Customer GOES OFF on Me, Drives to My Shop to Confront Me

we're on the ground floor we have the opportunity of a lifetime we've already delivered parts to spec to this company and then all of a sudden i get a phone call from mr yarbrough some of you in the business know who i'm talking about right i'm not mentioning companies but you know who i'm talking about and he calls me up and he's like titan what the f and i'm like already on eggshells right because i know who's calling me and i run a company right i'm not used to people talking to me like that but at the same time i need to be careful because i don't understand the context of the conversation and i have employees that are dependent on the work that this company is giving us and they're presenting us with an opportunity to actually take our company to another level so i'm humbling myself and he's like what the f we have parts in our facility that we need right now and they do not meet spec and you're putting us behind schedule this is a problem and all of a sudden he's like you know what titan i'm jumping in my truck and driving the 10 hours to your company i will be there tomorrow morning click oh man i go out and i talk to my guys and i'm like i don't even know what parts these are like what is going on here like why would i be getting this call and we had delivered different parts right so i wasn't actually sure what exact parts we were even talking about right so i went to my inspection department went to quality control and i'm like what did we just deliver to this company i call my guys in and i'm like look like why am i getting this call okay we had these jobs they went out and the documentation says that they were perfect so why am i having this problem and we could not figure it out so all of a sudden my whole shop is put on notice this guy is coming to our shop in the morning and he's basically insinuated that he's taking all of his work out of our shop because we failed right i go home that night and i talk to my wife and i sleep on all night i'm just up right i go into my shop in the morning and as i pull into my shop there's a truck that i don't recognize and a gentleman in the truck sitting there at 6 00 am i pull up i parked i get out he gets out and it's mr yarbrough and i walk over and i shake his hand and he's not yelling but he like shakes my hand and he's like hello and he's very short he looks at the shop he walks in my door he looks at the granite he looks at the tile and it looks at everything and it's like titan can you show me around so i walk them through first place like always i walk them right through inspection my guys were starting at seven o'clock so they all hadn't arrived yet so i walk in turn on the lights boom boom boom i show them inspection boom right cmm all the equipment boom walk about in the shop turn on the lights shop is huge machine stacked walk all the way down the line and i started showing him the different parts in process the documentation i can tell his whole mannerism basically dropped like the guy who said what the uh like on the phone this wasn't the guy anymore this guy was actually analyzing my shop so we walk through the shop walk to the next building walk through the shop come back walked to the front i asked him to go into the conference room and he said wait a minute let's go to my truck so we go to the truck we pull out boxes of parts that we had delivered as soon as he took out the boxes and basically opened one and i saw the part i understood what we were dealing with right we had a crazy bore in one of these parts and as you go down all the way down there were like eight finishes on the bottom and i remember that we were struggling with those finishes and we made a contraption that basically went down with a compound to polish it but we didn't have a way to actually get down there to check the surface finish because our prophylometer only had a stroke of like this much right and because we were new to aerospace we just didn't have the experience right so so i didn't say anything yet but i i knew so we took the boxes we took them into inspection we opened them up we took the parts out we went back to my office we took the parts out and basically sat down my inspector came in my shop foreman came in a couple of my other leads came in mr yarbrough actually grabbed a hold of the part and then he took out some documentation and he took these photos out of the surface finish inside the boar and he explained to us that there were scratches on the eight finish that we had actually met the requirement but we had screwed up the finishes and the parts needed to be assembled the following day therefore the reason that he drove all the way over to our shop so in this instance my guys and me we're quiet we let him go through the paperwork and the documentation on the eight finish and basically showing that this is what you put down and therefore we trusted you to actually hit this surface finish and you compromised it not only did you compromise it but the diameter is actually undersized on 20 of the parts so we can't even get the mating part to actually fit into the part that you supplied i just kept quiet and i listened to him the guy who was angry on the phone saying what the f the guy who who drove all night probably thinking about how he was going to just lay into me right the guy who sat in my parking lot waiting for me to show up like like i understood that there was something of magnitude that was happening and therefore i was humble and i and i walked them through the shop and i had complete clarity and transparency with everything i explained all of it and then when we came in i was quiet and i allowed him to speak i allowed him to carry on my guys were quiet my team was quiet and as soon as he finished i apologized and i said as a leader of this company it is my responsibility and my fault that you actually have parts that are not to spec and that you had to drive all the way up here and here is exactly what happened we accepted the part and i understood that that was going to be difficult and i quoted it anyway thinking that we could figure it out but during the process we failed because we didn't have the right equipment and then while inspecting it we saw that it looked beautiful and it seemed incredibly smooth but we truly didn't know because we didn't have the right machines to test it we sent the parts in that's my fault that will never happen again ever i took complete ownership of it i explained what happened and then allowed him to speak he said you know what titan in building raucous and and going after such a grand vision we're doing something and everybody expects us to fail we have so much money on the line and we're dependent on our vendors to actually hit the specs that we call out so we all can be successful i saw how much work they were actually sending to you and i also knew that you were the only supplier in northern california for machining i didn't understand why they would give you this work and then you failed at it so i came here but after coming into your door i get chills man i get chills because like this is so real to me right after coming into your door and shaking your hand and seeing your quality department and seeing your machines and seeing your documentation and and seeing you right i can see that you're about excellence i can see that you're about fixing things i can see your humility let's work together and fix this i asked his suggestions he had some simple ideas to actually fix the parts the parts on the inside had been masked therefore we still had raw material so we created a game plan and we spent all day and all night fixing those parts as we were fixing the parts on one machine on a separate machine we designed and created another inspection tool that sat down a certain way at the bottom to ensure that the diameter was perfect we figured out the process together we worked through it the following day mr yarbrough took the parts back they met spec and the parts got assembled and went on to the rocket okay now as a manufacturer as a leader you know it was very important for me to take that ownership right take the leadership not pass it off on my guys not pass it off on inspection i'm the owner it has to write on my shoulders right so we accepted responsibility we humbled ourselves and talked through it we came up with a a new process that the customer approved of we stopped everything to take care of the customer and we fixed the parts they went back later he joked with me and was like man i saw this picture of you like with tattoos on the internet and you're in northern california i'm thinking who is this guy he's like making parts in his barn i came up to basically put a hole to the whole relationship but titan again when i came in i saw excellence this is the type of partnership that we need this is the type of vendor that we need to grow with right and from that point on he and i became great friends when the company would have complex parts that they couldn't hit and they didn't have a vendor he would go to the buyer and he would say give it to titan's team and each time i would humble myself and i would talk to him and i said we've never done this before but we did this this this and this right so this is how i see it how do you see it you know let's be partners here and work through the problem and we would put the time in we'd develop the parts we'd ship the parts the parts would go on rockets the rockets would go up i took incredible pride that we're making these aerospace parts and people would always and still do ask me how did you build that relationship you know and and you've heard me say like i sent letters right and i and i hustled to get the opportunity but truly the relationship really started when we screwed up badly right and he came to my shop but sometimes when you have the worst mistakes and you actually work through mistakes with the engineer and the company and together you fix things and you follow through with your word and you lift your workmanship and you still deliver the parts to solve the problem that is how relationships are built right that's how it's built you want to be a great vendor for your company solve their problems if they come to you with a problem and they say this is a problem and they even insinuate that it's your problem don't be defensive lay it on the table open up talk to them about the problem even if you don't get paid for that extra time how you handle that situation will reflect in the future and can change the entire course of your company's future

Channel: TITANS of CNC: Academy

Views: 77,671

Rating: 4.8448534 out of 5

Keywords: titans of cnc, cnc machine, academy, manufacturing, machining, tutorial, cad, cam, cnc, kennametal, nyc cnc, solidworks, mastercam, engineer, engineering, machinist, Haimer, blaserbuilt, Doosan, Doosan Machine Tools, mitutoyo, Tormach, Fanuc, Schunk, Solidworks, LNS, Blaser

Id: JibCpG_3jCU

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021