The Manufacturing Automation Podcast

Gimbel Automation and Develop LLC
  • 5.0 (10)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

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.

  1. Sep 9

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

    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?

  2. Sep 2

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

    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.

  3. Aug 19

    Passion Fatigue, EA Day One & the Two-to-Three Year Customer Revenge Loop

    Matt opens the week with something he hasn't felt in a while — his passion back at full volume. Site visits, marketing roadmap sessions with the UK hire, deal structuring on strategic accounts, and a surprise shop tour at Ring Brothers, the company he helped build before Develop. It's energizing, but he knows high-passion Matt can be a lot for people who haven't seen it in a while. Michael's version of the week is quieter but equally significant: he ran an experiment where he just stopped doing EA tasks — didn't sort email, didn't answer the phone — and found four hours he didn't know he had. The in-person EA candidate came in for her trial day and got hired on the spot. On the sales and marketing side, Matt walks through a pattern that's now showing up repeatedly: companies that chose the low bid over Develop two to three years ago are coming back with machines they want to tear out. The email that landed in his inbox that morning flat-out said Develop's was the most thorough proposal, but the board went low bid anyway. His team wants to start a whiteboard over-under bet on how long each one takes to call back. Michael, meanwhile, is deep in value engine mapping — a Ryan Deiss framework for flowcharting the entire customer journey from ad click to money in the bank — and walks through how it helped him identify where Gimbel's funnel is leaky rather than just too small. IMTS prep is intensifying: a RoboDrill is now going into a 10x10 booth, CoolantClear units are getting shipped in a second crate to potentially sell on the floor, and nobody has confirmed whether selling product on the show floor is actually allowed. Engineering covers Develop's five-robot Project 29 machine getting derailed by one supplier on large milled plates, a factory acceptance test that caught issues before anything shipped, and a facility expansion plan that just hit a wall — precast concrete lead times jumped from three months to ten because of data center construction consuming Wisconsin's supply. Michael is filing a cluster of patents he can't talk about yet, has a rotary union collet chuck nearly ready, and is wrestling with product launch priority order across four items that could all ship within three months. The CI section closes with Matt deciding to delay his line of credit renewal rather than forecast through a normalization that keeps moving, Michael turning off Shopify notifications and finding more peace than he expected, and a pointed conversation about EA-as-forcing-function — both hosts landing on the same insight that having someone who will actually make the call, even imperfectly, beats the founder stalling indefinitely in their own inbox.

  4. Aug 12

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

    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.

  5. Aug 5

    Matt's First Real Vacation in a Decade, 50% Close Rates & Fireflies Is Out

    Matt opens the week having just taken his first real vacation in ten years — four days where the team didn't need him once. Not because he forced it, but because the systems held. He comes back to a week of 15 hours of pure sales meetings he didn't book, proposals he didn't write, and follow-ups he didn't send — all handled by the team while he was gone. Michael opens on the opposite end of the same evolution: all-in on marketing after a month of operations, launching 40 ads over a weekend, rebuilding abandoned cart flows with 3D GIF previews, and landing a 50% close rate on real leads — a number Matt immediately flags as a possible sign of underpricing. The sales and marketing conversation covers the email marketing gap both companies are closing — Klaviyo abandoned cart flows, welcome sequences, drip campaign architecture, and why Michael thinks email is the highest-leverage thing he's not doing consistently. Matt's marketing hire Andrew is three weeks in and pitching his full plan on the 10th. A business development engineer role just went live on Indeed. They also go deep on funnel filtering — how to slow calendar velocity without burning leads — and the right moment to hand a sales process to someone who didn't build it. Engineering covers the five-robot Project 29 machine getting insanely heavy, the HMI going into revision two with an architecture Matt expects to last a decade, CoolantClear 3 supply chain details being locked down, and a customer from years ago who bought from the lowest bidder and is now ready to throw those machines in the trash and start over with Develop. The CI section closes with Fireflies getting cancelled over security gaps that couldn't be fixed, Otter replacing it the next day for less money, a purchasing automation in Gim Command that gets POs onto vendor Gantt charts in one click, and a frank conversation about what it actually costs — in hours and dollars — to run on AI instead of people.

  6. Jul 22

    Oversubscribed and Understaffed: EA vs. Sales Hire, One Plan's Done & Matt's Most Intense Week Ever

    Michael opens the week trying to come up for air — CoolantClear is selling faster than it can be assembled, proposals are backing up, marketing has gone quiet, and he can't figure out which fire to stomp first. Matt opens on the opposite end of the same problem: 13 sales meetings in one week, Andrew in his first days booking more, Trish running the inbox, and a Thursday that converged accounting, legal review, CFO reporting, and the largest pitch in Develop history into a single day. Both are oversubscribed. The difference is which part of the business is doing it to them. The sales and marketing conversation is one of the most practical the show has had. Matt makes the case for EA before salesperson — and shares how Trish protected him from his own chronic optimism before Andrew could even start. Michael walks through his pricing experiment on CoolantClear, his 200-hour proposal generator that's 90% done and still breaking, and the EA versus sales hire debate he's been circling for weeks. They go deep on LinkedIn organic versus ads, zero-difficulty keywords, email drip campaigns, case study attribution, and the right order to line up marketing dominoes when you can't measure which one will fall furthest. Engineering covers a new pallet tending system Michael can't discuss yet — provisional filed, first customer implementation underway — incremental gripper redesigns cutting assembly cost without touching specs, and a mountain of parts arriving at Develop for the largest machine in company history. The CI section closes with One Plan officially outgrown: Develop has 3X'd its machine throughput and is aiming for 2-3X more in 2028, two team members are tasked with figuring out what replaces it, and Michael makes the pitch for building something in-house in 20 hours.

  7. Jul 1

    Automate Debrief, the Secret Hire Revealed & Spindle Storm Gets a Redo

    Matt comes back from Automate brain dead but buzzing — the LED wall was a hit, the custom trade show software finally worked instead of fighting them, and podcast listeners stopped him in the hallway of the Airbnb. Michael returns from Maui with four new hires in the last month and a company that's somehow handling its busiest month ever with fewer things breaking than usual. Both are starting to feel something unfamiliar: the systems are actually working. On the sales and marketing side, Matt officially announces the hire he teased last episode — Andrew, the account manager from his agency who was leaving, is coming on full-time July 13th to run top and middle of funnel. It's the commercial hire Matt has been circling for over a year. Michael, meanwhile, is watching ad creative fatigue eat into Meta ROAS in real time — campaigns that should be returning 4–10x are returning 2x — and knows exactly why: he hasn't filmed new content in weeks because sales volume has him buried. Both hosts go long on the middle of funnel problem — over a hundred stalled deals at Develop, a growing backlog at Gimbel — and what it actually takes to build reporting and follow-up systems that don't require the founder. Engineering covers Spindle Storm getting a full product redo — triple the airflow, investment cast instead of billet, with free replacements going to every existing customer — and a client 1701 case study video dropping soon that Matt clearly can't stop smiling about. The episode closes with Gim Command's vendor portal vision, Develop's push toward NIST and ITAR compliance, SolidWorks PDM that Michael knows he needs and keeps not doing, and Matt's ten-year anniversary with Amanda.

  8. Jun 17

    Sine Waves, Secret Hires & CoolantClear 3 Already in the Works

    Both hosts open on the same diagnosis: the sine wave problem. Michael keeps bouncing between B2B proposal mode and Shopify e-commerce focus, and whichever one he's in, the other declines. Matt's seeing the same pattern smooth out slightly as style guides and brand kits he built over three months start coming back to him from the team — nearly finished, almost no edits needed. When the tools work, the founder stops being the bottleneck. Both are trying to get there faster. On the sales and marketing side, Matt teases a major hire he can't fully announce yet — a dedicated marketing and sales role that's been in the works quietly and is close to being inked. It's the move he's been circling for over a year, and it changes the commercial structure of Develop significantly. Michael, meanwhile, moves email marketing entirely from HubSpot to Klaviyo to break the contact list ceiling, debates whether to build email flows there or inside Gim Command before September, and gets talked off a bad IMTS booth partnership by Matt in real time. The two also go long on what Gimbel Automation actually is — CNC accessories ecosystem or something else — in one of the most strategic conversations the podcast has had. Engineering covers CoolantClear 3 already in prototype — with a production prototype that solves every install issue from versions one and two — and a machine at a customer site approaching one million units processed in four months. Matt pulls data on what 98.5% versus 99.4% reliability actually does to customer perception, and both hosts dig into why customers obsess over cycle time while ignoring in-process probing that prevents crashes. The episode closes with Develop building toward running without Matt by end of 2027, Michael flying to Maui for a corporate retreat, and a frank admission that the number to sell either company would have to be so absurd it's basically not worth thinking about.

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About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Gimbel Automation and Develop LLC
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    90
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Gimbel Automation and Develop LLC
  • Show Website
    The Manufacturing Automation Podcast

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