Eagle Systems: How 1,500 Foil Machines Got Built in New Jersey

Carl Holden:0:00
Welcome to What's Made in the USA, the podcast that celebrates the people, companies, and ideas behind American manufacturing. I'm your host, Carl Holden, and on each episode we meet the entrepreneurs, engineers, and skilled professionals who are building real products right here in the United States. Today I'm pleased to have Michael King of Eagle Systems, headquartered in Ocean, New Jersey. Let's get started. Welcome, Michael.

Michael King:0:27
Welcome. Thank you for the opportunity here today.

Carl Holden:0:31
I appreciate you coming on. I'd like to jump right in, Michael. give us a top level overview of what you make at Eagle Systems.

Michael King:0:39
Eagle Systems has been around since nineteen ninety, and I've been doing the same thing since I was 14 years old, which is building hot foil machinery at first. And today our main product is coal foil, which is a foil being printed in a sheet-fed offset press, and all the colors in the world get printed downstream on that same printing press. And We manufacture here in our facility in Ocean, New Jersey. eighty-five percent of our machine is bought from American made products, including all our metals are certified for the machine, it's always has been. so it's been a l you know, quite a journey for me. and I'm still enjoying it every day.

Carl Holden:1:31
Good. can now I generally if if someone are looking at your website they're like, foil, it's this stuff that they they put on products that looks metallic, etc. But can you explain a little bit when you're saying hot f foil, cold foil, what's what's the difference and maybe a little bit of the process?

Michael King:1:48
Sure, hot foil. Sure, hot foil is a secondary process that's done after printing in a packaging house. Okay. if you take a look at a company like L'Oreal and you see the L'Oreal hair color foil stamped on a box in CVS, that hot foil stamping was done on my machinery or equipment somewhere in the world, most likely. Okay, we hold the highest percentage of foiling equipment. with 1,500 machines worldwide in the last 36 years. from small machines to very large format machines. So a hot foil, like a business card, a greeting card, seasons greetings stamped in gold. a wine box or whiskey box has all foil on it and it has the name of the brand on the there. Or very big in our industry is all chocolates. Lint, Nestle, I mean every chocolate company has.

Foil on their packaging. Good Diver is a hundred percent ran on my equipment worldwide. and all products like that. Anytime you see foil, most likely it ran through my machine somewhere.

Carl Holden:3:03
Pretty cool. That's awesome.

Michael King:3:04
Yeah, very, very small niche market in the the biggest industry in the world, which is print.

Carl Holden:3:10
Huh. Now the cold foil, what's the difference with that then?

Michael King:3:16
Okay, so coal foil is done in line in process of printing. So instead of being a secondary offline process of hop foil, it's now done in line with a a glue or adhesive printed, and wherever you put the glue on an adhesive, the foil comes off the carrier, putting the foil down on the paper or board. Then the next part of the process is downstream in that same printing compress. So you have First you put a glue, then you have the foil where the eagle is sitting on tower number two, and then you overprint on top of silver foil any color in the rainbow to create different color foils. We're in hot foil process, if you want to stamp red, you gotta use a red foil. If you want to stamp blue, you gotta use a blue foil. If you wanna make a rainbow color, you have to get a rainbow colored foil. Okay, you cannot do any variable. Coal foil, sky's the limit.

Carl Holden:4:03
Mm.

Michael King:4:13
And the speed. Speed is tremendous.

Carl Holden:4:15
Wow. Never really you see this packaging and stuff and you just you never really think about how it got on there and the process of all of that. That's that's really neat. I definitely encourage people or who are listening to take a look at the the website and seeing some of that also helps you kind of visually understand what Michael's talking about. you mentioned you've been doing this for a really long time, so if you could tell us like what your role is. at the company and what led you to your journey of doing eagle systems.

Michael King:4:49
I started off at a very young age, fourteen years old, never finished up school, working for my father up in New York City in Little Italy. Okay, and we would build these small mechanical foilers, these foil pullers, okay, and these foil pullers went on very small printing pr very small presses, okay. and at that time you can foil stamp something very small at five hundred sheets per hour. today we could go up to 73 inches at sixteen thousand sheets an hour or forty inches at twenty-two thousand sheets an hour. Okay. The volumes are out of control. People don't realize, you know, a lot of people in their mind say, with all this digital today, you know, the packaging world and the printing world must really be shrinking. Well, it it's in fact it's growing rapidly and it's never slowed down. and people have a have a mindset, there's not much.

How much foil could be out there? So we touched on L'Oreal, and I think that's a an eye-opener for a a gentleman like yourself who doesn't know my world. So people go, well, you know, let's look at all the foil packaging. How much is out there? Walk into CVS and look at the hair color. We're just talking hair color. And you see L'Oreal, half oil stamped in the corner of the box. Okay, how many different hair colors? are on that shelf and how wide is the shelf and how high is the shelf. How many boxes are there? You probably have a few to you probably have 50 to 60 different color hairs. Mine they don't make. They don't make gray. Mine's natural. Okay. Or white, whatever you want to call it. But however, you have L'Oreal. That's CVS in one store. But if you will go another row over, there's Revlon doing the same exact thing with the Hop oil stamp.

Carl Holden:6:30
Mm-hmm.

Michael King:6:44
That's been done on my equipment somewhere, and all the same colors or variables of. But I like L'Oreal because I like that Hop oil stamping better than Revlon's. And it's pretty much the same products out there. I mean, there are different brands, there are different qualities of and different levels of product. but we just talked about one shelf, two different colors, two different brands. How many CVSs are in our country?

How many Walgreens? How many Rite Aids?

Carl Holden:7:17
knows? Thousands, thousands and thousands.

Michael King:7:19
Thousands. Okay, now think of every store that Walmart. How many stores will carry hair color? How about your whiskey companies, whiskey boxes? That's my world. So when the economy dips down, people play games. So the card industry goes crazy, sports cards, and people drink a lot.

Carl Holden:7:41
Mm-hmm. Right. S so help me understand. I'm looking again at the site. You you've built these machines. You do this at the location of the products, or they send their stuff to you? Like, how is the

Michael King:7:44
Okay.

Michael King:8:00
We don't make a we don't make any of the cards, we don't make any of the boxes, we don't do anything. We don't even make the foil. We make the machinery that it enables them to put the foil down on the packaging. Okay, so it's just an attachment that goes onto a printing press or an attachment that goes into a die-cutting press, converts it to hot foil. But the hot oil world, we've we've shut ourselves down as far as manufacturing new

Carl Holden:8:15
Gotcha. Okay, see okay.

Michael King:8:29
two thousand I wanna say two thousand eighteen, two thousand nineteen. we only do coal foil now today. Plus we have a couple of other products as well.

Carl Holden:8:40
Gotcha. Okay. That makes more sense now, kind of understanding. So the people that work at your location, they are building these machines. But okay. Great. And then those machines are shipped off and do you send people, your people, to those facilities as some kind of like onboarding and training on how to use the machines, or how does that work?

Michael King:8:43
Mm.

Michael King:8:52
Correct.

Michael King:9:08
Well, that's a great question. So from start to finish, it's a whole process. We have to have a project meeting at the facility, look at the press that we're doing. And you can look at it this way. We've we have retrofitted our equipment to many, many different brands and models of different presses. So if you have a particular model that we've done in the past, it's really a no brainer for us to build and add a module to their system. we usually have all the components drawn up. But if it's a different printing press, here's a easy way for people to understand it. We make this radio, it's a it's a fabulous radio. Okay. It's the Bentley of foil machinery. Okay? But now you have a Chevy car, a Chevy, and you want to put that radio in that car. So we make a bezel for it. We make all the electronic hookups for it, and you're off and running. But now you call me up tomorrow.

And you've got a a Buick that you want to do. Okay, we go in and measure up the whole car, okay, figure out the electronic part of it, where the speakers are gonna go, and then we add that to the car. So you come back to me later on and now you got a another Buick, it's a simple add on for us. there's over sixty thousand opportunities for me to sell my equipment out there in the world today. Okay. I am grabbing a very, very small percentage. In the hop oil world, jumping back there, there was forty five hundred opportunities for my company to sell hop oil. And in the period of time that we did sell them, which kept us very happy and very busy and very profitable, there was forty five hundred opportunities and we got four hundred and fifty of them. So we got ten percent of the market. On the coal foil side, if I get one percent of the market, I'm doing better than I did with the hot foil side. But w we're very, very busy with this market. we don't really advertise anywhere. People know if you want foil, you go to Eagle. We've built that reputation worldwide.

Carl Holden:11:11
Wow.

Carl Holden:11:21
Gotcha. Now I we we skipped away from it, so back to the story of you doing foil with your dad, what eventually where did that turn into Eagle Systems?

Michael King:11:35
In nineteen ninety he retired and I moved on and started my own company. He had partners and I didn't want to have anything to do with their partners, so I just moved on and started my own company.

Carl Holden:11:45
Okay. All right. So you took that experience as as a young man and just said, I'm gonna do my thing and have been doing it ever since. That's awesome.

Michael King:11:55
Yeah. Well I was the one in that company that actually developed and invented all the products. I was one of those kids, Don't leave Michael home, he'll take it apart. Okay, and then later on I learned how to put back together.

Carl Holden:12:04
Mm.

Carl Holden:12:08
Okay, very cool. How many people work at Eagle Systems and and how do you keep those people engaged with what you do and and sounds like it's a very niche kind of thing. So this isn't like there you can go on LinkedIn and say, Hey, do you have foil machine building experience, right? Like how does that all

Michael King:12:31
Correct. Everybody's very highly trained here. There is some administrative stuff that's normal business, but our technicians are very, very specialized. the company itself is nineteen people. Okay. we went through our growing pains of being a very large company making no money to smarting up and making a a very strong, small niche market for ourselves and we s we do fantastic.

Carl Holden:13:00
Yeah, that's been really interesting to to the companies that I have have interviewed that it's this thirty thirty person or less team if you can really hyper optimize, you can get a lot done with way less people. I think growth has always been the mindset of people. Well, we need more people, more people. Well, you need the right type of product, you need the right type of customer, and it sounds like you're doing that. Now, you make these products, you're saying Revlon and other pro products that I'm aware of, but do you also sell

Michael King:13:31
No no we don't make the Revlon product. We make

Carl Holden:13:34
Or well the the the the the foil. The foil on the product. That and then that's done through your machines.

Michael King:13:38
Right, we we make we make the machinery that literally moves the foil through the press. That's all we do. We don't make the foil, we don't make the box, we don't print the box.

Carl Holden:13:43
Sure. Yeah.

Carl Holden:13:49
You're you're pressing the foil together, etc.

Michael King:13:53
Yeah, we're we're making machinery that actually just moves the foil. That take a piece of some ram ramp and move it accurately. Okay? But at high speeds.

Carl Holden:13:58
Gotcha.

Carl Holden:14:02
Gotcha.

Carl Holden:14:06
And what I was partly getting at is, is this a product or these machines just here in the US with US products? Do you do international work? How are you like supporting like the local the gl larger global economy and and do ecosystems exist outside of outside of the US?

Michael King:14:26
in nineteen ninety six, the time is now to go global was our tagline for that year. prior to that people did buy from Eagle, but we did another thirty percent up charge on the cost of the equipment, which is substantial. and we would charge the customer thirty percent higher if you were outside of our country. then later on we we made the same pricing throughout the world. Okay, so we brought the pricing up and We're not an inexpensive piece of equipment at all. Okay. But what we are is a company that builds a machine that I I can honestly say some of them are out there still thirty years. even the ones I built prior to my own company are still out there thirty and forty years. Never had one service call and it's still running.

Carl Holden:15:16
Hmm. But you do service calls if there are issues. That's part of like the

Michael King:15:18
So Absolutely. We all have our situations, but most machines go out, get installed, and in the first thirty days we might have a couple of little hiccups with the with these folks. But I engineered and developed a very unique system, the first in the world in our industry, in nineteen eighty two, okay, which is a online system. Now you say online, how were we online in nineteen eighty two? We were online with a 300 board modem. Are you familiar with modems? Okay, so a 300 board modem, okay, and then by 1990 when I started Eagle, we were up to a 9600 board modem. Before 1995, we went real time with the World Wide Web. Okay, so we were able to service our machinery via a when we say service it, we're able to get data from the machine to say, hey, this is what it's doing.

Carl Holden:15:54
Yeah.

Michael King:16:18
This is what it's not doing. Okay. In 1982. today our machines have cameras on them as well. So we go real time. People could take, you know, we can actually watch the machines run from anywhere in the world on our live dashboard. And all of our equipment's tied into that. So and we also do upgrades for the life of machine. You know, as we come out with security or safety upgrades, it's a very, very high tech machine, and we can do this all remotely.

Yeah, long before any of the big boys came out with this, my mentor from years ago said, Michael, you missed your calling. You should have built ATM machines.

Carl Holden:16:57
Maybe so, but then the world wouldn't have the foil technology that it has. So I think you definitely filled the gap that was was needed. And that's incredible to hear that you were connecting at such an early time and and it probably wasn't easy and was fraught with error, but you you kinda cut your teeth in a time that allowed you to kind of stay on the forefront over the foreseeable future.

Michael King:17:04
Yeah.

Michael King:17:24
Yep. We were ahead way ahead of our time with all software developments. again, I I really enjoy actually writing the software and the code for you know, so I combined what's what back then the first machine was written in basic. So c that's the actual language, basic. Okay. And then later on it became GW Basic. And then another comp another program called Procom Plus. So I'm combining my GW basic with my Procom Plus.

Carl Holden:17:42
Yeah, no, I know of basic.

Mm.

Michael King:17:54
I was able to create the communication software and it was just a you know a service button on the screen that they would hit back then. And you had a you know, the old computer with the green phosphorus screen, and it was option the last option service. And what it would do is it would take all the data out of the machine and then send it over the phone line. And then at that time my office was in Brooklyn and I had an old dot matrix printer and the computer was always on twenty-four seven.

And the information would come over that computer and then it would come out on my dot matrix dot matrix printer. And I would know what I have to do or what I didn't have to do or how I can explain to the customer what to look for. But that's more a few. absolutely. Well, that's what enables us to do things around the world today. You know, when somebody says, How am I going to get servicing over here? Well, for the most part, we can tell you what the situation is. And, you know.

Carl Holden:18:37
Wow, that saved you a lot of traveling.

Michael King:18:52
Ninety-nine percent of the time in today's world, it's hand me down information that causes trouble. When I say that, we go in, we s we train a company, we train their people on the press, and all of a sudden now that guy's no longer with the company or he's leaving soon or he's retiring after ten years. And he was trained and he came up with his own shortcuts and everything else, and then the next guy never gets fully trained.

So when we do get a phone call today, the first question we ask is, you know, is Chris Hartley still there? no, he's retired. Now we know what we're dealing with. We're we're dealing with hammy down information. So we're gonna start there and see if it's, you know, as we say, a few dumb questions and we just say, Listen, just pacify me. You might know everything I'm gonna ask you, but we just need to ask the questions.

Carl Holden:19:35
Right.

Michael King:19:50
ninety nine percent of the time it's just operator not knowing what

Carl Holden:19:55
These sound like they make a lot of material, but do you have customers that buy several of these just by pure volume of needing to get their product?

Michael King:20:04
absolutely. Absolutely. Hallmark one time bought over three hundred small machines from me at one time. they later on on the large machines total bought ten of You know. And with with presses and everything. So yeah.

Carl Holden:20:11
Wow.

Carl Holden:20:18
Yeah.

It it's funny, I I I enjoy doing the podcast like this and my job generally because it's like a constant episode of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood where I'm learning how the stuff gets made and I never next time I go in C V S I'll be like, Hey, I know the guy that makes the machine that puts that little logo into the package. So that's pretty neat.

Michael King:20:43
Right. But when you're in there, I use L'Oreal and Revlon as an example. There's a few more and is also not just hair color. I mean pharmaceutic pharmaceutical packaging of supplements is very big in it. what really became really big in the last couple I'd say the last several years is the the cannabis business. All of a sudden they're gonna have the marijuana fo leaf all done in foil.

Carl Holden:20:53
Mm.

Carl Holden:21:13
Yeah.

Michael King:21:14
You know. So there's a lot of different areas that people don't even realize.

Carl Holden:21:20
Now you talked about you're moving, help me understand, you're moving a little more towards cold foil, not as much hot foil. Are there any other like innovations or changes that you see in the next five to ten years for Eagle Systems?

Michael King:21:34
We also make some other proprietary equipment that we do for the card industry, you know, trading cards. Trading cards is so big, people don't even realize it. Okay. I don't know. Are you a a collector of cards?

Carl Holden:21:44
yeah.

Carl Holden:21:49
on TikTok for my work and half of the time and I don't even really collect cards. There's just so much card content out there and the volume I went down the rabbit hole of looking at what collectors buy and all this. There's just it's insane. It's insane. And the amount of money that just a single card for all different types of trading. Like I there were cards, what were they doing? They're even now like local teams that through I guess the process that you have and other things that can affordably make cards and they even trade those and even those have a lot of value. It it's pretty crazy.

Michael King:22:29
There is I'm sure l lot of your folks here have heard about a company called Fanatics. Fanatics is was a big memorabilia company, but now they do a lot of production of a lot of different things, but however they're really growing rapidly, great company. but I'm not a sports person, neither is my wife. And they had their first fanatics festival a few years back. So me and my wife went up to this

Carl Holden:22:36
Mm.

Michael King:22:59
festival up in Jacob Javerton, Manhattan in New York City. I've been in the card manu I mean I've been in the part of the foil side of the cards. Like if you look in the nineteen eighties, all those baseball cards, which is mostly baseball and football back then and hockey, all the names of the players were hot oil stamped in in gold or silver. Okay. And just to add a little bit to this, People didn't even realize it. it was I think twenty two carat gold or eighteen karat gold it was. Not even sure it would be actually stamped on the card. back in the eighties those baseball cards had didn't have synthetic gold or silver. It was actual gold on the cards. Okay. But it was the first

Carl Holden:23:50
Wow. Didn't know that.

Michael King:23:55
I would say the first five thousand sheets only. Okay. And that would make them unique. And it was stamped with the player's name on it, but it would have I if I remember right, it's like twenty-two carat gold little logo for that there. And then after those five thousand sheets were made, that was the last of those five thousand sheets made. But the average card run back in the eighties was a million sheets.

Carl Holden:24:23
Wow.

Michael King:24:24
Okay, and every sheet had a hundred cards on it. Okay, so the first five thousand they would run real gold foil through the our machines. And then they would pull that off and go to regular synthetic foil.

Carl Holden:24:27
Yeah.

Carl Holden:24:39
Yeah, admittedly the only cards I've ever collected were like Pokemon cards back in the nineties when I was a kid. I haven't really

Michael King:24:46
Pokemon tarts back in the nineties. Pokemon's one of our biggest customers.

Carl Holden:24:50
Okay. Well there you go. so I yeah, I've probably had a hand on stuff that went through your machines then. So my mom and I would go to Yeah. Yeah, my mom and I would go to Books A Million and try to hustle kids out of their Charizards and stuff so that I could get my full set. We still are sitting on it today. We looked it up, it's like

Michael King:25:00
The Fanatics Festival though, if you get a chance to go to it, it will blow your mind.

Carl Holden:25:16
It's the older set, but it's worth two or three grand, which is kind of crazy to think. and Pokemon cards vary. it's a whole thing that my brother knows more about that, but that's really fascinating. Tell me a little bit about the tariffs or any other po potential like hindrances to this business and like maybe how you've turned those into opportunities.

Michael King:25:40
The tariffs have always been a major problem for every machine manufacturer in the United States. right now, I love what's going on now. It has it hurt us a little bit? I wouldn't say hurt. I I think it's just partnership between us and and other companies that have we have to go through this phase in order to get ourselves out of where we've been. Will manufacturing come back to the United States? As people say, no way it is. Well, it has to come back a To a certain extent, because otherwise we're just a service country. But the tariff side, if I sold to India all my life, now a machine could go range from a half million to a million dollar machine, that customer would pay a hundred percent duty in India. That means that if I sell a machine to India for half a million dollars, he's gonna pay a million. Well, that puts him right out of the loop of buying an Eagle system. Okay, so he's gonna buy a cheaper value. somewhere maybe out of China. Okay. but he'll get what he pays for, but he'll deal with it because in in a Indian mentality they're you know they they're always negotiating, they always want the cheapest price. And we don't even stand a chance in that that country. Now in China, I have quite a bit of equipment in China over the last many years. But when COFOIL wasn't even in China, the duty was twenty five percent.

Once I once my machine's over there and they start manufacturing a machine that competes with me, then the the duty of my machine goes up to 50% to the end buyer in China. So again, a half million dollar machine now becomes 750,000. You know, and our machine competing against a Chinese machine, if we're a half million, they're probably 120,000 or 100,000. Okay. But

Carl Holden:27:23
Mm.

Carl Holden:27:35
Mm.

Michael King:27:38
Now we're a hundred thousand versus you know, seven hundred and fifty thousand. Okay, but however, they still buy the quality because at the end of the day, you know, you got seven times the trouble when you buy it the other way.

Carl Holden:27:52
Right. Well and from what you said previously, these machines so la last so long that staff like retires before you get a call. so that's really awesome.

Michael King:28:02
Right.

So the tariffs have helped us now because it's now listen, I just believe in a fair playing field. Okay, that's all I want to see. And it's never been fair to any American machine manufacturer ever. Ever. Until now. You know, whether you like the administration or not, you have to deep down inside look at what the value is and what things are how things are happening. Where

Carl Holden:28:14
Yeah.

Michael King:28:35
Or where are we saving the money? Okay. Are the gas prices right now elevated? And of course they are. But it's a strategy with the government. It's nothing to do with reality. And w everybody'll see that shortly. I honestly believe that.

Carl Holden:28:49
Yeah. Well, and that's partly why I wanted to do this podcast was to get the news out that there is there are good things happening and that people like yourself are being able to leverage these opportunities to bring revenue and jobs back to the US and that also you're part of the larger manufacturing picture of when these companies and stuff are creating their products and things that you your your equipment made here in the US allows and supported here in the US allows that kind of manufacturing to potentially happen here, help happen elsewhere. It just it adds to the the bigger picture of logistics in allowing the United States to make things. And that's awesome.

All right, we're gonna pivot a little bit to some personal questions. What is a favorite place in the United States that you like to visit?

Michael King:29:51
that's well I actually I I like Florida a lot. I really do. We s and we live in Florida in the winter time. we live in New Jersey in the summertime. Okay, and I'll I'll work remotely as much as I can. I have a fabulous crew here at Eagle System, which allows me the flexibility.

Carl Holden:30:11
Awesome. Yeah, pens like what part of Florida are you talking?

Michael King:30:14
Palm Beach Gardens area.

Carl Holden:30:16
Okay, okay, great. what is a childhood, a younger mer memory of the United States that you hold dear?

Michael King:30:29
Freedom to do whatever I wanted to do. Okay, including at the end of the day during the day growing up in a area of Staten Island, New York, which some people think is a rough area. You know, you go out the door in the afternoon, your mother you say okay, I'm going out, and your mother say just be home for five o'clock for dinner. these kids will never see that in our lifetime ever again, until we fix this country, which I believe is around the corner.

Carl Holden:31:00
That's awesome. Yeah, I I watch those and Yeah, I have I have kids and I'm not even in New York and I can't just let run around in the street. It's the security is definitely something that needs fixed.

Michael King:31:01
Most than

Michael King:31:09
No disappear.

Michael King:31:15
My parents never worried about me going out on the bicycle or going in in the neighborhood. So that's something that these kids today will never see. I'm hoping they

Carl Holden:31:26
Yeah. Well hopefully hopefully maybe one day. speaking of the younger generation, if all of them could hear you at once, what is something you you would tell those who are coming into the workforce?

Michael King:31:41
My world is a lot of technical. and unfortunately today our technical teaching abilities of our in our country are not there. So just a perfect example is welders. I feel bad for these kids that I I give interns a shot. we have an intern that just started with us recently. now he's full time. He came to us originally.

Become a mechanical engineer. So he wanted to work hands-on assembling machinery, learning machinery. And I'm not an educated man, I didn't go to school. Okay. But there's certain things I did pick up over the years, which you know, you're going for mechanical engineering, and I said to the young man, I said, So what is your second? And he says, well, I I you know, my second's biology. I says, So I said to him, I said, What does mechanical engineering have to do with a frog?

And that's exactly what I said to me looking at cracked up. I said, Well, I again I don't I never went to college, but I just hear all the craziness from everybody. So I said, Well, why don't you think about your second being electrical or electronic or something like that? He says, You know, I had a bad idea. I said, You're putting this mechanical machine together that's driven by electronics and electrical components. You get a little bit of both, now you got a a robotic a robotic background, automation background.

He went right out and changed it over. came back for a second, you know, second year for intern. got on to his third year and in he went for architectural, lasted doing that for three weeks and then said, Can I get my intern again over at Eagle System? Came back and now he's full time as of this past May. You know, so yeah, so communication. You know, a lot of

Carl Holden:33:33
That's awesome.

Michael King:33:40
A lot of the people that come the younger generation comes in here, and if I sit in my office and try to talk to them, there's a good percentage of can't even look you in the eye and talk. A lot of them have been so focused on what they're looking down or maybe it's just I don't feel them intimidating. I'm trying to open up a little bit and see what they're about. But you know, that's a big thing, you know, when you get somebody comes in here and he looks down, tries to give you an interview, it's like, You gotta look at me and talk to me. face to face. But the welder side, I think that's it's disgusting the amount of money that these kids are paying for this education that they're not getting. So I've interviewed without exaggeration in the last four years fifty welders young and I gave up on the ones coming out of school. Because first thing I say, can you weld? Yeah, tick, big, stick.

Carl Holden:34:34
Hmm.

Michael King:34:38
I'm a certified welder since I'm 18 years old. I said, Whatever one you can do, just bring your equipment in and let's see what you can do. You need your helmet, you need your gloves. Everything else we'll have. You'll have a jacket as as well. They go there to weld. What's your best? A tig. Okay. And you look at it and you're like, I can't have them welding for me. They're not even close to a welder. But they've spent forty grand and they think they're welders.

Carl Holden:35:01
Mm.

Michael King:35:05
Shame.

Carl Holden:35:06
Yeah, that's part of our education system. You got them being taught by people who probably have ne never professionally welded. They're just in schools teaching other people. And I had the same problem with marketing. They just want to teach a bunch of soft skills, and I'm I was sitting there like, Well, who's gonna teach me how to code? Who's gonna teach me how to rank stuff in Google? Who's gonna teach me strategies for social media? And I was getting nothing.

And that's why I started Zealous because I'm like, I'm gonna start a marketing agency that's based on technical skills because business school is all just like writing papers. It's even worse than that. yeah our equivalent is a very squiggly welding line. and so that's really awesome that that you work with those people. I love that story about the young man and in you being a mentor. young people need mentors 'cause they're not getting it obviously in school. And so that's great.

Michael King:36:04
We all needed mentors. I've had two in my life. Okay, a a very educated man on the on the automation side. I call him Schmirnoff, still today, because of his last name is a little bit long. And I nicknamed him that at the age of nineteen years old. We're both the same age. I still communicate with him all the time. He's a very, very brilliant man. I've learned a lot from him on the software side. And he actually was

Carl Holden:36:17
Mm.

Michael King:36:32
Very blown away with my software for communication in one of his advanced classes when I was about probably twenty-two, twenty-three years old. And now I went to his advanced class up in Massachusetts, because that's where I learned my type of stuff. And he said, Wow, that's pretty cool. You're communicating with your machines. I gotta do you mind if I put this up at the advanced class and talk about it a little bit, w a way you can go one day with you know, our controllers and software.

I said, sure, no problem. And he put it up on the screen. I was very, very proud that day. I was like, Wow, they used me as a demo. So that was a very young age, but he taught me a lot. And then I had the business side, a gentleman that was a president of of the largest die cutting company in the world of North but in North America, a company that was building everything in Switzerland. and he reached out to me in nineteen ninety When I first started Eagle and he said to me, Michael, I've been watching you since throughout the eighties when you worked for your father's company. And I really just want to work with you. And I'm I'm gonna I wanna just sell for your company. He's the one that got the deal at Hallmark and he sold millions of dollars and he was he had a big position, but he retired. And he just wanted to travel the country with his wife and he said, I I'll pay for my wife's fi fares and everything else. All I want to do is travel with her and I'll sell for you and I'll just work on a commission basis. Sh shortly after starting the company, we became really close and on Sunday because he was on the West Coast, I'm on the East Coast. And about nine o'clock on a Sunday night he would always reach out to me and say, Michael, can we talk for a little bit? Yep. And we'd talk about everything going on for the week and you know what sales he was working on and I'll be working on what's manufacturing what level we're getting to and some Sundays he you know yelled and screamed at me like what I was I thinking. I was young. I was you know and some weekends he patted me on the back. I would say patted me on the back more than yelled and screamed at me, but I got a a good a fair share of both. But that's how you learn, okay? Nobody teaches you how to be in business when you're at that age. Now you can go all

Michael King:38:52
Through all the business school learning that you want and or that you can and get all those pieces of paper and they don't mean nothing because I've already sat down with some of them with this piece of paper and I and I said, What are they thinking? I mean, there's no way that I would even consider w doing what they're thinking. You know, so without hands on experience, it's a tough one out there for the for these younger folks.

Carl Holden:39:12
Yeah.

Carl Holden:39:19
For sure.

Michael King:39:21
And they gotta realize too, I just recently had a situation with a relative that was looking for some advice knowing that I had the company and they're ready they're so ambitious, this young man. And he could and I see he can he's really gonna go places because he's got that much of ambition. And he's after three months with a company, he's ready to sit down and start negotiating because he knows the company is not that big and he really You doesn't want to put all his eggs into that basket knowing that he's gonna make a small salary. I was like, you have to learn first. Okay, and you you're not in a negotiating stage yet. You have to prove yourself and bring in that revenue that you're that you're thinking that you can. And at the end of that, when you start bringing that revenue in, he's gonna if that man's a small businessman, he's gonna make sure that you stay aboard. I've had salesmen that made a lot more money than I did. People thought I was crazy. I was like, I'm making good money. I don't care if he's making double what I'm making. He's keeping this company going, he's growing this company. Okay. Who cares? You if you look at a printing company today, not as much today will you see it because a lot of people work from homes. But I can tell you back in the eighties, when you pulled up to a large packaging house in New Jersey, in Brooklyn, wherever it was.

You pulled up there, there was Bentley's and Rolls-Royce's back then, high end Mercedes. They weren't the owner's cars. They were the salesman's cars.

Carl Holden:40:57
Mm-hmm.

Michael King:40:58
Okay, because those are the guys that brought the revenue into the company. You know, some salesmen do twenty, thirty million dollars a year. Yeah, they deserve to make big money. You know? It's a but some owners can't deal with their employee making more than them. I have no problem with it.

Carl Holden:41:16
Yeah. Well and you gotta get people to buy it. You can make you can get the logistics and have stuff ready, but if no one's paying for it, you're you're dead in the water. So sales is definitely sales is also not something they're teaching at all at school and I've struggled to find additional salespeople and I'm sure 'cause the good ones are going and selling, you know, tw twenty million dollars a year in Eagle Systems, et cetera, so That's definitely another something that if young people could hear this, listen to what Michael just said. Go into sales, get good at sales. You can make a lot of if money is important to you and you want to have a good career, sales is where that's at. So Well, Michael, thank you so much for sharing everything you did with Eagle Systems, incredibly interesting past and and history and and future that you have with this company, and thank you so much for building here in the United States and supporting this ecosystem. Thanks for coming on today.

Michael King:42:19
You're welcome and thank you for having me and let's look forward to the future.

Carl Holden:42:25
Sounds good.