Turning Breakdowns into Breakthroughs | Brian Lennon

Brian Lennon:

We're always on the look-out. If a potential customer comes to us and says the current supplier just is not succeeding for this reason, we've been very good at figuring out, okay, how do we do that? How can we develop a system to make this customer happy? And that's led to most of our wins.

Nick McLean:

Welcome to Ambition. It's Nick McLean, your host, and today we're talking to someone whose story is all too familiar. Sometimes people don't find their passion right away in life. They're in high school or college and they can't focus. This leads to bad grades, acting out in class or dropping out altogether. But something inside them has that passion to be a leader once they find their calling. You've heard their names, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and today I'm sitting down with Brian Lennon. Brian had been an underachieving student until his father brought him along to work one day. During that visit to the family business, General Die Casters, Brian says his ambition switch was turned on.

And in the years following, he went from underachiever to CEO, growing their business in the unique alloy castings niche into a company with revenues of tens of millions of dollars. We're going to learn what this journey looked like for Brian and the lessons he learned along the way, from the importance of hard work to patience and trusting in the long-term vision of the business.

I especially want you to listen for Brian's belief that larger companies create more problems to solve. It is interesting how that belief meshes with his idea of how luck manifests itself. But before we get into that, we need to hear about the man who made it happen in the first place, Brian's father.

Brian Lennon:

He was in die casting since the late seventies in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and that plant closed about 1990 and at that time, the General Die Casters' owner at the time, Emory Pryor. It was a very small company, just a few machines, really struggling to make its mark. He had met my dad in a conference, talked him into coming out. My dad was really excited about that. It was the first time that he could actually get his hands on a business and help set strategy. And a couple of the tenets that he set back then were quality and customer service. So he set up world-class quality department back then, put in an X-ray machine, CMMs, all the... And then on top of that, he really instilled in the company you know what? No matter what, we're going to get the customers good products, and if they have an issue, we are going to take care of them. Whether it's our problem or not, they're going to experience the best level of customer service that they've ever had.

Those were his two main pillars back then. And pretty quickly they got some significant new customers. Kirby vacuum sweepers, which was really big back in the nineties and a couple auto jobs. And then from there it was up and running. We had really, it was maybe a 10 million dollar company in 1990 and just steadily grew and we grew it with the right types of customers, die casting in particular. A lot of people look at them as a commodity. They just shoot metal into a mold, right? They can do it here, they can do it in Mexico, they can do it in China. And that's true for a lot of die castings but we had our niche in castings that not everybody could make. So castings with unique alloys, a lot of machine type porosity specs. So having that capability allowed us to grow with customers.

Nick McLean:

So as I think about it you've never failed a quality inspection the first time. However, our other customers, they never passed the quality inspection the first time. But if they're going to be a little bit lower, we're probably going to go with them. In this era of extreme cost-cutting and whatnot, do you still feel like customer service is a winning strategy? Is that winning you customers? Is it keeping you customers, or is that something that regrettably is just taking a back door to price?

Brian Lennon:

I think it's different with a lot of different companies. Everybody has their model for how they compete. There are customers out there that buy a lot of die castings that we just know we're not going to be competitive with. But fortunately, there are still enough out there where we have been able to be competitive with that strategy and most of our new customers that we've won, it's because we were able to do something that somebody else couldn't, whether it's make the casting or develop a certain process for them. So we're always wanting to look out for that. If a potential customer comes to us and says, the current supplier just is not succeeding for this reason, we've been very good at figuring out, okay, how do we do that? How can we develop a system to make this customer happy? And that's led to most of our wins.

Nick McLean:

That's great. That's great. So I know you experienced a lot of organic growth. Also have to talk about the merger with Dart. Thinking about other business owners that are at 10 to 15 million of revenue, is this a path that you would encourage, buying a company that almost doubles the company overnight? Can you just talk a little bit about your experience regarding the merger with Dart?

Brian Lennon:

It was both admittedly exciting and terrifying at the same time. But yeah, when the opportunity arose to merge with Dart Casting, it really just made a lot of sense. I mean, as I talked about, General Die Casters has always competed based on making very difficult castings, highly engineered parts. Whereas Dart had been successful with just the opposite strategy. Really being extreme lean and being able to compete with offshore pricing. It made a lot of sense to be able to... Any quote that came in the front door, it could be a better fit for Dart or it could be a better fit for GDC so it really opened up the market.

I really wasn't sure how it would go. It was definitely my first experience stepping into a brand new company and taking the helm, and it could have went a lot of different ways, but fortunately they had a really great team in place. Really a lot of diamonds in the rough. Really young crew, which is very unique for manufacturing.

So yeah, most of the crew is in their mid to late thirties and very talented and most importantly, just very ambitious and they want to learn. They know that our team has been through the wringer, we've been through everything. We've had a lot of experience and they're very eager to learn from us. So yeah, we're about a year and a half in right now and we've accomplished a lot of things and they've learned from us and we've learned from them, and we're trying to implement each other's best practices.

And yeah, we're really starting to see the results on the sales front too. We both help each other attract customers that we wouldn't have attracted otherwise. So yeah, it's going really fantastic.

Nick McLean:

Yeah, and definitely I've been in some of those conversations with you. It definitely makes a lot of sense. It's not as if you have one part of your plant that is dedicated to lower cost production. You just say we have a whole plant dedicated to that with different processes and different machinery. So I do think it hits different with certain customers when you can point to different physical locations. But you talked about some of the younger staff having ambition to grow in their careers and whatnot. Talk to me about your own personal ambition. Was it always your goal to become CEO of a company? Once you got to be CEO, was it growth or are you more along the lines of, I just want to create a healthy business and do what I can to ensure the livelihoods of the employees or some combination of the two? Can you just talk to me a little bit about your own ambition and how that has changed over time?

Brian Lennon:

Yeah, sure. I'd love to. It's really interesting. I started college as an underachieving high school student, didn't really have a lot of direction or interest, and my dad drug me into the plant and just immediately just thought manufacturing was just the most fascinating thing ever. It was a combination of all these people working together. You had the science and engineering of the equipment and how do you mesh all that together to get a certain result? So I just got really fascinated by it and changed my major in college and immediately started getting good grades. And yeah, that's when my ambition switch turned on. And I can't say that I thought a lot about being CEO back then, but I was very motivated about efficiency. I just wanted to figure out how do you get these people to work together? How do you coordinate all this equipment?

How do you develop processes and systems to get the parts out the door as efficiently as possible? And I was just always fascinated by that puzzle and trying to solve that puzzle. And I think if you're an operations person, I think you have to be wired that way. Obviously it's all about the dollars at the end of the day, but if you focus on gaining the utmost efficiency of all your operations, reducing scrap and uptime and keeping the team coordinated and marching in the right direction, then I think the bottom line takes care of itself. And yeah, before I knew it, but yeah, the CEO thing just came along.

Nick McLean:

That's a great outcome for you. You talk about never having thought about the CEO role. Whenever you're talking about how you wanted to mesh all those different areas together to be more efficient, I think that's really the hallmark of a CEO. So often we'll talk to engineers and they're so really laser focused on perfecting the product or if we could just make this small change here or that small change there, it's going to be so much better and maybe it will be better. But this is just one piece of the cog. All the different pieces of the machine really have to be working and working together, not just individual stars or whatnot.

Brian Lennon:

We've been very lucky at General. One of the reasons for our success is we just had this magical group of people that happened to fall in the same place in the mid-nineties, and most of us are still here. We're all different, but we all complement each other.

Nick McLean:

Why should other business owners listen to you when you talk about how you were able to grow your business, how you were able to achieve scale?

Brian Lennon:

I don't think I'm a remarkably talented person in any way, and I think I'm a kind of good example of the fact that most people can succeed if they have that drive, have that tenacity. Just having that drive and commitment to figuring out how to make it happen. Most of the time I'm not coming up with the answer, but I find the people, I get the people together. I think I'm decent in facilitating conversations where I'm able to find the right answer to get success. And it's not really a talent, it's mostly about hard work and determination.

Nick McLean:

I always like to add one word to that and it's resilience. Thinking about athletic endeavors. You know it's going to be hard work, lifting weights or running. The hard work is part of it, but I think in running a business, there's the aspect of hard work in concert with all the setbacks and challenges that makes it a little bit different than purely committing to putting in the hours, putting in the work.

Brian Lennon:

Yep, yep. I would agree. I think that's probably the personality trait of mine that kind of helps. I like doing silly things like running 30-mile races on trails, which probably all gets tied in together. It's a lot easier to develop that. Anybody can be really good at running a marathon. All it takes is doing it every day. It just takes commitment and determination.

Nick McLean:

Now, as you look at the landscape of die casters specifically in the U.S., there are a lot of smaller operators that have not been able to achieve the size and scale that you have at General. What have you done differently in order to achieve that scale over the years?

Brian Lennon:

I assume most manufacturing businesses are this way, but you have to get to a certain scale for it to be sustainable. If you're 10 or 15 million in sales, it's just hard to get enough cash flow to reinvest in the company the way that you need to grow because it's very capital intensive business. So I think it's really important to get that scale as quickly as you can. I was fortunate as I got into the management end of things, we were probably already scaled past that point. So that kind of goes back to probably my father's realm of getting it over that threshold.

And yeah, really it was about establishing that capability, quickly set up the systems, quality systems, the process systems to be able to make difficult parts that others couldn't, got that focus on customer satisfaction in. And then we were fortunate enough to get a few customers to get us to that scale, and then from there it was a lot easier to keep growing. So yeah, that is a tough one, but I think it's trying to get that scale as quickly as you can early in the business, especially in manufacturing, so you can support that future growth.

Nick McLean:

The challenge of the business owner is not to answer easy questions or not to find the answers to easy questions. It's really to find the answers to hard questions, whether you're the one providing those answers or your team. And it sounds like in your case, one of your skills has been that you've been able to assemble a good team to figure out the answers to those tough questions, those tough challenges, et cetera.

Brian Lennon:

Yeah, and I think that comes back to commitment again. Once you're at that cusp of that threshold, you probably have to put yourself in an uncomfortable position. You're going to have to invest to make that step and once you make that investment, it's probably going to be a tough few years before you really are in a position where you got the cashflow to justify it. So yeah, I think it comes back to just being committed to solving the problem and finding a way to make it work.

Nick McLean:

What's interesting in your comment is that you said it's going to be tough for a period of time. I think some people might think, oh, two, three months, six months maybe is the period of time you're talking about, but you said several years. I think that perspective of making a decision and it taking several years before you really figure out if it was the right decision, can seem really scary and daunting to folks, especially those that haven't run a business before. What are your comments on that?

Brian Lennon:

We're going through it right now honestly, with our Dart operation. We're in that position. We have a good level of sales, but we know we need to make a pretty good investment in order to arrange the organization where it's going to be more efficient and profitable for the future. That means taking on debt, and it also means a big project in addition to all the day-to-day work, which already takes up 110% of your time. So you got to make that time commitment that hey, we're going to spend the money, we're going to make it happen. And yeah, it's going to be a couple of years before you get all the ratios back in place with your debt and the earnings and you actually get the benefits of that investment from the efficiency standpoint. So yeah, it's unnerving, but it definitely takes courage and commitment and dedication. You work it all out on a spreadsheet and if the numbers look like it can work, then you just put your head down and go.

Nick McLean:

So looking into the future, what are some of your goals for Dart Casting and General Die Casters? Not necessarily in terms of financial goals. But we all know that a company, we can't rely on Joe in shipping to just show up every day. We need processes and procedures in place so that Joe, if he's taken off, we can still get parts out the door, but also so that Joe can move up in the organization and whoever is ready to backfill Joe can know how to do it. Now, is that a key focus for your companies as you continue to grow, to continue to build out and optimize those processes? Or do you feel like there are other initiatives that you're going to need in order to take that next step in the company's growth?

Brian Lennon:

Well, developing those systems is high on our list of things to accomplish at Dart. General grew rapidly, but the Dart grew, doubled in size in just a couple of years, so they turned into a midsize company, but they were still running themselves like a very small mom and shop company and did remarkably well, but they still don't have a lot of those systems in place. So that's something that we're working hard on. You got to have the systems in place to get the results that you want.

So yeah, we're implementing. We just went live with our ERP system at Dart. It's the same ERP system we have a GDC, so that helps force the systems, forces you to work in a certain way. That's very high on our list. And then even at General, you could work a hundred lifetimes achieving the ultimate level of manufacturing efficiency and never get there. So we're still trying to adopt a lot of the lean manufacturing maintenance programs, total preventive maintenance, trying to achieve that airline industry. The potential is unbelievable. If you could improve the uptime in your machine even a few percent, it's significant dollars.

And then automation is big in both of our plants. We're really lucky. We've got a really good team at General and at Dart doing a lot of automation internally, automating die casting machines and CNCs. Yeah, there just aren't enough people to go around for the business we have now let alone to continue to grow. So that's definitely high on our list.

Nick McLean:

There's that old adage, I don't know if you're familiar with it. Little kids have little problems, big kids have big problems. Meaning little kids cry and you got to tend to them because they're screaming and it's really annoying. But bigger kids, they can go to jail or hurt themselves or hurt others. As you think about your companies and what it's like to run the company now at its size versus when the company was smaller, does that adage apply? Are the issues that you face now totally different than when they were smaller? Do they keep you up more at night? Do they keep you up less at night because you have a team to rely on that's helping you solve those problems? Can you just talk to me about the differences among the challenges of a large company versus a smaller one?

Brian Lennon:

I can't say that the problems are different. I think there's just more of them. Time efficiency and management efficiency has become a lot more critical. There's far more to do than is practical on any given day, and I think it's prioritizing right now that I've been working on the most because you can't do it all, especially out at Dart. They've got these young ambitious kids that just want to be doing everything and just trying to... I think that's been the biggest thing as my job of a leader is, okay, what are the priorities? What are we going to work on? What order are we going to do it in? Just trying to keep everybody focused. With a lot more people and a lot more machines, a lot more going on, it's really easy for everybody to get off track and be going in different directions, and as soon as that happens, then things don't go the way that you want. So I think that's probably the biggest thing I've been working on is communicating that vision and trying to give clear direction and good priorities.

Nick McLean:

I think one challenge people in other industries have is the whole work from home phenomenon or whatever, increasingly hard to get people to actually show up in the office. Manufacturing don't really have that luxury because you can't take the equipment home. Are there any unique challenges there that you feel like you're facing that others aren't? Or do you feel like you're facing the exact same challenges that really any company is facing?

Brian Lennon:

Yeah, we've never really experienced the work from home phenomenon, so it's probably impacting us more at just attracting new people. A lot of people like that opportunity to be able to work from home, and we really can't offer that. So I'm sure that does shrink our pool of people that we are pulling from, and I think we've seen that. It's never been easy to get people to work in manufacturing, in particular on the night shifts, and that hasn't improved at all. So that's probably one of the biggest risks and fears I think, of manufacturing in general. It's just being able to attract those people that don't mind coming to work every day and especially working in the evenings.

Nick McLean:

I completely agree. One area that really fascinates me as I talk to different business owners and just my friends and colleagues and whatnot, is the concept of luck versus hard work. Is that something that you ever think about as it relates to your career? Obviously it's maybe some combination of the two. Is that something you think about? Because some people say, oh, it's all hard work, no luck. Other people say, I just got lucky, and other people say, that's a stupid question. I don't want to spend time thinking about it. How would you respond to that?

Brian Lennon:

For me, I've had opportunities, but honestly, I think a lot of people have opportunities. I think the key in life, both personally and for your business is recognizing those opportunities and then figuring out how to capitalize on them. And I think maybe that is what equals luck, because luck, we've been very fortunate at General to be successful. I guess luck would be, hey, they get that call from that customer that you've been looking for. Oh, why did that customer call you? And it's probably because, hey, you've been writing these blogs and your Google search criteria is high. So when he was searching for that, it came up. So I think if you do the right things behind the scenes, then you put yourself in a position for those lucky things to happen.

And then the key is recognizing opportunities and attacking them. You got to make things happen. You can't just hope things go your way. Once you see an opportunity, you got to figure out, okay, how do I set the stage where I can make this happen?

Nick McLean:

So you brought up two really interesting points there. You said recognizing an opportunity and then doing whatever it takes in order to capitalize on that opportunity. Do you feel like your specific skillset is better at one versus the other?

Brian Lennon:

I think I'm probably half decent at both of them. I think you have to do both in order to succeed. So yeah, I think I'm always listening. I'm always reading. I'm always thinking about opportunities in any event that occurs. Even when bad things happen, it's like, all right, how do I make the best of this situation? This machine broke down and you know what? We've been trying to put a robot in this machine for two years and we haven't had time. It's down. We're going to put a robot on it.

And then just having I think, determination. What drives me nuts a lot of times is if you want to get from point A to point B, just thinking of the problem as a whole might seem insurmountable, but break it down into steps. What needs to occur, and then putting that plan together to get the results that you need. I think almost anything is achievable if you have enough time and if you think it through and just, yeah. I often find it aggravating that not more people can do that, but I think just maybe not everybody's wired that way.

Nick McLean:

It's an interesting point. Even when I look at my kids, sometimes their rooms will be an incredible mess and I almost have to be impressed at how messy they can make their room in such a short amount of time. There's a level of efficiency there. Then when you ask them to clean it up, it feels like such a daunting problem to try to clean that up, even though similarly to what you said, just break the problem down and start attacking it piece by piece.

I wonder if that is a key part of how some people that are running their business struggle for growth. They see all this opportunity and it's really just daunting because they don't know how to make these big changes and they aren't able to break that down. Have you experienced any circumstances where you're working with business owners and you feel like they haven't been able to break down those bigger problems and try to solve them?

Brian Lennon:

I think logical thinking, logical problem solving, there is a strong lack of that, and I really don't think it's really taught anywhere along the way. Now, I remember one of my first jobs at General was I set up our process monitoring system which monitored all the die casting machines for speeds and pressures. It collected all this production data and I had this database with all this data in it. So I was learning how to program databases and do queries, and I think it was one of the most valuable experiences of my life because it really taught me to think logically. If you wanted this data to come out in this order to get this result, you have to code it just right or it doesn't give you the result that you want.

So I think that thought process really helped me look at really everything in a different way. I think that's a skill that we really need to think about in schools is critical thinking, logical problem solving because I think it's a concept that just not many people get experience with.

Nick McLean:

I completely agree. I remember whenever I was interviewing for jobs at some of the top consultancies, they'd have these logic puzzles that you would have to solve, and I'd read through some of them. I'd think, I've never seen problems like this before. This is important. If these really well-known and established and successful companies think this type of skill is valuable, why is there none of that in any of the 16 years or whatever of schooling that I've been in? It's an interesting point that you bring up there.

One thing though, I want to definitely give you praise because I remember whenever we first started talking, I heard about some of the things you were doing. You had the eBook about die casting and how to use die casting in different applications and whatnot. You started a blog. We're talking about a manufacturing company. Yes, it's high-tech. There's a lot of engineering that goes into the cavities and the shot pressures and whatnot. But at the end of the day, I mean this is just basic manufacturing, so I have to give you a lot of praise for being progressive as it comes to marketing. Where do you think that came from?

Brian Lennon:

Yeah, I can't say it was a big personal light bulb moment, but had some good advice from a few different people. One in particular is a good friend of mine and has been a mentor, Chris Gilmore. He ran Godfrey Wing, which is a vacuum impregnator. Really sharp business guy and they turned me on to the inbound marketing concept because what we had been doing previously just wasn't... Most of our business we had won by word of mouth and just didn't like our fate of the company just waiting for that phone call. So know we had to take a more active role. Chris was telling me how inbound marketing was very successful for his manufacturing business, and I admittedly always enjoyed creative writing and I've never had the opportunity to tie that into work. So having the opportunity to get to sit down and write about some of the things that I'm the most passionate about was very appealing as well.

And then we were pretty lucky to find a local company that specialized in inbound marketing right here in Twinsburg, Felber marketing and PR, that he really helped us a lot to along the way. Introduced us to HubSpot and showed us the ropes of inbound marketing. So yeah, getting back to recognizing opportunities. You hear something that, you know what, that sounds right, and then figuring out the steps that needed to happen to bring it to life. And yeah, we've got a couple eBooks now and lots of blogs and it's definitely helped a lot, both developing the brand and bringing a lot of traffic to the GDC website.

Nick McLean:

One more question before we try to wrap this up. One word or concept I've heard you talk about twice now I think, is a mentor that you've had throughout your career. We've only been talking for about 30 minutes now, and you've talked about a mentor twice. So it really sounds to me like mentors have played a meaningful part in the development of your career and whatnot. Can you talk a little bit about the impact that mentors have had on you?

Brian Lennon:

Oh yeah. If there's anyway that I've been lucky, I would say just having the opportunity to work with a lot of good people. I mean, I think most importantly is my father. My father worked in die casting his whole life. Him and his partner purchased General Die Casters in 2000. But yeah, I got to work with him for almost 20 years and one of the best business people around. He was one of the best people around working with people. He just taught me so much about getting people to work together, respecting people, respecting the team. Of all the things that he's proud of building the business, the one thing he is most proud of is all the people that he's helped. He never forgot about the people that were running the machines on the floor. He always tried to take care of those people, and I always try to live by that because it's the team that makes it work. No one person does it on their own.

Nick McLean:

So if you have to think about one struggle in your career that has been particularly impactful that you really feel like could be a teachable moment not only for other business owners, but maybe for people rising through the ranks or whatever, is there one or two of those real core moments in your career that you felt like was a significant crossroads that either led you to where you are today or would've been something different? Or do you feel like it's just been more little steps along the way where you've been continuing to build knowledge? How would you answer that question?

Brian Lennon:

You know, I would say it's mostly little steps. I mean, there are those events that occur that kind of make you rethink things. The challenges of our business is selecting new work and especially at General. We pride ourselves in making very difficult parts. So we get a lot of quotes for very difficult parts. And for a while there, my mentality was, this is our thing. We need to take on the hardest things out there. But you know what, that's not always the smartest business decision. So it's weighing what you're capable of, what you personally think you can do, what you can achieve with what's good for the business and not taking on too much risk. I stepped over that line once at a project for an automotive project back 15 years ago now probably. And it was a part that was basically unmanufacturable.

Before that we would always work and the customer would always recognize, hey, you know what? They're doing the best they can. We need to work with them on this. And this customer just drew the line in the sand. We were standing in the face of physics, and I'm like, we can't do it. You want it. And then things got pretty ugly.

That always stands out as an important learning topic. And I think that's when I started putting the business hat on more than the engineer hat sometimes. That was a very important lesson there. And there have been many of them. But yeah, that's definitely one that sticks in my head.

Nick McLean:

In thinking back on our conversation, there's a couple of themes that really stand out to me. One, it's recognizing opportunity, looking for opportunity, and also recognizing that this might not be a home run type opportunity. And then once you recognize that opportunity, taking action on it. And then the second theme might be how the positive influence various mentors, coworkers, family members, et cetera, have been on your career and on your life as well, and how they have smarts in certain areas that you can learn from.

Brian Lennon:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it was very fun talking through these things and yeah, I think you hit on a couple big topics in my life. So yeah, I would definitely say those are two important areas of how I've managed to be successful. Yeah.

Nick McLean:

Well, good. I really appreciate your time. We've mentioned time management being a critical part of your job, and so taking an hour away from that, I just am very appreciative that you would do so. Just again, want to thank you for that. Also, where can our listeners go to learn more about General Die Casters and Dart Casting?

Brian Lennon:

Sure. Website's a great place to start, generaldie.com and dartcasting.com and then of course we're on all the social media feeds as well. But yeah, check out our websites and go from there.

Nick McLean:

Great. This podcast will be released on all the platforms. So again, thanks for your time. Really enjoyed it and looking forward to talking to you again.

Brian Lennon:

Thanks, Nick. Been a pleasure.

Nick McLean:

Brian's story is ripe with optimism and surprising perspective shifts that we can all learn from. For example, he sees a machine breaking down as an opportunity to accomplish an important company goal. That sounds crazy, until you realize that it is actually incredibly efficient. Challenges are always going to arise in business even at scale, and it's all about how you react to them.

Brian's mindset is built on a foundation of critical thinking and logic, skills he credits for helping him break seemingly insurmountable problems down into small steps that lead to a solution. Showing up every day is an important part of success. Much like running a marathon, commitment and determination are the daily steps that get you to the finish line, not talent alone. The impressive growth of General Die Casters and the company's successful merger with Dart, are the hard won evidence of Brian's ability to see opportunities in surprising places and take action to achieve targeted results.

The next time you're faced with a problem, ask yourself if it might actually be a stepping stone toward your goals. If you are inspired by this episode of Ambition, please share it with a friend or colleague. Thanks for listening.