Capacity Ep. 16 - Joe Osborn & Michael Langston of OMW Corporation
When aerospace manufacturers seek precision machining partners, they're not simply looking for skill — they're looking for trust. Few companies exemplify this principle better than OMW Corporation. Founded by Joe Osborn and co-led with President Michael Langston, OMW has grown steadily by placing integrity, transparency, and partnership at the heart of its operations.
The Foundation of Craftsmanship
Joe Osborn didn’t initially dream of aerospace precision machining. His journey began with a passion for craftsmanship, first as an apprentice violin maker and later as a hobby machinist. After successfully growing and selling a software business, Joe returned to his love of metalworking. He founded Osborn Metal Works (now OMW Corporation), initially specializing in carefully crafted machinist tools.
Transitioning to Aerospace
OMW’s progression into aerospace manufacturing was organic, starting with custom machining projects for medical equipment. This work honed the company’s ability to deliver precision and consistency, skills that quickly drew attention from the burgeoning drone and surveillance technology markets. Soon, OMW was handling complex aerospace components, prompting Joe and his team to secure critical certifications, including International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and Aerospace Standard 9100 (AS9100), prerequisites for aerospace and defense contracts.
The Integrity Test
As OMW deepened its aerospace commitments, integrity became more than a value; it became a competitive advantage. Michael Langston, who brought experience from large corporations like United Technologies, underscores how maintaining trust has defined OMW's customer relationships. A defining moment occurred when OMW discovered a longstanding internal oversight involving marked aerospace components. Rather than quietly correcting the issue, OMW proactively disclosed the mistake to their customers. This decision created initial chaos, but ultimately bolstered trust and cemented OMW’s reputation for reliability.
Navigating Growth with Discipline
Rapid growth often tempts companies to expand broadly and quickly. However, Joe and Michael have steered OMW differently. Instead of diversifying aggressively, they strategically concentrated on their core strength: complex, 5-axis machining. Michael emphasizes that staying disciplined about their core competencies allowed OMW to scale sustainably and meet the exacting standards of their aerospace customers.
Culture of True Partnership
OMW’s growth isn't just about equipment or capabilities; it's deeply rooted in a culture of genuine partnership. Joe and Michael believe strongly that employees, vendors, and customers aren't mere participants in transactions, they're integral partners. This philosophy has created an environment where transparency and collaboration thrive. Employees at OMW aren't micromanaged; instead, they're empowered to be positively arguementative and trusted to deliver critical outcomes. This approach fosters a productive and innovative workforce.
Leadership through Empowerment
Central to OMW’s success is a leadership style focused on empowerment rather than oversight. Joe believes the best way to motivate employees is by clearly communicating the significance of their roles, then trusting them to rise to the challenge. This management style promotes an environment where everyone feels valued, leading to higher job satisfaction and exceptional performance.
Strategic Decision-Making
In a dynamic and demanding industry, the temptation to chase 'shiny objects' is constant. However, OMW has cultivated a discipline of strategic thinking, carefully evaluating each potential expansion or investment. This cautious, thoughtful approach ensures every decision aligns with OMW’s long-term vision and core strengths.
Mastery through Consistency
When asked about OMW’s secret to success, Joe often refers to "The Old Master," a tale illustrating that true mastery comes not from hidden shortcuts but from consistent excellence in every detail. This philosophy underpins OMW’s approach to aerospace machining: consistently meticulous, always transparent, and unfailingly committed to quality.
OMW Corporation’s story demonstrates that thriving in the aerospace industry isn’t simply about machining capabilities; it’s fundamentally about trust — trust carefully built, thoughtfully maintained, and relentlessly protected.
Transcript
Sunny 00:00
Joe, welcome to another episode of capacity. We're here in Novato, California with OMW Corporation. We have Joe Osborn, the founder and the chairman of the board, as well as the Chief Operating Officer, Michael Langston. They make really difficult to make components for the private space and satellite industry, and they make some of the really, some really, really cool stuff. We can't mention any businesses or any companies. We just got a tour today, and they're doing some really impressive stuff. Welcome.
Joe Osborn 00:30
Hey, thanks. Thanks for having us.
Sunny 00:33
All right, so you started off your career building violins and writing software, and kind of meandered towards metal working. Tell us about your beginnings. How did you come to create this business?
Joe Osborn 00:47
Well, yeah, the violins and such were that's very early in my career. The high school days, I've always been interested in craft and building things. And so I was also interested in music. So I got into, you know, being an apprentice violin maker early on, I had a wonderful shop teacher in freshman year in high school, and was very into metal working for building models live steam locomotives and such as, as a kid after that, I went to college. After college, decided I wanted to go into business, and so started, actually a family business with my father in software. Always been oriented toward high tech. Did that for 15 years, we built up a software company, which was one of the largest microcomputer software companies in the US, but not one of the top 10 or 20, more likely top 80 to 100 but it was a successful company. We sold it in 1996 and I had been a hobby machinist. I had a little kind of hobby shop in my garage, and loved the you know, loved working with metal, loved working my hands and such. So got a little bit of money selling off the software company. But as my wife and I started to have children and expenses started to be more of an issue we needed. I realized I needed to create a really a viable business out of what was essentially just a little hobby business out of my garage.
Sunny 02:33
I saw a picture in the lobby of you taking delivery of what looked like a mill, a manual mill, or something.
Joe Osborn 02:39
That was a Chevalier. That was a manual Chevalier, basically a Bridgeport copy with an analam control. It was one of the, you know, one of the retrofit Bridgeport CNC mills, just an open, you know, Bridgeport design, but it had ball screws and CNC I actually reminded me I went right around mid 1990s when we were selling the software company, I was interested in software. I wasn't, by the way, you mentioned writing software. I personally didn't write software. We had some really wonderfully talented programmers in the company were actually writing the software, but, but I did manage, you know, the company, which had a lot of software people in it, and I knew quite a bit about software, so I went to a trade show and Cam 3d modeling in cam, you know, packages like AutoCAD and such, had been out for quite a while by the mid 90s, but solid modeling was brand new. SolidWorks was basically taking the cam world by storm in the early, mid 90s. It had never really been done on PCs before, full solid modeling, and also packages like surf cam were doing true CAD I'm sorry, cam on PCs as well. So this combination of solid works in the early, mid 90s and surf cam and, to some degree, Master cam, was something very new. You know, a lot of shops back then were still, I'd say most shops were just programming on the controls, if they had CNC at all. You know, there were still a lot of open CNC mills that weren't fully enclosed. You know, it was a trend, still a transitional period where full, you know, the average machine shop had not been taken over fully by CNC equipment. So I saw surf cam and Solidworks. And got very I realized right away that that was the future, you know, that running those packages like that, on PCs and small shops like mine with, you know, affordable CNC equipments coming in from Taiwan, from Asia, you know. I knew that was going to revolate, revolutionize the small shops. So that's was kind of my, you know, my path forward at om W, which in the originally was Osborn metal works. I started my little business. Basically it's a little machine shop in my garage, calling it Osborn metal works. There was quite a large, a large Osborn manufacturing company out there already, and there were a couple other Osborn names out there. So I took the acronym OMW, Osborn metalworks and turned it into OMW, which later became OMW Corporation when we incorporated in 2003 so anyway, it started as that small organization and just kept building. It.
Sunny 05:50
Did you start without aerospace from the beginning?
Joe Osborn 05:52
No, it was not aerospace in the key. I mean, you know, I was one guy in a, you know, about a 16 by 12 foot home garage making stuff on a, you know, on a little Bridgeport CNC mill and just a manual lathe. Know, what I got into? I wasn't really experienced enough machinists to compete strongly in Custom Machining even at that point. So I came up with some. I was a hobby machinist, so I understood what hobby machinists liked, and I knew there were some tools that weren't being produced out there that were that, you know, I found in books on building, you know, live steam locomotives and such. So I started a line of little machinist tools, because there I could take more time working out the manufacturing of them and not, you know, the trouble with Custom Machining is you have to be very, very good at making different things quickly. You know, every day a different something making it quickly. And I wasn't really skilled enough to compete very well in that world, but if I had the time I could work out manufacturing a tool really nicely and make a really nice tool, and then, you know, dial in manufacturing it fairly efficiently. So that's the route I took in the beginning. And then as I got better at it, I quickly moved the, you know, fairly quickly moved the business out of the garage into a rented space, and I'd run into another fellow who was a much more experienced machinist, who wanted to share space too. He was starting a business as well. So we actually shared some rental space together for a while, and I got better at doing custom work, and the custom work started to over the first few years, become more profitable, and it was clear there was a bigger market for that. So I started to veer that direction. And then as I hired, the first employee I hired was actually an accountant to take that burden off me. And then I started to hire machinists who were better machinists than I was. So, you know, we started to improve the custom work. But, but again, there was no, very little aerospace to begin with. We actually our earliest customers were in there was a local CUSP manufacturing company, actually a pretty big one making pipettes. And they were making manufacturing their own custom manufacturing equipment to do these custom molded medical pipettes. And so they would come to us with, Hey, we're going to build three of these machines. They've got you know, 200 different parts here, a bunch of small parts we need made. They were great. And we would, you know, it was pretty low volume, but fairly sophisticated. You know, moderately sophisticated parts. It fit our niche well, and we grew with them for several years, and then we tacked on additional clients that were doing RF things and such. By about, say, 12 years in, we were getting sophisticated enough to we started it. I remember we picked up a an aerospace a drone, an early drone company making drones that were designed for potentially military applications. But at the time, it was mostly surveillance applications. They were just essentially very good drones for for collecting data from, you know, from altitude. And later on, they were that company was sold to Boeing. So we we got into Boeing through that company we're making parts for. And then in the 2000 10s. I come from a large family. I had a nephew who was a PhD, basically a PhD, space scientist, and he was working in. Uh, in that industry. And so I talked to him, saw there were lots of parts, you know, getting made in that industry as well. So we started to work in the commercial space industry. And in the beginning, we weren't even qualified for it. I remember going and visiting the company he worked for, and seeing parts that I knew we could make physically and But in talking to the buyers, they were like, well, you know, you need ITAR registration. You need a quality system. And, you know, I didn't even know what ITAR was at that point, so I said, Okay, if we get all that, you know, can we quote on some of these parts, they were like, sure, you know. So it took about six months to get all get some of the registrations.
Sunny 10:46
Back in 2008 the private space industry was tiny.
Joe Osborn 10:50
Yeah, it was tiny when, and we were tiny, you know, we were a tiny company. So it seemed big to us because they were larger company than us, but,
Sunny 10:56
And it was large enough that you wanted to make the investment in in getting,
Joe Osborn 11:00
Yeah, it didn't take, you know, it was, it wasn't a very big investment in terms of the registrations and such. There was an annual fee, but, but the things that we were at that point investing in, like a quality system, it was pretty clear that the that was going to be needed doing more sophisticated work. I mean, as a as a businessman, I knew that we wanted to pull ourselves out of a commodity business, you know, it's, it's, it's commodity businesses are tough because you're competing essentially on price. And we wanted to be competing in sophistication, you know, not directly on price. There's three in manufacturing, as you probably know, there's really only three factors. There's quality, price and delivery. And quality is pretty much assumed, you know, I mean, there are definitely different quality levels with the customers. You know, depending who you pick for customers, you can kind of choose what level of quality, but whatever level you choose, you've got to you've got to produce parts at that it's expected that you will produce parts at that level of quality. Then there is delivery. Delivery is really kind of the key, you know, the key issue in custom manufacturing, because delivery is really difficult in the world of custom manufacturing, getting parts out on the date that you say you're going to get them out is tough. Price is, you know, just been doing this a long time. Price is always a factor the market. It's what the market you know, will bear, and you've got to be cost competitive. There's just no question if, if another client can deliver and produce that the level of quality that the client, that the customer needs, you're going to have to be able to compete with them on price. So, you know, we just kept doggedly. Om W is a nose to the grindstone business where we are working hard every day on a whole lot of things to you know, that are necessary to get parts out the door. People sometimes ask me what the secret of OMW is, and I refer them to an old short story called The Old Master, about a master precision rifle manufacturer who everyone thought had some secret to his incredibly accurate barrels that all the Olympic marksmen would buy from him. And the whole point of the story was, at the very end, the young apprentice finds out that there is no secret. It's just being really good at a whole lot of things and doing a whole lot of operations extremely carefully, and, you know, with great caring. And that, I think, is, you know that's on. W's secret, if there is one.
Sunny 14:04
So since 2008 the space part of Aerospace has really grown really rapidly. I've met a lot of companies in my journeys that try to keep up, and couldn't. They just couldn't grow their own operations fast enough. How have you been able to do that, like, how have you been able to stay, stay in tempo with the growing industry.
Joe Osborn 14:23
Well, first of all, you have to want to stay in tempo. And you know you have to, if you want to choose that industry, you know you have to care about it. I grew up. I think Michael did too. Grew up in the age of Star Star Trek, the original series, you know, I watched that as a child. I watched the moon landing, the, you know, the first moon landing on a black and white TV. I still remember exactly where I was in Massachusetts watching it. I've always been in the night. It's hard to imagine now for people to. Weren't around in the 1960s just how exciting the space industry was then. You know, the astronauts were incredible celebrities. Those rocket launches were major events in the 1960s watching them on TV. You know, it was just a it was an amazing part of the social fabric of America. The space program in the 1960s JFK had said, we're going to go to the moon. By the end of the 1960s a huge percentage of the US budget was earmarked for NASA. What NASA was doing was absolute state of the art in so many technological ways. You know, technology today that we take for granted was driven by by much of what was developed for the space program in the 1960s so it was exciting, and I cared having grown up in that, that era, I was kind of wired for the space industry. I really cared about it, but it's a very demanding even today, it's still very innovative, extremely demanding. I saw a lot of companies drop out because they interpreted that those demands as sort of unreasonableness. But it's not because you know, what the space industry does is extremely hard, and you know, if you aren't demanding, you're not going to succeed. There is a deep level of integrity in that industry. I think you're talking about astronauts lives. You're talking about, you know, launches that are hundreds of millions of dollars of, you know, of investment per launch. So you have to have an appetite for that. And I don't think it is the right industry for everyone. I don't I think there's a lot of people that don't have an appetite for it. We've been doggedly pursuing that, and, you know, just essentially changing om w as we went along to match those customers. And you know, I gotta say that a huge part of OM W has been the employees that we have, you know, we, we see. I'll just say one other thing quickly, which is that OMW is a partnership. I think of OMW, and I think Michael does too, as a partnership Corporation, it's integral to our strategy as a company and to who we are, really, it's integral to our company culture that we're in partnership with our employees, with our customers and with our vendors, and we have enormous transparency. That's another thing that some businessmen don't, you know. They want to keep the cards close to their vest they want to, you know, they're not willing to share certain information. We with those partner groups, our employees, our vendors and our customers. We're basically almost completely transparent. I mean, obviously there's some areas, you know, personal areas and things you don't want to share data, but I think we are more transparent than 99% of the companies out there, with our groups and we see our employees, we see our vendors and our customers as true partners. Now, does that mean every customer wants to be a partner with OMW, no, there are customers that don't operate in a partnership driven, you know, culture, and we weed out those customers. We've, we've, you know, we have let a lot of customers go for that reason. The same thing's true with vendors. The same thing's true with employees. You know, they see it as, I'm the employee, and, you know, the customer, the company is trying to take advantage of me, and I'm going to get the, you know, they don't see it as a partnership relationship. And we work very hard to make sure, since we're in, you know, we're the company side, which is generally the sort of bigger, more powerful sides look, you know, versus an individual employee. We try to make sure that each employee sees OMW as their own company, that they're part of this organization, an important part of the organization, that they have equity in it in different ways, and that they have control and that they have trust. We see every employee in the early days of OM W I remember every employee had a key to the to the company, you know, a key to the door of the company. And some, some of my friends who were business, were like, Why do you give everyone a key? You know, aren't you afraid that you're gonna have stuff stolen? And my reaction was that, no, I give them all key, because every one of them is like our security guard, you know. Like, I totally trust, you know, none of them are going to steal anything. Well, I, you know, I wouldn't, they wouldn't be employees if they were had, they were going to steal something. So we've always had a high level of trust, and we trust our vendors, and we trust our customers too. So anyway, that partnership is an important part of who we are.
Sunny 20:18
So I was told when I was very young that having values and integrity is really important, but it gets exponentially more difficult as things get more complicated and as you grow anything yourself or a business, that appetite for being transparent, for rising to the level of potentially unreasonable expectations from your customers. Has that appetite been challenged? Ever? Have you ever gotten stretched so far that you're like, Man, am I doing the right thing?
Joe Osborn 20:46
Well, there's lots of gray areas, you know, it's, I mean, if you just look at, for example, you can have a part that's really, really difficult, okay, you could have a tolerance of a couple of tents on, you know, or several tents. And sometimes those tolerances are on features that, you know, the tolerance really is too tight on, might be a bolt hole, clearance hole or something. So you might have run, you know, 100 of these parts at really expensive parts, and you're out by a few tents on a bolt hole, you know, clearance hole that you know has no impact to the customer. So what a lot of companies would do, I've seen it is essentially not mentioned to the customer. You know, maybe they know the customer's not checking. Maybe they're supposed to check, you know, and issue a report, a QA report, on those holes, but the customer is not going to double check it, so they let that feature slide. And that feature doesn't affect anything, you know, nothing. No one gets hurt in that sliding, that gray area. I mean, that hole, they know that hole can have that tolerance, and it's not right, and it It's doesn't hurt anyone, so they let it slide, right? But in our world, you it's okay to let that slide, but that is not your decision on the tolerance of that hole, right? I mean, from our standpoint, so you are going to tell the customer, hey, I've got 100 parts, and we are out of tolerance on this whole. And let the customer, you know, and sometimes, and you know, again, gray areas, right? The customer has a total right to say, remake all those 100 parts. We don't care, you know, we don't even want our engineer to look at that. It's not nominal, you know, you've got to remake the parts. And we would do that. But, you know, this is real life. So typically, what happens, I mean, what happens a lot is, you say, Okay, we'll remake all 100 parts. It'll be two more weeks. And they're like, oh, we need them in a week, you know, we've got a giant project that, that, that'll, that's going to be very expensive for us. So we're like, well, is that whole okay, you know? And then it kind of changes, well, okay, you know, we'll, we'll have the engineer look at an issue in SDR, and, you know, we'll let it slide. But again, that dialog, that honesty in what is happening. I remember something happened years ago. We had, we obviously job out a lot of in fact, we've done ourselves a lot of plating in the past. We had some in anodizing, you often have rack marks. And it's actually in the spec you, you know, you can, you can have these rack marks, because with these electrolytic processes, you've got to have electrical contacts. You can have little areas that don't get plated. And in some cases, you know, you'll, you'll figure out a way to cover them up with something that's but in the anodizing business, a lot of times, the anodizers will literally, because customers don't like to see those little rack marks, so they'll take like a Sharpie pen, and if it's black anodized, you know, they'll mark out the little marks with a black pen. Well, we had an employee years ago who had, I think, had, you know, been involved in plating, and he was, unbeknownst to us, he was marking little rack marks on a black anodized part with a sharpie pen. Now, in the space world, you know, that's a no no, because you're essentially putting a, you know, another substance, substance, right? And you don't know what's going to happen in the atmosphere of a space vehicle. I mean, that's up to the aerospace engineers right to make that decision whether that's okay or not. But we discovered this. And we'd been making these parts for years, I think, and this guy had been marking them for months, if not years, and we suddenly discovered it, and the customer had never complained. Mean, there'd never been any problem. These parts had gone, you know, been used in real life many times without any issues. But so what do you do again? A lot of companies would just say, just ignore it. You know, they'll never know. You know, they didn't complain. They never noticed. You know, just keep doing what you're doing. Well, we didn't we immediately called the customer and said, you know, here's what happened. We had an employee, unbeknownst to us, they were marking parts. We've corralled all the parts. We let them know the serial numbers and the part numbers that were affected. You know, it created a huge, you know, a huge hubbub with the client with us. There were hundreds of parts that were, that were affected, and, you know, there's a big sort of uproar over this for a couple of weeks while it all it's a little settled down. But about, I remember about three weeks or a month later, the customer coming back to us and saying, you know, we really, really appreciated that. OMW fessed up to this and came to us and discovered it. You know, a lot of our vendors we don't trust would actually do that.
Michael Langston 26:14
I could jump in. That particular experience was early on in my my tenure here, and it was part of the what Joe's describing as part of the maturation process. I believe that that particular incident was the first time om W ever had to do a corrective action for a customer, do an ad worksheet, worksheet and so on. So, you know, in terms of how we've grown with the space industry, that's part of it. We were willing to do the things that it took to mature, to develop a real quality management system, to grow as our customers grew. And, you know, your last question was about, has our willingness to be transparent been taxed, and it has right and and some you know, we when I talk to a customer or new customer or new buyer for an old customer, I'll give them the talk about how we'll more than happy to be transparent, but I always end with and I expect you to be the same, and we're not always met with that, and it colors the relationship. We need to be working on the same principles, or also gets difficult. It's all part of our maturation as an organization. We've, we've grown tremendously in the last 1012, years, and that's allowed us to keep up with our customers. We've, we've grown up along with the industry, is the way I like to think about it.
Sunny 27:38
So dovetailing on that it's really difficult to get someone with your background to join a small company, no matter how exciting it is or how fast it's growing. You have Joe who has a vision about how manufacturing should be done, about meeting potentially unreasonable demands from customers, and also a set of principles that all together, make it hard to operate and scale an organization. There's all these restrictions. And clearly, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. We share a lot of your same values. What possessed you to want to come to a much smaller organization that had much fewer resources, that had many more challenges and many more restrictions and and if you could tell us a bit about your background too, that'd be great.
Michael Langston 28:21
Well, I came to own W from United Technologies, where I come from a quality background. UTC is where I got introduced to AS9100 to real quality system at our had previous experience with ERPs like SAP. And, you know, I'd already seen how manufacturing process should work. And when I came to own w i, I'm not the best person to be in a large corporate environment, you know, I didn't, I didn't. I loved the work I was doing, but I didn't love the environment of working for such a large company. And when I, when I came across Joe, I knew pretty immediately that there was a lot of opportunity here. My my first day of work, one of my one of my colleagues was told me who's still here. We still work together. Told me, hey. Well, congratulations on the job. Our biggest customers moving all their parts to Malaysia, we have this new crazy space company that has, you know, all these really, really crazy requirements that we don't know how to fulfill. So the whole place is falling apart. But welcome, all right, and, and, you know it wasn't, it wasn't true. It wasn't, you know, there was, but it was a change, and you could see immediately that that this was a company that had great potential. And for me, the salesperson was Joe. One of the things that Joe has always been really good at is expressing enthusiasm for what we do, and it's contagious. You know, we had the interview. You. And I think my first interview lasted two hours or so. I came back a couple couple of days later, and just the level of energy and enthusiasm you felt for what was in front of this company was great, and I knew that there was opportunities for somebody like me to come in and and be effective. Sometimes you get lost in the big company, and it just, it just seemed like a great fit from the minute I walked in the door.
Sunny 30:29
You alluded earlier to the fact that you've had to kind of remake your company multiple times at different stages as you grew. What was, what was the first time that you realize that a seismic or systemic change had to happen, and what did you do?
Joe Osborn 30:44
Well, I mean, if you go way back, it was probably that I needed to move out of my garage, because, for one thing, I didn't have three phase power, and lays especially, don't like two single phase power. Should your wife have to do with that? Yeah, I don't think that was so much of an issue. It was just, you know, we had, like, a gravel driveway. It was hard for you know. I mean, my garage was smaller than some bar machines now, you know, so, so that was, you know, the big change. But one of the things that I learned, you know, I was in the software business for 15 years, and one of the things that I learned there was you need to follow the customers, and you need to follow the money, you know, you need to look at where the money is, not because and I am, we're not, you know, the goal of OMW is not to make a lot of money. I think when I was young, that was sort of seemed more important to me. But now, now that I'm older, there's only so many toys you can play with, you know, it's really about how much time you have and what you love to do. And I think the, you know, I love the craft of working with metal. I mean, the the toys I buy are like tools for my workshop, and I still have my home workshop, you know, on little, little home machines to to use there. I love that craft part of it, and I love the I love the industry we're in, you know. And I like the customer relationships. I like the vendor relationships, you know, we try to find vendors like Fulcrum that have a really good strategy that share our similar values, that are good partners. So that's been, you know, a hugely satisfying and fun part of of OMW, and I have no plans to retire because I or sell the company. You know, every single day I get, I get emails or texts from, you know, from financial people asking whether it be interested to sell the company, or whether I'm ready to retire. Probably because I'm right, the right demographic, you know, they see an owner ready to retire and sell his company. But om w is an independent organization. I don't see myself as an owner. I see myself as a as a founder and a, you know, someone who promotes a company culture and an investor, but the company is really an independent entity, and its goal it, obviously, it has to make money. I mean, I can't remember what I want to say Harold Janine, but it may not have been. There was a famous businessman. Famous businessman that said, business is like a game. And one of the things about businesses, it's a It's this incredible game that only has one rule, and the one rule is, if you run out of money, they take you out of the game. And that's true in business. You know, you do have to make enough money to survive in business, but just making money by itself is not a, not a goal that drives a quality organization. I really don't feel the most fun that I have in OMW is not, you know, making more money than I did last month. It's having a better organization this month and last month, and improving the organization. And the improvements don't have to be, you know, buying a, you know, one and a half million dollar new, fancy CNC machine. The improvements could be, you know, a better paper towel dispenser in the bathroom. You know, that's, you know, because the old ones driving everyone crazy, or, or hire, you know, hiring that great new intern from Cal Poly or Berkeley or somewhere, you know, it's those sorts of all the improvements excite me. And I think it's, it's very, very gratifying to be an or be in an organization where those are the things that are driving the organization forward.
Sunny 34:43
You've been here almost a decade now, Michael.
Michael Langston 34:46
February, like 10 years.
Sunny 34:49
A lot has changed. You know, new buildings, new machines, a lot of growth. How have you done it? What? What have you seen? I. 10 years ago as a newcomer now as part of the establishment.
Michael Langston 35:03
Yeah, 10 years is a while, and the change has been constant. It started the second week I was here, one of my first tasks was to help manage a supplier audit for what became our biggest customer, and we started making parts for for commercial vehicles. In right around 2012 2014 and 2016 we had our first supplier audit. We had somebody from NASA here, and it was the first time we became actually flight approved, approved to make flight parts. And that was my second week on the job, and we still work with the same people. They became our biggest customer, and seeing that relationship grow and the nurturing that it took to get it there has been really, really rewarding. And the change has been driven by the customer's needs, as their needs increased and we were able to do the things that it took to match their pace. I started in 2016 by 2017 we were as 9100 approved. That was a kind of a milestone marker for us, putting in processes, hiring some of the first kind of skilled quality people that we had above and beyond what we you know, when I started, we had one guy in quality, and he's still here. He's our Quality Manager. Fantastic job. You know, world class at his job, but he was one guy. And seeing that department build, seeing us continue to add new equipment. My first few years here, we would buy one machine a year, and it was really driven by task considerations as much as anything else. And you know, last year we bought six machines. This year we've already bought five, and seeing that pace grow and assess the demand from our customers drove that. And we've built this class of managers. We've built this class of, you know, higher level managers, young people. You've met a lot of the young people that we have here who are kind of growing up in the business, which is so exciting to see, but part of us that Joe's been willing to make that investment. He's been willing to assume the risk. And, you know, we can do all we want, but if you don't have an ownership structure that's willing to put money into the company, if you don't have managers who are willing to take that money and do something effective with it, it wouldn't work, you know. So a lot of things have had to work together to get us where we are. Some of the people that were here when I started really weren't able to scale with us, and we had to bring in new blood. Some of the people who were here when I started are still here and doing amazing things, but the change has been constant, and I think you have to, you know, I don't want to say either have to, like, change or die, but if you're not, if you're not evolving, if you're not constantly moving forward, I don't think you can keep pace with the with the world that we operate in.
Sunny 38:13
During that time. Do you see the changes that have happened? Kind of like a Ship of Theseus, where the ship is the same, or is it a different ship, a larger ship, a more complicated one.
Michael Langston 38:23
It's definitely more complicated, definitely larger, but the structure of it's the same. I think the values, you know, the three things that I think of as our core values are, be straightforward, be honest and be transparent. And those things have not changed. I think that the we built onto the house if you want, so if you want to, you know, change the metaphor. But I think we keep building new rooms and new floors, but I think that the foundation has been exactly the same.
Sunny 38:57
I have noticed that I hold back the company more often than not, and that sometimes when I hire somebody, or make a change or pivot the company's strategy or execution, that so it's not as me centric, I can allow for a lot of people to grow, and a lot of a lot of things grown. Oh, for sure. Have you noticed things like that? And in what ways have you held the company back? And how you how have you come out from this?
Joe Osborn 39:21
Absolutely, I think, as a as an entrepreneur, you know now, now you're in the world of the entrepreneur, right? It's, you've got to be very cognizant of becoming, you know, a critical path in the organization. That's, that's, it becomes a blocker for the organization, and you've got to make sure you don't through ego or through you know, most entrepreneurs have a need to kind of control and to be the boss. And you know that can be very important, especially when a company's small, taking control and such. But as the company gets large. You know, I do remember, here's an interesting point i i do kind of remember the size at which the where OMW grew to the point where a single person essentially couldn't keep all the transactions in their head. You know, when the company was very small, we'd have like five jobs going. So it was like, you know, yeah, I knew every job. I knew what machine it was on. I knew exactly what was going on, what was going to get shipped that day, blah, blah, blah was all in my head originally. And then as the company grew, you know, more people started to hack out pieces of those components, you know. And it got to, I remember getting to the point where, you know, I really didn't know, like, what was going to ship that day, or what the, you know, I mean, we, we'd set up reports and such to get visibility into it, but it was no longer something that a single person could control. It was its own organization. And I think, organism, I should say, rather than organization, a company, I think up at, you know, 20 or 30 people starts to become an independent organism, independent from the founder. The founder can still, you know, kill this organism by stupid decisions or by pulling funding, or, you know, selling it off, or whatever. But, but it no longer is totally under control of the founder. And then, you know, we're significantly bigger than that now. So, you know, you're tending this organism as it gets larger. And I think as it gets larger, the company culture becomes a primary driver of the organism. You got to get out of the way, you know, as the founder.
Michael Langston 41:44
For me, letting people do their thing is Assistant Manager for nice. You know, seven or eight years ago, I was running around and I was doing a lot of things. You know, we didn't we had one person in planning. We had one person in purchasing. And, you know, small company wore many hats. It wasn't uncommon for me to spend a bunch of my day moving parts from one part of the shop to another, and there's a tendency to want to micromanage. And if you, if you do micromanage, you know, why should? Why should you do it if I'm going to do it for you? And you know, I think all of us have had to learn how to let go of certain things and let other people do the job. And I think for me, it's, it's the lesson that we learned from our customers. You know, we have these young entrepreneurial companies are doing these amazing things, building these amazing vehicles, satellites and so on. And I, we've watched these young people come visit us with, you know, a laptop and an agenda. They've gotten great support, great and great training. They show up here and they they're amazing. They're amazing people, and they do a great job. And watching that unfold from our customers has given me a lot of confidence in sending people like, like we sent to Fulcrum, and letting them go, letting them do their thing and come back and bring it with them, and seeing the young managers we have, the young professionals, we have be given responsibility, take it, really, care about it. And I think that's what's really driving us forward. You know, Joe and I, if we have to do all the all the tasks, we're not going to get very far.
Joe Osborn 43:27
If you talk to entrepreneurs, sometimes they're sort of like, Yeah, but if you let them, give them too much freedom, they're just going to, you know, play video games all day in front of their computers and such and blah, blah, blah. You know, it'd be touchy feely company where nothing gets done there is at om W number one, you've got to hire people that actually like to work, you know, there, and that enjoy the work they're doing. Because, you know, if they hate their work and they don't like to work, they're going to look for every way, you know, to not work, and you're never going to be able to, you know, to corral them into working hard. So you've got to hire the right people, and then you do have to have standards. You know, the trick is you don't want to dehumanize the employees by forcing them into some sort of trying to match some robotic standard. But you do want to, you've got to get the employees to realize how important their jobs are in the organization. Like, hey, the customer really needs these five parts shipped today. You know, you don't say, I want you at that desk for the next 10 hours straight, and don't leave it till those five parts get shipped. You know that that doesn't make the employee feel good. But if you say, you know, I know that you're the key person to get those five parts out today, and the customer really needs them out. Do you think we can get them out? You know? And then the employee will say, Yeah, I think I can. I can do it, boss, you know. And we have high expectations, yeah, you got to have those expectations, right? And then, and then it's fun for the employee. It becomes like a game, you know, like, Yeah, I know I can do it. I'll get those parts out. I'll get, you know, and then they get them. Out, and then you're like, hooray. You gotta, you know, we got them out, you know. And everyone celebrates. That's a That's a fun environment, you know, versus the stay at that desk until those damn things ship.
Sunny 45:12
At this stage in a company's development, there's usually two forces that kind of plateau growth. One is either playing not to lose. You want to keep what you already have, and you want to, don't want to, don't want to take more risks. The other is not staying focused and and trying to do a bunch of different things. Yes, yes, those are traps you guys have, I think, demonstrated amongst a lot of shops that I've seen. Really have the emotional discipline, to say, very focused, even against this, you know, risk of not of being under diversified, or of being really, really deep in one area, and you've also continue to have a culture where you're taking risk, where you're doing new things, buying new machines, trying new technologies, trying to reorient your shop in different ways to alleviate bottlenecks. How do you as a management team keep those two things at bay when a lot of organizations at your stage, it starts to erode the company.
Joe Osborn 46:09
You know, those are dangerous distractions. You know, I have this analogy of this shiny object. You know, I think of it as someone walking along and you see some shiny object on the pavement, and you want to pick it up and look at it and play with it. And you go a couple more feet, see another shiny object. You want to pick it up, and you get distracted right by these shiny objects. And you've, you know, start losing focus on your walk down the sidewalk. And the same thing is true in business. It helps a lot. I think, you know, actually, I'll promote the idea of of older employees. Now we talked about young employees, but age, I think, helps a lot in that regard. Because you see, you know, I see a lot of ways that I got distracted being younger, jumping at what appears to be the latest opportunity is, is a big problem for an entrepreneur. You know, they're in some businesses like, oh, that business over there is bigger, better, growing faster, growing industry. That being said, you know, you do want to be in an industry that'll be around if your industry is dying, that is a problem. But there are, there's a lot of industries that are growing, you know, that are good industries. So it's not just space, for example. And there's noise in the signals too, you know, understanding where, where your industry is in the the long term growth signal and in the short term noise. You know you may be in a three month downturn and it looks like the sky is falling, you got to keep your arm hands on the tiller and keep steering if you know this a temporary storm, and that comes with age too, is because you've seen those downturns before, and you've seen the recoveries. It's typical with the stock market. Is always a great analogy there, because neophyte investors will sell out at the first downturn.
Michael Langston 47:56
I think, Sunny, you used the word emotion. And you know, one of, one of our principles here, is that, you know, the thing that we can control is how we react to things. And I think we're really good at that, not that we we don't have emotional up and downs, you know, ups and downs, but, but we, Joe and I, are pretty good about checking each other and making sure that we're not making, you know, wildly emotionally based decisions. I think that helps a lot. It helps to have people that you can, you know, get feedback from. So when you are being emotional, you're not making, you know, you have somebody to tell you, like, hey, let's slow down. Joe talks about the shiny object. We talk about that a lot, you know. And even within the industry that we primarily operate, we've been offered many different, different opportunities, you know, why don't you get into EDM? You guys don't do EDM. If you did EDM, why don't you do that? You know? And we, we've looked at, we've gone pretty far down the road on some of these opportunities and chosen not to do them. And that singular focus, I think, has really helped us. I think if there was an opportunity that we could pencil out, that made sense, yeah, that we would really strongly look at that if it's not something we don't do, but we've really kind of jealously guarded our core competence and and what we do well is complex, five axis machine machining, competitive pricing. We do that well, that's what's gotten us here. And, you know, we can, we could veer off into Swiss machining and add that capability. We could get into large machining. And there's opportunities along the way. Our customers say, hey, we like what you're doing over here. Why don't you do this too? But I think that our choice has meant to stay as focused as we can we do well and grow that. And I think that that's been that's worked out pretty well.
Joe Osborn 49:54
You do need a core competency, you know, in a value add scenario. For your own organization, but if you're partnership driven, one of the one of our themes here too, is that if you've got, like, if you say to yourself, oh, you know, let's get into screw machining. You know, first thing is ask, like, ask your own purchasing people. Do you have problems sourcing screw machining? You know, do you have, you know, a lot of times they'll say, oh, we have a great screw machine guy, you know, he's cheaper than you know, then you could imagine, always gets the parts in on time. You know, we don't get that, you know, we're not a screw machine house alone. So we don't do that much screw machining. This guy's great. So you look at that, and you say to yourself, great. We got a great partner, you know, partnering with us in screw machining. Why should we do it ourselves? You know, it's not about like, cutting that guy out and trying to squeeze another 1% you know, that guy's obviously taking some margin. The screw machine guy, the you know, whether you could actually make more money doing it yourself is an open question. Because, for sure, I mean customers come to us for sure, with enormous resources, with enormous in house shops, you know, with with very good machinists on staff, and they because of the ebbs and flows of their own business and their own priorities, they can't come. They rather have us make the parts, because they can't compete, because they've got too many other things to do, you know, or don't have the volumes. You know, they don't have multiple customers, so they, you know, they can't keep those machines running. 24/7, like we do. You have to make smart decisions about what your core competency is and where to expand. It's no fun to be in an organization that's not at least improving as an organization, you know. And you want to have an organization that's fun for both you as the founder or the or a manager and the employees you know, they want to have they want to have opportunity. And if you don't have an organization that's improving, you don't have opportunity for the employees.
Michael Langston 52:01
I think we've also gotten good at being argumentative, right? I think we've learned how to argue well, you know, I think everybody talks about making data driven decisions, and we have plenty of that. But, you know, decisions can also be very emotional. You have all the data in the world, but a lot of people, a lot of times you make a decision just based on your gut feeling or what you want. I think we've learned how to how to be argued. You know, the other part of being scientific, if you want to call it, that, is the data, but also the argumentation. You're right, the like you have. What? Challenging assumptions, challenging challenges. I'm going to come with it, with data, with information. I think we've gotten pretty good at that. We've overcome even the decisions to buy like the MX 330s versus mams, that was something that was debated for a long time, right? Oh, we need more tools. So we should have mams. And then I'll say, oh, no, we need more spindles. And this is why. And those decisions, you know, took, you know, some time for us to make, but organizationally, we're really good about including people in our decisions, yeah. And we're really good about arguing it out and doing it in a way that everybody feels comfortable with the decision, when, when it does, when it does. Yeah, they were slow. We make quick decisions.
Joe Osborn 53:19
And they feel comfortable in that environment of arguing things out or discussing things. You know, they're, they're, you need to remove the fear factor. You know, people can't. If someone has a a different opinion than mine, I want to hear it. I don't want them to be like, Oh, I better keep my mouth shut because Joe got pissed off and fire me, you know, or whatever. You don't want. You don't want that environment in the company. You want bright young people to say, Hey, why are you doing it this way? You know, why are you making this part this way? Oh, we've been doing it for years, yeah. But I, I think you should do it this way, you know. You want to hear that because they might be, they might be onto something, and you want that environment where you can discuss and talk, you know, at the same time, you got to ship the parts every day so you can't get lost that that can be shiny objects disguise themselves, you know. So you can't spend all day arguing. At some point, you got to make a decision to just move forward.
Michael Langston 54:16
Yeah, if you make decisions, you know, with all the best information you have, and you make the decision quickly. If you're right 85% of time, you're probably doing very well. And if you take all the time in the world to make decisions, you'll probably only be right 85% of the time anyway. So let's move fast.
Joe Osborn 54:36
Yeah, and it's okay to you know, we all make mistakes. We're all humans, and you know, we've had, I've had, you know, young employees that have crashed a $25,000 spindle. You know, you're not going to get fired at om W for that, unless you do it like every two weeks too long. I mean, there's a, there's an expected level of competence. That you should have. But that being said, you know, people do make mistakes. I've made multi million dollar mistakes myself, you know, by calling out some strategy that that didn't work long term, you know that that cost a lot of money. So how can I get too mad at some young employee that made a mistake and was it cost an expensive repair. You really you've got to be that's the other thing is, you've got to not be too much of a hypocrite and hold yourself to a different level than than the other people in the organization, or your vendors or your customers.
Sunny 55:39
I'd like to finish by talking a bit about the future, this Redwood sapling that you you have that you're growing right now. You're bootstrapped. You have a relatively low debt load, you have years of backlog. You have all the all the demand that you could possibly want, and you're still buying equipment. But as you've kind of threaded through, not every employee, as great of people as there are out there would be a good fit for om W not every vendor or every bank or every partner would be the right one. Not every machine tool manufacturer that is looking to develop some new features should come and talk to you, and not every aerospace company should work with you. What? What are the ideal partners for you? What are the ideal companies that that you want to make components for? Or what are the ideal people that you would want to have here?
Joe Osborn 56:33
Well, there's two parts that there's the there's the ideological partnership, you know, people that share the value. But there's also the technical side of it, like, like, let's take machine tools. For example. You might have a company that has great company culture that very, very closely matches om W, you know, they're transparent, they're honest, they're they're great partners, but they're producing machine tools for the sort of budget side of the of the market, you know, they're producing machine tools that are wonderful if you're a small shop and you're running because a small shop can usually only keep a machine tool running a few hours a day. We're now, you know, we're 24/7 365, shop. We're running parts on Christmas Day. We're running them on New Year's. We're running them on Ramadan. You know, we and we have a very diverse workforce. That is part of the reason that that's possible. So we buy only the very highest end machine tools made on planet Earth. And so that company that might be just wonderful from a cultural background, might not be the right company. From a technical background, they're just not producing a, you know, a machine that we that's going to fit in our environment. So you've got to match all, you know, you've got to match all the, all the factors to in making those decisions.
Michael Langston 57:59
In terms of, in terms of customers, I think that, you know, we get there isn't a day. And one of the exciting things about my job is that there's not, not a day that I show up for work, that there isn't a new opportunity that crosses my desk. We quote a lot, and, you know, ideally for us, for the customers, are, are those that that one share? Do share our values, are willing to be transparent, communicate well and so on. But we want the customer to have some upside. We we might call it even handicapping. So it might be a startup, but we want to judge that that customer is going to have some growth potential for us. We're not a company that's going to be really great for quick turn R D kind of work right now. We do a lot of NPI work, but we're not like a proto fab or something like that, where you can just we're just going to take a model and run apart for you. That's that's really not where we are. And in terms of employees, I think that we've had really great success hiring people over the last few years. And as Joe said, we had our youngest employee is 18, and our oldest is 82 we have a number of employees from like 65 to 70 age group as well, and that's really great diversity. And what most of them have in common is that they're smart, they're talented, and they they want to be here, and for lots of different reasons, we have young operators we just hired, who just finished community college programs, who are choosing to be in this business and so excited to be here, and are just, you can just see them absorbing what they're what they're doing every day. Those are the people that we want. And we're, we're pretty good and pretty for. Passionate in our in our hiring. And I think essentially what we want is the customers who want to work with us, the employees who want to be here. And it's, I don't think we think that much about diversity in terms of of industry, industry segment and so on. We're pretty, pretty much stacked into the space world, but we just want those customers who are going to work with us and be here for a while.
Sunny 1:00:30
Thank you guys for being on the podcasts. Where can people find you if they want to reach out and say, I'm one of these perfect employees or vendors or customers?
Joe Osborn 1:00:38
Yeah, different places.
Michael Langston 1:00:40
Different places. The best way to get a hold of us is an email address, rfq@omwcorp.com. That's monitored by a few people and get to the right place. And they can always look at our website, omwcorp.com.
Joe Osborn 1:00:56
Also LinkedIn. We have a strong presence on, we've been using that quite a lot, especially recently. Just type in OMW Corp on LinkedIn, or Michael Langston or Joe Osborn, you'll or any of our employees for that matter, a lot of us there.
Sunny 1:01:12
Awesome. Well, congratulations on all the success, and best of luck going forward.
Michael Langston 1:01:17
Thank you so much for coming to visit.
