Engineering at the Speed of Innovation: Joshua Tarbutton on People, Process & Possibility

Speaker A: Hey there. I'm Ryan Weiss, founder and CEO, uh, of eps. We are all about spotlighting leaders who bring vision and clarity to their teams. At eps, we help you eliminate the chaos of bad handoffs and the frustration of employees between departments. We focus on increasing revenue and efficiency while making life easier for your team and customers. If you found this content compelling, join us@opticsinaction.com apply to be a guest and share your insights as a leader with vision and clarity.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome back everyone to another episode of Optics in Action, where we spotlight leaders with vision and clarity. And today, I'm honored to have Josh Tarbutton. Josh is the founder and CEO of an organization called Bravo Team. We're going to learn a little bit more about what that is and how they work to create value for clients in a little bit here. So welcome to this episode. Josh, pleasure to have you here.

Speaker C: Is an honor to be here. Thank you.

Speaker B: So thanks for taking the time today. The first question I always ask clients, not clients, but the, uh, the folks who come on the podcast are, why do you do what you do? Before we get into what Bravo Team is and what you do and how you do it, let's talk about why you do it. Why did you found this? Why are you passionate about what Bravo Team does?

Speaker C: Yeah, I would say my why. There's probably a couple major themes. Design and engineering or engineering. Design is one of them. Uh, innov is the second. You know, the ability to create. I think the first one leads to the second one and then the third one is people. So I think most of my life has been spent on, on those. The three things. The first part was mostly the engineering and that turned into fascination with the design process. And I was fortunate to have some very good professors at the university. Josh Summers, and got to connect with David Ullman later in life. And the third passion is, is people, because I think, you know, you can't do anything without people.

Speaker B: Yeah. So I love it. So design, innovation and people. And you mentioned in there kind of the process that brings all that stuff together and how those things link together. So tell me a little bit about what Bravo Team does. We were talking earlier about it and I imagine Bravo Team has something to do with the, uh, name, has something to do with your previous engagements in the military and things like that. I imagine there's some connection there.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker B: And then. But tell us a little bit about what your team does. So you've got, you've got a quite a team of people. You're doing design and innovation. Tell us a little bit about what that looks like for Bravo team.

Speaker C: I would say mostly in support of making things, usually manufacturing or M A manufacturing oem. And it could be automotive or it could be the food service or it could also be just maybe a local company that needs innovation for their. Maybe they want to introduce a new product line. Uh, we can help, uh, with all those. We have about 2/3 mechanical. We have a little over 30 engineers. Of the mechanicals, I'd say probably half are on the sort of mechatronics side. The other half, you know, controls, automation, mechatronics. The other half are more on the, like classical mechanics, uh, design gears, uh, bearing structures, fluids, forces, all that stuff. Thermals, other. The third, uh, is computer and electrical. And we do a lot of PCB design. We do a lot of firmware development. We do app development, mostly related to, I would say more industrial products, sort of like remote monitoring or, you know, taking older components that don't have data acquisition or what people used to call telemetry, but people don't really use that word anymore. Kind of upgrade their products, if you would, to what the consumer expects. And I'd say there's a number of projects like that, but I'd say we're kind of, uh, project agnostic in a sense. And we're also hardware agnostic. We're mostly software agnostic. And we are. But we do have faith, and our faith is in that design process. And so we'll, we'll use whatever tools available, whatever the right tool is. We try to get a real good understanding of what the customer defines as successful. And sometimes it's mainly the timeline, sometimes it's mainly the cost. And so, you know, those are often driven by design. And so we just try to listen and give people what they want.

Speaker B: That's awesome. So, so as you, uh, and I don't want to get into the politics of it, but the, but the tariffs are creating some disruption in global supply chains right now. So as you look at that type of thing, and you're talking a lot about manufacturing and gears and bearings and innovation and products and manufacturing and go to market strategies. As you think about some of those things, are you starting to see some reshoring activities? Even with COVID Right. There was this disruption in global supply chain when those types of things happen. How do you see that impacting American manufacturing? Reshoring of uh, of maybe supply chains and things like that? How does that play into what you're doing?

Speaker C: Yeah, it is definitely, uh, dynamic in the marketplace. It's undeniable. We don't have a long line of people standing uh, outside to onshore right now. I mean I can peek but uh, we, we do have some. But we've also been doing on shoring for, for years. We can make quite a few things. We can give the numbers on what it would cost and some, you know, it's largely driven by assembly costs. I think that's where the, the competition globally is mostly concentrated. I would also say there's good, there's very good groups of designers globally. You know, some countries are really good with certain aspects of you know, design or services already. Uh, we had. So we have been on shoring uh customers in the past. It was because of uh, somewhat of a compromised supply chain during COVID Uh, we certainly saw the supply chain dry up. Uh, we had to really pivot our designs. Um like many other companies, uh, fortunately, you know the difference between us and some other companies, maybe they, they don't have all of the ability to do the design. Uh so for one example for that we had is you know we had a chip that was part of a product that we invented which is a dog collar, the Bravo Walk. Um, and it trains your dog not to pull on a leash. And one of, one of the chips that we had in there we needed to replace. And so we uh, we had to redesign it against uh, what was available. And then we had to kind of scurry in the marketplace and find the parts. And all these third party websites were, were hoarding parts and gouging people. And so uh, we used those, we used ebay and we used what we could to put things provide that function. Often, you know, if you can't get what you, what you need, you can kind of be like you know, MacGyver and try to look around and see what, what you have and what you can do with it. But it's scary for a lot of people. I think you know, the businesses that are going to, that are impacted the most are those that rely on the, the margin of imported products and those companies and there's a lot of them, a lot of retail is, is going to get hit. You know it's going to be affected which is going to drive the consumer price index up. And so I think it's all connected. I'll be honest. I'm a mechanical engineering, I was a mechanical engineering professor. So uh, I don't fully understand the economics but I definitely see them in whatever is going on play out and how, where I can find components. But I'm m pretty good at finding things.

Speaker B: Uh, and it sounds like you built quite a team to uh, be able to do some of those things. So I was going to ask you. So you mentioned about the dog collar and that dog collar innovation. I might have a connection for you that might be interesting there. Uh, another former military vet who has built a dog training franchise business and he's got franchises all over the country. So it might be a connection for us to talk about.

Speaker C: Yeah, terrible at sales. So any, any bit of, any bone you want to throw the, the dog walking business, that'd be great.

Speaker B: Fantastic. So I was going to ask uh, are you able to share some of the innovations or some of the products or technologies? I'm sure you've got confidentiality agreements and stuff, so I don't want to breach any of those. But are you able to share any of the uh, some examples of projects or types of products that you've worked on in the past that might give our listeners some idea?

Speaker C: Uh, we have designed high precision machines that can hold positional tolerances over five axes on the order of microns 1010 to the -6 meters. And we have designed machines that automatically mark objects with lasers uh, on both sides as they go through a process. We have done a lot of automation and there'd be like end of line tests. So when a product gets all the way to the end, you know, how do we know it's good? Uh, we've designed a lot of test and measurement where customer needs to characterize maybe the performance of something they've designed. So we can, we can take their artifacts or their sub component and we can help them understand where it is. And we've also done a handful of consumer products that are out there, we, which you might recognize some of them, but I don't believe we're allowed to say that we were. We can't take credit for their, their products but there's a number of consumer products out there as well.

Speaker B: Yeah, so, so common things that we may have used but you're not able to talk about. So completely get that and appreciate and respect that I think in the design and innovation community for sure. One of my clients, we were talking about their innovation strategy and products and technologies and they were like we don't want any AI recording any of these meetings. And uh, largely because they're like, we don't know where that data is going and we've got, this is an innovation, our strategy for the future and the way we go to market. So completely respect that. You may not Be able to talk about all the things you're working on. So let's take a different direction here a little bit with the. I like to talk about the intersection of people and process. So I kind of have two themes. One is that great people without process get frustrated. So if you've got great people, but you don't have a good design process, you don't have a good innovation process, then those people will get frustrated. Customers get frustrated, Engineers get frustrated. People get frustrated. The corollary or the sort of the parallel to that is that a, uh, great process without people is wasted. You can make amazing what you perceive or what I perceive as engineers to be amazing processes, but if people don't follow them or people don't engage with them, or it doesn't make sense to the people doing them, then it's completely wasted. So people without process get frustrated. Process without people is wasted. So tell me a little bit about your experience. Do you have any sort of experience or thoughts on. Oh, uh, yeah, the intersection of people as it relates to, you know, design and innovation and working with clients and working with engineers and making all that happen?

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. You know, coming from academia, I assumed a lot about business. Um, and I know that these podcasts come out. You know, some of my people listen to them and they'll be the first to say that Josh is clever fella, but I do kind of fall more into the nutty professor category than the well organized category. Uh, so process is something I would say I largely underappreciated, uh, when we first started. And only through the pain of, uh, uh, the ensuing chaos did I begin to appreciate it. Now it's funny because in the design process I, I feel very strongly about the order in the steps and you know, you know, when is, when can you purchase something, when can you, like, how can this part of the design move forward when this design is still in, in limbo? What is the right timing for moving on in sealing and design? You know, because, um, as designers we, we want to stay in an infinite loop. You know, we can make it better. Is there's a, that tendency? Yeah, uh, you know, in all of us. And also, you know, when you make something and you put it out into the world, there's the vulnerability that, hey, somebody's going to see something. And, and so I think there's an inherent tendency, both psychologically but also by the nature of a lot of engineers. You know, they want to get things, you know, where they could be, where they should be. And I think so that Part of knowing. Knowing when to move through those steps of the process. Uh, I'd say we were. We excel at. But where we struggle is sort of the more obvious stuff. It's like when, you know, lead comes in, we do. We have all of the steps explicitly defined so that there's no wasted time and we're not having unnecessary meetings with. With information that would have been easier to obtain. And so for me, I didn't fully appreciate process until, you know, kind of like swimming in chaos. And as a, as a leader, you're usually.

Speaker B: I love that. Swimming in chaos. That's a great, great statement. I like it.

Speaker C: We're not, we're not swimming in chaos now, but. But, um, we. We have tamed much of it, but we have. I mean, I think process improvement is something you can't ever stop.

Speaker B: I love some of the sort of articulation that you shared in that. Starting with that swimming in chaos, but understanding that's not where you are today. But sometimes we jump into the deep end of a pool and we don't have a process prepared for something. And learning through failure, learning through refining through failure, refining through the fire becomes an essential part of what we do and how we innovate.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: Innovation is not always clean. It's not always a point A to point B. Right. In fact, a lot of innovation doesn't do anything like that. It goes in swirlies and all over the place, and it comes back to, yeah, you know what? This could work. And if innovation was easy, then everybody would do it. It sounds like you've assembled quite a creative, artistic engineering group that's able to navigate some of those challenges and opportunities to step through the. The framework of kind of key steps on that path to innovation. Am I describing that right?

Speaker C: Absolutely.

Speaker B: Does that resonate or am I missing something in there?

Speaker C: Absolutely, yeah, I think. And, you know, going back to the people, part of it is, you know, uh, people are frustrated without process. And when you hire. When you hire the kind of people that we have, you know, when we first started, there's 30 engineers now. We first started the company. I could walk into a room, I could say, hey, guys, you know, I could look at something. What about this? And he's, oh, you're so smart. It's a great idea. You know, and now I walk into the room, they're like, yeah, we thought about that. This is why it won't work. Do you need something? So it's not harsh like that. I mean, the guys are great, but. But they, they are pretty independent. But the, the pro, the pain that really came, uh, mostly from how we were organized. And so what we try to do is pretty challenging because we do cross disciplinary projects. They almost always involve software, hardware, mechanical design and electrical design. Almost all of our products now, I mean even our trash cans have, you know, sensors on them and open for us and we have to have what we call T people. It's a very agile way of thinking. It's like, you know, inherited from Scrum. So I've, I've worked with David Ullman a little bit on agile for hardware. Um, and I would say that, you know, a lot of the frustrations that we've had is not organizing the team and decision making the best. And incidentally we've landed on something that's kind of like uh, it's very insp. It's very similar to how a military unit might operate. Uh, so we uh, have a pretty flat organization that is organized into small teams that are T people and T people are people that have, you know, the, the depth. So it's kind of like your vertical dimension and you have your horizontal dimension, uh, which is your breadth. And so we try to be real careful to hire people. Obviously we're hiring a younger person. We don't expect them to be too deep or too wide, but we do expect them to have the, the, the desire to learn, uh, and that, that fire to, to grow. And if we can do that, well, you can pair a, uh, maybe a shallow tea with a deep tea and the shallow tea gets bigger like in record time. It's incredible to watch. And that dynamic, you know, between a, uh, more experienced, you know, engineer and a younger engineer to learn through the work as they uh, contribute and learn. And often, you know, the younger person might end up doing some of the tasks that are not as exciting to the older person. But because they're learning, some of those less interesting tasks are still interesting enough because they're acquiring those skills and that speed to move at the velocity of the work. And when we get that right on the team, there's, in my opinion there's very few things more, more fascinating to see. So I feel like that's, that's actually something that we finally landed on this year. But I would say we've had teams like this all along, uh, with different forms. But as the company grows, you know, Million Dollar Company has different processes in a $5 million company than a $10 million company. And as we've gone through those milestones, all of the processes have to change. Not uh, all of them, but many m. Yeah.

Speaker B: Things have to evolve as you grow and as you go through those stages, don't they?

Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah. So we've definitely experienced that. No process frustration and also the process without people, uh, problem.

Speaker B: So you've been on this journey from the military to being a professor, to being a very successful entrepreneur. And as you've gone on that journey, what's something that you've learned that you would share with your younger self or with another person who's going down the path of, you know, becoming an entrepreneur one day? What's something that you've learned? One or two things that really made an impact on the way you lead today and the why you're successful as you have been.

Speaker C: I would say major theme and is that relationships are often more important than being right. And for me, recognizing that the ego is kind of the story I tell the world. And if I get wrapped up in my own storytelling of. Of myself in the world, then I don't always see myself so clearly or my behaviors so clearly. And I think having good people around you is essential to allow yourself to be protected from your blind spots.

Speaker B: Wow. That. I love that. I love that wisdom. So, uh, my background, I got degrees in chemistry and finance. So I'm like, technical guy, right? And when I first started in the chemical industry, I'm like, I'm going to solve the world's problems through chemistry and finance. Like, we're going to make an impact. And what I did when I ran smack into a wall of if you don't engage people, if you don't surround yourself with the right people, if you don't get the right people on board, nothing happens. And that's. That process without people gets wasted. You can know everything you want about finance and chemistry and physics and mechanical engineering. If you don't engage the right people, nothing happens.

Speaker C: Yeah. Who not how right, who not how people are, what make life worth it? And, um, you know, I don't. I don't think, you know, some of us may want to be the richest person all alone on a. In a mansion, on a hill, on an ocean, far away from everybody. And I can honestly say that didn't sound too bad to me when I was younger, but I think, like, I don't think happiness is ever defined without the context of. Of people. And I like what they say, you know, I'm a big fan of EO and, uh, Vern Harnish. Uh, I went through the accelerator program, uh, which changed my life. If you get. If you make over a Quarter million dollars, you're eligible. And you get paired with an entrepreneur that's been successful enough to be a coach. And they help you scale, but they focus on strategy, execution, cash and people. And they say, strategies, revenue, executions, profit. Cash is cash. Only one way. Only one way to measure it. You go look at the bank account. You can't count credit cards or loan or line of credit or anything. Cash is cash. And then number four, people is happiness. People is happiness. And I think, you know, EO was real instrumental when I first started the company, just to recognize, like, how important it was. But as a professor, I wasn't especially sensitive to how I made people feel. And so that's been sort of the journey after, uh. And I recently read a Forbes article, is talking about green flags. You know, we talk about red flags in relationships. Uh, but a green flag, they said, is when you have conflict and at the other side of it, you're able to own your own behavior and extend grace to each other and realize, like, hey, this stuff happens when we're trying to do hard things. Especially when you're trying to do hard things. You know, our emotions are. Get heavily involved. But to be able to go through hard things to, you know, to say things you probably shouldn't have said, to get excited or whatever and, you know, and be able to come back and say, look, you know, I screwed up. I'm sorry. And for them, say, it's okay, and. Or vice versa. It. It's. It's a green flag. And I think sometimes we think, oh, we had conflict. Now we all have to run away. You know, I'm the. I'm the CEO. I started this company. You know, screw them. But it's like, just. There's no way to go. There's no way to go. I love.

Speaker B: I love that perspective. I mean, you know, a, uh, great mentor in my life once shared that when we. When we genuinely care about other people, we'll go through conflict and we'll come out the other side. Our relationship may even be stronger than it was going in. And, uh, the people we care the most about in our lives, maybe our spouses or our children, there's times when we have conflict and we come out the other side of it and we say, okay, we went through that, but we're here. We're committed to making something work, and that's really what makes life worthwhile.

Speaker C: And I'll say that, like, you know, with what you're talking about, about process is like, why do process, right? So we. We don't want to first, you know, no process. You framed it in the context of, you know, frustration. Well, for people. Right. But often a lot of times I feel like people institute process to control people or to drive profits. And those are all, I mean, legitimate business reasons. I mean a business, if, if they don't make a profit. Right. They can't pay the people. And that's not good for the people. But, but if the business thinks and of process in terms of empowering people and, and removing frustration, and if they think of it really as like a people first activity, I think some of the resistance to getting help with processes, it can be diminished because you really, it's, it's, it's, it's like an, it's like an employee benefit to give people clarity. It's like, it's a, it's a basic need that we all need. We need to, we need to be successful. We need to look at our week and to look back and say, hey, we had a good week. And if, and a lot of that is, is how, you know, the leadership defines success. And if I, and if I can define success against, you know, healthy business metrics that are like, designed to help people work in harmony for their benefit, then we have, I think, the, the right processes in place. Yeah.

Speaker B: One thing came to mind as you were sharing some of that. So there was a gentleman, W. Edwards Deming, who taught. Yeah. The Deming Institute. I think, like last time I checked, uh, this was like the quote on their front page of their website is that a bad system will beat a good person every time. And when you really start to absorb and think about that, he's not saying that systems are more important or that systems, that process should be used to control people or anything like that. What he's saying is, and when you really think about the meaning of that a bad system will beat a good person every time. What he's saying is that if you have a bad system, if you have a bad process and you hire in, you attract and you hire in the best employee, like this is an amazing employee and you have terrible onboarding systems and your processes are frustrated, uh, like you're going to chew them up and spit them out. You go and you attract the ideal client. You say, this is the client. Wow, this is like the best client. We've been going after this golden goose for decades. And we built our business to get this project. If you have bad processes for onboarding that client, you know, chew them up and spit them out. Right. If you have great vendors, you like, we've got great vendor partners that collaborate with us, uh, to bring innovation in the market. But you've got bad processes for dealing with vendors. You could have the ideal vendor, you chew them up, you spit them out. So that bad process or bad system will beat a good person every time. He's not saying that people are less important. What he's saying is people are the most important thing and you want to have good systems and good processes to enable them to melt the frustration away so that they can perform to a level that they're capable of performing to.

Speaker C: Yeah, well, um, he said it better

Speaker B: for sure. Well, listen, Josh, it has been an absolute pleasure having you on this episode of Optics in Action. How do people learn more about you, learn more about Bravo Team? I'm sure that folks have innovation ideas or manufacturing clients, you know, potential clients. Like, how do they learn more about you and what you're doing with Bravo Team?

Speaker C: Yeah. And thank, thank you for having me and for the work that you're doing with work, uh, streams, I think it's very important. Uh, we're pretty easy to get in touch with. I have a weird last name. You could start there. Josh Tarbutton. You'll find me. Or you can go to jtarbutton.com not 100% sure the website is up yet. Or just come to our company website, ww.bravo team tech. Uh, I was too cheap when I started the company tobuy.com, but it was because it was $8,000. But I did buy it later. Uh, but that's why we're dot tech. I also thought it was kind of cool, but now I end up explaining it every time I talk about it. If you're interested in the dog collar, you can go to Chewy or Amazon or ww, uh,.bravo walk.com and yeah, we'd love to hear from you. If you have any innovation needs, we can always look at it and say we can't help. But we love to look and would love to help.

Speaker B: Fantastic. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on this episode of Optics in Action where we spotlight leaders with vision and clarity. And it is great clear from the team that you're building there at Bravo Team Tech that you have vision, you've pulled this together and you've got innovation and design and you've got clarity of where you're going and how you're leading. And I think that self reflection that you've shared is really important for any entrepreneur, any leader to be thinking about. So thanks again. For being on this episode of Optics in Action.

Speaker C: Absolutely. Thank you, Ryan.

Speaker A: Hey there. My name is Ryan Weiss and I am the host of the Optics in Action podcast where we spotlight visionary leaders who bring clarity and innovation to their industries. If you are interested in being a guest, or if you know someone who would be, you can find more information about the podcast and listen to previous episodes at. Ah. Opticsinaction.com we'd be thrilled to have you on the show and can't wait to hear your story.