74: Pints & Podcasts: A Crossover with Manufacturing Happy Hour Featuring Ron Hockersmith

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[00:00:48] Chris Luecke: I think there'll be more. Hey, this is a brewery. Let's get loud like it's a brewery real quick. Yes. All right. There we go. There we go.

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[00:00:56] Chris Luecke: I just wanted to make sure people weren't mistaking this for like a funeral parlor or something else. We gotta get some energy. Feel free to laugh. You know, we'll have some fun tonight. Good to have everyone out here. Thank you. Hey, let's start with a quick cheers everyone. Cheers. Thank you for coming out.

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[00:01:12] Lori Highby: So your show is called Manufacturing Happy Hour. So you're the professional at this type of thing.

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I mean, Kris, you're an alumni though of Manufacturing Happy Hour. And it has been, it's been over four years since you and I did our podcast. Is, you know, it was, it was still there, it was late in the pandemic days, but you and I met up and we sat at opposite ends of this giangiant boardroom table, kind of like you would in like a medieval environment, right?

When you. Picture like a king and a queen, like having a meal together that. You know, we were, we were very far apart. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's been good interacting with all of you over the years and I'm ready for some fun tonight.

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So we were at the office. He had some Blue Moon for me and it was, yeah, you made it very comfortable.

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[00:02:23] Lori Highby: It was a twinkle in Ron's eye at that time. But anyways, what are you drinking right now, Kris?

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[00:02:36] Lori Highby: Ron, what do you got?

[: 00:02:37

[00:02:44] Lori Highby: Interesting. All right. And Chris with a C?

[: 00:02:48

I believe, is it a double dry hopped sentient as well? Is that it?

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[00:02:59] Chris Luecke: But it's not double dry hopped, correct?

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[00:03:11] Chris Luecke: Yeah, you wanted to appear humble is what I'm hearing. And, and and one thing we do like in the manufacturing industry is we use a lot of acronyms. But can you if you were having a drink with someone and they were learning what DDH is for the first time, double dry hopping, how would you describe it for someone, Ron?

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So it's one of those two things or something between. Two, we only use it because it's a marketing term that tells people it's going to have like a super saturated flavor of hops in it. But to be honest, almost every one of our IPAs, the minimum we've ever done is triple dry hopped and some are as high as sextuple dry hopped.

That would be really not humble to write sextuple dry hopped.

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[00:04:16] Ron Hockersmith: And among people that don't know that sex is also a prefix for the number six.

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[00:04:39] Chris Luecke: Yeah, happy to. So, I'm one of the two Chris's on stage tonight. The one that hosts Manufacturing Happy Hour. The way I describe it, it, the, the mission since it started in 2016 is this really campy YouTube channel. It's all about talking about the trends and technologies and issues impacting the manufacturing industry.

The same way you would discuss that type of stuff over a cold one with someone, right? Getting beyond the acronyms and the buzzwords and things like that, and just getting real about the issues that impact our industry. And, and the most fun way to do it is literally over a beer with all of you at a spot like Amorphic Brewing here in Milwaukee.

So give it up for yourselves. Thanks for coming out tonight. Thanks for hanging out with us.

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[00:05:24] Kris Harrington: All right. If we keep taking sips of beer, this is going to get very interesting as we go through. So I am Kris Harrington, one of the three broads in A Broadcast for Manufacturers, and our show is really about challenging the status quo.

We like to talk to different people in the manufacturing industry with all types of different backgrounds who are impacting the industry in different ways. Most importantly, taking it forward. So, pleasure to be here in this crossover event with you at Amorphic Beer.

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[00:06:01] Kris Harrington: Oh yeah. That side job or Gen Alpha Technologies. Yeah. So I am the CEO of Gen Alpha Technologies. We work with manufacturers and distributors and we help them sell their equipment and parts online.

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And today, not only do we have this amazing crossover event, but we are interviewing Ron Hockersmith, Hockersmith, who is the owner and brewmaster of Amorphic Beer. We are at his brewery, amazing, awesome experience here. So a little bit about Ron. He grew up in Arizona and studied mechanical engineering at Arizona State University and the California Institute of Technology.

After stints in gas turbine engine design and research on the mechanics of viruses, he ended up in Milwaukee at GE Healthcare. Ron became a lean master black belt and led teams in new product introductions at GE for 14 years before transitioning to a VP of Engineering role for an international defense contractor.

Ron retired early in: 2020

[00:07:23] Chris Luecke: What a resume!

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[00:07:30] Chris Luecke: That is crazy, absolutely. But you're a hockey guy, so, like, that makes.

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[00:07:38] Chris Luecke: Fair.

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So how did working in a large manufacturing environment impact what it is that you're Amorphic Beer?

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And then we, we did, but a lot of the same approaches to things that we did there, we end up using here. Like GE kind of founded, I would say modern leadership. Although you know, they split recently and it's maybe not as good as it used to be, but that's cause I left, so it had nothing to do with me.

They, the, the adoption, at least in the United States, North America for like the Toyota, the lean manufacturing thing was heavily embraced by GE early. It went along with the Six Sigma and designed for Six Sigma philosophy. And I would say we embrace all of those principles, but a lot of them, we kind of leave the formality out.

If you were working at GE in: 1999

Another thing we do as a joke, but it's actually good is Kaizen. So we have Kaizen of the Week even here at Amorphic, but only two people have ever won Kaizen of the Week because there's only two of us that participate. And we're basically, every week we're competing with each other to see what improvement we can make in the brewhouse to make it easier and more efficient to get done. Can I tell my Kaizen of the Week? So I'll tell you my submittal for this week. So, our, we use a lot of carbon dioxide in the brewery, that's how it gets the bubbles. We use it for other things as well, it's how we push the beer out the tap system. When we first put that in three years ago when we opened, we used this braided vinyl hose, and we ran it all throughout the brewery in this network. But, It's not the best, you know, braided vinyls, it's plastic. If it gets hot and cold, it kind of expands. So we started to get these leaks popping up all the time, everywhere. We're constantly like fighting these leaks. So we decided to do like a real brewery would do that makes way more beer than we do and we hard plumbed it with this week. We hard plumbed it with copper and the whole way. So trying to have all these pesky leaks and in plastic growing. Although this podcast probably almost didn't happen in the tap room, almost didn't open today because we flipped the switch to switch to the new system, it didn't work. But we fixed it quickly, so, I'm submitting that tomorrow for the Kaizen of the Week. And I think all my business partner's gonna have is like he, you know, slightly improved the keg washing process by 30 seconds or something.

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[00:11:07] Ron Hockersmith: We don't have a tally of who's winning overall.

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[00:11:13] Ron Hockersmith: Yeah, some vendors that we started working with really liked that. You know, when they would send us, well, here's your drawings and be like, well, no, we're not doing it like that. We're not doing it like that.

We're doing it like this. Some, some of them really liked that. Some even offered us jobs, but other ones were just like, well, this is how we do it. We're not changing. We're not doing those types of things. But with the good news about that is we also do all of our own maintenance. Anything breaks in here, we fix it.

But if it breaks, it might also be our fault because we probably designed it too. So it turns out that a couple of mechanical engineers running a brewery is, that are also handy and fix their own cars and change their own oil is that kind of goes together.

[: 00:11:51

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Are there other things that you do, thanks to your background, working as an engineer at a large company, that other small craft breweries, other owners of breweries, other brewmasters, are there things that you do that other spots just aren't even thinking about, that, that you think help in your business, the way you make beer, et cetera.

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I'm sure some breweries do this, but I would say it's pretty rare. And of our size, it's I'm sure like Miller and well, I know Sapporo because a lot of the models we have are based on technical papers written by Sapporo, by grad students in Japan. Luckily Google Translate. So that's one example of the other one.

And there's actually one of our team members in the audience. So, this may either be a surprise or she'll say that I'm lying. We'll find out. I mentioned GE was like a great at leadership development and developing leaders, and a lot of leaders went and became leaders at a bunch of other companies from, from GE. Sort of the way that we manage the team here is the same way you do it at GE.

And whenever we interview someone new, regardless of the position, we kind of explain that we run this, like it's a international engineering organization. And this may be different for you and it may work or it may not. You'll get feedback if you're doing well, you get feedback if you're not doing well, your compensation will depend upon how you're doing, all of these types of things, which I don't think are that common and especially like working in a taproom environment.

But I can proudly say even in this environment, we've not had any change in staff in over two years. In the service industry, which I think is unheard of. So apparently just run a tap room like an international conglomerate, which sounds bad, but apparently it works for that part of things.

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You, you opened a little over three years ago, basically, at the end of the craft beer boom. Like anyone could open a craft brewery between 2010 and like 2018 and kill it, because that.

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[00:15:59] Chris Luecke: Yeah, exactly, like, you didn't need to know like, because you were a craft brewery, people were gonna show up.

That's not the case anymore. You know, here in Milwaukee, and a lot of other spots, we're seeing consolidation, we're seeing craft breweries shut their doors. One thing that I really like and admire about Amorphic Brewing is you seem to have the business savvy and, and, and you seem to be doing just fine as a business, like, despite the fact that maybe your industry isn't having an upward, you know, moment right now. So what would your advice be to manufacturing leaders out there on how they lead their business, even if their particular industry might not be at its peak? And feel free to answer this in the context of, of the things you do here, specifically at Amorphic.

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[00:16:52] Chris Luecke: Yeah, exactly.

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That's not only true there, that was true when we built the place. We made sure that we would have, we had a model that would, a financial model that would tell us, are we going to make money or are we not going to make money? And we, our model did not assume that we would take over the world and try and be the next, or even the state and try and be the next Lakefront or Third Space.

That's a very Milwaukee example of large regional breweries, if you're watching from somewhere else. And we basically just followed that. So that sounds kind of obvious and generic. I can tell you the brewing industry based on the questions I get asked from other brewers. That's not super common.

Essentially it's, you have a plan, you've sort of set a baseline for your assumptions and you have some data to back those assumptions up and then we execute, and then when we deviate, like for example, when we, when we, our plan for this said that we were going to sell 50 percent of our beer in distribution. And within one year, we were going to have to put in six more tanks that were twice as big as the ones that you see on the other side of the wall. But I guess this is good news. Our profit was exceeding what it was supposed to be if we did that, even though we hadn't done that, but we were only selling 15 percent of beer in distribution.

Well, the margins of distribution are trash and it's very difficult to make money unless you make tens of thousands of barrels of beer per year in distribution. So we, we were able to recognize that, pivot and I guess embrace that side of things and not go spend a lot money that our plan said we were.

The other thing I would say that I don't see that often, and I think, especially in small businesses, is trust, especially of the, the team. Trying to see if there's smirks coming from my team members in the back, of course, but no one's ever worked for me that I don't trust. And doesn't matter if I'm working in defense contracting for GE or at the brewery, so you trust them, you empower them to do the right things.

We don't really have a manager here in the tap room. Everyone who works here is the manager. They decide if something if how to make the situation right, as something goes awry, I don't think that's that common here in the industry. And I would guess that that empowerment and trust is not that common in a lot of, even in manufacturing operations, even if someone might say that it's their goal.

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[00:19:54] Ron Hockersmith: But we don't make any decision. I mean, we even sometimes debate, should we buy this 36 thing? I mean, that's probably too far. That's probably bad. That's a, that's a bad example, but we do debate that. I hear you. I hear you. We model it. Like, how is this going to affect our results?

[: 00:20:06

And that's a common thing that I hear on my show. Lori, Kris, I'm sure you hear it on your show all the time, right? That you have that empowerment. You've created that culture, that makes having all the technical know how and all the business savvy, you know, work because you've got the people here to help back it up as well. So great answer. Thank you for sharing that.

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So, thank you for putting that out into the universe.

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Now, another, another thing this person said was that don't try and hire for like the perfect team because you'll never find the perfect people to fit into the perfect cogs for the team. Find what your people that you have or can get are very good at and then build your organization around that. And even here, we, we do that.

For example, I think I'm here too much and I don't want to be here 70 hours a week anymore. So I'm trying to avoid it. We only be here 20 hours a week. We're trying to find a way to do that with the people that we already have in trust, instead of hiring some new person that we'll have to figure out what happens that we think is going to be perfect, probably isn't going to be perfect.

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And in life and in business, we're always challenged to change and innovate and do things quickly. And trust is the key to all of that. So, you know, that resonates. I think it resonates with all of us just because we're also small organizations trying to do good things in the world. So. Awesome. So, I'm curious to know, how is working for yourself different than the responsibilities you had in working for a large organization? Can you just tell us a little bit about that?

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[00:23:13] Chris Luecke: You act like a Millennial. Yeah, I'll just throw that out there. Most of our conversations revolve around snowboarding and other ridiculous topics, so I'll.

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It didn't matter if I was the vice president of engineering running an organization with 300 engineers. Like I still had someone that I had to like, let know that sometimes wasn't even in the country that I was going to have to do, that I was going to go snowboarding for a week or something like that. Well now I just kind of decide what I want to do, and that sounds kind of obvious, but I think how that also plays in is this particular business, Lori and I have argued about this over beers, not argued, discussed this over beers at least a dozen times. I would not say that this is not a growth business.

Like we are not trying to take over the world and we have passed on several opportunities to make a lot more beer because it's a lot of work and we didn't do this to work even more than we're doing it now. And I mean, when I was a GE or any of the three fortune 500 companies I worked for, I mean, you would not pass on some of these things.

So here we can decide, well, we're already satisfied with our performance and we're going to say it's okay. And we're going to continue and enjoy the success we have. Whereas I remember sitting in all hands meetings at various companies and they'd be like, we made 2 billion this year. But we're going to lay off a bunch of people because our goal was to have double digit growth of 10 percent or whatever.

Here we're, and I understand why that is a duty to the shareholders and so forth. Here we don't have that. We can just decide, well, we could spend the next six months doing capital investments and doing construction. And instead we choose to enjoy the life we have and balance working with this. So that's the biggest difference that, that I would say.

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[00:25:31] Ron Hockersmith: It may even be legally required that you keep going.

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[00:25:38] Lori Highby: Yeah, great answer. And you commented on this pre show that we're all entrepreneurs on the show right now. Which is really fun and exciting.

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Like, I just, I feel You're not mega yet. Please, you're too big. Enough isn't enough for me. Sure, sure. Okay, okay. So, four, but regardless, four different business owners on this stage does not usually happen at least on my podcast, right? I feel like there's, you know, someone's a leader at a large enterprise. There's usually someone in the mix that doesn't fit that. But to have four entrepreneurs on the stage at the same time might be a first for Manufacturing Happy Hour. I don't know about A Broadcast, though.

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[00:26:27] Kris Harrington: That's true. She would be here. She's here in spirit.

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It doesn't have to be anything related to manufacturing. And we've had things that a third grade science fact, all the way to AI, which tends to be one of my favorite topics. So yeaK Chris, why don't you finish this sentence, I just learned that.

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Since we are here at Amorphic and we're talking about beer, I just learned that in ancient Egypt, beer was used as payment for workers and was believed to give laborers the strength to build structures like the pyramids. So, they would pay in three to four liters throughout the day for laborers that were working on the pyramids beer and they would give it to them three times a day.

It was apparently not as alcoholic. It was sweet and it was thick. But it was used as payment back in the day. So I just thought that was very interesting and perfect for this show.

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[00:29:18] Chris Luecke: Really?

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[00:29:24] Lori Highby: Interesting, fascinating. I feel like you told me that one point in a random beer conversation. So Chris, what did you just learn?

I'm going

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So I think it still counts. I think it still counts as something I just learned, but the 90s rap, rock, hip hop, reggae band 311. Their original name, does anyone know this? Does anyone know this?

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[00:29:53] Chris Luecke: No, no. Clever answer, but no, it was not 712. 311's original name was The Fish Hippos. Which is an incredible name for a band, but probably not one that, if you want to have names.

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[00:30:06] Chris Luecke: I would I'd take that all day long. If you may I would love it! I would love it, yes. As long as you give me credit, you can use Fish Hi Like, I'm not the one that has any sort of trademark over this, so yeah. Like, don't ask me, but yeah, go ahead, make a beer called Fish Hippos. But yeah, 311's name used to be Fish Hippos. And they announced the name change on stage while they were opening for legendary band Fugazi. So, what a way to make that announcement. That's the first thing I learned, but I want to do something that's a little more on brand for that, cause I didn't really see any head nodding to that in the audience, so I'm just probably really out there right now for most people. I learned what a corporate venture studio is. And I was on a trip to Pittsburgh, and it's like an incubator. I was doing an interview at a systems integrator that has grown considerably over the years. Their name is Premier Automation. And they recently started a segment of their business called Premier Labs, where in house, they basically run their own incubator for new ideas that could be productized, could be turned into a new business line.

So very much as someone might think of like an accelerator, like Y Combinator for example, they're doing this in house to try to create new product lines around new ideas. But since they're not like bringing in a cohort of founders or something to do it, it's not an incubator. It's referred to as a corporate venture studio.

So that was something that I thought was really interesting recently that was relevant to this conversation, certainly more relevant than 311 previously being The Fish Hippos. So those are my two answers.

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[00:31:53] Chris Luecke: I would say so. I honestly, it's, it's, there's, there's, this is going to get really meta, but I think it's like an entrepreneurial, like founder of a company, like bringing entrepreneurship into the company. So it's like entrepreneurial again. I, intrapreneurship, intrapreneurship is probably the simple way to describe it. Yes.

[: 00:32:12

So the leaf itself is actually very round and attractive to deer apapparently. but just thought that was interesting.

[: 00:32:52

[00:32:59] Lori Highby: Ron, anything you've just learned?

[: 00:33:01

But I don't think we have deer, we have a fox though. But we don't have a deer. Oh, that's squirrels, but mostly fox. And mostly squirrels and a fox. I have two answers too, but I don't think either one is like very, not as deep as yours maybe. The two things I've been thinking about this week and learning about our I'm going snowboarding this weekend.

And the place I'm going is getting eight plus inches every day. And it's got several feet for the past couple of days. So that's very exciting. So I just learned that I'm going to have a good time this weekend. Maybe I slightly more advanced to the thing is some of you may have heard about this tariff thing. So I've been trying to learn more about that. So I think that I've learned that 60 percent of aluminum that goes into cans for beer is from Canada. So we're trying to figure out how much, where on the supply chain do our cans cross the border to guess how much this is going to mean that our four packs are going to go up in price. But I haven't quite figured that out yet. I am still working with our supply chain, but I mean, we order our cans from a place in Chicago. They get printed there. We actually print, I'm kind of wavering here, but it prints directly on the cans. There's no label and it's very recyclable. But I don't know if that aluminum can is made in Canada and then shipped to Chicago. The company that we buy them for is a Montreal based company. So that's possible. That's why if you notice the palace of cans, it says merci on them in there because they're from Montreal. Qu'est ce que c'est? Or do they just ship the raw aluminum to a facility in the United States? If the letter is true, maybe it's only, you know, 30 cents per four pack, but it could get kind of out of hand depending on when they when they cross.

So this is what I've been learning about this week. It's kind of somber, I guess, but. And that's what's going on.

[: 00:35:05

[00:35:28] Kris Harrington: I think it's a perfect way to sum up what's on the mind of many manufacturers right now as they're thinking about the impact of tariffs. So I've been at a couple of conferences where this was very relevant right now it's, it's part of conversation for everyone, so. Perfect.

[: 00:35:46

That being said, Ron, if any of our listeners and viewers were interested in getting in touch with you, what's the best way that they can reach you?

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[00:35:57] Lori Highby: Meet you in the brewery?

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[00:35:59] Chris Luecke: Show, show up to Amorphic Brewing and buy a beer. That's the best way.

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[00:36:21] Lori Highby: All right. And since this is a crossover show, I think it makes sense that we all share of our, our contact details. So Chris, how can folks get in touch with you?

[: 00:36:29

But that's the best way to find the podcast, whether it's video or audio. Or connect with me on LinkedIn. Chris Leuke, my last name is six letters. It's L U E C K E. That's a great way to connect, have a conversation as well. So, we'll keep it at that. But if you search Manufacturing Happy Hour, it's going to be like the first 10 hits on Google, whether it's my website, Spotify, et cetera, you're going to find me there.

[: 00:37:04

[00:37:07] Kris Harrington: Yes. So you can find me on LinkedIn at Kristina Harrington, or you can visit our website, genalpha. com.

[: 00:37:15

All right, that's all we have for today. Typically, I say this is three broads, but right now it's two broads and two bros with four beers. We're wrapping up. We want you all to go out there and make something awesome.

[: 00:37:42

[00:37:43] Ron Hockersmith: Thank you. Thanks for coming.

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[00:37:44] Kris Harrington: Cheers. Thank you.