The Manufacturing Automation Podcast

Michael and Matt talk about company philosophies and operating systems, industrial marketing for automation B2B companies, how they structure their lives/work-life-balance, and much more.

The Manufacturing Automation Podcast is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 92 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts The Manufacturing Automation Podcast, a business show with 92 episodes published.

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  Episode #95

  350 Leads From a 10x10, Why Phone Calls Beat 3,000 Emails, and Raising Implementation Prices

  Sep 30, 20261h 3mS1

  One week after IMTS 2026, Michael breaks down what it actually cost to bring a Robodrill to Chicago: $40K to $50K before labor, from rigging and freight to hotels and ads. He shares how a 10x10 booth pulled in 350 leads, how 22 of 25 CoolantClears sold right off the floor, and how a geo-targeted Instagram ad reached a buyer in his hotel room who sent a colleague to the booth. Matt explains why moving his vacuum fixture product onto its own domain took it to the top spot for its main keywords, and how he built a Claude project that drafts technical customer emails with near-perfect accuracy. The two dig into hiring a senior salesperson, why Matt went senior-only and is open to hybrid candidates, the risk of a single point of failure in sales, and whether agencies or a dedicated growth manager overseeing freelancers get better results. On the marketing side, Michael shares what happened to Google performance after turning off Meta ads, why blended ROAS and MER may be the better metrics, and why he is betting on Bing ads for a 40 to 60-year-old buyer. He also admits that 30 phone calls drove more revenue than 3,000 emails. In operations, the two cover booth lead capture rules, kanban compliance ("technically solved but not culturally solved"), taking IntraLoad orders from existing customers to fund better unit economics, and why Gimbel is raising implementation pricing to bring average deals from around $30K to $35K to $40K. Plus Matt's team taking over weekly resource planning without him, and a friendly SOP showdown between OneDrive with Copilot and Notion with Claude.

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  Episode #94

  IMTS Recap, a Runaway Dog, and Why Easy AI Can Make You Less Productive

  Sep 23, 202656 minS1

  Michael joins fresh off six days at IMTS 2026 in Chicago, and Matt is running on four hours of sleep after his own label printing show in Rosemont. Michael breaks down what made this IMTS night and day compared to two years ago: a loaned FANUC Robodrill in a 10x10 booth, the last-minute bailment insurance scramble to get it there, and geo-targeted Instagram ads that pulled CNC machinists within a four-mile radius straight to the booth. CoolantClear 3 officially launched and is finally back in stock. Matt shares how his team scores and enriches trade show leads before they hit HubSpot, and why they make visitors wait so every conversation gets complete notes. The two compare proposal workflows (HTML versus PDF), talk through how to prioritize 100+ post-show proposals by buyer persona, and dig into ad fatigue, attribution blind spots, and what happened when Michael turned off $10K a month in Meta spend. Also covered: Matt's 22,000 sq ft facility addition and ClickUp go-live, Michael's hard lesson about letting one product's demand surge pull the whole business off balance, and an honest conversation about how AI can leave you with seven projects 80% done instead of one finished. Plus the story of Teddy's 19-hour escape through Chicago.

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  Episode #93

  Shopify Went Dark, Conquest Ads & the Blanket PO Conversation That Could Change Everything

  Sep 9, 20261h 10mS1

  Michael opens with one of his rougher weeks of the year. A silent Shopify bug — only visible to brand-new users in a completely cookie-free browser — killed e-commerce sales for six to seven days and took 80 hours to track down. Combined with ad fatigue on Meta, a 43-day deal close lag hitting turnkeys right now, and IMTS prep reshaping the entire booth layout at the last minute, it's been a week of everything converging at once. Matt's week is a different kind of pressure — two full-day site visits, contracts in multi-month red-line negotiations, and a sales bottleneck that's no longer a pipeline problem but a pure capacity one: his team is quoting more than ever in company history and still can't keep up. The sales and marketing section is one of the most tactical the show has had. Michael makes the case for conquest ad campaigns — buying competitor keywords, running direct AutoVise versus Air Vice comparisons, targeting CoolantClear against Rotoclear — and walks through how his Meta ads quietly poured all budget into one winning creative while 60% of his ad library never saw a single dollar spent. Matt admits he's never run a competitor keyword campaign and gets talked through why it's probably already happening to him. They go long on the AI content saturation problem — everyone's marketing is better than ever, nobody's converting because everyone else's is too — and why the only differentiator left is the content that's intentionally hard to make. Matt gets a LinkedIn posting mandate from his marketing team. Michael's multi-AI debugging workflow using Claude, Manus, and Groq in parallel is what finally cracked the Shopify bug. Engineering covers Develop's largest machine ever — 30-plus feet long, split for transport, loaded by forklift because it won't fit through a door in one piece — losing two full weeks to one supplier on large milled plates, and a new HMI architecture debuting at Lupe for the packaging market. Michael is finalizing IMTS demo assembly, filing provisional patents he can't discuss, and stashing 30 CoolantClear units in a hotel room to sell in ways that may or may not comply with show floor rules. The CI section closes with the most substantive supply chain conversation the show has had — Matt making the case for deep blanket POs with fewer, growth-minded vendors as a strategic relationship rather than a procurement tactic, and drawing the analogy to a building lease: nobody hesitates to sign a five-year lease on the space that generates their revenue, so why hesitate to commit to the product that does the same?

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  Episode #92

  Decision Authority Matrix, 30X Meta ROAS & "I'd Rather Lose It Today Than in 12 Months"

  Sep 2, 20261h 1mS1

  Matt opens with decision fatigue at a peak — seven hours of back-to-back meetings on Thursday, four reports on his desk, and a team that's been waiting for him to put authority in writing that he assumed they already had. The fix isn't more hierarchy — it's a decision authority matrix that makes explicit who can approve what, up to what dollar threshold, without Matt. Michael opens on his first full week with an EA and a quieter inbox, and lands on an uncomfortable insight: he'd been using email and EA-type tasks as a refuge from the harder, higher-stakes decisions he was avoiding. Both are figuring out what their jobs actually are now that the scaffolding is coming off. The sales and marketing section covers a lot of ground. Matt is watching machines his team bid on three to four years ago — machines that went to the low bidder — getting decommissioned in the corner, and customers spending 50 to 100% more to start over with Develop. Two competitors released marketing content this week copying the scoping theory Develop has been building for four years. He takes it as confirmation, not a threat. They go long on margin philosophy, risk scalers on new-to-world machine builds, when to strategically compress margin to enter a market, and why B2B conviction during the quiet years is the only way the flywheel eventually starts. Michael is running 20–30X return on Meta ads — until it drops off a cliff, every time — while Google holds steady at 10X without being touched. The CoolantClear price increase campaign was their most successful email campaign yet, and his marketing hire Nate's idea. Engineering covers Develop's five-robot Project 29 machine now in full build with all robots landed, the critical path getting squeezed by one supplier on large milled plates who will not be supplying again, and the IMTS booth being completely redesigned around a last-minute Fanuc RoboDrill that nobody wanted to say no to. Michael is finalizing the in-house CoolantClear 3 production supply chain, narrowing down a product launch priority order across four items, and filing a cluster of patents that are draining to read and worse to draft. The CI section closes with Matt running a full audit on all active CIs after realizing the board has grown beyond what the team can execute in parallel, and a pointed conversation about ClickUp, Gim Command, and what it actually costs to hire for a homegrown ERP that nobody else in the world has ever touched.

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  Episode #90

  Growth vs. Profitability, a RoboDrill in a 10x10 Booth & Fanuc Comes to You

  Aug 12, 20261h 1mS1

  Michael opens the week in what he calls profitability mode — except the tension is that pushing for profitability and pushing for growth are fundamentally opposed, and he's trying to do both at once. He's obsessing over conversion rate, rebuilding the checkout experience, adding CAD model GIFs to email sequences, and rearchitecting the entire customer journey — all while knowing what he really needs is an EA and a marketing person, and holding off on both because the business already has so many new people to onboard. Matt's week is the mirror image: the team is handing him fully prepped proposals without him asking, booking meetings he didn't know about, and sending follow-up emails from his Otter transcripts — and his new question is why he's still reviewing things that don't need him at all anymore. The sales and marketing conversation is a long one. They go deep on when to choose growth over profitability and commit fully to one instead of straddling both, the EA versus marketing hire dilemma, conversion rate measurement in B2B versus B2C, the danger of over-engineering proposals to the point of creating noise, and a seven-hour session where Matt's marketing hire went through all 236 of Develop's proposals to re-engineer the funnel from scratch. Fanuc reaches out unprompted after seeing Develop's Inland case study — they want to build a dedicated case study page with backlinks and offered a RoboDrill for IMTS. Michael, meanwhile, is squeezing a RoboDrill into a 10x10 booth and has accepted that the showrunners will probably yell at them. Engineering covers CoolantClear 3 going into full in-house production for the first time — no outside vendors, one assembly tech who turned out to be a machinist — and a new pneumatic collet chuck with built-in rotary union that's been visited and revisited six times and is finally looking sellable. The CI section closes with a Shopify and HubSpot unification that creates a single fulfillment source of truth for the assembly team, morning scrum getting messier in a good way, a cash bucket discipline conversation pulled from Ryan Deiss, and a pointed exchange about YPO versus EO for founder peer groups.

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