Ray Dick: If we can’t get to young people and inspire them in fifth or sixth grade or younger, we’ve already really missed our chance. If they’re going into manufacturing at the high school level, they made that decision a long time ago. What we really have to do is show people, young people and those that influence them, parents, counselors, peers, friends, that manufacturing really is cool. At the end of the day, it’s cool and that there’s a home for everybody.

Adam Honig: Hello and welcome to Make It. Move It. Sell It. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving, and selling products and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig, the CEO of Spiro.AI. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain, but we’re not talking about that today. Instead, today, we’re talking with Ray Dick, the founder of Project MFG, which is all about helping create a bigger labor pool for manufacturers in the US. Welcome to the podcast, Ray.

Ray Dick: Thank you. Adam, I really appreciate you having me on the air.

Adam Honig: Yeah, it’s my pleasure. Hey, Ray, I want to start by talking about something I know is of interest to you. It’s something called ikigai. Before we jump into manufacturing and everything like that, can you just tell the folks at home here what that’s all about?

Ray Dick: Oh, absolutely, and I will argue that it is part of manufacturing. It’s not something we’re going to leave and jump into. Ikigai is a Japanese expression for finding that passion that you have and creating a life around passion such that it’s more about being than working. Seeking ikigai is seeking that passion that you can make a vocation at and have a successful, wonderful life around. For me, I’ve been seeking my ikigai for about 10 years now. I self-funded and founded a nonprofit that eventually grew into Project MFG, which we’ll talk about a little bit today. But it is that passion that drives me every day and makes life fun.

Adam Honig: Is ikigai the kind of thing that you’re always attaining towards and you never achieve it, or it’s something that you can actually be like, no, I’ve achieved it; we’re good here?

Ray Dick: That’s a great question. I don’t know if you can ever achieve and say, I’m good because it’s always out there, but I can definitely say that when you get there, it’s a great place to live. I don’t know if there’s another side to it, but the last couple three years have been an awful lot of fun, and I attribute it to finding my ikigai.

Adam Honig: That’s great to hear. Well, it’s interesting because it sounds a little bit like what you’re trying to do with Project MFG is actually help other people get their ikigai as well. Am I kind of hearing that correctly?

Ray Dick: You are driving the taproot of our tree. Our view on the trade workforce pipeline is there’s a home for everybody, and you just have to realize what you like to do, what you can be good at, and where it fits in manufacturing. If you can find that ikigai in manufacturing, you can have the life you want and still be in manufacturing, still making things, and having a wonderful life around it. That has been the driving force on pretty much how we have really set the mission for Project MFG.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. Well, I want to jump into that mission, but let’s pull back for a minute and just take a slightly bigger picture and look at what’s going on with manufacturing. We have a lot of people on the podcast who talk about the challenges that they’re facing in finding talent. I would say it’s a top three challenge for almost everybody who comes on the podcast.

Ray Dick: The workforce, the trade workforce specifically, is almost at a national crisis level. I hear a lot about how we are automating, and we’re getting rid of or reducing the reliance on manual labor, and the trades are going to be diminished. I would argue we’re just seeing the opposite of that with what’s going on globally. Our particular effort where our biggest customer is the Department of Defense, and what they have recognized is that if you can’t produce domestically, you have a national security breach. If you can’t control where it’s made, how it’s made, and what’s in it, do you really control the security of your products? That’s driving a lot of activity at the federal level to reinvest in domestic manufacturing, which is just taking a bad situation and making it much worse. The submarine industrial base has a massive gap in trade, skilled workforce, and it’s just exacerbating it for everybody else.

Adam Honig: We had the national economist for the National Association of Manufacturers on the program recently, and he was saying that there were 700,000 open jobs, unfilled jobs in manufacturing today. This is exactly what you’re talking about here, right?

Ray Dick: It is exactly what we’re talking about, and it’s actually going to grow. If you look at the history of the last 30 to 40 years, our generation, my generation, we were really guided to college. We took away the interest in going into the trades. During the early ‘80s, we traded from a high-quality production model to a low-cost production model. We saw this plethora of offshoring happen. We lacked investment in the people going into the trades. We offshored which diminished capabilities. Now, at this point in time, we have the retirement happening of the current generation that was exacerbated by COVID. You had this perfect storm of an increasing demand for onshoring based on defense and economic value creation, coupled with a greatly reduced workforce because they’re retiring, and a young set of students that don’t even know what manufacturing is in many cases anymore.

Adam Honig: I can definitely see that. What about the people who say, well, what about automation? What about AI? What about robotics? Can’t we just use all of that to make up the gap here?

Ray Dick: Automation, AI, and technological advancements can definitely change the conversation, but there’s always going to be a human in the loop somewhere. It might change job classifications. It might change what a day looks like in the life of a machinist, for example. But we’re never going to eliminate the human in the loop, at least for the foreseeable future. The other thing that’s going on is this is causing a struggle with advanced manufacturing technologies. Again, we spend a lot of time in the national security, or the defense industrial base space is how do you qualify these new technologies such that the performance is validated against the mission requirements? We have a slowdown of adoption in defense space, specifically defense industrial base, coupled with a need to grow faster. I’m an old automation guy at heart, and I appreciate the impact it can have. I think we’re still a generation or more away from it taking any significant difference. That’s my personal opinion.

Adam Honig: That’s what we have you here for, Ray. Speaking about your personal opinion, maybe just share a little bit about how you got into this space. What caused you to want to start a nonprofit in this area?

Ray Dick: I’ve been in manufacturing pretty much my entire life in different capacities. I’ve had multiple startups where we tried to make things and commercialize them, recognize all the pains that your audience feels around supply chain issues, cash flow issues, sales channels. I appreciate all of that. I’ve also been really big in the education space; I’ve taught graduate school engineering. What happened was I had an opportunity to engage in the trade education network; CTEs, community colleges. CTE is continuing trade education programs, community colleges. We started out as a predominantly Department of Defense-funded program. A customer of mine said, oh, wouldn’t it be great to have a Top Chef competition for manufacturing? That was five years ago now. That really stimulated, and they funded it. We started the competition. But what it’s done over the last five years is we’ve really dug deep into what is driving the trade workforce, training pipeline, and the ecosystem that it may or may not be best matching the manufacturers’ requirements today. It truly is being able to work with young people coming up in the trades, seeing a middle school, young, homeschooled kid, get to run a plasma cutter and then weld up a doghouse in the afternoon. The passion and the excitement we can bring to manufacturing, it’s just amazing.

Adam Honig: I feel like everybody agrees that there is a big need for more people to be coming into manufacturing. There’s also a skill gap, which we’ll get to in a minute. But I’m also seeing like an excitement gap as well that manufacturing, when you talk to young people, they want to be in video games, or they want to be filmmakers or something like that. But nobody comes up to you and says, hey, I want to build a centrifugal supercharger or something like that, to me. I really love your program because I feel like one of the things that it does is it generates that kind of excitement for people about this space. Maybe tell folks about how that works.

Ray Dick: We really decompose the workforce pipeline to the younger kids. What we’ve learned over the several years, and we have an innovation program as well that gets more into cloud from what I call the STEM orientation. If we can’t get to young people and inspire them fifth, sixth grade, or younger, we’ve already really missed our chance. If they’re going into manufacturing at the high school level, they made that decision a long time ago. What we really have to do is show people, young people and those that influence them, parents, counselors, peers, friends, that manufacturing really is cool. At the end of the day, it’s cool and that there’s a home for everybody. It’s nondiscriminatory. If you like to make, there’s a place for you to make something in manufacturing. For us, what we do in our program, we came out with the Clash of Trade as a reality YouTube show for a manufacturing competition. It’s our Top Chef of manufacturing. We now produce Clash of Trade on an annual basis, a few series and episodes that really create heroes. We give away $100,000 to our national winning team and try to put some prestige behind it and create a narrative where they can stand proudly and say, I made that. You can’t and I can, a great anecdote. We had a competition a year ago in Wichita, Kansas, a team from Sarasota, Florida had a high school senior on the team. Fantastic game, or to your point, he loved the computer as a gamer. He may have been one of the best CAD/CAM programmers we’ve ever seen because he was able to connect the gaming three-dimensional world to the manufacturing three-dimensional world. By the end of the week of competition, he had been offered a job at an aerospace company in Wichita for $40, $42 an hour. If we can tell the story of what the art of the possible is, they don’t even see that. We can tell them what the art of the possible is, find a little passion, and they could get hired to get them motivated, that’s where the success comes in the long game.

Adam Honig: Gotcha. The Clash of Trades, it’s essentially a television program, right?

Clash of Trades: Welcome to Clash of Trades. I’m your host, Todd English. Schools from across the nation have been competing in the 2023 season of Project MFG’s advanced manufacturing competition to be one of the final four at the national championship. The teams are going head-to-head for the national championship title in a chance to win $100,000. This season is all about medical manufacturers.

Adam Honig: Are they making whatever they want, or do you give them guidance? How does that work?

Ray Dick: We really treat it a lot like your first day on the job. We’ll have teams compete through the course of the academic year, of the school year. We’re going to have our next final in Charlotte, North Carolina over Memorial weekend at the Coca-Cola 600. The competition is going to be in the Stewart-Haas Racing manufacturing facility. The secret is NASCAR teams have manufacturing, and so we’re going to have our competition in their manufacturing facility. They’re going to show up, and it’s like their first day of work. They’re going to be given some raw stock. They’re going to be given a technical data package. They’re going to have access to some welding equipment and 5-axis machining, and over the span of 16 hours, they have to make something, whatever that TDP drives them to make. But, oh wait, it’s not like a traditional ‘I’m going to train to the test, and because I trained to the test, I’m going to do good.’ Real life is messy. You go pick a manufacture or an engineering change orders come through. Mistakes are found in TDPs. We introduce that kind of variability into our competition to let young people experience what a day in the life really is like if they’re on the job as part of a team, actually having to produce something with the constraints of time and money. It’s just amazing to watch them compete. They get into it. Football players have nothing on competing manufacturers.

Adam Honig: How many teams do you typically have competing for the prize?

Ray Dick: This year, in our integrated competition, we started with 81 teams, and we’re down to the final four. In our National Welding League, I think we started with 281 welders, and there’s going to be 15 of those at nationals. We start wide and narrow down to the best and run what you brung and hope you brung enough.

Adam Honig: That’s awesome. Do companies sponsor the competition, or how do you match up manufacturers with the talent that you’re creating?

Ray Dick: Honestly, Adam, you just hit on one of our Achilles heel is we’ve never been able to be able to say we put a butt in a seat. That has always bothered us because if we’re really able to say we’re getting after the workforce gap, you got to say this person went to this job. What we started doing last year is having discovery events and career fairs as part of our actual competition event cycle. Now, we’re able to use placement as part of our program. We bring in local and regional manufacturers that are tied to the community wherever we land. In this case, it will be Charlotte regional manufacturers, and then we’ll connect them with our competitors and then younger students to do workforce discovery and career placement.

Adam Honig: I was just envisioning somebody would have the Northrop Grumman patch on their shirt while they were welding or something like that.

Ray Dick: If any of your manufacturers out there want to sponsor a team, call us. We are all for it. We are working in that direction, but we haven’t tipped that can over yet. I do got to give a shout out to our manufacturing partners. Lincoln Electric has been a fantastic partner of ours and has sponsored us way beyond anything I ever imagined. Haas Automation, CNC Machines has been a fantastic partner. Zeiss has been a fantastic partner as well as Miller Electric. We have a collection of really core partners, but our next iteration foreshadowing next year, we are looking at corporate-sponsored manufacturing teams for the competition.

Adam Honig: The Clash of Trades show is on YouTube today. Any plans to take that to Netflix or anything else like that? Is that in the works?

Ray Dick: In the works, that always comes out of the mouth and flows so nice and easy. What we’ve learned is the jump from a YouTube reality show that’s self-produced to a picked-up episode on Netflix or something is a little bit longer tail. But our production crew out in LA, ATS, they’ve been working to get us in front of some folks. Every year, we’ve done, I think, seven episodes now. Every year, we work it. We did win a Viddy, which is a video award, last year. We won a Webby last year. We continue to elevate our production quality, but that’s like Tesla coming out with a new car. It’s tough to start an automotive manufacturing company. It’s hard to break into reality TV.

Adam Honig: We just need to get Elon Musk on the team. That’s what you’re saying.

Ray Dick: That’s what I’m saying. A CubeSat project tied to SpaceX, we’d be in.

Adam Honig: It’s really interesting because one of the things I’ve been talking with a lot of guests on the podcast is this idea of stimulating interest in manufacturing with younger people. We’ve been talking about Marvel movies, like what could we do to that? But what I’m hearing is more like Pitch Perfect, but for manufacturing teams. We just need a movie version of this to really get the word out.

Ray Dick: It’s really interesting, Adam. You bring up how you promote, and you attract and get young people into the trades. We’ve had a lot of conversations going everywhere from fancy ads during the Final Four or during the Super Bowl. We got some folks that are doing that that draw a certain crowd. We’ve talked about you just get them excited around the arts. Welder, for example, you go after the artistic welders or the artist and try to get them into manufacturing. What we’ve learned along the way is manufacturing and art sound very similar, but if you take welding as an example and you have a production welder, the last thing you want that production welder is doing is taking artistic license with your technical data package, especially if you’re in a critical field like aerospace or anything like that. There’s a dichotomy of the trade workforce need that has to be thought through, even going back to how we recruit them.

Adam Honig: No, I understand. On the submarine, you don’t want them freelancing about how the two pieces are coming together, for example. That sounds like a bad combination right there.

Ray Dick: It sounds like it could be a bad situation deep under the sea.

Adam Honig: Yes. Now I do feel like I am seeing locally, so I’m in Massachusetts, and I went to my son’s high school event last night. There’s a lot of advanced manufacturing stuff going on there. I was very pleased to see it, classes and different programs. I’m feeling like there is movement in this direction. Based upon what you’re seeing, though, how do you feel like we’re progressing on this topic?

Ray Dick: Progress on the topic of trade workforce education, specifically at the middle of high school, community college level is massively on the upswing. I can give you many examples. We’re actually going to be in Groton, Connecticut next Monday for a welding competition. The week after that, we’re going to be in Providence, Rhode Island. We just came back from a competition in Hawaii. We’re having an additive competition down in Austin. I was just speaking with some folks in Washington, DC yesterday, and the conversation is starting to come around. There’s a recognition of the need and that it’s a good wage job. I got to be honest, the college loan and student loan situation is helping the trade education conversation because you have all these young people coming out with huge student loans that are having trouble finding jobs versus a trade education where if you have loans, it’s not very much, and you still have a really well-paying job. From what I see, there’s awareness. There’s a growing interest in it, and it has really almost hit the tipping point of being a really good conversation. Five years ago, when we started, it was tough.