“I Don’t Want to Be the Bottleneck”: How Method MFG Builds a Flexible Aerospace Shop
Rhys Andersen never planned on running an AS9100 aerospace machine shop outside Austin, but he has spent most of his life learning how to build systems that hold up when things get chaotic.
In conversation with Fulcrum’s Sunny Han on the Capacity podcast, Andersen traces that approach all the way back to a sewer business in Montana and summers on wildland fires. “I grew up in a shop back home in Montana,” he says. “My family had a sewer business. We built most of the equipment for the sewer business, and then that business also translated into contracting equipment to the government.”
He remembers long winters welding and running manual machines, alongside a neighbor across the street who made competition rifles. “I just knew I always liked to make things,” he says. Watching raw material turn into precision hardware “was just really interesting” and seeded his obsession with how work gets done on the floor.
From fires to five-axis: treating problems as puzzles to solve
Before Method MFG, Andersen’s main career was fighting wildfires. “When I turned 18, it was kind of expected that I would start fighting fires,” he says. “I worked my way up to engine boss. I would take out a crew. We’d go everywhere from like anywhere in Montana to California.”
That experience shaped how he now thinks about process and communication. On large incidents, he recalls, “you’d have 1000s of people working on a shared goal. If you don’t have systems in place and you can’t communicate, you run into issues.” According to Andersen, most serious accidents on fires “almost always boil down to communication.”
He says that is why he leans so heavily on checklists and visual cues. On the fire line, drafting water required turning valves in a very specific order while radios were blaring and stress was high. “I’d watch these guys on the back of their truck struggling to pull a draft because they weren’t turning the right valves,” he says. His solution was simple: “We’re gonna put colored tape on all of these valves, and then there’s gonna be a little card that’s like, if we’re drafting, turn all the yellow valves this way, all the blue valves that way.”
“The same mentality works out in machining,” he says. If someone runs into an issue, he wants them to have a checklist so “they can kind of run through and be like, Oh, I forgot to do this. That’s why that happened,” instead of relying on tribal knowledge.
That mindset carried him through some rough early chapters. His first fabrication company “went horribly south” with a business partner whose goals did not match his. Later, he bought a huge used CNC mill in a dirt-floor barn, rebuilt it himself, and discovered the control was inverted only after crashing a marker through a cardboard box into the table. He sums up his attitude simply: “You just kind of have to always figure things out. I just view things as problems to solve, and that’s all it is.”
Designing a shop where no one person is a single point of failure
Growing up, Andersen watched his dad successfully run a business “mainly without any systems.” He calls it impressive, but he also says it showed him what not to replicate. “My dad ran his entire business out of his head,” he says. “That causes a lot of problems when you try to scale something.”
From the start at Method MFG, he says he did not want to be that kind of bottleneck. “I try to shove as much into the organization because I don’t want to be the bottleneck,” he says. “If you have everything based on a key person, anything could happen to that key person.”
That principle shows up in how he thinks about skills and roles on the floor. Andersen describes a time when only one machinist could run their nicest five-axis machines. “If he didn’t come in, or if he was late, or if his dog got sick, that would affect our production,” he says. Now, he explains, “we want everybody up to speed so that everybody’s interchangeable.” He believes that is better for the business and also for employees, because “they’re not the point of failure” and can take care of life without feeling like the whole schedule depends on them.
He approaches systems the same way he approaches troubleshooting. “One of the big things that I often see is that people try to change too many variables at one time,” he says. In the shop, that means he pushes his team to “make slow, incremental adjustments” and change one thing at a time when a part or machine is behaving badly. According to Andersen, teaching that way of working lets you “bring somebody up a lot faster.”
That disciplined approach extends into software and planning. Before an ERP, he tracked everything on a large Excel workbook. As the shop grew, he tried multiple systems and even lived through a failed ERP implementation that his team eventually abandoned. Looking back, he says the homegrown spreadsheet worked because “our Excel sheet was kind of a linear process,” while the ERP they dropped forced users to “jump around” and juggle several tabs at once. When they went shopping again, he says they looked for an ERP where “you can kind of fumble your way through” a linear progression from quote to ship.
Betting on aerospace, automation, and constant technology trials
Method MFG is now predominantly an aerospace shop. That path started with a serendipitous connection to a spacesuit program and a customer who agreed to treat them as AS9100 from day one. “We kind of entered the prototyping phase with the understanding that we would get AS9100 certification,” Andersen says. “They would treat everything from the start as if we were AS9100, which was kind of painful in the beginning because we didn’t know anything about it.”
The experience forced the team to learn aerospace documentation in detail. Over time, he says, they brought in more experienced machinists and a veteran quality manager. “We quickly realized that if this is the path we’re going to pursue, we’ve got to really dial ourselves into it,” he says. “You can’t really do it halfway.” Today, he estimates that “probably 80 to 85 percent” of Method’s work is aerospace.
He believes success in that environment starts at the quote. “A lot more needs to go on on the front end when you are quoting stuff,” he says. His quality manager will comb through customer quality clauses and point out hidden requirements. “When somebody sends you that, you need to read through it, and you need to really understand what their expectations are, so that you’re on the same page,” Andersen says. He notes that two identical parts can require very different levels of paperwork depending on the customer.
Underneath the quality work is a deliberate approach to capital and capacity. Andersen says he continually reviews data on how each machine performs. He describes a relatively new machine they are removing from the floor in favor of more automation. “For the space that that machine’s taking up, it’s not worth having here,” he says. “We need to put in the right tool so that we can get through our parts faster.”
On staffing and automation, he prefers to invest in robots before adding shifts. “Right now, we’re investing heavily in automation,” he says. “I would rather have a robot work a third shift than have my people do that.” For him, automation is less about replacing people and more about raising the level of work. If the robot loads parts, he says, “they can be programming something or working on sorting out what’s going on with a first article.”
Andersen applies the same experimental mindset to software and CAM. “We are constantly testing things all the time,” he says. At any given moment, they may have “multiple CAM systems that we don’t use for our daily driver, but we’re just kind of keeping a pulse on things” while also building their own tools. He calls the cost of that exploration “just kind of the cost of being on the tip of technology.”
Looking ahead, he expects Method MFG to keep doubling down on aerospace and expansion, but he wants the current facility to stay as the place where experimentation happens. “Right now, we’re dialing in our system,” he says. “I view this as our incubator spot that we test things out, and then as we expand, the other locations maybe are more fixed in how we do things, but this kind of exists as our innovation center.” He is also actively exploring different growth paths, including outside capital, and says the main question for him is whether each option “matches my goals and what I want to do, and does it still give my team the flexibility that I want.”
When he thinks about the pace of new technology and automation, Andersen admits it is hard to know whether he is ahead or behind on any given day, but his bias is toward optimism. “A lot of the technology is giving the guys on the floor the ability to do more challenging and exciting work and actually get better at what they’re doing,” he says. “If we have every machine loading itself, that’s just going to give us additional capacity to do more.”
Transcript
Sunny (00:00):
Rhys, welcome to another episode of the Capacity Podcast. I’m here with Rhys Anderson from Method Manufacturing. They’re a precision aerospace company located outside of Austin, Texas. Good to see you. You have a very interesting background — you were a wildland firefighter, you studied architecture — it’s a diverse path. How did you get into precision manufacturing, and how has that background helped you see things differently?
Rhys (00:26):
I kind of got into it randomly, but I’d always been interested in it. I grew up in a shop back home in Montana. My family had a sewer business. We built most of the equipment for it, and that eventually expanded into contracting equipment to the government. Over the winters, when the business wasn’t as busy, we’d work in the shop — welding, running manual machines. My neighbor across the street made competition rifles, so I had a good overview of manufacturing. I always liked making things, and that’s what initially got me interested.
Sunny (01:15):
What makes a competition rifle? The barreling is super precise or something?
Rhys (01:20):
Yeah, the barreling and the chamber work are extremely precise. That was the first time I’d seen something where you take raw material and turn it into something entirely different. Growing up, we’d weld and cut material, but nothing like transforming a block into a finished part. That really captivated me. My neighbor had CNCs. We occasionally turned something manually in our shop, but nothing too complex.
Sunny (02:05):
But you were a firefighter first. How did that happen?
Rhys (02:15):
The government contracting my family did included firefighting, so that became the family business. When I turned 18, it was expected that I would start fighting fires. I worked my way up to engine boss. I took out a crew and traveled anywhere from Montana to California.
Sunny (02:40):
What prompted you to stop and move on?
Rhys (02:45):
I met my now-wife, and I was starting to think seriously about a career. Firefighting was great for getting through college, and I enjoyed it, but I’d leave in May and be gone until September. My wife wasn’t thrilled about that.
Sunny (03:17):
And you studied architecture too, but didn’t pursue it.
Rhys (03:21):
Right. I came from a very small town in Montana — I’d never even met an architect. I was interested in art and design. I started in business because I was going to take over the family business, but then decided I wanted to leave my hometown. I switched to art, then realized it didn’t translate clearly into a career. Architecture seemed like a structured path. But once I talked to actual architects, I realized the day-to-day wasn’t what I imagined. I was more interested in designing products and making things.
So I finished my undergrad in architecture, then went to product design school in California. Again, when I looked at the career path — time required, pay, type of work — it didn’t pencil out. I dropped out of graduate school. My wife and I were dating at the time, looking for an up-and-coming creative city. We had Raleigh and Austin on the list. She visited Austin, got a job, called me while I was about to take out another fire crew, and said, “We need to move to Texas.” So I drove from Montana to California, grabbed our stuff, drove to Texas, and we’ve been here ever since.
Sunny (05:57):
Amazing. A few false starts, but manufacturing stuck. How did this become the thing?
Rhys (06:11):
It was always there. Growing up, my favorite thing was working in the shop — welding sculptures, building go-karts, working on equipment with my dad. Making things has always been part of me.
Sunny (06:42):
What was the first job you did? Where did this all start?
Rhys (06:47):
We originally started as a fabrication company. That went horribly south with my business partner at the time, so I shut that down and went to work in the oil field. While doing that, I tried to figure out what I could do that didn’t keep me away from home. A friend in semiconductors told me they ordered these large parts from California with huge lead times. Not knowing anything about machining, I thought, “Those look simple enough. I could figure that out.”
I started researching what size machine you’d need. A new one was half a million dollars. These parts were 40 by 50 inches. I found a used machine in the oil field. I didn’t know anything about CNCs — a machine was a machine to me. It had been rolled into a dirt-floor pole barn. I sent my fiancée to look at it — she sent me pictures of this rusty, dust-covered machine. But it was affordable, and big enough.
We bought it. It was so big we had to build the building around it. We powered it up — nothing. So we rebuilt it: new control, rewiring, fixing electrical issues. During rigging, the crane rolled it forward and crushed the doors. I rebuilt those too. Eventually, we got it running.
Sunny (09:24):
All while already having an order to fulfill.
Rhys (09:27):
We didn’t have orders yet — they said, “If you can make them, we’ll send you work.” I was trying to get the machine running while working full-time in the oil field.
My friend who was going to run the machine moved away unexpectedly. I ran my first program myself — put a cardboard box in the vise, tried to write my name with a marker, hit Cycle Start, and the spindle plowed through the box into the table. The machine was inverted — G0 meant spindle to table. I had no idea.
Then I realized it also had no tool changer. I was the tool changer — with CAT50 tools.
The company finally sent me very small parts — thankfully, because it took scrapping about 30 to get 7 good ones. But they slowly sent bigger jobs as I improved.
Sunny (11:56):
Your first partnership ended poorly. How did that shape what you did next?
Rhys (12:15):
People always say the most important thing in choosing a partner is planning the exit. I didn’t understand that the first time. My partner just wanted a bolt-on fab shop and had no intention of growing. My eggs were in his basket, and when his basket broke, so did mine.
In “version 2.0,” we planned the exit upfront. When my next partner decided he wanted to move back to Montana, the transition was smooth because we had already defined everything on the front end.
Sunny (13:51):
Most people would have quit. Why didn’t you?
Rhys (14:00):
I just see everything as a problem to solve. You figure things out.
Sunny (14:33):
You’re the inverse of the typical E-Myth example — instead of being a master machinist, you learned machining from the outside. What has that been like?
Rhys (15:02):
My superpower is that I’m not the world’s best machinist. That forced me to find smarter ways to do things. My partner was always faster at setups. He didn’t care about zero-point systems, but I needed them because it took me forever to tram a vise. Not being great pushed me toward efficiency.
Growing up, my dad ran a business with no systems — everything lived in his head. Watching that made me determined not to build a company that way. I didn’t want to be the one who had to make every decision.
Sunny (16:38):
Did you know what your system should look like, or did it evolve?
Rhys (16:45):
You figure it out as you go. At first, I tracked everything in Excel. You have to constantly audit whether your system still works at your size. An Excel sheet works at two people, maybe three. Beyond that, you need more.
Things you mentally track at one size stop working too. For example, when I was in the shop alone, I always checked the air compressor oil when I turned it on. I didn’t need to document it. Then one day the compressor seized. Someone asked, “Have you been checking the oil?” The team didn’t even know they needed to. As you grow, all those “obvious” things need to be codified.
Sunny (18:21):
Were there systems you introduced that didn’t work?
Rhys (18:27):
All the time. You try things, learn, adjust. One example: we built an internal anodizing setup. It worked, but the scale didn’t justify someone waiting for parts down there. Maybe in the future we’ll revisit it or automate it.
Sunny (19:17):
How do you know when to scale something?
Rhys (19:33):
It’s tricky, but easier to start early with a small team. When we brought on an ERP, no one had used one before, so adoption was slow. Learning something new is always slower at first. People often think something “isn’t working” when they’re just early in the learning curve.
Sunny (20:55):
Did you have this wisdom baked in, or were there other influences?
Rhys (21:02):
Wildfire experience was huge. On large incidents, everything depends on communication and process. That’s where my love of checklists started. Stress makes people’s IQ drop. If you have a simple reference — colored valves, a card showing what to turn — you avoid mistakes. That approach translates directly into machining.
Sunny (23:47):
When a problem arises and you don’t understand it, do you get into the weeds?
Rhys (24:10):
The biggest issue I see is people changing too many variables at once. If you break things down and change one thing at a time, you can diagnose almost anything. Teaching that incremental mindset is the main skill.
Sunny (25:26):
You bootstrapped this business. What were the biggest lessons?
Rhys (25:57):
I try to make intelligent, calculated decisions. A big one is knowing whether a machine is earning its keep. I always look at data — performance, throughput, bottlenecks. We’re actually getting rid of a year-old machine and replacing it with an automation cell. Nothing’s wrong with the machine — it just isn’t the best use of floor space.
Sunny (27:50):
Your dad kept everything in his head. Do you do any of that?
Rhys (28:08):
I try to push everything into the organization. I don’t want to be the bottleneck or the single point of failure. We train everyone on everything — even the nicest five-axis machines — so production doesn’t depend on one person.
Sunny (29:40):
You got into aerospace relatively recently. How?
Rhys (29:48):
A vendor introduced me to someone he thought I should meet. We went to a Cubs game. I mentioned my wife’s cousin worked on the NASA spacesuit. He asked if he was tall. I said yes. He asked if his name was Tim. It was — he had been his boss.
He had since started a private company working on the spacesuit. We entered during the prototyping phase, agreeing we’d pursue AS9100. From day one, they treated everything as AS9100. It was painful at first, but a great learning process.
Sunny (31:07):
What was it like adapting to aerospace?
Rhys (31:30):
We had to level up. We brought in more skilled machinists and an experienced quality manager. If you commit to aerospace, you can’t do it halfway. They don’t care about your size — only that you do everything correctly. Now our culture is fully aligned, and our whole team participates. Machinists spend time in the quality room learning how everything ties together.
Sunny (33:15):
What percentage of your business is aerospace now?
Rhys (33:21):
Eighty to eighty-five percent.
Sunny (33:28):
What were the big lessons in that transition?
Rhys (33:47):
Most of it happens at the quoting stage. My quality manager would review customer documents and point out things I missed. You have to read everything upfront and understand expectations. Two identical parts can require completely different amounts of documentation based on the customer.
Sunny (35:17):
You seem to run a smaller but mightier team. How do you think about scaling?
Rhys (35:58):
I always want my team to have the best tools. Our accounting team asked if we could add another shift. Sure, but I’d rather have a robot run third shift. That frees our people for higher-level work — programming, first articles — instead of loading parts for hours.
Sunny (37:11):
You aggressively test technology. How do you evaluate tools?
Rhys (38:01):
You have to test a lot of things to build intuition. You also have to continuously audit — is the team actually using this? Does it fit how we work? We once implemented an ERP everyone liked on paper, but it didn’t fit us. We were about to hire someone just to manage it. That’s when you know it’s wrong.
We don’t get stuck in sunk costs. Machines, software — if it’s not working, move on.
Sunny (40:26):
How do you persuade your team to adopt something new?
Rhys (40:40):
You have to figure out if resistance is because it doesn’t work or simply because it’s unfamiliar. That comes from observing the team and talking through real workflows.
Sunny (41:21):
After the first failed ERP, was the second implementation easier?
Rhys (41:33):
Yes. And we learned a lot by comparing the ERP to our old Excel system. The Excel sheet worked because it was linear. The ERP we abandoned required bouncing around constantly. We wanted a system where you could “fumble” your way through naturally.
Sunny (43:28):
You’ve mentioned “strong core tech with weak features” vs “weak core tech with great features.” How do you pick?
Rhys (44:06):
We’re constantly testing multiple CAM systems while also building our own. We don’t know which direction will win, so we keep a pulse on everything. That’s important with how fast tech is changing.
Sunny (45:22):
How do you weigh the cost of constantly experimenting?
Rhys (45:57):
It’s simply the cost of staying on the cutting edge. If you’re unwilling to have some false starts, you’ll get left behind.
Sunny (46:41):
Manufacturing is changing fast. Where do you feel Method sits?
Rhys (47:43):
It comes down to flexibility. We’ll go from production runs to prototypes and back. Not being rigid is key.
Sunny (48:04):
Where do you see the company going?
Rhys (48:14):
We’re focused on aerospace. It’s historically strong, and demand is growing. We’ll expand here, maybe add more locations. I see our current facility as the incubator — the innovation center. Future locations may be more standardized.
Sunny (48:59):
Will you continue bootstrapping, or consider investors?
Rhys (49:09):
I’m exploring. I’m involved in the tech scene in Austin. I’m not opposed — I just want to understand what each growth path looks like and whether it aligns with my goals and supports my team.
Sunny (49:52):
If you could tell your past or future self one thing, what would it be?
Rhys (49:59):
When you’re in it, problems seem impossible. But if you break things down and solve them incrementally, you’ll be surprised where you end up. You don’t have to figure everything out at once. Ask: What is the key decision I can make now that will have the biggest impact?
Sunny (51:17):
Any hopes or concerns about this new wave of tech?
Rhys (51:21):
It’s hard to know day-to-day whether I’m ahead or behind. Things change so fast. But overall, I’m optimistic. Technology gives the guys on the floor the chance to do more interesting work. No one loves loading and unloading parts. If machines can load themselves, that just gives us more capacity.
Sunny (53:40):
Thank you for having us and sharing your story.
Rhys (53:45):
Definitely. Thank you.
About Capacity
The Capacity Podcast is where vitally important manufacturers finally tell their stories. Hear how business owners, entrepreneurs, and operations leaders overcome challenges to build amazing manufacturing businesses. Hosted by Fulcrum CEO Sunny Han. Listen to every episode:
