When to Quit Your Job with Area 419 Founder Jon Addis

hi folks when to quit your day job or rather talking about some of the things you should think about if you're pursuing starting up a machine shop or an entrepreneurial endeavor but you've got something else going on in your life that maybe gives you some stability or a sense of a career we offered our own insights i wanted to ask some folks that i look up to and i think have had really good experiences to share unvarnish what was their experience what's their opinion and maybe what's some advice so i'm sitting down today with john from area 419. if you haven't seen the shop tours that we've done it's an awesome story that we've been able to follow kind of along the way with their growth would you mind introducing yourself who area 419 is and maybe some of your backstory and you had a career you had a job but talk us through that i'm john addis with area 419 out of grand rapids ohio now delta ohio we are a premier builder of precision rifle accessories as well as precision rifles themselves we just recently moved into a new eighteen thousand square foot shop out of my backyard where we resided for uh four years now i attended the university of toledo for bachelors in mechanical engineering i worked at gainer mountain while i was going to school didn't really drive my love for firearms it was already there that was kind of why i worked there mostly to get the discounts on stuff after that i started working for a medical device company in bryan ohio called davlin they make uv phototherapy equipment okay i was a design engineer there did a lot of improvements on current machines and designing a new machine had a pretty good gig there this is your this is your first shot out of college yeah so i would say that was my first real job that was your first engineering job yep it's a big company if or fairly large uh 15 million a year something like that size company i was the only mechanical engineer oh wow there was an electrical engineer uh but small enough that at the time especially they've grown a lot since then but small enough at the time that i was the only engineer which was which was nice although i didn't get the some of the experience that comes with working in a bigger company that might have been good but so you're there you you graduate college you get this job you're working there for some period of time as an engineer good job and then you decide to start tinkering i was working there i worked there for four or five years i started out actually not as a engineer there started out as a traveling service technician traveling around the country just installing and repairing their machines and then moved into the engineering role and all the while area 419 the business existed mostly just to have an ffl so back then it was just the the more hobby side of things building five or ten rifles a year for buddies and maybe some unknown customers but no semblance of what it is today strictly a hobby at that point it wasn't until 2016 that it started to become more of a real business uh with the development of the hellfire break and realizing that it was going to be a popular product that was when the decision to jump ship from a day job security all that kind of stuff to where i would call the real start of area 409 as you know it today i do remember while i was trying to decide whether to quit my job thinking i make pretty good money i didn't make six figures but i made pretty good money as an engineer how on earth am i to pay the salary that i make now or anywhere even close to it to support a family and all that stuff and we didn't have kids at that point yet but it was on the horizon so so you're married married um own a house no kids at that point just the dog and uh it was hard to see even in the future how i would get back to that and i knew i would take a huge pay cut to start the business as a full-time job but i didn't know that it would have to happen in order for anything to grow so i don't know that i probably could have gone and i see other people that are were probably in my shoes and stuck it out longer than i did um but i wouldn't change that i probably jumped in earlier than i actually needed to okay but it kind of goes along with buying machines if if you're buying a machine because you need it it's too late almost same thing goes for for quitting your job because so much of your time needs to be dedicated to to growing the business that if you're working eight hours a day and you're just doing this at night on the weekends there's just not enough hours especially if you have a family where you're having to balance that whole life so when i quit my job it was at first i didn't really know what i was going to do all day because there wasn't enough to keep me busy but that allowed me to find things to do to fill my time which was design new products all those things so that's probably the best advice i can give is don't don't quit your job too early because you need to be able to support it financially if the business isn't self-supporting yet but if you wait too long you're really going to hinder yourself it's that it's that unspoken opportunity cost of not letting yourself do what you plan on being good at right developing products yeah can we drive into the details of that what so what year would this this have been when you like when you issued the first po for muzzle brakes for the hellfire late 2016. okay so you had your your barn you had some manual equipment had you bought the tm was it the tm-22p so you owned a hoss machine was it important that you were employed to get the financing for that machine i think so yeah i bought that machine almost as a a hobby because i wanted to learn about cnc machining so it was purchased solely with the idea of doing barrel floating because at the time all i was doing was rifle builds okay so i wanted to do my own barrel fluting not because i knew it would save me money because no way would it have saved me money i didn't do that much i just wanted to learn how to do it and i knew i could afford it with the job that i had so i didn't have the machine didn't have to pay for itself right um that was important um where if i would have bought that machine without a job and it had to support itself it would have been a lot more stressful are you a numbers guy like do you look at like hey i gotta sell this many hellfires i got to do this many barrels and my wife's down my throat about how are we going to make ends meet is that your approach maybe i used to be um and not necessarily down to the details of that i just knew it was always just we need to sell more okay there wasn't a target in mind necessarily it was just i don't know i think there was enjoyment on my side and i think craig's side as well um just how far can we push this it's exciting to watch something grow especially on on social media now and they really throttle us back and it's it's annoying as the company that we are but back in that day it was exciting to watch it grow you could just see the development it's more organic you're not right publishing magazine ads and waiting for it to come back it's somebody buy something they talk about it on facebook and more people buy it and it's just this compounding of um word of mouth advertising so it feels like the right way to do it which is again we could go down a different rabbit hole of the algorithms and industry concerns but um that's a feeling i can't begin to convey as an entrepreneur is when somebody's willing to exchange their money for your product and then do that numerous times a week or a day and just continue it's just you can feed off that energy yeah yeah and it's not the money side of it at all it's not that oh i'm making more money now that's great it's it's that i'm selling more product right people are appreciating the product for what it is they're buying it over another product because it's better right that's like you said it's contagious and it's it's exciting so so you had issued a po to an other machine shop though and that was why you still had your job correct okay yeah probably two purchase orders to a local machine shop while i was still working okay at my job so to be annoying with the benefit of hindsight should you have bought a lathe sooner and not done that or do you like that idea no i wouldn't change anything there i wouldn't i probably would have been hamstring by it i would have tried to keep up and not been able to and thus not had product in stock got it where this machine shop had a ton of capability or capacity i should say right so at that time no matter how many i ordered they could keep up later in the game we even grew beyond their capacity to where we're selling more than they can produce in a timely manner so which is why the decision to bring those in-house finally now that we have the space and the resources to do so i think there's two awesome takeaways from that number one is uh we've heard from folks that say well if i if i outsource it it costs me too much money i think that really begs the question of well then are do you have an adequate margin in this product to justify what it's worth in the industry place and what it's worth for you to go pursue this the second is it's okay to let other people help you out it doesn't have to be long term yeah especially when you're developing the product in its infancy um it might not make sense yeah you can make another 10 20 points a margin but if you can't keep up with it or if it slows you down from doing other things just let somebody else make it take a hit on that margin for a while it'll help you grow because you give them a drawing and you forget about it and then you just issue pos so it's definitely fun to make things in-house and do everything yourself but you don't always have to do everything especially right away do you think you had a solid uh advantage because your engineering background meant you could actually do a properly dimensioned drawing and thus work with a shop maybe a little better than somebody who's new to manufacturing new to engineering new to machining etc yeah i would say so i think the the design side of things having and i i was new when i started that job i was new to autodesk inventor okay i'd never used it before i'd really never used any kind of 3d drawing because when i was going through college that kind of stuff was still somewhat new really and they didn't teach it all that well what year did you graduate college well in 2010 i don't want to say it was new but okay i don't remember what the software was that we even learned on but um it was more 2d stuff just interesting um autodesk autocad yeah sure so that seems like i mean autocad has its point but i just think it seems like an integrated dinosaur for example the modern manufacturing world of solid modeling yeah so having that knowledge of 3d modeling was definitely a benefit and being able to give them a model not just a drawing that they could work off of that was a benefit that that machine shop worked that way some machine shops you try to give them a 3d model and they say what's this i can't even open it right so but giving them a dimension drawing for qc purposes yeah it was it was an advantage to knowing how to do that ahead of time did you know this shop or as a no man how did you convince them to take a p.o this is actually kind of a funny story so when i was looking for that tm-2p this machine shop was actually selling a i think it was a tm1 on ebay and i saw that it was the location was a town close to me so i called him up and asked him if i could come look at the machine and they gave me a tour of the shop and uh we just got to talking about the the hellfire and they said oh yeah we can make those no problem so i think that was when i went home and started getting together drawings and sent them a rfq and so definitely kind of interesting how i found out about them because i didn't know of any real machine shops at the time because i hadn't done things like that before so it would have been a struggle maybe to find somebody had that not just kind of naturally happened i love it too because sometimes the key in life when you're working with somebody or not negotiating per se but let them come up with the idea meaning yeah you go meet them to look at a machine and they're saying well we take a look at making that part for you and all of a sudden it's their idea instead of you just lobbing out rfqs yeah which you know that's what drop shots do but there's always a different feel behind how you yeah approach those yeah and it's good to have i think sometimes on the engineering side of things you might over tolerance stuff no which um really really hurts you sure and it's something that i didn't i didn't even know at the time that like obviously i want to put as tight of tolerances out of this thing as i possibly can but if you don't need it don't do it because it's going to cost you money and they were forthcoming enough to tell me that instead of just saying oh we're going to charge you a bunch more money for these so they would kind of work through that with me and that was really helpful yeah that's great getting some real work experience under your belt of bringing a i don't think i wouldn't call the hellfire simple product but certainly not dozens of mechanical assemblies that interface with each other where you like the zero press it's beautiful but i can't even imagine how many things have to be right on that to work yeah got it the fun thing about john is there's actually like a rumor around here or kind of a joke that john continues to quit his day job and you can talk more about that but i think it's probably like the best thing about being a good entrepreneur is that willingness to recognize what you do do it well build processes build systems and then hand it off yeah exactly and that's like i've said at other times it's a lot of the key to our growth is uh there's this hard cap of how much one person can do um and you're just not gonna make it past that so you have to be able to give up control so the first thing i'd say i quit was making my own website which i made on geocities and uh oh that's awesome yeah and uh so i handed off that control to craig and then that relationship grew and he worked on the side and then came in full house full time um and then from there was the the cnc machining i was doing the design the programming the prototyping and then all the way down to i was changing parts as we were making them and i realized this isn't where my my time is best spent so i hired justin to start changing parts and he then quit that job to take on more important things in the company and like you said it just keeps happening and then i never in a million years would have thought that i would hire another mechanical engineer because that's that's my ball game i don't want to give up that control but here we are six months ago we hired a full-time mechanical engineer to support me and my daily tasks and just take that workload off so i guess uh you can't be afraid to give up some control it's it's hard and you're not going to want to give it all up and you don't have to but you definitely need to give up enough that people can help you if you want to be able to grow and be successful do you mean it's your company do you you're the leader do you come to these realizations to quit another job on your own or do you have people that push you or challenge you to think about this stuff i think early on yeah i kind of made the decision on my own that it had to happen but now i've got people telling me what we might need because maybe i don't see everything that goes on day to day like i used to i used to sit in the the office where all the shipping was done that was my office so it was annoying but it was also good at the same time that all this was going on around me i saw everything happening i don't see that stuff anymore so if we need to hire another assembly person i would have no idea right so i rely on other people to make those decisions and um more operators we rely on our our higher end or uh justin your operations guy yeah they they have the pulse for what we need as far as uh more employees there than i do um so yeah does anybody ever say to you john you got to stop doing this like you got does anybody have to save you from yourself or are you pretty comfortable recognizing when it's time to say nope we need we need some help here i think there's probably a combination um people telling me that i don't need to be doing that but i'm still going to do it i'm still out in the shop modifying stuff that i really shouldn't be doing but you're not going to get away from that and there's there's enjoyment in that so you don't want to lose touch of everything to where all you're doing is running the business right i don't ever want to get to that point it's not about the money it's not about yeah i don't want to just own this company and not come in and do things and just collect the paycheck i want to i enjoy seeing it grow and doing all the things that i did early on still i just do maybe less of them so i can do other things that are more important we'll play with all the new toys yeah okay so let's wrap up with sort of the question which is why you ultimately made that decision to go to your boss or your employer and say hey i really enjoyed it but i'm moving on you know your family your wife your parents whomever the close loved ones around you was it support good to go do they believe in you was it still a lot of anxiety was it nervous that day to quit i think by the time the decision was made i think it was in full support from from everybody around me so that made it easier i didn't really have anybody fighting me on it but it was just stressful leading up today even up to the day of having to tell the owner of the company that i was working at that i was leaving because he was a great boss treated me well treated all the employees well so i didn't want to hurt his feelings right all that stuff but when it came down to it sat down with him and talked about it and he was in full support and said he'd do whatever he needed to do to help me through that path so wow so you told him about what you had been doing yeah okay yeah and had we been in a competing industry that probably would have been a different different story but um yeah it was great to have even the support of the the guy i was quitting a job at yeah that's huge that's great and even justin my director of operations worked with me at that company and i stole him from them there wasn't even animosity at that point wow they fully supported the decision to that justin was going to be required to help me grow so that was definitely helpful and i can see that being a sticking point for it's not always going to be like that right but right you don't necessarily need their support it's good to have but don't let that stop you from doing what really needs to be done when i was taking an entrepreneurship class in college one of our tasks we had to go interview an entrepreneur and you know you're in college you're trying to learn as much as you can but i think as you and i have talked about a lot sometimes advice is very contextual but i vividly remember having lunch with this guy and his advice was you need to go work for somebody and you know when you're in college and you're gung-ho and you're thinking hey we're going to go invent this product and we're just going to crush it we're never going to have a day job and that advice didn't mean to me what it then what it does now which is how much you can learn from working for a good boss you you said something interesting though your your former employer took care of their employees that's certainly something we see here i got to think there's a correlation of lessons you learned and money you saved yeah helping get to here those are things that you just can't learn if you start day one as a on your own so i definitely value and at least work in a job for a while and as long as you can to support what you do i want to thank john and the whole team at area 419 for sharing uh their story otherwise folks i hope you learned something hope you enjoyed take care see you soon you

Channel: NYC CNC

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Keywords: tormach, fusion 360, how to, cnc, machine shop, nyc cnc, DIY, machining, milling, CAD, cnc machining, cnc milling, learn cnc, john saunders, manufacturing entrepreneurship, provencut, chip rag, CAM toolpaths, workholding techniques, fixturing

Id: ejpfUidHOIg

Length: 22min 5sec (1325 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 11 2021