Advertise on podcast: The Manufacturing Automation Podcast

One week after IMTS 2026, Michael breaks down what it actually cost to bring a Robodrill to Chicago: $40K to $50K before labor, from rigging and freight to hotels and ads. He shares how a 10x10 booth pulled in 350 leads, how 22 of 25 CoolantClears sold right off the floor, and how a geo-targeted Instagram ad reached a buyer in his hotel room who sent a colleague to the booth. Matt explains why moving his vacuum fixture product onto its own domain took it to the top spot for its main keywords, and how he built a Claude project that drafts technical customer emails with near-perfect accuracy. The two dig into hiring a senior salesperson, why Matt went senior-only and is open to hybrid candidates, the risk of a single point of failure in sales, and whether agencies or a dedicated growth manager overseeing freelancers get better results. On the marketing side, Michael shares what happened to Google performance after turning off Meta ads, why blended ROAS and MER may be the better metrics, and why he is betting on Bing ads for a 40 to 60-year-old buyer. He also admits that 30 phone calls drove more revenue than 3,000 emails. In operations, the two cover booth lead capture rules, kanban compliance ("technically solved but not culturally solved"), taking IntraLoad orders from existing customers to fund better unit economics, and why Gimbel is raising implementation pricing to bring average deals from around $30K to $35K to $40K. Plus Matt's team taking over weekly resource planning without him, and a friendly SOP showdown between OneDrive with Copilot and Notion with Claude.

Michael joins fresh off six days at IMTS 2026 in Chicago, and Matt is running on four hours of sleep after his own label printing show in Rosemont. Michael breaks down what made this IMTS night and day compared to two years ago: a loaned FANUC Robodrill in a 10x10 booth, the last-minute bailment insurance scramble to get it there, and geo-targeted Instagram ads that pulled CNC machinists within a four-mile radius straight to the booth. CoolantClear 3 officially launched and is finally back in stock. Matt shares how his team scores and enriches trade show leads before they hit HubSpot, and why they make visitors wait so every conversation gets complete notes. The two compare proposal workflows (HTML versus PDF), talk through how to prioritize 100+ post-show proposals by buyer persona, and dig into ad fatigue, attribution blind spots, and what happened when Michael turned off $10K a month in Meta spend. Also covered: Matt's 22,000 sq ft facility addition and ClickUp go-live, Michael's hard lesson about letting one product's demand surge pull the whole business off balance, and an honest conversation about how AI can leave you with seven projects 80% done instead of one finished. Plus the story of Teddy's 19-hour escape through Chicago.

Michael opens with one of his rougher weeks of the year. A silent Shopify bug — only visible to brand-new users in a completely cookie-free browser — killed e-commerce sales for six to seven days and took 80 hours to track down. Combined with ad fatigue on Meta, a 43-day deal close lag hitting turnkeys right now, and IMTS prep reshaping the entire booth layout at the last minute, it's been a week of everything converging at once. Matt's week is a different kind of pressure — two full-day site visits, contracts in multi-month red-line negotiations, and a sales bottleneck that's no longer a pipeline problem but a pure capacity one: his team is quoting more than ever in company history and still can't keep up. The sales and marketing section is one of the most tactical the show has had. Michael makes the case for conquest ad campaigns — buying competitor keywords, running direct AutoVise versus Air Vice comparisons, targeting CoolantClear against Rotoclear — and walks through how his Meta ads quietly poured all budget into one winning creative while 60% of his ad library never saw a single dollar spent. Matt admits he's never run a competitor keyword campaign and gets talked through why it's probably already happening to him. They go long on the AI content saturation problem — everyone's marketing is better than ever, nobody's converting because everyone else's is too — and why the only differentiator left is the content that's intentionally hard to make. Matt gets a LinkedIn posting mandate from his marketing team. Michael's multi-AI debugging workflow using Claude, Manus, and Groq in parallel is what finally cracked the Shopify bug. Engineering covers Develop's largest machine ever — 30-plus feet long, split for transport, loaded by forklift because it won't fit through a door in one piece — losing two full weeks to one supplier on large milled plates, and a new HMI architecture debuting at Lupe for the packaging market. Michael is finalizing IMTS demo assembly, filing provisional patents he can't discuss, and stashing 30 CoolantClear units in a hotel room to sell in ways that may or may not comply with show floor rules. The CI section closes with the most substantive supply chain conversation the show has had — Matt making the case for deep blanket POs with fewer, growth-minded vendors as a strategic relationship rather than a procurement tactic, and drawing the analogy to a building lease: nobody hesitates to sign a five-year lease on the space that generates their revenue, so why hesitate to commit to the product that does the same?

Matt opens with decision fatigue at a peak — seven hours of back-to-back meetings on Thursday, four reports on his desk, and a team that's been waiting for him to put authority in writing that he assumed they already had. The fix isn't more hierarchy — it's a decision authority matrix that makes explicit who can approve what, up to what dollar threshold, without Matt. Michael opens on his first full week with an EA and a quieter inbox, and lands on an uncomfortable insight: he'd been using email and EA-type tasks as a refuge from the harder, higher-stakes decisions he was avoiding. Both are figuring out what their jobs actually are now that the scaffolding is coming off. The sales and marketing section covers a lot of ground. Matt is watching machines his team bid on three to four years ago — machines that went to the low bidder — getting decommissioned in the corner, and customers spending 50 to 100% more to start over with Develop. Two competitors released marketing content this week copying the scoping theory Develop has been building for four years. He takes it as confirmation, not a threat. They go long on margin philosophy, risk scalers on new-to-world machine builds, when to strategically compress margin to enter a market, and why B2B conviction during the quiet years is the only way the flywheel eventually starts. Michael is running 20–30X return on Meta ads — until it drops off a cliff, every time — while Google holds steady at 10X without being touched. The CoolantClear price increase campaign was their most successful email campaign yet, and his marketing hire Nate's idea. Engineering covers Develop's five-robot Project 29 machine now in full build with all robots landed, the critical path getting squeezed by one supplier on large milled plates who will not be supplying again, and the IMTS booth being completely redesigned around a last-minute Fanuc RoboDrill that nobody wanted to say no to. Michael is finalizing the in-house CoolantClear 3 production supply chain, narrowing down a product launch priority order across four items, and filing a cluster of patents that are draining to read and worse to draft. The CI section closes with Matt running a full audit on all active CIs after realizing the board has grown beyond what the team can execute in parallel, and a pointed conversation about ClickUp, Gim Command, and what it actually costs to hire for a homegrown ERP that nobody else in the world has ever touched.

Matt opens the week with something he hasn't felt in a while — his passion back at full volume. Site visits, marketing roadmap sessions with the UK hire, deal structuring on strategic accounts, and a surprise shop tour at Ring Brothers, the company he helped build before Develop. It's energizing, but he knows high-passion Matt can be a lot for people who haven't seen it in a while. Michael's version of the week is quieter but equally significant: he ran an experiment where he just stopped doing EA tasks — didn't sort email, didn't answer the phone — and found four hours he didn't know he had. The in-person EA candidate came in for her trial day and got hired on the spot. On the sales and marketing side, Matt walks through a pattern that's now showing up repeatedly: companies that chose the low bid over Develop two to three years ago are coming back with machines they want to tear out. The email that landed in his inbox that morning flat-out said Develop's was the most thorough proposal, but the board went low bid anyway. His team wants to start a whiteboard over-under bet on how long each one takes to call back. Michael, meanwhile, is deep in value engine mapping — a Ryan Deiss framework for flowcharting the entire customer journey from ad click to money in the bank — and walks through how it helped him identify where Gimbel's funnel is leaky rather than just too small. IMTS prep is intensifying: a RoboDrill is now going into a 10x10 booth, CoolantClear units are getting shipped in a second crate to potentially sell on the floor, and nobody has confirmed whether selling product on the show floor is actually allowed. Engineering covers Develop's five-robot Project 29 machine getting derailed by one supplier on large milled plates, a factory acceptance test that caught issues before anything shipped, and a facility expansion plan that just hit a wall — precast concrete lead times jumped from three months to ten because of data center construction consuming Wisconsin's supply. Michael is filing a cluster of patents he can't talk about yet, has a rotary union collet chuck nearly ready, and is wrestling with product launch priority order across four items that could all ship within three months. The CI section closes with Matt deciding to delay his line of credit renewal rather than forecast through a normalization that keeps moving, Michael turning off Shopify notifications and finding more peace than he expected, and a pointed conversation about EA-as-forcing-function — both hosts landing on the same insight that having someone who will actually make the call, even imperfectly, beats the founder stalling indefinitely in their own inbox.

Michael opens the week in what he calls profitability mode — except the tension is that pushing for profitability and pushing for growth are fundamentally opposed, and he's trying to do both at once. He's obsessing over conversion rate, rebuilding the checkout experience, adding CAD model GIFs to email sequences, and rearchitecting the entire customer journey — all while knowing what he really needs is an EA and a marketing person, and holding off on both because the business already has so many new people to onboard. Matt's week is the mirror image: the team is handing him fully prepped proposals without him asking, booking meetings he didn't know about, and sending follow-up emails from his Otter transcripts — and his new question is why he's still reviewing things that don't need him at all anymore. The sales and marketing conversation is a long one. They go deep on when to choose growth over profitability and commit fully to one instead of straddling both, the EA versus marketing hire dilemma, conversion rate measurement in B2B versus B2C, the danger of over-engineering proposals to the point of creating noise, and a seven-hour session where Matt's marketing hire went through all 236 of Develop's proposals to re-engineer the funnel from scratch. Fanuc reaches out unprompted after seeing Develop's Inland case study — they want to build a dedicated case study page with backlinks and offered a RoboDrill for IMTS. Michael, meanwhile, is squeezing a RoboDrill into a 10x10 booth and has accepted that the showrunners will probably yell at them. Engineering covers CoolantClear 3 going into full in-house production for the first time — no outside vendors, one assembly tech who turned out to be a machinist — and a new pneumatic collet chuck with built-in rotary union that's been visited and revisited six times and is finally looking sellable. The CI section closes with a Shopify and HubSpot unification that creates a single fulfillment source of truth for the assembly team, morning scrum getting messier in a good way, a cash bucket discipline conversation pulled from Ryan Deiss, and a pointed exchange about YPO versus EO for founder peer groups.

Matt opens the week having just taken his first real vacation in ten years — four days where the team didn't need him once. Not because he forced it, but because the systems held. He comes back to a week of 15 hours of pure sales meetings he didn't book, proposals he didn't write, and follow-ups he didn't send — all handled by the team while he was gone. Michael opens on the opposite end of the same evolution: all-in on marketing after a month of operations, launching 40 ads over a weekend, rebuilding abandoned cart flows with 3D GIF previews, and landing a 50% close rate on real leads — a number Matt immediately flags as a possible sign of underpricing. The sales and marketing conversation covers the email marketing gap both companies are closing — Klaviyo abandoned cart flows, welcome sequences, drip campaign architecture, and why Michael thinks email is the highest-leverage thing he's not doing consistently. Matt's marketing hire Andrew is three weeks in and pitching his full plan on the 10th. A business development engineer role just went live on Indeed. They also go deep on funnel filtering — how to slow calendar velocity without burning leads — and the right moment to hand a sales process to someone who didn't build it. Engineering covers the five-robot Project 29 machine getting insanely heavy, the HMI going into revision two with an architecture Matt expects to last a decade, CoolantClear 3 supply chain details being locked down, and a customer from years ago who bought from the lowest bidder and is now ready to throw those machines in the trash and start over with Develop. The CI section closes with Fireflies getting cancelled over security gaps that couldn't be fixed, Otter replacing it the next day for less money, a purchasing automation in Gim Command that gets POs onto vendor Gantt charts in one click, and a frank conversation about what it actually costs — in hours and dollars — to run on AI instead of people.

Michael opens the week trying to come up for air — CoolantClear is selling faster than it can be assembled, proposals are backing up, marketing has gone quiet, and he can't figure out which fire to stomp first. Matt opens on the opposite end of the same problem: 13 sales meetings in one week, Andrew in his first days booking more, Trish running the inbox, and a Thursday that converged accounting, legal review, CFO reporting, and the largest pitch in Develop history into a single day. Both are oversubscribed. The difference is which part of the business is doing it to them. The sales and marketing conversation is one of the most practical the show has had. Matt makes the case for EA before salesperson — and shares how Trish protected him from his own chronic optimism before Andrew could even start. Michael walks through his pricing experiment on CoolantClear, his 200-hour proposal generator that's 90% done and still breaking, and the EA versus sales hire debate he's been circling for weeks. They go deep on LinkedIn organic versus ads, zero-difficulty keywords, email drip campaigns, case study attribution, and the right order to line up marketing dominoes when you can't measure which one will fall furthest. Engineering covers a new pallet tending system Michael can't discuss yet — provisional filed, first customer implementation underway — incremental gripper redesigns cutting assembly cost without touching specs, and a mountain of parts arriving at Develop for the largest machine in company history. The CI section closes with One Plan officially outgrown: Develop has 3X'd its machine throughput and is aiming for 2-3X more in 2028, two team members are tasked with figuring out what replaces it, and Michael makes the pitch for building something in-house in 20 hours.

Matt comes back from Automate brain dead but buzzing — the LED wall was a hit, the custom trade show software finally worked instead of fighting them, and podcast listeners stopped him in the hallway of the Airbnb. Michael returns from Maui with four new hires in the last month and a company that's somehow handling its busiest month ever with fewer things breaking than usual. Both are starting to feel something unfamiliar: the systems are actually working. On the sales and marketing side, Matt officially announces the hire he teased last episode — Andrew, the account manager from his agency who was leaving, is coming on full-time July 13th to run top and middle of funnel. It's the commercial hire Matt has been circling for over a year. Michael, meanwhile, is watching ad creative fatigue eat into Meta ROAS in real time — campaigns that should be returning 4–10x are returning 2x — and knows exactly why: he hasn't filmed new content in weeks because sales volume has him buried. Both hosts go long on the middle of funnel problem — over a hundred stalled deals at Develop, a growing backlog at Gimbel — and what it actually takes to build reporting and follow-up systems that don't require the founder. Engineering covers Spindle Storm getting a full product redo — triple the airflow, investment cast instead of billet, with free replacements going to every existing customer — and a client 1701 case study video dropping soon that Matt clearly can't stop smiling about. The episode closes with Gim Command's vendor portal vision, Develop's push toward NIST and ITAR compliance, SolidWorks PDM that Michael knows he needs and keeps not doing, and Matt's ten-year anniversary with Amanda.

Both hosts open on the same diagnosis: the sine wave problem. Michael keeps bouncing between B2B proposal mode and Shopify e-commerce focus, and whichever one he's in, the other declines. Matt's seeing the same pattern smooth out slightly as style guides and brand kits he built over three months start coming back to him from the team — nearly finished, almost no edits needed. When the tools work, the founder stops being the bottleneck. Both are trying to get there faster. On the sales and marketing side, Matt teases a major hire he can't fully announce yet — a dedicated marketing and sales role that's been in the works quietly and is close to being inked. It's the move he's been circling for over a year, and it changes the commercial structure of Develop significantly. Michael, meanwhile, moves email marketing entirely from HubSpot to Klaviyo to break the contact list ceiling, debates whether to build email flows there or inside Gim Command before September, and gets talked off a bad IMTS booth partnership by Matt in real time. The two also go long on what Gimbel Automation actually is — CNC accessories ecosystem or something else — in one of the most strategic conversations the podcast has had. Engineering covers CoolantClear 3 already in prototype — with a production prototype that solves every install issue from versions one and two — and a machine at a customer site approaching one million units processed in four months. Matt pulls data on what 98.5% versus 99.4% reliability actually does to customer perception, and both hosts dig into why customers obsess over cycle time while ignoring in-process probing that prevents crashes. The episode closes with Develop building toward running without Matt by end of 2027, Michael flying to Maui for a corporate retreat, and a frank admission that the number to sell either company would have to be so absurd it's basically not worth thinking about.

Matt opens with a gut punch: his agency account manager — the person carrying the entire team for two years — is leaving, and the contract runs through November. He's weighing a settlement negotiation, bringing marketing in-house, or both, and Michael doesn't hesitate with his position: for niche B2B manufacturing, agencies that can't tell a vise from a clamp aren't worth the training cost. It's the second person that day to tell Matt the same thing, and he's starting to listen. Michael is running on fumes. The proposal generation tool is done — three to four hours down to ten minutes — and Gim Command is humming, but CoolantClear demand has completely outrun supply, and the mental load of managing a product growing that fast while hiring two assembly techs, finishing the configurator rollout, and trying not to burn out is taking a visible toll. The configurator suite is now complete across TumbleBlast, CoolantClear, and grippers — all with email capture built in and targeted drip campaigns being built behind each one. Engineering covers Develop's largest group orientation in company history — electrical and mechanical engineers starting the same week — and an onboarding process that was compressed from three weeks to three days. Matt and Michael go long on vibe coding vs. real technical debt, whether B2B SaaS is actually going to collapse or just slow down, and how manufacturing is one of the last industries where Claude still surprises people on the shop floor. The episode closes with the best accounting meeting Matt has ever had in company history, Michael already prototyping CoolantClear 3 for fun, and both hosts landing on the same honest admission: entrepreneurs love the first 90% of every project and can't stand the last ten.

Matt opens the week buried in content review — 18 pages for Vac-Fixture, eight for Develop, two press releases, and a 12-email drip campaign audit, all pushed through in one week to hit the Automate deadline. It's good work, but he's sick of reading about his own company. Michael is dealing with a softer May on e-commerce after a record April and trying to figure out whether it's a content problem, a sales cadence problem, or just a lumpy business reality — then a second CoolantClear reel hits 1.1 million views and 30K in sales in 14 hours, which doesn't fully answer the question but does clarify the recipe. On the marketing and sales side, the TumbleBlast 3D configurator is live and already eliminating four calls a day about cabinet compatibility. A CoolantClear compatibility checker and a full G-code kinematic simulator for 500 CNC machine models are both in progress — though Matt pushes back on priority order, and Michael concedes mid-conversation that he's doing the exciting thing again instead of the highest-leverage one. The HubSpot vs. Gim Command debate resurfaces with an actual bet: Michael thinks Matt drops HubSpot within 18 months, Matt takes the other side, and they both agree to let the business decide. Engineering covers Develop's new CNC machinist starting his first real parts on day four — promising but emotions deliberately regulated — and a new peer review process being tested where junior engineers review senior work first for exposure before a senior signs off. Michael is getting pulled back into CoolantClear 2 electrical details he shouldn't be touching, and names the real bottleneck: his lead engineer is remote, and he needs a local one whether he wants to spend the money or not. The episode closes with a packaging foam machine that ROIs in a month, Matt's 90-day review process being handed to team leads for the first time, and a shared reflection on what it feels like when the business finally starts running without you in every seat.

Matt opens the week buried in content review — 18 pages for Vac-Fixture, eight for Develop, two press releases, and a 12-email drip campaign audit, all pushed through in one week to hit the Automate deadline. It's good work, but he's sick of reading about his own company. Michael is dealing with a softer May on e-commerce after a record April and trying to figure out whether it's a content problem, a sales cadence problem, or just a lumpy business reality — then a second CoolantClear reel hits 1.1 million views and 30K in sales in 14 hours, which doesn't fully answer the question but does clarify the recipe. On the marketing and sales side, the TumbleBlast 3D configurator is live and already eliminating four calls a day about cabinet compatibility. A CoolantClear compatibility checker and a full G-code kinematic simulator for 500 CNC machine models are both in progress — though Matt pushes back on priority order, and Michael concedes mid-conversation that he's doing the exciting thing again instead of the highest-leverage one. The HubSpot vs. Gim Command debate resurfaces with an actual bet: Michael thinks Matt drops HubSpot within 18 months, Matt takes the other side, and they both agree to let the business decide. Engineering covers Develop's new CNC machinist starting his first real parts on day four — promising but emotions deliberately regulated — and a new peer review process being tested where junior engineers review senior work first for exposure before a senior signs off. Michael is getting pulled back into CoolantClear 2 electrical details he shouldn't be touching, and names the real bottleneck: his lead engineer is remote, and he needs a local one whether he wants to spend the money or not. The episode closes with a packaging foam machine that ROIs in a month, Matt's 90-day review process being handed to team leads for the first time, and a shared reflection on what it feels like when the business finally starts running without you in every seat.

Both hosts open the week running on fumes but with cautious optimism — Matt's new EA is three weeks in and already taking real weight off his calendar, while Michael is back from his last planned in-person install and feeling the full weight of how much travel has been quietly killing his momentum and marketing output. The shift to Turnkey Direct is officially underway, IntraLoad is fully wound down, and Michael is now focused on building an ecosystem play where every product on the floor feeds recurring hardware orders for years. On the sales and marketing side, Matt heads out on a full-day site visit to a large packaging company with half a dozen automation projects worth one to several million dollars each — and comes back focused on how Develop can become their fractional automation department rather than a one-time vendor. Michael confronts a stretch where deals just weren't closing, then three Turnkey Direct orders land within two days of each other, and he lands on the same diagnosis every time: his follow-up cadence and marketing output both fall apart when he's on the road. The HubSpot vs. Gim Command debate resurfaces — Matt's all in at $9,600 a year, Michael is counting down to cancellation. Engineering covers Develop's largest single component spend in company history clearing in one month for its confidential flagship project, two more engineers starting June 1st to give the team some buffer back, and a candid admission that the customer's product is still slightly evolving mid-design. Michael's CoolantClear 2 saga continues — a motor change cascaded into a driver change cascaded into a new electrical enclosure — while demand on CoolantClear 1 keeps outrunning supply. The episode closes with a long, honest conversation about CI prioritization, P&L forecasting discipline, and the strange disorientation of becoming a manager who's now worse at the individual work that built the company in the first place.

Michael opens on the road — again — and makes a decision he's been circling for a while: IntraLoad is done, full-service in-person turnkeys are done, and the business is going all-in on product revenue and remote Turnkey Direct installs. The goal is scalability without him being the critical path. Matt's feeling a different kind of drain — not hours, but context switching. Negotiating contracts, building comp structures, prepping for Automate, and trying to find time for a deal pipeline audit that hasn't happened in seven weeks. Both hosts land on the same diagnosis: the grind doesn't get lighter, the weight just shifts. On the marketing and sales side, Michael launches a 3D configurator with 300 machine models that lets customers visualize and add-to-cart a full automation package in one click — built on Replit, deployed via iframe, and now wrestling with an SEO tradeoff Matt pushes back on. They go deep on keyword strategy for machine-specific CNC tending pages and whether low-difficulty brand keywords are actually worth chasing. Matt, meanwhile, is seven weeks behind on a deal pipeline audit and actively designing his first sales hire — with a margin-based comp structure his roundtable helped him shape that ties commission to delivery, not just close. Engineering covers Develop completing its full hiring wave — CNC machinist, two new engineers on June 1st — and a site visit to a multi-robot machine that's running beyond KPIs with operators onboarding in under a day. Michael's Coolant Clear 2 production prototype is wrapped, supply is being reshored, and a viral Instagram reel hit a million views in two minutes of filming. The episode closes on cash strategy — Matt's three-tier war chest structure and a frank conversation about what happens when you pour every dollar of margin back into R&D.