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The Manufacturing Automation Podcast: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Gimbel Automation and Develop LLC
Michael and Matt talk about company philosophies and operating systems, industrial marketing for automation B2B companies, how they structure their lives/work-life-balance, and much more.
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- 1 weeks ago1h 9m
Shopify Went Dark, Conquest Ads & the Blanket PO Conversation That Could Change Everything
Michael opens with one of his rougher weeks of the year. A silent Shopify bug — only visible to brand-new users in a completely cookie-free browser — killed e-commerce sales for six to seven days and took 80 hours to track down. Combined with ad fatigue on Meta, a 43-day deal close lag hitting turnkeys right now, and IMTS prep reshaping the entire booth layout at the last minute, it's been a week of everything converging at once. Matt's week is a different kind of pressure — two full-day site visits, contracts in multi-month red-line negotiations, and a sales bottleneck that's no longer a pipeline problem but a pure capacity one: his team is quoting more than ever in company history and still can't keep up.The sales and marketing section is one of the most tactical the show has had. Michael makes the case for conquest ad campaigns — buying competitor keywords, running direct AutoVise versus Air Vice comparisons, targeting CoolantClear against Rotoclear — and walks through how his Meta ads quietly poured all budget into one winning creative while 60% of his ad library never saw a single dollar spent. Matt admits he's never run a competitor keyword campaign and gets talked through why it's probably already happening to him. They go long on the AI content saturation problem — everyone's marketing is better than ever, nobody's converting because everyone else's is too — and why the only differentiator left is the content that's intentionally hard to make. Matt gets a LinkedIn posting mandate from his marketing team. Michael's multi-AI debugging workflow using Claude, Manus, and Groq in parallel is what finally cracked the Shopify bug.Engineering covers Develop's largest machine ever — 30-plus feet long, split for transport, loaded by forklift because it won't fit through a door in one piece — losing two full weeks to one supplier on large milled plates, and a new HMI architecture debuting at Lupe for the packaging market. Michael is finalizing IMTS demo assembly, filing provisional patents he can't discuss, and stashing 30 CoolantClear units in a hotel room to sell in ways that may or may not comply with show floor rules. The CI section closes with the most substantive supply chain conversation the show has had — Matt making the case for deep blanket POs with fewer, growth-minded vendors as a strategic relationship rather than a procurement tactic, and drawing the analogy to a building lease: nobody hesitates to sign a five-year lease on the space that generates their revenue, so why hesitate to commit to the product that does the same?
- 2 weeks ago1h 0m
Decision Authority Matrix, 30X Meta ROAS & "I'd Rather Lose It Today Than in 12 Months"
Matt opens with decision fatigue at a peak — seven hours of back-to-back meetings on Thursday, four reports on his desk, and a team that's been waiting for him to put authority in writing that he assumed they already had. The fix isn't more hierarchy — it's a decision authority matrix that makes explicit who can approve what, up to what dollar threshold, without Matt. Michael opens on his first full week with an EA and a quieter inbox, and lands on an uncomfortable insight: he'd been using email and EA-type tasks as a refuge from the harder, higher-stakes decisions he was avoiding. Both are figuring out what their jobs actually are now that the scaffolding is coming off.The sales and marketing section covers a lot of ground. Matt is watching machines his team bid on three to four years ago — machines that went to the low bidder — getting decommissioned in the corner, and customers spending 50 to 100% more to start over with Develop. Two competitors released marketing content this week copying the scoping theory Develop has been building for four years. He takes it as confirmation, not a threat. They go long on margin philosophy, risk scalers on new-to-world machine builds, when to strategically compress margin to enter a market, and why B2B conviction during the quiet years is the only way the flywheel eventually starts. Michael is running 20–30X return on Meta ads — until it drops off a cliff, every time — while Google holds steady at 10X without being touched. The CoolantClear price increase campaign was their most successful email campaign yet, and his marketing hire Nate's idea.Engineering covers Develop's five-robot Project 29 machine now in full build with all robots landed, the critical path getting squeezed by one supplier on large milled plates who will not be supplying again, and the IMTS booth being completely redesigned around a last-minute Fanuc RoboDrill that nobody wanted to say no to. Michael is finalizing the in-house CoolantClear 3 production supply chain, narrowing down a product launch priority order across four items, and filing a cluster of patents that are draining to read and worse to draft. The CI section closes with Matt running a full audit on all active CIs after realizing the board has grown beyond what the team can execute in parallel, and a pointed conversation about ClickUp, Gim Command, and what it actually costs to hire for a homegrown ERP that nobody else in the world has ever touched.
- Aug 19, 20261h 0m
Passion Fatigue, EA Day One & the Two-to-Three Year Customer Revenge Loop
Matt opens the week with something he hasn't felt in a while — his passion back at full volume. Site visits, marketing roadmap sessions with the UK hire, deal structuring on strategic accounts, and a surprise shop tour at Ring Brothers, the company he helped build before Develop. It's energizing, but he knows high-passion Matt can be a lot for people who haven't seen it in a while. Michael's version of the week is quieter but equally significant: he ran an experiment where he just stopped doing EA tasks — didn't sort email, didn't answer the phone — and found four hours he didn't know he had. The in-person EA candidate came in for her trial day and got hired on the spot.On the sales and marketing side, Matt walks through a pattern that's now showing up repeatedly: companies that chose the low bid over Develop two to three years ago are coming back with machines they want to tear out. The email that landed in his inbox that morning flat-out said Develop's was the most thorough proposal, but the board went low bid anyway. His team wants to start a whiteboard over-under bet on how long each one takes to call back. Michael, meanwhile, is deep in value engine mapping — a Ryan Deiss framework for flowcharting the entire customer journey from ad click to money in the bank — and walks through how it helped him identify where Gimbel's funnel is leaky rather than just too small. IMTS prep is intensifying: a RoboDrill is now going into a 10x10 booth, CoolantClear units are getting shipped in a second crate to potentially sell on the floor, and nobody has confirmed whether selling product on the show floor is actually allowed.Engineering covers Develop's five-robot Project 29 machine getting derailed by one supplier on large milled plates, a factory acceptance test that caught issues before anything shipped, and a facility expansion plan that just hit a wall — precast concrete lead times jumped from three months to ten because of data center construction consuming Wisconsin's supply. Michael is filing a cluster of patents he can't talk about yet, has a rotary union collet chuck nearly ready, and is wrestling with product launch priority order across four items that could all ship within three months. The CI section closes with Matt deciding to delay his line of credit renewal rather than forecast through a normalization that keeps moving, Michael turning off Shopify notifications and finding more peace than he expected, and a pointed conversation about EA-as-forcing-function — both hosts landing on the same insight that having someone who will actually make the call, even imperfectly, beats the founder stalling indefinitely in their own inbox.
- Aug 12, 20261h 0m
Growth vs. Profitability, a RoboDrill in a 10x10 Booth & Fanuc Comes to You
Michael opens the week in what he calls profitability mode — except the tension is that pushing for profitability and pushing for growth are fundamentally opposed, and he's trying to do both at once. He's obsessing over conversion rate, rebuilding the checkout experience, adding CAD model GIFs to email sequences, and rearchitecting the entire customer journey — all while knowing what he really needs is an EA and a marketing person, and holding off on both because the business already has so many new people to onboard. Matt's week is the mirror image: the team is handing him fully prepped proposals without him asking, booking meetings he didn't know about, and sending follow-up emails from his Otter transcripts — and his new question is why he's still reviewing things that don't need him at all anymore.The sales and marketing conversation is a long one. They go deep on when to choose growth over profitability and commit fully to one instead of straddling both, the EA versus marketing hire dilemma, conversion rate measurement in B2B versus B2C, the danger of over-engineering proposals to the point of creating noise, and a seven-hour session where Matt's marketing hire went through all 236 of Develop's proposals to re-engineer the funnel from scratch. Fanuc reaches out unprompted after seeing Develop's Inland case study — they want to build a dedicated case study page with backlinks and offered a RoboDrill for IMTS. Michael, meanwhile, is squeezing a RoboDrill into a 10x10 booth and has accepted that the showrunners will probably yell at them.Engineering covers CoolantClear 3 going into full in-house production for the first time — no outside vendors, one assembly tech who turned out to be a machinist — and a new pneumatic collet chuck with built-in rotary union that's been visited and revisited six times and is finally looking sellable. The CI section closes with a Shopify and HubSpot unification that creates a single fulfillment source of truth for the assembly team, morning scrum getting messier in a good way, a cash bucket discipline conversation pulled from Ryan Deiss, and a pointed exchange about YPO versus EO for founder peer groups.
- Aug 5, 202655 min
Matt's First Real Vacation in a Decade, 50% Close Rates & Fireflies Is Out
Matt opens the week having just taken his first real vacation in ten years — four days where the team didn't need him once. Not because he forced it, but because the systems held. He comes back to a week of 15 hours of pure sales meetings he didn't book, proposals he didn't write, and follow-ups he didn't send — all handled by the team while he was gone. Michael opens on the opposite end of the same evolution: all-in on marketing after a month of operations, launching 40 ads over a weekend, rebuilding abandoned cart flows with 3D GIF previews, and landing a 50% close rate on real leads — a number Matt immediately flags as a possible sign of underpricing.The sales and marketing conversation covers the email marketing gap both companies are closing — Klaviyo abandoned cart flows, welcome sequences, drip campaign architecture, and why Michael thinks email is the highest-leverage thing he's not doing consistently. Matt's marketing hire Andrew is three weeks in and pitching his full plan on the 10th. A business development engineer role just went live on Indeed. They also go deep on funnel filtering — how to slow calendar velocity without burning leads — and the right moment to hand a sales process to someone who didn't build it.Engineering covers the five-robot Project 29 machine getting insanely heavy, the HMI going into revision two with an architecture Matt expects to last a decade, CoolantClear 3 supply chain details being locked down, and a customer from years ago who bought from the lowest bidder and is now ready to throw those machines in the trash and start over with Develop. The CI section closes with Fireflies getting cancelled over security gaps that couldn't be fixed, Otter replacing it the next day for less money, a purchasing automation in Gim Command that gets POs onto vendor Gantt charts in one click, and a frank conversation about what it actually costs — in hours and dollars — to run on AI instead of people.
- Jul 22, 20261h 1m
Oversubscribed and Understaffed: EA vs. Sales Hire, One Plan's Done & Matt's Most Intense Week Ever
Michael opens the week trying to come up for air — CoolantClear is selling faster than it can be assembled, proposals are backing up, marketing has gone quiet, and he can't figure out which fire to stomp first. Matt opens on the opposite end of the same problem: 13 sales meetings in one week, Andrew in his first days booking more, Trish running the inbox, and a Thursday that converged accounting, legal review, CFO reporting, and the largest pitch in Develop history into a single day. Both are oversubscribed. The difference is which part of the business is doing it to them.The sales and marketing conversation is one of the most practical the show has had. Matt makes the case for EA before salesperson — and shares how Trish protected him from his own chronic optimism before Andrew could even start. Michael walks through his pricing experiment on CoolantClear, his 200-hour proposal generator that's 90% done and still breaking, and the EA versus sales hire debate he's been circling for weeks. They go deep on LinkedIn organic versus ads, zero-difficulty keywords, email drip campaigns, case study attribution, and the right order to line up marketing dominoes when you can't measure which one will fall furthest.Engineering covers a new pallet tending system Michael can't discuss yet — provisional filed, first customer implementation underway — incremental gripper redesigns cutting assembly cost without touching specs, and a mountain of parts arriving at Develop for the largest machine in company history. The CI section closes with One Plan officially outgrown: Develop has 3X'd its machine throughput and is aiming for 2-3X more in 2028, two team members are tasked with figuring out what replaces it, and Michael makes the pitch for building something in-house in 20 hours.
- Jul 15, 20261h 5m
Andrew Starts Monday, Claude Is Everyone's Therapist & the HubSpot Debate Rages On
Matt opens week two post-Automate with nine sales calls booked and ten more already on next week's calendar — but for the first time, he didn't send most of the emails to get them there. The shift is working. Michael is in a parallel version of the same problem: more high-quality enterprise leads than he can get proposals out to, a marketing engine that's gone quiet while sales volume is high, and a growing sense that something structural needs to change before the pipeline dips in three months.The sales and marketing section turns into one of the most substantive exchanges the show has had — a 30-plus minute conversation about funnels, deal velocity, when to chase versus let die on the vine, the real cost of HubSpot versus Klaviyo at different deal sizes, and whether building a Klaviyo MCP server for ten hours is the right move when a four-hour drip campaign would've done the job. Andrew, the marketing hire Matt has been building toward all year, officially starts Monday. Michael's version of that hire is still undecided — but by the end of the conversation, he's closer to admitting he needs one than he was at the start.Engineering covers a CoolantClear production breakthrough Michael can't talk about on air, a full TumbleBlast redesign with clean file structure and proper part numbers for the first time, an Access Air redesign expanding compatibility to the full Haas fifth-axis line, and a factory acceptance test at a supplier site that caught a laundry list of non-SOW deviations before anything shipped. The episode closes with a long and genuinely funny conversation about Claude Skills — Matt's hidden gem unlock that took half a Monday and ROI'd by Friday — and a frank exchange about Fable, Manus, data security, and what it means when your entire team starts using Claude as their best friend and therapist.ReasoningNot a duplicate or too similar to prior titles. Recent episodes covered the Automate debrief, the AI compute cost debate, nine people and one inbox, and Spindle Storm's redo. This episode's defining threads are Andrew finally starting, the most in-depth HubSpot vs. Klaviyo debate the show has had, and the Claude Skills conversation — none of which have anchored a prior title. "Andrew Starts Monday" closes a storyline that's been building across multiple episodes and gives return listeners a satisfying payoff.Why this title fits MAP 87. "Andrew Starts Monday" is the most concrete milestone of the episode and a genuine moment listeners have been waiting for. "Claude Is Everyone's Therapist" is pulled almost verbatim from Matt's own line — one of the most memorable and quotable moments of the episode, and the kind of hook that travels outside the core audience. "The HubSpot Debate Rages On" captures the longest and most substantive exchange of the episode, a genuine back-and-forth where both hosts hold their positions and neither fully convinces the other.Why the description is structured this way. Opens with the parallel post-Automate energy from both hosts, dives into the sales and marketing conversation which earns the most description space because it dominates the episode, covers engineering milestones including the FAT story which is both concrete and funny, and closes on the Claude Skills and AI tools conversation — which is the most shareable and broadly relatable thread for listeners outside the core manufacturing audience.
- Jul 8, 202658 min
Nine People, One Inbox, and the AI Compute Cost Nobody's Talking About
Michael opens on a milestone he didn't expect to feel so strange: he's up to nine people, four of them in the last month, and for the first time his job is almost entirely infrastructure and people management. The individual contributor work is almost gone — except sales calls, which he's starting to find numbingly repetitive and knows need to be handed off. Matt's feeling the same fatigue on the other end of a late, no-show customer who turned a routine call into one of his worst sales performances in a year. Both are building toward something that doesn't require them in every seat — and starting to feel the gap between where they are and where that actually is.On the marketing and sales side, Michael is deep in email marketing infrastructure — building a Klaviyo MCP server so Claude can write and push campaigns without him touching the interface — and is watching Meta ad fatigue eat into ROAS in real time while he's too buried in production to film new creative. Matt's EA Trish is now handling invoicing so well that month-end close happened the day after month end for the first time in Develop history, and he's down to under two hours a week in accounting. Matt also debuts AirDAM — an AI-powered digital asset management vault his team built so agencies and contractors always pull the right approved content, not the same four photos.Engineering covers CoolantClear supply chain hitting a wall so hard that Michael is spinning up in-house production capacity on the idle spindles, a new Spindle Storm first article in production with triple the airflow, and a greenfield facility buildout proposal moving fast at Develop with multiple robots and parts showing up daily for Projects 2902 and 2903. The episode closes with a conversation both hosts keep circling back to: what happens when AI compute stops being subsidized by venture money — and whether the entire infrastructure Michael is building quietly becomes three people's salaries overnight.
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About The Manufacturing Automation Podcast
Michael and Matt talk about company philosophies and operating systems, industrial marketing for automation B2B companies, how they structure their lives/work-life-balance, and much more.
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