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Component Manufacturing dverti$er
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Adverti$er
May 2019 #11238 Page #14
What Do I Know?
I
think the answer to the title’s question is the same as the answer to “am I beautiful.” Those who know me are screaming, “the answer is NO,” but the correct answer should be, “It’s in the eye of the beholder.” I believe knowledge and experience work the same way. What I know may be useful to one person or Chris Scott company yet not to another, but I can guarantee it will be entertaining on some level. Square 1 Design & Manufacture Inc So, let me lay out some of the path that I have walked professionally—then you can decide if what I know will make my articles worth reading and (hopefully) providing some value to you and your operation each month. Like many before me, I started in a lumberyard at the age of 18. I graduated High School on a Sunday and started on the insulation crew on Monday. It literally went from one of the highlights of my life one day to straight downhill like a roll coaster from hell the next day! I was immediately put in charge of standing in a truck feeding the hopper bunks of insulation, so the crew could blow it into walls. Every day, I came home bordering on heat exhaustion, covered in insulation, and looking like a chicken! It was top 5 worst 4½ months of my life. It did, however, provide excellent motivation to start college in the fall. Kicked down to part time, I was moved to the yard and spent the next 5 years going to college and being a lumberyard rat. I am grateful for the lessons and experiences I had in this time. I worked with old school guys who taught several hard lessons that have stuck with me for years. Earning respect from guys like that are still some of the proudest moments I have. I graduated with a Mechanical Engineering Technology degree around 9/11, which was an extremely hard time to be new in the work force and find a job in northern Indiana. So, I moved down to Indianapolis and started with ProBuild. It was a perfect match—I was young, cocky, hard-working, and willing to do anything. Lucky for me, my GM and Design Manager’s personality types matched mine pretty damn well. Honesty, it was a challenge to keep up with the pace and learning curve, kind of like drinking from a fire hose. Here I was taught wall panel design from a gentleman who used to do it by slide rule and pencil. To this day, he is one of the best and most detailed designers I have ever had the privilege of working with. We were growing fast and, as my managers moved up and on, I got the chance to run design. Those were some of the best years of my life—we had a great team, a ton of work, learning new concepts daily, and growing like crazy! We literally didn’t feel the downturn in ‘08 because we were expanding our factory just to keep up with demand. Another important lesson that I learned here: the faster you grow, the more pain there is. This is where the fun stopped and, for the first time, I was really tested (and don’t mean a little, I mean the weight of the world on your shoulders feeling). I am extremely glad for this experience though— without it, I don’t know if I would have been able to make it through later situations. It was a rough couple of years, but my family life was good, I was surrounded by a good team, and I was confident that everything would get better (which it did). When the dust settled, I had run our shipping department for a year and was now an outside field rep. Amazing experiences, and so much more knowledge and situations that I could pull from later in life.
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