just for, because of the, the way that our business runs, we have to have, have batches. But we've embraced Kan Bonds. And that was really a big. A big thing for us to be able to understand and to. Now our inventory isn't just one big clump of stuff moving around from here to there. It's intentionally placed.

Yeah.

For a time in a. You know.

Yeah. And you would say. You say that you. You deal in batches, but I would argue you probably deal more in what I would call a pitch. Right. Like, instead of like, just a huge, massive batch, it's like a pitch of 50 things stacked together. Right. And so that's. That's different than just saying we're batch. Right. And so I wouldn't beat yourself up too bad. But. But yeah, man. Hey, so listen, we had this idea, and I don't know why I'm agreeing to it, man, but this is risky. Risky. But I understand you got an old radio DJ background. You got radio DJ voice and all that. So for whatever reason, man, you want to flip the script here and you want to fire some questions at me. But I'll tell you what. I just. It just came to my mind as I was thinking about. You were talking. I'm gonna agree to this on one condition.

Talk to me, brother.

That you're gonna come back on and we're gonna do a proper interview. I'm gonna interview you.

All right, that sounds good. Deal, buddy. Let's go. Let's go.

But. But I'll. I'll. I'll play gay man. Like, in fact, the last episode this. That we did, this guy, he was sort of like, live coaching me live and all that, and I had no idea what he was going to say and played a log. So here we are again, man. I'm gonna. I don't know what's gonna happen, but let's see.

Let's go. That's awesome. Yeah, man, I. I really appreciate. And we, like, I, like I already mentioned. I mean, our. We're off to a great start with our lean in. Our Lean Journey. And we've had a few other companies that we work with that are further along than us have been very encouraging to us as well to, you know, to kind of stick with it. And. And that the law of entropy is very real. And, you know, everything that we're. That we're into now is we're. We're. We're getting standards in place. And, you know, we're kind of running into some. And we're. We're running into some. Some headwinds with. Now there's so many standards that they're almost kind of slowing us down. Or we're not able to keep up with it all the time the way we used to when we were in this run and gun, you know, wild, wild west type of environment that we were successful in. It's been difficult for us to a little bit slow down and to approach it a little more systematically. And we have a standard and we stick with the standard. And, and, and I guess I'm just looking for you, like, how do we keep the inertia going when it becomes a little less maybe exciting?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, earlier on you were telling me everything's up, this is up, that is up, this is up. So sometimes when, what's weird about, if you ever walked in, have you ever been into like a Toyota facility or anything like that?

Have you ever been inside just pictures and videos.

You need to go if you can one day just go whenever you're in Kentucky or whatever, you know, go, go take a tour. And, and not just Toyota, there's lots of really super strong lean companies out there. But when you walk into these places and you're looking at the assembly area or whatever it might be, there's this like weird, it's hard to describe this weird calmness to what's going on. Like nobody's rushing around, you know, there's just everything's on purpose, you know, and, and so it doesn't seem hectic. Whereas back in the day before you had standards. Yeah. People were like rushing around and they're sweating and this and that, you know, because, you know, you required effort to sort of meet the customers. I mean it still requires. Eff, get me wrong. But, but you know, but when you have things balanced and when you have things in, in place and you're, you're being intentional with your behavior, things are going to slow down. So that's not a bad thing. So long as, you know, like every day, like, what's the plan for today folks? We're going to do this many, whatever. And you write it on the board, right. Or your hour by hour board or however you're tracking it and you go, you know, and if it's calm and collected and you're doing it, then great. Now if you aren't, you know, meeting your, your expectations, you aren't meeting your customer requirements and you have potentially over standardized things. I've seen that as well. And that's okay. So that's where you just got to keep experimenting your way forward. Right. You've probably heard that from Steve a million times. Experiment your way forward. Right? And, and, and just see what works and what doesn't work and what you learn along the way. So I don't know. So I wouldn't necessarily gauge anything based on like, it feels like we're going slow. I mean, are you going slower or not? Yes or no. Right. It's very fact based at that point, you know, and, and because I, I assume that you're measuring, you know, things on a, on a regular basis.

Yeah, yeah, you're right. That is, it's interesting. It is as much a perception that I'm, that I'm referencing as, as it is than a reality, you know, because we are doing, we are more efficient. We are. Things are going better. I think part of it, maybe, Ron, is that when you're on the front end of trying to climb a mountain, you're looking like, hey, I need to go there, you know, and you start to go and you climb that for, get to that first peak and that's where you thought you were gonna go to. And you think, oh, that's where I got to get to. And if I get there, everything's just going to be great and everything's going to be perfect and I'll have fixed all these problems. And you get to that point and all of a sudden you're like, wow, that mountain range has a lot more mountains to climb. And you couldn't even see those when you were on the front end of your journey.

Right.

And so as we're trying to lead and coach our team, you know, we're in that spot where we've kind of made some ground, we've made some progress, we've take, we've solved some problems and we've, we've gotten rid of tension in the organization and you get to this next spot and you're like, it's a little overwhelming to see now look at all these other problems that we get to solve.

Well, yeah. And then that's where I would bring you back to all the foundation that Steve's laid out for you guys and embrace scientific thinking, because that is the way, man. Scientific thinking is the way. It is the truth. It is every. And that's what, that's what's going to bring you to where you need to go. Because all you're trying to do is figure out, you know, that next challenge your leadership needs to do that. You and your leadership, right? Like, hey, by the end of, you know, we're here early 2024, when we're talking in December 2024, what, what will you have accomplished right? Like, what's that? And then, and then you back into it. Where are we now? What's our next target condition? What are the obstacles in front of us? And you rinse and repeat, man. That's it. That's the magic, right? That's what makes hap. That's why the Toyotas and Danahers of the world are so amazing, because that's all they're doing, you know. Yeah, they're not any better at 5s and Kanban than anybody else. You know, they're. I mean, maybe they are a little bit better, but you know, that's not their secret. Right. Their secret is their whole idea of, of breaking things down. Experimenting your way forward intentionally, deliberately, maybe is a better word.

Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's encouraging too, you know, because, you know, I think we had a little bit of a, a destination mindset, you know, that like, you know, we, we, we, we only had the problem. We, we only had the problems that we understood or could see. And what we're realizing now is that the problems that we're gonna go after next are a lot more complex. They were, and they're a lot more collaborative. So for us to, to, to take it isn't the low hanging fruit that we've taken, you know, and that's where the, some of those real problem solving efforts really come in, you know, to dig deep into the five whys and get really down into the grid of it.

Yep, yep. For sure, man. For sure. What else, man?

You know, what did, what do you, what do you think? You know, Ronnie, you got inertia. You got some things going really well. You know, things are, you got traction and. But there's just a segment of your organization that is just still reluctant to fully embrace all that is lean. You have any tips for a guy that might be in that spot?

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You got any tips for a guy that might be in that spot that.

I would say, first of all, be patient really with them and seek to understand, you know, like, why are they why are they resisting? You know, now, if some people are just, you know, refuse to change and they don't want to be part of the. The new approach, then. Well, you know, they may choose to go a different direction, but it would be their choice. Right, but hopefully it doesn't come to that. Hopefully you can, you can be patient with them. And then my whole approach with those folks who might be a little bit more resistant is to. Is to gently involve them. Right? And then listen to them and ask for their ideas and then experiment with their ideas and bring them along with you. Right? And when you bring them along with you and you experiment your way forward with them, most of the time I've seen those folks sort of show come alive. And there's been moments where people, you know, will. I mean, true stories. Back in my corporate days, I remember this one gentleman at the beginning of the Kaizen event, he had his arms crossed in the back of the room and, you know, didn't want to be there and all the rest of it. And I was like, oh, boy, this is gonna be interesting. But I didn't pick on him. I just sort of, again, just sort of left them alone. And, and, and then once we got out into the shop floor, we were in. In his area and. And so I was like, hey, I don't remember his name. Bill. Hey, Bill. Like, what do you think, man, about this over here? Well, you know, you kind of grumbled a little bit. I'm like, oh, that's interesting. So we tried. I said, that worked well. Yeah. And then this, you know, over here and. Oh, okay. So, you know, so we just started involving him and next thing you know, get out of the way, man, because he's. He's off and running. And that end of that week when we did the, like, the final report out, this guy got up, grown man. I mean, grown, grown, grown man, like experienced man. Been there a long time. The diet. The dude literally had tears in his eyes. And he said, no one's ever listened to me. Like this team listened to me. And he'd been there 20 some years, you know what I mean? And so, so it's, it's, it's. It's that, you know, I mean, respect for people gets overused sometimes in our movement. And, you know, can be like, oh, just be passive and hold hands and sing Kumbaya. Know, it's not. That's not what I'm talking about either. But, you know, because eventually if I. You try to get the person involved and you're being respectful about it and they don't want to play ball kind of thing. Well then, you know, again, they might have to go a different direction. But I would think in most cases you can get these people involved by, by just involving them, gently listening to them and implementing and experimenting with their ideas doesn't mean that they're going to work. Right. But when you experiment with their ideas and you're learning together and they're going to feel respected that their idea was at least tested.

Yeah, that's. Wow, that's. I appreciate you saying that and offering that perspective. You know, I, my, my great grandpa moved to the, to the, to the great USA from Sweden in 1906. He was 14 years old. He had his little sister with him. Just those two. They sail across the ocean.

Wow.

Well, they make it through Canada to small town Nebraska where they had some family. And my great grandpa, he's buying land that had never been turned over before. It had never been farmed before. And I'm just thinking, hearing you talk that like that landed the first year that he planted crops, probably didn't. The seeds didn't take as well as they do today. Yeah, with the irrigation and all the other things that, you know, my cousins are still farming that land. You know, they put a lot of effort in the fertilizer, the, you know, all the irrigation, everything they need to do to make sure that land produces max crops. But that first time, that first few years, I can see where maybe just like you said, being patient with, with the process of vision casting and throwing those lean seeds out there and, and nurturing them. And I appreciate you offering that. That's, that's, that's really helpful, you know, so thank you for your wisdom in that.

Welcome.

What about office work? You know, a lot of, a lot of the, a lot of the, the Gemba training that we did had to do with the manufacturing efforts and, and, and it's real easy to see it, right? It's easy to see motion in a manufacturing environment. You know, you can see those wastes really easily. What, what have you seen in the. To be like, like successful in illuminating waste inside of an office area or more of a corporate, you know, white collar environment?

Yeah, yeah, no, that's a good question. I think, you know, truthfully, I don't think they're all that different. We make it different because it looks different. But in the end, value still needs to move about. Right now, value in a, in a shop or a mill or whatever is. Yeah, you can see it. You can see that piece of wood Moving about or the, the metal widget in the factory moving about. You can see it being transformed. So it's a little. I wouldn't say it's easier. It's just, it's different to, to visualize. Right. Whereas in an office environment, things are often hidden, they're in a computer. But there's things that you need to accomplish. For example, you know, one that we deal with. Like we have if, when we sign a contract with, with you guys, you know, there might be a master services agreement or something like that. Right. And so your lawyers might have a big crazy document that we send over. And our lawyers are like, this is a crazy document. And so then, you know, you got to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Well, that. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. That's no different than a factory when you're reworking things back and forth. And so how can you streamline this process so these lawyers, you know, don't waste so much time? I'm picking on lawyers, but you know what I'm saying, it's easy.

They're an easy target.

Right. But, but, but that's an example to where. Because until we can get that MSA done, man, we can't collect any money from y'.

All. Yeah.

You know, and, and you can't get our product. And so we're both stuck. Right. And so that's an example to where you could still map that. And we have, you know, we, we've got some pretty elegant solutions in place that we're trying to, to really streamline the collaboration and, and trying to make sure that what gets presented the pretty close. So internal, external, like quick changeover, like all this kind of stuff, it all applies, man in the office. My business partner, Kevin Meyer, while he just actually retired on us, but he's still kind of working. This is the first week where he's retired. But I've emailed him Mike, and he replies back right away. So I'm like, ah, Kevin, you know, you say you retired, but, but Kevin, man, he got our, our month end close, and we got a pretty complex close, man, because we got a lot of customers and online all over the world and different tax laws, and if we do it wrong, we're going to jail kind of thing, you know, and, and I mean, I'm talking thousands and thousands of lines of stuff that he's got to reconcile. The, the bottleneck in his process now is waiting on the banks and the bank statements. We're waiting on the bank, like we've got it dialed in, man. So that's like, he's used quick changeover smed, you know, to our accounting processes. And again, we've got a complex close that we do. And, and so, so I just, I don't know. I, I'm probably less patient with the office world as I should be because I'm like, you're not different. You're just not. Stop saying you are because you're not, you know.

You know, hey, that's, that's totally fair and right. I think you're right. Just even that mentality of the waste is real. People are waiting for responses for an email.

That's right.

That's still waiting.

That's right. That's right. And there's over processing. Like, there's all this. The MSA is a perfect example. And we've got all this stuff. It's like, do we really need all that, you know, Like. Well, no. Okay. Why is it in there? It always has been.

You know what I mean?

Take it out. Right? Take it out. So, so yeah, the waste is all around us, man. And, and it's just like people say, I heard somebody say, well, it was a manufacturing company actually. And they said, well, you know, we don't just get to make cars all day long like Toyota. I'm like, oh, yeah. Because making a car every 60 seconds, that's easy. Yeah. You know, I mean, come on, man. Everybody wants to think that they're different and it's just, honestly, it's an excuse for their lack of action, man.

Wow.

You know, so, so just get after it and, and make things better. No matter what. Try to make value flow. That's it. I mean, that's lean, right? Make value flow seamlessly to your customer and, and, and life's going to be good.

What do you see? What do you see? This is a little bit of a, of a different type of question, but, you know, the law of entropy is real. And that downward drag on all of our organizations is just constant. Right? What, what is the life, what do you see for the lifespan of Lean or the long term success rate of Lean for organizations that, you know, a lot of people, I'm just guessing that a lot of people start out, maybe they start out hot and they fizzle because it's hard. It is, it is really hard to keep that, that enthusiasm up. What do you, what do you see for that life cycle of Lean or, or is there something to be mindful of in that life cycle of Lean that might be helpful for somebody like.

Me to be thinking about the life cycle is infinite. It's never going to end. The only reason, Lean, or just maybe it'll be called something different 30 years from now, I don't know. But the ideas behind it, they'll never die so long as human beings want to do better. It's as straightforward as that. Right now there may be some new tools and new methods that we haven't even thought about, you know, that'll be brought in. Who knows what AI and all this kind of stuff will do for us down the road. But, but the whole idea of making things this is like humanity. If humanity is to continue to prosper, you're going to need mechanisms to prosper. And I would argue that there's no better, at least in the business world way of going about it than, than just continuous improvement. Call it that. Whether it's lean, Six Sigma, Triz, project management, I don't care what you want to call it, but it's the things that we can do to make things better. There's just no. That we know of today. Now, maybe there will be down the road that, hey, we'll tip our hat to it when it, when it arrives. But right now, this is the best that we've got. And it will not fail so long as people don't. So long as people don't quit trying. If you quit trying, yeah, it's all over.

It's all backwards, right?

Yeah. And as it relates to entropy, I'm so glad you brought that up. Like one of my big pet peeves with. And I'm a big, big Six Sigma guy. I love Six Sigma, I love Lean, I love all of it. I'm not in any camp and. But one of the things that drives me nuts about sick, traditional Six Sigma D is C is control. And you can't control entropy, just like you can't control the stock market. The stock market very rarely ever goes completely sideways. What's it do? It either goes up or it goes down. Okay? And that's what happens in our processes. They're either getting a little bit better or they're getting a little bit worse. Very rarely are they ever going completely sideways. That machine that's turning over there, it's wearing out. Whether you realize it or not, it is wearing out. You know, and there's going to come a point where it's not going to turn anymore. Right. Because entropy is going to break it. So you got to keep improving. You know, this is where like my friend Paul Akers and these guys, I love the whole idea of whether you want to call it 2 second lean or what. I don't care what, what marketing message you want to put around it. But if you keep making things just a little bit better every day, you don't ever have to worry about it backsliding, you know. And this is why visual management is so important, why it's so critical that you're keeping score. That if I walk out into your factory or your workplace or your mill or whatever, your office, and I walked up to any person and I just said, hey, Clinton, right now, are you winning or are you losing? You need to be able to answer. You need to know if you're winning or losing. If the CEO.

Yeah.

Of your company, you should be able to walk up to him or her and say, are you winning? Are you losing?

Yeah. I had a friend of mine who is formally trained and lean with the, with the train he and air conditioning company. And that, that was, he humbled me with that. About, about that was probably seven years ago. He answered, asked me that question, are you winning? And that, well, sales are, we're doing good. And this, he's like, yeah, but I didn't ask you that. He said, are you winning? Are you winning?

Yeah.

How? I was just humbled by it.

Yeah.

And if I don't know if I'm winning, how does anybody else know if they're right? And I think focusing on leading indicators has been a really helpful thing for me too. Because the sales number is a lagging indicator.

Yeah.

A profit number is a lagging indicator.

Yeah.

And so to help our team focus more specifically on those front end, what are the things that are going to make us successful?

That's right. Yeah. My buddy, Taylor Bailey Taylor called key performance actions versus key performance indicators. Right. The KPIs are important. We all have them, we need them. But those actions, you know, what are you going to do? You keep stepping on a scale and you weigh more than you want. Great. Stepping on that scale every day ain't going to change anything. Right. Put a carrot in your mouth instead of the donut. And that's a key performance action. Right. So, you know, I love that.

Yeah, that's good. Key performance actions. That's awesome.

Yeah.

Well, that's great, man. I really, I, this has been, this is really fun for me and I, I'm thinking about the future and you know, you're kind of a pace car for me here, Ron. You know, you, you're years ahead of me on your lean journey, but you're going for the win. And you said that this thing goes on forever. Infinitely, as long as you don't stop trying to improve. I'm just wondering, the guy who teaches continuous improvement and who has everything figured out and writes the books and does the podcast, what's that guy trying to figure out?

Yeah, man, trust me. We've got lots of opportunity for improvement here at this little company of ours and we're trying, man. Man, I would say for us like just thinking about this year, like we've got our ocean plan dialed in and we're locked and loaded and, and ready to, to go after it. We're, we're looking at like some different types of products. Like, you know, we're, we're Lean in Six Sigma and that sort of thing obviously. And we're continuing to make new content and those in those niches. But we're actually really excited about going after just some more general leadership topic. So maybe a company's not just. They don't even know what lean is, but they know facilitating a meeting's important or emotional intelligence is important and that sort of thing. So, so we're actually looking to, you know, create a, maybe a whole new area of content on, on leadership and also looking at different languages. I mean experimenting with. We've had like captions forever, right. But. And we, we have some, a lot of content with us with Spanish speaking presenters. But. But we're looking at other languages with like German speaking presenters and different things like that. So we've got lots of things, man, that we're, that we're going after. So it's going to be an exciting year. But we'll. Let's check back in with each other, man.

I really, I'll look forward to that and I really appreciate you and I, I cherish the time and I'm. And like I mentioned, I'm super thankful for, for you following through on that dream and I guess that would be my encouragement to anybody who's listening out there is that if you've got that dream, go for it. Yeah, just go for it. What? And even if it isn't pretty right away, you know.

I think, I don't know, I probably have mentioned this before but I don't know, probably shouldn't or marketing people. What are you doing? But the very first videos that we ever made with Gemba Academy, they're not even on our website. You can't even find them anymore. But they're not. Took them off YouTube everything. But the very first videos we ever made were that we launched a company with was 12 videos on value Stream Mapping. I had a gray bed sheet from Bed Bath and Beyond that I bought. It was like an $80 bed sheet. I remember it was expensive there. Yeah, it was a gray bed sheet and I tacked it to the wall and that was the backdrop. The first Gemba Academy backdrop shop. I had it. I did have like one of those softbox lights, you know, it was like a 50 light, but it was like a proper, you know, video softballs. Like my little camera that I was using back then was a head. Remember those little mini DV tapes? You know, like those little, like a little cassette tape.

Look a thing.

It was a little mini DV tape camera and I had a microphone strung across the floor and I think my dog was sitting at my feet when we recorded it. Oh, listen to this. The first. I don't know why I'm sharing all this, but you're all about the beginning. The first teleprompter. And we've always used teleprompters. You know, like read the words for the video.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, now we've got this fancy thing where it's like this weird. The iPad sits down here and it's this glass and it reflects off the glass somehow. And I don't know how it all works, but you read, you read the words off this glass and the camera's right behind it, right, like, like on the news station. So that's what we've. That's how we do it now. But back then I didn't have any of that. So I had a little monitor. It was like a little 17 inch monitor. And I, I had some teleprompter software which was pretty, I was pretty proud of. And you know, the words would just sort of roll up the screen, you know. And so I took, I literally took milk crates. Three milk crates. And I had to have, I remember three milk crates. And then I had to use some books to get the right height. I'd sit the monitor on there and I'd set it that right behind the camera. And so the very top part of the, of the monitor, like the, the top portion of it. So I could see three or four lines on the teleprompter. They would appear because. So I would look right above the camera at the. And that's how I read the teleprompter. And I controlled it with a little keyboard that was at my, my knees. But you. I was just recording my like chest up. So like that's literally how we made. I made videos by myself. And then I edited them and all the rest of it. And man, I'm talking about when it was. You talking about Gorilla, man, that's awesome. Hey, we. We did it, man. And that's how we started, man. And now we've got, you know, the studio here in Texas and all that. But yeah, man, it's been a lot of fun. We've been super blessed, man. For sure.

How many years has it been around. How long ago was.

We started the company in March of 2009.

Okay.

Yeah. So yeah. What was that, 14 some years or whatever? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, man, it's. It's been wild. And yeah, it was bittersweet. My. The very first employee that we, Elaine Crescione, she. She retired this last year in December. And. And then Kevin, my business partner, he. He's still gonna help with some consulting and things like that. So he's not completely going away, but. But you know, he's, he's stepping way back. So, you know, big changes there, you know, like me and Kevin and then John Miller's are my other business partner. You know, we're the ones who built this company. And so one of. One of us is sort of, you know, going into the next phase of life. So it's, it's going to be a. A weird year without Kevin is involved and, and Elaine and all that. But hey, man, the show goes on, so.

That's right. It does. It does. Yeah. Well, thank you for all you've done for us and I appreciate who you are and how you conduct your business and, and having worked with multiple people from your organization, I can see that, you know, they say, they say organizations kind of resemble their top leadership and you got a world class thing going on. So appreciate it. We'd love to keep working with you in the future here too, so.

Yeah, we're all about it, man. I appreciate you too, Clint. Now again, you gotta. Everybody's hearing it. Clint will be back on down the road sometime and we're gonna do a proper interview. I'm gonna grill you, man.

Okay, Sounds great, buddy.

All right, man. I appreciate you. Thanks, Clint.

Yeah, thanks, Ron.

Take care. 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 Six 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. As a variety of Lean and Six Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.