Connect with Darrin Mitchell: Website: www.manufacturing-masters.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrin-mitchell-20ab80158/ Lisa Ryan: Hey, it's Lisa Ryan. Welcome to the Manufacturers' Network Podcast. I'm here today with Darrin Mitchell. Darrin has been a global manufacturer of highway equipment for the past 24 years. Last year, he developed an online training platform for manufacturing businesses to find best practices from experts worldwide. So, Darrin, welcome to the show. Darrin Mitchell: Awesome, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Lisa Ryan: Please share with us your background and what led you to do what you're doing in manufacturing. Darrin Mitchell: We're a global manufacturer of big highway equipment. If anybody out there listening right now has ever been stuck in traffic, and you've complained that the equipment up ahead is blocking your way or making you late, I'm officially the guy to blame. We build the equipment that was building roads or in the mines or hauling agricultural products. We make big highway trailers for transporting big bulky things. We do that across North America, Australia, New Zealand Middle East, South Korea, and Europe. Lisa Ryan: And so, and why did you choose that industry? What led you into highway equipment, to begin with? Darrin Mitchell: So, 25 years ago, I met my business partner, an engineer. He said he was going to start making these highway trailers. I said, "For the love of Mary, please do not ever do that." He said no, no, I think it's a good idea. I said, "Listen, our biggest competitors are out of Ohio. They are vertically and horizontally integrated. They own their suppliers; they are next to the customers; they come and pick up the product from the factory, and they're happy with a five to 9% margin. Literally, day one - if we tried to compete from a rural and remote community, we've already lost just on the cost of getting materials to our factory. There is no hope in hell of us ever succeeding in competing against someone who has hundreds of millions of cap expending. They're fully automated. They're competing on volume and integrated into the supply chain. We'd never be able to win. Lisa Ryan: Obviously, something changed. Darrin Mitchell: I know. He went ahead and started it anyway and then told me. A few months later, he said I'm in deep, help. Oh okay. We started getting innovative immediately, understanding what we were up against—and not doing what our competitors were doing. One of the things that we did was built a lot of innovation into the product. We were able to ask for a premium. Being from a place where you're removed from your supply chain or customer base, you have to ask for a premium. We built a lot of things moving parts. The products could do things that our competitors couldn't do because they didn't have the capacity. When I meet with my competitors, they say I hate you and say, well, I, like you. Why do you hate us? They would say I hate you because it's hard to copy you. We have a massive assembly line set up in our factory, but how you've innovated with your products makes it hard to replicate that. They had an enormous assembly line, where you would put 10,000 20,000 products a year. So the first thing that we did was we innovated to make the product more valuable to the customer so that we could charge a premium. That's how we started growing the business and understanding that we didn't want to compete against the masses. So we tried to skim the cream off the top and ensure that we could show that value to the customer to charge that premium for the product. So that was the first step in what we did for the business's growth. Lisa Ryan: How did you decide what to add to your products to make them premium? Was that in researching the industry, talking to customers, etc.? How did you choose, and what would be an example of an innovation that you put in a product that your competitors couldn't...