Transcript
Bill Murphy: Well, I think that the key right there is I have to say, in the last 18 months, we've probably been to twelve or more trade shows and conferences, and 50% or more of every lead we've gotten is for employee development or training. So that's where one of our big focus is at the present time.
Phil Shoemaker: But that is such a moving target. This is really painful for me because we've tried a number of different things with varying levels of success. Mainly failure.
Tom McCall: A lot of failures.
Phil Shoemaker: Yeah. Well, the problem is it's hard to everybody agrees that you need training. You've got this new workforce. Old guys like me are leaving the workforce, and new guys need to come in and take their place. That's clear somehow or the other. You have to transfer that knowledge, though, and that normally comes down to something called training. Well, okay, where are you going to go to get it? And there's been this interesting inversion of our training classes. Back in the 2000s, you could offer a class in basic injection molding or basic extrusion and would fill up. Now, all the plants have their own training classes in the plant. So their star extrusion guy might be the guy who leads the training classes. You no longer need an elementary class in extrusion, but their star training guy loves to come in and see a class on twin sprue extrusion technology. That class always fills up. So we've changed the model initially from a basic kind of class to a more advanced class. However, only a few of those classes have really struck a chord, really resonated within the industry. And I think part of that is people don't know about. So I know you guys are not extrusion or injection experts, but when you think about how you make a compound, you put stuff into an extruder, it mixes it all up and disperses it, and it spits it out into a little Pellets. Well, those steps putting stuff into the extruder, the extruder itself, and then pelletizing it, which what Tom does all day, every day, those three steps are really complicated, and they can drive you absolutely out of your mind. So Bill and I put our heads together, and we said, I know we'll do classes on how you put the stuff into the extruder with these things called feeders. Nobody signed up.
Bill Murphy: Thought it was a great idea.
Phil Shoemaker: Yeah, and I think it's still a good idea. You got to get the word out, though, and that's where we're failing. We did a Pelletizing.
Doug D. Simone: Class.
Phil Shoemaker: Now, that turned out really well because everybody hates Pelletizers. They're the most problematic piece of equipment.
Doug D. Simone: On an extrusion line.
Phil Shoemaker: They're forever breaking down. They're a bit delicate, and if you drop something in them, it completely destroys them. So people have learned that they really need to know more about them. That class filled up, but we also had a lot of marketing help. We did. So, to answer your question, training is not a simple subject to talk about, okay? It's it's one of our biggest headaches but I also think it's one of our biggest opportunities. We're struggling with it right now.
Jourdyn: All right, so second segment especially curated for you guys, just for you. It's called down to a Science because I know not a lot of listeners may understand what polymers exactly are. So basically, we're going to explain what it is. We're going to define what it is. We're going to see how this science benefits your company and how it can benefit some of your potential consumers. First question. Can someone define a polymer? Because I'm very confused.
Garrett Shimmer: It looks at me, I guess. Polymer is just a repeating unit of what's called a basic unit called a monomer. So monomer is just a clearly defined chemical structure that has a defined start and finish point, and a polymer just repeats that end to end, over and over again. And you don't know how long that chain is unless you do any kind of analytical experimentation on it.
Jourdyn: So it's like chemistry.
Tom McCall: Think of a polymer like a strand.
Garrett Shimmer: Of pasta, and if you cut the pasta down to an infinitesly thin slice, that's your monomer. And now you grown that polymer to the size of that pasta strand. And that's kind of like a basic model that you hear about, like in grade school or undergraduate science, like a basic model. And with polymers, you can have two different domains. You can have a crystalline domain where there's a unique unit cell structure where there's like a defined shape for that crystal. And then you have an amorphous type.
Doug D. Simone: Structure where the pasta strands are just.
Garrett Shimmer: Randomly distributed, convoluted, tangled up together. Think of like, curly hair like this. It's just everywhere, all knotted up.
Phil Shoemaker: It's not really defined.
Tom McCall: Now, if you have an amorphous mouth structure so just to jump on what he says, we talk about polymers. That's an amorphous polymer. You can see through it you wouldn't.
Doug D. Simone: Be able to see through the other day.
Tom McCall: And what's unique about Pet is it can be both amorphous and semicrystalline. So if you extrude this and melt it, it comes out clear if you cool it really quick in the morphe state. That's why you have a very bottle if you allow it to. If you don't cool it that quickly, will become opaque again in white.
Garrett Shimmer: Tom had a good example of that. So, like, Pet like a quiet link tripthalate. This is like a very common where you have both domains. Ideally, in most polymers, you're going to have both domains because there's no such thing as having like 100% pure crystal material. You'll have a crystal dominant or you'll have like, amorphous dominant. And whichever one is more dominant will be like a driving factor for a lot of physical properties, like stiffness or like a gas or liquid permeation or color haze, opacity. So the crystal structure, ultimately, there's this thing called the structure property relationship. And that's ultimately what drives a lot of the developmental work is you understand the structure, then you'll understand what the final output is that's coming out.
Jourdyn: That makes a lot of sense. I like the pasta analogy, thinly slice or something and being able to see like, that's a part of, like, a bigger chain. That was really good. Yeah, at first I was just like.
Doug D. Simone: Analogy coming up later. We use cake on our side.
Jourdyn: Oh, really?
Tom McCall: Use cake?
Bill Murphy: I use pasta.
Garrett Shimmer: See, I heart sponsor of Tony's Pizza University area.
Doug D. Simone: Shout out to Tony's pizza was sponsored by Tony's Pizza.
Phil Shoemaker: I wore their shirt. Does that matter?
Doug D. Simone: Oh, I guess not. Never mind. I want to tell Justin.
Garrett Shimmer: I'm going to get a picture.
Jourdyn: Next question. So what does a polymer engineer do?
Tom McCall: A polymer engineer? I guess that's me.
Garrett Shimmer: That's multifaceted, though, because you can kind of go both ways between the extrusion side and the testing side.
Tom McCall: But you're trying to improve the properties of a material, whether it's the strength, the elongation, the impact. But you're trying to add materials, whether they're additives, strengthening a glass. You may have to put modifiers into the bomber to to make the additives become more I'm not trying to say see, now we got to cut this.
Doug D. Simone: Sorry.
Garrett Shimmer: You want to talk about increasing the performance of a specific property. So, like antioxidant and impact modified.
Tom McCall: You're trying to put the right properties in the plastic for the ultimate parts. And that's really what you're always trying to do. Even that's what compounding is about, putting the right properties into the polymer.
Doug D. Simone: You know, carpets changed over the years. All these stain protection, wear protection, well.
Jourdyn: Carpet'S, plastic things I learned, part five.
Phil Shoemaker: Of this episode.
Doug D. Simone: 20% of this room is plastic. Most of your clothes are plastic. Eyeglasses cases, well, carpet is plastic. So over time, people found additives put in for stain resist and odor resistant, and you build that into that plastic. So you take something that's neat and then you add additives to it, like a cake. You put in something. You put in something that makes it taste different, makes it do different things. It's the same type of thing is what an engineer is trying to do with plastic. He's trying to modify it and make it better for what you need. Fire retardants, antimicrobials. You put in things. Unless you're wearing cotton, we're all wearing plastic.
Tom McCall: It's got to perform whatever the final application is. But one of the most important properties of plastics is the cost, and you got to make it to where it's economically feasible. You can do a lot of things in the laboratory. You can solve a lot of problems. But if it's not if you're not connecting that it's too expensive. No one's going to buy.
Doug D. Simone: You can build a house that won't burn down and nobody can afford it. Right?
Garrett Shimmer: I mean, what Tom said was probably the key thing that defines, like, a polymer engineer versus a scientist is that it's all about making something that is economically viable. The scientist is the one that's designing either a new polymer or a new additive. And Tom is taking those formulas or derivatives of those formulas and making it to something that's actually going to work. I would say that's the biggest key difference between somebody who's a lab scientist or bench scientist versus an engineer on an R and D line or something like that.
Doug D. Simone: We've made some really great biodegradable bags that can degrade like in 45 days, just laying in the ground without being rotated or something. Great. But if they're a dollar a bag, grocery stores can't afford them, so it can get cost matters.
Jourdyn: That makes me think of, I don't know if you've seen this. This was like recent, like what, two, three years ago, where they had the plastic water bottles that basically dissolve after you compost them or something like that. I don't know. Would that be more of like a polymer engineers type of thing?
Tom McCall: So the polymer chemist, that's probably PLA, which is a corn based material, and it's compostable, and the polymer chemist came up with that polymer using corn instead of petroleum. Now the polymer engineer is going to have to make that material work for.
Doug D. Simone: A part.
Phil Shoemaker: Or they make tha, which is what she's describing. You can take a package like Fritos and you eat all the fritos. And since you're a liver bug, you throw it out on the floor of the forest, a PHA bag will completely disappear because the same bacteria or similar bacteria who made it will eat it. It will completely disappear.
Doug D. Simone: Wow.
Phil Shoemaker: But like Tom points out, there's a real big problem with that. It's incredibly expensive because to get it, you have to grow it with bacteria, harvest the bacteria or harvest the PHA.
Doug D. Simone: Out of the bacteria and make sure.
Phil Shoemaker: You don't contaminate your PHA source with bacteria bodies.
Bill Murphy: If we go to the grocery store and you see two bags of Cheetos, one of them is a dollar, the other one is $2, but the bag is biodegradable. You got to spend an extra dollar for that bag. Some people.
Phil Shoemaker: My wife would, she would.
Bill Murphy: She'S into recycling and biodegradable, but I think most people probably wouldn't.
Jourdyn: That's true.
Bill Murphy: There's a price point that they're not going to pay for recyclability or sustainability.
Phil Shoemaker: Which I can see that is in.
Jourdyn: Like Whole Foods or Airwind, where they have the biodegradable bags and stuff with certain things. I think that's probably the difference why they put certain products in certain stores.
Phil Shoemaker: As Euro and Doug were talking, he's talking about a completely biodegradable plastic, but then you can also modify it to either improve its physical properties or make it more biodegradable or more quickly biodegradable for less cost. Yeah, and then there's things that we're doing that have nothing to do with plastic, and it's completely about biodegradability.
Jourdyn: That actually leads into my next question. So what are the various types of polymers or other compounds that we interact with daily. I know you guys pointed out carpets, clothes. Clothes bags. Bags, water bottles. I don't know if there's anything the.
Garrett Shimmer: Parts in your car from the 90s up until now, every year the EPA tries to mandate fuel efficiency and to get that fuel efficiency rating for each car brand, they're having to lightweight the cars. So how to lightweight your cars? You straight away from metal and you start incorporating plastic materials, like your headliners, your dashboards, your door liners, your seats. All of those have some sort of most likely like some sort of vinyl compound, right, Tom?
Tom McCall: Yeah, I think there's a great commercial now where it's talking about that plastics were to disappear and everything around everybody just starts disappearing. Disappearing in your shoes. Like everything's going electric now. You got to have a lighter car so a lot of metal parts can replace with plastic. The thing that I think we're getting off on the tangent here, but it's a single use plastics that kits a bad rap. It's the water bottle, it's the bags. And that's where everything a lot of people are focused on how do we make that either compostable or recyclable? And right now, all these bottles are recyclable, but we're not doing a good.
Doug D. Simone: Job recycling.
Tom McCall: In medical. Plastics are essential in medical. Any surgeries you have the IV bags, the catheters. Plastics is not going away. But what we have to focus on is how do we eliminate or how do we do a better job recycling or how do we do a better job making things where they'll disappear in.
Doug D. Simone: The ocean, if they get in the ocean degree.
Tom McCall: And I don't remember what the question was now, and I got the thing.
Garrett Shimmer: I think it's plastics in your daily life.
Doug D. Simone: People don't think about it, but my whole left shoulder is plastic. The screws, the sewing in there, the clips, everything they use my hip in January. It's ceramic on one side, plastic on the other. And people just but you don't want that sterile. I want that to last 20 hours. I want it.
Phil Shoemaker: If you look at the volume use, as Doug pointed out, it's carpet. If you look at your house, the floor coverings, the wall coverings, all plastic pipes, water, the insulation on your electrical lines, all those pieces are plastic. And so increasingly what you've seen is a move away from wood, metal, and glass to plastic. It's the first completely new family of materials in about 10,000 years. So, yeah, of course, when you finally come up with that, if they were invented today, if they hadn't existed earlier, they'd be considered a green material because they've replaced so many materials at so much lower a cost and at so much lower cost to the environment than the alternatives. It's just really annoying when you're driving down the road and somebody's tossing water bottles out. There's a plastic bag stuck in a tree or the ocean is filling up. And that's not the plastic that's we're not putting where it belongs.
Doug D. Simone: You got to look at the cost versus we made everything disposable, too. Your vacuum cleaner breaks, what do you do? You don't call Hoover for repair. You throw it away. It's $179. Microwaves used to be two grand. Now they're $99. Most of it's plastic, so it's only going to last so long. But we have to find ways to recycle, reuse redo that. But then you got to separate the guts and what's in it. That's a whole nother avenue. But we've made everything disposable, too. Even these cars, when you get plastic parts, they're going to be easier just to throw away the fender. We're not going to putty and patch them anymore. We injection mold one for $25.
Tom McCall: I think the most shocking one to me was the clothes. No, honestly, I didn't know plastic was in the clothes.
Doug D. Simone: You know the old polyester suits?
Tom McCall: Well, polyester plastic. I'm a trader.
Garrett Shimmer: I'm wearing wool right now.
Doug D. Simone: Hate to say it, but wigs, most.
Phil Shoemaker: Of your wigs are all synthetic.
Doug D. Simone: Even though it feels like hair.
Phil Shoemaker: Those are the ones that turn green if you wash them too much.
Tom McCall: Really makes you look like the synthetic.
Garrett Shimmer: I think a lot of hair is PVC based.
Phil Shoemaker: Is it?
Tom McCall: We're working with a customer who's going to make it biodegradable.
Doug D. Simone: There you go. I wasn't sure what we could say.
Tom McCall: That's very cool, actually.
Doug D. Simone: The idea of what we have worked with. We could sit here hours of fun. We have. That's why I love going to work every day. When I tell my wife sometimes what I'm doing at work, she's like, really? Who would have bunk of that? And it's like you got guys with credit cards saying, I got an idea. Let's try something. Then you got engineers saying, I've been looking at this for the last seven years. I think I have something. It's a great just a great place to go every day. But we'll get into that later.
Jourdyn: If I was a scientist, I hope that's all I'd be making everything just because I could. Just because I could.
Bill Murphy: We got a lot of people like.
Doug D. Simone: That.
Jourdyn: Be like Jimmy Neutron.
Tom McCall: So they don't have the equipment to do it, so they come to us. We have equipment and
experience and the knowledge to be able to take their idea and make a pellet so they.
Doug D. Simone: Can make a part.
Tom McCall: There you go. Bring them your idea.
Jourdyn: I want to make Goddard from Jimmy Neutron with my own robot dog.
Tom McCall: We saw those.
Bill Murphy: We did.
Tom McCall: Wait, for real?
Phil Shoemaker: Yeah, we did.
Bill Murphy: It kept coming up to me, looking at me, and I'm freaking out because we just had this weird looking face.
Tom McCall: I'll show you the video.
Jourdyn: After that.
Bill Murphy: 18 year old kids were running them.
Phil Shoemaker: Yeah.
Jourdyn: Because now I'm going to be like, oh, my gosh. I like how all the questions are like leading on top of each other. The next one is what polymer processing does. Sensors start to receive more requests for.
Tom McCall: It biomaterials, we were just talking about it. Biodegradable compostable anything natural, renewable, recyclable. They're trying to get rid of the single use plastics where if it does end up in the ocean, it'll go away. Now the challenge with that is they don't process as easy as petroleum based or thermoplastics so there's different processing that we have to use, different screw designs.
Doug D. Simone: Different molds, different molds.
Tom McCall: But that's really it seems we're getting a lot of interest and a lot of work. Not just us, I mean nationwide, there's a lot of push for this.
Doug D. Simone: Part of the reason too, is if you're going to develop it, you want to be able to develop it on equipment that's already out there. Right. Doesn't do you any good to develop this great something and then have to spend $10 million on a piece of equipment to run it. So people are coming to us saying, can you still use your plastics equipment to process this? And we've been doing it for years now.
Tom McCall: And that's important to investors too, because they want to make sure that they can take the product and run it anywhere and run plastic.
Bill Murphy: And our equipment is industry standard, right? A lot of it's 2025 years old, the 25 year old Extruder will make a product just as good as a.
Doug D. Simone: Two year old Extruder.
Phil Shoemaker: Well, we have to admit that we end up modifying things, well, dramatically sometimes to get yeah, the 25 year old.
Doug D. Simone: One has more duct tape on it.
Tom McCall: Fixes off. But also with that, recycling is huge now because there's two ways to solve the problem. Either you make it disappear or you just keep using it over and over and they don't like each other. Recycling, doesn't like biodegradable material getting into the recycling stream. So we're seeing a lot of push recycling and every time you recycle it, you lose some property. So you have to come up with the additives that's going to keep the property. So you can make the same product every time. Same quality.
Doug D. Simone: Same quality.
Tom McCall: You can see now, I don't know if you've noticed that Coke is going to all clear bottles. You don't have a yellow bottle. And that's for recycling because that was one of the hardest things that you have. Green, yellow, different color. You're trying to make bottles. You can't do that. So that Coke has really pushed. I guess others will follow because again but I think until it's mandated, because again, sometimes it's more expensive from recycled material than it is prime material.
Doug D. Simone: It also goes the price of oil. Oil goes up, recycle becomes more valuable. Oil drops, recycle becomes less valuable
Tom McCall: So we're seeing a lot of customers come up recycle product and we're trying to make a final compound that they can reuse economically viable product. Because I. Think it's going to be mandates. I think everyone's putting to have at least 100% recycled in their product by I don't know what the 2025 or whatever, but recycling is also a big.
Bill Murphy: It'S here to stay.
Doug D. Simone: You've seen plastic decking, right? Decking boards. You've seen the plastic boards
Decks made out of composite. You've walked on composite boards all over the place.
Tom McCall: Yeah.
Doug D. Simone: So you cut a two by four and a half. How many ingredients are in there? Wooden water, basically, right. You cut one of those plastic decking boards in half, there could be 1015 ingredients, could be fillers, could be whatever, which is a good avenue using recycled material.
Bill Murphy: The majority of those are one gallon polyethylene milk jugs. Hundreds, thousands of them. They recycle them, grind them up, reextrude it, make those bowls. So instead of that milk jug going to the landfill, it's on your deck.
Doug D. Simone: Not that I'm advertising for Fair Harbor, but I bought some shorts and shirts from there last summer. Pair of shorts, 28 bottles. Shirt, twelve bottles. That's what they made them out of. That's interesting.
Jourdyn: Now whenever I look at clothes in the storm, like, I wonder how many bottles it took.Phil Shoemaker: I know.
Doug D. Simone: Yeah. So, I mean, that's what people are doing. Because when you melt, even though this is rough now, you melt it down, put it in a very fine, fine thread. It's soft as your hair.
Phil Shoemaker: Well, here in North Carolina, a company called Unify does exactly that. They take the old
scrap bottles, turn.
Tom McCall: It into fibers, and turn it into clothes.
Phil Shoemaker: And they made a big marketing effort to that effect, which obviously didn't penetrate too well, since you guys have any clue about it. But they're here in North Carolina, and that's what they do.
Bill Murphy: Great company, too.
Doug D. Simone: Well, that's what's fun. That's why people come to us, because you're going to have to put something else in it. What can I do? What can I put in it to help it soften up or fire retardant or make the colors or just whatever. And that's why they come to us, to get the start.
Tom McCall: I ain't curious about this clothes thing.
Jourdyn: Just trying to understand that.
Bill Murphy: Start looking at labels, you rarely see.
Doug D. Simone: Anything, but they wear great and acceptable.
Tom McCall: So like a typical, like, right now, like average bought, like you said, twelve bottles, 25 bottles.
Jourdyn: Sims probably weren't 200 bottles.
Tom McCall: I'm very curious.
Doug D. Simone: Like, I'm after about 45 bottles now. I don't need to do that. Glad we're not filming it.
Phil Shoemaker: It's radio, not TV.
Tom McCall: One day we will be filming.
Doug D. Simone: They tell you how many bottles you use to make a shirt or make shorts.
Tom McCall: That is really so fascinating. I like it. I think that's cool. I never knew that.
Jourdyn: I didn't know that either.
Doug D. Simone: One of the things I tell new customers, I say, you know, the worst thing about working here is they look at me, waiting for me to say, course, my boss Or My Drive. And usually I say, everybody, here is four week vacation. And they look at me and I'm like, that tells you how long everybody's been here. You're bouncing ideas off of a group of 16 people. That 70. 80% of them got four weeks vacation. So, a we're doing something good that they want to be here, and they like being here, and they're staying here. And what's great about that is we all interact together. If I'm helping a customer, it's eventually going to end up injection molding down to euro. So Euro has an interest in making sure that I'm helping him. He's helping me. Phil and Tom are making sure that everybody's working together as the groups are, just because it's trying to make sure that you're getting all the information you can from everybody. We have. Everybody that runs equipment out there knows products inside now. Equipment inside now. So if something comes up, it's not just yes or no. We can make changes. All the guys. Everybody thinks so much. They like what they do, and they like helping people develop. Because I tell everybody comes in. We do anything for a PO. But if we don't make you something, you're not making money. You're not coming back. You're not talking good about us, and we want to get you something. We want to help you keep going on the next step. It's. Just enjoy going to work. There's plenty of times if we have a customer come in for extrusion, they want to sit and talk. We go grab euro. We're going to take 15 minutes of your time and we're all going to sit A lot of the customers, they'll come in first trial with an idea, and then the second trial, they're like, hey, let's talk ahead of time. I want your ideas. We'll all sit together roundtable, talk about where they could go. Screw designs, machine changes. Maybe there's additives out there. Different additives they could try. And it's personal. What it really comes down to is it is personal. We create a relationship with most of our customers that they look forward to seeing you. I mean, God brought me four dozen cookies yesterday.
Phil Shoemaker: I tell you what. Well is not being exactly honest. What the customer said was he extorted Four Boxes Cookies. What he said to them was, if you come back, you got to bring me cookies.Tom McCall: Well, okay.
Jourdyn: Well, what kind of cookies?
Phil Shoemaker: Because all the best oreos and chips.
Jourdyn: Of wood you lost me. I'm Sorry. I have to bake my cookies. I don't like going to little packages.
I'm Sorry.
Tom McCall: Well, now, we do have people who do that.
Doug D. Simone: We have people make pies. I had an apple pie.
Phil Shoemaker: It was really good.
Doug D. Simone: Again, it sounds weird
Tim : Hello everybody and welcome to Surviving the Pride. I am your host.
Tim: Tim him.
Jourdyn: And I'm Jordan, and you might be.
Tim : Asking, what is Surviving the Pride? Well Jordan, I would tell you Surviving the Pride is all about marketing. Explaining all aspects of marketing to help a business grow, importance of having a website, SEO, social media. And we're also going to be talking about starting a business as well.
Jourdyn: Yeah, so in addition to that, we're also going to give you guys some helpful hints, tips and tricks about current and upcoming trends within whatever industry our guest business is from and give you guys a bit of general information. In regards to that, I just want.
Tim : To give a brief rundown on some of the segments that we have planned for him during this podcast. One of them is titled technically the Hot Seat. Usually within this segment we kind of just introduce the guests, we put them in the hot seat, asking them questions about customer experiences and how to deal with the branding that they have currently been doing with social media and if they have anything that else that they would like to describe or say about their business. And then also near the end of it, we're going to be playing a.
Tim: Little game with them.
Tim : Just called word association. Typically with that, each round entails for our guests to give us a phrase or words that first come to their mind based on our randomly generated word selection. Now with all that being said, I would like to introduce our guests that we have here today. With us today we are going to be speaking with James from Onsite Security.
James: I'm James, owner of Onsite Security, and we have a family ran security company here in New Jersey.
Tim: Nice. What made you guys decide to begin on site security?
James: I have a 20 year electronics background. I've worked for a whole bunch of different other people. And time and time again I find that my values didn't align with people that I worked with, not coworkers, but the owners, they had their own agendas and I didn't agree with it. The way they treated employees, the way they treated customers. And I decided and along with my best friend, we opened Onsite Security about four years ago.
Tim: Nice. Torres, is there anything you want to add?
Jourdyn: Yes, obviously because you saw some things that you didn't particularly like about some of your competitors. I want to say what was your mission when you initially started or like do you guys have a mission statement for your company?
James: Sure. So I don't know if I want to say a mission statement. I mean, we do. I have a great challenge coin that one of my friends who's a firefighter down in Florida had made for me from his company. And it says to provide exceptional customer service and safety to the neighborhood and our community and yeah, that sounds good and great and all. But I will say the thing that strives us to do what we do is it says it right on my hat is 212. And a lot of people ask it's on our hat. It's on my desk right here. Big letters. It's on our sweatshirts. Not this one. This is like one of our original sweatshirts, but all of our new sweatshirts say right here on the arms, 212. It actually has a lot of people asking us every time that we shake hands when we meet, what's 212? And we describe it. And that's us. A lot of people don't know what it is. 212 is the boiling point of water. And as silly as it sounds, it sounds a little corny. That the boiling water can create steam, which can power the world. As simple as that. 211 is what? Just hot water. So that one degree makes all the difference. And that's what I strive for us to be. Everybody, whether it's myself, the employees, that's what I strive to give, is that 1% difference. I say it to the guys very bluntly. Like, we're here, you're here doing the work already. Do it to the best of your ability. Why not? You're here. Don't slack out. And, oh, I don't feel like running this last wire. I'm going to make you run it anyway, but just do it. And that's us.
Tim: Nice. I never heard of someone describing, like, a mission statement as, like, something be equivalent to boiling hot water. So that's very cool.
James: Actually.
Tim: I like that a lot.
Jourdyn: I think that's like, a really cool concept, honestly. Like, that one degree hotter
That's really cool.
Tim: Yeah.
Jourdyn: Okay, let's see. I think that's the end of our first segment. Now the second.
Tim: Well, I do have a question now.
Jourdyn: Go ahead.
Tim: Just the security just, like, around neighborhoods, correct. Do you do, like, businesses or what type of security is it like?
James: We've we do camera installations. We do alarm systems primarily. We do a lot of access control. So like card swipe readers and a ton of security cameras. We do all the security work for Rutgers University. So we're their security vendor for Newark and New Brunswick and all their buildings in between. So which we do. We do their cameras, their camera systems, cabling access control systems. That's our bread and butter. But yes, we also do home residential camera systems, home automation. So we link alarm systems with camera systems and lighting and have it all work together as one.
Tim: That's pretty cool.
James: Yeah, it's fun stuff. It really is.
Jourdyn: Okay, are we ready for the next segment?
Tim: Yes.
Jourdyn: Okay. So this next segment is actually something that I've just recently come up with. It's called hashtag. Stop or secure it. So in this segment, it's basically being a yay or nay kind of concept with some words that we've generated on whether a customer should secure this item or they shouldn't. And then you can tell us why. So are you ready?
James: Sure.
Jourdyn: Okay, so first concept would be company assets.
James: Yay, absolutely. Secure it. We have a whole bunch of customers that we do their company assets, like you say, primarily builders and companies that have tools and expensive equipment that easily not stolen. I don't always want to say things stolen, but just misplaced forgotten. We have one customer that is when your basement gets flooded and they come in and they make sure all the water is gone and the smell and everything like that, and the mold and everything, they come in and fix that. They have hundreds of machines that go missing. They bring to a job site. They have a huge facility where they have to come in and they forget three or four of them, but each one is five, six, $700. Well we have tags that we put on their machines that they can GPS locate. They pay a monthly subscription fee to be able to locate them, track them, manage them, and they reduce their loss.
Jourdyn: Okay, he said yay. So let's see. The next word or concept would be lighting inside your home. So any lighting fixtures or anything that's controlled by a home access panel, I would say nay.
James: You don't need to secure it. But we can control it. We can integrate it all together.
Tim: Electronically. You control it through your phone or like an app or something? Or is it something totally different like something like that?
James: Absolutely. I'm going to actually open it up right now. We can control it all simply
from your phone, from a tablet, from the light fixture. We can dim lights, turn them on and off. We have them all integrated together. I have a button in here that I could turn my whole house off. Just one button. Whole home off. TVs, lighting, door locks are locked all by one button.
Tim: Dang, that's pretty cool.
James: Sounds like Google Forms.
Jourdyn: Excuse me, are there any specific systems like certain companies that you guys prefer or advise your customers to use?
James: So the company that we use is Control for, and I like them, they're an American company. You can get their product. It's not a year backlog like some of the other companies that we've also worked with as well. I'm not going to blast them out on here, but yeah, they're a company right out of North Carolina and they integrate with everybody. So whether you don't have to go with everything from them, if you have stuff from Phillips or this or that company, or Lutron Lighting, it'll integrate with everything. So you can control things through their system that you already have. You can control your TV. They don't have a TV. They don't have a control for TV. We can control your Samsung TV to turn on and off or anything that you can think of.
Jourdyn: Oh, that's a cool concept. I honestly didn't even know about that company. So
that's a huge bonus. For people that are in the area.
James: Absolutely, yeah.
Jourdyn: Next concept would be home security systems. So to touch base off of the.
James: Control panels, secure it. There's no place like home. To have anybody come into your home that shouldn't be without your knowledge is just a complete invasion of privacy. I was a victim of a break in when I was a child, and I remember we walked in the house and everything was torn apart. It was a terrible feeling, and I don't want anybody to go through that feeling. And I think the first step is even before any security system or cameras, is just not to be a target. And there's very simple solutions. We give customers to not be an original target outside of all of anything that we do. So it's not like we're just after the dollar bills, like, hey, yeah, secure it. Secure it. No, we tell people lighting is very important. Keeping a well lit, clean front of your house where a criminal can't just sneak around and be able to have their way with your home while nobody's home.
Tim: Yeah, that makes sense.
Jourdyn: That does. Trying to think, I have so many words up here, and now they're all escaping my mind. Okay, last word. Computer access.
James: Oh. Secure it. Computer security is a huge market. It's a huge industry. I think this year it's $2 trillion of computer theft between stolen identity and money. They're expecting in the next five years for it to be 13.
Tim: Did you say 2 trillion?
James: Yeah. Across the world? Across the world.
Tim: Well, still that's still a lot.
James: But that's just how big of a business between just how much theft is going into, like, that's where everything goes to.
Jourdyn: That's crazy.
Tim: That's crazy.
James: But you have to think there's 7 billion people or 8 billion people, whatever it is, what's it going to be in the next five years? 10 billion people.
Tim: That's actually a good point.
James: They estimate by, what, the year 2030, there's going to be ten or 15 billion
people.
Tim: Now, would your products be different from, like, securing, like, something as, like, the computer databases and the files and all.
James: That versus so yes and no. We actually work with somebody that works for the Air Force doing Internet security, so he works with us. We secure some of our clients servers and cloud platforms, and they did our cloud platform for our access control. So we do offer it basically as a subcontractor. I give his information out, and he has his own company, Ntm Technology, and they do a great job.
Tim: Oh, that's awesome.
Jourdyn: Wow. Everything is super secure.
James: Yes, we do a little bit of everything.
Tim: It's that whole 1%, you said, that's it.
James: Listen, we have a lot of customers that ask us to do things, and there's things that we don't do. Can we do it short? Every so often, we will have to cut a hole to run a wire. We don't want to, but they'll ask, do we patch it? No, I don't. I do electronics, but we have plenty of people that can come in and patch it and paint it. So I don't want to make it seem like if we don't do it, we find the expert for you.
Jourdyn: Yeah, that's smart. That's good. That way. You guys have to put some crazy review up, like, hey, that's not your wall holding my wall, and I don't want to be fixed. Everything looks crazy.
Tim: Yeah, you don't want that.
Jourdyn: Oh, alarm systems. I didn't even think to touch on that. Obviously, these are things that people typically use inside their homes. I know that they usually commercialize certain homes being secured when it comes to alarm systems, but do you have any specific take on them?
James: Oh, absolutely. You got a minute? Talk about this all day. Everybody knows there's so many alarm system companies out there, and there are so many companies that are trying to invade the alarm and security industries. You have Amazon and Google. They're the two biggest that are in their attempt to invade the space. Amazon went out, they bought Ring, they bought Blink, they bought a couple of other companies. And none of them are security companies. They're all software companies. That their point of concept, is security. Ring originally started as a doorbell, and it's great in that concept. If anybody ever looked at any of their cameras in the footage, I'm sure you guys have seen it on Facebook. Somebody posts a picture, hey, can you recognize this person? And you can't even see their face. And it's only from 10ft away. Why? Because technology is not there to run WiFi video at anything higher than a half a megapixel. So you're not going to get a clear, good footage of it, as well as they're really in the data storage game. And Google went out and bought ADT. People don't even know that. You didn't know that Google went out and bought ADT, and they're having ADT install their Google Nest product items. So if you see on ADT's commercial, we'll give you a free Nest camera. Free this, because that's exactly what they did. And there is no real company, ADT. ADT is just basically a contractor that subcontracts it out to other alarm companies like myself. We don't use them, but they've called me and asked to become a dealer of theirs. So you call ADT, you get, oh, we're going to get this, that, and the other thing. They call me and they say, you're going to go to Tim's house tomorrow and you're going to install X, Y, and Z. Here's your tshirt. Put your tshirt on. It says ADT. There you go.
Jourdyn: So what would be like a red flag of knowing if a company is basically being subleased rather than them being, like, I guess the term would be a sole proprietor?
James: Oh, it's tough. It really is tough because especially with these large companies, they have so much money in smoke and mirrors to be able to throw at people. I would say the best thing to do is I'm a small company kind of guy. Small company with a good reputation. That's who I root for, because there are so many different people that you have to fight against, like the big companies and anybody else that sells out to them. Listen, I don't blame ADT selling out to Google for $4 billion or whatever the number was. But then an instance, you have to realize that that's what you're getting. You're getting nest products now? That's all ADT installed now is all Nest products, and it's all wireless cameras and wireless this and wireless that. Well, guess what? If your wireless goes out, doesn't work. Same thing with Ring. Your WiFi goes out, your Internet goes out. If you have again, I'm going to blast them. If you have somebody like Altitude, they go out all the time. Their internet is awful. In New Jersey, if you have somebody like that, your Internet's out all the time. You have no footage, you have no cameras, you have no alarm system. Nothing works. That is not security. Something that hinges on something else to work or not work. Security is supposed to work all the time.
Jourdyn: Yeah, right, I agree. And I feel like with some companies, at least from what I'm seeing, they are more so marketing towards the technical side of everything. Like, look what this can do. Look what this can do. Look how we're working. Partnering with this company rather than giving you an actual service.
James: Correct. Everything's a gadget. Now, can I do this with it? Does it pair with this? Security is not meant to be pairing with these other things, because when you do that, in order for them to do that, they have to open their API. They have to open the forum and the sources to be able to be integrated with well, shouldn't that be proprietary? Shouldn't nobody know the key to your system? If it is, it's a toy. That's the word I use. There's a lot of toys or for your entertainment only systems. So, like, Ring isn't UI classified. You can't put it in commercial settings you're not supposed to. Why? Because it's not listed and they won't list it because they understand that it's a toy. So they're trying to protect the industry understanding that business owners will. Oh, well, it's a $90 alarm panel. Well, you get what you pay for.
Tim: I say that all the time.
James: That's where anything I see it everywhere. We take it out of a lot of places, too. We get a lot of customers from them. Oh, my cameras don't work well, I'm like, well, you got a $40 camera. What do you expect? You get what you pay for with technology.
Tim: So I do have a last question just on my end. Do you ever get your security system inspected, or is that like a thing to have them inspected?
James: Yeah, commercially it is. Commercially, it's required is to have your systems inspected annually depending where you are. Every jurisdiction is a little bit different. Some of them are semiannual, but it's primarily annually. Homeowners typically don't there's no forcing them to. And if somebody doesn't want to do something, they're not going to. And if they have to pay for something, they're really not going to. But I recommend if you get I don't want to say anything, but almost anything, it should be at least looked at maybe once a year or so. If you have a camera outside your house, or four cameras, or eight cameras, whenever it is. And here in New Jersey, we get some crazy weather. One day it's 70, the next day it's 30, and it's snowing.
Jourdyn: Snowing.
Tim: And Jordan Or is all about that. She's from New York.
James: Exactly. So you have items that are outside. They're meant to be outside, but they're still outside in the elements they're going to get and again, they're tightened and so on and so forth down, but they're still going to move a little bit. They're going to have dirt, are going to get on the lenses. The camera is not going to be as clear as the first day. If we do an automatic lock on your door. So we do a lot of electronic, like, front door, like door deadbolts that are electronic base, and they're either fingerprint to open them, or you put a pin in and it opens your front door or back door. Those should be tightened, too. It's something that you're turning, you're opening, you're pulling, and just over time, screws loosen, and they should be inspected. I really recommend it commercially because the foot traffic is immensely more than at your home, but I recommend everybody to at least think of it as no different if you called your plumber or your gardener or whoever to inspect anything.
Jourdyn: Right. Especially for commercial properties, because you have so many assets in one area.
James: Oh, correct. Yeah.
Jourdyn: All right, I think that's all of our questions. Tim, do you have anything you wans to add?
Tim: No, not at the top of my head, I don't.
Jourdyn: That was all my questions I'm questioned out.
James: Sounds good.
Tim: Awesome.
James: Would you have anything for us? That's it.
Tim: Awesome. Well, it was a pleasure, James.
James: Awesome. Pleasure was all mine. Thank you, guys. Thank you.
Jourdyn: Have a great day.
Tim: You too.
Services
