The Manufacturing Executive

When a private equity firm buys a manufacturing business, closing the deal isn't completion. It's commencement, the start of five to seven years of work to make the company worth more than it was. Eric Wiklendt, Managing Director at Speyside Equity, has done that work from both sides, first as a plant manager and CEO inside manufacturers, now as the buyer.

In this episode, he lays out the two-phase system Speyside runs on every company it owns: Fix the margins first, then Build the top line. He walks through what a buyer is really evaluating when they ask whether a business is scalable, why a company where every decision runs through the owner is hard to sell, how customer concentration gets priced, and the difference between creating value on paper and getting cash into your bank account.

You'll also hear why Speyside starts planning an exit a full two years before it goes to market, his test for a sellable business, whether it's the kind of company Warren Buffett would want to buy from you, and why owners who may never sell should still operate by his rule: always be exiting.

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All expressions of opinion provided in this podcast are subject to change without notice and are not intended to be a forecast of future events or results. There is no assurance that the trends highlighted in this podcast will occur in the future or that the projections, if any, will be met.

Manufacturing has spent years asking how to get more women into the industry. Allison Roberts Grealis, founder and president of the Women in Manufacturing Association, says the harder question is what happens after they get there. In this episode, she'll talk about why retention is where companies lose the people they worked hardest to hire, what it actually takes to grow someone into a leadership role, and why the women coming up need to see someone like themselves already in the room. We also get into how the leadership job in manufacturing has changed, and why stepping away from the daily grind has become part of doing it well.

There's a new acronym for it every week: AEO, GEO, LLMO, AI SEO. Grace Wright, VP of Innovation at Gorilla 76, will tell you that regardless of what you call it, the job is the same. Your buyers are searching for what you sell, and ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude are answering with three or four company names. Yours is either on that list or it isn't. In this episode, we trace how 20 years of search engine optimization got us here. Then we get into what actually decides which manufacturers get recommended: whether AI can read your website, whether your content answers the question a buyer actually asked, and whether anyone outside your company vouches for you. You'll hear why the old tricks stopped working, what Grace found auditing manufacturer websites all summer and how to check your own visibility before this episode is over.

Co-founder and CEO of Phaseshift Technologies, Fazal Mahmood, will tell you that much of modern industry still runs on metal alloys introduced half a century ago. Better ones are possible. Proving one works is harder and far more expensive than inventing it, and that's where most new materials die.

In this episode, we explore why that's finally changing. You'll hear where additive manufacturing landed after the hype burned off, how technologies like nuclear fusion and hotter-running aircraft engines have outrun the materials they were built from and why a supply shock in tungsten pushed some of the most change-resistant industries in the world to start looking for alternatives. We'll also get into what a small-to-midsize manufacturer should actually do with any of this.

Ask everyone in your company one question: who's responsible for safety? About half will say the safety manager, and Brian Fielkow, consultant and author of Making Safety Happen, will tell you that half has it wrong. In this episode, we'll unpack why safety is a bottom-line business decision that starts with the leader, and why a safety failure really costs about five times what your insurance loss runs show. You'll hear how to harness the frontline leaders you already have, how to market safety to your own people, and a smarter way to respond when something goes wrong.