Winn Hardin: [00:00:07] Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Manufacturing Matters. I’m Winn Hardin with Tech B2B, managing director, and we’re putting we’re here at the A3 Business Forum today, and I happen to be with Gary Miller, the founder and owner of Miller Resource Group, who’s been a key A3 partner for a number of years and one of the best recruiting businesses that I know in the industrial automation, food automation, and other space. How are you doing, Gary?

Gary Miller: [00:00:29] I’m doing great. Thank you for that introduction and kind words.

Winn Hardin: [00:00:33] It’s my pleasure. Anybody who knows Gary always remembers Gary. He’s got a great team. So you probably might know Mike “Sully” Sullivan and some of his other people who are floating around here this week. So before we get in and talk a little bit about MRG, one of the things that I just wanted to say, what we’re going to talk about today, and it’s one of my most interesting topics for me because we’re in the business of helping companies and other industries to adapt to labor gaps, especially in the manufacturing space. And you’ve got your finger on the pulse of hiring both from an employer and an employee perspective. In some of our key markets. So I’m looking really forward to hearing more about that, but before we dive into that, give us the quick rundown. What’s the elevator speech on MRG and the areas that you cover, which I know, again, are not just limited to industrial automation.

Gary Miller: [00:01:21] Okay. Well I started in 1977, and quite by accident I was assigned to place and recruit salespeople in the electrical and electronics industry. So if a company called in and they were in that field, that came to me. Well a company called up in 1978 and said, “We need to hire a sales engineer to sell a programmable controller. It’s a new device on the factory floor that will replace relays.” Well, if it’s a new device and it’s exciting, I kind of bought into it. Turned out I helped that company hire dozens of people over the next few years. That company was Modicon, and they basically helped establish PLCs as a juggernaut industry and a key element of automating factories globally. From there, we got to learn all about all of the other areas of automation — the software, the sensors, the robots, the vision — and became experts in all those little niches. And we kept growing our team based on relationships and people moving from one company to another and moving higher up the hierarchy. So our clients just grew. So we worked in many other markets, but our primary markets now are automation and food manufacturing. We found food manufacturing is steady. People have to eat. May not be as exciting as the internet bubble of 2000, but food is steady. There’s lots of innovation there. And so we’re just excited about and we also know the labor shortage, etc., the gap, it’s pretty serious stuff. We have to automate or we will not be able to feed the planet.

Winn Hardin: [00:03:12] You know, it’s interesting because I was just catching a little bit of Bolio’s presentation this morning, and he was saying that food is going to just trend down slightly right now in the United States. And Canada was a little bit behind that. But it’s really irrelevant when you’ve got so many open positions in food processing and development right now.

Gary Miller: [00:03:29] Sure. And he commented on slowing growth. But if the food industry is several trillion dollars and it declines by a fraction, that’s still several trillion dollars of output.

Winn Hardin: [00:03:44] Do you have any idea how many people are employed in North America?

Gary Miller: [00:03:47] I should know that number, but I don’t offhand.

Winn Hardin: [00:03:50] I’m going to guess it’s probably in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

Gary Miller: [00:03:52] Oh for sure, for sure. We’ve got 10,000 food companies in our database. And you know, we were talking about food. I mean, I think if Maslow were alive today, he would say it’s food, shelter, clothing, and talent is what people need. It’s how are you going to grow your enterprise without talented people?

Winn Hardin: [00:04:14] Human assets are definitely the most important. That’s something every company is struggling with, including ourselves. So was Miller Resource created in ’77–’78 time frame, or when did the corporation officially become . . .

Gary Miller: [00:04:27] Actually, I was not the founder. The company was founded in 1970 by a gentleman, Don Tobin. His father was the founder and general manager of the Chicago Blackhawks. So some legacy there. Good, good folklore. But he hired me right out of college just because he liked me and gave me a one-week tryout. But several years later, and I took to the industry and enjoyed it. Performed well. And a few years later, they made me the manager. And then he was not in great health. And in 1984 he asked me if I wanted to buy the company. So I was 29 years old. And so I didn’t have this vision of building a great company. It’s just like, Friday I was a salesman. Monday I was a business owner.

Winn Hardin: [00:05:18] That was a steep cliff i bet you were looking over the edge at.

Gary Miller: [00:05:20] Yeah, we had our second child that week too, so it was an interesting time.

Winn Hardin: [00:05:25] Wow. And you’re here with your son Travis, I think you’re stepping into a leading role in the company.

Gary Miller: [00:05:30] Definitely my succession plan is in place. He’s been with us 13 years and is the president of the company. He’s the face of our company going forward. And we’re excited about that growth.

Winn Hardin: [00:05:44] I can tell anyone who wants to go out there and meet Gary, sees him at a conference or just around and looking for advice on either how to find job or hire folks, beware taking him out on the golf course, and you know, you might want to keep the wallet back in the car. Just going to leave it at there, especially if you’ve got more time to practice.

Gary Miller: [00:06:00] There’s no gambling here at Bushwood.

Winn Hardin: [00:06:05] All right. So in industrial automation, what kind of insights? What’s the two or three takeaways about what’s happening? What’s trending right now in our labor market?

Gary Miller: [00:06:14] Well, it’s hard to utter a sentence about automation without the word “robot” in it somewhere. Robots are everywhere. They’re pervasive, they’re growing. There’s big ones. There’s small ones. There’s what they’re integrating with. Somebody told me that they were going to rename Pack Expo and call it Palletizing Expo because every booth had some palletizing application. But you know, anything having anything to do with manufacturing and moving goods from here to there. You think about grocery stores and 7-Elevens and even convenience stores, and you think about the magic of how every item is stocked and populated everywhere in the world, everywhere in America. There’s Ruffles and there’s beef jerky and there’s soda pop and there’s whatever it is, it’s in inventory. And automation is making that happen. Software is helping with the writing. People are developing that technology. So you know, it’s just pervasive at the beginning of the line in production, not only just in factory automation but in process automation too, the making of stuff: food, beverage, chemicals, raw materials, dry goods, bulk goods. Once stuff is made and it gets put into a container, it becomes a thing. And now it’s discrete manufacturing and counting, and can of beer. The liquid goes into the can of beer. Can of beer goes into the six-pack into the 12-pack into the case under the pallet, onto the truck, on to the store. And automation is impacting every step of that way.

Winn Hardin: [00:08:06] So one of the reoccurring themes in a lot of the recent shows that we’ve been doing is automation technology guys trying to simplify their systems, which everybody needs to do. And the point being is so that you don’t have to have a robotic engineer to set up a new work cell. I mean in many cases a lot of these new solutions don’t need engineering talent at all. And the other thing in industrial automation, we’ve taken a lot of engineers and made them salespeople. Because it was a technical sell, and you needed that knowledge. Are we starting to see any other shifts where you don’t have to have the four plus two – you know, be an EE to really have a place in this market? Are we seeing more opportunity for technicians, vocational, CAD folks, for example, who may not have four-year degrees? Are you guys seeing anything like that?

Gary Miller: [00:08:53] It just reminds me of a story back from the early ’80s, when petroleum engineers were in crazy demand. And there was a story of a manager at DuPont or something like that. Went home at lunch to have his pool serviced and hired the pool service guy as a technician and brought him into the chemical processing industry because he had just some basic understanding of mixing chemicals. I mean, who’s to say you couldn’t take an auto mechanic and turn him into a robot technician or things like that?

Winn Hardin: [00:09:28] Or take a welder and put him in charge of a whole bunch of welding cells.

Gary Miller: [00:09:31] But I also think that somebody without technical training could learn how to sell and be reasonably effective at finding opportunities, building relationships, qualifying, doing basic qualifying of an order, making sure the engineers are used on applications where it’s more probable. If a company calls up from Alberta, Canada, and says, I would like you to send one of your engineers up here because we want to automate our plant, and then they get up there and there’s nothing there, it’d be a huge waste of time. Well, a good salesperson could . . .

Winn Hardin: [00:10:11] Especially if they’d worked in that space before, because they’re able to directly connect with those people, know the application. They might not be able to design something for an enterprise per se, but they can certainly do a lot of that groundwork. And like you said, be a force multiplier for that engineer and that company who’s leveraging that engineered solution.

Gary Miller: [00:10:29] But we go to many other conferences, and every conference it’s the same problem: it’s where are we going to get people interested in in manufacturing in general? And somebody told me the other day, a millennial, typical millennial or Gen Z or Gen whatever, new people: “Manufacturing is something that’s dirty, dangerous, and my grandfather used to do.” That’s their exposure to manufacturing. So the continuous introduction of exposure of even the video that was shown, if more people could see that at a young age . . .

Winn Hardin: [00:11:10] It is a cultural thing, and even in boring companies, traditional machine shops and things like that, there’s a lot of studies that show that as they adopt technology, it’s easier to bring in young people into that organization. Plus it gives a career path for folks who may want to just be a welder at this point but still someday have dreams of having something a little bit more.

Gary Miller: [00:11:32] Our office is next to North Central College in Naperville, and I’m trying to get an audience with the professor of engineering and speak to his classes and just talk to him, and we can also give general lectures about how to position yourself to get a great job and negotiate, interview well, etc., and “Oh, by the way, manufacturing is really a cool sector.” So even a few years ago I went to my old high school and I brought a bus full of students to Automate when it was in Chicago, just to get them exposed. And if people ever want to get rid of their swag on the last day, we’ll bring a busload of high school kids. They were loading up, their bags were full with every little toy they could get because the exhibitors didn’t want to take it home. So that was fun.

Winn Hardin: [00:12:22] I know this year they’re going to do a bunch with Automate too. We were hoping to be able to get with those kids and video something. We’ve got that one squared away.

Gary Miller: [00:12:29] That’s a crazy idea in light of what the speaker said last night about crazy ideas, if we could get all Chicago manufacturers to each sponsor a busload of high school kids and drag them around the show, you could have hundreds and hundreds of high school kids saying, “Wow, that’s cool. I’d like to get into that.”

Winn Hardin: [00:12:47] Absolutely, absolutely. That’s an excellent point. Listen, I know we’ve only got a couple of minutes. So, briefly, your business helps both employers and employees. You can help employers with cultural development. That’s going to help them attract the talent. You can help the other individuals for positioning themselves based on whatever their career goals are. But the last question is top line. Are we continuing to see a massive dearth of available application engineers, qualified EEs, mechanical engineers for our space? I mean, are these people finally getting staffed where they need to be or is the demand still . . .

Gary Miller: [00:13:23] No, because it’s a finite number of people that know enough to contribute today. And that finite number of people, we can’t all pick from the same pool. There’s just not enough. And that’s what drives up the wages and whatnot. But really where we help our clients is we help them tell the story about why their opportunity is a good, a better-than-average place to work and consider. And that’s how we differentiate ourselves, because most of these companies are small. Their name is not familiar to people. And we help them get the word out about why working there is a good deal, giving them better chances of attracting top talent.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:04] Especially in a tight, highly competitive labor market.

Gary Miller: [00:14:06] Yeah, it’s tough out there.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:07] All right. And well, as we talked about so briefly with the kids coming in, the long-term secret to our success is going to be spreading the word. And perhaps in conjunction with educational institutions, at least we’ve seen more robotics, not so many machine vision although there’s more of them, course lines and everything in universities, as well as some of the smaller community colleges. It would be great to, maybe in a future episode we can go into that a little bit more and talk about those feeder systems.

Gary Miller: [00:14:36] Well here’s a plug for my friend Jake Hall, who is dedicating his career to helping get the word out to grade schools and high schools and community colleges about what a great place automation is to have a career.

Winn Hardin: [00:14:47] Jake Hall, Manufacturing Millennial, for those of you who don’t know, he’s a good friend of this show, and we wish him all the best. Gary, thank you so much for joining us today, brother. All right. I hope you’re having a great time here in Florida. And a safe trip back to the frozen North when you go that way.

Gary Miller: [00:15:03] Well, the grandkids are coming down. We’re hanging around Disney for a few days. What a great combo.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:09] That’s fantastic. All right, so the website is millerresource.com.  If you want to get some more information about how to work with Gary and his team, I’d encourage you to check that out. If you’ve got any questions or want to be in a future Manufacturing Matters episode, please go to Manufacturing-Matters.com and you can find our podcast on every major platform. Until the next time, thanks for joining us today, Gary, I’ll see you soon.

Gary Miller: [00:15:33] All right. Take care.

Winn Hardin: [00:15:34] So long everybody.