[00:00:00] Speaker A: The reason it can develop and grow so quickly is that you got to have the right circumstances, you got the right systems and leadership and tools, technology, all this combination of things for the super talents to thrive.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Our guest today started his first business at age 19 in a precision manufacturing area. It's since grown into a multimillion dollar operation known today as Dillon aerospace. Yet in 2023 he officially launched Legacy Maker, offering entrepreneurs a revolutionary AI based software platform for turning their incredible ideas into income generating assets. Something every entrepreneur wants to be able to do. Very excited to have you with us today. Welcome to the show, Darrell Sutherland.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: Hey bud. Yeah, this has been a long time coming, so I'm excited to be here now.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: You know, there's so many different directions we can talk about today. We're definitely going to spend some time talking about this new software tool that you've developed and how it's helping entrepreneurs. But I want to rewind the tape and go a little bit further back. You know, thinking about starting a manufacturing company in the aerospace industry isn't something that most people when they're at 19 years old think, yeah, I really am going to go do that. So I'm really curious, what prompted that decision for you? Did you already have a proclivity to like really be fascinated by things in aerospace? What made you decide to go in that vertical directly and what was the drive to say, you know what, I'm going to start my own business.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: Wow. How to unpack that?
Well, I was definitely one of these kids that I think most entrepreneurs would really understand this where didn't really fit into the traditional education system. I would say we did not get along very well. Spent a lot of time not in class, usually like in the principal's office or some kind of detention or like I said, we just did not get along.
But one thing I found very interesting is I was math and science type of things, specifically math came super easy to me. I could just see anything that was formulaic would come very fast and easy.
And my dad was a craftsman. He told me when I was very young that if you were to learn a highly demanded skill in the trades that you'll at least always be able to feed your family.
And I thought that was some of the greatest advice.
And I like building things. He had basically a woodworking shop at our home. He built a little shop and that was pretty awesome. For a period of time. He was never a guy that would sit and teach me anything. You'd have to basically just sit there and shut your mouth or Else you'd be kicked out of the room.
And I was one of these kids who was just deep curiosity and inquisitive and asked a lot of questions, which is a lot of the reason why the education system didn't necessarily like me because. Because I would constantly question authority and why we're learning this thing and this idea, how would I ever use this in the real world? I mean, can you imagine as a second and third grader asking your instructor, your teacher, how would I ever use this in the real world?
Yeah, I was that kid. And so manufacturing, to me, I mean, it seemed to be like the easy transition. I was exposed to the metal manufacturing, if you will, instead of the woodworking side through a friend of mine. Growing up, his dad had a pretty amazing machine shop in his garage.
And yeah, I mean, that's how I started. My buddy was building parts. I'd ride my BMX bike over to his house when he was in his early teens and. And he was building military parts in this garage. And I'm like, man, is this shit even legal?
I didn't even know that was a thing or you could do that. And I was just so fascinated. The ability to take a big chunk of material and whittle it down into this precision part.
And it was just so fascinating to me. And it basically consumed my life at that point.
Everything I could get, every opportunity I could get. And I basically just started working in this guy's garage at 16 years old. And that was the start of the manufacturing space for me.
And by the time I was, let's see, well, 19 is when I got right out of high school and I started working this little tool and die shop. And at the same time I started, you know, my little. I called it DA Systems and for my initials and. And I basically was just doing some like basic weld and fab out of this guy's facility and had an opportunity that came up the. We were building some production ground support work for Boeing and this tooling work. And it wasn't flight critical stuff.
And our. Basically the welder that we were using had some issues and they couldn't do the work. And so my, the guy that owned the company was all up in arms like, man, we got this job to get done and we don't have a welder. And I was like, well, I can weld. And I didn't have any idea what I was getting myself into because this was like precision welding, not like stick welding. Throw a blob on. Burning two pieces of material together. This Was actually very specific, critical toleranced type of work. And for that previous year, there was a guy, Lenny, who was the sales guy for the local weld shop distributor that was calling us on a regular basis. He said, hey, if you ever need any help. So I called up Lenny and I was like, man, I just stepped in this one, man, I have a potential opportunity here to do some weld work. But I have no idea, you know, what any of this stuff means, you know, can you help? And he's like, for sure. We have a willing, you know, kind of a demo type slash class. And so I ended up going to this thing. He told me the gear I needed to buy for this specific job and you know, just became just that. You know, we didn't know him at the time, but we call them mentors now, right? Or a coach.
And he was just a guy that, you know, he wanted to sell, but he was, he was so deep into the welding world of truly supporting his customers that he held my hand through this whole project. And I was able to buy my first piece of equipment, which was this welding machine, A very special welding machine that could do wire feed mig in steel and aluminum. And so anyways, I ended up getting this job.
I set it up, set up a little production facility at this guy's shop and you know, that became the very first professional, you know, fab job I ever did. And that, you know, that evolved and just keep evolving. And I would, I would pick up these little customers here and there of building, you know, aftermarket products. Everything from, well, we can't do it anymore, but like gun parts to.
I mean safely gun parts to paintball to ultralight aircraft. I mean, anything you can think of that was some kind of precision metallic work. I was doing all these side jobs and that side business just kept rolling and rolling and eventually it replaced my main income.
But I had a really unique opportunity working with my friend in this small tool and dye shop. And we had the opportunity to actually take the company over.
He offered me to be a partner in that deal. And I counseled with a bunch of people and they were like, yeah, partnerships with friends don't work so well. And so we opted to not do that. And I just had a really unique opportunity to work inside a turnkey facility that had all this equipment and beginnings of automation. And I just contracted, I basically just contracted the equipment, right? I got my own customers and I helped build his team. So we had a really unique. In fact, I don't think you could replicate the deal that we had just from a liability standpoint today in this litigious society, it was almost an unofficial.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Partnership in that it was real true collaboration before the word collaboration became popular.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: Yeah, well said. Yeah, yeah, it was very, very much a collaboration. He got tremendous value out of me because I trained his people and built systems and things of that nature. And as they grew and then moved on into their own buildings forward, I did the same thing and stayed in the same parking lot and you know, eventually rented a big space and then you know, more space and more space and started stacking it with machines and, and just kept growing and growing and growing and you know, and then, and then of course 911 happened and that was a real, you know, kick in the face here. We just got things really rocking. Um, I think at the time maybe I had like seven or eight people and, and when you have, you know, people that you've trained highly skilled, it's like man, you cannot let them go. They're just too hard to find. And especially because you know, they learned from me.
And, and so when, when the whole industry shut down, you know, I hustle man, I got out. And, and, and that's really when I, I formed this, a deeper sort of a time block model. And it's something we can talk about too. I created this thing called My Toys which is just I call entrepreneurial's time block model.
And Just Really Quickly MyToys is an acronym so my and then T O Y s so my time 7 to 11, T is their time, O is our time, Y is your time and S asleep. And so it's a model that I created way back then and then didn't formalize it into this My toys thing until I don't know, maybe eight years, seven, eight years ago.
But I used this idea of four hour block times because I knew as a kind of a crazy ass entrepreneur, the idea of being strapped down to a 15 or 30 minute Franklin Covey planner ish type of thing was like sticking a fork in my good eye. And so, but I knew if I could stuff things into a four hour block, it would significant, I could get significant things done. And I just proved this over and over and over again.
So I would early in the morning, first four hours and usually I would start.
This model shifted quite a bit. But when I was building my company originally this idea of what is a manufacturing company going to look like?
There wasn't the Internet, right? I mean there wasn't all these programs and the only thing that was available was the sort of personal Development, Tony Robbins, Brian Tracy, Jim Rohn, kind of all the big names, personal development and Robert Kiyosaki kind of popped out back in the, what, 90s, I think.
And there was a bit of a shift to try and package up what building businesses was like, but nobody in the manufacturing. In fact, it was quite the opposite.
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[00:12:48] Speaker A: Everybody in the manufacturing space, it was like, you know, eating at a prison, right? Where it's like everything that's in front of you is like high, deep depth protection.
Everything was ip, right? No matter what you did, how you planned it, everything in the business model became your little secret protected.
The ways that you do things is what I would consider true intellectual property.
So there was nobody to teach you how to do anything. And so it was literally, you know, you, you. Basically what I did is I had companies that I really respected and I would figure out a way to get on their approved supplier list and just start doing work for them so I could talk to the leadership and then eventually, ideally get through C suite or even to the, you know, ownership, depending on the size of the business. And then I was just curious, I asked a lot of questions and, you know, I kind of, I basically spend a tremendous amount of time serving the people so I could build a relationship. Right. I mean, you know, this seems sort of like, oh, it's a duh moment, but back then there was nobody teaching any of this stuff. And so you needed to keep your.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: People and effectively the industry you had built a business around had shut down temporarily. It was the only way to keep the engine flowing.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. And when you have, you know, a solid team of people, it's just paramount to, once they're running and trained kind of under your umbrella, that you just don't lose them. And so, yeah, so I got out in the market and hustled my butt off. I literally put the suit on, which you don't do in the Manufacturing space, but I did because I didn't know any difference. So I went into the whole men's warehouse back then and got my first, what I consider business suit. And I, I'd put that sucker on and for four hours I'd be out pounding doors and the old shaking hands, kissing babies kind of thing.
And it really paid off because you wear the suit coming in the front door and then you wear the, whatever, Levi's, Wranglers, the jeans and the cowboy boots coming in the back door, so to speak. The people in the front door is usually leadership, founders, owners, C suite. And the back door is, you know, all the, the people that get the done right then the ones that actually do the work, so to speak. And, and I was, I was, I was the guy that, you know, was the back door guy. And I had to learn to become the guy in the front door working and living in that space. And I mean, again, no, you know, there was nobody teaching this these type of things. And so for me, it was like formulating all these variety of plans, not just how I would build a part through the shop in some kind of a work order and then hitting all these different work centers.
And this is the model I'm building formally today, what I call beyond the machines, which is how we're building out all of these tools and models for other people to build a successful manufacturing company from zero. Right. So I'm writing a whole series of books and we'll get in. You had mentioned the Legacy Maker package. I built that software for myself because I'm not a person. I'm not designed to sit down in front of a keyboard and type my thoughts out. My brain doesn't flow that way. I'm a person that has to be speaking my ideas out loud like most of my entrepreneur friends, right. I need to be hiking, I need to be in some kind of flow state. And when I am, it is like magic.
You can get yourself well, I've learned this now, but I can get myself into flow state so quickly on variety of subjects, but I didn't have a great way to capture the information. So we built out this ridiculous AI platform over quite a few years. But it's another tool in the tool belt.
But in the beginning, when you don't have the mentors and you don't have the systems and so forth, and you're just kind of bumbling your way through, I had to figure out who I could go to that I felt was like really doing what I wanted to do and how I wanted to build my model in the space and there was a couple decent shops and I did backflips for these guys just to get in their favor so I could learn anything. And that was really kind of a unique way to almost be like an intern, if you will, where I would say I was doing reduced rates on building the parts just so I could spend time with the people. And because I was giving them such a good deal, they love me coming in, right? And I was always talking and listening and, and I, I learned, I probably learned a lot more of what not to do than I did of what to do. Which has probably just saved me millions of dollars over the last, you know, whatever, 40 years, 30 years, 35 years.
[00:18:08] Speaker B: That's through asking good questions, but also being observant. Because if you're in there, you're in their shop, you're in there, you're in their business location, you're learning what their challenges are and how are they overcoming them. And you have a mind that says, is that the right path? What else could you do? What might you do differently? Is probably the type of question that's going on inside the internal conversation you're having with yourself.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Well, just like I was describing, sort of my issue with the education system is that if it was in a formula and I could apply that formula to real world, I'm pretty high. Quick start in that space.
For those of you know, the colby, I'm a 2295 and so super visionary, quick start entrepreneurial, very entrepreneurial type of person, which is really strange with a 2295, which basically I don't have a lot of follow through or the other side. After you get excited about the idea and the vision, the execution, I'm already done onto the next thing. And so I didn't understand these things about myself until I learned the Colby and June Myers Briggs and all the other variety of interesting tests out there to sort of formulate an idea around how I'm wired from birth. And that's. I talk a lot about that in my book, your life is not your fault until it is. That whole model of how I went from a 300 pound drunk to completely turning my life around. And so the idea of, I don't know who said this, you've heard this many times, but people need to stop focusing on their weaknesses and really start focusing and crafting and generating all of your efforts around your strengths as opposed to your weaknesses. Because if you really look at how any organization works, especially we'll say in business and this is how I train and teach this methodology pretty consistently these days is just think of your business life as an org chart. And on that org chart, you know, let's just say it puts you, the CEO at the top of the org chart and then you get a whole C suite of people. Well, that C suite, they're not just titles, they're not just names. Those are very specifically designed people that need to be in your life, they need to be in your business. If you want to build something in a business that is actually exitable, meaning that some investor is going to come along and look at what you've built and say, I cannot live without that thing. I need that thing. And there is no way possible that it's going to happen without.
Now granted, you could have some really unique software package and you're a master coder and you did it all by yourself and you're a master marketer and all those things. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of businesses out there need a very specific org chart and just parallel that with your life. Everybody needs their own life org chart because you need these key people in your life. If I'm the CEO, I'm the visionary, I'm not the finance guy, I'm not the marketing guy, I'm not the sales guy necessarily, right? I'm not the tech, I'm not the CTO and the CMO and the CEO, right. I'm not the operations guy.
And there's people that are designed very specifically for those roles.
And you see, to me, once I saw and understood this org chart model and just so you know, I used to be one of these guys who's like, ah, screw those org charts. You know, it's all the bureaucracy and all the BS and it's flat. I'd rather have a flat organization and all that. And that, that comes from a very small minded, just quite honestly, just totally naive business person that thinks that you can get your business model built with a flat organization, it's not going to happen. You're going to have to have, I mean if you want to grow something of size and scale and, and ultimately have an exitable business. Because let's say you are the greatest at all those things. When you exit your business, there is.
[00:22:30] Speaker B: No business, there's no business left. You, you, you're the superman of the whole business. And I'm glad you brought Colby into it because I'm a 338 6. So you and I are very similar in our Colby identification and also speaks to why we're very tactile individuals. I have a trade background, you have a trade background. It makes a lot of sense. Didn't fit in at school very well because wasn't really built around that model of thinking. And actually it's the follow through. You've got a two, I've got a three follow through. I actually view that as one of the strongest areas of superpower because it cuts through bureaucracy. It, it actually amplifies the ability to break down things that aren't necessary and say, well, why do you need this? Can you do it better, faster, quicker, some other way? What's another way of doing it? The ability to look for alternative routes is a unique skill set that not everyone has and that's a huge advantage in any organization. We all need someone like that in your, your situation as, as the visionary that allows you to see how to build parts differently, do things differently, run the business differently, create new ideas. And yes, you need some people in the organization structure to help make those ideas reality, make it real and then make it recur. And so that's a really powerful way of looking at things. So I'm glad that you identified in your book, but also that you're sharing with our listeners because it's so fundamental to have that knowledge base of self. Once you have a deeper understanding of you, it's easy to figure out how you fit in the world around you or where things don't fit.
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[00:24:27] Speaker B: And you know, if you work on your, on your weaknesses, all you have is really strong weaknesses. Stop doing that.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: The sooner an individual can invest the time in themselves to discover who they are and how they're wired uniquely from birth.
And then I'm going to put it this way, this is my method and model for understanding the idea of happiness and joy in a person's life.
When you discover how you're hardwired from birth and then you have a belief system that your I call them producers, which is your preachers, teachers, coaches, parents, siblings, all the people that are around you and your community, those are the people that helped you produce your life up to whatever point you are. That's why I call your life is not your fault until it is that this gap between how you're hardwired from birth and your belief system is your happiness scale.
And the closer you align these two, the happier you will be in life.
And I'm going to say this is one of the easiest things to do and one of the hardest things you'll ever do, right? Because until you have, I'm going to say until you can get yourself over your ego, which is a really hard thing to do for, you know, especially people like us that were, you know, kind of kicked out of the traditional world and then we go out and we're successful in the market because we've been fueled by this idea that you're basically proving everybody wrong. So you got this chip on your shoulder and you just want to slam dunk anybody. All those people in your mind that you still have that told you you're a freaking loser, you're feeling the explanative and so on and so forth.
But then you get to a certain point in life where I'd say there's no more haters like the ones that were in my head for all these years. Or it's like, slam dunk that one, slam dunk that one. You know, it's like I've won, right? Like, you know, you build a business and got a beautiful wife and beautiful kids, got seemingly everything is working yet.
£300 and I'm a drunk. Like, what the hell? Like how is that possible? How's it possible to get to that place?
And I truly believe it's this separation model. It's the discovering what my unique abilities are, how I'm hardwired from birth and what my belief system is. And my belief system now granted it's certain levels or categories if you will, which I teach in this model is health, relationship, recreation and wealth. And you can score these and so forth. But the idea is that is that if you can put a number.
Now again, I learned all this stuff through the decades of the manufacturing space.
Most of these great quotes and things we all hear and all these guru, the gurus of today, they're all stealing it from the Bible or someone way back when and they all call it their own ip. So all these self help so called influencers that are out there, most everybody just copied from somebody else. So slow your rolls there, gurus.
This idea of what gets measured gets managed, right? And that came from Deming back in the whole continuous improvement. Then the Japanese took and call it kaizen but that's the whole plan. Do, study, act, model, right? And I had this whole continuous improvement model jammed down my throat because the aerospace business, you know, way, way, I mean 40 years ago and just had bits and pieces of it over time. Again, like I said, I'm wired and designed to see formulas. How do I can see the formula or the way I think about things? And solving problems is very formulaic. That's why I have such tremendous, I'll say envy for people like an Elon and there's a whole slew of others, but people like that, that they think and operate from first princ. Whereas if you understand the root problem that you're trying to solve for the vast, vast, vast majority of people out there, there's such a simple system to solve their problem. I mean it's staggering how difficult people make life.
It's staggering. And I was one of them. It's like, man, you got all these things going on, you got, I mean I had all the stuff and I took a 10 year sabbatical to raise my kids and thank God I did it, had it planned from May of 05 to May of 15 away from day to day operations and I'd be dead if I didn't do that. There's no question. Bought a cabin, had the cabin thing and there's no question I'd be dead if I didn't do that. But I saw it again as these are all components or tools, if you will, as part of a formula to help you, I'd say achieve whatever you want in life.
If your model is just to overcome something, there's a simple model for it. If your model is to achieve something significant or your ideas, your vision is to achieve something significant. There's already a proven model.
And as an entrepreneur I'm in my own way all the time because I'm the guy that wants to build the tool because I'm a tool builder. That's what I do. I see the formula and I want to snap my magic into some kind of package. And then I got a tool, then I want to go sell the tool. And I'll just tell you, man, I've burnt, I mean, trust me, great experiences, life experiences and all that. But if I was really clear on what my vision was, I wouldn't have wasted millions of dollars, I wouldn't have wasted all of this effort, time and effort to try and get something done that I could have just paid a SaaS or somebody else a certain amount of dollars and just basically bought speed by investing in that tool. And so I became this. I can't even tell you how many courses I have. I mean, the 1,500, $2,000. I mean, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, right? I mean, just a mass consumer of these things. And in the beginning, yes, I was trying to solve a problem, but eventually I was like, okay, I've got a pretty good solid model on how to fix all my shit. And so I built that model, but then I started looking at, well, what's the next step? Because I need to be able to package up my own thing so I can help all these people that I want to help. Because, like, in the manufacturing space, all my fellow brothers and sisters in the manufacturing space aren't exposed to this type of personal development, for the most part. Doesn't exist because manufacturing people generally are the ones that were kind of kicked out of the system. They got a little chip on their shoulder, they got a little experience, they're making a little money, they're doing a little better than the next guy. And their bar is so low, relatively speaking, and they could do so much, but they don't have the champions in the space to help them go do these things. And so, yeah, I just decided with the help of one of my mentors, because I was looking at selling my aerospace company, right? I mean, I could get pretty penny for it. We're a Boeing direct supplier and other majors, and my mentor is like, dude, you invested your entire life into this space. And like, I know, but I'm just, I'm kind of bored, right? Because I built everything I can build and it just doesn't excite me that much. I buy new technology. Yeah, it's cool. Lights out, five axis robots, and it's freaking awesome. And every time I'm standing in front of it, I get chills because it's just like, oh my God, it's so amazing to watch and all that.
But I'm like, yeah, that's commoditized now, you know, it's not exciting. And he helped me realize that I could do manufacturing differently.
I don't have to be the guy building parts. I don't have to be the guy programming. I don't have to be the guy leading even those smaller groups and teams anymore. I can hire all that out and I can go do the things that I want to do, which is expose the unbelievable opportunities in the manufacturing space and go teach and train at the level that I want to. And so that's what we've been wrapping up, kind of packaging and trying to figure this thing out.
And again, I'm just taking all of this, my historic knowledge and understanding and the way I'm wired and doing things the way I want to do it and having fun doing it and creating a new formula for other people to fall into, if you will, so I can help them set that vision and ultimately either be a part of ours because we're building an empire, or help them go do it on their own and then eventually we'll buy them later. And I found over the years I had, I had attracted and built this amazing group of super talents in my business.
And the challenge is one of the things that we were experiencing, and everybody experiences this unless they use a tool like this, is if you're trying to solve some problem, it generally means most people haven't been able to.
They came to us for a very specific reason and we have an idea on how to solve it. But that doesn't mean we're going to nail it the first time.
And sometimes you nail it in the first, second, third, fourth try. It's fantastic. Obviously, the sooner the better.
But what I found is what we weren't capturing is all of the attempts in between.
Because to me, that is where the real knowledge comes from. All of the tries when I was hands on, deep in it myself.
And I'm still called in for some of the bigger things that they can't solve, or at least just a little different perspective on it.
But I rely on my team heavily to solve these problems and they do it 99% of the time, 99.9% of the time. And occasionally I'll often be pulled in on certain things and some things we know that because I've defined really clear models around what we want to try and accomplish and tackle. And so this legacymaker concept came about because I have all these brilliant people and I want to capture all of this carnal knowledge because over all these decades, we've had tremendous people that have come and gone over the years. And people just retire out or they just kind of tire the up and down flow of the aerospace world.
And all that investment that I've put in my team collectively, it's amazing. A lot of times you get really smart people from other places or you develop them, which is, you know, we do both significantly, which is exciting.
[00:36:14] Speaker B: And that'll lead us right into this incredible software tool you develop, which we're going to talk about when we come back after these messages.
[00:36:21] Speaker C: Okay, Richard, I keep hearing about this thing called the Colby A Index.
[00:36:24] Speaker B: You talk about it all the time on the show.
[00:36:26] Speaker C: What is it? How do I get information about this.
[00:36:29] Speaker B: Thing and why is it so important?
[00:36:33] Speaker C: When I first got my Colby done, it turned totally revolutionized everything for me. I finally felt like, oh, man, this is what I was looking for. All the things I've been doing that have been working for me and all the frustrations I'd had, if I just understood this at an earlier age, boy, oh boy, would my life be different.
You can take that step. If you want to learn and understand how it can change things for you and the way you communicate with others, you can go to coachcanfield.com and download your free report.
[00:37:06] Speaker B: So what exactly is the Legacy Maker and how is it creating a revolutionary thinking that allows entrepreneurs to scale and create income from their ideas? Incredible platform that you've built, Darrell. This is really the culmination of, again, you're a problem solver and you had a problem in your own world that you wanted to solve. And so you built something really for you to use. And you figure, well, if I can use it, probably some other people can use it too. Am I on track?
[00:37:33] Speaker A: You're spot on. Yeah. I found myself coming from this very specific big problem solving world in the manufacturing space.
The big primes and the big OEMs, they contract us to solve their big problems, which is always fun.
But the reason it could develop and grow so quickly is that you got to have the right circumstances, you got to have the right systems and leadership and tools, technology, all this combination of things for the super talents to thrive. Right. I mean, if you're the super talent and you're in this other organization and they don't even know you have these unique abilities, there's no way for them to grow. There's no way for them to actually go and express themselves in this space. And so for me, I wanted a way to capture what was going on in between. Right? So we would say from work center to work center and ultimately capture all of the work centers. Meaning if I'm going to build.
If I'm going to build this abrasive water jet, right angle cutting nozzle for decommissioning nuclear reactors, I would take that thing and we'd build a work order, a workflow and that assembly, all these different parts are going to be broken down and they're going to hit all these different work centers. And so the idea is, from workcenter to work center, what are we doing at each work center and getting that information dialed so it's completely 100% documented and teachable. Now per our AS 9100 and ISO certifications, all of our workcenter operations, all these things, the way that we function and operate is all documented anyways because that's how you develop and build a quality management system as 9100 or ISO.
But like I said, what we weren't doing is we weren't capturing.
As things evolve, you still are relative. And yes you can update documents, but I would say they're more static and they're not like I would call it live. Right. And so this idea came to me, man, if we could just get people at some level to consistently document the type of attempts that we made and then ultimately what was the significant shift that sometimes 1 or 2% that made all the difference in the world. And because we do really high end specialty like sheet metal forming with hydroform true hydroform press and some deep draw and some other interesting. We built some very specialized tools that in order for our, I would say the value of our organization to get captured mostly obviously for internal work. So when we get some new project we can query against something that's going to give us the ability to understand what we've done in the past about that. Because right now, basically what you have is you have really smart people and you pray that they're there every day. You pray that they're not going to get sick, you pray that they're not going to retire or for whatever reason you haven't provided enough value to them and they leave you.
All these things can happen easily. And all that work, all that investment into that individual literally is now gone.
[00:41:13] Speaker B: So you're basically capturing the communal knowledge base through iterative steps as a thinking process develops from the organization. And the tool will fundamentally be able to do that for any organization relative to maybe some measure of scale. And you're highlighting maybe the key, the key people that need to be utilizing it so you can pool that knowledge base together. Am I kind of on track there?
[00:41:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And so if you could take it. So that was the original, that was the original thought process and idea was to make sure that we had a really unique tool that could do all these things right. And then there's so many different variables to this model and eventually you have to pick a lane that is going that you can, you can focus all the energy down into one product.
Now subsequently, whatever, six, seven years later, right after I hired my first software engineers, we've evolved this thing into so many different ways. The original thing was I was going to Build this big or we did, we built this big enterprise value machine. I had friends at very large medical institutions that you would know all the names to and they're like, oh my God, this thing's unbelievable.
You basically built a machine that you could, you could build a bunch of digital guides for the physicians and then all the way through the chain of a hospital, all the way to the patients. The patients could go through guided models and then put information up. So built a platform that you could have information coming from the top in a deliverable and then information coming in from the bottom in the results based type of model, right? And so we stamped this whole thing together. It was like crazy big and bulky and we spun our wheels for, I don't know, three and a half years with the medical institutions because it's horrible, like red tape and all the other bs. And I was like, this is ridiculous.
I'm funding the entire thing personally.
And I'm like, this is ridiculous. I need a product, man, I need something to.
So I basically, for all intents purposes re engineered a complete new path which was how do I help an individual like myself that has proven track record in multiple lanes and has all this information knowledge in their brain and want to share these ideas.
And so that became the new path of how do I get whatever I'm thinking about recorded properly.
And because I'm out like hiking every day and as a working out or hiking and so I go into this flow state and I have these ideas, but there's no way in hell my body, the way I'm designed, I can't write fast enough to get this thing out of my head, right. So back in 2010, one of my cousins, he wanted me to help with his business and he's like, you need to write a book to help me with my model and so forth. And I said, man, I've tried so many times, I just can't get the information. I'll sit down on the keyboard and I'll type out a couple paragraphs, but then the whole flow is gone. It's just like, well, I don't know where the idea went. So he actually bought me my first little digital recorder that you could just plug after you're done, you could just plug it into a USB device and then download. So I mean, since 2010 I've been recording all these thoughts and ideas out of my brain. And what I realized is I started experiencing this incredible dramatic drop in my anxiety and stress in my life. And I'm like, I don't know what's going on here? But I was like, oh, it must just be the hiking. All the hiking I'm doing, right? I'm out in nature, I'm getting my sweat on, getting my, you know, my cardio, whatever. And what I ultimately asked, through talking to different psychologists and different, you know, mindset type of people, I started realizing that what was changing is I had the ability now to not in my brain, keep spinning all these plates of ideas and thoughts and solutions and problems and all these things. And I could just do a daily dump. I could just. Whatever's going on in my brain, I just, I just talk it out, whatever it is. And for a period of time I was like, hey, it's just all coming out and that's great. But now it's stuck in this digital box that I got to go back and have somebody. So I started having somebody go back and just like manually like transcribe. And that was a pain in the ass and expensive.
And I invested in my first AI tech company back in, well, 10 years ago now, which now is interesting because it got gobbled up and now is the largest bitcoin producer in the world.
So that was a nice win. But I got to see what was happening with this machine learning being in the space that I'm in, PLC and machine learning and then into AI more than 10 years ago. And I saw it was coming. I was like, I got to get in the space. I got to build something that I can kind of get ahead of the curve before these billion dollar AI companies start releasing OpenAI. Google, they start releasing tools that we can snap into. So we built this whole front end so we could start capturing. And the very first idea was I need a really good digital recorder that transcribes because that was the big pain in the ass. And so I hired a couple engineers at University of Washington and we just started like I normally do, right? Just like, you gotta have an idea and then you gotta have stakes involved, right? You gotta. And for me it was capital and now I'm hiring people. And so we built this first product super quick and it was amazing. Basically a digital recorder into transcription. And a lot of folks back then they're like, dude, this is a killer product. You just need to put it out there right now, like, you should go sell that. And I'm like, I don't want to go compete with the transcription guys. To me, it's going to be commoditized. Now looking back, I could have built a fricking monster business around this. But I didn't because it wasn't what I wanted. What I wanted was I wanted a turnkey tool that I could talk into and it would 100% do these series of tasks and I'll describe them, but I wanted to be able to talk into it. I wanted to go into a machine, process the entire thing and spit it back out to me in my ear and in a text to speech back. Okay. And we eventually have built this, but in the beginning it was digital recorder and then a transcription and then I needed it to process it and put it away because I needed it to start building out my deep memories. For this is my brain, right, my second brain if you will, or the clone, whatever people are calling today. And the idea is that we have this deep memories machine that's constantly building on all your thoughts and ideas and how you speak and talk and basically your clone.
But I was like, well that's great. But now it's in this digital vault and now I still have to go query against it. So now I wanted a deliverable. And so we built this, what we call the ideation tool, which is basically just push record, you dizzle record into it. And it then goes and takes whatever your recording is and we make sure that gets put away properly. And then we built a whole series of algos that snap in and out all these different AI agents such. And so now it takes your digital recording, your transcription, we pack it away in our unique way and then we ultimately turn it into a deliverable. So that means it goes and gets processed. We have a whole series of interesting AI agents and prompt engines and so forth that take whatever your content is and will process it in the way we decide or in this methodology, it delivers it back to you in what we call a deliverable. So that means you could read it and drop it right into a social media post for a blog or what have you.
And they vary in length. Sometimes they're two minutes, sometimes they're six minutes. Kind of depends on the information that you're putting in and subject matter and so forth.
And then we text to speech it so you can listen back to it, which is again a very unique key. I always thought I wanted it in my voice, but what I found especially for me, it triggers me if it's in somebody else's voice and it's my content, because I'm like, wait a minute, what the hell? That's mine, that's my content. Who is this person saying my content back to me? I find it's really interesting. These Triggers these psychological triggers.
[00:50:04] Speaker B: It creates a conversation almost versus you're talking to yourself.
[00:50:08] Speaker A: It's really interesting the dynamic that goes on. So now I'm still out hiking, right? I talk the whole thing process and now it's spitting it back to me in a digital recording, in a text to speech.
Plus we auto title it with AI plus we auto image it. And so now it creates it into what we call an ID8. And that's sort of a micro project. And then we built a whole series of composition tools all the way from. We built our own Kindle like reader. So when you're done processing all these things, you can punch the reader and it'll go and process it and automatically dumps it into an actual looks like a Kindle type of device where it's book cover and all the tools. And then we built the.
So you can listen back. One of my friends in developmental education was saying for all of people like me that are on spectrum at some level with these ADD and OCD and dyslexic, autistic, all kinds of different ways to be categorized.
She asked me to add in tracing, right? So not only do you do you hear the audio and see the pages, but you also have a tracer that follows the audio along as well. And it's a pretty incredible package. And then a variety of tools to like kdp. So if you process your entire book with all the editors and all those components, you can push the KDP tool and it'll turn into a PDF that ideally is like ready to send the KDP to print your book. So anyways, it's quite a package. It's absolutely revolutionized and changed my mind. I mean the tools that we've built now where I can speak because I've been recording basically into this thing and packed a bunch of content in there. I mean I have 100 gigs of information right into this database. And so I literally can, I can have an idea talk 3, 4, 5, 6 minutes of an idea and my system set up right now where I literally can take that, run it through our idea process and then run it through. We call Magic Book Builder, which is an awesome new tool that we haven't released to the public yet, where it literally will take whatever I said, process it and then I'll run it through the Magic Book Builder and this whole series of processes and it will literally write a 15 to 60,000 word book in about 20 minutes. It takes about the whole process.
[00:52:51] Speaker B: That's incredible.
[00:52:51] Speaker A: It's pretty spectacular.
And quite honestly, I don't even know if I'm going to release that component directly to the Pod link because we're building a course builder machine too. So MBB is going to turn into NGB Magic Guide Builder, where it'll build these digital guides and then people will be able to host on our platform and so forth. So there's very unique tools built specifically for individuals and, and shortly we're going to snap those so people can be in a much larger enterprise where they can have their teams. But man, if you want to be able to get your ideas out of your head and if you're a content creator, there's nothing better than there's nothing out there in the market that even touches what we have. There are tools that do certain things individually better, but there isn't a single packaged up package out there like ours. None. Not even close.
[00:53:50] Speaker B: That's incredible.
[00:53:51] Speaker A: So it's pretty exciting. Yep.
[00:53:52] Speaker B: Well, exciting and also hugely advantageous to just develop that second brain in such a way where you can have the recall and the database and everything stored.
100 gig sounds like a lot, but you know, fundamentally that's a lot of great ideas that can be called into the future, which I absolutely love. Darrel, this was absolutely fantastic. Thank you for sharing your story with with us and more importantly, for taking the initiative to build something unique that the marketplace needs. And I'm so grateful to have you on the program. And for those of you watching, stay tuned. When we continue to unpack the ways that entrepreneurs are overcoming major challenges and innovating like Daryl is into the future.
