John Juricic: Good afternoon to the Shawn. What do we have now on our Sidney Breakfast Club after hours? What about 32 million people are watching, aren't they? 

Jim Lowe: Yes, they are. 

John Juricic: Yeah, they are. So generally over the place. Welcome to a voluminous audience online. The Sidney Breakfast Club after hours sessions are all about digging a little deeper into the previous session, which was very well attended. 

And we have two panelists here that were there, and I think we are going to get a third, so we will welcome him when he is ready. This topic of corporate efficiency and corporate productivity is now a priority, not only for companies that are looking for ways to deal with the tariff wars and the economic uncertainty. It looks like as a country we are also looking to find ways to be more productive and more efficient, because we are going bankrupt. We have deficits bigger than I have ever seen in my lifetime by 10 times, and the only way to deal with that is for us to generate more business and become more efficient and more productive. 

So we had some great discussions with you folks, and maybe I can start with Jim. Jim, you might want to just introduce yourself, have Mike introduce himself, and then we will start with a question. 

Jim Lowe: Sure, I will keep it simple here. My name is Jim Lowe. I am the Director of Operations here at Bailey Electronics. We are out in the signage community building control handles and throttle controls. 

Thank you for having me, John. 

John Juricic: Thank you for joining us. Before we get to Mike, I have been doing labor market partnership activity for a dozen years, working with the province and engaging with businesses, and I engaged with Daryl Locklear of Sure Grip Controls, which was your previous company. So I am somewhat familiar with what a big operation you guys are running there. 

Jim Lowe: We definitely are. I would say we have 14,000 square feet currently, and then we are moving and having a new facility built over by the technology park. We are moving into a 35,000 square foot facility. It is showing that business is growing, but also how we do business and business flow changes with the dynamics as well. 

We need this not just for growth, but for flow and future growth. Definitely for survival. 

John Juricic: It looks like the folks that embrace this globally will be the survivors. Mike, let us know what you do and who you are. 

Mike Viala: I am the owner of Viala Technologies. We are a small machine design shop, and we focus a lot on custom manufacturing equipment. We help a lot of local manufacturers automate their processes. 

A couple of years ago, we also branched into manufacturing for ourselves, and we partnered with an AI company that makes license plate reading systems for giving out parking enforcement tickets. 

John Juricic: I see. So you are the cause of all those parking tickets. Not yet, I am teasing. That is great, much appreciated that you are here, and the fact that you are more at a startup stage, I take it, but embracing these principles is great. 

Clearly you are going to do okay. Hey Ray, how are you? You popped into our little party here. 

Ray Brougham: Sorry, things got a little hectic here. I am in the back of an Uber on the way to the ferry right now. 

John Juricic: Lordy lord, Ray, thank you for doing this, much appreciated. I explained to our audience, and by the way, there is quite an audience watching us. Last I checked it was 32 million people. 

Ray Brougham: Bigger than the last time, that is good. We are getting traction. 

John Juricic: A lot of people interested. Ray, perhaps you could introduce yourself and what you do. That is the stage we are at right now. 

Ray Brougham: I am Ray Brougham, the President and Founder of Rainhouse Manufacturing Canada. We have been at this for about 20 going on 25 years now. We manufacture for aerospace, defense, medical, and marine industries, so you can see that is quite a wide swath of areas that we are involved in. 

Equally, our offerings are pretty diversified. We do CNC machining, we have circuit board assembly, contract manufacturing, R and D, and we even do some purchasing for some customers. 

John Juricic: Holy mackerel, they are going to have to clone you and Jim. Both of you are going to grow. Shawn, why do you not give us a quick little summary of what you do as well? 

Shawn O'Hara: A quick summary of what I am doing, that can be tough. I am a marketer and I deal with a variety of different trades and manufacturers and the healthcare sector. I like to go back to the old roots of direct response marketing, more than just the brand advertising of putting it out there. I focus on what is actually going to bring in the results. 

John Juricic: You are actually doing sales marketing, that is how I consider it. That is what Ray and I do, we actually pick up the phone after we send a text and a PDF. This is a follow up to the last session about increasing productivity and increasing efficiency. 

I am going to start with Jim. Jim, some folks would like to know what does that mean. We talk about this, we say let us be more productive and the country has to be more productive. What does that mean in terms of what we do? 

Jim Lowe: Everybody looks to lean as one simple process. Follow these 14 steps and you are going to achieve business success. Really, lean is all about identifying ways within the company to get to zero defects, zero inventories, and offer endless variety. 

People ask, how do I do that. It starts with identifying your business and your process flow. Do you have a strategy? Once you have that, your tool belt is the biggest thing in lean. You look at value stream, you identify your current processes, and then look for process improvements. 

There are other tools like 5S. How do we sort, shine, and follow the rest of the S's that go with that? There is inventory management, so lean is not necessarily one process in what you do. I look for where you want your greatest improvement. Sometimes it is inventory management. 

You do not want to have excess, and especially today, like you alluded to John with tariffs, we really need to be careful about our overhead. Do we have excess? Can we continue moving through it? How do we order and replenish it? What is our safety stock? That in itself is a whole lean topic that can go on. 

John Juricic: I am going to challenge you, Jim. I am going to actually challenge Mike and Ray, and let us make this a little bit more provocative today, because we can. I am involved with communications all my life, I have run businesses, I have had tons of staff. 

My role has always been on the front end getting the sales, marketing, promoting, and the communications side. When Ray invited me to be involved with the formation of the Vancouver Island Manufacturing Excellence Alliance, VIMA, I said of course and I have been active on the front end of that, promoting that. During the course of all of that, I am learning more about lean because I am not an operational guy and I am not an engineer. 

The more I learn about it, the more it occurs to me that it is as much about effective communication as it is about improving processes. You can sit and talk about how to improve process, but you have to talk about it, and you have to have some sort of community of understanding of common goals. So there is my provocative statement to you, Jim, what do you think of that? 

Jim Lowe: I would totally agree with that provocative statement. When I initially started out my lean journey in my early career, a lot of people asked, what do you do here, and I said I consider myself a linguistic specialist. They asked what that meant, and I said I take what engineers are talking about and translate that into production speak, and then I take it from production back into engineering. 

I really agree with you that it is a style and a delivery of communication that is part of the lean process. People learn through various activities. Some are better at reading, others would prefer if you give it to them with a hands-on approach or in a class, or let them do it by themselves. So you have to cater your delivery to the individuals and the team. 

When you go in with a lean approach, the mindset for the change agent cannot be that everybody is going to look at you as a savior. You have the biggest target on you because you are going against the grain. You are trying to present and talk to them, and you really have to be open and receptive. 

One key point about this is to ask, am I listening to respond or am I listening to hear the point and the message that they are trying to get across. You have to listen to listen. Communication and listening both are key here. 

John Juricic: Thank you, Shawn. I am not hogging, but I thought I would chat to bring in our three guests and maybe a second layer. I know Ray has a lot to say about that. Mike, you have been kind enough to join us. 

You are a new business, you are a startup. Good for you, kudos that you are recognizing that you need to do this, well done. What are some of the elements that have prompted you to get there in your company now that you have started things? 

Mike Viala: For us, and I think also Ray has this similar problem, we go hardcore on a design and on a process for a short period of time. Then we do that for a few months and often switch processes. Lean for us is really about making our work areas dynamic and able to adapt quickly to new jobs. 

Like I mentioned, with the license plate reading systems, we will do 50 in a few months and then we will not have any for three months, and then we will do 20 in a couple of months after that. We do not want to waste our space and all of our setups. We want to make our spaces really dynamic so that we can build something else in there while we are having slow periods. 

In our area we are really trying to focus on kits and making the process really dynamic. That is where we are trying to eliminate waste. 

John Juricic: I think it is great that you have joined this community. We have to call ourselves something, right, efficiency people or something like that. We are going to have some kind of name like those Disney shows, the Dynamic Four or something. 

Some kind of name for us would be great. 

Shawn O'Hara: You mean meaner than VIMA, which sounds nice and soft. 

John Juricic: Meaner than VIMA, the leaners. The leaners, that is good. Ray, I know that you have been an absolute leader in this area and you have been involved with this, and you are now trying to have the community embrace it. 

Talk more from a corporate piece. You are running Rainhouse Manufacturing. Why is this so important? 

Ray Brougham: I talk about this a lot with people. We started our lean journey quite some time ago, and shortly after we started, we figured we had solved it and we did not have much more to do. That could not have been further from the truth. 

Even with the resolve that you are going to be relentless and you are going to make this top of mind for everybody, things get in the way. We remind ourselves quite often that we still have a lot of work to do, and that has to come from the top that this is important. It is important. 

You really have to shine a lot of light on successes and make sure that people understand that effort is not wasted. We got on the bandwagon of doing two-second lean improvements for some time, and a lot of good ideas came from it, but now we are graduating to other things. It is an evolution, and I think there are some parts of lean that you could say you have figured out. 

It is easy to lull yourself into thinking that part is okay. You need to audit yourself and be honest with yourself. 

John Juricic: Constantly evolving. I have been involved with online training all my life, and one of the precepts and the foundation of that is lifelong learning. From what I am hearing from you, there is lifelong improvement as well. 

That is a mantra. Ray, one more question and then I will get to Shawn, who is likely going, what are you doing, John. Why should our manufacturing community care about collectively trying to be more efficient? What is it about the national and global manufacturing environment that means we should all be talking to each other? 

Ray Brougham: Just from a productivity compared to GDP perspective, we are not doing that great. Think about this: Korea builds ships and 60% of their processes are automated. We build ships and I do not know if it is 5% that is automated. 

Therein lies the problem. We are just not very aware or interested in being intimately connected to the idea that what I do results in something that supports my company. 

John Juricic: Canada used to be a global leader in innovation and efficiency, with a recognition that we are a small player but a big player in a big market. What happened, guys? 

Ray Brougham: It is funny, I was just at the Association of BC Marine Industries Business Opportunities Conference. Somebody from the defense department in Canada got up and said we used to crank out three ships a month in wartime. We had the biggest navy and we do have the biggest three coasts right from coast to coast. 

That is a lot of water. We were leaders in this area and look where we got to. We could get into all kinds of political discussions about why that is. We are starting to see some glimmer of hope that Canada is a big ship with a tiny rudder, and the problem is that changing direction is not happening as fast as it should be. 

What it means for us SMEs, which are 98% of the economy, is that we have to get our act together, because if they do, we are going to be there. That is the hope. We cannot do anything about tariffs. We cannot do anything about all the big things that are going on in the world. 

If we build a strong foundation industrially and in the community, it involves everything, community as well. You have to get people to think about productivity as a good and necessary thing. We love and enjoy the lifestyle we have here, but do all of us work for it 100 percent? 

I think we have to look in the mirror a little bit and ask that question of ourselves, the overall community, and the overall benefits. 

Shawn O'Hara: Instead of waiting, we need to be able to work collectively. I know one of the topics that we had was on the marine industry, talking about ship building and building ferries. Not all of our 32, now 33 million listeners are standing in BC, so they would not be aware of what is happening with ferries. 

We have our latest ferries being built in China, and that was one of the questions, what would it take to build them here. One of the comments was that it would take investment, but what it would actually take before that is the will to do it. 

Ray Brougham: And the capacity. There are so many things that are missing out of that equation, and I do not think anybody wants to triple their ferry ticket price or wait 10 more years for a ferry. I think it is a wake-up call though. 

There is a way to deal with that, which is to make a plan that looks decades into the future, not election cycles. That is what is starting to happen, at least with defense procurement. 

John Juricic: How about this. A lot of what lean is about is change management and people’s ability to change, and we all know it is very difficult for people to change. What if all of a sudden 80% of your team determines that there are some processes that should be adopted and they collectively agree that you will therefore improve efficiency, make more money, and improve margins? 

What do you do about the 20% that do not want to change, besides the obvious, which is firing them? Jim, I am asking you this question. 

Jim Lowe: You are always going to have the naysayers who say this will never work or that they have seen this improvement tried five years ago. It really is about bringing them along for the journey and involving them in the discussions. You have to accept that this is where we are moving, understand that there is going to be some pushback, and be clear that the company goal, vision, and strategy are here and we need to align with it. 

When we present it and work with them through it, they tend to come along on their own decision. Joining a company today is not like it was in the past, where you joined and that was your career for the next 35 or 40 years. That is not the case today. 

People's passions, values, and goals are going to change, and they may not align with the company. Their decision at that point is that they are either on board with this or unfortunately they are finding another company that aligns with their goals and strategies. That is acceptable. 

Working in the community as we do with teaching lean, we are strengthening the entire community. You are going to have those that will jump ship from here over to Mike and vice versa. That is the evolution that we want because growing the skillset is the exact same as buying a 20 million dollar piece of equipment. 

People have skills that are transferable. We need to invest in them, and while you wish they could stay, things change. They help us grow, or they are finding their path, and I cannot make people see it. They have to be willing to invest and turn it on. 

John Juricic: They do. How about you, Mike, have you come across this issue yet? 

Mike Viala: Yes, definitely, but I think lean is largely about making your job easier. It does not make a lot of sense for somebody not to want to have their job easier. Seeing somebody else doing it in your organization can be a really motivating factor if somebody is reluctant to adopt the process or try to implement changes that make their job easier. 

Once they are around it and they see that someone who is doing something similar is doing it much more easily, they tend to come on board. Only in the worst case scenario, I think, would somebody have to leave because they are not helping out in this way. 

John Juricic: Both Shawn and I have run larger marketing companies. I come from that era, and I know Ray and I have talked about this, where there was a time when I used to demand that people change, and if they did not, I would say then you have to leave. 

That is old school now, that does not work, and it would not be accepted in the workforce. I know, Ray, you have made your own changes that way, have you not, and embraced your work community as opposed to demanding from your work community. 

Ray Brougham: You could say we are lean then, because we have learned from our mistakes, adapted, changed our processes, and changed the way we approach solving problems. That is a lesson well learned. Not everybody learns it, but I know we have. 

Shawn O'Hara: In your hiring processes, is there anything you put people through to determine their mindset or how open-minded they are? 

Ray Brougham: We have working interviews where you are actually doing the things that you are going to be doing when you work there. We had so many people who are very good at marketing themselves. 

When you put them to work, they say you have to invest in me because all those things I said I could do, I do not actually know yet. We make sure we understand what the person says they can do. Then the test is based on their knowledge. 

If they tell us that they are fairly green in quality control, then it is going to be a different approach. If they are very well experienced, then they are going to hit the harder questions, and then we watch how that process unfolds. You are coming to work for us for four hours. 

Jim Lowe: Here at Bailey, we have something similar in production. Production is a hands-on environment. During our interview process, we will present the interviewee with a handle assembly that is all taken apart. 

We tell them we are going to leave them alone for 20 minutes and ask them to put it together the way they think it should go. Then we come back and ask them what they thought of it, what was difficult, and what they noticed. My questioning is not about the ability to put it together, it is about the thought process of the individual. 

Are they expressing openness? Do they say they were really frustrated at first, but then worked through it and started to look at different levels of it? That is what I want, somebody who can express themselves and is able to challenge themselves, feel that limit, and then push through it and come out the other end. 

It is great even if they missed a screw, that does not matter. We also have some work assignments in supply chain, not unlike what Ray described. We say we would like you to work through this scenario, and if they touch on points of lean topics and what have you, based on their level of experience, you can really see it. 

I have had people in the past say they are okay and do not need to do that, and I say that is fine, you do not have to. It is an interesting level of insight. 

Ray Brougham: Mike, are there 32 million people watching this because we are giving away all these secrets? 

Jim Lowe: That will lead itself to my final question, and then we will stop recording. 

John Juricic: Mike, did you want to touch upon whether you have had occasion to implement unique processes for hiring folks? 

Mike Viala: At this stage, no. I have only hired about nine people in total. The thing that really gets me when I am interviewing people is talking about their past projects and how passionate they are about them. 

How much did they actually know? If it was a group project, how much contribution did they have in it, and how many details are they willing to go into? If they know a lot of the details, they were pretty heavily involved in it. That is my primary focus, and then I look at whether I think I can get along with them. 

We are a small team. We hang around each other all day long, so that is a pretty big aspect of it. 

John Juricic: We have now occupied about 40 minutes of your time, which in the general scheme of things is becoming inefficient for running your businesses. Let us finish this in the spirit of what we are talking about, and maybe each of you might have some expression of where you want to see the future go with all of this. 

I, for example, would like to see Vancouver Island, and lower Vancouver Island specifically, become a global center for innovation and efficiency and productivity dialogue. I think we are getting there, and if you say global center that means we might say, why do we not try to be a BC center and try to do that in five years and capture that dynamic entrepreneurial spirit again that we used to have. 

How about you guys, where would you like to see it go? 

Mike Viala: I grew up on the Island here and I love this place. I have a similar feeling as you. I would like to see this be a very prosperous place to live, and I think that is through creating good jobs. 

In order to create good jobs, you have to be competitive. I have been to Japan many times, and I feel like on an international level, we are not quite there. We are a little bit spoiled, and I think we have to try hard and trim the fat. 

Ray Brougham: Similar to what Mike said, what I can say is that we love the lifestyle that we have, and I do not think it lines up with the output. I am not trying to be negative about it, but I think it is very valid to say that we are in a global family and we have to be contributing more if we want to keep living this kind of lifestyle. 

As I said before, you have to have the foundation to give our leaders something to rely on. In my own company, if I have a whole bunch of inept people and I bring in work, it is not going to end well. If I have the great team that I do have, I am happy to overload them and give them as much as they can take. 

That is how you grow a business. I think what we are doing is doing our part at the bedrock level to have a super strong foundation so that we can build on it. That is my goal with all of this. Do what you can, fix the things you can fix, and keep track of what is going on where you cannot make change. 

Obviously we get to vote every once in a while, and that is when we make that difference. 

John Juricic: Thank you, Ray, that is great. Go ahead, Jim. 

Jim Lowe: That is hard to follow up with everybody's comments here. I think, to Ray and Mike's point, growing our foundation really starts with us in the community. That foundation is having, for me, an open door policy. 

I need to be open both to my people who we have working and to people outside who come in. There are tons of lessons learned, and I do not mind sharing them. I think the only way businesses grow is through learned lessons from others' failures. 

I encourage my team to take an action and fail. Fail, because we will learn from it and we will grow better. I do not think I have ever implemented a process that worked the first time. There were always tweaks. 

For me, where I would like to see this go is having that list of who is on call that I can refer to for any lean process you want or just advice or ideas to bounce off. In this community, it is really hard to get together and speak out without feeling that maybe you are not a good business leader or that you do not know everything. Let us work through it together. 

I think that is the mantra. 

Shawn O'Hara: These are great responses. I am just wondering if we can get a plug for VIMA since we are near the end of our time. There will be VIMA plugging. 

John Juricic: The Vancouver Island Manufacturing Excellence Alliance, started by Ray, certainly is gaining some momentum and is trying to capture all of what we discussed today and build a community. It is providing education and collectively pursuing opportunities and using efficiency and productivity to get there. 

That is what VIMA is going to do, so thank you, Shawn, you are right. 

Shawn O'Hara: If there are local manufacturers and they want to find out more, where can they go? 

John Juricic: It is going to be all over these boxes. I am going to plug it all over the place and I will put the URL up there, and there will be lots of exciting updates. In the meantime, to all three of you, and obviously to my co-host, thank you. 

We are at really pivotal times and your input, your commitments, and, maybe most importantly, your passion is so much appreciated. Thank you, till next time. 

Links

• Bailey Electronics 
• Rainhouse Manufacturing 
• Viala Technologies 
• Vancouver Island Manufacturing Excellence Alliance
• YouTube video of this podcast: Why Canada Must Embrace LEAN Thinking: The Future of Manufacturing Efficiency on Vancouver Island