Artwork

IndustrialSage에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 IndustrialSage 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.
Player FM -팟 캐스트 앱
Player FM 앱으로 오프라인으로 전환하세요!

CCS Dualsnap: Paul Konrath

40:01
 
공유
 

Manage episode 298267717 series 1508937
IndustrialSage에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 IndustrialSage 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.

Paul Konrath of CCS Dualsnap returns to the show to share about how his career started and how their company fared during the pandemic.

ACCESS THE FREE PERSONA BUILDER hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});

Danny:

– Hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by Paul Konrath who is the president of Custom Control Sensors. Paul, thank you so much for joining me today.

Paul:

– Pleasure.

Danny:

– Well Paul, this is not your first rodeo with us. This is the second one. We did an interview with you a couple years ago, and I think this was before we actually had the Executive Series. So excited to have you back and learn more about you and about your company, Custom Control Sensors.

Paul:

– It’s a thrill to be back. Thank you very much for remembering me and inviting me back.

Danny:

– Well I’m excited to jump into it, learn more about you. We were talking about some stuff in the preshow here which I think is going to be very interesting. But before we get into everything, maybe if you could just let me know—I know, but the audience—who Custom Control Sensors, who are you guys? What do you guys do? What’s your history?

Paul:

– Sure, sure. We’re a 60-year-old company that has developed, designed, introduced pressure and temperature switches and sensors, mainly into the aerospace, defense, and industrial markets around the world. We have global markets, and almost every kind of plane has our products on it. Lately we’ve been introducing new technology, new types of sensors to especially aerospace, but same with industrial. We’re out here in California which is our main location. But we operate around the world, so it’s a global company. It makes it kind of fun.

Danny:

– Excellent. Well I guess we’re going to get into this here in a little bit more, but before we dive a little bit more into the business and challenges that you’re solving, this is the time that we’d want to get to know you a little bit better and learn how you ended up as president here. How did you end up with CCS? How did you end up in the engineering space? Take us back.

Paul:

– Okay, yeah, and it’s funny. You had given me some homework to do before we got together. It did make me think things I’ve never really thought much about. Me, I’m a Midwesterner, and one day I was filling out a form to go to school. A good friend of mine, he actually became my brother-in-law eventually, suggested engineering. At the time it was simple; okay, fine, I did that. Next thing I knew I was five years of engineering under my belt. It was a good time to be studying engineering. I think it’s a better time now because engineering runs the world in a lot of ways. Anyway, I came out of school and wasn’t quite ready for the workforce. I did some interning. I did some co-opping. Those are all good programs. So I had a little experience, but I was a lousy engineer as far as I could tell. So I got an opportunity to travel; then I went back into grad school and got an MBA which, in my eyes, I was blessed by a professor who, at the time, could see the benefits of an engineer with a sense of business.

The irony is all through engineering school, we picked fights with business students because we thought we were better than them. But in the end, as my father one time said, it’s the business guy who hires the engineer. So I got a business degree as well, and that really put me in a good position. And as I mentioned, I did some traveling. I biked around Europe for a summer which taught me a lot about myself as well as travel and taking on new challenges. I had the benefit of growing up as being in the Midwest, coming out of Milwaukee which is my hometown. You could travel around America which we did in an old, beat-up station wagon and see the country and realize you can leave Milwaukee and go other places and survive.

And so I came out of school, and pure luck, somebody called me out of the blue and offered me an opportunity with a company, Texas Instruments at the time. I had a couple requirements. I’m an engineer; okay, I wanted a company that was technology-based, well-respected, well-known. TI had a good reputation. Obviously a heavy driven engineering company. On the other hand, they had some of the worst sales and marketing experiences because they were engineering-driven. So it was a great time to go to Texas Instruments. Nobody could second-guess me because there weren’t that many people there who weren’t engineers or who had a business degree. So that got me started, and I moved out of Milwaukee. It’s a great place to be from. In fact, I was just there over the Fourth of July, and it’s still a lot of fun in the summertime. But I never looked back.

The funny thing was I went to Texas Instruments in Massachusetts and New England. I was there mostly in marketing and got into sales. Somebody suggested to me one day out of the blue, hey, you might make a good salesman, being an engineer. I never wanted to be a sales guy. All I could think of is used car salesmen. And this is no offense to used car salesmen because I respect them now. But at the time, oh, my God, I don’t want to be a sales guy. And yet I took the chance, and that’s something I think somewhere along the line I learned about, hey, if it’s a reasonable challenge—reasonable meaning, what’s the worst that could happen? Go on and take the chance and see where it goes. So I moved into sales, and that made me a better marketing person when I went back. At the time, I was middle-career I suppose you could call it, and I was getting a little frustrated.

Again, another person came up to me and gave me some good advice, said you may not be thrilled to be a mid-level marketing guy at Texas Instruments, but—his words, some of these, they always haunt me as being too simplistic—but it was bloom where you’re planted. Now, if you picture the guy who told me that, those words coming out of his mouth did not–he’d always been kind of a hard-bitten kind of guy, and here he was talking about flowers and bloom where you’re planted. But the interesting thing was, the message I took was maybe this isn’t the perfect place I want to be in, and maybe I’d like to be someplace else. But do the best job you can while you’re here. And people noticed. Next thing I know, somebody else came along and took a chance on me, partly because of that attitude. This may not be the place to be, but I do a good job—and moved me into operations for a while. That was an eye-opener.

When you’re in sales and marketing, you can say all you want because it’s expected a little bit. I’m in marketing; I’m in sales. But when you’re in operations it gets a lot different. And to me that was one of the hardest jobs I ever had, dealing with people on a daily basis. You become part of their—you hear their problems. You hear everything about their families, and you still try and get work done. But it was a good experience. Then out of the blue I got a call to another company that was headquartered back in Milwaukee. It might be fun to work for that company. Again, it was out in the East Coast, but I could go back to Milwaukee and visit my family “on company time,” as they would say. So I did that for a few years. At the same time I kept my—I wanted to work internationally because the world’s getting smaller, and if you don’t understand—especially in our industries, industrial, aerospace, even defense in some ways—if you don’t understand what’s going on outside your local office, you’re missing opportunities.

So I had done a good job in marketing and some program management. As luck would have it, my boss became responsible for a company over in England. He was one who couldn’t relate to the British, so he asked if I would. So I went over with my family for a couple of years, had a nice time, big experience, broadened my horizons. That opened up other doors for me. Again it was a challenge. Do you want to move your family to England or anywhere? It was a reasonable challenge. It was a certain risk, I suppose. Who knows what happens? When it came time to coming back, we ended up in California which probably wasn’t my wife’s plan, but it was an acceptable plan. The kids loved it, so here we are in California.

And I had worked in large corporations for most of my career. I said next time I move, I want to move to a smaller company, a little flatter organization. The opportunity arose, and I’m in a relatively—CCS, Custom Control Sensors, privately-held company. It’s been under the same general family for 60 years. The owner is my boss, and it’s a very flat organization. So that got me here. The pandemic tossed a few curves at us, but eventually—and one of the reasons I came here, again similarly like when I went to Texas Instruments, the owner said, “I really don’t know much about sales and marketing.” Great; you won’t be second-guessing me, necessarily. I suddenly became the smartest guy in the room when it came to sales and marketing. That doesn’t happen in a big corporation where you have a lot of layers and a lot of people second-guessing or telling you this or that. Your ideas, you can’t please everybody all the time. Here it’s a lot easier to please. I only have to please one or two people, and I’m okay with that. That’s one of the attractions of a smaller business.

Danny:

– Yeah, obviously you have a very storied career, going around and with travel and not just from a geographic standpoint but also from different departments, obviously going from marketing to sales. You see that pretty common, or sales to marketing. But ops is definitely, it’s where the rubber meets the road right there. That’s when the ops guys start yelling at the sales people. What the hell did you just sell? We can’t do this!

Paul:

– What were you thinking? But I remind him that nothing in a company happens until something is sold.

Danny:

– True.

Paul:

– The rest of you guys can all just sit around, and until the sales guy produces, you’re all support. Granted, to your point, once I sell something, then I’m hoping the operations guy believes me and makes it happen.

Danny:

– I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve never run into that here. I’m curious. You said that you did engineering. What kind of engineering did you study?

Paul:

– I started as a biomedical engineer because I had great dreams of designing and making artificial limbs. But I found out that the school I was going to, their definition of biomedical engineering was essentially pre-med, which I could not see myself as a doctor. So electrical engineering was a huge overlap between—in fact, if you walk into an operating room today, it’s more of an electrical engineer than it is a doctor in some ways. Now they have, the doctor drives a robot that does the surgery. So I went into electrical engineering and stuck it out. I’d still be there if it wasn’t for some good friends and some fraternity brothers that helped me out in tough times. I’m not a very good engineer, but I get the concept.

Danny:

– It sounds like that’s helped a lot. Obviously it’s very difficult to get into a very technical—getting into technical sales or anything. Obviously when you were at TI, from a marketing standpoint, being able to relate to the audience, depending on who you’re selling to certainly you’re going to likely be selling to other engineers. There’s other stakeholders involved there, but being able to at least somewhat talk the same lingo helps tremendously. And then obviously in operations, that’s kind of a given.

Paul:

– You’re absolutely right. To be able to walk into somebody and have a technical—one of my focuses was, I want a technical product. When I interviewed with companies, and when I looked at a company, I would look at the product. Is it technical? Are they a leader in the marketplace? Are they well-respected and have a great quality reputation? Those are the three deciding factors. It didn’t matter where they were located because I’d move around. And it didn’t matter a lot of other stuff. But if it was a good technical product, well-made, highly reliable and a good quality reputation, that makes my job as a sales and marketing person all the easier.

Danny:

– Throughout your career you talked about that there were different people that approached you, said hey, you’d be good in sales, or hey, do you want to move your family to England and help. What’s one person or moment, maybe, that comes to mind that really, you think had a big impact? I know there’s probably multiple. Most of the time there is. But what’s one that stands out?

Paul:

– Probably one of my first bosses, Ed Iannotti. I’ll always remember him because, one thing is he took a big chance on me. He was willing to look at someone and bring him into an organization and stand behind me and give me some sense of direction, but at the same time freedom to do what I wanted to do, to learn, to fall, to trip a little bit, nothing fatal. He also taught me that I could have a relationship with my “boss” where it wasn’t all one way, that he would actually ask me what I thought and use my opinion. And here I was, a rookie, newbie, whatever you want to call it. He taught me early on that everyone has an idea. In my position now, I’m more of a consensus. I’ll sit in a meeting and try to draw the quiet ones out because they probably have good ideas, but they’re just overwhelmed by the other ones. That was one of the things that taught me about listening. Listen to the people, working with the people under you. I don’t like to use that term.

But that was one; he was a big one, took a shot on me. And so did Ray Tarangela who gave me the operations job. I’m a sales guy, a marketing guy. I had very little, if any, operational experience. And he said, I’ll take a shot on that. And he taught me more about operations. Again, he said here’s the basics; just make sure—he taught me early on when Kaizen was new, when using Kanban was new. He taught me that—we had people running presses, and they spent more time with that press than they did with their spouse. But when you went up to them and said, “Take care of that like you want; do what you want to do to it,” all of a sudden the place cleaned up, and it ran smooth. So again, he was the kind of guy that opened up and said, “Give it a shot. Give it a try.” There aren’t any bad ideas except the ones that you don’t try.

Danny:

– No, it’s great, yeah. So I’m just curious. Your day-to-day now, obviously, it’s a little different. What’s a typical—I know I didn’t ask you this ahead of time, so I’m throwing you a curveball.

Paul:

– Yeah, that’s all right.

Danny:

– What’s your typical day-to-day look like?

Paul:

– You know, I wouldn’t say it’s real regular, but you usually come in and you check emails, see if there are any disasters. I got the smartphone, so I know if something goes haywire overnight. I’ll probably hear about it before I get here. But first of all, it’s a very good team here. And if you let them do their job, more often than not they’ll do the job. So I come in, I’ll check emails. If any one looks like a crisis, that might be one I focus on. I try to get all my meetings in the morning. One of the benefits of, if there’s such a thing as a benefit for a pandemic, was video conferencing because I can sit in my office. I can be in a meeting. I can be doing some other things if it’s not me that needs to contribute. I can get people who—trying to get people in a conference room sometimes, one is first getting them there. Second is, at the end of the meeting they want to sit around and shoot the breeze. The beauty of the video conference, you can turn it off and go on to something else. I’ll do that in the morning.

I have a number of projects that we’re working on. Some of them are creative; some of them are longer-term. I try to put those in the afternoon. I go out and—I believe in management by walking around. It’s well-worn at this point. But get out and just talk to people. Say hi, what’s new. And how’s that thing work; what’s it do? How’s your day going? I think the people that work in this building, they like to know that upper management is around, is participating. Sometimes you help somebody out. Somebody complained about the air conditioner not working. I’m sure they told the maintenance guy, “Hey, the air conditioner isn’t working,” but if I see the maintenance guy and I suggest you might want to check that guy’s air conditioner, he’ll do it. The people appreciate that. That’s my day, and then usually I check emails before I leave, too, in case I missed any, and wrap it up. I try not to take work home. That’s why I come here. If I travel—and I haven’t traveled in a while, but I like to travel. So then when I do travel, that’s a little more chaotic. But again, and we’ll see how that goes post-pandemic, how travel goes.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of the pandemic and everything, I’m just curious for your organization. How much of an impact did it have for you, and what did you learn from it?

Paul:

– One of the biggest things is it blew us out of our comfort zone. CCS is, in some ways, very old-school. You came; you worked from six to whatever, whatever. You’re at your desk, and suddenly—and we have a large engineering staff. We have sales and marketing and production control. And suddenly California was probably a little aggressive in some of their mandates which, okay. Suddenly you couldn’t go to work, and we scrambled. And next thing you know, within a relatively short time, most people were up and running from home. I was impressed. Our IT gentleman Rod just did an outstanding job wiring us and getting us up. Henry, our CEO, was also very accommodating, just saying, “Whatever it takes, let’s get it set up. Make the people comfortable.” And we did a good job of sanitizing the plant and getting people back in relatively quickly with… one thing is—we’re proud of this—there were no transmission cases of Covid in the company. We were up and running within a couple weeks after the original shut-down. We’ve kept it clean. We finally just stopped wearing masks. If you’re vaccinated, now you don’t have to wear a mask.

So it’s amazing how fast we moved from an at-your-desk, nine to five to working remotely and Zoom meetings and WebExes, and we kept it going. I think that taught us that we can be flexible. Now people are, can I work remote today? We don’t necessarily encourage or discourage it, but it’s an option that we didn’t have before. So that was great. It taught us that we could recover, and it taught us that we could be a little more flexible with people and their work environments. On the other hand, in some ways, I consider the pandemic a bit of a speed bump in our business. The aerospace business was booming in 2019 into 2020. Industrial was doing fine. Then all of a sudden, it’s amazing how you think you planned and projected and forecasted everything and didn’t see that one coming. In some ways, though, that speed bump helped us catch up on some things. It helped us work on some projects that, because things slowed down, we could work on some things that we were putting on the back burner. It got some other projects kick-started because ecommerce and digital marketing suddenly taught you how important digital marketing and ecommerce is because you couldn’t talk to people. You could call them on the phone. But it jump-started a few of those programs as well. I don’t want to see another pandemic, but I could find some silver lining in that cloud.

Danny:

– Sure, absolutely. And I think it’s a story that we’ve heard over and over again. Obviously yes, nobody wants to go through that again if we don’t have to, but certainly silver linings in terms of what, being able to learn. The flexibility is a piece that we hear a lot of. It’s always interesting hearing about different impacts. We deal with a lot of companies in the material handling space, and they’re still going nuts. Talk about accelerating business and just—but then everyone’s dealing with supply chain issues still relative to labor and resiliency, just the whole nine yards.

Paul:

– I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.

Danny:

– I don’t think so. Unfortunately I agree with you. Some of it I think is self-induced. Other stuff is just, things are still running its course. That being said, from challenges that you see in the industry right now, what are the things that you’re seeing that you see on the horizon, whether they may have already been here pre-Covid or maybe not. What are you seeing?

Paul:

– From a change in the way our industry works?

Danny:

– Yeah, in the industry, the way that it works or, yeah.

Paul:

– When we say industry, I see myself flipped. Our customers’ industry is probably more important. My industry is sensors and switches and measurements. That’s always going to be important because sensors are the fingertips of the internet. It’s the sensors that are the eyes and ears of the machine and the systems that they run. And they become more so as people found out, hey, I can’t always depend on people being here, so robotics is more important. Automation is important, and we’ve embraced that here as well. I see that our business in terms of sensors and switches is pretty solid going forward as long as you’ve got the right types of switches and sensors. As far as industry goes, I think everyone appreciates the supply chain a whole lot more than they did a year and a half ago. I’ve seen a few industries back off the pressure for what used to be low price, low price, low price. Suddenly now it’s more, is it a good value?

I’ve always preached, we’re a good value. We’re not the least expensive. We never will be, probably not the most expensive. But we’re going to give you the value you’re looking for. I think this whole pandemic has made people like the aerospace industry and energy and power and oil and gas a little bit more respective of, yeah, okay, this company provides support. It gives me a good value. It gives me a good product. They’re there when I need them. So I think you’re going to see a little less pressure on cost, cost, cost and a little bit more on, are you there? You’ve seen the move from foreign supply back to domestic supply. That’s not going to go away until somebody starts to say, “Hey, can I get it cheaper somewhere else?” Then hopefully somebody will say, “But remember what might happen,” or, “Remember what happened the last time.”

I also see some larger companies reaching out financially supporting some of the supply base because they’ve put the supply base at risk with their cost-cutting. Then all of a sudden the demand disappeared, but you can’t make an airplane without certain parts. So now the aerospace industry has to carry some suppliers to keep them in business. I don’t think they like that, but they realize that we have to make sure that our supply base is financially viable even in a certain risk environment, God forbid another pandemic.

Danny:

– Yeah, it’s interesting just the inter-dependability across everything relative to supply chain. You look at globalization and just how the impact there. It’s a lot to unpack. I think the whole question around lean manufacturing is being re-looked at. Well, okay, maybe we pushed that a little too far.

Paul:

– Leaned it out a little too much.

Danny:

– Yeah, exactly. And aerospace—I’m a pilot—you lean too much of your fuel to air mixture, and you’re going to lose an engine. So we can’t go too lean.

Paul:

– That reminds me, yeah, I was going to tell you. You’re a pilot, and one of the things that happened during the pandemic, was one of my children started flight school.

Danny:

– Oh, awesome. That is very cool. They get the pilot’s license yet?

Paul:

– Not yet, not yet. He’s about halfway there. The goal is to be a commercial pilot someday, so we’ll see where that goes.

Danny:

– That’s exciting. Well, as an aside, and I’m not exactly sure. Obviously Covid messed with things a little bit. But there was a big pilot shortage coming up in 2028 I think was supposed to be the peak. I don’t know now. It probably is still there.

Paul:

– Yeah, it hasn’t changed a whole lot. One of the— and I’m not a pilot, so I don’t have to worry, but retiring at 65.

Danny:

– Exactly.

Paul:

– Pilots can still change. They were still retiring. They turned 65 during the pandemic, they had to retire. And so granted demand is down a little bit, but in some ways the airlines are lucky they weren’t making new pilots either at the time. So the pilots were retiring, but you weren’t replenishing the pool. And now suddenly the pool is kind of low. And it’s not just pilots. It’s flight attendants; it’s maintenance. It’s a lot of other stuff that’s impacted the industry as well. I would like to think in the next five years they will get back together, but—

Danny:

– You never know. I would think so, but to your previous comment that you made earlier just in the way that we’re doing business now and being more open and adept to video conferencing, for example. Go-to-market strategies, I know there’s a big question right now in terms of business travel, and I’m sure it affects you guys as well and what you’re thinking. But I’m hearing a lot of companies have, you can travel now, but a lot of people are like, you know what? I don’t know that I necessarily need to from a business standpoint. Maybe I don’t need to travel all over the place for all these meetings when I can do this over Zoom versus—So it’ll be interesting, I think, to see what that impact will be.

Paul:

– You made a very good point. The airlines certainly want business back. I’ve learned that we won’t always be able to get out to that person, so we have to find more ways for them to find us.

Danny:

– Yeah, exactly.

Paul:

– Going back to that digital marketing, that whole idea of helping people find you and make it easy to find, easy to buy, easy to do business with. And once they find you, can they buy your product? We’ve obviously pushed in that direction so that not only are we easy to find, but it’s easy to buy our product. But that’s the leverage that I try to tell my sales people, marketing people is you used to have to get in the car and drive to these meetings around the city. If you do this right and you do it well, you could stay in your office and do twice as many introductory meetings, meet-and-greets. Hi, is there an interest here? Can we get together? And we’ve learned to do that with larger corporations too. I can now address a number of engineers while they’re at their desks and say hey, do you want to join for this WebEx? Let me just talk to you about it. And if there’s an interest, I’ll be happy to jump on a plane and come up and see you. But I can talk to five or ten of you in an hour whereas I could only talk to two or three of you in a day after I travel all the way up there. So I see the benefits of video conferencing, the digital marketing, the ecommerce, and maybe that’ll make the business travel all that much more efficient and effective because I still believe eventually customers would like to see the person from time to time.

Danny:

– Oh, yeah.

Paul:

– They always do better in person.

Danny:

– Oh, 100%.

Paul:

– I believe your father was a salesman, or is a sales person. And so the selling job hasn’t gone away. How you go about it, obviously, is changing a little bit.

Danny:

– Yeah, certainly, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve. And it’ll oscillate and go back and forth. It’s an interesting observation; kind of an interesting tangent, too, talking about, getting in with the whole pilot thing. It worked. So Paul, one last question I want to ask, and again, I didn’t send this to you because I like asking people this off the cuff. So get ready for the last curveball. Sorry. And that is, what are you doing as a leader of your organization to stay on top of your game?

Paul:

– Okay, one is I’m not sure I’m ever on top of my game because I’m still learning so much every day and new things come up every day that you think, where did that come from? But one of the things is, I like to read. So I’ve been reading leadership books and articles because a lot of people have gone before me, have done a good job at being leaders. So you can learn from their ways. The other thing is, I’ve also learned, communicate more. I often believe—and somebody told me long ago, and I thought she was pretty smart—said you know, if you give the same information to a number of people—reasonable people, rational people—they’ll probably all come to pretty much the same agreement or consensus. And I find that’s true. If you take the time to communicate, you tell them what you want to do, you tell them the outcome you’d like to have, you give them the same data that you’ve got, generally they’re like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Let’s do it.

And I’ve learned to do that a lot more in this position because there are so many different things going on. But if you talk the main point, the main direction, the main things you want to get done here, most people are good at heart. They want to get it done. They want to do the right thing. And they’ll try to do what you want done. You don’t have to micromanage them. You set the general direction. We want to have good products. We want to be fair with people. We want to be reasonable. You want to treat people like you want to be treated. I’m trying to keep putting that into practice and lead by example too. So yeah, reading up how other people have done it, communicating like crazy, explaining and studying examples, those are probably the three best things I could come up with off the cuff.

Danny:

– That’s fantastic. No, that’s great. Any books in particular that you’ve come across that stand—you’re like, this is awesome?

Paul:

– Two or three come to mind. One of them is—I just finished a book on leadership. It talked about Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. I lived during some of their times. I never thought about it, but it talked about how they went through certain crises and came out, and they forged their leadership qualities and got through. But the book I’m reading right now, believe it or not, and I mentioned I was from Milwaukee, is Instant Replay by Jerry Kramer about the 1967 Packers season under Vince Lombardi. And I’m learning about Vince Lombardi leadership style. I’m not saying he was always right, but he certainly won games.

Danny:

– He certainly did, and that’s awesome. That’s fantastic. My wife is from Minneapolis, so we won’t get into anything there.

Paul:

– I lived in Minneapolis. Part of my wanderings, I’ve lived in Minneapolis, and it’s a wonderful city except in January and February. But really, good for you. And you know what? The people up there are super. I come from the East Coast back to the Midwest, and I didn’t realize the type of people and the quality of people out of Minnesota. Other than the Vikings, everything’s great.

Danny:

– Other than the Vikings, yeah, that’s what I hear. There’s a little bit of that that I’ve picked up on. Anyways, well Paul, listen, we could probably go on for three hours. This has been just interesting and fascinating, learning more about you.

Paul:

– Thank you for having me. No, I love your questioning. I love your questions.

Danny:

– This has been good. So for those who would like to learn more about you, would like to learn more about CCS, what’s the best way that they can check you guys out?

Paul:

– We have our website address is ccsdualsnap, all one word— long, but one word— ccsdualsnap.com. We’re always looking for advice on how to do better, but that’s the first place to go. I certainly encourage people to check it out.

Danny:

– Well, we’ll make sure that all the information is in the show notes and accessible throughout the video so if people want to check you out, they certainly can. So Paul, thank you.

Paul:

– Thank you.

Danny:

– And we’ll wrap.

Paul:

– Keep up the good work, by the way. I love your show.

Danny:

– I will. Thanks so much. Alright, well that wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with Paul Konrath who is the president of Custom Control Solutions. Got that right. You can go to ccsdualsnap.com, check them out. The information will be in the show notes. Thank you for watching or listening. Listen, if you’re not subscribed, I highly recommend going to the website and getting on our email list because you’re missing out on great content like this, and there’s more and more and more coming out every single day. So I’ll be back next week with another episode on the Executive Series. Thanks so much for watching.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Sponsored by Optimum Productions

  continue reading

241 에피소드

Artwork
icon공유
 
Manage episode 298267717 series 1508937
IndustrialSage에서 제공하는 콘텐츠입니다. 에피소드, 그래픽, 팟캐스트 설명을 포함한 모든 팟캐스트 콘텐츠는 IndustrialSage 또는 해당 팟캐스트 플랫폼 파트너가 직접 업로드하고 제공합니다. 누군가가 귀하의 허락 없이 귀하의 저작물을 사용하고 있다고 생각되는 경우 여기에 설명된 절차를 따르실 수 있습니다 https://ko.player.fm/legal.

Paul Konrath of CCS Dualsnap returns to the show to share about how his career started and how their company fared during the pandemic.

ACCESS THE FREE PERSONA BUILDER hbspt.cta.load(192657, 'ee6f69de-cfd0-4b78-8310-8bdf983bdcc9', {});

Danny:

– Hello and welcome to today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview. I am joined by Paul Konrath who is the president of Custom Control Sensors. Paul, thank you so much for joining me today.

Paul:

– Pleasure.

Danny:

– Well Paul, this is not your first rodeo with us. This is the second one. We did an interview with you a couple years ago, and I think this was before we actually had the Executive Series. So excited to have you back and learn more about you and about your company, Custom Control Sensors.

Paul:

– It’s a thrill to be back. Thank you very much for remembering me and inviting me back.

Danny:

– Well I’m excited to jump into it, learn more about you. We were talking about some stuff in the preshow here which I think is going to be very interesting. But before we get into everything, maybe if you could just let me know—I know, but the audience—who Custom Control Sensors, who are you guys? What do you guys do? What’s your history?

Paul:

– Sure, sure. We’re a 60-year-old company that has developed, designed, introduced pressure and temperature switches and sensors, mainly into the aerospace, defense, and industrial markets around the world. We have global markets, and almost every kind of plane has our products on it. Lately we’ve been introducing new technology, new types of sensors to especially aerospace, but same with industrial. We’re out here in California which is our main location. But we operate around the world, so it’s a global company. It makes it kind of fun.

Danny:

– Excellent. Well I guess we’re going to get into this here in a little bit more, but before we dive a little bit more into the business and challenges that you’re solving, this is the time that we’d want to get to know you a little bit better and learn how you ended up as president here. How did you end up with CCS? How did you end up in the engineering space? Take us back.

Paul:

– Okay, yeah, and it’s funny. You had given me some homework to do before we got together. It did make me think things I’ve never really thought much about. Me, I’m a Midwesterner, and one day I was filling out a form to go to school. A good friend of mine, he actually became my brother-in-law eventually, suggested engineering. At the time it was simple; okay, fine, I did that. Next thing I knew I was five years of engineering under my belt. It was a good time to be studying engineering. I think it’s a better time now because engineering runs the world in a lot of ways. Anyway, I came out of school and wasn’t quite ready for the workforce. I did some interning. I did some co-opping. Those are all good programs. So I had a little experience, but I was a lousy engineer as far as I could tell. So I got an opportunity to travel; then I went back into grad school and got an MBA which, in my eyes, I was blessed by a professor who, at the time, could see the benefits of an engineer with a sense of business.

The irony is all through engineering school, we picked fights with business students because we thought we were better than them. But in the end, as my father one time said, it’s the business guy who hires the engineer. So I got a business degree as well, and that really put me in a good position. And as I mentioned, I did some traveling. I biked around Europe for a summer which taught me a lot about myself as well as travel and taking on new challenges. I had the benefit of growing up as being in the Midwest, coming out of Milwaukee which is my hometown. You could travel around America which we did in an old, beat-up station wagon and see the country and realize you can leave Milwaukee and go other places and survive.

And so I came out of school, and pure luck, somebody called me out of the blue and offered me an opportunity with a company, Texas Instruments at the time. I had a couple requirements. I’m an engineer; okay, I wanted a company that was technology-based, well-respected, well-known. TI had a good reputation. Obviously a heavy driven engineering company. On the other hand, they had some of the worst sales and marketing experiences because they were engineering-driven. So it was a great time to go to Texas Instruments. Nobody could second-guess me because there weren’t that many people there who weren’t engineers or who had a business degree. So that got me started, and I moved out of Milwaukee. It’s a great place to be from. In fact, I was just there over the Fourth of July, and it’s still a lot of fun in the summertime. But I never looked back.

The funny thing was I went to Texas Instruments in Massachusetts and New England. I was there mostly in marketing and got into sales. Somebody suggested to me one day out of the blue, hey, you might make a good salesman, being an engineer. I never wanted to be a sales guy. All I could think of is used car salesmen. And this is no offense to used car salesmen because I respect them now. But at the time, oh, my God, I don’t want to be a sales guy. And yet I took the chance, and that’s something I think somewhere along the line I learned about, hey, if it’s a reasonable challenge—reasonable meaning, what’s the worst that could happen? Go on and take the chance and see where it goes. So I moved into sales, and that made me a better marketing person when I went back. At the time, I was middle-career I suppose you could call it, and I was getting a little frustrated.

Again, another person came up to me and gave me some good advice, said you may not be thrilled to be a mid-level marketing guy at Texas Instruments, but—his words, some of these, they always haunt me as being too simplistic—but it was bloom where you’re planted. Now, if you picture the guy who told me that, those words coming out of his mouth did not–he’d always been kind of a hard-bitten kind of guy, and here he was talking about flowers and bloom where you’re planted. But the interesting thing was, the message I took was maybe this isn’t the perfect place I want to be in, and maybe I’d like to be someplace else. But do the best job you can while you’re here. And people noticed. Next thing I know, somebody else came along and took a chance on me, partly because of that attitude. This may not be the place to be, but I do a good job—and moved me into operations for a while. That was an eye-opener.

When you’re in sales and marketing, you can say all you want because it’s expected a little bit. I’m in marketing; I’m in sales. But when you’re in operations it gets a lot different. And to me that was one of the hardest jobs I ever had, dealing with people on a daily basis. You become part of their—you hear their problems. You hear everything about their families, and you still try and get work done. But it was a good experience. Then out of the blue I got a call to another company that was headquartered back in Milwaukee. It might be fun to work for that company. Again, it was out in the East Coast, but I could go back to Milwaukee and visit my family “on company time,” as they would say. So I did that for a few years. At the same time I kept my—I wanted to work internationally because the world’s getting smaller, and if you don’t understand—especially in our industries, industrial, aerospace, even defense in some ways—if you don’t understand what’s going on outside your local office, you’re missing opportunities.

So I had done a good job in marketing and some program management. As luck would have it, my boss became responsible for a company over in England. He was one who couldn’t relate to the British, so he asked if I would. So I went over with my family for a couple of years, had a nice time, big experience, broadened my horizons. That opened up other doors for me. Again it was a challenge. Do you want to move your family to England or anywhere? It was a reasonable challenge. It was a certain risk, I suppose. Who knows what happens? When it came time to coming back, we ended up in California which probably wasn’t my wife’s plan, but it was an acceptable plan. The kids loved it, so here we are in California.

And I had worked in large corporations for most of my career. I said next time I move, I want to move to a smaller company, a little flatter organization. The opportunity arose, and I’m in a relatively—CCS, Custom Control Sensors, privately-held company. It’s been under the same general family for 60 years. The owner is my boss, and it’s a very flat organization. So that got me here. The pandemic tossed a few curves at us, but eventually—and one of the reasons I came here, again similarly like when I went to Texas Instruments, the owner said, “I really don’t know much about sales and marketing.” Great; you won’t be second-guessing me, necessarily. I suddenly became the smartest guy in the room when it came to sales and marketing. That doesn’t happen in a big corporation where you have a lot of layers and a lot of people second-guessing or telling you this or that. Your ideas, you can’t please everybody all the time. Here it’s a lot easier to please. I only have to please one or two people, and I’m okay with that. That’s one of the attractions of a smaller business.

Danny:

– Yeah, obviously you have a very storied career, going around and with travel and not just from a geographic standpoint but also from different departments, obviously going from marketing to sales. You see that pretty common, or sales to marketing. But ops is definitely, it’s where the rubber meets the road right there. That’s when the ops guys start yelling at the sales people. What the hell did you just sell? We can’t do this!

Paul:

– What were you thinking? But I remind him that nothing in a company happens until something is sold.

Danny:

– True.

Paul:

– The rest of you guys can all just sit around, and until the sales guy produces, you’re all support. Granted, to your point, once I sell something, then I’m hoping the operations guy believes me and makes it happen.

Danny:

– I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve never run into that here. I’m curious. You said that you did engineering. What kind of engineering did you study?

Paul:

– I started as a biomedical engineer because I had great dreams of designing and making artificial limbs. But I found out that the school I was going to, their definition of biomedical engineering was essentially pre-med, which I could not see myself as a doctor. So electrical engineering was a huge overlap between—in fact, if you walk into an operating room today, it’s more of an electrical engineer than it is a doctor in some ways. Now they have, the doctor drives a robot that does the surgery. So I went into electrical engineering and stuck it out. I’d still be there if it wasn’t for some good friends and some fraternity brothers that helped me out in tough times. I’m not a very good engineer, but I get the concept.

Danny:

– It sounds like that’s helped a lot. Obviously it’s very difficult to get into a very technical—getting into technical sales or anything. Obviously when you were at TI, from a marketing standpoint, being able to relate to the audience, depending on who you’re selling to certainly you’re going to likely be selling to other engineers. There’s other stakeholders involved there, but being able to at least somewhat talk the same lingo helps tremendously. And then obviously in operations, that’s kind of a given.

Paul:

– You’re absolutely right. To be able to walk into somebody and have a technical—one of my focuses was, I want a technical product. When I interviewed with companies, and when I looked at a company, I would look at the product. Is it technical? Are they a leader in the marketplace? Are they well-respected and have a great quality reputation? Those are the three deciding factors. It didn’t matter where they were located because I’d move around. And it didn’t matter a lot of other stuff. But if it was a good technical product, well-made, highly reliable and a good quality reputation, that makes my job as a sales and marketing person all the easier.

Danny:

– Throughout your career you talked about that there were different people that approached you, said hey, you’d be good in sales, or hey, do you want to move your family to England and help. What’s one person or moment, maybe, that comes to mind that really, you think had a big impact? I know there’s probably multiple. Most of the time there is. But what’s one that stands out?

Paul:

– Probably one of my first bosses, Ed Iannotti. I’ll always remember him because, one thing is he took a big chance on me. He was willing to look at someone and bring him into an organization and stand behind me and give me some sense of direction, but at the same time freedom to do what I wanted to do, to learn, to fall, to trip a little bit, nothing fatal. He also taught me that I could have a relationship with my “boss” where it wasn’t all one way, that he would actually ask me what I thought and use my opinion. And here I was, a rookie, newbie, whatever you want to call it. He taught me early on that everyone has an idea. In my position now, I’m more of a consensus. I’ll sit in a meeting and try to draw the quiet ones out because they probably have good ideas, but they’re just overwhelmed by the other ones. That was one of the things that taught me about listening. Listen to the people, working with the people under you. I don’t like to use that term.

But that was one; he was a big one, took a shot on me. And so did Ray Tarangela who gave me the operations job. I’m a sales guy, a marketing guy. I had very little, if any, operational experience. And he said, I’ll take a shot on that. And he taught me more about operations. Again, he said here’s the basics; just make sure—he taught me early on when Kaizen was new, when using Kanban was new. He taught me that—we had people running presses, and they spent more time with that press than they did with their spouse. But when you went up to them and said, “Take care of that like you want; do what you want to do to it,” all of a sudden the place cleaned up, and it ran smooth. So again, he was the kind of guy that opened up and said, “Give it a shot. Give it a try.” There aren’t any bad ideas except the ones that you don’t try.

Danny:

– No, it’s great, yeah. So I’m just curious. Your day-to-day now, obviously, it’s a little different. What’s a typical—I know I didn’t ask you this ahead of time, so I’m throwing you a curveball.

Paul:

– Yeah, that’s all right.

Danny:

– What’s your typical day-to-day look like?

Paul:

– You know, I wouldn’t say it’s real regular, but you usually come in and you check emails, see if there are any disasters. I got the smartphone, so I know if something goes haywire overnight. I’ll probably hear about it before I get here. But first of all, it’s a very good team here. And if you let them do their job, more often than not they’ll do the job. So I come in, I’ll check emails. If any one looks like a crisis, that might be one I focus on. I try to get all my meetings in the morning. One of the benefits of, if there’s such a thing as a benefit for a pandemic, was video conferencing because I can sit in my office. I can be in a meeting. I can be doing some other things if it’s not me that needs to contribute. I can get people who—trying to get people in a conference room sometimes, one is first getting them there. Second is, at the end of the meeting they want to sit around and shoot the breeze. The beauty of the video conference, you can turn it off and go on to something else. I’ll do that in the morning.

I have a number of projects that we’re working on. Some of them are creative; some of them are longer-term. I try to put those in the afternoon. I go out and—I believe in management by walking around. It’s well-worn at this point. But get out and just talk to people. Say hi, what’s new. And how’s that thing work; what’s it do? How’s your day going? I think the people that work in this building, they like to know that upper management is around, is participating. Sometimes you help somebody out. Somebody complained about the air conditioner not working. I’m sure they told the maintenance guy, “Hey, the air conditioner isn’t working,” but if I see the maintenance guy and I suggest you might want to check that guy’s air conditioner, he’ll do it. The people appreciate that. That’s my day, and then usually I check emails before I leave, too, in case I missed any, and wrap it up. I try not to take work home. That’s why I come here. If I travel—and I haven’t traveled in a while, but I like to travel. So then when I do travel, that’s a little more chaotic. But again, and we’ll see how that goes post-pandemic, how travel goes.

Danny:

– Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of the pandemic and everything, I’m just curious for your organization. How much of an impact did it have for you, and what did you learn from it?

Paul:

– One of the biggest things is it blew us out of our comfort zone. CCS is, in some ways, very old-school. You came; you worked from six to whatever, whatever. You’re at your desk, and suddenly—and we have a large engineering staff. We have sales and marketing and production control. And suddenly California was probably a little aggressive in some of their mandates which, okay. Suddenly you couldn’t go to work, and we scrambled. And next thing you know, within a relatively short time, most people were up and running from home. I was impressed. Our IT gentleman Rod just did an outstanding job wiring us and getting us up. Henry, our CEO, was also very accommodating, just saying, “Whatever it takes, let’s get it set up. Make the people comfortable.” And we did a good job of sanitizing the plant and getting people back in relatively quickly with… one thing is—we’re proud of this—there were no transmission cases of Covid in the company. We were up and running within a couple weeks after the original shut-down. We’ve kept it clean. We finally just stopped wearing masks. If you’re vaccinated, now you don’t have to wear a mask.

So it’s amazing how fast we moved from an at-your-desk, nine to five to working remotely and Zoom meetings and WebExes, and we kept it going. I think that taught us that we can be flexible. Now people are, can I work remote today? We don’t necessarily encourage or discourage it, but it’s an option that we didn’t have before. So that was great. It taught us that we could recover, and it taught us that we could be a little more flexible with people and their work environments. On the other hand, in some ways, I consider the pandemic a bit of a speed bump in our business. The aerospace business was booming in 2019 into 2020. Industrial was doing fine. Then all of a sudden, it’s amazing how you think you planned and projected and forecasted everything and didn’t see that one coming. In some ways, though, that speed bump helped us catch up on some things. It helped us work on some projects that, because things slowed down, we could work on some things that we were putting on the back burner. It got some other projects kick-started because ecommerce and digital marketing suddenly taught you how important digital marketing and ecommerce is because you couldn’t talk to people. You could call them on the phone. But it jump-started a few of those programs as well. I don’t want to see another pandemic, but I could find some silver lining in that cloud.

Danny:

– Sure, absolutely. And I think it’s a story that we’ve heard over and over again. Obviously yes, nobody wants to go through that again if we don’t have to, but certainly silver linings in terms of what, being able to learn. The flexibility is a piece that we hear a lot of. It’s always interesting hearing about different impacts. We deal with a lot of companies in the material handling space, and they’re still going nuts. Talk about accelerating business and just—but then everyone’s dealing with supply chain issues still relative to labor and resiliency, just the whole nine yards.

Paul:

– I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.

Danny:

– I don’t think so. Unfortunately I agree with you. Some of it I think is self-induced. Other stuff is just, things are still running its course. That being said, from challenges that you see in the industry right now, what are the things that you’re seeing that you see on the horizon, whether they may have already been here pre-Covid or maybe not. What are you seeing?

Paul:

– From a change in the way our industry works?

Danny:

– Yeah, in the industry, the way that it works or, yeah.

Paul:

– When we say industry, I see myself flipped. Our customers’ industry is probably more important. My industry is sensors and switches and measurements. That’s always going to be important because sensors are the fingertips of the internet. It’s the sensors that are the eyes and ears of the machine and the systems that they run. And they become more so as people found out, hey, I can’t always depend on people being here, so robotics is more important. Automation is important, and we’ve embraced that here as well. I see that our business in terms of sensors and switches is pretty solid going forward as long as you’ve got the right types of switches and sensors. As far as industry goes, I think everyone appreciates the supply chain a whole lot more than they did a year and a half ago. I’ve seen a few industries back off the pressure for what used to be low price, low price, low price. Suddenly now it’s more, is it a good value?

I’ve always preached, we’re a good value. We’re not the least expensive. We never will be, probably not the most expensive. But we’re going to give you the value you’re looking for. I think this whole pandemic has made people like the aerospace industry and energy and power and oil and gas a little bit more respective of, yeah, okay, this company provides support. It gives me a good value. It gives me a good product. They’re there when I need them. So I think you’re going to see a little less pressure on cost, cost, cost and a little bit more on, are you there? You’ve seen the move from foreign supply back to domestic supply. That’s not going to go away until somebody starts to say, “Hey, can I get it cheaper somewhere else?” Then hopefully somebody will say, “But remember what might happen,” or, “Remember what happened the last time.”

I also see some larger companies reaching out financially supporting some of the supply base because they’ve put the supply base at risk with their cost-cutting. Then all of a sudden the demand disappeared, but you can’t make an airplane without certain parts. So now the aerospace industry has to carry some suppliers to keep them in business. I don’t think they like that, but they realize that we have to make sure that our supply base is financially viable even in a certain risk environment, God forbid another pandemic.

Danny:

– Yeah, it’s interesting just the inter-dependability across everything relative to supply chain. You look at globalization and just how the impact there. It’s a lot to unpack. I think the whole question around lean manufacturing is being re-looked at. Well, okay, maybe we pushed that a little too far.

Paul:

– Leaned it out a little too much.

Danny:

– Yeah, exactly. And aerospace—I’m a pilot—you lean too much of your fuel to air mixture, and you’re going to lose an engine. So we can’t go too lean.

Paul:

– That reminds me, yeah, I was going to tell you. You’re a pilot, and one of the things that happened during the pandemic, was one of my children started flight school.

Danny:

– Oh, awesome. That is very cool. They get the pilot’s license yet?

Paul:

– Not yet, not yet. He’s about halfway there. The goal is to be a commercial pilot someday, so we’ll see where that goes.

Danny:

– That’s exciting. Well, as an aside, and I’m not exactly sure. Obviously Covid messed with things a little bit. But there was a big pilot shortage coming up in 2028 I think was supposed to be the peak. I don’t know now. It probably is still there.

Paul:

– Yeah, it hasn’t changed a whole lot. One of the— and I’m not a pilot, so I don’t have to worry, but retiring at 65.

Danny:

– Exactly.

Paul:

– Pilots can still change. They were still retiring. They turned 65 during the pandemic, they had to retire. And so granted demand is down a little bit, but in some ways the airlines are lucky they weren’t making new pilots either at the time. So the pilots were retiring, but you weren’t replenishing the pool. And now suddenly the pool is kind of low. And it’s not just pilots. It’s flight attendants; it’s maintenance. It’s a lot of other stuff that’s impacted the industry as well. I would like to think in the next five years they will get back together, but—

Danny:

– You never know. I would think so, but to your previous comment that you made earlier just in the way that we’re doing business now and being more open and adept to video conferencing, for example. Go-to-market strategies, I know there’s a big question right now in terms of business travel, and I’m sure it affects you guys as well and what you’re thinking. But I’m hearing a lot of companies have, you can travel now, but a lot of people are like, you know what? I don’t know that I necessarily need to from a business standpoint. Maybe I don’t need to travel all over the place for all these meetings when I can do this over Zoom versus—So it’ll be interesting, I think, to see what that impact will be.

Paul:

– You made a very good point. The airlines certainly want business back. I’ve learned that we won’t always be able to get out to that person, so we have to find more ways for them to find us.

Danny:

– Yeah, exactly.

Paul:

– Going back to that digital marketing, that whole idea of helping people find you and make it easy to find, easy to buy, easy to do business with. And once they find you, can they buy your product? We’ve obviously pushed in that direction so that not only are we easy to find, but it’s easy to buy our product. But that’s the leverage that I try to tell my sales people, marketing people is you used to have to get in the car and drive to these meetings around the city. If you do this right and you do it well, you could stay in your office and do twice as many introductory meetings, meet-and-greets. Hi, is there an interest here? Can we get together? And we’ve learned to do that with larger corporations too. I can now address a number of engineers while they’re at their desks and say hey, do you want to join for this WebEx? Let me just talk to you about it. And if there’s an interest, I’ll be happy to jump on a plane and come up and see you. But I can talk to five or ten of you in an hour whereas I could only talk to two or three of you in a day after I travel all the way up there. So I see the benefits of video conferencing, the digital marketing, the ecommerce, and maybe that’ll make the business travel all that much more efficient and effective because I still believe eventually customers would like to see the person from time to time.

Danny:

– Oh, yeah.

Paul:

– They always do better in person.

Danny:

– Oh, 100%.

Paul:

– I believe your father was a salesman, or is a sales person. And so the selling job hasn’t gone away. How you go about it, obviously, is changing a little bit.

Danny:

– Yeah, certainly, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve. And it’ll oscillate and go back and forth. It’s an interesting observation; kind of an interesting tangent, too, talking about, getting in with the whole pilot thing. It worked. So Paul, one last question I want to ask, and again, I didn’t send this to you because I like asking people this off the cuff. So get ready for the last curveball. Sorry. And that is, what are you doing as a leader of your organization to stay on top of your game?

Paul:

– Okay, one is I’m not sure I’m ever on top of my game because I’m still learning so much every day and new things come up every day that you think, where did that come from? But one of the things is, I like to read. So I’ve been reading leadership books and articles because a lot of people have gone before me, have done a good job at being leaders. So you can learn from their ways. The other thing is, I’ve also learned, communicate more. I often believe—and somebody told me long ago, and I thought she was pretty smart—said you know, if you give the same information to a number of people—reasonable people, rational people—they’ll probably all come to pretty much the same agreement or consensus. And I find that’s true. If you take the time to communicate, you tell them what you want to do, you tell them the outcome you’d like to have, you give them the same data that you’ve got, generally they’re like, yeah, okay, that makes sense. Let’s do it.

And I’ve learned to do that a lot more in this position because there are so many different things going on. But if you talk the main point, the main direction, the main things you want to get done here, most people are good at heart. They want to get it done. They want to do the right thing. And they’ll try to do what you want done. You don’t have to micromanage them. You set the general direction. We want to have good products. We want to be fair with people. We want to be reasonable. You want to treat people like you want to be treated. I’m trying to keep putting that into practice and lead by example too. So yeah, reading up how other people have done it, communicating like crazy, explaining and studying examples, those are probably the three best things I could come up with off the cuff.

Danny:

– That’s fantastic. No, that’s great. Any books in particular that you’ve come across that stand—you’re like, this is awesome?

Paul:

– Two or three come to mind. One of them is—I just finished a book on leadership. It talked about Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. I lived during some of their times. I never thought about it, but it talked about how they went through certain crises and came out, and they forged their leadership qualities and got through. But the book I’m reading right now, believe it or not, and I mentioned I was from Milwaukee, is Instant Replay by Jerry Kramer about the 1967 Packers season under Vince Lombardi. And I’m learning about Vince Lombardi leadership style. I’m not saying he was always right, but he certainly won games.

Danny:

– He certainly did, and that’s awesome. That’s fantastic. My wife is from Minneapolis, so we won’t get into anything there.

Paul:

– I lived in Minneapolis. Part of my wanderings, I’ve lived in Minneapolis, and it’s a wonderful city except in January and February. But really, good for you. And you know what? The people up there are super. I come from the East Coast back to the Midwest, and I didn’t realize the type of people and the quality of people out of Minnesota. Other than the Vikings, everything’s great.

Danny:

– Other than the Vikings, yeah, that’s what I hear. There’s a little bit of that that I’ve picked up on. Anyways, well Paul, listen, we could probably go on for three hours. This has been just interesting and fascinating, learning more about you.

Paul:

– Thank you for having me. No, I love your questioning. I love your questions.

Danny:

– This has been good. So for those who would like to learn more about you, would like to learn more about CCS, what’s the best way that they can check you guys out?

Paul:

– We have our website address is ccsdualsnap, all one word— long, but one word— ccsdualsnap.com. We’re always looking for advice on how to do better, but that’s the first place to go. I certainly encourage people to check it out.

Danny:

– Well, we’ll make sure that all the information is in the show notes and accessible throughout the video so if people want to check you out, they certainly can. So Paul, thank you.

Paul:

– Thank you.

Danny:

– And we’ll wrap.

Paul:

– Keep up the good work, by the way. I love your show.

Danny:

– I will. Thanks so much. Alright, well that wraps up today’s IndustrialSage Executive Series interview with Paul Konrath who is the president of Custom Control Solutions. Got that right. You can go to ccsdualsnap.com, check them out. The information will be in the show notes. Thank you for watching or listening. Listen, if you’re not subscribed, I highly recommend going to the website and getting on our email list because you’re missing out on great content like this, and there’s more and more and more coming out every single day. So I’ll be back next week with another episode on the Executive Series. Thanks so much for watching.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to subscribe to our weekly newsletter to get every new episode, blog article, and content offer sent directly to your inbox. You can also subscribe wherever you download podcasts so you can listen on the go!

Sponsored by Optimum Productions

  continue reading

241 에피소드

모든 에피소드

×
 
Loading …

플레이어 FM에 오신것을 환영합니다!

플레이어 FM은 웹에서 고품질 팟캐스트를 검색하여 지금 바로 즐길 수 있도록 합니다. 최고의 팟캐스트 앱이며 Android, iPhone 및 웹에서도 작동합니다. 장치 간 구독 동기화를 위해 가입하세요.

 

빠른 참조 가이드