I mean you said you got a big loan from from the banker was there have any any issues there in regards to making ends meet we've had a lot of challenges throughout the years making ends meet in a lot of the businesses but we've always worked through it Kathy had a retail business packaging shipping and rubber art stamp business was doing close to a million dollars a year and 911 come along changed this country forever sorry it almost bankrupt us we worked through
it we were advised to file bankruptcy we didn't it's been challenging but we're very strong very thankful where we are today sorry I think the one of the foundational values that steelhead is grip i' say Dana and the team his leadership team are the living embodiment of just doing the hard things when the hard things are extremely hard nights weekends Andy mentioned seven days a week to keep the lights on type of thing for nine years and I I would say when we first met Dana this was probably two
and a half or three years ago and walked through the front door it was Steelhead was in a place where we were extremely young and probably I mean we had one beta customer in the up of Michigan with a couple people but Dana was our first legitimate customer and at the time Mark here had work orders built but it was pretty much just work orders and steel at at large was just an idea and the best part was we believed in it and Dana believed in it and there actually wasn't even like he wanted the number
one thing that he wanted was job costing and and we had it technically in the database but it actually wasn't like visible so I think a huge credit goes to Dana our company I don't think we'd be here today without him believing what he couldn't even see and yeah I think the the start of our relationship was completely due to due to his belief his firm belief that when you know the numbers and you can actually appli by the Numbers it'll it'll change change the business outcome so I guess the first
question for you is when we walked in that day I think it was January or maybe December of 2021 what was the team's reaction versus your reaction to a new way of life I certainly had some push back my son was General Manager he's the biggest skeptic ever and he seen some possibility on this but I thought there was going to be a lot of work involved my plant manager talked about MRP and Erp systems he said you can look at spending a million to $2 million to get in and he said we're going to have
to do it someday we weren't ready Dean come in and virtually got us into this system for almost nothing it was so easy for us we knew they were new they were developing their system wanted to grow with us wanted us to help them grow and design their system to to work for powder coaters and plers and painting shops job shops and we we just had a great relationship to grow both businesses together MH and now Andy mentioned earlier I think that a huge takeaway for for all of our customers here today
is operational discipline like getting the people to properly put in their their times and and use the system properly so the leadership team can make adjustments and you kind of steer the ship towards the profitable customers or profitable jobs but it's extremely hard to do to get the whole team on board down to every operator on first shift second shift and Beyond so how did you guys get all the operators on board it was a struggle we really didn't make it an option you were either going to get
on board you were going to do this or you weren't going to work for us that's how it worked we believed in it we've seen the value of it did take take some time to get everybody involved participating get usable data in but within four to six months we were able to learn a lot and make huge changes on determining where we were making money and where we weren't we we got some real eye openening experiences out of the data can you explain those experiences one of the things we found with had customers
that we didn't feel we were making any money on really considered letting them go got the Steelhead data and they were 30 to 35% margin nobody in the plant knew it they're my new best friends we we just didn't know it we thought we weren't doing well on some small prototype Walkin work one off we didn't realize we were losing hundreds if not thousands of dollars on every one of them jobs we had to develop minimums and we had to start turning away some work that we had previously done that wasn't
working for us we had some large items big heavy products that we didn't know if we were making money on thought maybe we were doing okay found out some of that had 60 and 70% margin nobody knew these were huge to our business we took took something that was marginally profitable and turned it into something that has huge margins we do lot less work and make a lot more money it's American Dream really and now what about the so the financials are a key piece what about the operator adjustments that
you guys have made based on the data from the time it takes to cre you know for like operator a to complete part A versus operator B to complete part A what have you guys learned there another thing we learned off of it is for example a taping and plugging process we found out one operator might take 3 minutes to complete that function and somebody else might take 13 14 15 minutes and it's not necessarily that the person that was taking the longer time was not doing their job or not doing it properly
it's just some people were more efficient so we've used it a lot to reassign and how we use our people of where they're efficient and what they best at