Eddie Russnow: We did all the electrification for the overhead on the Green Line Extension to Somerville.

Adam Honig: That was a pretty big project. 

Eddie Russnow: That was huge. 

Adam Honig: Well, I’d like you to do the rest of the Green Line because it’s really not that good. 

Eddie Russnow: They’re going to be doing it, just so you know. The whole subway where they go, the branches, the D branch, all that stuff, that is all right now under design review to be upgraded.

Adam Honig: That’s great. We’re going to bring it into the 20th century. 

Eddie Russnow: 20th century, right. Not 21st, 20th.

Adam Honig: That’s great to hear. 

Hello and welcome to Make It. Move It. Sell It. On this podcast, I talk with company leaders about how they’re modernizing the business of making, moving and selling products, and of course, having fun along the way. I’m your host, Adam Honig, the CEO of Spiro.ai. We make amazing AI software for companies in the supply chain, but we’re not talking about that today.

Instead, today, we’re talking with the president of MAC Products, Inc., Eddie Russnow. In case you’re not familiar with MAC Products, they are a producer of products and services for the transmission, distribution, and control of electrical power. Welcome to the podcast, Eddie.

Eddie Russnow: Adam, it’s a pleasure to be here. I appreciate you having me today.

Adam Honig: It’s awesome to have you here. Maybe just tell us a little bit more about MAC Products and this distribution and control of electrical power. It sounds pretty technical.

Eddie Russnow: Certainly. In many cases, it is very technical. Myself personally, I’m not a technical person by training. I started off my career in banking, and I was an international finance major in college and thought I would be working on Wall Street for my career. But I got bored doing what I was doing at the time. As I was getting ready to get married, my future father-in-law, who was the founder and owner of MAC Products, offered me a position to come work here at MAC. That was 34 years ago. I’ve been here ever since. 

To go back to your question about technical, our business, when I started here, was very much a catalog-driven business. We had our own product line, which we still do to this day. But I would say that at the time I started, we were probably 80% to 85% ordering out of a catalog and 15% to 20% manufacturing and designing custom splice kits and solutions for electrical utilities.

Fast forward a number of years and we started recognizing a change in the marketplace with a lot of our competitors moving to China or to Mexico and being much more competitive in the marketplace. We realized that for us to really move the needle and grow our business, we needed to become more of a solutions-based manufacturer. Hence, we went out and did an aggressive hire on the engineering side to increase our technical know-how and expertise. 

Adam Honig: I totally get it; you wanted to add more value. What was that like though? Because the company came from more of a, as you said, the catalog route. Was it a big challenge to get the organization to buy into that vision? 

Eddie Russnow: No, I think it was something that really excited people. What we recognized was we started seeing people who we were hiring anyway that were having very strong technical backgrounds. A lot of it just came naturally to the business. Then when we were approached by certain customers to say to us, well, hey MAC, you manufacture this particular product for us, but did you ever consider manufacturing something like this? We know you have the capability. Why don’t you give it a try? Lo and behold, that’s what we did. More times than not, we were successful doing that.

Adam Honig: It was really like the customers were showing you the way to transform the business as well. But the staff was excited about it because it was probably more interesting than what they were working on previously. 

Eddie Russnow: Yes, I would certainly agree with that. I would also tell you that from working with a lot of the people from the early ‘90s, when we were just starting to do this, there certainly was trepidation and nervousness, but we had people in the key positions who were there. They knew how to push people the right way—not in a bad way, but in the right way—to challenge people. We understand that human beings, for the most part, want to learn, and in order to grow, you need to learn. When you present it the right way in a real positive light and people understand what the goal is, for the most part, they’re on board. They want to be part of a winning organization.

Adam Honig: I’m totally with you on that. Maybe you could tell the folks at home here just a little bit about some of the solutions you provide. Some of them are pretty mission critical for your customers. 

Eddie Russnow: I’ll tell you something that we did fairly recently. There is a project in Seattle, Washington where the Seattle Department of Transportation is installing a light rail system on a floating bridge over Lake Washington. It’s the first rail system of its kind in the world to be installed and operated on a floating bridge.

It’s not the easiest thing to deal with. We were hired by our customer, the installing contractor, to design and manufacture portions of what they call the expansion joints that sit on the bridge and support the electrical cable that runs overhead that brings power these trains. We were given a concept that was really all it was, and working in conjunction with our staff, our engineers, and other engineers, we were able to come up with the proper solution, proper design.

It’s gone through testing at one of the large testing agencies, and it’s waiting to be electrified and run over that floating bridge. I believe that will go into service next year in 2024. It was very exciting for us. 

Adam Honig: I guess I don’t get out there enough to know that they were building a floating bridge. That sounds super cool.

Eddie Russnow: The floating bridge has been there for many years. They just decided to add this rail link. I believe it’s connecting Seattle to Redmond.

Adam Honig: You definitely don’t want the train getting stuck halfway out across the bridge or anything like that.

That’s a long way from a commodity product that you manufacture in bulk. 

Eddie Russnow: Right. I will tell you, we still do some commodity manufacturing. We are a niche manufacturer, so where big part of our success over these 50-plus years has been, we do things that others can’t do or don’t want to do. When we’re approached with something like that, and we’re able to uncover the customer’s pain and be able to support them and be able to deliver for them, it leads to future opportunities with those customers, and then others hear about it. It’s word of mouth a lot of times.

Adam Honig: I’m sensing that part of the transformation over your time at MAC Products wasn’t just from catalog to customer solution. It was also customer focused in terms of understanding really what the need are and getting closer to them. Do you spend a lot of time with customers yourself? 

Eddie Russnow: I do. I’m very passionate about it. It’s very important to me to visit, to travel. I’m on the road quite a bit. I really enjoy being with my customers, understanding what we’re doing right and what we’re not doing right. If they don’t give me that feedback, we can’t improve upon it.

I believe in continuous improvement; that’s part of our ISO, learning. But also, one of our fundamentals within our company is for us to be lifetime learners. That just doesn’t mean as individuals; that means as a business overall. If we’re not, we’re just going to stagnate, and we won’t be here tomorrow. 

We really have to be cognizant of that. Part of that is hearing what the customers have to say and telling you, hey guys, this is what you’re doing great, but here’s where I see a need for improvement. Take it for what it’s worth. You can do that or you don’t have to do it, but this is what I’m seeing. I bring that back to the staff, and 80% of the time, we’ll make that change and we’ll make that adjustment. 

Adam Honig: 80% is a great rate for that, for sure. Tell me, Eddie, I see over you right now, you’ve got the slogan, “We don’t do easy.” Tell me a little bit about that.

Eddie Russnow: One of my staff members who’s since retired, he used to joke with us all the time about, how come customers don’t come to us with the easy stuff? How come they always come to us just with the difficult stuff? I picked up on that, and I said, well, that’s great because why do we want them just to come to us for the easy stuff? We want to do difficult.

We came up with this, “We don’t do easy,” because people come to us when it’s not the easiest thing to do. They know what our capabilities are from a design standpoint, from a manufacturing standpoint, from a customer service standpoint, all the way through. When they know it’s difficult, they come to us and they say, we need your help. What can you do? 

Adam Honig: If it was easy, they could go anywhere. 

Eddie Russnow: They could go anywhere. They could go to Home Depot.

Adam Honig: Do you use that with customers too? Is that part of your customer marketing?

Eddie Russnow: Yes. As a matter of fact, I’ve tried to trademark this. I’m still working on that.

Adam Honig: I didn’t realize you could, but it looks good as a hashtag.

Eddie Russnow: We hashtag it. We put it on our brochures. It’s on the website. That’s something that is near and dear to our hearts. We tell our customers that, and when they hear it, they say, that makes a lot of sense. That is probably why we do a majority of our business with you. 

Adam Honig: Some of our customers call that like a brand promise or something like that. Is that the direction? The idea is that’s something that you stand for as a company. Not to talk too much about Spiro, but we’re against CRM because we feel like it’s a backwards paradigm for a lot of things, so that’s a big part of our message to the market is that’s it’s expired. The time for it is gone. You need something different. It sounds like a similar  approach that you guys are taking. 

Eddie Russnow: I think it’s built into our culture now because everybody sees it every morning when we have our team huddle or leadership team meeting every morning at 8:30. We get together for at least a half an hour to talk about what is in front of us today or what challenges did we overcome yesterday, and everybody sees it over my shoulder. Then every time I’m in one of these Teams meetings or Zoom meetings, that question comes up. What is that? A lot of the customers will say, oh yeah, we get it. We know why we’re doing business with you. 

Adam Honig: Totally. Makes complete sense. You mentioned earlier that MAC Products is a family business at this point. How does that impact the culture of the business? Do you feel like there’s a difference between a family-owned business and another kind of business? 

Eddie Russnow: I will tell you that there’s definitely a difference, especially now that we’ve got three generations here. That is, of course, very rare. I’ve got my father-in-law who started the business and myself. I’ve been here 34 years, and now my son’s been here almost three years. When he came on board, I believe that a lot of the staff felt very positive because not knowing where things might end up after I retire, which, maybe I won’t ever retire now that my son’s in the business.

Adam Honig: Just you and LeBron James doing that father-son thing. 

Eddie Russnow: You got it. That’s right. Eddie and Henry, that’s my son, and LeBron and Bronny. I would say that from what I’ve seen and heard from other people outside of MAC when it comes to family businesses of people who– I’m in Vistage, so all my Vistage members, they’re all family businesses. It’s very interesting. A lot of them are second, third generation as well. 

There’s this feeling of continuity. There’s a feeling of, we are aggressive, but we’re aggressive in a way that doesn’t demean people. We want results. We expect results. This is not a philanthropy. This is a for-profit business. We’re all here to put money in our pockets and to enrich the lives of ourselves and our families. We all recognize that. 

One of the things that I was taught very early on in the business is that we are very conservative as a business from a financial standpoint. We’re aggressive when it comes to selling and doing those things, but we’re very conservative because we understand that it’s not just our family that eats and is supported from this business. With 130 or 140 employees, you could be supporting 600 mouths. That is very important to us. It’s something that my father-in-law taught me early on in the business, and it’s a core belief of mine.

Adam Honig: It’s super interesting. I want to go back to something you said a minute ago because it’s also super interesting that the employees were relieved when your son was coming into the business in a way. I could imagine a scenario that they were like, oh this young guy, what does he know or anything like that too, that people might feel that way. But it sounds like it’s completely the opposite. 

Eddie Russnow: Yeah, I would say because with all of the businesses being sold over the last number of years and people cashing out with huge multiples and everything else, I’m sure they saw it as, oh my God, they’re going to sell the business. This business is ripe to be sold. I get phone calls twice, three times a week. Hey, we want to buy your business. We want to invest in your company. Well, okay, great, but I’m here to grow the business, and that’s what I want.

Adam Honig: Is your father-in-law still involved in the business too? 

Eddie Russnow: He is. He’s here every day. He’s down in Florida now for a while since it’s wintertime. But he will come back and forth, but he doesn’t really get involved in the day-to-day runnings of the business. I update him multiple times during the day on what’s going on. Hey, this is what’s happening. This is where we’re looking, and that’s great. We have an open line of communication, and he couldn’t be happier now that his grandson is here working.

Adam Honig: That’s awesome. Every once in a while, my son who’s in high school is like, oh, do you think I’ll be the CEO of Spiro one day? I’m not sure our industry really works that same way, but it’s interesting to think about it. I’m jealous that you get to do that. That’s awesome. 

Eddie Russnow: It’s a great thing. It really is. It just happened because he didn’t come right out of college. He did work first in the financial services industry, but he had worked here in the factory a few summers while he was in high school or college, so people were familiar with him. He has a different mind than I have. He’s very mechanical. He really has a great grasp of that stuff, of manufacturing, which I didn’t have when I started here. As our plant manager says to me all the time, he said, Henry has the best of both worlds. He’s got your father-in-law’s mechanical mind, which you don’t have, and he’s got your business sense. That’s really going to be great for the future of the business. 

Adam Honig: Thinking about bringing people into the business in talking with a lot of people in manufacturing that getting younger people to be excited about manufacturing can be a challenge. Obviously, not for your son because he was aware of it and everything like that, but do you find it challenging to hire younger staff?

Eddie Russnow: One thing we’re very fortunate about is that we’ve got a lot of other families that work here. We’ve had generations of other families here. I will tell you right now, I have two fathers and sons that are working here both in manufacturing. We had a father and a daughter. The father retired, and he moved back to Europe. Unfortunately, he passed away last year, but his daughter is still here. Now she’s brought in her niece. 

A lot of the way that we get people is through word of mouth. It’s clear to me when that happens that I know we are a good company to work for. 

Adam Honig: Keeping employee satisfaction high means that people are just  naturally bringing in. Although I have to say, depending upon your team to have kids and grow up sounds like a slow road on hiring sometimes. The lead time for that could be a while.

Eddie Russnow: Absolutely can. I would say that being in Northern New Jersey and trying to find some key people in the manufacturing space could be challenging. One of the ways we’ve approached that to combat that is to automate and add technology into the mix. What we’re seeing is that when we can add technology, that excites people to want to come work here. Technology is, for lack of a better word and not to be cliche, the great equalizer. Software is the great equalizer. If we can get people here excited to see that, hey, we’re doing modern manufacturing. It’s not the same old thing over and over again. This company continually invests in itself with new equipment, with personnel, whatever it takes, we’re willing to do. That investment in having people come in here and see the company opens their eyes and they say, wow, I can definitely see myself working here.

Adam Honig: Building strong employee satisfaction, offering automation and excitement on the technology side, two key ways to get people in the door. What about expanding to other areas geographically? Are you guys manufacturing everything in the US?

Eddie Russnow: Yes, for the most part. We do some importing of some small components, but 85% to 90% of our manufactured product is in the US. 

Adam Honig: Then you now have the operation in North Carolina as well. 

Eddie Russnow: Yes. That just started March 1st, and that is all manufactured in the US.

Adam Honig: Is there something you can highlight about some of the technology improvement you did in the factory that gets people excited? 

Eddie Russnow: I would say our first step into, we’ll call it, modern manufacturing was adding cobots into our CNCs so that we could move away from having a person stand at a CNC to load and unload. That is not a value-add proposition.

Adam Honig: Now just in case people aren’t familiar with a cobot or CNC, maybe you could just tell us what that is. 

Eddie Russnow: CNC is automated machining equipment, lathes and mills, where in the past they’d be done manually. You’d have a class, a machinist standing there and actually machining everything to a print. Well, obviously as technology changed and things expanded over the years, Computer Numerical Control is what a CNC machine is. Now we have a programmer who programs the part, loads it to the machine, and then the machine goes ahead and does its work. 

You add a cobot, a co-working robot. It’s an arm that loads and unloads the machine. We have capability where we’ve added bar feeders on to the CNC lathes so that the cobot is only unloading. It’s not loading. That means what we can do is we could leave here at five o’clock and the machine runs all night, runs lights out. We come in the next morning, and we’ve picked up two and a half times from a production standpoint without having a person do it. 

We do it with multiple machines, so when we have the need to run those machines based on the orders that we get, it’s very easy. They just run. We have a camera set up, so if there is an issue, let’s say the machine gets jammed because of shavings of steel or copper or aluminum, whatever it is, somebody will get an alarm at night to say, hey, something happened to the machine. If it’s urgent, somebody will come down and reset it. If not, they wait until the next morning.

But we have realized an increase in our productivity because of that in our throughput. We hope to be able to do more of that where the sales team can go out now and be more aggressive from a sales standpoint with some products that we might not have been able to compete with previously because now we have this new capability.

Adam Honig: Yeah, that’s the dream to have that just happening overnight. Just come in the next day, and there you are. Amazing. 

Eddie Russnow: Earlier this year, we added on a co-working robot for welding, a welding cobot. When we do get volume with things that we have to weld, again, same thing. One of the young guys in the shop goes over. He programs it, sets it up, and lo and behold, then it just runs. We have the jig set up properly where we can weld six or eight or 12 up at a time. It saves us time. It gives us consistency in the welds, and nobody’s getting tired. That’s key.

Adam Honig: Right, it’s just doing that over and over again, who wants to do that? 

Eddie Russnow: Now we have other stuff that we do, welding, where the cobot can’t do it. It needs a human to do that work. We have them not doing the repetitive stuff, and they’re doing the things where they’re doing piping assemblies and things of that nature where it’s an art. We’ve got the best of both worlds. We could do both.

Adam Honig: Wow. I love it. That’s so awesome. Eddie, I’m hearing so many things that you get excited about in the business, visiting with customers and spending time there. Obviously, the team and the family connection, even the automation, you’re super energized by that. What would you say is thing that gets you most excited?

Eddie Russnow: The thing that gets me most excited is the prospects for the future and my desire to grow this business dramatically, putting together strategic plans, putting together sales plans, trying to upskill the workforce both in the factory and in the office. 

As I said to you earlier, I believe in lifetime learning. That’s a core belief of mine. It’s one of our company fundamentals. When somebody wants to learn a new skill, they want to learn how to do something, as long as it relates to the business, we will invest in those people to do those things. If somebody said to me, I want to learn how to become a real estate agent. Well, okay, that doesn’t apply. Sorry, no, we’re not going to pay for that. But we’ve had that before. We’ve had people actually approach us on that. 

Adam Honig: We’re not going to buy another building soon enough for that to pay itself back. Right, I understand.

Eddie Russnow: Those are the things that get me really excited because I know that we’re situated in a good spot. We have good people here, and the investments that we’re making in equipment, in people, and in our processes are really going to change the company for the better. 

Adam Honig: Eddie, shifting gears for a minute, tell me a little bit about how you like to interact with the team.

Eddie Russnow: It’s very important to me to know everybody within the company. Every day that I’m here, when I’m not traveling to see a customer or go to a trade show or be with a vendor, I want to make sure that I’m engaging with the staff. I walk around the shop. I see them every day. I talk to them, see what they’re working on. 

Part of the thing that’s really important to me is having the right culture. Recently, we engaged with a company called CultureWise—I believe their corporate name is High Performance Culture—and a gentleman named David Friedman. We implemented the 30 fundamentals that we have at the company. What we do is we have a printed pamphlet that I pass around. Everybody has one of these, and I hand them out to my customers whenever I’m with them. For the most part, they look at it and they say wow, this is something that we should be doing.

Adam Honig: I love this approach. The synthesis of it is essentially documenting all of the behaviors that you think are super important and then reinforcing them in meetings and discussions. Is that the gist?

Eddie Russnow: Correct. This didn’t come from me. This came from the team. I have a leadership team here. We sat with the people at CultureWise, and we went through this. We voted on it. I didn’t veto anything. I needed it to be from everybody. We all needed to understand that this is what we want our culture to be. This is what we want our company to be. 

In order for us to grow in the way that I want the business to grow, we have to define what our culture is. Those people who don’t get it or who don’t want to participate, they won’t be here long term. They’ll fire themselves because they won’t be able to keep up with what we want, and they won’t be able to really want to be part of this type of culture. This is really important. 

What I did for each fundamental, there’s a weekly insight. I did the first 30 weekly insights. What will happen is when we go back and we start with week one again, somebody else from my team will do the weekly insight. It doesn’t always come from me.

Adam Honig: When you say do, what does that do look like?

Eddie Russnow: The person who is reading that fundamental for that week—let’s say it is put your best foot forward always—they put in their own words what that fundamental means to them. Everybody in the company reads that, and they get a reminder of it every day through the app that is provided with CultureWise. 

Adam Honig: What I really like about the approach is that it’s very reinforcing. It’s not just something you put on the board and nobody ever looks at again. It’s like a living, breathing engagement of the culture.

Eddie Russnow: One thing I’ll tell you just real briefly, something that happened about a year and a half ago. I got an email; it was sent to me and my father-in-law from one of our long-term employees’ sons. He wrote a note to us, and he said, I don’t know if you know who I am. I want to give you an understanding of my family’s story. He said, my father and my mother came over to the US during the Haitian flotilla many years ago. Had it not been for a company like MAC Products, my father wouldn’t have had a job. He’s been working for your company for 25 years. 

I am now a doctor, and my sister is the head of procurement for one of the US army bases. Both the son and daughter went through the military. He was thanking us for taking a chance on his father and other members of the Haitian community. Had it not been for us, they don’t know where they would have been. I was so emotional about it. It spoke to me about truly what the culture of our company, our family is, and I was really proud to have that email from this gentleman, David’s son. It was an amazing email that he wrote to us.

Adam Honig: That’s amazing. What an impact. That’s awesome. Obviously, you want to have a great culture to retain employees, to attract employees, but of course, it’s a virtue in its own way to have that. 

Eddie Russnow: Correct. Very important.

Adam Honig: Awesome. It’s really exciting, Eddie, and I really appreciate your joining us on the podcast to tell us about it. 

Eddie Russnow: Adam, I thank you for reaching out and asking me to join. It doesn’t seem like I’ve been here as long as I have. I do wake up every morning very energized to get to work. Yeah, we all have headaches in our day to day running of the business, but at the end of the day, most days, I leave here very satisfied.

Adam Honig: Awesome. That’s great. Well, to our listeners, as a reminder, you can find every episode of the Make It. Move It. Sell It. podcast at spiro.ai/podcast. Be sure to subscribe. I don’t know, Eddie, should people give us a thumbs up or a five-star review or something like that while they’re listening? 

Eddie Russnow: I believe they should. I would say five stars plus. Adam, you’re a great host, and people should recognize that as well.

Adam Honig: Excellent. Well, thank you, Eddie. Well, good having everybody on the podcast, and we look forward to speaking to you at the next episode.