So my

favorite part of this story is you trying to convince him to do lean.

And then he said, all right, Kevin, I'm going to go take this video walking around our entire place.

So you guys literally have this video of him walking around pointing out like a hoarder mess, like opens a closet and it's just full of crap and papers everywhere and everything.

And he's like, we'll see how good you do in a year.

yeah I mean one I wish we all had that like when around the factory originally

What are we going to have ready for this? Even our lean tours, every second week, we're always pushing to be better every week.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, about, it must be eight years ago now, Paul Akers actually visited Satan Matters and we were really looking forward to him coming because we thought he was going to come and give us all these things that we should do and should be working on.

And he walked around the tower for like, I don't know, three or four hours.

And at the end, I was sitting ready with the notebook ready to say, right, Paul, like, what do you have to say? What should we do? And he said, you guys will figure it out.

You're doing amazing.

You're doing great.

And that's actually what I wanted.

Now you need to fix it.

going to let Ryan lead and kind of be the

I think I had a light bulb moment when you told me, when we were talking about this, I was like, Because all I try to do is make things simple.

And if anybody out there Googles lean manufacturer and there's all these charts and graphs and it's all this complicated stuff.

But I always look for like phrases or words to like explain lean in simple terms.

And I think you've done it for me this week.

You talked about removing friction.

And it sounds like a small word, but I think we should talk about this because a lot of people can benefit from Yeah.

Like just in the weeds with somebody like fighting.

It belongs.

It belongs.

But what I've seen this week is, in some cases, the exact opposite.

You know, disorganized areas, stuff on the floor.

But they were hitting their numbers and making a lot of money.

Yeah.

And it kind of made me think, and this is maybe not a lean thing, but just like a business thing in general, is that I need to personally focus more on sales.

You were like, everyone was like, oh, my gosh.

But as part of the mix, you know, how important is the

book as part of it? I think what I'm trying to do is create a whole package.

So you've got the YouTube content, which people love sitting back in their living room in the evening and watching a 25 minute video.

And there's loads of visuals, loads of physical stuff to see changing.

We're taking out old machines.

We're painting walls, we're renovating an old 63 year old company and people love how engaging that is to watch.

You know, I get messages all the time where people saying like, we sit as a family and watch your videos.

How do I go about doing that? What would you say to that person to help them sort of get over that hurdle to actually just start? There's

are the wine drinkers going? Weed?

Tequila, hopefully.

Yeah.

I mean, I think wine...

Wine brands also maybe don't market as well to the younger people as, you know...

I guess those seltzer drinks are more popular.

RTDs are on fire.

We talked about it maybe two years ago.

Hello and welcome to the Voice of Authority podcast with me, Alastair Luke.

And my vision is to make Ireland the next Japan.

What I'm doing is not shining a light on me, I'm shining a light on

There's no better person to begin that conversation with than Ryan Tierney, the founder of Lean Made Simple.

I think the world is divided into two types.

You're either a consumer or a creator.

And I would rather be on the creation side.

Everybody's got an iPhone in their hand.

We don't necessarily need the history in terms of scale and nature of work and customers and, and team numbers, and the same for Sperrin Metals, and let's do a bit of a compare and contrast so people can see that, um, you've learned lessons and you're applying them.

Yeah, absolutely.

So Seating Matters is our first family business.

Uh, my mother is an occupational therapist.

She seen the need for this type of seating, uh, and she couldn't get it anywhere, so myself and my two brothers started to making one chair in a, in a back, uh, in a small shed behind her family home.

Started off very small and grew up, but seven or eight years into our journey, I was in charge of operations, and operationally, the business was very chaotic.

Our lead time was really long with loads of quality issues.

Right.