Shop Talk
Data-Driven Decisions: Driving Growth and Expansion with Control
Identity & metadata
Video title
Data-Driven Decisions: Driving Growth and Expansion with Control | Steelhead Shop Talk
Host
Dean Halonen
Guest
Dina Wing
Company
Precision Spray + Coatings
Guest title
Director of Business Planning and Operations
Recorded
August 20, 2026
Video type
Steelhead Shop Talk Podcast Episode
AI-optimized summary block
What this episode covers
Dean Halonen sits down with Dina Wing of Precision Spray + Coatings to discuss how better data and operational visibility can help manufacturers make stronger decisions, expand into new markets, manage growth, and maintain control as the business becomes more complex.
Core themes
• Data-driven decision making
• Manufacturing growth and expansion
• Operational visibility
• Diversifying into new markets
• Capacity and process planning
• Using better information to maintain control while scaling
• Manufacturing growth and expansion
• Operational visibility
• Diversifying into new markets
• Capacity and process planning
• Using better information to maintain control while scaling
Core takeaway
Growth is easier to manage when leaders have reliable data, clear visibility into operations, and the ability to understand where opportunities and constraints exist before making the next move.
Full transcript
Transcript notes
Full raw transcript from the provided recording. Timestamps, repetitions, filler words, and transcription errors are preserved.
Transcript
[00:00:02.070 - 00:00:06.550]
Dean Halonen: Hello everybody, my name is Dean. I'm one of the co-founders and CRO of Steelhead.
[00:00:06.560 - 00:00:24.160]
Dean Halonen: And this is ShopTalk, so ShopTalk is for those that have dedicated their livelihood to the craft of manufacturing, and today we have a very special guest, Dina Wing from Precision Spray and Coatings in Texas, Houston, Texas, where the weather is a little hotter than it is here up in,
[00:00:24.260 - 00:00:41.059]
Dean Halonen: Up in Minnesota, but just a touch, but Dina, maybe starting off with you, could you explain precision spray at the high level, what you guys offer? And then also what, like, kind of how you got involved with Precision Spray, maybe what you were doing before, and kind of what your role is now.
[00:00:41.380 - 00:00:52.469]
Dina Wing: Absolutely. So Precision Spray and Coatings is a mid-sized, industrial hard metal coating company. We do, chrome coating, electroplating in…
[00:00:52.760 - 00:00:59.440]
Dina Wing: 6 30-foot deep tanks, and another 6? 15-foot tanks for smaller parts.
[00:00:59.440 - 00:01:14.710]
Dina Wing: And then we also do, HVOF spray. We have several booths for spraying carbide, chrome carbide, that kind of thing. We recently expanded into a new building that is about to come online, which has added
[00:01:14.710 - 00:01:24.860]
Dina Wing: plasma spray capacity to our offerings, and we are doing spray infused now. And then we have all the attendant
[00:01:24.880 - 00:01:33.710]
Dina Wing: Machining capabilities, so polishing, honing, grinding, ball lapping, that sort of… offering. So it's…
[00:01:34.420 - 00:01:42.660]
Dina Wing: Pretty focused on, wear and corrosion resistance, and any… any function that can… Help us.
[00:01:43.790 - 00:01:45.370]
Dina Wing: manage those parts.
[00:01:45.760 - 00:02:02.290]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, and pretty intensive in the oil and gas. Obviously, in Texas, a lot of people lean oil and gas, but what parts are these actually, like, what oil and gas parts are there? Is it, like, deep-sea rigs? Is it pipes? Is it, like, cracking operations?
[00:02:02.620 - 00:02:12.059]
Dina Wing: So it… that leads to a question of, like, how this company has changed over the past 5 years. So, when I first started, in 2021,
[00:02:12.550 - 00:02:19.670]
Dina Wing: this place was, like, 95% drilling. Like, specifically,
[00:02:19.960 - 00:02:31.190]
Dina Wing: rotors for… from power sections, reworking those, I don't know how familiar everyone will be with that specific niche product line, but rotors, mandrels, housings…
[00:02:31.340 - 00:02:37.719]
Dina Wing: that kind of stuff. So it was almost entirely, focused on the drillers,
[00:02:37.770 - 00:02:51.579]
Dina Wing: who… a lot of them headquarter just north of our facility, and then a very short trip, short by Texas standards at least, to the Permian Basin, which is where most of this is happening.
[00:02:52.180 - 00:03:09.380]
Dina Wing: Since then, we have made a very concerted effort to diversify out of just drilling, so rotors has dropped to maybe 50% of our offering. It's still the backbone of the company, and we're very good at those, but we've added, ball valve
[00:03:09.490 - 00:03:19.519]
Dina Wing: Customers, and that's more… I suppose that's more downstream?
[00:03:19.740 - 00:03:31.809]
Dina Wing: Because there's a lot more of, like, the processing of oil and gas, rather than the collection of oil and gas. There's more of the deep-sea rigs, we've started touching those.
[00:03:31.810 - 00:03:44.400]
Dina Wing: We've started touching some mining customers, very limited, because a lot of that is very large stuff, and our infrastructure isn't ready to handle it yet. And then we're getting into, turbines and power generation.
[00:03:44.470 - 00:03:50.800]
Dina Wing: Hydraulic parts, So we've added all of these product lines,
[00:03:51.240 - 00:03:59.220]
Dina Wing: really within the last two to three years, we've been ramping up. Rotating equipment just started this year. Ball valves, we really…
[00:03:59.550 - 00:04:07.149]
Dina Wing: Went from zero to a significant percentage of our company, within the last year and a half.
[00:04:08.309 - 00:04:21.360]
Dean Halonen: Okay, so you made a little pivot there. I guess, Dina, what was your experience before? Have you always been in oil and gas, or have you always been in manufacturing, or how did you get to be, I would say, a very strong leader at Precision Spray? How did you get here?
[00:04:21.590 - 00:04:25.359]
Dina Wing: It's actually kind of a funny story, because… so I…
[00:04:25.550 - 00:04:44.889]
Dina Wing: My education is in literature. I had absolutely no prospects or intentions of going into manufacturing when I was coming out of school. It wasn't a thought in my mind. But my… the president of the company that I work for, John Jenkins, he…
[00:04:45.020 - 00:04:46.599]
Dina Wing: I knew him…
[00:04:47.720 - 00:04:53.900]
Dina Wing: not socially, but he had worked with family members. I knew him outside of that, and when
[00:04:53.900 - 00:05:10.909]
Dina Wing: the previous company we both worked for was setting up a facility, an expansion, in… out of the country, and I had lived in that country and was comfortable and familiar with the people there and how to operate there. He hired me as, like.
[00:05:11.620 - 00:05:17.800]
Dina Wing: kind of a… I was, like, the second hire, so it was, like, I would do customer service, I was the receptionist, I did all the things.
[00:05:17.910 - 00:05:27.029]
Dina Wing: supply chain, whatever. Whatever they needed from me, I learned how to do. And, I was there for 3 years, and that was a manufacturing company that,
[00:05:27.270 - 00:05:35.379]
Dina Wing: manufactured power sections. So, that's why my understanding of the rotor business and all the attendant
[00:05:35.970 - 00:05:49.720]
Dina Wing: needs for those parts is very strong, because that's… that was my first job. That's what I did. So I get those, I got real deep into how those work, what those require, in terms of…
[00:05:50.470 - 00:05:57.610]
Dina Wing: Quality needs and… That kind of thing. So I worked there, and then we went through COVID,
[00:05:57.770 - 00:06:08.129]
Dina Wing: during COVID, precision spraying Coatings was, and pre-COVID, was run by, the original guy who started the place, and it was…
[00:06:09.060 - 00:06:15.309]
Dina Wing: A smaller business, a more focused business, and they, when oil kind of…
[00:06:16.590 - 00:06:22.370]
Dina Wing: went negative for a minute during COVID, this facility very nearly closed.
[00:06:22.850 - 00:06:23.400]
Dean Halonen: Oh, wow.
[00:06:23.400 - 00:06:33.949]
Dina Wing: This… this company almost went out of business, because they were so reliant on, the drillers, and the drillers were not drilling. So there was… it was…
[00:06:34.140 - 00:06:43.089]
Dina Wing: they got close. So, the original owner sold a large part of his stake to a board of investors, and that board brought John in.
[00:06:43.260 - 00:06:55.099]
Dina Wing: who had worked for several of the different, OEM manufacturers, and kind of had a very strong grasp of the drilling customers, but also a plan for how to diversify.
[00:06:55.960 - 00:07:01.919]
Dina Wing: John then… very shortly thereafter, called me, and I had been…
[00:07:02.030 - 00:07:17.519]
Dina Wing: hoping to move back from the Middle East, so, I took the job, and here we are. And I started mostly just customer service, but I have been adding additional responsibilities ever since.
[00:07:17.970 - 00:07:20.630]
Dean Halonen: Wow, so you started off at Precision Spring Customer Service.
[00:07:20.630 - 00:07:25.959]
Dina Wing: Not even as customer service manager, I was just a representative. I was basically the account…
[00:07:26.030 - 00:07:41.570]
Dina Wing: like, primary point of contact for all of our rotor customers. And then over the last 5 years, I took a manager role, so I picked up responsibility for the rest of the team and all the different product lines.
[00:07:41.740 - 00:07:49.510]
Dina Wing: Then, I think he gave me, planning, so I started planning, all of the…
[00:07:50.150 - 00:08:06.319]
Dina Wing: work running through the shop, then it was the Steelhead implementation, and all of the processes and work alongside that, so I still am the primary power user for Steelhead, and any changes we make, the… I drive that.
[00:08:06.380 - 00:08:15.230]
Dina Wing: And then, within the last year, when I got the Director of Business Planning, and Operations title, we added Supply Chain.
[00:08:15.690 - 00:08:16.770]
Dina Wing: in IT.
[00:08:18.260 - 00:08:18.890]
Dean Halonen: Nice.
[00:08:19.020 - 00:08:21.920]
Dean Halonen: Just keep adding, and adding, and adding.
[00:08:21.920 - 00:08:27.660]
Dina Wing: like, outside of my actual, like, written job description, I've been just…
[00:08:27.920 - 00:08:30.800]
Dina Wing: Putting my nose in everyone's business and towards that.
[00:08:32.370 - 00:08:37.360]
Dina Wing: data analysis and all kinds of stuff, so I'm just… I'm a very nosy person. I want my hands in everything.
[00:08:37.780 - 00:08:53.389]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, which is good, I think, to understand the whole picture, so you can start to make better, strategic decisions. Now, speaking of that, one of them was, you sound like you're in drilling, and you kind of pivoted out of it, or actively, or made a concerted effort to diversify.
[00:08:53.390 - 00:08:59.459]
Dean Halonen: Which is honestly, I think, a good idea in hindsight. You guys have been doing really well.
[00:08:59.990 - 00:09:10.050]
Dean Halonen: the… it's one thing we see often in Texas, especially, but also, like, in the automotive industry, is, like, people kind of throw their hands up in the air and say, hey.
[00:09:10.050 - 00:09:20.920]
Dean Halonen: as automotive rides or dies, we ride or die. Or as oil and gas, you know, goes up and down, we're just gonna ride along with it. But it seems like you guys have a different approach, like, you're not gonna just…
[00:09:21.150 - 00:09:25.030]
Dean Halonen: fall, if one market falls, right? So where does that…
[00:09:25.350 - 00:09:31.919]
Dean Halonen: come from, like, that… that… I guess that competitiveness to… to adapt, and then how do you actually do it?
[00:09:32.580 - 00:09:42.170]
Dina Wing: So, I think it's large part driven by our management. Like, John, we are very lucky to have a president who thoroughly understands
[00:09:42.300 - 00:09:58.919]
Dina Wing: what this facility is capable of, and has the ability to match that to a variety of industries that they'd never looked at before. So, the… the ball valve expansion specifically, that's a lot of very specific
[00:09:59.380 - 00:10:02.799]
Dina Wing: operator knowledge. Like, a…
[00:10:02.940 - 00:10:16.179]
Dina Wing: a layperson or a regular grinder is not going to be able to just start doing that without any problems. The machines are very, specific, the skills are very specific, so we had started trying to do it
[00:10:17.010 - 00:10:28.019]
Dina Wing: like I said, a year and a half ago, we had, like, our first order, and we were… we were trying so hard to get this order through, and we had a heck of a time. And we…
[00:10:28.220 - 00:10:35.359]
Dina Wing: we're searching for people. So, this is the kind of business where personal expertise
[00:10:36.100 - 00:10:50.030]
Dina Wing: is… it is the business. And we managed to find some extremely talented people who had previously worked for a company that, at one point, was the leader in the space.
[00:10:50.670 - 00:10:58.330]
Dina Wing: company went out of business for various reasons that I'm not going to go deeply into, but we managed to pick up
[00:10:58.600 - 00:11:06.069]
Dina Wing: Salesperson… Sort of a product line manager, and…
[00:11:06.070 - 00:11:26.750]
Dina Wing: QC inspector, several operators, who had all had that experience, who knew the customers, who knew the machines, and what was needed. So we just kind of went on a scavenger hunt, finding those people that could fill those roles. And we found the first one, and she was extremely valuable, and kind of led us to the rest of them, and
[00:11:27.320 - 00:11:35.320]
Dina Wing: since then, it's sort of skyrocketed. We went from… Like, maybe doing… one order,
[00:11:40.590 - 00:11:46.159]
Dina Wing: Unlike. We started trying in 2024, and, were not succeeding.
[00:11:46.930 - 00:11:52.000]
Dina Wing: and Kellyard in 2025. And we went from, like.
[00:11:52.360 - 00:11:59.900]
Dina Wing: $50,000 to $100,000 of ball valve revenue. In June, we did $500,000 of ball valve revenue.
[00:12:00.710 - 00:12:01.260]
Dean Halonen: Ma.
[00:12:01.260 - 00:12:02.869]
Dina Wing: And that's…
[00:12:03.060 - 00:12:11.870]
Dina Wing: With a limited number of machines shoved in a small corner of our current facility, and not even
[00:12:12.180 - 00:12:23.930]
Dina Wing: all of the different spray options that we're planning to have in the new building. So the new building is adding, the plasma spray, and now we're… we're currently… we've just started doing the spray and fuse, and
[00:12:24.140 - 00:12:32.889]
Dina Wing: like, we don't even have all of, like, there are CNCs that we could add to, like, take more of this. There is so much runway.
[00:12:33.290 - 00:12:40.620]
Dina Wing: To get more and more of this business, because what we found is that after, the company…
[00:12:40.990 - 00:12:50.099]
Dina Wing: that used to kind of do all this went out of business. There's, like, two people that do it in the United States, and then everybody else sends their stuff to China or Italy.
[00:12:50.920 - 00:12:52.139]
Dina Wing: Which isn't cheap.
[00:12:52.620 - 00:12:53.210]
Dean Halonen: Yeah.
[00:12:53.470 - 00:12:54.459]
Dean Halonen: It tastes… That should…
[00:12:54.460 - 00:12:55.160]
Dina Wing: I'm…
[00:12:55.410 - 00:12:57.769]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, long lead times, expensive freight.
[00:12:57.770 - 00:13:04.359]
Dina Wing: And a lot of this stuff is the kind of equipment where, if you take it out of where it is.
[00:13:04.510 - 00:13:23.370]
Dina Wing: that's… that's a whole facility shutdown. Like, millions of dollars per hour of shutdown time. So we've struggled with, you know, rapid response. That's kind of what we're… we're focusing on, other than just expanding our… our offerings and…
[00:13:23.550 - 00:13:34.659]
Dina Wing: getting all of the customers to approve us and put us on their AVLs, it's just response time is huge for these customers. It's the same with power generation. They want it in 2 days.
[00:13:34.970 - 00:13:44.859]
Dina Wing: And this is kind of work where we have to remove the old coating, prep the part, make it shiny and straight and clean and beautiful and new,
[00:13:45.120 - 00:13:51.619]
Dina Wing: spray, whatever, or chrome plate, finish grind to whatever RA is required.
[00:13:54.200 - 00:14:12.570]
Dina Wing: keeping… and some of these tolerances are intense now. All of the rotor stuff is a thousandths of an inch, half a thou… at the worst. We would have several thousandths of tolerance, and with these new product lines, it's literally tenths of an inch, or tenths… tenths of a thousandths?
[00:14:13.230 - 00:14:17.120]
Dina Wing: Yeah, so .000… 1.
[00:14:17.610 - 00:14:18.960]
Dean Halonen: Wow. Wow.
[00:14:18.960 - 00:14:20.650]
Dina Wing: So that's been a bit of a struggle.
[00:14:20.820 - 00:14:30.400]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, so extremely high quality, extremely fast turn times, and I'm sure that leads to, if you can pull it off, some great, some great revenue.
[00:14:31.350 - 00:14:36.370]
Dina Wing: Yeah, those, those are, those are nice. The margins on those are pretty, pretty nice.
[00:14:36.550 - 00:14:51.410]
Dean Halonen: Pretty nice. So, Dina, there's a… that's amazing, and I'm guessing you were able to make this, determination to diversify based on some slowing sales numbers and the original,
[00:14:51.950 - 00:15:09.119]
Dean Halonen: drilling market, or maybe you've seen it in the news, and then… and then made that call. So, very, successful strategic decision. And I would say, this is my opinion, you are, inside of Steelhead, I think, put on a pedestal to some degree, based on your…
[00:15:09.560 - 00:15:25.689]
Dean Halonen: I think your superpower is, well, A, you're always willing to dig in and figure things out and, like, get the most possible out of the company or steelhead, which can be the one and the same. In my opinion, your superpower is…
[00:15:26.720 - 00:15:28.620]
Dean Halonen: data analysis.
[00:15:29.240 - 00:15:34.329]
Dean Halonen: And I think that comes in many different vectors, but one of them is…
[00:15:34.930 - 00:15:50.480]
Dean Halonen: One of them is, I think, job costing, and another one could be, like, tracking the quality that you mentioned, or another one could be the… the idle parts, you know, like, knowing what parts are sitting. So maybe just…
[00:15:50.480 - 00:16:00.140]
Dean Halonen: if you could explain at the highest level, like, when Dina Wing walks in at 8 AM, or the first day of the month, or the first day of the quarter, or the first day of the year, like, what do you…
[00:16:00.430 - 00:16:08.680]
Dean Halonen: what are you thinking about? What are you looking at? What's your approach to data analysis, today?
[00:16:09.530 - 00:16:16.469]
Dina Wing: Alright, that's… that's a hard problem, because it's changed so much over the course of this year. I mean…
[00:16:16.490 - 00:16:31.110]
Dina Wing: Pre-Steelhead, so we've been with you guys since 2024. Before that, I would start every day, but with 2 hours of pulling every single clock in that anyone had done, and putting that manually into a spreadsheet, so I understand
[00:16:31.110 - 00:16:36.659]
Dina Wing: Who had touched what part, and where everything was, and how long… much longer it was gonna take.
[00:16:36.850 - 00:16:42.649]
Dina Wing: for every single part in this facility. And, like, right now, we have… I don't know.
[00:16:42.940 - 00:16:53.460]
Dina Wing: 800, 900 active work orders. It was less than, but most of those work orders have multiple parts on them. So just a huge number of
[00:16:54.080 - 00:17:04.049]
Dina Wing: objects rotating through this facility, and it would take me 2 hours every morning just to do that, just to collect the information, not even go to make decisions.
[00:17:04.159 - 00:17:10.320]
Dina Wing: So the blessing of Steelhead is… It has reduced friction.
[00:17:11.399 - 00:17:19.460]
Dina Wing: In the company from, like, Our regular operators, our people who aren't really great with computers.
[00:17:19.870 - 00:17:32.229]
Dina Wing: putting their data in, so labor hours, clock-ins, I'm not saying we're great. We're not great at it. Our data integrity is not where I want it to be, but we're improving, and we're doing things every week to see what else
[00:17:32.830 - 00:17:39.070]
Dina Wing: we can make easier for them. Like, where have… has management failed to…
[00:17:39.330 - 00:17:45.349]
Dina Wing: serve our employees so they can give us the data that I want, right? So…
[00:17:46.190 - 00:18:06.170]
Dina Wing: now, I mean, the beginning of my month and the end of my month are very different things. The beginning of the month, I'm doing data analysis of, like, a post-mortem of the previous month. I want to know, how many corrective actions we went through, I want to know how many returns we had to deal with, I want to know what our cost of poor quality was.
[00:18:06.290 - 00:18:13.050]
Dina Wing: how much opportunity cost are we wasting on parts that we're not getting any sales from because we messed up?
[00:18:14.540 - 00:18:17.670]
Dina Wing: what is the source of those mess-ups? Like.
[00:18:18.090 - 00:18:24.699]
Dina Wing: do we have a pricing problem, or do we have a quality problem? So, recently we've added,
[00:18:25.120 - 00:18:38.720]
Dina Wing: several KPIs, that's been my project all year, has been putting into place all these KPIs, actually discussing them on a monthly basis, and really generating action items and objectives based on
[00:18:38.830 - 00:18:42.220]
Dina Wing: How we did, instead of based on, sort of.
[00:18:43.160 - 00:18:49.460]
Dina Wing: I feel like we could probably fix this thing over here if we did these 5 tasks.
[00:18:49.720 - 00:18:56.440]
Dina Wing: we're trying to move away from, well, I think it's this, to, here, look at these numbers.
[00:18:58.140 - 00:19:10.789]
Dina Wing: explicitly, these numbers are what the problem is. So, for instance, last month, we had our best month of on-time delivery in, 11 months. -Oh.
[00:19:10.940 - 00:19:16.739]
Dina Wing: still not where I want it to be, mind you, but it's probably better. We had…
[00:19:17.580 - 00:19:23.380]
Dina Wing: An improvement of how many returns that came in, but we had a significant drop in first pass yield.
[00:19:23.520 - 00:19:27.920]
Dina Wing: Obviously, we were catching our quality escapes before they escaped.
[00:19:28.030 - 00:19:35.789]
Dina Wing: It's a very convenient pattern, and it's easy to explain. It's like, okay, how do we do more? We had…
[00:19:37.430 - 00:19:41.090]
Dina Wing: It wasn't our best month. The last June was our…
[00:19:41.370 - 00:19:48.309]
Dina Wing: highest month we've ever had, but July was… July was a little bit lower, but it was still… it was still a very good month, mind you.
[00:19:48.510 - 00:19:55.590]
Dina Wing: But, for instance, we had a certain amount of overtime, we had a certain amount of labor hours, and the…
[00:19:56.660 - 00:20:06.550]
Dina Wing: The instinct has been, when we can't hit a certain gross margin percentage, which we have a set goal, has been, okay, we need to raise costs.
[00:20:06.900 - 00:20:13.300]
Dina Wing: Powder costs have gone up, electricity costs have gone up, rent has gone up, everything!
[00:20:14.130 - 00:20:14.770]
Dina Wing: Including.
[00:20:15.250 - 00:20:32.850]
Dina Wing: Right? Like, it always does. So, okay, we need to increase our prices. Let's figure out who is… who we can increase prices on, and how fast we can do it, and how… what that will do. But the… the metrics that I'm running now are showing it's not a cost issue, it's a rework issue.
[00:20:33.670 - 00:20:34.350]
Dean Halonen: Wow.
[00:20:34.350 - 00:20:37.880]
Dina Wing: We are spending too much time fixing problems.
[00:20:39.290 - 00:20:41.209]
Dina Wing: That is eating into our revenue.
[00:20:42.200 - 00:20:51.059]
Dean Halonen: Wow, so your cost of poor quality… Exactly. And how do you track cost of poor quality? Is it labor and materials you're tracking on the…
[00:20:51.060 - 00:20:59.810]
Dina Wing: So, the materials is harder to do for some of our product lines, like, it's very difficult to get an accurate understanding of how much, like.
[00:21:00.400 - 00:21:06.329]
Dina Wing: chrome flake or hydrochloric acid a part has been exposed to.
[00:21:06.620 - 00:21:15.249]
Dina Wing: which I know there are companies that do it, we haven't gotten that far. But, powder costs were very specific, and then we have arrived at an overhead cost.
[00:21:16.080 - 00:21:22.860]
Dina Wing: For labor, that takes into account, okay, how much does the electricity cost, how much does payroll cost, etc.
[00:21:22.860 - 00:21:25.130]
Dean Halonen: Fully loaded labor shop rate, yeah.
[00:21:25.130 - 00:21:43.570]
Dina Wing: Right. So we have that, the powder costs, and, any outsourcing costs that are needed. So we've… a lot of these new product lines, we've had to do more outsourcing, because the equipment that we're going to use to service those markets isn't quite live yet. So we're kind of…
[00:21:43.640 - 00:21:49.629]
Dina Wing: Selling before we… are 100% ready to get there, but it's been working, so…
[00:21:49.850 - 00:22:09.389]
Dean Halonen: So that's pretty cool. A lot of… a lot of people in the industry, if they're missing the data, what they do is kind of what you… what you hinted at. It's like, hey, our margins aren't as good as we want them to be. Okay, well, here's all of our part prices in our portfolio. We need to make, you know, 5 or 10 more points, right, to get our target.
[00:22:09.390 - 00:22:10.610]
Dina Wing: 10%.
[00:22:10.610 - 00:22:11.690]
Dean Halonen: Just price increases.
[00:22:11.690 - 00:22:17.149]
Dina Wing: But that's not necessarily the problem. Like, our problem is not pricing, it's efficiency.
[00:22:17.740 - 00:22:21.389]
Dina Wing: That requires completely different tactics to solve.
[00:22:22.120 - 00:22:31.089]
Dean Halonen: Right. And then you don't risk churning good customers. Like, that's the risk of, like, if you just crank all the prices up, well then maybe… maybe you lose some great.
[00:22:31.090 - 00:22:31.980]
Dina Wing: Whatever.
[00:22:31.980 - 00:22:36.209]
Dean Halonen: Right, right. So you can't really charge them for your mistakes, in a way.
[00:22:36.350 - 00:22:54.119]
Dean Halonen: So… and then, Dina, I know you mentioned, so you spoke at one of our Revenue Riptide events about the, or maybe you mentioned this, I actually wasn't there, I was having our second baby during the last Revenue Riptide, but what I heard from my colleagues is that you had an idea of…
[00:22:54.120 - 00:23:01.809]
Dean Halonen: like, the idle parts, the idle parts, idea. Do you want to explain where that came from and what the… what the outcome has been?
[00:23:02.010 - 00:23:06.940]
Dina Wing: Sure. It started with, my previous job.
[00:23:06.940 - 00:23:26.050]
Dina Wing: They used to have what they called a war room, which is a very overblown name, for a meeting that happens on a regular schedule of business, where they just talk about the problems, the problem parts. Either parts that have sat around for too long, parts that we've reworked too many times, parts that are expected to be expedited, that kind of thing.
[00:23:26.480 - 00:23:29.520]
Dina Wing: And they used to have that war room meeting.
[00:23:29.730 - 00:23:35.649]
Dina Wing: Every day. At Precision, it's… we already have so many meetings. I'm not trying to add…
[00:23:36.460 - 00:23:46.510]
Dina Wing: People need to go and do their jobs, not just talk about doing their jobs. So, we started having a twice-a-week, slow-moving parts meeting.
[00:23:46.580 - 00:24:05.069]
Dina Wing: And, we go through things that are on quality hold in Steelhead, any returns that are currently running through the system, where they are, what they need, because those are always going to be hot, they're always going to be a problem, we've already done something wrong on them, so attention needs to be paid. And then.
[00:24:05.080 - 00:24:17.110]
Dina Wing: anything that sits still for too long. And how long too long is has changed dramatically, over the course of the time that I've been tracking it.
[00:24:17.310 - 00:24:34.320]
Dina Wing: Because we have just way more work. It used to be… there was a period where our lead times had dropped, like, in the rotor side, we were returning rotors… OEMs in, like, a week, and we were turning used parts in, like, 2 to 3.
[00:24:34.320 - 00:24:34.900]
Dean Halonen: Oh.
[00:24:35.230 - 00:24:44.010]
Dina Wing: partially because there was less demand, actually mostly because there was less demand. Now we have so much demand, there's… there's the…
[00:24:44.810 - 00:24:49.650]
Dina Wing: almost 400 rotors in this facility. That's the most we've ever had by…
[00:24:50.250 - 00:24:54.709]
Dina Wing: I don't know, that's double what we were rocking last year at this time, I think.
[00:24:54.710 - 00:24:55.220]
Dean Halonen: Wow.
[00:24:55.220 - 00:25:05.640]
Dina Wing: End of July, we had 90 rotors in-house. So obviously, we were turning them at an incredibly fast rate. Now, we have stuff that has to sit and wait.
[00:25:06.130 - 00:25:10.569]
Dina Wing: Because everyone is sending their parts to us. It's, one of those problems you want to have.
[00:25:13.690 - 00:25:16.619]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, it's almost… it's a good problem to have,
[00:25:16.620 - 00:25:17.000]
Dina Wing: Everything.
[00:25:17.000 - 00:25:20.130]
Dean Halonen: How have the customers reacted to that? Those,
[00:25:20.910 - 00:25:25.720]
Dina Wing: I mean, they don't love it. They don't love the extended lead times, but…
[00:25:26.580 - 00:25:40.610]
Dina Wing: we have done a good enough job at our quality and communication and managing our prices that, they don't want to go anywhere else, even if they're taking longer. So…
[00:25:42.340 - 00:25:59.669]
Dina Wing: There are some customers that are very lead time specific, and sometimes we can't meet their expectations, and they have to go somewhere else. It is what it is. There are enough that want the quality that we provide, and the communication that we provide, that we don't have a problem filling our lanes.
[00:25:59.960 - 00:26:02.539]
Dina Wing: Which is a great position to be in.
[00:26:04.040 - 00:26:07.130]
Dina Wing: The question started with slow-moving parts. Right, so…
[00:26:07.390 - 00:26:26.090]
Dina Wing: I had asked, when we first implemented Steelhead for a report, like, a custom report that just showed, all the work orders and how long they had gone since they'd moved the last time. Because you could filter and find, okay, this part has been sitting for 2 weeks.
[00:26:26.340 - 00:26:27.340]
Dina Wing: Why?
[00:26:27.570 - 00:26:37.949]
Dina Wing: What is wrong with it? It's been sitting, for 48 hours, and it's expedited. That's bad. We have only 4 days. That's the half the lead time.
[00:26:38.400 - 00:26:56.389]
Dina Wing: let's go! So… I had explained that to the Steelhead team, they'd made me a custom report, which was great, we loved it, we used it. It had dropped, I think the metric… this was last year, obviously, so we had way less backlog, but it had dropped our average, like, dock-to-doc time.
[00:26:57.320 - 00:27:04.789]
Dina Wing: Gosh, what was the number? I put it on that, presentation. It had dropped it, like, to a third of what it was, or something ridiculous.
[00:27:04.790 - 00:27:06.950]
Dean Halonen: 27 to 7 days or something?
[00:27:07.390 - 00:27:13.120]
Dina Wing: Yeah, something like that. Which is… it's very, average, so it's…
[00:27:13.200 - 00:27:29.709]
Dina Wing: some things are much longer, some things are much shorter. But it was, it was still, it was a huge accomplishment. We were very excited about it. And then, when I, mentioned that, that at the Revenue Riptide, your team performed a, very rapid
[00:27:29.710 - 00:27:34.889]
Dina Wing: miracle, and made it available to everyone, which I thought was…
[00:27:35.180 - 00:27:42.650]
Dina Wing: really incredible. So it's… it's in the, watchtower, where you can just filter by what hasn't moved for the longest.
[00:27:43.710 - 00:27:44.330]
Dean Halonen: Yep.
[00:27:44.860 - 00:27:48.910]
Dina Wing: Huge inc… huge convenience for… for… for me, and…
[00:27:49.210 - 00:28:05.460]
Dina Wing: people on my team who are looking for parts that sit around. Because, I mean, a lot of the time, the majority of your work is rolling through the shop, no problem. Like, you don't have an issue, it just goes. But if there's anything that moves it outside of the lanes.
[00:28:05.570 - 00:28:18.580]
Dina Wing: And it gets missed, you might have a part that's just sitting in dust, like, hiding beneath a rack, put to the side, stacked under another box, and it gets lost.
[00:28:19.360 - 00:28:24.669]
Dina Wing: And, that's basically solved this problem for us entirely.
[00:28:25.060 - 00:28:30.770]
Dean Halonen: Wow. And do you get the emails, too? I think you have… there's an ability to get an email after X amount of hours.
[00:28:30.770 - 00:28:42.429]
Dina Wing: We haven't really used that so much, just because our lead times change… are so different between business units. Got it. Some where the expectation is… is, like.
[00:28:42.860 - 00:28:49.330]
Dina Wing: a week to 10 days. We have some where the expectation is 2 weeks. We have some where our lead times are out to almost 10 weeks.
[00:28:49.330 - 00:28:49.739]
Dean Halonen: Oh, wow.
[00:28:49.740 - 00:28:56.240]
Dina Wing: So, we can't really set an across-the-board, if it's spent more than 24 hours idle.
[00:28:56.560 - 00:28:59.330]
Dina Wing: screen, you know what I mean? It won't…
[00:29:00.010 - 00:29:04.699]
Dina Wing: It's not effective, so it has to be looked at manually, but we do it twice a week, it's not a big deal.
[00:29:05.090 - 00:29:12.369]
Dean Halonen: Awesome. And then, Dina, one thing I remember talking to you, I think years ago, or either you or John, but the… the…
[00:29:12.430 - 00:29:28.020]
Dean Halonen: job costing data, when it comes to, like, repricing parts, or, like, handling… because, like, no one wants to raise the price on the customer if you don't have to, like you mentioned. If you can fix it with internal processes, great. Because when you raise the price, it's obviously…
[00:29:28.180 - 00:29:45.720]
Dean Halonen: the sensitive thing is the customer might go somewhere else, right? So how have you handled that conversation with your sales team, or with your customer, just to be, like, very transparent, to gain their trust, and to charge a fair price for the service?
[00:29:45.720 - 00:29:48.969]
Dina Wing: Yeah, it, so we have different tactics,
[00:29:49.640 - 00:29:56.490]
Dina Wing: for chrome and for carbide. And that's… that's… I'll explain the reasons for that. So, for… on the chrome side.
[00:29:56.490 - 00:30:19.280]
Dina Wing: It's largely been just inflationary. Like, we did have, early on, when John and I first started here, we had to make some big changes to prices, just because they dropped so low, given the demand during COVID, that we had to make serious corrections. And, that was hard for a lot of people to adjust to, but we've, we've gotten there. But,
[00:30:20.500 - 00:30:23.840]
Dina Wing: We do a lot of… Pricing…
[00:30:24.270 - 00:30:39.290]
Dina Wing: that is dependent on how much repair is required, and we have been, flexible as to what the customer has required. So, like, for instance, we have some customers that
[00:30:39.370 - 00:30:46.199]
Dina Wing: Want… they want actuals, but they are willing to accept an invoice
[00:30:46.630 - 00:31:03.920]
Dina Wing: Without a PO being adjusted. So, at the end of the job, we can go in and say, like, okay, so we had to weld it for 2 hours, we had to prep and deal with the damage underneath the previous coating for another 8 hours, and it needed
[00:31:04.570 - 00:31:09.939]
Dina Wing: We have averages in terms of how much chrome thickness is normal.
[00:31:11.410 - 00:31:19.450]
Dina Wing: and then… every sole amount of thousands. Above that, we add a charge to it. So if something needs
[00:31:19.700 - 00:31:24.659]
Dina Wing: 50 thou per side, that's going to be in our chrome tank for, like, 5 days.
[00:31:25.710 - 00:31:33.350]
Dina Wing: it's there forever. If something needs 7 per side, it's like a 12-hour situation, because you only get, like, a thou and a half.
[00:31:33.470 - 00:31:34.920]
Dina Wing: Per hour? Ish?
[00:31:35.490 - 00:31:43.919]
Dina Wing: And we run 24-7, but it's still, like, it occupies space, and that can be expensive in terms of opportunity costs. So we upcharge
[00:31:44.290 - 00:31:50.159]
Dina Wing: based on thickness requirement, we upcharge based on, hours of repair required. And that…
[00:31:51.120 - 00:32:00.239]
Dina Wing: Our customers understand that. They… they don't have to have a giant sticker shock, because these are very large parts, so I'm… I'm talking… we have things that are, like, 20 feet long.
[00:32:00.360 - 00:32:11.040]
Dina Wing: up to 30 feet long in the 30-foot tanks. They're, like, giant bars of steel. They're huge. So any repair work and chrome work and processing.
[00:32:11.430 - 00:32:13.480]
Dina Wing: It's very expensive.
[00:32:13.870 - 00:32:17.819]
Dina Wing: So, if you have a price list that is all in cost.
[00:32:17.950 - 00:32:21.100]
Dina Wing: That all-in cost may be $8,000.
[00:32:21.440 - 00:32:27.400]
Dina Wing: But if you split it up, it's like, okay, if it's within normal parameters, it's gonna be 5 grand.
[00:32:27.680 - 00:32:35.630]
Dina Wing: We're gonna add this much, for hours of additional repair, we're gonna add this much for, hours additional in Chrome.
[00:32:35.870 - 00:32:44.280]
Dina Wing: the… Transparency, they like that. They're comfortable with that, they all trust us, to…
[00:32:44.490 - 00:32:50.369]
Dina Wing: do right by them, and give them a quality part for a reasonable amount of money.
[00:32:51.090 - 00:33:06.339]
Dina Wing: And then, when we need to up it, it's usually a matter of, okay, electricity's gone up, insurance has gone up, here's a list of all the things that have increased in price, we absorbed them for X amount of time, now we have to pass some of it on to you. But generally.
[00:33:06.460 - 00:33:08.440]
Dina Wing: There's some back and forth, but it's not a…
[00:33:09.350 - 00:33:15.189]
Dina Wing: it's not a big deal. It's been harder for thermal spray. I don't know how much…
[00:33:16.240 - 00:33:19.860]
Dina Wing: time you guys have spent looking at the price of tungsten over the last.
[00:33:19.940 - 00:33:23.280]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, I've heard about it. I've heard about it, it's gone crazy, yeah.
[00:33:23.280 - 00:33:33.680]
Dina Wing: Right, so tungsten carbide went from $30 a pound for our normal powders to it peaked at over $200 a pound.
[00:33:33.680 - 00:33:34.140]
Dean Halonen: Wow.
[00:33:34.140 - 00:33:37.420]
Dina Wing: this year. And then we're back down to…
[00:33:37.720 - 00:33:51.619]
Dina Wing: reasonable… I mean, it's not reason… it's still, like, 5 times the price that it was last year, but it's stabilized. We had no choice. We had to pass that cost on. But all of our customers were getting the same.
[00:33:52.160 - 00:33:52.830]
Dean Halonen: Yeah.
[00:33:52.830 - 00:34:10.350]
Dina Wing: information from every vendor and everyone they spoke to. So, at a certain point, there was a lot of arbitrage happening where, like, somebody had an amount of powder that they had at a previous cost, and they could keep prices down for a little bit longer, but eventually it all equaled out.
[00:34:11.050 - 00:34:20.159]
Dina Wing: So, it's… we've been transparent on why the costs are going up, and that's usually been enough that our customers have accepted it.
[00:34:21.050 - 00:34:30.540]
Dean Halonen: Awesome. I see that across our customer base, and everyone that I've really talked to across even all types of metal finishing, is that, like, if you…
[00:34:31.130 - 00:34:39.450]
Dean Halonen: If you can deliver the on-lead times, if you have great quality, and you charge a fair price, like, you can't be the lowest
[00:34:39.570 - 00:34:52.309]
Dean Halonen: cost person, it just doesn't work. You also can't charge, you know, an insane amount, but if you just charge a fair price, the customers typically say, got it, makes sense. One thing we've seen actually work extremely well, Dina, is, like, if you can
[00:34:52.530 - 00:35:08.660]
Dean Halonen: like, sometimes if you look at a part number and it actually is too high, the price was… maybe it took quicker than expected, actually lowering some prices is a great way to say, like, hey, we're just trying to charge the fair… the fair price here. Have you guys ever lowered prices for customers?
[00:35:08.910 - 00:35:13.560]
Dina Wing: We have a couple, and these are customers that…
[00:35:14.130 - 00:35:20.460]
Dina Wing: like I said, they accept price changes on the invoice and don't require,
[00:35:20.460 - 00:35:20.939]
Dean Halonen: a quote.
[00:35:20.940 - 00:35:36.090]
Dina Wing: additional purchase orders, quotes, approvals, that kind of stuff, where we've gone to actuals for them. So we'll estimate how much we think it's gonna take, and then if it ends up being lower at the end, we have been willing to adjust down.
[00:35:37.670 - 00:35:47.350]
Dina Wing: it's sort of a customer-by-customer thing. We're willing to do it, sort of across the board, but then the customer has to run the risk of, okay, maybe the estimate was too conservative.
[00:35:47.750 - 00:35:53.239]
Dina Wing: And it's actually more expensive than we thought it was gonna be. Right. It depends on how our customer
[00:35:54.330 - 00:36:01.980]
Dina Wing: what risks they want to take, how they want us to proceed. We've been extremely flexible on a customer-by-customer basis on,
[00:36:03.250 - 00:36:06.729]
Dina Wing: how they want us to manage that. And we find that that…
[00:36:07.070 - 00:36:11.590]
Dina Wing: helps, because, I mean, if you're working with Halliburton.
[00:36:12.350 - 00:36:26.350]
Dina Wing: they don't have time to go back and forth getting approvals over and over again, and their system is extremely picky on making sure things match. So, we have some…
[00:36:26.530 - 00:36:32.119]
Dina Wing: Halliburton International customers, where they… we just do an all-in price, and it's higher.
[00:36:32.260 - 00:36:40.719]
Dina Wing: For sure, it's much higher, but they're paying for the convenience of not getting multiple emails asking for permission for things.
[00:36:40.900 - 00:36:42.190]
Dean Halonen: Got it.
[00:36:42.190 - 00:36:43.040]
Dina Wing: Faster.
[00:36:43.170 - 00:36:45.080]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, makes sense.
[00:36:45.080 - 00:36:47.300]
Dina Wing: That is valuable, we'll go and do that.
[00:36:48.010 - 00:37:05.159]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, and Dina, what is… so maybe looking back a couple years, so say you had to go, you know, give a message to your previous self 2-3 years ago, or someone brand new to Steelhead, or brand new to the industry, like, what would you say is, like, the most…
[00:37:05.160 - 00:37:20.990]
Dean Halonen: Like, say they're hopping into a, you know, strategic business, operations, maybe an ownership role, or a leadership role, and they're, like, they're pretty naive or ignorant to all the things that you know or learned. What would you say is, like, the most important
[00:37:20.990 - 00:37:30.200]
Dean Halonen: maybe top 1 or 2 or 3 KPIs to really be, like, just dialed in on to make sure they have a successful outcome for their business.
[00:37:30.570 - 00:37:35.329]
Dina Wing: If I was to focus on KPIs specifically, cost of poor quality.
[00:37:35.550 - 00:37:41.140]
Dina Wing: Is… is huge. And do it as a percent of revenue, so you're not just tracking, like, how much
[00:37:41.660 - 00:37:51.499]
Dina Wing: cost you're spending, but as a factor of what you're shipping. Because it… if that percentage keeps going up, it's a different
[00:37:51.940 - 00:37:53.100]
Dina Wing: Message.
[00:37:53.270 - 00:38:06.530]
Dina Wing: And you're maintaining a same percentage across the board. It's like, okay, you can't do more than 2… less than 2%, but if you keep going up, and it's 2% this month, 3% next month, and 4% the month after that, you've got a problem.
[00:38:08.410 - 00:38:23.169]
Dina Wing: And there are other people at the company that spend more time on some of the financials, so, like, gross margin, obviously, it's hugely important. Whether or not we hit our budgeted revenue number, hugely important, but if you're looking at how to
[00:38:23.470 - 00:38:31.630]
Dina Wing: fix problems inside the company. Cost or poor quality, equipment uptime.
[00:38:31.990 - 00:38:37.819]
Dina Wing: Which I haven't talked about very much, and, labor efficiency.
[00:38:38.400 - 00:38:52.940]
Dina Wing: So equipment uptime, we measure by, like, if a machine is down, it gets marked red on a spreadsheet, and then at the end of the month, we calculate how… what percentage of possible labor hours
[00:38:53.050 - 00:38:58.420]
Dina Wing: those machines were available for? Because if your machines aren't running, then you can't…
[00:38:59.190 - 00:39:10.310]
Dina Wing: you're not getting any money off of them. You might be spending a huge amount of effort trying to fix them, but you're not getting revenue. And then, labor efficiency,
[00:39:12.770 - 00:39:15.400]
Dina Wing: Are your margins going to be accurate?
[00:39:16.550 - 00:39:20.629]
Dina Wing: Are your people clocking in properly? Are they skipping steps?
[00:39:20.950 - 00:39:22.749]
Dina Wing: Are they making mistakes?
[00:39:23.360 - 00:39:25.290]
Dina Wing: Do I need to do retraining?
[00:39:26.650 - 00:39:35.310]
Dina Wing: So those three, kind of, between the three of them, you can answer a lot of questions about where things are going awry in your shop.
[00:39:35.830 - 00:39:46.859]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, and labor efficiency is like, hey, we… Dina worked 40 hours, and she clocked how many hours did jobs. Correct. Got it. What do you typically see for a labor efficiency number?
[00:39:46.860 - 00:39:48.120]
Dina Wing: I don't want to tell you.
[00:39:49.590 - 00:39:58.360]
Dina Wing: We've only been tracking that for a few months, and it's great in some of our departments and not so good in others. So, like, for our…
[00:39:58.460 - 00:40:15.989]
Dina Wing: rotor polishers, which are, like, one-man, one machine attended kind of situations, they're, like, close to 80%. Which, great, and that's… that includes setup, but doesn't include, like, their lunch hours and stuff like that, so that's a very reasonable amount, is… we think. But some of our ones where it's…
[00:40:16.410 - 00:40:28.020]
Dina Wing: a person that's attending to multiple tanks, and it's more based on dwell time. We're kind of toying with how we want to measure that, because maybe it needs to be measured on capacity utilization instead.
[00:40:28.160 - 00:40:37.950]
Dina Wing: And that's, like… We have all this data, but we're still deciding what measurements best serve us.
[00:40:38.630 - 00:40:54.469]
Dina Wing: kind of the continuous improvement that we're working through. How can we get our systems to provide us with data, that we can use better, and how can we use that data to make things easier for our operators to hit our customers' deadlines?
[00:40:54.820 - 00:40:56.760]
Dina Wing: Kind of the whole plan.
[00:40:57.160 - 00:41:10.090]
Dean Halonen: Got it. And the on-time delivery, you said, is improving. That's obviously a key KPI as well. On the labor utilization for the lines, you can actually log into a line, so you don't have to log into a tank. If an operator's running.
[00:41:10.090 - 00:41:11.299]
Dina Wing: Talked about that.
[00:41:11.300 - 00:41:12.289]
Dean Halonen: So, not gonna be one.
[00:41:12.290 - 00:41:16.209]
Dina Wing: Adjusting the way that we log in. We actually had a meeting about that earlier this week.
[00:41:16.400 - 00:41:19.280]
Dean Halonen: Oh, there you go, there you go. We've also talked…
[00:41:19.280 - 00:41:23.090]
Dina Wing: We're using racking to help fix it, all kinds of stuff, so we're gonna…
[00:41:23.770 - 00:41:29.109]
Dina Wing: We're gonna adjust how we measure that, for sure, but deciding how is still in discussion.
[00:41:29.280 - 00:41:38.849]
Dean Halonen: Awesome. So, Dina, that sounds like it's quite the amazing story in terms of had a little bit of a drilling issue, diversified actively.
[00:41:39.030 - 00:41:55.909]
Dean Halonen: you know, restructured, got it new equipment, new labor, the sales team went out and filled that capacity, and now you guys are at, I think he's mentioned a record month in June, and great record on-time deliveries in July. So, like, things are really going…
[00:41:56.860 - 00:42:13.070]
Dean Halonen: I would say it seems, like, perfectly, obviously, here from Minnesota, looking outside, looking in, but obviously there's a ton of hard work and, and talent, being applied every day, every hour down there. What does the future look like for a precision spray? Say you zoom ahead.
[00:42:13.070 - 00:42:18.110]
Dean Halonen: 12, 24, 36 months. Do you guys have an idea of, like, where is this all going?
[00:42:18.890 - 00:42:33.669]
Dina Wing: Yeah, I mean, we're still actively adding to, what we can provide to our customers. Like, we're always looking for, okay, we can do these 5 things, what makes sense to add?
[00:42:33.670 - 00:42:45.120]
Dina Wing: to provide more services to our customers. Like, I talked about the plasma spray. We're expanding into another building.
[00:42:45.260 - 00:42:52.480]
Dina Wing: within a couple weeks, we'll have another facility online. We're looking at…
[00:42:53.750 - 00:43:00.590]
Dina Wing: Other industries that we can service using the same functions, so we…
[00:43:00.940 - 00:43:08.760]
Dina Wing: chrome and carbide wear and corrosion resistance, that can be used in a lot of different ways. We've never really touched so much on aerospace.
[00:43:08.760 - 00:43:09.210]
Dean Halonen: Huh.
[00:43:09.440 - 00:43:14.249]
Dina Wing: So we've thought about doing that. That would require NADCAP,
[00:43:14.990 - 00:43:18.109]
Dina Wing: That kind of thing. We haven't had enough
[00:43:18.280 - 00:43:28.529]
Dina Wing: demand there, to really go for an ad cap, and… but we don't have the capacity to do it right now. So as we increase our capacity, which we're always looking to do,
[00:43:28.910 - 00:43:31.590]
Dina Wing: What else can we use to fill those gaps?
[00:43:32.450 - 00:43:32.850]
Dean Halonen: Wow.
[00:43:32.850 - 00:43:41.779]
Dina Wing: more mining. We've never talked about, automobile, automotive, and maybe we're in the wrong location for that, because most of that's up where you guys are.
[00:43:42.250 - 00:43:47.680]
Dina Wing: But is that something we want to get into? So there's… there's just… there's always…
[00:43:48.300 - 00:43:56.950]
Dina Wing: More customers we can touch if we want to, but we have a really nice moat around the customers we currently have, and we intend to maintain it.
[00:43:57.150 - 00:44:16.500]
Dean Halonen: To maintain the growth, or actually, maybe even step on the gas pedal a little bit harder. Well, Dina, thanks for joining us. You guys are running a world-class operation. You tell John I said hi as well, and thanks for your time, and we'll be here to support you guys in the next phase of Precision Spray's journey.
[00:44:16.680 - 00:44:17.829]
Dina Wing: Love to hear it.
[00:44:18.030 - 00:44:19.130]
Dean Halonen: Awesome. Thanks, Dana.
[00:44:19.130 - 00:44:20.050]
Dina Wing: Thanks for having me.
[00:44:20.050 - 00:44:20.680]
Dean Halonen: Yep, see ya.
Dean Halonen: Hello everybody, my name is Dean. I'm one of the co-founders and CRO of Steelhead.
[00:00:06.560 - 00:00:24.160]
Dean Halonen: And this is ShopTalk, so ShopTalk is for those that have dedicated their livelihood to the craft of manufacturing, and today we have a very special guest, Dina Wing from Precision Spray and Coatings in Texas, Houston, Texas, where the weather is a little hotter than it is here up in,
[00:00:24.260 - 00:00:41.059]
Dean Halonen: Up in Minnesota, but just a touch, but Dina, maybe starting off with you, could you explain precision spray at the high level, what you guys offer? And then also what, like, kind of how you got involved with Precision Spray, maybe what you were doing before, and kind of what your role is now.
[00:00:41.380 - 00:00:52.469]
Dina Wing: Absolutely. So Precision Spray and Coatings is a mid-sized, industrial hard metal coating company. We do, chrome coating, electroplating in…
[00:00:52.760 - 00:00:59.440]
Dina Wing: 6 30-foot deep tanks, and another 6? 15-foot tanks for smaller parts.
[00:00:59.440 - 00:01:14.710]
Dina Wing: And then we also do, HVOF spray. We have several booths for spraying carbide, chrome carbide, that kind of thing. We recently expanded into a new building that is about to come online, which has added
[00:01:14.710 - 00:01:24.860]
Dina Wing: plasma spray capacity to our offerings, and we are doing spray infused now. And then we have all the attendant
[00:01:24.880 - 00:01:33.710]
Dina Wing: Machining capabilities, so polishing, honing, grinding, ball lapping, that sort of… offering. So it's…
[00:01:34.420 - 00:01:42.660]
Dina Wing: Pretty focused on, wear and corrosion resistance, and any… any function that can… Help us.
[00:01:43.790 - 00:01:45.370]
Dina Wing: manage those parts.
[00:01:45.760 - 00:02:02.290]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, and pretty intensive in the oil and gas. Obviously, in Texas, a lot of people lean oil and gas, but what parts are these actually, like, what oil and gas parts are there? Is it, like, deep-sea rigs? Is it pipes? Is it, like, cracking operations?
[00:02:02.620 - 00:02:12.059]
Dina Wing: So it… that leads to a question of, like, how this company has changed over the past 5 years. So, when I first started, in 2021,
[00:02:12.550 - 00:02:19.670]
Dina Wing: this place was, like, 95% drilling. Like, specifically,
[00:02:19.960 - 00:02:31.190]
Dina Wing: rotors for… from power sections, reworking those, I don't know how familiar everyone will be with that specific niche product line, but rotors, mandrels, housings…
[00:02:31.340 - 00:02:37.719]
Dina Wing: that kind of stuff. So it was almost entirely, focused on the drillers,
[00:02:37.770 - 00:02:51.579]
Dina Wing: who… a lot of them headquarter just north of our facility, and then a very short trip, short by Texas standards at least, to the Permian Basin, which is where most of this is happening.
[00:02:52.180 - 00:03:09.380]
Dina Wing: Since then, we have made a very concerted effort to diversify out of just drilling, so rotors has dropped to maybe 50% of our offering. It's still the backbone of the company, and we're very good at those, but we've added, ball valve
[00:03:09.490 - 00:03:19.519]
Dina Wing: Customers, and that's more… I suppose that's more downstream?
[00:03:19.740 - 00:03:31.809]
Dina Wing: Because there's a lot more of, like, the processing of oil and gas, rather than the collection of oil and gas. There's more of the deep-sea rigs, we've started touching those.
[00:03:31.810 - 00:03:44.400]
Dina Wing: We've started touching some mining customers, very limited, because a lot of that is very large stuff, and our infrastructure isn't ready to handle it yet. And then we're getting into, turbines and power generation.
[00:03:44.470 - 00:03:50.800]
Dina Wing: Hydraulic parts, So we've added all of these product lines,
[00:03:51.240 - 00:03:59.220]
Dina Wing: really within the last two to three years, we've been ramping up. Rotating equipment just started this year. Ball valves, we really…
[00:03:59.550 - 00:04:07.149]
Dina Wing: Went from zero to a significant percentage of our company, within the last year and a half.
[00:04:08.309 - 00:04:21.360]
Dean Halonen: Okay, so you made a little pivot there. I guess, Dina, what was your experience before? Have you always been in oil and gas, or have you always been in manufacturing, or how did you get to be, I would say, a very strong leader at Precision Spray? How did you get here?
[00:04:21.590 - 00:04:25.359]
Dina Wing: It's actually kind of a funny story, because… so I…
[00:04:25.550 - 00:04:44.889]
Dina Wing: My education is in literature. I had absolutely no prospects or intentions of going into manufacturing when I was coming out of school. It wasn't a thought in my mind. But my… the president of the company that I work for, John Jenkins, he…
[00:04:45.020 - 00:04:46.599]
Dina Wing: I knew him…
[00:04:47.720 - 00:04:53.900]
Dina Wing: not socially, but he had worked with family members. I knew him outside of that, and when
[00:04:53.900 - 00:05:10.909]
Dina Wing: the previous company we both worked for was setting up a facility, an expansion, in… out of the country, and I had lived in that country and was comfortable and familiar with the people there and how to operate there. He hired me as, like.
[00:05:11.620 - 00:05:17.800]
Dina Wing: kind of a… I was, like, the second hire, so it was, like, I would do customer service, I was the receptionist, I did all the things.
[00:05:17.910 - 00:05:27.029]
Dina Wing: supply chain, whatever. Whatever they needed from me, I learned how to do. And, I was there for 3 years, and that was a manufacturing company that,
[00:05:27.270 - 00:05:35.379]
Dina Wing: manufactured power sections. So, that's why my understanding of the rotor business and all the attendant
[00:05:35.970 - 00:05:49.720]
Dina Wing: needs for those parts is very strong, because that's… that was my first job. That's what I did. So I get those, I got real deep into how those work, what those require, in terms of…
[00:05:50.470 - 00:05:57.610]
Dina Wing: Quality needs and… That kind of thing. So I worked there, and then we went through COVID,
[00:05:57.770 - 00:06:08.129]
Dina Wing: during COVID, precision spraying Coatings was, and pre-COVID, was run by, the original guy who started the place, and it was…
[00:06:09.060 - 00:06:15.309]
Dina Wing: A smaller business, a more focused business, and they, when oil kind of…
[00:06:16.590 - 00:06:22.370]
Dina Wing: went negative for a minute during COVID, this facility very nearly closed.
[00:06:22.850 - 00:06:23.400]
Dean Halonen: Oh, wow.
[00:06:23.400 - 00:06:33.949]
Dina Wing: This… this company almost went out of business, because they were so reliant on, the drillers, and the drillers were not drilling. So there was… it was…
[00:06:34.140 - 00:06:43.089]
Dina Wing: they got close. So, the original owner sold a large part of his stake to a board of investors, and that board brought John in.
[00:06:43.260 - 00:06:55.099]
Dina Wing: who had worked for several of the different, OEM manufacturers, and kind of had a very strong grasp of the drilling customers, but also a plan for how to diversify.
[00:06:55.960 - 00:07:01.919]
Dina Wing: John then… very shortly thereafter, called me, and I had been…
[00:07:02.030 - 00:07:17.519]
Dina Wing: hoping to move back from the Middle East, so, I took the job, and here we are. And I started mostly just customer service, but I have been adding additional responsibilities ever since.
[00:07:17.970 - 00:07:20.630]
Dean Halonen: Wow, so you started off at Precision Spring Customer Service.
[00:07:20.630 - 00:07:25.959]
Dina Wing: Not even as customer service manager, I was just a representative. I was basically the account…
[00:07:26.030 - 00:07:41.570]
Dina Wing: like, primary point of contact for all of our rotor customers. And then over the last 5 years, I took a manager role, so I picked up responsibility for the rest of the team and all the different product lines.
[00:07:41.740 - 00:07:49.510]
Dina Wing: Then, I think he gave me, planning, so I started planning, all of the…
[00:07:50.150 - 00:08:06.319]
Dina Wing: work running through the shop, then it was the Steelhead implementation, and all of the processes and work alongside that, so I still am the primary power user for Steelhead, and any changes we make, the… I drive that.
[00:08:06.380 - 00:08:15.230]
Dina Wing: And then, within the last year, when I got the Director of Business Planning, and Operations title, we added Supply Chain.
[00:08:15.690 - 00:08:16.770]
Dina Wing: in IT.
[00:08:18.260 - 00:08:18.890]
Dean Halonen: Nice.
[00:08:19.020 - 00:08:21.920]
Dean Halonen: Just keep adding, and adding, and adding.
[00:08:21.920 - 00:08:27.660]
Dina Wing: like, outside of my actual, like, written job description, I've been just…
[00:08:27.920 - 00:08:30.800]
Dina Wing: Putting my nose in everyone's business and towards that.
[00:08:32.370 - 00:08:37.360]
Dina Wing: data analysis and all kinds of stuff, so I'm just… I'm a very nosy person. I want my hands in everything.
[00:08:37.780 - 00:08:53.389]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, which is good, I think, to understand the whole picture, so you can start to make better, strategic decisions. Now, speaking of that, one of them was, you sound like you're in drilling, and you kind of pivoted out of it, or actively, or made a concerted effort to diversify.
[00:08:53.390 - 00:08:59.459]
Dean Halonen: Which is honestly, I think, a good idea in hindsight. You guys have been doing really well.
[00:08:59.990 - 00:09:10.050]
Dean Halonen: the… it's one thing we see often in Texas, especially, but also, like, in the automotive industry, is, like, people kind of throw their hands up in the air and say, hey.
[00:09:10.050 - 00:09:20.920]
Dean Halonen: as automotive rides or dies, we ride or die. Or as oil and gas, you know, goes up and down, we're just gonna ride along with it. But it seems like you guys have a different approach, like, you're not gonna just…
[00:09:21.150 - 00:09:25.030]
Dean Halonen: fall, if one market falls, right? So where does that…
[00:09:25.350 - 00:09:31.919]
Dean Halonen: come from, like, that… that… I guess that competitiveness to… to adapt, and then how do you actually do it?
[00:09:32.580 - 00:09:42.170]
Dina Wing: So, I think it's large part driven by our management. Like, John, we are very lucky to have a president who thoroughly understands
[00:09:42.300 - 00:09:58.919]
Dina Wing: what this facility is capable of, and has the ability to match that to a variety of industries that they'd never looked at before. So, the… the ball valve expansion specifically, that's a lot of very specific
[00:09:59.380 - 00:10:02.799]
Dina Wing: operator knowledge. Like, a…
[00:10:02.940 - 00:10:16.179]
Dina Wing: a layperson or a regular grinder is not going to be able to just start doing that without any problems. The machines are very, specific, the skills are very specific, so we had started trying to do it
[00:10:17.010 - 00:10:28.019]
Dina Wing: like I said, a year and a half ago, we had, like, our first order, and we were… we were trying so hard to get this order through, and we had a heck of a time. And we…
[00:10:28.220 - 00:10:35.359]
Dina Wing: we're searching for people. So, this is the kind of business where personal expertise
[00:10:36.100 - 00:10:50.030]
Dina Wing: is… it is the business. And we managed to find some extremely talented people who had previously worked for a company that, at one point, was the leader in the space.
[00:10:50.670 - 00:10:58.330]
Dina Wing: company went out of business for various reasons that I'm not going to go deeply into, but we managed to pick up
[00:10:58.600 - 00:11:06.069]
Dina Wing: Salesperson… Sort of a product line manager, and…
[00:11:06.070 - 00:11:26.750]
Dina Wing: QC inspector, several operators, who had all had that experience, who knew the customers, who knew the machines, and what was needed. So we just kind of went on a scavenger hunt, finding those people that could fill those roles. And we found the first one, and she was extremely valuable, and kind of led us to the rest of them, and
[00:11:27.320 - 00:11:35.320]
Dina Wing: since then, it's sort of skyrocketed. We went from… Like, maybe doing… one order,
[00:11:40.590 - 00:11:46.159]
Dina Wing: Unlike. We started trying in 2024, and, were not succeeding.
[00:11:46.930 - 00:11:52.000]
Dina Wing: and Kellyard in 2025. And we went from, like.
[00:11:52.360 - 00:11:59.900]
Dina Wing: $50,000 to $100,000 of ball valve revenue. In June, we did $500,000 of ball valve revenue.
[00:12:00.710 - 00:12:01.260]
Dean Halonen: Ma.
[00:12:01.260 - 00:12:02.869]
Dina Wing: And that's…
[00:12:03.060 - 00:12:11.870]
Dina Wing: With a limited number of machines shoved in a small corner of our current facility, and not even
[00:12:12.180 - 00:12:23.930]
Dina Wing: all of the different spray options that we're planning to have in the new building. So the new building is adding, the plasma spray, and now we're… we're currently… we've just started doing the spray and fuse, and
[00:12:24.140 - 00:12:32.889]
Dina Wing: like, we don't even have all of, like, there are CNCs that we could add to, like, take more of this. There is so much runway.
[00:12:33.290 - 00:12:40.620]
Dina Wing: To get more and more of this business, because what we found is that after, the company…
[00:12:40.990 - 00:12:50.099]
Dina Wing: that used to kind of do all this went out of business. There's, like, two people that do it in the United States, and then everybody else sends their stuff to China or Italy.
[00:12:50.920 - 00:12:52.139]
Dina Wing: Which isn't cheap.
[00:12:52.620 - 00:12:53.210]
Dean Halonen: Yeah.
[00:12:53.470 - 00:12:54.459]
Dean Halonen: It tastes… That should…
[00:12:54.460 - 00:12:55.160]
Dina Wing: I'm…
[00:12:55.410 - 00:12:57.769]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, long lead times, expensive freight.
[00:12:57.770 - 00:13:04.359]
Dina Wing: And a lot of this stuff is the kind of equipment where, if you take it out of where it is.
[00:13:04.510 - 00:13:23.370]
Dina Wing: that's… that's a whole facility shutdown. Like, millions of dollars per hour of shutdown time. So we've struggled with, you know, rapid response. That's kind of what we're… we're focusing on, other than just expanding our… our offerings and…
[00:13:23.550 - 00:13:34.659]
Dina Wing: getting all of the customers to approve us and put us on their AVLs, it's just response time is huge for these customers. It's the same with power generation. They want it in 2 days.
[00:13:34.970 - 00:13:44.859]
Dina Wing: And this is kind of work where we have to remove the old coating, prep the part, make it shiny and straight and clean and beautiful and new,
[00:13:45.120 - 00:13:51.619]
Dina Wing: spray, whatever, or chrome plate, finish grind to whatever RA is required.
[00:13:54.200 - 00:14:12.570]
Dina Wing: keeping… and some of these tolerances are intense now. All of the rotor stuff is a thousandths of an inch, half a thou… at the worst. We would have several thousandths of tolerance, and with these new product lines, it's literally tenths of an inch, or tenths… tenths of a thousandths?
[00:14:13.230 - 00:14:17.120]
Dina Wing: Yeah, so .000… 1.
[00:14:17.610 - 00:14:18.960]
Dean Halonen: Wow. Wow.
[00:14:18.960 - 00:14:20.650]
Dina Wing: So that's been a bit of a struggle.
[00:14:20.820 - 00:14:30.400]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, so extremely high quality, extremely fast turn times, and I'm sure that leads to, if you can pull it off, some great, some great revenue.
[00:14:31.350 - 00:14:36.370]
Dina Wing: Yeah, those, those are, those are nice. The margins on those are pretty, pretty nice.
[00:14:36.550 - 00:14:51.410]
Dean Halonen: Pretty nice. So, Dina, there's a… that's amazing, and I'm guessing you were able to make this, determination to diversify based on some slowing sales numbers and the original,
[00:14:51.950 - 00:15:09.119]
Dean Halonen: drilling market, or maybe you've seen it in the news, and then… and then made that call. So, very, successful strategic decision. And I would say, this is my opinion, you are, inside of Steelhead, I think, put on a pedestal to some degree, based on your…
[00:15:09.560 - 00:15:25.689]
Dean Halonen: I think your superpower is, well, A, you're always willing to dig in and figure things out and, like, get the most possible out of the company or steelhead, which can be the one and the same. In my opinion, your superpower is…
[00:15:26.720 - 00:15:28.620]
Dean Halonen: data analysis.
[00:15:29.240 - 00:15:34.329]
Dean Halonen: And I think that comes in many different vectors, but one of them is…
[00:15:34.930 - 00:15:50.480]
Dean Halonen: One of them is, I think, job costing, and another one could be, like, tracking the quality that you mentioned, or another one could be the… the idle parts, you know, like, knowing what parts are sitting. So maybe just…
[00:15:50.480 - 00:16:00.140]
Dean Halonen: if you could explain at the highest level, like, when Dina Wing walks in at 8 AM, or the first day of the month, or the first day of the quarter, or the first day of the year, like, what do you…
[00:16:00.430 - 00:16:08.680]
Dean Halonen: what are you thinking about? What are you looking at? What's your approach to data analysis, today?
[00:16:09.530 - 00:16:16.469]
Dina Wing: Alright, that's… that's a hard problem, because it's changed so much over the course of this year. I mean…
[00:16:16.490 - 00:16:31.110]
Dina Wing: Pre-Steelhead, so we've been with you guys since 2024. Before that, I would start every day, but with 2 hours of pulling every single clock in that anyone had done, and putting that manually into a spreadsheet, so I understand
[00:16:31.110 - 00:16:36.659]
Dina Wing: Who had touched what part, and where everything was, and how long… much longer it was gonna take.
[00:16:36.850 - 00:16:42.649]
Dina Wing: for every single part in this facility. And, like, right now, we have… I don't know.
[00:16:42.940 - 00:16:53.460]
Dina Wing: 800, 900 active work orders. It was less than, but most of those work orders have multiple parts on them. So just a huge number of
[00:16:54.080 - 00:17:04.049]
Dina Wing: objects rotating through this facility, and it would take me 2 hours every morning just to do that, just to collect the information, not even go to make decisions.
[00:17:04.159 - 00:17:10.320]
Dina Wing: So the blessing of Steelhead is… It has reduced friction.
[00:17:11.399 - 00:17:19.460]
Dina Wing: In the company from, like, Our regular operators, our people who aren't really great with computers.
[00:17:19.870 - 00:17:32.229]
Dina Wing: putting their data in, so labor hours, clock-ins, I'm not saying we're great. We're not great at it. Our data integrity is not where I want it to be, but we're improving, and we're doing things every week to see what else
[00:17:32.830 - 00:17:39.070]
Dina Wing: we can make easier for them. Like, where have… has management failed to…
[00:17:39.330 - 00:17:45.349]
Dina Wing: serve our employees so they can give us the data that I want, right? So…
[00:17:46.190 - 00:18:06.170]
Dina Wing: now, I mean, the beginning of my month and the end of my month are very different things. The beginning of the month, I'm doing data analysis of, like, a post-mortem of the previous month. I want to know, how many corrective actions we went through, I want to know how many returns we had to deal with, I want to know what our cost of poor quality was.
[00:18:06.290 - 00:18:13.050]
Dina Wing: how much opportunity cost are we wasting on parts that we're not getting any sales from because we messed up?
[00:18:14.540 - 00:18:17.670]
Dina Wing: what is the source of those mess-ups? Like.
[00:18:18.090 - 00:18:24.699]
Dina Wing: do we have a pricing problem, or do we have a quality problem? So, recently we've added,
[00:18:25.120 - 00:18:38.720]
Dina Wing: several KPIs, that's been my project all year, has been putting into place all these KPIs, actually discussing them on a monthly basis, and really generating action items and objectives based on
[00:18:38.830 - 00:18:42.220]
Dina Wing: How we did, instead of based on, sort of.
[00:18:43.160 - 00:18:49.460]
Dina Wing: I feel like we could probably fix this thing over here if we did these 5 tasks.
[00:18:49.720 - 00:18:56.440]
Dina Wing: we're trying to move away from, well, I think it's this, to, here, look at these numbers.
[00:18:58.140 - 00:19:10.789]
Dina Wing: explicitly, these numbers are what the problem is. So, for instance, last month, we had our best month of on-time delivery in, 11 months. -Oh.
[00:19:10.940 - 00:19:16.739]
Dina Wing: still not where I want it to be, mind you, but it's probably better. We had…
[00:19:17.580 - 00:19:23.380]
Dina Wing: An improvement of how many returns that came in, but we had a significant drop in first pass yield.
[00:19:23.520 - 00:19:27.920]
Dina Wing: Obviously, we were catching our quality escapes before they escaped.
[00:19:28.030 - 00:19:35.789]
Dina Wing: It's a very convenient pattern, and it's easy to explain. It's like, okay, how do we do more? We had…
[00:19:37.430 - 00:19:41.090]
Dina Wing: It wasn't our best month. The last June was our…
[00:19:41.370 - 00:19:48.309]
Dina Wing: highest month we've ever had, but July was… July was a little bit lower, but it was still… it was still a very good month, mind you.
[00:19:48.510 - 00:19:55.590]
Dina Wing: But, for instance, we had a certain amount of overtime, we had a certain amount of labor hours, and the…
[00:19:56.660 - 00:20:06.550]
Dina Wing: The instinct has been, when we can't hit a certain gross margin percentage, which we have a set goal, has been, okay, we need to raise costs.
[00:20:06.900 - 00:20:13.300]
Dina Wing: Powder costs have gone up, electricity costs have gone up, rent has gone up, everything!
[00:20:14.130 - 00:20:14.770]
Dina Wing: Including.
[00:20:15.250 - 00:20:32.850]
Dina Wing: Right? Like, it always does. So, okay, we need to increase our prices. Let's figure out who is… who we can increase prices on, and how fast we can do it, and how… what that will do. But the… the metrics that I'm running now are showing it's not a cost issue, it's a rework issue.
[00:20:33.670 - 00:20:34.350]
Dean Halonen: Wow.
[00:20:34.350 - 00:20:37.880]
Dina Wing: We are spending too much time fixing problems.
[00:20:39.290 - 00:20:41.209]
Dina Wing: That is eating into our revenue.
[00:20:42.200 - 00:20:51.059]
Dean Halonen: Wow, so your cost of poor quality… Exactly. And how do you track cost of poor quality? Is it labor and materials you're tracking on the…
[00:20:51.060 - 00:20:59.810]
Dina Wing: So, the materials is harder to do for some of our product lines, like, it's very difficult to get an accurate understanding of how much, like.
[00:21:00.400 - 00:21:06.329]
Dina Wing: chrome flake or hydrochloric acid a part has been exposed to.
[00:21:06.620 - 00:21:15.249]
Dina Wing: which I know there are companies that do it, we haven't gotten that far. But, powder costs were very specific, and then we have arrived at an overhead cost.
[00:21:16.080 - 00:21:22.860]
Dina Wing: For labor, that takes into account, okay, how much does the electricity cost, how much does payroll cost, etc.
[00:21:22.860 - 00:21:25.130]
Dean Halonen: Fully loaded labor shop rate, yeah.
[00:21:25.130 - 00:21:43.570]
Dina Wing: Right. So we have that, the powder costs, and, any outsourcing costs that are needed. So we've… a lot of these new product lines, we've had to do more outsourcing, because the equipment that we're going to use to service those markets isn't quite live yet. So we're kind of…
[00:21:43.640 - 00:21:49.629]
Dina Wing: Selling before we… are 100% ready to get there, but it's been working, so…
[00:21:49.850 - 00:22:09.389]
Dean Halonen: So that's pretty cool. A lot of… a lot of people in the industry, if they're missing the data, what they do is kind of what you… what you hinted at. It's like, hey, our margins aren't as good as we want them to be. Okay, well, here's all of our part prices in our portfolio. We need to make, you know, 5 or 10 more points, right, to get our target.
[00:22:09.390 - 00:22:10.610]
Dina Wing: 10%.
[00:22:10.610 - 00:22:11.690]
Dean Halonen: Just price increases.
[00:22:11.690 - 00:22:17.149]
Dina Wing: But that's not necessarily the problem. Like, our problem is not pricing, it's efficiency.
[00:22:17.740 - 00:22:21.389]
Dina Wing: That requires completely different tactics to solve.
[00:22:22.120 - 00:22:31.089]
Dean Halonen: Right. And then you don't risk churning good customers. Like, that's the risk of, like, if you just crank all the prices up, well then maybe… maybe you lose some great.
[00:22:31.090 - 00:22:31.980]
Dina Wing: Whatever.
[00:22:31.980 - 00:22:36.209]
Dean Halonen: Right, right. So you can't really charge them for your mistakes, in a way.
[00:22:36.350 - 00:22:54.119]
Dean Halonen: So… and then, Dina, I know you mentioned, so you spoke at one of our Revenue Riptide events about the, or maybe you mentioned this, I actually wasn't there, I was having our second baby during the last Revenue Riptide, but what I heard from my colleagues is that you had an idea of…
[00:22:54.120 - 00:23:01.809]
Dean Halonen: like, the idle parts, the idle parts, idea. Do you want to explain where that came from and what the… what the outcome has been?
[00:23:02.010 - 00:23:06.940]
Dina Wing: Sure. It started with, my previous job.
[00:23:06.940 - 00:23:26.050]
Dina Wing: They used to have what they called a war room, which is a very overblown name, for a meeting that happens on a regular schedule of business, where they just talk about the problems, the problem parts. Either parts that have sat around for too long, parts that we've reworked too many times, parts that are expected to be expedited, that kind of thing.
[00:23:26.480 - 00:23:29.520]
Dina Wing: And they used to have that war room meeting.
[00:23:29.730 - 00:23:35.649]
Dina Wing: Every day. At Precision, it's… we already have so many meetings. I'm not trying to add…
[00:23:36.460 - 00:23:46.510]
Dina Wing: People need to go and do their jobs, not just talk about doing their jobs. So, we started having a twice-a-week, slow-moving parts meeting.
[00:23:46.580 - 00:24:05.069]
Dina Wing: And, we go through things that are on quality hold in Steelhead, any returns that are currently running through the system, where they are, what they need, because those are always going to be hot, they're always going to be a problem, we've already done something wrong on them, so attention needs to be paid. And then.
[00:24:05.080 - 00:24:17.110]
Dina Wing: anything that sits still for too long. And how long too long is has changed dramatically, over the course of the time that I've been tracking it.
[00:24:17.310 - 00:24:34.320]
Dina Wing: Because we have just way more work. It used to be… there was a period where our lead times had dropped, like, in the rotor side, we were returning rotors… OEMs in, like, a week, and we were turning used parts in, like, 2 to 3.
[00:24:34.320 - 00:24:34.900]
Dean Halonen: Oh.
[00:24:35.230 - 00:24:44.010]
Dina Wing: partially because there was less demand, actually mostly because there was less demand. Now we have so much demand, there's… there's the…
[00:24:44.810 - 00:24:49.650]
Dina Wing: almost 400 rotors in this facility. That's the most we've ever had by…
[00:24:50.250 - 00:24:54.709]
Dina Wing: I don't know, that's double what we were rocking last year at this time, I think.
[00:24:54.710 - 00:24:55.220]
Dean Halonen: Wow.
[00:24:55.220 - 00:25:05.640]
Dina Wing: End of July, we had 90 rotors in-house. So obviously, we were turning them at an incredibly fast rate. Now, we have stuff that has to sit and wait.
[00:25:06.130 - 00:25:10.569]
Dina Wing: Because everyone is sending their parts to us. It's, one of those problems you want to have.
[00:25:13.690 - 00:25:16.619]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, it's almost… it's a good problem to have,
[00:25:16.620 - 00:25:17.000]
Dina Wing: Everything.
[00:25:17.000 - 00:25:20.130]
Dean Halonen: How have the customers reacted to that? Those,
[00:25:20.910 - 00:25:25.720]
Dina Wing: I mean, they don't love it. They don't love the extended lead times, but…
[00:25:26.580 - 00:25:40.610]
Dina Wing: we have done a good enough job at our quality and communication and managing our prices that, they don't want to go anywhere else, even if they're taking longer. So…
[00:25:42.340 - 00:25:59.669]
Dina Wing: There are some customers that are very lead time specific, and sometimes we can't meet their expectations, and they have to go somewhere else. It is what it is. There are enough that want the quality that we provide, and the communication that we provide, that we don't have a problem filling our lanes.
[00:25:59.960 - 00:26:02.539]
Dina Wing: Which is a great position to be in.
[00:26:04.040 - 00:26:07.130]
Dina Wing: The question started with slow-moving parts. Right, so…
[00:26:07.390 - 00:26:26.090]
Dina Wing: I had asked, when we first implemented Steelhead for a report, like, a custom report that just showed, all the work orders and how long they had gone since they'd moved the last time. Because you could filter and find, okay, this part has been sitting for 2 weeks.
[00:26:26.340 - 00:26:27.340]
Dina Wing: Why?
[00:26:27.570 - 00:26:37.949]
Dina Wing: What is wrong with it? It's been sitting, for 48 hours, and it's expedited. That's bad. We have only 4 days. That's the half the lead time.
[00:26:38.400 - 00:26:56.389]
Dina Wing: let's go! So… I had explained that to the Steelhead team, they'd made me a custom report, which was great, we loved it, we used it. It had dropped, I think the metric… this was last year, obviously, so we had way less backlog, but it had dropped our average, like, dock-to-doc time.
[00:26:57.320 - 00:27:04.789]
Dina Wing: Gosh, what was the number? I put it on that, presentation. It had dropped it, like, to a third of what it was, or something ridiculous.
[00:27:04.790 - 00:27:06.950]
Dean Halonen: 27 to 7 days or something?
[00:27:07.390 - 00:27:13.120]
Dina Wing: Yeah, something like that. Which is… it's very, average, so it's…
[00:27:13.200 - 00:27:29.709]
Dina Wing: some things are much longer, some things are much shorter. But it was, it was still, it was a huge accomplishment. We were very excited about it. And then, when I, mentioned that, that at the Revenue Riptide, your team performed a, very rapid
[00:27:29.710 - 00:27:34.889]
Dina Wing: miracle, and made it available to everyone, which I thought was…
[00:27:35.180 - 00:27:42.650]
Dina Wing: really incredible. So it's… it's in the, watchtower, where you can just filter by what hasn't moved for the longest.
[00:27:43.710 - 00:27:44.330]
Dean Halonen: Yep.
[00:27:44.860 - 00:27:48.910]
Dina Wing: Huge inc… huge convenience for… for… for me, and…
[00:27:49.210 - 00:28:05.460]
Dina Wing: people on my team who are looking for parts that sit around. Because, I mean, a lot of the time, the majority of your work is rolling through the shop, no problem. Like, you don't have an issue, it just goes. But if there's anything that moves it outside of the lanes.
[00:28:05.570 - 00:28:18.580]
Dina Wing: And it gets missed, you might have a part that's just sitting in dust, like, hiding beneath a rack, put to the side, stacked under another box, and it gets lost.
[00:28:19.360 - 00:28:24.669]
Dina Wing: And, that's basically solved this problem for us entirely.
[00:28:25.060 - 00:28:30.770]
Dean Halonen: Wow. And do you get the emails, too? I think you have… there's an ability to get an email after X amount of hours.
[00:28:30.770 - 00:28:42.429]
Dina Wing: We haven't really used that so much, just because our lead times change… are so different between business units. Got it. Some where the expectation is… is, like.
[00:28:42.860 - 00:28:49.330]
Dina Wing: a week to 10 days. We have some where the expectation is 2 weeks. We have some where our lead times are out to almost 10 weeks.
[00:28:49.330 - 00:28:49.739]
Dean Halonen: Oh, wow.
[00:28:49.740 - 00:28:56.240]
Dina Wing: So, we can't really set an across-the-board, if it's spent more than 24 hours idle.
[00:28:56.560 - 00:28:59.330]
Dina Wing: screen, you know what I mean? It won't…
[00:29:00.010 - 00:29:04.699]
Dina Wing: It's not effective, so it has to be looked at manually, but we do it twice a week, it's not a big deal.
[00:29:05.090 - 00:29:12.369]
Dean Halonen: Awesome. And then, Dina, one thing I remember talking to you, I think years ago, or either you or John, but the… the…
[00:29:12.430 - 00:29:28.020]
Dean Halonen: job costing data, when it comes to, like, repricing parts, or, like, handling… because, like, no one wants to raise the price on the customer if you don't have to, like you mentioned. If you can fix it with internal processes, great. Because when you raise the price, it's obviously…
[00:29:28.180 - 00:29:45.720]
Dean Halonen: the sensitive thing is the customer might go somewhere else, right? So how have you handled that conversation with your sales team, or with your customer, just to be, like, very transparent, to gain their trust, and to charge a fair price for the service?
[00:29:45.720 - 00:29:48.969]
Dina Wing: Yeah, it, so we have different tactics,
[00:29:49.640 - 00:29:56.490]
Dina Wing: for chrome and for carbide. And that's… that's… I'll explain the reasons for that. So, for… on the chrome side.
[00:29:56.490 - 00:30:19.280]
Dina Wing: It's largely been just inflationary. Like, we did have, early on, when John and I first started here, we had to make some big changes to prices, just because they dropped so low, given the demand during COVID, that we had to make serious corrections. And, that was hard for a lot of people to adjust to, but we've, we've gotten there. But,
[00:30:20.500 - 00:30:23.840]
Dina Wing: We do a lot of… Pricing…
[00:30:24.270 - 00:30:39.290]
Dina Wing: that is dependent on how much repair is required, and we have been, flexible as to what the customer has required. So, like, for instance, we have some customers that
[00:30:39.370 - 00:30:46.199]
Dina Wing: Want… they want actuals, but they are willing to accept an invoice
[00:30:46.630 - 00:31:03.920]
Dina Wing: Without a PO being adjusted. So, at the end of the job, we can go in and say, like, okay, so we had to weld it for 2 hours, we had to prep and deal with the damage underneath the previous coating for another 8 hours, and it needed
[00:31:04.570 - 00:31:09.939]
Dina Wing: We have averages in terms of how much chrome thickness is normal.
[00:31:11.410 - 00:31:19.450]
Dina Wing: and then… every sole amount of thousands. Above that, we add a charge to it. So if something needs
[00:31:19.700 - 00:31:24.659]
Dina Wing: 50 thou per side, that's going to be in our chrome tank for, like, 5 days.
[00:31:25.710 - 00:31:33.350]
Dina Wing: it's there forever. If something needs 7 per side, it's like a 12-hour situation, because you only get, like, a thou and a half.
[00:31:33.470 - 00:31:34.920]
Dina Wing: Per hour? Ish?
[00:31:35.490 - 00:31:43.919]
Dina Wing: And we run 24-7, but it's still, like, it occupies space, and that can be expensive in terms of opportunity costs. So we upcharge
[00:31:44.290 - 00:31:50.159]
Dina Wing: based on thickness requirement, we upcharge based on, hours of repair required. And that…
[00:31:51.120 - 00:32:00.239]
Dina Wing: Our customers understand that. They… they don't have to have a giant sticker shock, because these are very large parts, so I'm… I'm talking… we have things that are, like, 20 feet long.
[00:32:00.360 - 00:32:11.040]
Dina Wing: up to 30 feet long in the 30-foot tanks. They're, like, giant bars of steel. They're huge. So any repair work and chrome work and processing.
[00:32:11.430 - 00:32:13.480]
Dina Wing: It's very expensive.
[00:32:13.870 - 00:32:17.819]
Dina Wing: So, if you have a price list that is all in cost.
[00:32:17.950 - 00:32:21.100]
Dina Wing: That all-in cost may be $8,000.
[00:32:21.440 - 00:32:27.400]
Dina Wing: But if you split it up, it's like, okay, if it's within normal parameters, it's gonna be 5 grand.
[00:32:27.680 - 00:32:35.630]
Dina Wing: We're gonna add this much, for hours of additional repair, we're gonna add this much for, hours additional in Chrome.
[00:32:35.870 - 00:32:44.280]
Dina Wing: the… Transparency, they like that. They're comfortable with that, they all trust us, to…
[00:32:44.490 - 00:32:50.369]
Dina Wing: do right by them, and give them a quality part for a reasonable amount of money.
[00:32:51.090 - 00:33:06.339]
Dina Wing: And then, when we need to up it, it's usually a matter of, okay, electricity's gone up, insurance has gone up, here's a list of all the things that have increased in price, we absorbed them for X amount of time, now we have to pass some of it on to you. But generally.
[00:33:06.460 - 00:33:08.440]
Dina Wing: There's some back and forth, but it's not a…
[00:33:09.350 - 00:33:15.189]
Dina Wing: it's not a big deal. It's been harder for thermal spray. I don't know how much…
[00:33:16.240 - 00:33:19.860]
Dina Wing: time you guys have spent looking at the price of tungsten over the last.
[00:33:19.940 - 00:33:23.280]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, I've heard about it. I've heard about it, it's gone crazy, yeah.
[00:33:23.280 - 00:33:33.680]
Dina Wing: Right, so tungsten carbide went from $30 a pound for our normal powders to it peaked at over $200 a pound.
[00:33:33.680 - 00:33:34.140]
Dean Halonen: Wow.
[00:33:34.140 - 00:33:37.420]
Dina Wing: this year. And then we're back down to…
[00:33:37.720 - 00:33:51.619]
Dina Wing: reasonable… I mean, it's not reason… it's still, like, 5 times the price that it was last year, but it's stabilized. We had no choice. We had to pass that cost on. But all of our customers were getting the same.
[00:33:52.160 - 00:33:52.830]
Dean Halonen: Yeah.
[00:33:52.830 - 00:34:10.350]
Dina Wing: information from every vendor and everyone they spoke to. So, at a certain point, there was a lot of arbitrage happening where, like, somebody had an amount of powder that they had at a previous cost, and they could keep prices down for a little bit longer, but eventually it all equaled out.
[00:34:11.050 - 00:34:20.159]
Dina Wing: So, it's… we've been transparent on why the costs are going up, and that's usually been enough that our customers have accepted it.
[00:34:21.050 - 00:34:30.540]
Dean Halonen: Awesome. I see that across our customer base, and everyone that I've really talked to across even all types of metal finishing, is that, like, if you…
[00:34:31.130 - 00:34:39.450]
Dean Halonen: If you can deliver the on-lead times, if you have great quality, and you charge a fair price, like, you can't be the lowest
[00:34:39.570 - 00:34:52.309]
Dean Halonen: cost person, it just doesn't work. You also can't charge, you know, an insane amount, but if you just charge a fair price, the customers typically say, got it, makes sense. One thing we've seen actually work extremely well, Dina, is, like, if you can
[00:34:52.530 - 00:35:08.660]
Dean Halonen: like, sometimes if you look at a part number and it actually is too high, the price was… maybe it took quicker than expected, actually lowering some prices is a great way to say, like, hey, we're just trying to charge the fair… the fair price here. Have you guys ever lowered prices for customers?
[00:35:08.910 - 00:35:13.560]
Dina Wing: We have a couple, and these are customers that…
[00:35:14.130 - 00:35:20.460]
Dina Wing: like I said, they accept price changes on the invoice and don't require,
[00:35:20.460 - 00:35:20.939]
Dean Halonen: a quote.
[00:35:20.940 - 00:35:36.090]
Dina Wing: additional purchase orders, quotes, approvals, that kind of stuff, where we've gone to actuals for them. So we'll estimate how much we think it's gonna take, and then if it ends up being lower at the end, we have been willing to adjust down.
[00:35:37.670 - 00:35:47.350]
Dina Wing: it's sort of a customer-by-customer thing. We're willing to do it, sort of across the board, but then the customer has to run the risk of, okay, maybe the estimate was too conservative.
[00:35:47.750 - 00:35:53.239]
Dina Wing: And it's actually more expensive than we thought it was gonna be. Right. It depends on how our customer
[00:35:54.330 - 00:36:01.980]
Dina Wing: what risks they want to take, how they want us to proceed. We've been extremely flexible on a customer-by-customer basis on,
[00:36:03.250 - 00:36:06.729]
Dina Wing: how they want us to manage that. And we find that that…
[00:36:07.070 - 00:36:11.590]
Dina Wing: helps, because, I mean, if you're working with Halliburton.
[00:36:12.350 - 00:36:26.350]
Dina Wing: they don't have time to go back and forth getting approvals over and over again, and their system is extremely picky on making sure things match. So, we have some…
[00:36:26.530 - 00:36:32.119]
Dina Wing: Halliburton International customers, where they… we just do an all-in price, and it's higher.
[00:36:32.260 - 00:36:40.719]
Dina Wing: For sure, it's much higher, but they're paying for the convenience of not getting multiple emails asking for permission for things.
[00:36:40.900 - 00:36:42.190]
Dean Halonen: Got it.
[00:36:42.190 - 00:36:43.040]
Dina Wing: Faster.
[00:36:43.170 - 00:36:45.080]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, makes sense.
[00:36:45.080 - 00:36:47.300]
Dina Wing: That is valuable, we'll go and do that.
[00:36:48.010 - 00:37:05.159]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, and Dina, what is… so maybe looking back a couple years, so say you had to go, you know, give a message to your previous self 2-3 years ago, or someone brand new to Steelhead, or brand new to the industry, like, what would you say is, like, the most…
[00:37:05.160 - 00:37:20.990]
Dean Halonen: Like, say they're hopping into a, you know, strategic business, operations, maybe an ownership role, or a leadership role, and they're, like, they're pretty naive or ignorant to all the things that you know or learned. What would you say is, like, the most important
[00:37:20.990 - 00:37:30.200]
Dean Halonen: maybe top 1 or 2 or 3 KPIs to really be, like, just dialed in on to make sure they have a successful outcome for their business.
[00:37:30.570 - 00:37:35.329]
Dina Wing: If I was to focus on KPIs specifically, cost of poor quality.
[00:37:35.550 - 00:37:41.140]
Dina Wing: Is… is huge. And do it as a percent of revenue, so you're not just tracking, like, how much
[00:37:41.660 - 00:37:51.499]
Dina Wing: cost you're spending, but as a factor of what you're shipping. Because it… if that percentage keeps going up, it's a different
[00:37:51.940 - 00:37:53.100]
Dina Wing: Message.
[00:37:53.270 - 00:38:06.530]
Dina Wing: And you're maintaining a same percentage across the board. It's like, okay, you can't do more than 2… less than 2%, but if you keep going up, and it's 2% this month, 3% next month, and 4% the month after that, you've got a problem.
[00:38:08.410 - 00:38:23.169]
Dina Wing: And there are other people at the company that spend more time on some of the financials, so, like, gross margin, obviously, it's hugely important. Whether or not we hit our budgeted revenue number, hugely important, but if you're looking at how to
[00:38:23.470 - 00:38:31.630]
Dina Wing: fix problems inside the company. Cost or poor quality, equipment uptime.
[00:38:31.990 - 00:38:37.819]
Dina Wing: Which I haven't talked about very much, and, labor efficiency.
[00:38:38.400 - 00:38:52.940]
Dina Wing: So equipment uptime, we measure by, like, if a machine is down, it gets marked red on a spreadsheet, and then at the end of the month, we calculate how… what percentage of possible labor hours
[00:38:53.050 - 00:38:58.420]
Dina Wing: those machines were available for? Because if your machines aren't running, then you can't…
[00:38:59.190 - 00:39:10.310]
Dina Wing: you're not getting any money off of them. You might be spending a huge amount of effort trying to fix them, but you're not getting revenue. And then, labor efficiency,
[00:39:12.770 - 00:39:15.400]
Dina Wing: Are your margins going to be accurate?
[00:39:16.550 - 00:39:20.629]
Dina Wing: Are your people clocking in properly? Are they skipping steps?
[00:39:20.950 - 00:39:22.749]
Dina Wing: Are they making mistakes?
[00:39:23.360 - 00:39:25.290]
Dina Wing: Do I need to do retraining?
[00:39:26.650 - 00:39:35.310]
Dina Wing: So those three, kind of, between the three of them, you can answer a lot of questions about where things are going awry in your shop.
[00:39:35.830 - 00:39:46.859]
Dean Halonen: Yeah, and labor efficiency is like, hey, we… Dina worked 40 hours, and she clocked how many hours did jobs. Correct. Got it. What do you typically see for a labor efficiency number?
[00:39:46.860 - 00:39:48.120]
Dina Wing: I don't want to tell you.
[00:39:49.590 - 00:39:58.360]
Dina Wing: We've only been tracking that for a few months, and it's great in some of our departments and not so good in others. So, like, for our…
[00:39:58.460 - 00:40:15.989]
Dina Wing: rotor polishers, which are, like, one-man, one machine attended kind of situations, they're, like, close to 80%. Which, great, and that's… that includes setup, but doesn't include, like, their lunch hours and stuff like that, so that's a very reasonable amount, is… we think. But some of our ones where it's…
[00:40:16.410 - 00:40:28.020]
Dina Wing: a person that's attending to multiple tanks, and it's more based on dwell time. We're kind of toying with how we want to measure that, because maybe it needs to be measured on capacity utilization instead.
[00:40:28.160 - 00:40:37.950]
Dina Wing: And that's, like… We have all this data, but we're still deciding what measurements best serve us.
[00:40:38.630 - 00:40:54.469]
Dina Wing: kind of the continuous improvement that we're working through. How can we get our systems to provide us with data, that we can use better, and how can we use that data to make things easier for our operators to hit our customers' deadlines?
[00:40:54.820 - 00:40:56.760]
Dina Wing: Kind of the whole plan.
[00:40:57.160 - 00:41:10.090]
Dean Halonen: Got it. And the on-time delivery, you said, is improving. That's obviously a key KPI as well. On the labor utilization for the lines, you can actually log into a line, so you don't have to log into a tank. If an operator's running.
[00:41:10.090 - 00:41:11.299]
Dina Wing: Talked about that.
[00:41:11.300 - 00:41:12.289]
Dean Halonen: So, not gonna be one.
[00:41:12.290 - 00:41:16.209]
Dina Wing: Adjusting the way that we log in. We actually had a meeting about that earlier this week.
[00:41:16.400 - 00:41:19.280]
Dean Halonen: Oh, there you go, there you go. We've also talked…
[00:41:19.280 - 00:41:23.090]
Dina Wing: We're using racking to help fix it, all kinds of stuff, so we're gonna…
[00:41:23.770 - 00:41:29.109]
Dina Wing: We're gonna adjust how we measure that, for sure, but deciding how is still in discussion.
[00:41:29.280 - 00:41:38.849]
Dean Halonen: Awesome. So, Dina, that sounds like it's quite the amazing story in terms of had a little bit of a drilling issue, diversified actively.
[00:41:39.030 - 00:41:55.909]
Dean Halonen: you know, restructured, got it new equipment, new labor, the sales team went out and filled that capacity, and now you guys are at, I think he's mentioned a record month in June, and great record on-time deliveries in July. So, like, things are really going…
[00:41:56.860 - 00:42:13.070]
Dean Halonen: I would say it seems, like, perfectly, obviously, here from Minnesota, looking outside, looking in, but obviously there's a ton of hard work and, and talent, being applied every day, every hour down there. What does the future look like for a precision spray? Say you zoom ahead.
[00:42:13.070 - 00:42:18.110]
Dean Halonen: 12, 24, 36 months. Do you guys have an idea of, like, where is this all going?
[00:42:18.890 - 00:42:33.669]
Dina Wing: Yeah, I mean, we're still actively adding to, what we can provide to our customers. Like, we're always looking for, okay, we can do these 5 things, what makes sense to add?
[00:42:33.670 - 00:42:45.120]
Dina Wing: to provide more services to our customers. Like, I talked about the plasma spray. We're expanding into another building.
[00:42:45.260 - 00:42:52.480]
Dina Wing: within a couple weeks, we'll have another facility online. We're looking at…
[00:42:53.750 - 00:43:00.590]
Dina Wing: Other industries that we can service using the same functions, so we…
[00:43:00.940 - 00:43:08.760]
Dina Wing: chrome and carbide wear and corrosion resistance, that can be used in a lot of different ways. We've never really touched so much on aerospace.
[00:43:08.760 - 00:43:09.210]
Dean Halonen: Huh.
[00:43:09.440 - 00:43:14.249]
Dina Wing: So we've thought about doing that. That would require NADCAP,
[00:43:14.990 - 00:43:18.109]
Dina Wing: That kind of thing. We haven't had enough
[00:43:18.280 - 00:43:28.529]
Dina Wing: demand there, to really go for an ad cap, and… but we don't have the capacity to do it right now. So as we increase our capacity, which we're always looking to do,
[00:43:28.910 - 00:43:31.590]
Dina Wing: What else can we use to fill those gaps?
[00:43:32.450 - 00:43:32.850]
Dean Halonen: Wow.
[00:43:32.850 - 00:43:41.779]
Dina Wing: more mining. We've never talked about, automobile, automotive, and maybe we're in the wrong location for that, because most of that's up where you guys are.
[00:43:42.250 - 00:43:47.680]
Dina Wing: But is that something we want to get into? So there's… there's just… there's always…
[00:43:48.300 - 00:43:56.950]
Dina Wing: More customers we can touch if we want to, but we have a really nice moat around the customers we currently have, and we intend to maintain it.
[00:43:57.150 - 00:44:16.500]
Dean Halonen: To maintain the growth, or actually, maybe even step on the gas pedal a little bit harder. Well, Dina, thanks for joining us. You guys are running a world-class operation. You tell John I said hi as well, and thanks for your time, and we'll be here to support you guys in the next phase of Precision Spray's journey.
[00:44:16.680 - 00:44:17.829]
Dina Wing: Love to hear it.
[00:44:18.030 - 00:44:19.130]
Dean Halonen: Awesome. Thanks, Dana.
[00:44:19.130 - 00:44:20.050]
Dina Wing: Thanks for having me.
[00:44:20.050 - 00:44:20.680]
Dean Halonen: Yep, see ya.
Taxonomy tags
Industry
Manufacturing; Metal Finishing; Industrial Coatings; Hard Chrome; HVOF; Thermal Spray
Business topic
Growth; Expansion; Diversification; Data-Driven Decision Making; Operational Planning
Use case
Operational visibility; manufacturing growth; business planning; capacity expansion; diversification; process improvement
Theme
Data; Visibility; Growth; Control; Leadership; Expansion
Stage of journey
Advocacy