SendCutSend CEO Jim Belosic on bootstrapping a nine-figure sheet metal manufacturer to 350 employees in 7 years

like explain exactly who your customers are, how you grew the business? I'd love to kind of kick it off with like an intro on you and the company. Okay. Uh yeah, our customers are everyone.

I guess usually usually the way I describe it like my mom my mom has a a silly sign that we cut for her that says live, laugh, love. Um and then we also have parts that are in orbit right now. Wow. Um we have parts at the bottom of the ocean, parts in Antarctica.

Uh, you know, we do work for 60 to 70% of the Fortune 500. Wait, how big can you go? You might you might be a solution. We're looking for a bigger gong. We're looking. Okay. I was hoping you would ask. Yes. Because we are trying to get a rather large gong and this gong is is relatively modern, but it's not big enough.

Needs to be even bigger. This is incredible. Oh, yeah. Uh, I think we could even put logos all over it. That might be some sponsorship opportunity. There we go. Now we're talking our language. That's fantastic. Uh can you do you have any update for the business? Can you share anything about the scale of the business?

How many employees or size of the business? Anything you got? Yeah. Yeah, we're uh we're in our seventh year of operation. We're profitable. Profitable. For hitting the gong for profitability. There's nothing better. There's nothing, you know, the big fundraises, they're great, but nothing like nothing. Really?

Congratulations. Yeah, we're doing uh nine figures of revenue. Wow. About 350 employees. That's amazing. So, yeah, we're we're doing it. Yeah. And and and all in America, right? Um like what what does the actual footprint of the business look like? Where you based? How how what's the scale right now? Yeah. Yeah.

100% in the US. Uh including support staff, remote staff. Uh we have staff in 22 states I think right now. Our headquarters is in Reno, Nevada, which is not known to be a big manufacturing tech or whatever, but we're doing it. Vegas little city. Yeah. Yeah. It's known for a lot of things, but yeah, we love it.

Uh we have a a facility in Paris, Kentucky. Yep. Uh which is a town about 10,000. Yeah. Yeah. Paris. And then and then Arlington, Texas. So just about 200,000 square feet under roof right now. Okay. So, so, so 2018, seven years ago, you start the business. Uh, like there was not an American Dynamism meme at that time.

People weren't writing breathless when the American Dynamism meme started. Did you look I invented American Dynamism. Like, come on.

Uh but but but but seriously like like what was it a happy was it a happy accident or was it deliberate that you saw something on the horizon about uh America's need to manufacture things domestically and you made the conscious decision or was it just like hey you're here you're making your thing you're building the business why not build it where you grew up?

Yeah, I'm I'm not that smart. I I don't see the future very well. Uh really I it was for selfish reasons. I needed parts made. So uh I've always been a car guy. I'm always working on weird side projects and I needed some custom parts made.

No one really wanted to make them especially in a quantity of one, you know, um I could get them made in a thousand or I could wait 8 weeks, but no one would make something, you know, high mix, low volume. So I was like, well, I'm a software guy. I should be able to figure this out. Yeah.

So that's really how it started. I told my wife, uh, hey, I want to buy this machine. It's like $600,000, but I think I think if I can get just enough customers, it'll pay for itself and then I get to use it for free. Nice. And for whatever reason, she was like, "Yeah, go for it.

" So, uh I I told her it would print money, took about seven years, and now it prints dollar bills. Uh so, hoping to turn that into hundreds at some point. That's amazing. That's amazing.

Um what uh what yeah talk about the actual automation and software that went into uh like increasing profitability of of a given machine. I imagine that that's like the secret sauce.

That's the proprietary like platform that you know keeps you know um keeps margins reasonable in a world where probably anyone can go out and buy the same machine but they're not going to get the same yield. Uh how did that evolve? Where's the status of this now? Like how autonomous is manufacturing in America?

Yeah, it's it's got to be a mix. It's got to be a mix of robots and dudes. And no matter what, like I think you can over robot, you can over autonomize. Is that even a word? Um or you can go with just too many humans. And I think we've figured out the right mix.

Um you put guys where guys are really good and put robots where robots are really good. Yeah. I think our secret sauce was we approached this whole thing uh as software guys. We weren't manufacturers. We're like, "Oh, how hard can it be? " You know, software development is supposed to be like the hardest thing.

Like we make all the money. You're a computer science manufacturer. Yeah. How hard can that be? But it was it was a gift because we approached things completely differently than anybody else. Uh because we just didn't know any better. And we made a lot of mistakes.

like we had to throw stuff away that people had learned a hundred years ago and and we were just learning for the first time because we were trying to figure it out by ourselves.

But some of the things we discovered um you know being software first it helped us you know like you said we we can beat everyone on efficiency and and waste material up time or material utilization and machine uptime.

So, you know, our our original vendors for our big equipment, they didn't want to sell us the machines because I showed them how we were going to use it and kind of hack their software and use our own. And they're like, "Oh, it'll never run. It'll never run.

" Uh, few months later, the sales guy came back and saw our numbers and was like, "Oh, holy crap. Can you teach us how to do it? " So, at one point, you know, we thought, "Why don't we just license our software? " Yeah.

you know, that's we're software guys and I keep getting cut on metal and it's heavy and stinky and whatever. Um, but but it's it's really not possible. Our software would not work for anybody else. We're so weird with the way that we approach things.

Um, you really have to start from scratch and um I think really vertical integration is the way to do it. you know, if if I could, you know, buy a a boxite mine and smelt my own aluminum and have my own ships to transport the aluminum and everything, I I would.

Um, I don't know if that's the future for us, but really controlling everything from software up. Yeah, Jordy, you you can go ahead. Yeah, I I it feels like uh I mean, this is we we've had a lot of your customers on the show and this is your first time.

Have you intentionally stayed out of like like the avoided kind of the the hype cycle? I know you got a Jason Karman video as of today, but it feels like if you wanted to, you could go out and raise like billion, you know, billion dollars right now.

Uh if if you wanted to play that game, but it feels like it's just not something that doesn't seem like that that's interesting. You seem to be just focused on this. Yeah, that's the motivation. I I don't know that world. Like I don't know finance and venture capital or anything.

Um I have a really tough time understanding our balance sheet. But you know, I have a I have a high school education. I I just like to make parts. Like the way that I run this business is like a lemonade stand. You know, we sell lemonade. This is incredible. Yeah. I make parts, sir. I make parts. Yeah.

So, if we sell enough lemonade, I can take my profit and go buy more machines and make more lemonade. And that's that's really what I love. Yeah. So, I I've kind of had my head down for seven years and we've been doing it. We've been uh self-funded and and able to buy all of our own stuff. That's great.

And what I realized is like if you if you want to shortcut that and go the VC route, you can light money on fire so much faster in manufacturing than you can in software. uh the the capex is just absolutely wild. So, thank god we didn't go down that path. Um we're a little smarter now.

Uh we do need to expand at a very very rapid flip here in the next couple years. We just got into CNC machining, which is an order of magnitude more expensive. Um but honestly, I I I I don't want to raise I I want to show people that it can be done with our method with our dumb Binance method and and it can work.

It's great. Uh, talk to me about how steep the distribution is in your customers. You said you're in I I think you said somewhere in nine figures in revenue.

Um, and I imagine that there is a tension between I want to serve the mom who wants to cut a live, laugh, love sign or whatever your example was and then uh the re-industrialization process and there's a you know a billion dollars on the table. Yeah. Exactly. And so uh obviously you want to say yes to both.

They're both profitable. But there there tends to be a tension in C in just every company of we have an enterprise, we have a B2B, we have a BTOC business. Uh have you have you bifurcated the the business at all internally? Are there tradeoffs or tensions? Like talk to me about how that evolves.

We treat everyone the same. Wow. Um we we try and emulate In-N-Out Burger. Yeah. You know, I don't care who you are. Everyone gets a double double the same way. You can't ask for it medium rare. You can't ask for a filt of fish. The menu is small, but it's good, fast, inexpensive.

Um, so we're actually very proud that, you know, all these, uh, you know, rocket launch companies that use us, uh, they get the same exact treatment as some guy who's building a Harley in his garage. So, I I think building a system that can serve everyone equally.

Uh maybe maybe the Fortune50s get a little worse service than they're used to. We're not bending over backwards. We're not giving them, you know, net 300 terms. Y uh they get a little worse service, but then the guys in their garage get an amazing service and then they they grow. We help them grow.

I I want to see people do a prototype and then 10 units, then 100 units, and then a million units. You know, everyone should be making a business out there. Yeah.

And and I'm sure at some point like if we're talking about you know the like some huge huge customer that's going to be making trillions of things like they always have the option to bring that inhouse and do that themselves and that's their financial calculation but you're going to keep scaling and it's a race between you know hey yeah like you might be able to bring it in house and do a little bit better this year but I'm going to keep going next year and the than the year after.

So maybe you stick around. Uh that yeah it's it's a huge incentive for us because uh in software in SAS we had a concept of churn. Churn was absolutely terrible.

Y uh here we don't really have a concept of churn until the company gets so large that they purchase their own equipment and we've actually advised on that a couple times. Sure. But it's it's a reminder of no, we should be the ones scaling. We should be the ones uh growing with them and we've been able to do it.

That's good. That's good. Um Jordan, you have something or it's just incredible. Yeah.

our friend David Senrose someday I think is gonna make a podcast episode about you to be a biography first you know to to reference on approaches I do have a question the chat loves you by the way everyone is like obsessed it's going crazy um but uh I I have a question about like position against like Americanmade products like the narrative is uh there's always the narrative that like ah China's cheaper but then there's also and they respond fastaster faster the the responding faster thing, there was this viral YouTube video, I'm sure you saw it, of like I tried to make something in America versus China and like the Americans couldn't get it to me and blah blah blah.

Uh, and so mo when I've heard the initial narrative, a lot of it's been like look, we're going to be a little bit more expensive, but we're going to be higher quality, more reliable, more compliant with DoD rules and government rules.

How do you how do you see the landscape of comping your business to international competitors evolving? Like what's at the top of the stack in terms of benefits of going with you over international competitors? And how is that evolving?

Well, I think I think no matter how fast we are and how much better the service, people always will shop with their wallet. They they vote with their wallet, right?

So our goal is we have to be equal if not better than offshore options and we are so especially on the CNC side um because of everything we've learned we've been able to leverage our software and our efficiencies and so we can compete um we have a lot of customers that are coming to us now and going hey you guys are maybe a dollar more or a dollar less uh but you're faster so I'm using it's it's 100% possible there's a lot of people that are coming back on shore I think the climate right now with the tariffs and the no dimminimous shipping and everything.

It's there's a wave right now of stuff coming back on shore. Yeah. Uh so if you're equipped so that you can respond or you can do instant quoting.

You know a lot of these shops uh they were set up in the 80s and 90s and it was based on facts and it was based on like hey let me look at my your blueprints for two weeks and then uh and and then we'll we'll send you a a letter in the mail or something. And they still operate that way. Yeah.

That's why I'm encouraging people to go start manufacturing now because you're going to start with a totally different text stack than anyone ever has there. There's, you know, email first, chat first, texting first. Yep. That's really where the business is.

Um, China does a good job of it, but all the new startups that I've interacted with are doing it even better. Yeah. So, speaking of those new startups, like, uh, I'm interested to hear from you since you're so far upstream of like the next tech shift.

Uh, you know, we've heard about like drones, like there's been a boom in drones. There's there's been a few industries.

What What are you seeing on the on like the next breakout interesting industry of like things or objects or physical products that's being made in America that you have an early insight into where you're like, "Oh, I I didn't actually know that we'd have that as a customer and now they're here making cool stuff and I see their products and that actually could be big.

" I'd be interested to see what your what your take on like the the hard tech world is broadly even outside of like defense and and B2B. I I'm actually really excited about the basics. It it's not necessarily a category like drones or automotive or aerospace or whatever. It's people are making nuts and bolts here again.

They're making washers. They're making just simple brackets. stuff like that has been offshored for way too long and a lot of people don't want to make it because uh offshore could always, you know, out compete. Yep.

And so you'd lean on something like ITAR in order to like do your aerospace work that couldn't be done offshore. Yeah. But what we're seeing now is just dead simple stuff that is going into OEM components. Uh and I was like, okay, once we get that base, then you can add complexity as we go.

So I don't know what the next thing is. Um I I think I think drones is a is a great one. Yeah. Uh we're seeing a lot of movement in in automotive. Uh just with with OEMs that were producing stuff in the US. They have factories in the US, but the castings maybe came from offshore.

Some of those castings are coming from here in the US now. So it's it's really exciting at the basic level. Yeah. Automotive is interesting. It feels like you know Tesla's obviously vertically integrated very heavily, but it's kind of caused like a rethink of all the OEMs. They all need to rethink their strategies.

Um, anyway, anything else? I'd like to see you guys acquire Intel and get them on the right track because I think your your your system of dumb dumb finance or whatever you called it, plus just hardcore engineering. It's clearly working. Yeah, this is working. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping.

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