The Achieve Podcast - James Ashton (Precision Holdings & Accelerate)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, the show where we highlight the leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses and shaping their industries. My name is Jesse Warner and I'll be your host today. We're excited to have Jim Ashton, chairman of Precision Holdings and Accelerate and board member of several other companies. Jim, we're excited to have you on the show today.

Good to be here, and hopefully it'll be useful for folks.

So our audience can get to know you a little bit better, give us a quick backstory on who you are and some of the businesses you've been involved with.

Well, I'm, uh, I'm an engineer sort of by birth and education, a family of engineers, and went to school and got the bachelor's, and then later, a little later, master's and PhD in engineering. And went to work for General Dynamics in the airplane business, but actually composite materials development. Did technology, wrote some books, uh, went back to Harvard Business School and got into running things. And I have for 50 years now managed a variety of companies or parts of companies. Most fun job I ever had was starting up the F-16 program as the Vice President of Operations. But I've had the good fortune to have lots of different kinds of companies. I, I did some turnarounds and decided after I'd done the turnarounds, the next time I did one, I wanted to get paid for it. Obviously get paid for it in a big company, but with a nice bonus and the like, but I wanted to have a piece of ownership. So in 1994, I went looking for something I could own part of, get involved with private equity firms, and I've now been involved with various different private equity firms and private firms, uh, 25 or so different firms over the last 30 years, where usually I'm a board member or chairman or sometimes CEO.

It sounds like you've had quite the run there.

Yeah, I tell some people that, well, I can't hold a job, so I've got lots of experiences.

So, you know, nowadays it sounds like you're doing a lot on the board side, chairman. What is it like being the chairman for Precision Holdings?

Precision Holdings is a good example because I actually was involved with one part of it a long time ago when we started up a roll-up called Precision Holdings— Precision Partners, I'm sorry— which was a consolidation of, back then, 6 different large precision machine shops. I have a lot of background in manufacturing and building precision things, and most of the marketplace for precision is into aerospace and defense. Which I've, I've worked in across a variety of systems. So I got back involved with it a couple of years ago when a private equity firm, Brightwood, that was going to— they actually are a leveraged lender more than equity, but in this case they ended up being equity holder and a large piece of debt. They knew me from several other things, uh, I recognized I'd also already been involved with Precision, one part of it, um, years ago. And so asked me to join and become chairman. That's, that's sort of typical of how I get involved. I don't go looking for jobs. I suppose I maybe I have, I can't remember the last time I looked for a job. I've had the good fortune that since I've moved around and know a lot of people. People find something that looks like it might look like something I would be interested in, and they come to me. And if it is interesting, uh, and I think I could have some value added, then, then we work out some kind of a deal. Um, Precision Holdings is a good example of that, and it's my kind of a company. I already know lots about precision machining, actually about that company, and also the the marketplaces we sell into. I think if you're going to be, in this case, a chairman or often the CEO, you really have to know something about the business. Now, I— you say, well, Jim, you've worked in all these different things, you couldn't possibly know about those things. Well, not going in, but I have a strong enough education, technical education, to be able to go in and if I'm willing to study and learn about it fairly rapidly, I can get so I actually know something about the business. A good example of that, I think it's worth mentioning, I was going to work in a business in the submarine world, and I didn't know that much about nuclear submarines at the time, but What I did when I showed up is I'm now running this several hundred million dollar submarine manufacturing business. First of all, there's a tech manual that goes on every nuclear submarine, a whole bunch of tech manuals, and there's an executive summary and it's about 1,000 pages. So I took the existing executive manual for the submarines we were building and I read it. I don't mean I thumbed through it. I read it in some detail. And I also took the head of mechanical engineering who now worked for me and had been in the business his whole life. And I brought Russ in and said, Russ, you're gonna be my professor. And so every week for about 3 months, Russ would come to my office and we'd talk submarines. So I didn't know much of anything when I went in it. But I sure did after a while, and I do now. And I think it's easy to fall in the trap that you think you can run businesses by looking at income statements and balance sheets. I think it is very difficult to run most businesses without knowing a lot more than that— knowing the people, and knowing if it's a technical business, knowing the technology. So that's what I do. And once I'm get up to speed, then I think I have some managerial background and talents and can figure out how to improve the businesses, both with the customer and internally.

Talk to me about how the business has changed as it's grown, from what kind of where it started to what it looks like today.

Well, in one, it's already big, obviously that doesn't apply, but, but when you, you, uh, go into a more of a startup, and I've done a few true startups. The early part of the business is invariably very heavy on the marketing. How do you get to the customers, listening to your customers so you adapt your product or service to them? And even as the chairman or CEO, you, you better be fairly involved in, in understanding and getting close to that. As the business grows, however, you— most of that gets delegated to To others, you still have to know something about it. But after a while, you do something closer to managing the people from the top down. But with you not doing very much of the work— I often tell people, I don't do any work. If I'm doing my job right as chairman, even as it grows, I don't do any of the tasks to speak of. I may go meet some customers and the like. But I have good staff, and if the staff are provided some guidance and freedom, they'll go do the work. And that's how you really want it to work. And when you start, when it's quite small, you, you're doing a lot of the work yourself. But by the time you get a business up to, say, $50 million, you're not doing very many of, hardly any of the tasks anymore. You, you're managing the people who are doing the work or the people who are managing people doing the work. So I think you, you have to evolve. And I, when I see people who start with a company smaller, they're doing a lot of the work. One of the, the things I think many people have trouble doing is letting go of doing the work because they're really good at it. But you can't, you can't get to $100 million and keep doing the all the tasks you were doing in a $5 million business. So you got to, you got to let go, get good people, delegate and manage them.

So, Jim, as you sat on these boards here and you look at larger companies thinking about sales and marketing and outreach, what are some things that have worked for your companies and maybe what are some things that haven't?

Well, Interestingly, I think the emphasis almost always has to be, and in my view, surprisingly often isn't, you think you got a good idea what the customer needs, wants, and the like. That's why you're going to go create products or services and go sell them. But people keep trying to sell, sell to customers something that isn't quite what they really want, and they don't take the time to to listen carefully to what does the customer like, but also what do they not like? Where, where are you not hitting the sweet spot? And I find that in this, at the starting role, but even as you get bigger companies, getting the folks who are dealing with the customers, if it's yourself, fine, but if it's other folks, find out what works and what the customer really likes and doesn't like. And maybe you can't adapt your product or service to what they like, in which case you haven't got the right marketplace. You better find different customers. But if the customer is buying something from you and is sort of almost irritated with your product or service a part of the time because this isn't what they really want, you're not going to succeed very well. You better adapt your product or service to what they need or find different customers.

Jim, there's a lot of talk about AI and automation right now. How are you using AI to help your companies grow?

I'm, I'm really not so far. I'd say it's in early. I, I have a reasonably extensive background in, in over 50 years in using computers, which have become ever more valuable and sophisticated in what they can do for you. I don't see AI as quite as much of a revolution as many people do. I think it is a pretty more than a little bit different and valuable than what we're kind of used to. It's a big step forward, but it still amounts to figuring out how you can get it used that computing power to do things either faster or better or maybe even different than what you could do. And I think there's going to be all sorts of opportunities to do that in almost every business with AI. But I think it's sort of a natural evolution as opposed to a revolution.

Looking back on your journey, talk to me about some of your wins and maybe some of your mistakes. What are the lessons that stand out?

And kind of back to the customers, if, uh, if you— if, if your customers aren't consistently really happy with what you're, you're providing them, at some point you're not going to be able to grow the sales. You're not going to get growth. And when you can't get any growth, it gets really hard to make very much money in most businesses. So once again, the things that have worked for me is having a product or service that either already fits what the customers need or can be adapted, and you adapt to the marketplace or find customers that will match what you need so they're happy with your product or service. In addition to that, in larger things. And often in turnarounds, paying attention to doing the things you're doing with improving efficiency is often one of the keys. Screwed up companies, companies that aren't making money even if they're selling quite a bit of the product, it, it may be a sales and marketing thing, but very often it's internally they're not, they're not efficient enough in how they're executing. And then you can go in and improve that significantly, often you have to have different people, um, or you have to get them in the right spots. But if you're not making good money and you are selling product, um, you almost for sure have to improve the efficiency with which you turn out that product or service.

Jim, looking into the future, what are you most excited about?

Oh, I'm not sure. I know I, I, uh, I've been doing this a long time and people say, when are you gonna retire? And the answer is, why would I retire? This is fun. I think I've got, I guess, 5 companies I'm actively involved in in the moment. You know, as chairman, board member, you don't actually do very much work. So you can do quite a few companies as long as you can keep it all straight. And I think I usually have value added. It's fun. Get to know more and more things. And since many of them are privately owned, owned by private equity companies, they'll get sold. We'll make— if we do our job right, we'll make some good money selling it for a lot more than we bought it for. But then I'll go find some more of them, another one to do that, because it is value-added and it's fun.

The last question here for you: what advice or, or any final thoughts you want to give to leaders or small business owners or business owners a little bit bigger even? You know, our audience is mostly, you know, they're past the startup stage. Or, you know, somewhere at least $500,000 revenue. A lot of them are still growing, right? They're still— they're in the battle. They're trying to cross that chasm of getting out of being founder-led. What is some advice that you can give these business owners?

Well, in my experience, when things aren't growing like you'd like them to or aren't as profitable as you reasonably think they should be, You got to figure out why and change things. And beating your head ever harder on the wall only makes your head hurt. And, and people— I, I always thought it's strange that people can be in a trap where they're not getting really good results and all they want to do is work harder doing the same thing. And I think that almost never is what you need to do. Working harder is unlikely to be the way you succeed. Working smarter, I suppose, but figuring out why it's not working the way you're doing it is a lot more important than just doing what you're doing harder.

Good thoughts. Well, Jim, thanks again for joining me today. Really appreciate your insights and your story. If you want to learn more about Jim, you want to connect with him, you can visit him James Ashton on LinkedIn. You can search it for him. You can also visit midstateusa.com. And that'll wrap up today's episode of the Achieve Podcast. A big thank you to our sponsor Achieve Fractional, which provides fractional executives for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's conversation, follow our show, share with other entrepreneurs who'd also find value in it. And again, thanks for listening. We'll see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast. [MUSIC] [MUSIC]