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Unknown
Hi. My name is Rob Thomas. I am the founder and one of the current owners of Anchor Bay Powder Coat.

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Unknown
Anchor Bay Powder Coat is a premier coating facility

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Unknown
located in New Baltimore, Michigan, and beautiful anchor Bay.

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Unknown
We do burn off blast wet paint, powder coat,

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Unknown
and pretty much any type of paint or powder coat you might want. There's a lot of different things.

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Unknown
And certain people do certain things where for us, we do just about anything in those fields that you can imagine.

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Unknown
We serve a very diverse base of end markets, aerospace and defense being our core. But beyond aerospace and defense, we absolutely have tentacles and paths into other high growth end markets that we see already are growing exponentially.

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Unknown
So we originally started. My dad started it as a auto body shop back in the 80s,

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Unknown
And then, in 2009 ish, when the economy was going bad, I needed to figure out something better to do and just sort of had first and completely doing all powder coat.

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Unknown
It's to me it's it's, like a family affair. I feel like not just my family, but the extended family of my employees that have been with me for years and years, and to be able to be part of growing that with these people and watching these people grow and become more successful.

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Unknown
That's what it's all about for me.

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Unknown
how much we care about our customers.

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Unknown
They're super important to us. It's not just another number. Hurry up. Get them in. Get them out. It's. I know every one of my customers first name basis.

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Unknown
Anchor Bay and Steelhead have been working together for for over three years now. And it's really a Michigan success story. When we first reached out, and came up for our on site, Rob and the team were running predominantly on paper, and some of the issues that they had encountered at that time were the doors that open, the paper flies out.

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Unknown
So just the absolute basics of running the shop, tracking jobs, keeping things moving, scheduling, knowing where parts are at

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Unknown
keeping the customers informed of the progress of jobs where some of the challenges they had at that time.

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Unknown
Steelhead just allows us to be more organized and have more information at our fingertips. You know, before all pen and paper, you could have information, but you never knew how accurate it was. A lot of people just wouldn't fill it out at all.

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Unknown
So now we just have more information right at our fingertips. It's more accurate.

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Unknown
Gives our customers a lot more confidence that we're actually achieving what we tell them we're achieving. So it's it's really been a godsend for us

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Unknown
As far as the visibility that Steelhead provides, there's just enormous opportunity from front to back in our organization and in the company.

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Unknown
Using a tool like Steelead. Starting with the inbound product that's coming in to us on the front end, being able to build robust quotes with, using historical data around labor and material, our overhead, being able to track overhead and tie overhead back to the unit costs of our business,

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Unknown
is just an extreme advantage when it comes to pricing.

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Unknown
Looking at margin analysis across different services that we provide our customers as well as end markets is very advantageous to us. And then obviously, being able to manage work and processes, customers drop product off at our facility, we receive it and then get it entered into our manufacturing process.

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Unknown
Our business is characterized as one where we have a lot of orders. We have a lot of invoices. Steelhead really helps with the administrative part of our process as well. So in addition to just being core for how work flows through our shop, how we maintain quality, it's the critical and essential tool for maintaining accurate finances within the company, accurate production and capacity planning, and just overall KPIs that we use to make decisions related to adding headcount, expanding the space, considering new offerings.

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Unknown
So it's pretty fundamental in a business where we're generating lots of messy data to have one system that can help corral all of that. Part of that together and present it in a very intelligible way. So

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Unknown
time is money. And our goal here is to significantly reduce our lead time to really start to drive enhanced and improve productivity. Steelhead is the tool that allows us to do that, and we're very, very happy to have a relationship with the Steelhead team.

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Unknown
honestly? Steelhead has been tremendous in me selling products and selling the anchor Bay way, as I like to call it, because, no company has ever seen anything like steelhead before.

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Unknown
I'll bring a shipper with me. Just a basic shipper from a nonmilitary customer, and I'll bring it to my interviews with new customers, and I'll show them by just scanning a QR code. Just the traceability that I can pull up jobs in the past, the customer profiles, things along those lines, and what our customers really like to see is the fact that everything's counted in a database.

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Unknown
So as soon as the part comes in from step A from receiving and brought to the end of it, and shipping every step of the way that we do processes in-house is tracked. And customers like to see that, because by the time it ends up at the desk, it's just a click away from our certificate guy and he can make the shirt and send it right off to the customer with the couple click of a button.

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Unknown
One of our defense customers has actually reached out to me last week, and there is a push for this job to be done. We're able to log on to steelhead and see exactly where the process was in the actual shop. We're able to manipulate the scheduling around with steelhead. We were able to get that customer's job by the end of day instead of two weeks.

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Unknown
Steelhead has been absolutely amazing. You know, not only gives us opportunity to look at where customers jobs are at, but the traceability alone for the products that are on the floor is tremendous.

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Unknown
and our customers generally choose us based off of the traceability on steelhead alone rather than just, Joe Schmo powder coating Company.

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Unknown
So in my role and quality, it's really given us the confidence, really getting out of the paper trail of stamps and initials on paper and going into a digital tracking system for traceability,

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Unknown
has given me confidence to be able to sit at my desk to see what everyone is doing in the shop floor without seeing it with my own eyes.

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Unknown
certification process before Steelhead, A lot of, you know, stacks of paper, getting them out, giving it to the auditor. Oh, here's this paper here. Here's that paper there. Where now it's just sit in front of my computer screen, throw a couple screens at, they check a couple boxes and they go out there day.

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Unknown
I've actually reduced my audit times by almost a day. Every audit I've had in the past two years because of steelhead.

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Unknown
So inventory control is amazing with Steelhead, you're able to touch the inventory in to go into certain work order. So you know exactly what batch number and all the traceability that went on to those parts as well, which our customers love to see all of that, we're able to know when we're at a certain certain threshold when we need to order powder so we don't run out of materials.

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Unknown
We're able to flow all the batch and all a lot number and information as well to to our customers.

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Unknown
That was actually one issue that kind of always came to fruition of hang a job and actually, you know, you're looking at the rack of, oh, we only have 50 pounds and we need 100, so you can only run half the job.

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Unknown
Where now when a job comes in, it'll flag us. Hey, there's low inventory for that product. You want to put on there. Let's order some powder and get it going.

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Unknown
So our we are new for AS9100 Our audit actually, just a few weeks ago.

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Unknown
And the new process, you know, it was really easy with steelhead. Honestly, just the way we're able to build it out and manipulate it the way that we want to, able to do our contract reviews, able to flow down our past ratings and iterating all that stuff to our employees, to our vendors and all of that which is what we need to do for those standards, is to flow out that information.

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Unknown
And Steelhead just makes it so easy.

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Unknown
One of my favorite things about anchor Bay Powder Co is the unlimited opportunity for growth for all of our employees. It is truly,

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Unknown
obvious that we are investing in our people and our practices within the organization. And it just allows anybody with the right skill set, the right attitude,

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Unknown
to grow with the company because at this point,

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Unknown
It's unlimited. The amount of growth potential that we have right now.

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Unknown
So it just was starting to get kind of difficult to have to do everything on my own. And especially post Covid, the mentality of the average person has just changed. So I'm just getting harder and harder.

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Unknown
I knew I had a lot of opportunity to grow, but was getting sick of having to worry about it all myself, fund it all myself, things like that. So kind of had my wheels turning that, you know what? It might be nice if I had somebody that I could bring on that could help me with those things.

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Unknown
So we decided at, Anchor Bay Powder Coat that it would be best to seek out venture capital to help us fund this, this process moving forward.

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Unknown
And we decided that Six Axis Capital would be our partner to do that.

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Unknown
What drew us to Anchor Bay is the extreme diversity that this business has. Serving a high growth and market. Aerospace and defense, we believe, has just enormous tailwinds associated with it, both from a macroeconomic and also from a regional perspective.

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Unknown
We're sitting in one of the highest concentrations of defense manufacturers in the United States of America,

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Unknown
I think, most often a business owner and trusting the next person to run their business is one of their major life decisions.

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Unknown
And I'd say not all partners are created equally. I think you really want to understand your potential buyer, whether what their commitment is to the area, what their plan is for the business long term. Do they have a track record that validates what they're saying and what they're what you're hearing from them? So really understanding the partner maybe not always chasing necessarily the highest dollar value or the highest price, but rather the partner who sort of is going to be the best steward of your legacy long term.

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Unknown
Most likely results in a much better outcome.

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Unknown
it's been nothing but growth here at Anchor Bay And it's been an absolute honor, for Steelhead to be a partner in all of the growth

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Unknown
We'd love for anyone to come visit us,

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Unknown
online, but also at our factories at any point. We're investing heavily in our business, and we want to get the message out so you can find more about us at AnchorBaypowdercoat.com

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Unknown
Anchor Bay Powder Coat runs on Steelhead