Cutting Turnover by Respecting the Front Line: Mike White on the Road to Secchi
Manufacturing Happy Hour
Mike White, founder and president of Secchi, sat down at a Milwaukee bar for an episode of Manufacturing Happy Hour to talk about frontline leadership, and about why he thinks tracking data on hourly workers can make them better off rather than more surveilled. Across the conversation White kept returning to one claim: most frontline workforce problems come down to treating people with respect. What has been missing, in his view, is a simple way for supervisors to see and act on how each person is actually doing. He traces that idea from teenage summers running cornfield crews, through HR roles at Johns Manville, Caterpillar, and Master Lock, to the software he now sells.
A Bar, a Kia Plant, and the Data Behind Everything
White chose the venue: Pete's Pub on Brady Street, a nightlife street in Milwaukee. He isn't from Milwaukee originally. He grew up among the cornfields and soybeans of central Illinois and is a third-generation University of Illinois alum. He knows the bar because the owner's son plays soccer with his son.
The opening small talk set up a theme that came back later. White said he is struck by how much data runs a bar: how long people stay, how many drinks they order, and the inventory behind it all. In his view that isn't much different from manufacturing. The host remembered working at a dive bar around 2008–2009 that had no such data, and compared it to how old-school much of manufacturing still was then. White agreed. He has been in small shops where he wondered how they made money at all, and in plants that "look like science fiction." His example of the second kind was the Kia plant in West Point, Georgia, which he toured while part of a group bringing Caterpillar to Georgia. It had heavy automation and still a lot of employees working with the line. The bar and the car plant work the same way, he suggested: people make it run, and systems keep track of what happens. The difference is that "a beer is a little bit cheaper than a car."
"We Cut Turnover in Half"
Asked how he would explain Secchi to a stranger at the bar, White gave a one-line answer: "We cut turnover in half." The method is what he calls employee relationship management, backed by data. With the right data, the right leaders, and the right process, he said, customers can reduce turnover within weeks of adopting the software. He presented the simplicity of the idea as the reason it gets adopted easily. At bottom, he said, it is relationship management.
Why the Company Is Named After a Disk for Measuring Water
The name took some trial and error. White first tried "Employee Trail," but a search returned hiking trails and endless generic results about employees. He then settled on the concept of clarity. As he put it, executive leaders often have no idea what is happening on the front lines, and the product is meant to change that.
The name itself came from a friend, Josh, who was bragging about how clear the lake near his house was. That led White to the Secchi disk, named after Angelo Secchi. The disk is lowered into water on a rope, and the depth at which it disappears from view gives a measurement. White pointed out that Lake Michigan and the Gulf can both look "clear" while being very different. Secchi took a vague idea, water clarity, and made it a number anyone could compare.
White sees the same gap in workforce management. An experienced person can walk into a plant and within ten or fifteen minutes sense how the employees are doing. They notice the communication boards, who says hello, who smiles, how people interact, how meetings go. None of that is measured, though. Employee performance, like water clarity, is hard to quantify, and White said Secchi's software lets him select an individual employee and say, with measurable data, whether that person is performing well or poorly.
Why a Tight Labor Market Excites Him
The host brought up something White had said on another podcast: that he is excited about current workforce challenges, even though many manufacturers are not. White explained this by comparing it to the labor market at the start of his career. At Johns Manville, unemployment in his county reached about 10%. A plant could let someone go and immediately bring in someone else, and White described that period as "a race to the bottom." As an HR professional he was teaching leadership and fair, respectful treatment, but he felt the market gave companies no incentive to do those things. He said his own employer treated people well. His broader point was that behavior changes when the market forces it.
Now, he said, "if you have a jerk supervisor on your team right now, good luck," because people will go somewhere else. Earlier, a bad supervisor carried no real consequence, since workers felt they had to stay in a good job. He said he doesn't know how this would ever be measured, but he sees the standard of leadership rising in businesses of every size, including at the conferences Secchi attends.
White connected this to Secchi's purpose statement: "let great workers do great work," which he glossed as getting out of their way. He acknowledged that pay matters and companies must pay a good rate, but said the real question is whether people feel valued. For the past fifteen years he has taught and coached on how to treat people. He used to deliver "respectful workplace training," which he said was really union avoidance training, and privately he called it "be nice to people training." The idea is not complicated, he said, but until there is an incentive it doesn't happen at the same rate.
HR Lessons from a Cornfield
White originally studied education at Illinois Wesleyan and planned to become a teacher. His father is a farmer, and White started working in the cornfields as a teenager, "whenever it was legal and a little before probably." Years later he still listed "detasseling crews" on his résumé when applying to Midwest employers, because it used to be a rite of passage. He worked for a wrestling coach who ran crews, then did cleanup work for his father, who paid by the acre. At about 15 or 16 he partnered with someone old enough to drive. Eventually he and his brother had 80 people working for them.
He said he didn't realize at the time that he was doing HR work. Tired of paying people while they learned what to do and what to wear, he created checklists and then orientation programs that covered most of that before workers were on the clock. His "claim to fame" was eliminating water breaks, which he achieved by providing hydration packs. The father of one of the kids worked at a Bell helmet factory that made them. He and his brother ended up making good money doing good work.
That experience changed his career plans. Entry-level teaching then paid around $24,000–25,000 by his recollection, less than he had been making in the fields. While looking at MBA programs he came across the University of Illinois master's in HR, which advertised a 95% placement rate and an average salary about three times a teacher's. He reasoned that he could always go back to teaching, but might not be able to get back into business. He added that many manufacturers recruit HR graduates from that program.
Johns Manville: Humbled by the Front Line
White's first corporate role, around 2006, was with Johns Manville in the building construction division, which made fiberglass insulation. He remembered celebrating the placement because the division was making so much money that he expected a big bonus. Then the housing market collapsed and the warehouse filled up with insulation.
His early lesson was that most people's problems at work are "completely solvable," and that solving them mostly means treating people with respect. That became one of his leadership principles: everyone is a leader. His example was Larry Barry (that really was his full name, White confirmed), the plant janitor. White said Larry, without realizing it, shaped how White interacted with people. Larry would tell the young HR manager, "that ain't right what you just did." The host compared him to the janitor in The Breakfast Club, the wisest character in the film. Larry has since passed away, and White said the crew still talks about him when he visits Georgia.
His boss Joe, from New Jersey, had worked every job in the plant. White recalled Joe telling him, "We don't stab people in the back in New Jersey, we stab them in the face." Joe also told White he had never worked a day in his life. White protested that he had worked in cornfields. Joe's answer was that White had always had school and a vision of where he was going. He had never done the kind of work where you come in and do the same thing every day, where the company's profits don't affect you, and where the person watching insulation go by doesn't care how much the company makes. White said he can still picture where he was standing because he was so upset, and that Joe taught him respect for the front line. He never hung his degree anywhere, since in a factory there's no reason to.
He was candid about other lessons. He showed up at a plant in the Deep South driving a used Audi, cheaper than the trucks in the lot, and "caught so much heat" for it. More importantly, he said his ego got humbled "over and over and over again." He had assumed a degree meant intelligence, and frontline workers showed him otherwise. He called that one of the best things that ever happened to him, because he had been very cocky.
He also remembered a conversation with the plant's maintenance planner, who told White that while White measured success by education and moving around, he himself had his "house on the hill." At that time, before new plants arrived and land prices rose, land in that part of Georgia was nearly free. The planner could clock out without worrying about the plant, earned more than White, didn't have to relocate, went to church on Sundays, and saw his family every night. Looking back, White said his own measure of success had covered only one side of things. The host added that society is starting to understand what degrees do and don't indicate, and pointed to the respect given to apprenticeships in countries like Germany.
Leading HR Through the 2008 Downturn
The host asked how White handled being a people-focused HR leader during the recession. White said he spent a lot of time Googling other careers. He and a colleague he calls his "HR mom," who taught him how to care for people professionally, became very good at layoffs. They learned how to structure them so employees could maximize unemployment benefits. The layoffs rolled on and on, and he remembered asking himself why he had gone into manufacturing.
The downturn also opened a door. The company ended the leadership development program he had moved to rural Georgia for, which left him without friends or family nearby. A few weeks later, after the HR manager quit, the company put him in that role with no experience, in a 300-person plant represented by the United Steelworkers. White said the company would never have done that otherwise, and he wouldn't do it today. Karen, the plant manager, took him under her wing and "just made me good."
He said today's problems don't compare. Then the question was when the plant would be shut down, as plants closed "left and right." Later he took part in negotiating a shutdown agreement, which he described as four weeks of watching people in pain. Some workers couldn't read, and he worried morally about what would happen to them. The Georgia plant kept running. A New Jersey plant was shut down and, he said, restarted only a few years ago. He admitted he stayed in the field less by design than by grinding it out. The host agreed that finding a job during a downturn teaches you not to take work for granted, and that more downturns will come.
Caterpillar: Hiring 1% of a Community
Around 2012 White moved to a Caterpillar startup plant in Georgia. It was planned for 1,400 people and had about 1,800 by the time he left. His largest plant until then had been 350 people, and he had handled HR for perhaps 500. He said he convinced the plant manager and HR director by pointing to his work with local colleges and technical schools and the culture changes at Johns Manville.
He credited good timing and the State of Georgia, which he praised as easy to do business with, along with strong frontline leader hires and a startup team that set a clear vision for the culture and talked about it openly. The hiring pace was intense. It started at 24 people every other week, then became weekly, and at one point a manager told him that if he didn't hire 300 people he wouldn't have a job within a month. With an area population around 120,000 at the time, he said they were hiring about 1% of the workforce, so the leadership team spoke at community events whenever it could. Keeping people once they were hired depended on strong frontline leadership and relationships. White admitted that sounds cliché, and said the plant had high engagement scores. He also said that caring about people while hiring that fast, and keeping track of all those relationships, was a real challenge.
He described a strong sense of purpose on the leadership team. Community projects that had been on hold got approved because more people now had health insurance, and the local hospital added a building. White was careful to say he doesn't know that the plant caused this, "but it didn't hurt." Many hires came from small shops where people got jobs through family connections, and White had to explain that "hire my son" isn't how big corporations work.
Comparing the two employers, White said Caterpillar's advantage was centralized, well-funded systems for training. About 20 of roughly 250 management employees transferred from other Caterpillar plants and brought those systems with them. Johns Manville had systems too, but they were less centralized. The downside was bureaucracy. To use a weld screening test for hiring about 300 welders, with help from the State of Georgia, he had to convince roughly 12 people at Caterpillar that it wouldn't be discriminatory or invite lawsuits. It took six to eight months. At Johns Manville, he estimated, three approvals would have done it. The benefit was efficiency and resources once a decision was made, and the leadership team tried to keep the bureaucracy invisible to frontline employees.
From an Access Database to a Company
White said the idea for Secchi began at Johns Manville. Supervisors complained that HR wouldn't let them get rid of bad employees. White's answer was that they needed to do their documentation, and they told him it took too long. Wanting to make it easier, he worked with others to build a Microsoft Access database for coaching and discipline records. It worked for its original purpose: with documentation in place, they could remove poor performers, and according to White engagement "skyrocketed," because "nobody wants to work next to somebody that's lazy." They later added coaching and recognition. His takeaway was that if you make processes easy for supervisors, they'll do the right thing. He contrasted that with typical HR processes that are hard to follow.
Years later, at Master Lock in Milwaukee, the company came out of union negotiations facing grievances that cost money. White didn't want to say how much, but attributed it to poor documentation. In one dispute over an employee with a severe attendance problem, he was facing Tony Rainey, a union representative he named because they are now friends. White described Tony as one of the people who "can really do the job." White asked for a sidebar and admitted Tony was winning the argument. He agreed to bring the employee back but said they needed to keep the problem from recurring. All the while he was wishing he still had the old database.
Back at his parents' farm, he called Melinda, who had filled his old role at Johns Manville. She told him they were still using the database, which by then had spread to about ten plants, some 13 years after he built it. White reasoned that if old technology had lasted that long, adding 15 years of experience could produce something much better. As a Master Lock director he couldn't build it on company time, so he quit. He summed up the change in the product's purpose: he had built a tool to fire people, and once recognition was added it became a tool to retain them.
How Frontline Workers Respond to Being Tracked
The host asked how frontline employees feel about a system that records data on them. White pointed to recognition. Secchi measures "connections," including recognitions, and he said recognitions on the platform doubled in November. User numbers hadn't doubled, and he attributed the jump to Thanksgiving and people feeling grateful. Employees receive a text message through the platform thanking them for something specific.
He told a story about an early adopter, a logistics company with about 700 employees. White asked the CEO whether he knew an entry-level employee named Bill, and was surprised that he did. The company had systematically lost two pallets, and Bill had gotten them back into the system, told the whole team, and gotten them to the customer. White asked when the CEO would next visit Fort Worth. In two weeks, the CEO said, and White suggested he shake Bill's hand and thank him. White's point was that this kind of executive visibility into individual contributions drives engagement: "is Bill ever going to leave?"
White said customer feedback turned the product into what he now calls a complete culture development tool. An executive visiting a plant can see a photo of each person, how many days they've missed, what they've been coached on, and what they've done well, broken down even to the machine or process level. He called it "unprecedented transparency" for executives.
Data, Teamwork, and Courage
White explained the three company values listed on his LinkedIn. Data is there because people don't usually associate employee relationship management with data. Leaders get described as "good" or "great" on feel. White wants people decisions driven by data, with the administrative work taken away. Manufacturers are data-driven, he said, so the fit is natural. Teamwork ties to an internal principle, "everyone's a leader," which means listening to everyone. You don't have to act on everything, but you can learn something even from your worst employee, and you'd better be learning from your best.
Courage, he said, is about bold decisions. White said he never had trouble getting a "seat at the table" in HR. In selling to HR, though, he has found that many HR people know how wasteful their processes are but lack the courage to propose changes. He is frustrated when prospects say they already have an HRIS or that their time clocks handle it automatically. "They freaking don't," he said, and offered to come to any plant for free and process-map it to show that relationship-building isn't happening automatically. Courage also means trusting a young vendor. He described Secchi as about two years old and about one year operational. It also means trusting supervisors to lead. When people tell him supervisors won't use the tool, he says he hasn't had an adoption problem with supervisors, because the product makes their lives easier.
Why Traditional Performance Reviews Fail on the Floor
White was blunt about performance reviews for hourly staff. The idea that a frontline leader with 40 direct reports writes meaningful reviews that employees care about is, in his words, "foolish." He told another humbling story from Johns Manville. He built what he thought was a great review process and rolled it out at a supervisor meeting without asking for their input. The supervisors, he said, essentially threw the paper back at him. Each review meant an hour of setup and an hour getting the employee off the floor, and any issue that came up would then mean more meetings with HR.
His simplified version of hourly performance management is four questions. Did you show up on time and on schedule? Did you do something great? Did you do something wrong? That's it. He noted that manufacturing leaders carry notebooks, or keep notes on their phones or in OneNote, as the host pointed out. Secchi aims to pull attendance, positive events, and problems onto a single sheet, which White described as a 12-month calendar view showing an employee's whole year at a glance, based on recorded data rather than impressions. He said one customer's supervisor told him it saved hours and hours of work, and White added that the result is defensible because everything is documented. He stressed that Secchi is not an HRIS. No operations manager wants an HRIS with "50 clicks," he said, and Secchi is an employee relationship program built for ops leaders.
Are We Entering the Age of the Frontline Worker?
White answered "100%" and made a football analogy. In the 1990s the stars were running backs like Emmitt Smith, Marshall Faulk, and Thurman Thomas. Now teams often rotate several backs, and offensive linemen get recognition too. He mentioned Joe Thomas, a Wisconsin grad he said is a friend of one of Secchi's co-founders and was recently inducted into the Hall of Fame. In manufacturing, White said, the front line has been the offensive line: underappreciated, grinding every day, hitting problems and fixing them. The "quarterback" in the front office has to pay more attention to them, and a winning team wants the smartest line it can get. The host, a former St. Louis Rams fan, added Orlando Pace from the "Greatest Show on Turf" era.
White argued the trend has been underway for more than 20 years. His simplified view is that GE's Six Sigma was good project management that mostly meant listening to frontline people, and lean manufacturing meant the same. Now there are events where high school graduates put on plumbing and manufacturing hats instead of college ones. He said a great process tech can be more valuable than a degreed manager. HR, he admitted, "can be pretty replaced pretty dang easy," but someone who can run the melter or weld on three different machines has specialized skill that takes time to develop. He expects wages to move that way, which he sees as generally good.
He added a caveat. He values a respectful workplace over the highest pay. At Caterpillar's legacy plants he saw workers paid so well they couldn't leave, and he felt sorry for those who hated coming to work and felt stuck. He acknowledged inflation may have changed that picture since.
Looking Two to Three Years Ahead
Asked for a prediction, White said that based on the demographics he has read about, he doesn't expect the workforce itself to change much. Automation, which he sees advancing fast at trade shows, will drive productivity, and AI will play a role too. He predicted that critical thinkers who once would have been pushed toward college will instead weigh the debt of, say, an English or journalism degree against staying home and working with their hands. He expects skilled process techs, especially in Milwaukee, to be paid more than HR roles. He also predicted that AI will eliminate many management roles that "are just pushing paper," which will lead some people to reconsider tech school or apprenticeships. The host added that technology has made these jobs more appealing than even five to ten years ago, and that they are effectively tech jobs now.
White described how frontline careers can move. When maintenance arrives, the first thing they do is ask the operator what's going on. An operator who knows the answer is likely to be promoted soon. Companies will pay to train anyone with even basic mechanical aptitude and will try to hold on to them, which, he noted, is where Secchi comes in.
He recalled growing up in a blue-collar town near Champaign where his rich friend's dad was a plumber. The plumber told him he could find someone on every corner who could write a paper, but hardly anyone who could fix a toilet. White applied that to the office. Entry-level analysts, marketers, and financial analysts are easy to find. Someone who can fix a machine, let alone program one, is not. He said he is curious how that will play out as office work becomes more automated.
The Results Claim and the Closing Line
White ended with a customer result. A Fortune 500 customer in a large metro market, with a facility of about 400 people and what he called minimal market changes, implemented Secchi. Comparing February through July year over year, from 2022 to 2023, the facility lost 68 fewer people than the year before. White was open about attribution. The customer credits Secchi with a large impact, and he joked that "according to me" it was all 68, while "according to them maybe I'm 60." He called $4,000–5,000 per turnover a cheap estimate and put the implied savings at well over half a million dollars, plus the gains from keeping people. The host reckoned the figure represented roughly 15–20% of the workforce.
What stays with him most, White said, is something a customer told him: "Don't let your bad employees chase off your good ones." Rewarding and recognizing the right behaviors isn't complicated, in his view. The hard part is getting everyone coordinated, and Secchi's aim is to simplify that to "two clicks to value." He invited listeners to request a demo, saying that as an ops guy he'd rather show than tell. The host closed on that line about bad employees chasing off good ones.
Cheers from across the table, man. Mike, welcome to the show. Welcome to Manufacturing Happy Hour. Good, I want to get loosened up. Yes, absolutely, this is the way it was meant to be done, over beverages, hanging out at a bar. Since you picked the bar, tell us about the place. Where are we at right now, and what makes it special?
Well, Pete's Pub is my favorite bar, and what makes it special is Pete's son plays soccer with my son, and so that's what makes it special, is Pete Marshall. I got introduced to Brady Street through him, so I'm not from Milwaukee.
Where are you from originally? I'm from Central Illinois, cornfields and soybeans. Okay, I saw you had some connections to U of I. Yes, yeah, I'm a third-generation Illini. Oh, there we go, all right. Yeah, the first one that didn't play sports, but went into HR. Same difference. Yeah, same difference. Okay, all right, we'll roll with that. But yeah, HR, I'm sure it's a football match every once in a while too. Yeah. The trick to having a D1 athlete is not to marry a 5-foot-1 person, but my mom's 5'1", so I went the academic route. Fair.
All right, yeah, I saw you got an education degree originally. And for anyone listening not from Milwaukee, we're on Brady Street, iconic nightlife street here, I would argue becoming even more iconic. This has become one of the spots.
Every time I've been here I've had a blast. And I wouldn't say I'm a bar guy. I'm not. Sure, I like beer, but I'm not a bar guy, and this is a fun place to be. And what makes it, you know, actually just leadership talk in general, it's fun to talk to different industries. So you and I are from manufacturing, and so we talk to manufacturing leaders, and what's that like to lead people, and what's it like in your business. And it is crazy. We're going to talk about data here in a little bit. Yeah. It's crazy how much data goes into the bar business, and it's fascinating data: how long people are here, how many drinks they have. All that stuff is in an inventory. It's really not that much different than what we do.
I was going to say, because I worked at a dive bar in college, and we did not have that type of data at all. And this was back in like 2008, 2009. That was old school, the way it used to be done, much like manufacturing was still very old school in a lot of ways back then too, right?
You go to some shops and you're like, oh man, I could help these guys out so much if they just had one little piece of data, you could make a difference. I've been in those small shops that are very old school, and I'm like, how do they make money? And then I've also been in the shops where you're like, what can we do better here? Well, I mean, this thing looks like science fiction.
So I actually, that one, I went to the Kia plant in West Point, Georgia. Okay. So it was part of, I was part of a group bringing Caterpillar to Georgia, and they showed us around the Kia plant, and I was like, this thing's from the future. I mean, it was awesome. Automation everywhere. There were a lot of employees, but still automated, and so they were just, the way they could interact with the line. And so you take that example of the dive bar, I mean, you've got people that make it work, right? And then you have the systems of the big infrastructure where they're clocking in stuff, they're keeping track of all that inventory. Same thing, just I think a beer is a little bit cheaper than a car.
Yeah, maybe your next solution will be around frontline bartenders here in the beer industry. But that's not what we're here to talk about today. We're here to talk about Secchi, and one of what will be a number of frontline-centric episodes of Manufacturing Happy Hour coming up. So let's dive in. Let's say you're hanging out at Pete's Pub and you're having a beer with someone, and someone asks you, what is it that Secchi does? And that's Secchi, spelled S-E-C-C-H-I, for anyone that's trying to Google it right now. Yes, yes. I should go into where I came up with that name here, but... That's a good drinking story. We'll get to that in a second. Go there in a minute. But yeah, when someone asks you what you do, how do you answer that if you're at the bar with them?
What we do is we cut turnover in half. That's what we do. And when I say that to people at a bar, I've got to make sure they know what I'm talking about, so turnover. We cut the turnover in half, and how we do that is employee relationship management, and empowering through data. And if you have the right data and the right leaders, the right process, you can cut that turnover right within weeks of using their software. And so the idea isn't complicated, and that's one of the reasons it's so easily adopted, but it's as simple as relationship management. It's that simple.
Yeah, no, we're going to be talking data, leadership, process throughout this conversation. Since you brought it up, where did you get the name Secchi as well? We literally are here having beers right now, so I have to ask you.
Right. So think about, you're sitting there and you're like, hey, I've got to name a company, and you have Manufacturing Happy Hour, and you want that to show up on Google, right? So how do I get this software, this software that doesn't exist, what am I going to name it? And I ended up just trying, like, okay, Employee Trail was my first shot. And then you Google Employee Trail and it shows up trails, and then there's a billion results on employees, and I'm like, that doesn't stick. And then I said, it's clarity. This is what we do, is we bring clarity to the front lines. Executive leaders have no idea what's going on, but now with Secchi you have clarity of what's going on.
And so I ended up having a friend, Josh, who was bragging about how clear his lake was around this same time, the lake by his house. And a Secchi disk actually measures the clarity of water. Okay. And so you go, clarity of water, does that have to do with anything? So we can look out at Lake Michigan right now. I can tell you that it's clear today, but I just got back from the Gulf, and I saw the Gulf, and it was clear there too. Yeah. Those are two different clarities, right? So this guy Secchi decides he's going to measure the clarity of water, and he creates a Secchi disk. You drop a disk into the water; once you can't see the disk anymore, you pinch off a rope. Now I have a measurement. So he takes his really obtuse concept of clarity of water and creates crystal-clear measurement.
And so think about your workforce. I can walk into a plant, you've been in enough plants, you walk in, within 15 minutes you know how those employees are, maybe within 10 minutes. And it's not necessarily all measurable. It's the communication boards, who said hi to me, who's smiling, how are the employees interacting, how was the meeting. All those things go into it, but you don't have a measurement. And so with our software you have a measurement. I can select an employee and tell you if they're good or bad with measurable data. And so that disk is a measurement of an obtuse, a tough thing to measure, and we're the same thing. Employee performance is a tough thing to measure.
I think that's a great origin story. I did not know Secchi was an individual that was measuring the clarity of water and found a way to comparatively measure the clarity of water. I'm glad we started off our conversation with that. I've got one very much bar-centric question left before we kind of dive into your background. I was listening to you on another podcast earlier today, and I heard you say that you're excited about the workforce challenges right now because it's forcing people to do things differently. Now, that's a very interesting comment, because I know a lot of manufacturers that would say they're not excited about the workforce challenges right now. So my question then is, how are you seeing people start to do things differently because of these challenges?
Yeah, so the challenge of not having the labor pool. When I started working, the unemployment rate was, well, I started in a boom and then it dropped off. The unemployment rate got as high as 10%, I think, in the county that I worked at, Johns Manville. So we could let somebody go and bring in another person. It felt like it was a race to the bottom. And I saw the way supervisors treated people, the way businesses treated people. And as an HR guy, we're teaching leadership, we want to be the best, and we want to treat people right, fair, respectable, all that stuff. And the market wasn't there to where we were incentivized to do that. Now, of course, I worked for a great company; we treated people well. But when the market forces us to do stuff differently, you don't have a choice. So if you have a jerk supervisor on your team right now, good luck. Good freaking luck. Yeah. You're going somewhere else.
And so having sites all over the US, I could see it. You meet a few people and you're like, yeah, something's off here. But there's no real consequence to being a jerk, because people are like, I've got to stay here, it's a good job. Now our level of leadership, I don't know how we ever measure this, but I see it from the smallest businesses to the big business: you have to take care of your folks. And our purpose statement with Secchi is let great workers do great work, and get out of their way and just let them do their dang job. It's a time right now that the workforce has to treat people right or you will lose them. Because, you know, I know people think it's money, and it is money, you have to pay a good rate and all that, but really it's, do they feel valued?
And I've been teaching and coaching and mentoring the last 15 years on how to treat people. I used to call it respectful workplace training, which is union avoidance training. I used to go around and do that. And I used to call it be-nice-to-people training. Like, just be a good dude, just be a good person to people. It's not complicated, but until you have the incentive there, it doesn't happen at the same rate. So right now what I'm seeing, even at the conferences we've been at, the leadership level is raising, and it's going to have to continue.
Well, I like your comment that right now there are consequences to being a jerk, and we see that not just with frontline workers. We see that with a lot of employees that have options right now and are able to make the jump. Despite some softening in the job market, there's still that opportunity to go somewhere where you will get treated right. So I love the mission. I want to ask you more about your background, because it looks like you went to Illinois Wesleyan and you focused on education, and then you got your master's in HR. Like you said, you've got some University of Illinois heritage. So what drew you to the field of HR initially?
Well, you say field. You're leading me into, you don't even know this, but I grew up working in cornfields. Sure. And my dad's a farmer. It seemed like there was a good shot of that based on where you grew up. Yeah. I still have it on my resume, 15 years later. I went into the interview at Master Lock, and I have detasseling. I ran detasseling crews, on my resume. If I applied for a job in the Midwest, I would put it on there, because it used to be a rite of passage. I don't know if it still is anymore, but you'd work in cornfields.
And so I started whenever it was legal, and a little before, probably, and ended up working for the wrestling coach, and I did that for a few years. Then my dad said, hey, do some cleanup work for us, and then he paid me by the hour, or he paid me by the acre. At some point I got some guys by the acre. And then I think when I was 16, maybe I was 15, because my partner had to be 16 because I didn't have a car, we ended up just killing it. At one point my brother and I had 80 people working for us. And I didn't know it at the time, but I was doing HR work.
I was doing onboarding, because I was like, I'm sick of paying for people to learn how to do everything and wear the right clothes and, you know, be sick. And so I created checklists, and then I ended up having orientation programs where I could get most of that stuff done before they were on the clock. And then my claim to fame was getting rid of water breaks. And you go, how do you do that in a cornfield? Well, one of the kids' dads worked at a Bell helmet factory, and they made hydration packs. Okay. So I got them hydration packs. So my brother and I, we ended up just making too much money, and we did a really good job. And here I'm going to be a teacher, and I'm going to make 20... Literally, that's my line when people complain about pay. I was like, hey, I was going to be a teacher, so the entry-level job pays more than what my brain was at.
Sure. So I can relate. I think it was like, average salary is 24K out of school, maybe it's 25. So I made the switch, and I looked at MBA programs, ended up running across the Master's of HR for U of I, and I was like, wait a second, 95% placement rate, average salary was three times a teacher salary. Yeah. And I thought, I could go back to teaching, but I can't go back into business. And just tons of manufacturers recruit HR folks out of U of I, so yeah, it's great.
No, I think you should have that cornfield experience on your LinkedIn profile. You've got to tell that story more. That makes a lot of sense, because you were engaging from an HR standpoint with the frontline workers on the cornfield. So very cool how this came to be. Now, when I look at your, let's say, quote-unquote professional career, like Fortune 500 career, let's call it that, you spent a lot of time with two fairly iconic manufacturing companies, like Johns Manville, and then you went over to Caterpillar after that. I'm curious, what did you notice when you went into the field in your first role? I think this was around 2006 with Johns Manville. What struck you about the nature of frontline work at that moment in time?
So I was celebrating that I got into the Building Construction Division. It was building construction, the division that built houses. Sure. In 2006. I was like, yes, I got placed with the building group, they are making so much money, my bonus is going to be sweet. And then you know what happened. And then our warehouse was full of insulation. We made fiberglass insulation; it was such a cool process.
What I noticed early on is most of the issues are completely solvable for people, and it's just treating people with respect. And that's where I came up with one of my leadership philosophies: everyone's a leader. Literally everyone's a leader. The janitor, he and I would have conversations, and he said so many things. Larry Barry, RIP, I miss that guy. Larry would just say things that I picked up on, that I'm like, hey, I should be doing this differently, I should be talking to people differently. And he didn't know it at the time, but he very much influenced the way I interacted with folks. Interesting.
And then getting out on the line, I was lucky enough, I had a boss, Joe, out of New Jersey. He's a guy that, he goes, we don't stab people in the back in New Jersey, we stab them in the face. And I said, all right, yeah, okay, man. He scared me. And he was a guy that worked every job in the plant, and he put an impression on me. He spent time with me. He said, look, you've never worked a day in your life. And I'm like, no, I worked in cornfields. Yeah. And he's like, no, you
Didn't work a day in your life. You went to school, you knew, you have a vision of where you're going. You didn't work, like, real work, where you come in every day and this is just like... Do you think that you're going to do the same thing every day, and do you think they care about profits? Do you think they care about making you more money? It doesn't affect them. It doesn't affect the guy that sits there and watches his insulation go by how much our profit is.
And I can, like, picture where I was when he had that conversation, 'cause I was so upset that he told me I didn't work, 'cause I cried myself on work. And Joe really, really taught me, like, the respect of the front line. And needless to say, I never put my degree up anywhere, and there's no reason to in a factory.
The other thing that that factory taught me is, one, I took a lot of heat about: never buy an Audi in the Deep South and show up. It was used, it was cheaper than all their trucks, but I rolled into that plant with an Audi and I just caught so much heat. Yeah, that was not the first impression you wanted to make, was it? No, horrible first impression.
The second thing is, when you're sitting there and you think you're smart, like, I got my degree, and I think this is something that I love to focus on, the front line. I think I'm smart, and you get humbled over and over and over again. Like, just because somebody has a degree has no relation to their intelligence. And I just experienced that, and it's honestly one of the best things that ever happened to my ego. Like, I got owned. I got guys that really taught me how to... you know, as I'm growing up, I was very cocky, and I just got like, hey, I need to listen to these folks.
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm glad to see that we're in a space where people are putting, I don't want to say less value on degrees, but I think they're understanding what degrees and not having degrees really mean. Like, it's not an indicator of your success or your intelligence, like you're saying. We're definitely seeing that shift, in, I was going to say in the field, not to continue the pun, but just in society in general we're starting to realize that. And I think as the world's become more connected, we've seen what countries like Germany have done, where the apprenticeship program is a highly respected field that, you know, we kind of ignored for decades.
So I think along those lines of being humbled and, you know, being cocky and all that at 22, 23 years old, I should say the HR manager quit right about the time the downturn happened, and they put me in charge as HR. Oh, interesting. And I didn't know what I was doing, so it was really great.
But when you think about value and success, I had a conversation with, he was the maintenance planner, and he said, "Look, Mike, you think success is, you know, education, you're moving around." He's like, "Dude, I got my house on the hill." Which in Georgia at that time, before they built all the plants there and made a lot of money, you could buy land for almost nothing, put a house on it. And he's like, "I have a house on the hill. I clock out and I don't have to worry about this place." His success is exactly the goal he set out to do.
When I look back in time, I'm like, my measure of success was only one side. And I think that's one of the problems when you look at degrees, or you look at colleges, which college you go to, to look at success. 'Cause he didn't have to move, he was making a hell of a lot more money, 'cause he's a maintenance planner, and as you and I both know, those guys get paid a lot. And he was living his dream, and he was doing it at home, and he got to go to church on Sunday and see his family every night.
Yeah, he knew what he wanted out of life and he found a way to get it. Didn't overcomplicate it, right? You don't have to be VP, you don't have to be a director to have that success. And it just all... Secchi, and what you're doing too, is just the respect of people that actually build. Like, I don't build with my hands. You know, you and I shook hands, we don't build. But just respecting the people that put this table together and put the equipment you're using together, it's a different mindset, and I'm glad to see more and more of it in what you're doing and what some of your other colleagues are doing with manufacturing. It's awesome.
So a couple of my takeaways from this first part of the conversation: I like what you said about everyone's a leader, your story about Barry Larry. I think you were trying to remember the name. Larry Barry is his name. Larry, I remember his name. Really? It's Larry Barry? No, okay, I thought you were like, I'm trying to remember what it was. No, it's literally Larry Barry. That's a great name. That's a great name.
He was such a good dude. He invited me, like, I got to go to his church. He was such a caring man, and just respectful, and he knew I was young, and he told me a few times, he goes, "That ain't right, what you just did." And I'm like, what are you talking about? This is the janitor walking in. This is very Breakfast Club, if you've seen that movie, where the janitor's like the wisest person in the movie. Yeah, yeah. He's a good dude. He did pass away a few years ago, but it's funny, when I get back with that crew and I'm back in Georgia and we talk about him, he's good. Just a great guy.
Well, RIP Larry Barry. Great lessons. Obviously he's left a legacy that people remember.
You know, I've got to ask you, I didn't plan to ask this, but now that I think of it, you were an HR leader during the downturn in, like, 2008. How did you get through that? What was that like? I mean, someone that listens to this podcast a year or two down the line, we're going to have ebbs and flows in our economy. Some people say we're struggling, like it's a challenge right now. How did you lead through that, particularly when you're in a role that's very people-centric?
Yeah, so I did a lot of Googling for different careers. And I remember me and the lady who I call my HR mom, the lady who taught me how to really care for people at work in a professional way, we got so good at laying people off. We were just like, hey, here's your layoff. We knew how to do it where they'd maximize their unemployment benefit. And we would go up and down, I mean, just rolling layoffs that you never felt like we were ever going to get out of. And I'm like, why did I go into manufacturing? This is the worst. And like I said, a race to the bottom.
What kept me in it is those are the opportunities where things go down, and all of a sudden I got a call. I was in this leadership development program at Johns Manville, and they said, we're ending the leadership development program. I'm like, dude, I moved to the middle of nowhere Georgia. I don't have any friends, family, like, what? And then a few weeks later they called me, but the opening for the HR manager came open. They put me in it with no experience. They would have never done that, ever. I wouldn't do that today. Yeah, with no experience, a 300-person plant, United Steelworkers.
And it was just opportunity for me. I couldn't see it at the time, but it was such an opportunity. And Karen, the plant manager, took me under her wing and just made me good. And then during that downturn, the problems we have now are nothing compared to the problems we had. Like, it's not finding people, it's not "oh man, we're not going to make even more money." It was like, when are we going to get shut down? And we were shutting down plants left and right.
And later on I got to negotiate a shutdown agreement, or be a part of a shutdown agreement negotiation, which was four weeks of just pain, of seeing people in pain. There were people at that plant at Johns Manville that couldn't read, and you go, what's going to happen to them? Morally, it was scary. And luckily we were able to keep that plant in Georgia running, and then they shut down the New Jersey plant, and it just got started up again a few years ago. Oh, okay. So it's come around, but it was a different time. And I spent time looking around, looking at other careers, but I just kind of grinded it out, not on purpose.
Well, it sounds like you personally had an opportunity open up that wouldn't have opened up otherwise in this scenario. But I wanted to hear that because I do think we make a big deal about how challenging things are right now. And I've just been thinking to myself, because I was, I would say, fortunate to be getting a job during the downturn, or trying to look for a job, because you didn't take it for granted. You were just like, oh, thank goodness I found something, right? I'm just trying to keep it in perspective. You and I both have long careers ahead of us. We're going to have to deal with downturns again. It's not if, it's when. So I appreciate you sharing that. I know those are challenging moments to work through, but I like the spin you were able to put on it.
Let's jump to Caterpillar, because you went there around 2012. I want to ask you, what was different about the state of frontline work at that time? What did you notice going from Johns Manville to Caterpillar?
So Johns Manville is relatively small. It's not small, but when you go from JM to Caterpillar, it's small. And I was able to convince the plant manager and the HR director. I had checked all the boxes. I'd worked with local colleges in the area, technical schools. We'd done some really cool stuff at Johns Manville to change that culture. And I was able to convince him. I go, hey, you know, I know it's going to be 1,400 people. It ended up being 1,800 by when I left. But my biggest plant was 350 at that point, and so I maybe did the HR for 500 folks, and that plant was 1,800.
And so the thing we had going for us is the timing was excellent. The state of Georgia, I can't say enough about doing business with the state of Georgia. They were great. Frontline leaders, we were able to pick really, really good people. And I would say the folks that we had in that startup team, we as a leadership team set a very good vision of what we wanted our culture to be, and we talked about it.
I still laugh about this because I just haven't seen it since. We had a schedule of hiring 24 people a week, or every other week, and then it ended up being weekly, and then one of the managers sat me down and said, if you don't hire 300, I don't know how you're going to have a job in the next month. There was a lot of pressure to hire folks. Wow. How do you keep hiring that many people? How do you even keep track of that? You don't. You really don't. I'm starting to see where you might have come up with the idea to form Secchi. We'll get there later, I don't want to jump too far.
Like, I pride myself on caring about people, and so when we were hiring people so fast and connecting with them, it was a challenge, and then trying to keep track of who you're connecting with, who you're leading with. That moment, though, at Cat, the challenge was we were hiring 1,400 people, well, the population was 120,000 in the area at the time. It's bigger now. But I was like, we're hiring 1% of the workforce, how the heck are we going to do this? And so our whole leadership team was out in the community. We were doing speaking events every time we had the chance.
That all being said, we had to attract them, then we had to keep them. So how did you keep them? And that's where we had great, great frontline leadership interactions and relationships. It's all relationships. That's, you know, cliche to say, whether you're in sales or you're in leadership, it's cliche, but the group we had built strong, strong relationships, and so we had great engagement scores. But the idea of Secchi actually started at Johns Manville. Oh, really? Or the concept of it, yeah.
Well, trying to think, do we jump to that right now? I'm okay. Well, one thing I want to ask is, so you made the jump to Caterpillar. I'm curious about the changes you saw in the state of frontline work there. Would you say it was more of a reflection of Caterpillar, or more a reflection of the fact that it was six years later, things had changed in industry, we'd gone through a downturn? I'm curious.
We were just coming out of the downturn in 2012. The business was there. And, you know, one of the highlights for us, I mean, this is where, you know, politicians... this is a story for you. So we have great leaders, we've got a great team at Cat, we're doing all cool stuff, we're helping the community. All these projects that were on hold in the community got approved, because they're like, shoot, these people have health insurance.
And this is where the leadership team just had a deep, deep sense of purpose of what we're doing. Sure, we're making Caterpillar money, sure, it's going to be awesome for our Building Construction Products division, all that other stuff. But we knew that we are giving people jobs, or they're earning jobs that have health insurance, that have 401(k)s, that they now have a future that they didn't have before. And the hospital added another building. I don't know if it's because of us, but it didn't hurt that we hired 1,800 people that went from these small-time shops to Cat.
That was a huge challenge, recruiting people that got their job 'cause their daddy... Like, I can't tell you how damn many people just thought I would hire somebody 'cause I knew them. "Oh, hire my son." I'm like, no, that's not how big corporations work, buddy.
The state of it was, I would say Caterpillar had the infrastructure and systems to train folks, which was really helpful. And the people that we moved in, I think we had about 250 management employees there, I would say probably 20-ish were moved in from other Cat plants. And so those folks having the systems in place, that's what Cat had, is systems. Johns Manville, although it's big and they had systems, it wasn't as centralized and funded as it would have been in the big corporation.
Got it, okay. Centralized, funded systems. That's what separates the systems at one of the world's largest enterprises versus your regular enterprise, let's call it that.
Yeah. So the downside of that is, I implemented a weld test, and holy moly, I had to get it passed. I think it took me six months, maybe more, eight months. We're hiring 300 welders, and people that are listening are like, how do you hire 300 welders? I was like, I do not know, we were just going to figure this out. Well, a weld screening test, to get it approved to use with the state of Georgia's help, we had to convince probably 12 different people at Caterpillar that this wasn't going to be discriminatory and we're not going to get sued and all that. Whereas at Johns Manville, I probably could have got it past three people and got it approved.
So making change there is really hard. Sure. On the flip side, you have a lot of efficiency and resources to execute when you need to execute. As a frontline employee, they're not seeing that. We're trying to make sure they don't see that bureaucracy. But no, it makes sense.
That makes sense. I'm going to go back to the question I was thinking about asking you, which is, how did all this lead to Secchi? I know you had some other experiences in there, but I'm really curious how Secchi came to be, and you mentioned it was at Johns Manville where you kind of first had that idea.
Yeah, so we had an Access database. So I walk into Johns Manville, I don't know any better, and the
Supervisors start giving me a hard time. They're like, "You don't let us get rid of any of the bad employees." And I was like, "What do you mean? You just have to do your homework, just do your documentation." "Well, it takes too long." And they're complaining about all the processes, and I'm like, how do I make this easier? At the time we had a facility that uses an Access database, and I was able to get some folks together that helped me create coachings and disciplines. So that system started off as a way to get rid of bad folks, which it did. We were able to get the documentation in place. When you have documentation in place, oh my gosh, engagement skyrocketed, 'cause nobody wants to work next to somebody that's lazy, whether it's on this podcast or in a factory.
And so I built, or we built, this tool to get rid of bad people. That's the origin story. But then we add coaching, and then we add recognition. And that Access database was the idea of, like, hey, if we make it... it's where I learned: if I make things easy for supervisors, they'll do the right thing. Mm-hmm. And look, if you look at any HR processes, are they hard for people to do? And back to the purpose statement: let great workers do great work, right?
So we did that Access database. Then fast forward 15 years, 14 years, whatever, 13 years, and I call Melinda, the lady who had the Access database, that backfilled my job. I was at Master Lock, and we came out of negotiations and we had these grievances, and I probably shouldn't say how much we had to pay for those. Sure. But we didn't do a good job keeping track of our documentation. And I meet with Tony. I'm going to mention his name 'cause he lives in town and I'm buddies with him now. Yeah. Tony Rainey. You know, if you've ever dealt with labor unions, there's guys that, and this goes back to being humbled, there's guys that do the job and there's guys who can really do the job, and Tony's one of those guys. And we're arguing about somebody coming back to work that had this horrible attendance problem, and I end up saying, "Hey, let's sidebar." And he and I go out in the room and I'm like, "You're just kicking my butt in this argument. What do we have to do to get these employees... We're going to have to bring them back. Okay, fine. But we got to make sure this doesn't continue, so what are we going to do?" And in my head, I just wished I had that system. I wished I had that Access database.
Yeah. And I go back home, I'm at my parents' farm, and I called Melinda, 'cause it just was in my head and I couldn't stop thinking about it. I go, "Are you still using that database?" And she says, "Yeah," she goes, "we have it in like 10 plants." And I'm like, 15, or I guess it's 13 years ago, and you expanded it like that? That was like, okay, that's old technology; add in 15 years of experience, what could this look like? Yeah. And that's where I, as a director, I couldn't do it on Master Lock time, I had to do it on my own time, so I had to quit. But at that point I was like, this works, this is a problem everywhere, I'm going to do it. Well, when we added recognition, all of a sudden, I built a tool to fire people, now it's a tool to retain people. It's the easiest thing, too. It's just having the data.
I want to ask kind of the flip side of this. How do frontline employees feel about systems like this? 'Cause I like your line that you said, hey, no one wants to work next to someone that's lazy. But how do frontline workers, how do the team members respond to, when it's like, oh man, they've got data on this now? I'm curious what your take on that is.
So we talked a lot about the bad side of leadership and employee relationship management. The bad side is, yeah, there's people that are really bad. But the good side is, I know, it's funny, this month our recognitions doubled in, thanks, in November. So we have a measurement of all the connections. We call them connections, whether it's a... Recognitions are part of the platform? Yes, part of the platform is recognition. So our recognitions doubled in November, and I'm like, what's going on? It's not like we doubled our population of users. Yeah, it's 'cause Thanksgiving, everybody's being grateful right now. Oh, there you go. Okay, that makes sense. That's cool, that's a cool data point. Yeah, Happy Thanksgiving.
Well, I can tell you how many recognitions are sent out at each one of our customers. I can tell you, and the employees are receiving a text message within our platform that says thank you for doing X, Y, or Z. Got a little story on that. I sat down with a CEO, this was one of our early adopters, it was last year, and I said, "Hey, do you know this guy, Bill?" He actually said yes, which I was like, dang, he knows his people. I mean, they have 700 employees. He goes, "Yeah, I heard about that guy." And I go, "Did you know that..." This company does logistics. They systematically lost two pallets. This entry-level guy got it back in the system, communicated to the whole team, got it to the customer last week. And he's like, "That's awesome." I go, "When are you going to Fort Worth next?" He said, "Two weeks." I said, "Go shake Bill's hand and tell him that you appreciate him finding those two pallets." So that executive-level view, to know exactly what that person did, the engagement... I mean, is Bill ever going to leave? The CEO knows him and what he does. Good point.
So of course this program was built, like we talked a lot about the negative side, this program was built to just kind of CYA. But then what happened is, if you've ever heard of software building, you listen to the customers, you're doing new features. This is a complete culture development tool. So you said, what do you do, you cut turnover in half, how do you do that? Well, what if I could tell you exactly who does your work and exactly what they've done? And you're an executive, so when you go to visit a plant, you have a picture of the person, you know how many days they missed, you know what they've been coached on, you know what they're doing great, and to break it down to a level that's even machine level or process. It's just unprecedented transparency for the execs.
Well, one of the initial questions I wanted to answer during this conversation was, you know, what does it mean to simplify performance and employee relationship management? And I think your stories have really shined a light on that. One thing you mentioned at the start of the interview, 'cause you mentioned you cut turnover in half, I think that's going to be one of the things people remember from this conversation, and you mentioned it's because it's data, it's leadership, and process. I've got a question along these lines, because when I looked at your LinkedIn earlier, you talk about data, teamwork, and courage as the values that Secchi holds dear. So let's revisit this a little bit. Why data, teamwork, and courage? Why those three, and what do those have to do with employee relationship management?
So when you generally think about employee relationship management, you don't think about data. Mm-hmm. And that mostly has to do with, you're like, oh, they're a good leader, they're a great leader. And we want to bring this level of transparency with data, that we're no longer making feelings decisions with folks, we're making data-driven decisions, and we're taking away the administrative work around those data-driven... Let great workers do great work. Get the data in front of people. We are a data-driven business. Manufacturers are data-driven companies. We align well.
You add in the teamwork, and actually it says in our little sheet, that's not on the web, our internal sheet, that everyone's a leader. So that's the teamwork of, okay, I'm going to listen to everyone. Doesn't mean I have to do it, but I'm going to listen to them, because there's something I can learn from everyone. Even your worst employee, you can learn something from, and your best employee, you better be learning from.
And then courage is, hey, you know, I always wondered why HR people had to worry about having a seat at the table. I never really had that problem. Mm-hmm. And it's because I'm running into HR folks, we sold HR for a little bit, and HR, quite frankly, a lot of people in HR don't have the courage to make the change or propose this. They know how wasteful some of their processes are, but they don't want to say, hey, I have the courage to change that. Interesting. Yeah. And so we want to work with people that want to make bold decisions, 'cause it's the easiest thing for us to say, oh, we already have an HRIS system, oh, our time clocks do that automatically. They don't. They freaking don't. Anybody out there that thinks that your time clocks are doing stuff automatically for you and keeping track of employees and creating a relationship, I challenge you. I will come out to your plant for free, and I can process map it, and I can show you that it's not happening.
But so you add in that courage piece of, like, hey, we're relatively new technology. We're two years old and a year operational. And so you got to take courage to trust that we can execute. And also you have to take the step as a leader to think your supervisors are capable of leading people. If you don't think supervisors are capable, if you're cowardly and think the supervisors can't do it... I hear that sometimes: oh, supervisors won't do it. I haven't had an adoption problem with supervisors with our product. It just doesn't happen, because it makes their life so much... It's an empowering product, is what it sounds like. It is, very important.
And it's funny that you talked about, you know, clocking in, clocking out, because when I first started doing my research on Secchi and on you, and trying to understand what does this system do, those are one of the first things that jumped out at me. But I don't want to make this overblown, but I haven't really thought about that much during this conversation, 'cause it really feels like more of a... I don't want to say a character tracking platform, but it's a good way to, you know, capture what someone's real character is. Yeah. Was how I've interpreted some aspects of our conversation.
Right. So one of the features is we look at a holistic view. Imagine if you could look at a 12-month calendar, and I could show you the things you did good, the things you did bad, the dates you missed, in one visual view. Like that, in a snap of fingers, I have your performance. And it's real data. It's not, oh, I feel like they did this. And that's another misnomer, like, oh, we have performance reviews at our company. Oh, you do? Your frontline leaders that direct 40 people are writing performance reviews for each employee that are meaningful, and your employees care about it? No, they don't. They don't. And I feel like I'm attacking now, but I am. It's foolish to think...
And this is another story of that Johns Manville plant, this humbling experience. I built this great performance review process and I rolled it out to the supervisors. Didn't get their feedback, you know, normal HR guy stuff. I didn't get their feedback, I just kind of, like, hey guys, supervisor meeting, you all are doing this next. You know, it's probably in October, they had it due in December, and they're like, "You're freaking crazy." They basically rolled this nice piece of paper, threw it back at me: "We're not doing it. It's an hour to set up, it's an hour to get them off the floor. By the time I talk with them, then they're going to have an issue, so now I have meetings with you. This is not meaningful, this is not a good thing for us." And so one of the things I like to do is break things down simply, and the simple thing is hourly performance management: Did you show up on time every day as scheduled? Did you do something great? Did you do something wrong? That's it. That's a very simple way to break it down. I like that.
Now, you carry a booklet, I carry a booklet. Everybody that listens to Manufacturing Happy Hour carries around a book. We all do it. Mm-hmm. Go to a meeting in a manufacturing plant, you see it. The book could be on your phone too. Some people have a very disciplined way of keeping notes on their phones. Yes, there are. Didn't need to be a literal booklet, I just wanted to make sure folks out there listening knew that as well. There are some really cool OneNotes. Yeah. That being said, if you could take your book, and I could pull out all the employees, the dates they weren't there, the things they did great, the things they did bad, and I could put it on a one-sheet, and you sit down to do your performance review and see it in color... I mean, one of the customers, the supervisor is like, "You just saved me hours and hours of work." And the best part, it's all defensible, because it's all documented. So, yeah. A lot of people think the time... HRIS. We're not an HRIS system. I don't want to be HR. No ops manager wants an HRIS system; there's 50 clicks. We're an employee relationship program that's built for ops leaders.
Yeah, and you've talked about how it's simplified for them as well, and I like the way you simplified it with your three bullets you listed right there. And by the way, for everyone out there that wants to check out Secchi, we're going to have links in the show notes at manufacturinghappyhour.com. Again, that's S-E-C-C-H-I. I'm going to spell it multiple times out loud so people know how to find it. No, it's not like "Seki" or something like that. S-E-C-C-H-I. It's Italian. Angelo Secchi. Yes. We got you covered there.
So we're getting to the end of our beers, and we're also getting to the end of our conversation, so I only have a couple more questions. This one's a big one. I want you to take this however you want, answer it however you want. Are we entering the age of the frontline worker? 'Cause this is a constant theme on the podcast lately: people that have created solutions that are meant to, I'll say, empower the frontline worker in different ways. Like, some of them are how-tos; you're doing a platform that's very HR-centric. Are we entering the age of the frontline worker?
100%. The all-stars, you know, think about running backs in the '90s for football, right? Like Emmitt Smith, Faulk right at the end of the '90s, Thurman Thomas, right? Like, we all knew the star running backs. Yeah. And then you moved into the two backs. Now running backs are, you know, there's some standouts, but there are like some three-headed monsters on teams that have three different running backs they rotate between. Yes. And so the stars were the running backs. Yeah. And now the stars, I mean, I'll call out a Wisconsin native and friend of one of our co-founders, like Joe Thomas just got into the Hall of Fame, Wisconsin grad, O-lineman, right? It's like the stars aren't just running backs anymore, and running backs and quarterbacks.
And so I think when you apply that analogy to manufacturing, it's like the front line's kind of been the O-line. They're the underappreciated group of folks that have to go every day, grind, that run into problems, that have to fix things. And then you got the quarterback in the front office that has to pay more attention to those folks. And I think, like, you want to win, you want to have the smartest front line, smartest O-line you can have, the one who knows how to do the play.
And going back to the '90s, and being educated at the back end of the '90s, you look at what GE did with Six Sigma. And Six Sigma is mostly, I mean, I'm simplifying it, it's good project management, but it's mostly listen to your frontline people. Yeah. And then lean manufacturing: listen to your frontline people. That's already been in motion for 20-plus years. Now we're at the level where there's events where high school graduates put on their plumbing hats and put on their manufacturing hats instead of their
colleges because we are moving to, oh my gosh, these jobs are going to be so impactful, and a really, really great process tech is more valuable than a manager with a degree, cuz we can... I mean, I figured it out. I'm like, HR can be replaced pretty dang easy, but that guy who knows how to use the melter, the guy who can weld three different machines that's specialized and it takes a while to be able to finesse it, like those folks can... I think the tables are really headed that way, and wages are headed that way too, which is good, I think, generally.
I think I'm more attached to a respectful work environment than the highest paying. I saw a lot of folks at Caterpillar in the legacy plants that were so high paying they couldn't leave, and I felt almost sorry for guys that just hated coming into work and they were stuck. Yeah. Whereas, and maybe inflation has caught up, that's a few years old, but whereas you go to a plant that's a startup and you're at startup wages, and you know it's going to grow, but it's not as good as maybe somewhere down the road. Yeah, I think this is all a good thing for the frontline employee.
Well, I want to make a quick point that has almost nothing to do with this podcast, but I have known the value of front lines for a long time as a former St. Louis Rams fan, because the Rams are obviously a former St. Louis team, and we had Orlando Pace as a critical part of the O-line back in the Greatest Show on Turf era. So, right. But yes, the running backs, your Jerome Bettises, your Marshall Faulks of the world, certainly had more of the spotlight, but I thought that was a great analogy to talk about how we're starting to share the glory of the line, if you will.
So my next question is a follow-up to this, then. What do we think the nature of the frontline worker looks like two to three years down the line? Look in your crystal ball and tell us, look in your pint glass and tell us what you see a couple years down the line.
I am, you know, my confidence is up this much, so I am fairly certain two to three years down the line, I don't think the workforce... you know, I've listened to enough and read enough about the demographics, I don't think the workforce is going to change. I don't think it's going to change. And you and I are going to the same trade shows. The automation is really kicking ass, right? Right. So the automation is going to push and going to drive productivity, and AI is going to be there too.
But the frontline employee that is a critical thinker, that maybe when you and I were coming up would have been pushed into college, they're going to go, 100,000? It's going to be the same as the plumber story and the skilled trades right now. They're going to go, wait a second, all this debt, it doesn't really make sense to get this English degree or this journalism degree. They're going to go, I'm good with my hands, I stay at home, I don't have to move and chase this career. I can have a career here, in especially Milwaukee, right? Like, if you're a good process tech here, I see them being paid on the upside of definitely more than HR. It's going to be interesting.
Yeah, my prediction is automation, AI is going to drive out a lot of management roles that are just pushing paper right now, and that's going to put people going, hey, wait a second, you know, I remember when my dad taught me to hammer this nail or turn this wrench. Maybe I should go back to that tech school, maybe I should check that apprenticeship out.
The technology that's available is just making these jobs more appealing than they were even just 5 to 10 years ago. Like, these are tech jobs now at the end of the day, right?
The entry-level job is... is it the first thing you do when you're maintenance? I'm not a maintenance guy, but I know the training. First thing you do is you ask the operator what's up, you know. And if the operator knows what's up, it's almost certain that that operator is going to get promoted within a short period of time. And then on top of that is you come in with minimal mechanical ability, even just an aptitude of, hey, let's figure this out, companies are going to pay for those people to get whatever training they need, and they're going to try to hold on to them. And that's kind of, we help them hold on to them. But that workforce, I'm excited to see it differently. Like, I'm excited to see...
And I grew up in a small, at the time, blue-collar town. My rich friend's dad was a plumber. Like, that was a rich guy. Yeah, was he running the business at that point? Yeah. Yeah, I've been telling people, it's like if you can learn the trade and you can pick up some of the business savviness that goes with it, and then you can start running the show, man, that is a lucrative, kind of under-the-radar career opportunity right there.
Right. He said, and I remember this quote like it was yesterday, he's like, "Mike, you can..." and we're outside of... I grew up outside of Champaign, so it's a college town 20 minutes away from my hometown. And he goes, "I can find somebody on every corner that can write you a paper, but there is nobody that can fix a toilet." So there's only, you know, there's only a few companies that can.
And think about that concept. Think about that concept and where we're going with the workforce right now. I can find somebody that can do analyst work. I can find an entry-level marketing... I can find entry-level CFO, not... what's entry-level CFO? Financial analyst. Financial analyst, there we go. I could find a financial analyst, but if you can find somebody that can fix a machine, let alone be in programming, you know, where does that head? And yeah, it'll be interesting, as we automate more in the office, what that looks like in our world.
I'm excited to see how that plays out. I'm excited to see how the adventure for Secchi plays out as well. As we wrap up, what's the best way to connect with you? Any final thoughts you want to leave the audience with?
My beer's done. So you don't need to chug it, you only have like one sip left, but maybe that's a new rule of the podcast: the beers need to be finished by the end of the episode. I like that, especially. Yeah, they've got to finish it.
I think I'd leave it... so, set up a demo with us. Yeah, let us walk you... you know, I've done a lot of talking. I'm an ops guy, you know, show me. The thing that I'm going to hit you with, just a couple results, is the Fortune 500 customer we have, year-over-year 2022 to 2023, with minimal market changes, big metro market. They implemented us, and if we look at February to July year-over-year, they lost 68 less people than the previous year. This is a facility of about 400.
Nice. 68 less people, four to five grand a turnover, that's cheap. That is 15 to 20% of the workforce right there, based on the numbers you just threw out. It's a crazy number.
I don't need a... the data is the data. They lost 68 less people year-over-year. They give us credit for having a huge impact on the 68. Are we all at 68? According to me, yes. According to them, maybe I'm 60. But close enough. Close, still a big number. It's a big number, right? So if you save that, the implications of... you're well over a half million dollars in savings, and then you add in all the numbers that went up because they got to keep people.
And the thing that sticks out to me more than anything is: don't let your bad employees chase off your good ones. We had somebody say that to us, and it is so true that if you let a bad employee, they can chase off the good ones. And when you reward and recognize the right behaviors... this is not complicated. What's complicated is getting everybody coordinated in the line. That's the complication, and that's where we come in and we just simplify the heck out of it, and two clicks to value, man. That's it. So I just wanted to leave you with that stat, and I appreciate your time and letting me talk about Secchi.
Yeah, this has been a blast. I love all the storytelling. This has been an hour well spent. "Don't let your bad employees chase off your good ones," great note to end on. Obviously everyone should know how to spell Secchi by this point because we spelled it like three times, but for everyone out there, there are links over in the show notes, you know how to connect with Mike, all that jazz. This has been a blast. Thanks so much for coming, hanging out at the bar, doing things the way Manufacturing Happy Hour should be done.
Thanks a bunch. Cool. Shake hands, is that cheers? Yeah, we can't cheers on an empty glass. All right, folks.
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