Why Brad Tompkins Sold Automation Solutions and Stayed

Carl H:0:01
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 Brad Tompkins of Automation Solutions Inc. just down the road from us in Birmingham, Alabama. Let's get started. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Tompkins:0:28
Hey, good to be here.

Carl H:0:30
We we appreciate you being here today. I'd like to jump right in. small talk, we'll we'll have a bit of that at the end to talk about personal things, but I really would love for you to tell us, Brad, a top level overview of what you make at automation solutions.

Brad Tompkins:0:46
All right. So yeah, I'm Brad Tompkins. I used to own Automation Solutions. I sold it on May first. And we we help manufacturers eliminate downtime and lower cost with responsive service and reliable automation. All right. So we make things that make things. If you have a need, yeah, yeah. If you have a need, you can't buy it off the shelf.

Carl H:1:08
That's a great start.

Brad Tompkins:1:15
Right, something's unique about your product, we can engineer a manufacturing solution for you. So automotive, automotive tier one, that's probably thirty or forty percent of our revenue. And the remaining revenue comes from general manufacturing, mostly around the southeast.

Carl H:1:32
Okay. I looked at your site and I saw palletizing and some robot arms. Can you kind of explain that?

Brad Tompkins:1:40
Well, what we would have found on our website is kind of a s a standard product. And you know, that's the hook for the marketing, really. People tend to search for their solution with specificity. And if they're looking for something like that, we want them to find us. Many times, or many, many times, the end of line solution like a palletizing solution's not a standard solution. There's a unique requirement for that solution. For instance, you know, what you would have seen our website would have been like a collaborative robot sitting on a stand, you know, pallets on either side of it. It's an inexpensive solution for simple end-of-the-line applications. But and we want people to find that. We can provide that solution if it meets their needs. But as soon as a product weight gets over, you know, 50 or 60 pounds and the stacking speed needs to be faster than let's say four or five picks per minute. You know what I mean by a pick, right? One pick, one place, you know, on the pallet. Then we have to move away from that solution.

Carl H:2:46
Sure. Right.

Carl H:2:52
Okay. so tell me maybe some other potential customers, like what what are the types of jobs that are frequent or preferable in your company and what are those kinds of things associated that you're making for those those contracts?

Brad Tompkins:3:07
Yeah, we that's a lot to unpack because we do a lot of different things, right? I mean, I y you would consider us more of an engineering company catering to manufacturers than you would consider us a manufacturer. Okay. So I mean, I'll just go through kind of off the top of my head what we might have out in the shop. And of course we've signed NDAs with some of these people, so I can't get in sometimes into the nitty gritty details of them. But for instance, we have a

Carl H:3:11
Sure.

Carl H:3:18
Okay.

Brad Tompkins:3:36
And automotive customer, right? Japanese automotive manufacturing facility where we are putting a robot beside their line. It used to be a person picking product out of a bin because the bin has, let's just say, the parts have just been tossed into the bin and they're kind of, let's say, entangled. And what we're doing is we've replaced a robot with a 3D vision camera beside the line, and we're taking a picture of what is in the bin and we're picking the product that is on the top. You know what I mean? Least entangled out of the bin and placing on the production line. Okay. That's one. we have a large machine. It's over two million dollar sales price sitting on our floor that manufactures parts for a conveyor manufacturer, makes the rollers itself for a line shaft driven roller conveyor.

So you put in raw materials and it kicks out rollers every, you know, six, seven seconds. And you know, that's another example of what we do. there's a lead products, L E A D, right? The heavy metal lead products manufacturer right here in Birmingham. They make flashing for coastal regions, you know, galvanized steel just won't last in those salt area. regions. And it's heavy to handle. It's hard on people and it's a hazardous environment because it's just the production of lead. So we provided several pieces of automation for their facility to to tend presses that are punching out shaped parts, dispensing lead from a coil of lead and rolling it up into certain lengths of flashing.

Carl H:5:05
Check.

Brad Tompkins:5:33
And packaging it, rolling it, putting a covering on it, putting stickers on it, and palletizing it for shipment. what else do we have in the shop? We've got a really unique application where we are peening an underwater pipe. they experience these

Carl H:5:52
Okay.

Brad Tompkins:5:57
Currents that move the pipe very, very slightly, but over a long period of time where they're welded together, they will crack. Unless you treat that well right by performing grinding and peening and final profile grinding on the part of the pipe. So we've pioneered kind of a way to do that as well. So y you can tell they're all over the board.

Carl H:6:19
Okay. Well it sounds it's Yeah, and it sounds to me you very much match your name. People come with you maybe like automation problems and you come up with automation solutions, software and hardware, and you kind of work through with them, this is how you could get this done. So I'm guessing you have companies that come and say, Hey, we've gotta get this thing done, but we don't actually understand all the steps

Brad Tompkins:6:32
Yeah. Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:6:40
That's all.

Carl H:6:47
To do it, can you help us? Is that make Okay.

Brad Tompkins:6:50
Yeah, yeah. That that is definitely a part of what we do. We'll actually help R and D a process for them, right? If they if they know they need a product, they maybe done some testing to make sure that they that it's something that could be built, but they need to do it at scale. But how do they go from low volume manufacturing to high volume manufacturing? We can help them with that. You know, and then sometimes it is this

Carl H:7:13
Yeah, I I highly doubt I highly doubt I'm gonna look on Amazon and find an underwater peening machine. Right. Gotcha.

Brad Tompkins:7:20
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, we don't peanut it underwater, but we peint it so that it'll live underwater. Yeah.

Carl H:7:25
Lead Vanderwa okay. It's good, good, good. so now you just said that you had sold. Your previous role was the owner and CEO. and tell me a little bit about obviously you you've sold, but can you tell us a little bit about your journey with automation solutions while you were actually, you know, part of the company?

Brad Tompkins:7:48
Yeah, I mean I'll give you the history all the way back to two thousand and eight, right? I picked a great year to start a company, two thousand and eight. The economy was, you know, you recall not doing well, but that's when I started the company. But I gained traction almost immediately. And between gosh, two thousand and eight and two thousand and eighteen, we went from zero or just me, to thirty upper thirties worth of people.

Carl H:7:57
Not great.

Carl H:8:17
Awesome.

Brad Tompkins:8:18
And I started out kind of focused on motion control applications, challenging applications that utilize motion controllers of the time. And that was gosh, made toilet paper. You know, you could imagine toilet paper as a web of material that you have to perforate, roll up on a roll and create, right? You know how easy it breaks apart when it comes off a roll. Just imagine trying to

Carl H:8:41
Okay.

Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:8:46
Produce a piece of equipment that makes, you know, eight rolls every, I don't know, eight or ten seconds, you know. Paper towels, paper bags. It was something that we were really, really good at back then. There were challenges associated with that the the kind of business I'd created at that time because it was specific to motion control. And what it did was it drug us all over the country with all these specialized applications.

Carl H:8:54
Wow.

Brad Tompkins:9:16
That were very challenging and it tended to wear people out. You know, you you have a baby, you get a wife, you get a girlfriend, you kind of don't want to be spending all of your time on the road, and that's what was happening with people up through 2018 or 2019. So basically in 2020, I restructured the company to be more of a generalist. You know what I mean? And so our solutions started being much more varied.

Carl H:9:37
Okay.

Brad Tompkins:9:44
than just focused around motion control, motion control applications.

Carl H:9:50
Okay. I I know a little bit about that. We've got a client that does some industrial control systems. So were you also working with these kind of you have to also work with kind of the big box companies and their software that integrates with the facility. So there's some of that like integration issue of while you might be able to make a custom thing, it also has to talk to the larger system in a whole, correct?

Brad Tompkins:10:09
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:10:15
Yeah. A lot of times it does. Not always, you know, the machine can be standalone, but it does have to be able to speak to the plant. Sometimes the plant wants data out of the machine. Sometimes they want to feed the machine what it's going to do next and so forth. Yeah.

Carl H:10:30
Okay. And so you said from like two thousand eighteen till just about now, like what how did that generalization of becoming are you saying that you became a jack of all trades or what specifically shift

Brad Tompkins:10:43
Yeah, yes. Mm-hmm. It that that's what happened, right? I'm purposefully repositioned the company, be more generalist, right? So instead of just focusing on a fewer number of products, we started focusing on on in being able to integrate a wider variety of products. So gosh, a lot to a lot to unpack. You didn't ask a simple question, so you're not yep. Yeah.

Carl H:11:06
Sorry, but it's interesting to me and pr probably interesting to everyone listening here.

Brad Tompkins:11:12
Yeah, so so I shifted the company more towards generalist, which meant that instead of getting a lot of our leads from the manufacturer, which would have been the motion controller manufacturers, right? They needed competent people to do this work and those leads would find their way to us. So we didn't really have sales, we had app engineers to do the quotes.

But then as we became more of a generalist, our relationship kind of moved from manufacturers over to distributors. So local distributors, right? They sell products that might just be commodity style items all the way to the products that are or would require a value add of some sort in the plant. Okay. That makes sense. You know, and so

Carl H:11:46
Okay.

Carl H:12:03
Yeah, yeah.

Brad Tompkins:12:07
We dealt with those distributors and they brought us an enormous enormous number of leads. So basically since twenty nineteen, we started getting our lead flow from those distributors. And

Carl H:12:19
So it's it became a word of mouth thing because they were connected to all these other organizations.

Brad Tompkins:12:25
Well, yeah. I mean, you could imagine that distributors that were bringing us opportunities have a lot of boots on the ground. They have a a lot of a lot of visibility inside these manufacturing facilities. And any of these manufacturers, you know, the the people that are manufacturing here, right? And I don't want to conflate manufacturers that I was talking about before with manufacturers that are in our territory that we're helping, right? Manufacturers before would have been the, you know, the the

Carl H:12:31
Right.

Carl H:12:44
Right.

Carl H:12:52
Short.

Brad Tompkins:12:55
Omrons and the Allen Bradleys and the Deltas and the Delta Tows that did most control back then.

Carl H:13:02
Okay. so I want to shift a little bit to the people that are in this organization. You said you have about thirty that are they're employed at ASI, and what do you do to keep that team engaged? Because a lot of what I feel American manufacturing is facing is an employment issue, a retention issue. We don't have enough people to get all of these done. What do you feel ASI

Brad Tompkins:13:03
So

Carl H:13:31
succeeded in doing and keeping those people engaged and within the team.

Brad Tompkins:13:36
Well, I'm gonna tie that little bit back to becoming a generalist. And since twenty twenty, right, I recognized that I had to get people off the road if I was going to retain them. They couldn't, you know, i there's just so much of that that somebody's gonna tolerate. Somebody that's very talented, that's talented enough to do this kind of work and find a job anywhere, they don't have to travel as you know, as much as they would earlier. So what I did was I became a generalist, which my goal was, right? I'm going to take care of my people. I'm gonna make sure they have a good place to work.

Carl H:13:40
Okay.

Brad Tompkins:14:06
I'm going make sure to the best of my ability that they can stay in their own bed at night, that they're not going to be subject, you know, for three, four, or five weeks of out-of-town work while we're trying to get something installed and operational. So that's why we became more of a generalist, right? Is because we could compress our geographical footprint, but do a wider, wider variety of types of work. Okay. So that's one way we take care people. And I how how do I say this?

You know, if people won't follow poor or substandard leaders or even stick around with average leaders very well. And one of the things that I really started working on was myself really starting back in 2020 was how do I become a better leader? How do I create or paint a picture of where we're going as a company? How do I engage people in this company and make them feel like I am training and lifting them up professionally? personally and financially so that they feel like we're engaged, right? As a company with them and interested in their success. Okay. Because I mean if you reel back back the clock, you know, twenty or thirty years, you know, the kind of the mentality from a from the I'd say the business perspective is an employees just to come do their job. And they're exchanging an hour of their time for an hour of pay, basically.

Carl H:15:29
Right.

Brad Tompkins:15:35
And so I just became very hyper aware of how can I how can I help all my people succeed? You know, in the even in their own life. And I'm really proud of what we've done. I mean, we've we've got people that have been here long term. There have been people that have started on the shop floor that are now in positions of leadership and they're highly effective leaders themselves. It's because of, you know, trying to constantly lift people up and train them.

Carl H:16:05
That's awesome. you you would think that a competitive advantage shouldn't be just having good leaders, but it sounds like that alone helps retain the people. We have entire movies and comedy sketches about horrible bosses, and it seems to be a recurring theme in our society. Is well, this is me just dealing with my bad boss. I'm a huge fan of the office.

Brad Tompkins:16:23
Mm-hmm.

Carl H:16:32
And nobody would long term work for Michael Scott, who's a terrible, horrible person that was only concerned about himself while he had endearing qualities, that company would have never succeeded. So I think your goal was like, don't be Michael Scott, like invest in people, don't think about yourself. Yeah. Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:16:48
Yeah. Don't don't don't even be average. Don't be average. You know, even if you're a good boss, right? You're watching the right things. You're not creating any d disturbance or havoc in the office, but be an excellent leader, right? Difference between boss and leader. We've always kind of heard that, you know, described, but be an excellent leader. Lead people. Be interested in their own success, right? What What do you want out of your life? What are your goals as an employee? What are you here for? You know, you're not just here for the dollar. What where would you like to go professionally? How can I get you there professionally? And I'll be honest, some of these questions meant that some of our employees found the door. Either they did for their own reasons because they actually, through these difficult, I'm gonna say difficult, through these conversations, they recognized, hey, I I should be on a different

Carl H:17:35
Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:17:46
career path because that more closely aligns with my long-term goals. And that's okay. If we're if we're all aligned on our goals when we're at work, it's great. And our culture here has been really, really good since since I restructured basically to make us more of a generalist, started really concerning myself with people, how to raise people up, how to train people, how to make them be leaders. I mean, there's several things we do here, right, to to cultivate all of that, that The culture here's been phenomenal. Turnover has been tremendous tremendously reduced. And people when they come here, they can expect us to train them, us to cultivate them, raise them up the best we can.

Carl H:18:18
That's awesome.

Carl H:18:28
Well, and the news always talking about like what is the American dream and and for me, like as as a business owner too, my dream is that we can provide a company that provides a living for people to live as comfortably as they can within the economics that they can and that they feel like they're they belong, that they're contributing and that they're doing more than just a job, that they have a career at the place that they're at. Because that means a lot. to a working adult every single day, to their mental capacity and capability is that they feel like they're contributing to something more than themselves.

Brad Tompkins:19:05
Yep. exactly. Yep. It's critical.

Carl H:19:07
For sure. now, as far as ASI know you've you you have sold the you it it sounds like you're still a part of it. and okay.

Brad Tompkins:19:18
I am. Yeah, I am. I yeah, now let me tell a little bit of story too, right? You know, I became a generalist to kind of take care of people as you know, part of part of that whole strategy. Well, there's good and bad that comes along with being a str generalist. So back right before COVID and during COVID, we had really good lead flow coming from our distributors. But since then

Carl H:19:36
Mm.

Brad Tompkins:19:47
Distributors have encountered their own business environment challenges where parts in a box and those commodity items are easily purchased now online from online retailers, which strips that from distributor. They don't sell as much of it. And if they do sell it, they're not making the margins that they used to make. And so because of that declining revenue or that

Carl H:20:06
Mm.

Brad Tompkins:20:16
pressure on their top line revenue and then that pressure on their bottom line net income has pushed distributors into beginning to do more integration, which kind of what we do. Now we can do and what I have described that we do related integration is very grand, right? Big machines, big complicated solutions, but we also provide little solutions, little help solutions, you know, different kinds of specialized sensors. We'd help, install and integrate in plants, you know, simple software changes, little fixturing changes, all the all those little things. Well what happened was distributors needed to recover or needed to try to find a way to grow their top line and their bottom line. And so they started doing the easier integration work. And so what happened to our lead flow is our lead flow started declining. Make sense. So

Carl H:21:10
Gotcha. Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:21:15
In 20 early 2026, early this year, I learned that there was a a fairly large distributor coming to our territory, right? They were going to move into our territory. They had won contracts that brought us into this, brought them into this location. And so I reached out to them and said, Hey, look, I think the market is moving in this direction where distributors are becoming more integrators, right? And there's even a term for it that was in the marketplace, right? Called

Carl H:21:31
Mm.

Brad Tompkins:21:44
disintegrators. Right. Exactly. Well, and it's because of the market pressures and the market is shifting. And if you talk to people in this, you know, either in distribution or integration, they'll they'll tell you the same thing, right? They're these things are kind of getting mashed together. So I thought, well, you know, how can I help my employees and capture the most value out of automation solutions possible? And that is

Carl H:21:46
Okay. That sounds intimidating.

Brad Tompkins:22:14
To partner with a distributor that had boots on the ground, that we would capture all of that lead flow from that distributor.

Carl H:22:18
Mm.

Brad Tompkins:22:25
And a lot to discuss there. Don't know, you know, how in depth you want to go, but the that's the premise. That's the strategy. And what was interesting is when I made the phone call to them, they already had the same strategy. They're trying to move more into integration. They knew it. And when I pitched them and said, Look, I mean we're company at the time we're a company of 29 people, we're talented people, we're really, really good at integration, but we are starting to suffer with lead flow. And I had tried to set up a sales team, right? An an outside sales team where before when we had lead flow flow brought to us, we would just do app engineering internally, right? And get a proposal out and so forth. But the more we had to do sales, the higher t the the cost I started getting was let's see, cost to acquire a customer started going up. And it started to impact our bottom line profitability. Then I saw that compression. And it wasn't going to get better, right? It was just going to be more challenging. So together we are better. They already have sales team on the ground. They're already selling product. They've already got visibility in the plant and they can find the they can find the problems that need solving.

Carl H:23:24
Mature.

Brad Tompkins:23:48
And us being a part of their organization, right, it it gives me a bigger sales force than I could have ever mustered myself. So so combined, we are a much much stronger company. And I think you're going to see this happen more and more in this marketplace.

Carl H:24:03
For sure. I mean, you hear about acquisitions all the time, both mostly just to delete out that company. But this sounds like the best case scenario that two different companies with two different strengths and capabilities joined together and are more effective working together than against each other. And that's, I think, the kind of acquisitions and and merging that the US wants to see that's beneficial for everybody. And over the long term, That kind of con consolidation makes sense to me.

Brad Tompkins:24:35
Yeah. So I remain with this company. gosh, I'll tell you a little bit of the story of how the acquisition went, right? I mean, you know, initially, you know, they came in, they were starting to do their due diligence, and they recognized that I had created automation solutions with a good leadership team. They didn't really need me to be, you know, the head of the the snake, so to speak, right? I had created

Carl H:25:03
Gotcha.

Brad Tompkins:25:05
The organization so that I had one individual report to me. No one else reported to me, just one person. So I had positioned myself to work on the business instead of in the business. And so it was really not that difficult to, you know, pull me out of the org chart and reattach the rest of the organization, you know what I mean, to the right place in their organization. So then, and then I moved over into business development for

Carl H:25:12
Mm.

Carl H:25:16
Mm.

Carl H:25:33
Okay. And so they they wanted to have you stay in, obviously, for whatever time you guys discuss to make sure that the the goals you you know what they acquired stays solid, I it sounds like, and and all the strengths that you built up that that doesn't disintegrate because it does sound like many companies they'll buy assets and be like, We bought this company for all this stuff, and then it fails and you're like, Well, why did it fail? Probably because all the people that built it up were like kicked out.

Right.

Brad Tompkins:26:03
Exactly. exactly. Right. You do need some consistency in your culture and your leadership. You know, you don't want to lose customers. You want to maintain those, you know, customers through that acquisition and give those customers confidence that we are the same people. We're a company that can still do everything we did before, plus now we have all these new capabilities. And to help Transition the employees over, you know, some consistency of leadership is important.

Carl H:26:35
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, an acquisition can be scary for those who are employed with a company. You see a lot of people sell and disappear and go buy their yacht and drive off into the sunset. Kudos to you because you don't have you probably don't have to work, but you're working because you care about your people, you care about this company, and you care about and respect the fact that someone came in and bought it from you and you want to see them succeed too.

Brad Tompkins:26:47
Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:27:04
That's exactly right. I don't know that I'm never going to quit. I don't want to quit. Business is fun to me. There's no nowhere else can I number one create good income for myself. But number two, what's really, really rewarding is the ability to impact everybody else's life too, right? I mean, I've got lots and lots of stories about where people started and where they left, you know, or where they are here.

Carl H:27:11
It is.

Brad Tompkins:27:31
we pri try to pride ourselves on leaving you better than we found you. You know, we've got guys that have come in with with not not a lot of skills, poor credit, and you know, I I just mentioned that to say because we try to help everybody personally, professionally, and financially. And and when we raise those people up, I mean sometimes people leave. But I've got great stories lot of companies tell great stories about their internal people, and which I have a lot, right? People starting right on the shop floor, growing up through leadership. You know, our operations manager actually came 10 years ago on the shop floor, but he's incredibly talented. We've given ever oper given him every opportunity to learn and grow himself, right? Given him responsibilities and accountability in the businesses, and he's capitalized on all of it. And, you know.

But we've also got people that have come work on the shop floor. We teach them, train them, and when they leave, they're driving a nice truck and you know their credits repaired. They're they gained an enormous number of skills. And you know what I mean? Something changed in their life where they needed to move or something happened. And that's okay. That's but that's part of the the benefit of operating a business. That makes sense. I know I sk jumped around a bit there.

Carl H:28:50
Right. for it it does for sure. No, no, no, that's not a ramble. Those those are important things. to shift a little bit, obviously this show is called What Is Made in the USA. What do you feel with your company and th this company as well? What's the conversation around that as far as the importance of making things here versus elsewhere? and creating that economy within our country. Is that something that you guys regularly discuss? Is it a part of your plans? Like, tell me a little bit more about that.

Brad Tompkins:29:27
That's a lot to unpack. I mean, you know, just from a personal perspective, it's vital to our country, right? What do they call that? the world will come to me here in a minute, but it's it's highly critical to our nation. And we've let way too much of it go away. You know, the talent has left. And we've seen these seen some signs that there's some reinvestment.

Carl H:29:47
Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:29:54
in the United States. People are reshoring some production right now. We did see when the tariffs were announced, what'd they call that Liberation Day last year, that there was a pretty hefty downturn in our industry, I think just because of the unknowns and some some other financial reasons why, right, why

Carl H:30:07
Yeah. Yeah.

Carl H:30:12
Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:30:19
people doing importing had to go ahead and pay for those import fees before they received the product, which advanced forward their cash expense, right? Expenditure, which caused some reduction in their capital investment in their business, right? So we saw that in our numbers and you can see that in some of the industry numbers. But right now, just from a market perspective, some areas of our manufacturing industry are really hot and they're doing really well. But conversely, there's sections that are really doing poorly right now. And you've probably seen that.

Carl H:31:00
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I I think what I get from your company and our conversation today is critical outside of the thing or the widget that you make. One of the things we need to make in America is good jobs. Like the jobs itself, and we can make stuff if companies can actually provide a career for people versus just a job. And those kind of opportunities to build more in the US.

Brad Tompkins:31:15
Yeah.

Carl H:31:28
all lean on the fact that we need good bosses, good people at leadership levels that care about the people, that create the opportunities, that rather than, you know, just selling all the assets, telling the 30 people, good luck, I'm out, and and and transitioning them to a career that they still are comfortable with and still have growth in. I think we need to see more of that in America. And lo and behold, if people will trust a company, they'll stick with it. But company trust.

I think is is maybe a bigger problem we have than just like who has enough iron or where are the shipping ships are the ships are going in the ocean. It's more about can I stay here? Is this a place for me to does anyone here care about me? Like I feel like all the other stuff could solve itself if people just trusted where they were going, rather than the constant turnover and leadership not trusting the people and therefore The biggest asset is always in flux.

Brad Tompkins:32:32
Yeah, man, that's a lot to unpack. There's you know, I guess in my opinion, manufacturing's been under pressure in the United States for a good number of years, right? Forty years, fifty years. And so it's always depressed it just in my opinion, right? It's it's been historic that wages are kind of being depressed in the manufacturing sector. They're moving manufacturing overseas. manufacturers here in the United States are having to find a way to

Carl H:32:57
huh.

Brad Tompkins:33:00
to compete with Chinese products that are that are landing on our shore. And you know, companies are just buying the products that and people are just buying the products that are, you know, are a dollar less. And so I guess historically wages, it's been really difficult in the manufacturing sector to pay people what they're worth or what, you know, what they need, or gosh, how could I say this?

What they could go with the same talent in a different industry and earn. I'm seeing a little I'm seeing a little bit of what I think is a turnaround in this industry where, you know, with some of this reshoring that manufacturing will or being in the manufacturing marketplace will become a pretty good career again. There's a lot to be learned. you know, if you get into this industry and you learn how to do some automation, you learn how to handle a robot, you learn how to

Carl H:33:31
Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:33:55
access and program a PLC, learn how to work on equipment, production equipment. There's a pretty good career path there and you can make a decent living doing it.

Carl H:34:06
Well, and I I really appreciate all that you've said on that. I told you I'd give you easy questions. I asked a couple of hard ones. You're very well spoken and and spoke to it. And I you know, we're as a citizen, I'm proud of people like you who will go and try to make that difference to other people because that's what we need in entrepreneurship, that's what we need in manufacturing. So thank you for everything you're doing. Continue to do and we we wish good luck to your team.

Brad Tompkins:34:12
Right.

Carl H:34:33
A couple things just that are USA related that just let us get to know you maybe a little bit better. So first of all, we appreciate all your input on automation solutions. And we'll have link to their company all in the show notes. I want to ask you a couple of things that we ask all of our guests, what is a favorite place in the United States that you like to visit?

Brad Tompkins:34:57
East Coast of Florida.

Carl H:35:01
Okay, East Coast, so that's the facing the ocean.

Brad Tompkins:35:05
Yeah, yeah. Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, Miami. I enjoy that area of the country.

Carl H:35:08
Okay.

Carl H:35:13
I I do like Florida. It's it's hot like Alabama, so I'm used to the climate. yes, they have current. Sometimes it just kinda sits and stagnates here.

Brad Tompkins:35:18
Yeah. At least the wind moves though.

Brad Tompkins:35:26
Yeah, yeah. Alabama, if it gets hot, the wind stops blowing. And if it gets cold, the wind starts blowing. So it's just the opposite of what it needs to be.

Carl H:35:30
Yeah.

Carl H:35:35
Well and lately it's it just gets so hot that we'll just have freak storms come out of nowhere 'cause the moisture has nowhere to go. but yeah, I I like Florida as well. We go down to like the the Gulf Coast quite a bit, but we just went to Orlando last year to go to the parks and stuff. So that that is a nice place. Now, next question is what is a childhood, a younger memory of the United States that you hold dear?

Brad Tompkins:35:41
yeah. yeah.

Brad Tompkins:36:03
Hmm.

Brad Tompkins:36:09
Well I grew up in Indiana and I had a great childhood in Indiana. And one of one of the things that I felt like was a real benefit of me growing up in Indi Indiana was that Indiana has a good education system. I felt like I got a really good education, which set me up for success the rest of my life. And I happened to be there and I went to Purdue, right up there in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Carl H:36:12
Okay.

Brad Tompkins:36:38
And th so my entire childhood I had a good good opportunity to learn good school systems.

Carl H:36:47
Yeah, that's the United States is such a big place for us to say, you know, it's it's so crazy how I talk to people and the difference in and you live here now and you've seen differences in Alabama versus Indiana, the Midwest, I think that's called, as opposed to the South. And it it is really interesting to kind of see how the different regions kind of change our perspective, but also kind of make us as one. last question to the younger generation of these future professionals here in the United States, what would you like them to know or hope that they know as we may move forward in the future of this country?

Brad Tompkins:37:32
That's a good question.

Carl H:37:37
Maybe something that you project to especially your younger employees. What's something that you you wish you could just tell all the young people in the United States?

Brad Tompkins:37:47
Okay, okay, this is kind of a philosophical angle, right? But do everything you can.

Brad Tompkins:37:59
Apply yourself in

Brad Tompkins:38:05
Try not to get distracted by entertainment.

Carl H:38:08
Hm. Yeah.

Brad Tompkins:38:10
You know, there's so much dis so many distractions in the world, right? How many advertisements do you see? Your phone is a big distraction. I mean, and there's entertainment around the corner, right? Well, what it does is it extracts it's great in the moment. But what it does is it extracts your time from you and it extracts your money from you. Now, obviously there's a balance. So I would say do everything you can to educate yourself.

Carl H:38:28
Sure we're

Brad Tompkins:38:40
Apply yourself and try to add value to society. By that I mean educate yourself, educate those around you. and you know, we and I'll circle this back to leadership as well. So think about this: like in a group of peers, you know, you in in the group of the people that you go to school with and that you're associated with, there can be a leader amongst peers.

Right? Somebody that's setting an example and setting a positive example.

And I don't know, if if you just kind of try to keep that mindset through your life, I think you can you're gonna experience remarkable, positive things that occur for you. If you allow yourself to get distracted and entertained, because it is fun, it's enjoyable, but Is is We all wanna pursue happiness, but that can't be the end goal. Ha happiness can't be the end goal. Because it to attain happy, right? You get something and if you just keep getting that something, you're no longer happy with it. You have to get something else. Right? It's always gotta be escalating. So you need to seek reward. You need to seek adding value to society anyway.

Carl H:39:59
No, I I I love that. like the youth of especially today have no like opportunity to get bored, no opportunity to just sit and think. And those are the critical moments in which we come up with ideas or figure out a problem. But even now with AI and stuff, the risk of just letting something else come up with the answers for you. I think it's it's important that we project

Brad Tompkins:40:17
Right.

Carl H:40:26
those opportunities for people to grow because that's how this continues to s to sustain itself. So well

Brad Tompkins:40:33
yeah. Absolutely. Be uncomfortable. Really. Be drive yourself to be an uncomfortable. Because the only way you grow is to be uncomfortable. If if if it's the mind, if it's the body, anything. And that's where reward comes from ultimately, right? And fulfillment in life overall. Anyway. Yeah.

Carl H:40:38
Yeah.

Carl H:40:55
Awesome. Thank you so much, Brad, for coming on the show today, talking about automation solutions and investing both in the economics of industry, but also the economics of people. And we really appreciate all of your input today here on what's in the made in the USA. Have a great day.

Brad Tompkins:41:15
Hey, thank you. See, Carl.

Carl H:41:18
Okay.