JORDAN: So I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you got to develop a thick skin because you’re going to get rejected the majority of the time.

ADAMS: In this episode, I speak with Sarah Jordan, co-founder and CEO of Skuld a company focused on the new additive manufacturing evaporative casting process and other metals processing innovations. Sarah’s path into engineering was inspired by her father, an engineer, which led her to pursue ceramics engineering before switching to metallurgy. Her career spans industrial manufacturing, quality systems, and entrepreneurship with continuing education, including an MBA and a return to her PhD program while running her startup Skuld. 

In our leadership segment, Sarah shared her experience of introducing a new technology to a well-established industry. She emphasized the importance of persistence, adjusting messaging to align with customer priorities, and building industry trust through repeated engagements at trade shows and on LinkedIn. Sarah’s advice to engineers pursuing leadership stressed the importance of communication.

She recommended Toastmasters, Improv, and Theater as tools for building verbal confidence and emphasized that strong writing, particularly for grants and proposals, is just as critical. Her core message, communicate clearly, focus on your audience, and don’t let fear of rejection hold you back. Without further delay, here is my conversation with Sarah Jordan.

Hi, Sarah. Welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

JORDAN: Hey, nice to be here. Thanks for having me, Angelique.

ADAMS: Yeah, I’m excited to have you on. So can you start by just telling us how you got into engineering as a career path?

JORDAN: Yeah, I think the answer is somewhat typical for women engineers and that my dad is an engineer. So I was always exposed to that grew up around engineering, grew up with going on plant tours at industrial ceramic places. Maybe that’s not exactly. But I get lots of glass and ceramic plants. And so when I went to college, I thought I’d be like my dad and be a ceramics engineer.

ADAMS: don’t know how typical that is.

JORDAN: And ended up changing in that all my work experience ended up being in metals. So I ended up changing to become a metallurgical engineer and specializing in metals instead. Okay.

ADAMS: Great. And I know that you got your undergrad and you have continued your education. You got an MBA and now you’re working on a PhD. Can you talk a little bit about the decisions you’ve made about continuing your education?

JORDAN: So I don’t know that I made the decision maybe for the reasons people normally go to grad Skuld. Partly I went to grad Skuld originally to get my master’s degree was because I actually had my daughter when I was still a senior at Ohio State. I stayed home for a couple years and then when I wanted to go back to work, it was very hard having been a stay at home mom to just go back into the workforce. So I the decision that, okay, I go get a graduate degree and then that would help me get my first real job. And that is kind of what I did. And I started along the track of getting a PhD way back in, I guess, 2003, but I didn’t really like doing theoretical research. So I decided to get a leave after about a year and a half of being in the PhD program. I a job, know, did work just work stuff for a while. And then it became clear that, you know, to work move up in industrial places, seemed that I needed to have an MBA, get a better understanding of the business side of things, because I did not know anything about that. When I first took some classes at Carnegie Mellon, I was like, wait, what do mean that there are predictable ways that people behave? Like, that’s amazing. So.

Yeah, that was really great education things that I been taught any of that. I never had psychology. I never had like HR classes and engineering Skuld. And then when I had my startup company, we started doing research, having research projects. And I had reached out to my original PhD advisor for some help on something. And he’s like, why doesn’t your website talk about WPI at all? I’m like, well,

Because I dropped out, like I didn’t finish the degree. It’s kind of this weird, awkward thing from the past. He’s like, you need to come back and finish. But he kind of twisted my arm. Doing that part time, very part time. Being an entrepreneur takes a lot of time.

ADAMS: Yeah, let’s talk a little bit more about your actual work, your work history. So you’ve worked in industry for some and in manufacturing and now you now you are CEO and co-founder of your own company called Skuld. So can you talk just a little bit about your trajectory and maybe your decision to start your own company?

JORDAN: Yeah, so I’d say I have kind of a typical background for someone who’s a metallurgist. And then I worked at foundries, I worked at steel mills, heat treat plants. Back in, I guess, around 2008, 2009, kind of when the Great Recession was happening, I kind of lucked into a new role at a place called Performance Review Institute, which is a nonprofit, which that’s kind of a strange place, I think, for an engineer to be working at.

And, but they run something called NADCAP, which is an accreditation program in the aerospace industry. I got that role because I had some kind of background in quality and they needed, you know, people with metal skills and just kind of the stars aligned. And then I got thrown into being responsible for making the group that was going to oversee aerospace machining as in a new accreditation program when I really didn’t know much about it, I had had like one grinding class, you know, years earlier, and that was the extent of my machining know-how. And so I was basically thrown into this role where I was in charge of getting people from, you know, technical experts with like 30 plus years experience at the big aerospace OEMs like GE and Honeywell and things like that to, you know, all try to get them to come to agreement on what this program was going to be for them. Well, I forgot my MBA. I then went and worked at Emerson for about seven years in supply chain and marketing, which is again, kind of a little weird side quest for a couple of years. And then ended up deciding to start my own business. You saw a need from one of the areas of background I have, which is in lost film casting.

So we wanted to merge that with 3D printing, is kind of like up and coming technology area.

ADAMS: Curious if, you you mentioned them as sort of these side quests or these sort of atypical career jumps that you’ve made. I would imagine, though, that those experiences have actually been pretty beneficial for you as an entrepreneur because, you know, I work with a lot of entrepreneurs who maybe come directly out of their PhD program with a technology and no experience in production, no experience in manufacturing, definitely nothing in marketing.

And then maybe, you know, what you talked about with a nonprofit, certainly not the nonprofit experience, but this idea of getting stakeholders who have completely different interests, trying to get them to align on a common goal and move forward. mean, all of those, I would imagine, are pretty useful experiences to have had as someone who is starting their own business. Have you found that to be the case?

JORDAN: Definitely. think, you know, some of these things I didn’t, it wasn’t this like thought out. But definitely, you know, the experience at Madcap and working with, you know, the big aerospace OES, working with suppliers, all of these things do tie into like what I do now. And that, you know, trying to do sales, you’re trying to get people to do things that you want them to do. Hopefully you want them to want to do it. But yeah, getting people to buy in.

ADAMS: Right, right.

JORDAN: Yeah, all of that ties into that. And then the other thing on the business side for sure, the experience working, I was responsible for forecasting for Emerson’s HVAC business unit for like four years. So definitely at the time I thought it was like a super boring job and I wasn’t really that fond of it, but like I can understand the value of it a lot more now and kind of understanding how to build a business plan, a business model and all of the numbers that side of things for the entrepreneurship definitely very helpful.

ADAMS: And can you talk a little bit about what Skuld does? What is your business?

JORDAN: Yeah, so we do a couple of different things. Most of our technologies, I’d say, all tie to this type of investment casting called lost foam, which is a more efficient version of investment casting. So we do regular lost foam, is kind of I consider vanilla technology, right? Other people can do those things. Then we have a number of innovations related to lost foam. And then we have patents pending on this new way of merging 3D printing with last one that we call AMEC, additive manufacturing, evaporative casting. And then finally, we’re just starting to develop equipment for people to be able to use that technology themselves. So we have a new system we call the Lightning Metal that we’re finishing up and planning to send the first one to University of Tennessee Knoxville. And we also have an SBIR That’s a small business innovation research project with the Air Force to develop a custom system that can do aerospace aluminum.

ADAMS: Wow, I I find it really interesting that you went from sort of being an insider in the metallurgical metals manufacturing industry and now you’re leading some new innovations in that space. just kind of, again, talking about your educational and career trajectory, I’m just curious if you find yourself now thinking about, this might be the next set of skills that I need to, whether you decide to do anything formally education-wise or not, have you identified anything that you’re finding yourself wanting to learn about or maybe even hire people who can help with certain areas as you’re, sounds like you’re really in a growth mode with your company at this point.

JORDAN: Yeah, we’re definitely hiring lots of people and there’s definitely things that, you know, I don’t have good skills at like CAD, for instance, or, you know, hire mechanical engineering to design things. Maybe I can sketch it on paper, the general concept and then they kind of run with it. But I guess like with respect to kind of continuing education myself, I definitely listen to podcasts myself and I also, you know, read up on things. Especially like one thing I think, and maybe this is unique to maybe more unique to women, I think, is the whole like imposter complex kind of thing. Or even when you’re being successful, you’re like, I’m just a fraud and I don’t know how I’ve got people to buy into this stuff. So I think, you know, getting insights into that kind of self-insight is very helpful.

ADAMS: All right, Sarah, what leadership example are we going to be talking about today?

JORDAN: I think we’re going to talk about kind of this entrepreneurship journey and how we’re really trying to change the industry, the metals industry, and how things are manufactured.

ADAMS: Okay, great. can you talk a little bit about what is your approach to doing that? What are some of the things that you’re doing to try to maybe make people aware of what you think this change needs to be and then persuade them that the change actually needs to happen? And then I’m sure because this is a pretty big industry, you can’t do it on your own. So you’re probably trying to onboard supporters and maybe even other people that want to work in the same industry. So can you talk a little bit about your approaches?

JORDAN: Yeah, so I guess one of that drives us is kind of this leaf in wanting the world to be a better place, cleaner technology, doing things more efficiently. I one of the things that influenced me very early in my career is like, and you may have some experience of this from Alcoa days, when I worked at Timken, one of the first things they took me out was like, they had this, I don’t know, 10 acres of just bar stock rusting giant fields of inventory, which is like, what is all this stuff? And it just seems super inefficient. They never had the right inventory. Then I worked in supply chain, never had the right inventory. Your forecasts are always wrong. And so was just kind of seeing this need to like have a better way, more efficient way of using the resources that we as a society have. So kind of that’s one of our driving forces.

And that’s why we’re developing this new additive casting technology is to try to get farther along to being able to be more efficient. I think when we first proposed things, first of all, no one knew what lost foam was, let alone like, what are we even talking about? We’re just gonna use 3D printing, we’re gonna weld together metal. That was what everyone was doing. Or maybe they were sand printing. And then the people in casting area was like,

What’s this 3D printing nonsense, right? So it’s like everybody was pretty much like, you guys are like, what are you talking about? And so I think there’s a certain level of persistence and vision, I think, of how things ought to be. So it’s really important. When I was younger, I didn’t just like have that like, don’t know, calling, but like it’s somewhere you’re like, all right, this is the way we need to like try to get things to go. So a lot of it is about, yeah, being persistent and there’s this…

When I took, I think this was, I took a lead in training at some point. They gave this, they had this video and it was like, okay, well like the first guy gets up and is dancing and like at a concert is like this crazy guy dancing and like nobody else is dancing. So he’s like the crazy person. then they said at some point a second person like decides to like also start dancing. And then like all of sudden everybody starts dancing. So they’re like, the point is that was kind of like that

It’s not the first person, it’s the second person who’s the most important because that’s what actually where you actually start getting followers and people like going in a given direction. So I thought that was a good analogy.

ADAMS: That’s interesting. And I’m curious for your industry, where are the people? Where are the people that you’re trying to persuade? And how do you get in front of them so that they can even hear your message and hear your explanation?

JORDAN: Yeah, so one of the things we’ve learned along the way is that unfortunately in manufacturing industrial settings, really no one cares about clean tech.

ADAMS: Yep. Just my experience.

JORDAN: Half the people probably don’t even believe in climate change or any of that. So at some point it’s like, okay, we don’t use that as like the solid point. It’s kind of like sneaking vegetables in your kids’ heart food. So, you know, we talk about the benefits to the customers and like what they’re going to get. know, they’re going to their parts faster. They’re going to eliminate machining. They’re going to, you know, have other bet, you know, maybe they’re going to have a more local supplier. There’s all these other benefits that people do care about. So that’s what we talk to people about. And it’s much more about solving their current pain point. And so that’s one of the things I think I learned. Because I didn’t have a background in sales when I started on this. And so it’s one of the things, learn about. like, OK, it’s not what I want to do. It’s what they want. The right to help to them.

ADAMS: Yeah, think that’s 100%. I mean, think that’s hugely important. And some people really get stuck on that and will not move away from this idea. Certainly you have a vision, your company has a vision, you have a motivation, you do care about the environment. And you do want to make things more efficient and reduce inventories and things like that. And you have a process that will do that and help, as you said, help your customers solve their current pain points, which are economic in nature, I’m certain. And you really focus on that. And that’s what the art of persuasion is. It really focuses on what your audience cares about and makes sure that you can continue to amplify that. I think you’ve been very effective at that and caught on to that early on, sounds like, and have been very effective.

JORDAN: Early on. It’s been a long journey and I think it’s persistent.

ADAMS: Yes, well that’s it eventually figure it out. Right, you eventually figure it out. Now what about channels? for example, are you going into these production facilities to try to talk to them? Are you attending conferences or using social media? Like what are some of the channels that have worked well for you in your industry with your business?

JORDAN: Yeah, early on I didn’t buy into trade shows at all. I thought they were super expensive and like, why would you pay $10,000 for a booth? That’s crazy. But what I have learned is that’s actually, you you got to find the right ones, of course, that are applicable to your audience. I have found going to conferences and trade shows, talking to people is kind of key for this kind of thing.

Especially for big purchases, you’re not selling a candy bar here. You’re selling things where you’re asking somebody to change their manufacturing process, their suppliers. These could be pretty large purchases. So they’re not deciding things off of one interaction. so there’s this repeated interaction. That’s also why going to these conferences and trade shows, building the relationships with people. People want to do business with their friends.

ADAMS: Right.

JORDAN: So I find that very useful. think being authentic is important. People also don’t want to deal with people they don’t trust or think are fake. And I’m very active on LinkedIn, which I think also in trying to be authentic, put things out there, help other people. All of those things are key.

ADAMS: Alright.

And, you know, as you said, you’re trying to make this big shift in the industry. What are the indicators that you kind of use to help you say, okay, yeah, this is a strategy that’s working. I think I’m gaining some traction and other, you know, and maybe something else is like, you know what, I’m not going to do that anymore. That was just a complete waste of time. Like, how do you sort of decide what’s working for you and what’s not working for you?

JORDAN: Yeah, I think, you know, if you get people asking for quotes or, you know, actual business out of it, that’s, that’s, that’s the best indicator. And we have had that, like, I’ve had people reach out to me on LinkedIn that turned into orders. The, there’s definitely been conferences we’ve gone to where I was like, well, that was a bust, right? Like, that was not the right audience. Maybe it was too theoretical or we went to a  years ago, I went to an electric vehicle conference. was like, all right, that was not the right audience because almost everyone there was more on the battery side as opposed to car design and light weighting, which is kind of our pitch. But you just never know. Sometimes it’s how you go to events. We kind of have ones where we have gone repeatedly and we’re like, all right, that is a fruitful location for good conversations and where we’ve had good response.

Okay.

ADAMS: And you mentioned in your great analogy about like it’s not always the first person, it’s the second person that kind of is an indicator of followers. And I’m curious, you, so where do you see yourself in that? Are you one, two, or are you among the followers in terms of kind of heading in this new direction with this type of technology that you’re working on?

JORDAN: But I’m the first.

ADAMS: You guys were first. Okay, so you were first and do you have a number two? Do you have a number two yet or is that something you’re actively seeking?

JORDAN: You know, we, we’ve definitely been quoting lots of things and we’ve had some initial trials with prototypes and things like that. where, people are just starting to do that. guess more recently, I’m not sure when they started to this. I would think in the past three or four years, like we have become aware of other people in the foundry industry who starting to do.

Similar processes from what we can tell they’re doing things slightly differently so they wouldn’t be like necessarily inflicting on our IP but we’re like well that’s actually good if there’s people you know doing somewhat competitive things as opposed to us being like the only people. So yeah so we know Mercury Marine is developing a similar process. They as far as we know use that in-house right so they make boat things.

Yeah, so we know that there’s some research going on at some of the other universities. So I think it’s still very small compared to, know, powder bed. Like I use the analogy, I mean it’s not an analogy, but if you go on Google Scholar and you look up powder bed fusion, you’ll probably get something like 40,000 papers. And if you like look up all the papers in our area, there may be four or five.

ADAMS: OK, yeah, definitely on the cutting edge. And so I could see how, as you say, these other entrants into this kind of technology, assuming there’s no IP infringement, they actually will help spread awareness of the whole thing, which is a good thing. And I’m also curious, thinking about your team, you find that you are primarily in the role of talking about this technology, doing sort of the sales and marketing, or do you have other people on your team that are also doing some of that work? Can you just talk about who else is helping, if anybody, is helping with the awareness piece of kind of changing the industry?

JORDAN: Yeah, so definitely early on is kind of, know, myself, my co-founder. More recently, we’ve started signing sales reps, as well as we don’t have any internal salespeople quite yet, although I assume at some point we will add that to the staff. The other thing we do, and we did this, actually, I didn’t really mention this, but I did have a prior startup.

One of the things we did there and we have done at Skuld as well is this idea like, if one of our internal staff people has a connection or something and they sell something, they get the sales commission. It’s honestly their job, but we also don’t want people to not bring things because there’s no value to them. Actually, some of our floor operators have.

They have gotten purchases for things that we made originally just for like training show demos. So was like, okay, that’s cool.

ADAMS: Yeah, so you’re incentivizing. You’re incentivizing the rest of your workforce to spread the word and potentially get a sale. I think that’s really smart. Yeah, that’s a smart way to do it. What else? Are there any other tactics that you find yourself trying to deploy in order to help make this shift in the industry that we haven’t talked about yet?

JORDAN: I a lot of it is very much based around education. So I talk a lot, it’s, know, conferences, seminars, things like that. you know, people would have awareness of things. Then in addition to that, I think it’s, you know, really important not to get caught up with the fact if people, you know, don’t agree with what I think or…it’s not the right time or whatever reason they reject you. So I think if you’re an entrepreneur, you got to develop a thick skin because you’re going to get rejected the majority of the time. It’s kind of like in baseball, you’re not going hit a home run every time. If you bet 300, you’re doing great.

ADAMS: Yeah, I think that’s really important. And I’m curious how you balance that with what you said earlier about like, you you read about imposter syndrome and you, you you’ve, you, you are aware of some of these sort of sub maybe self doubt, self criticisms that, that are, that happened to all of us, but that happened. then, and now you’re, you’re in an environment where there’s even more of that, right? Cause you’re like, you know, you’re trying to do something really radically different.

And so entrepreneurship in general is filled with rejection, but then when you’re really trying to change a very well-established industry, I can imagine there’s even more of that. So can you just talk a little bit about how you manage that for yourself?

JORDAN: Yeah, so a couple of years ago, maybe, I this is pre-COVID, so maybe like five years ago, I had read this book called Rejection Proof. And there was this whole card game called Rejection Therapy. I read up all on this whole idea. And it’s like this weird reverse psychology thing of actively seeking out rejection. so…

How kind of the advice from that was like, you know, start tracking it, start like rewarding yourself if you get a certain amount of rejections. then because it’s not the rejection that’s the problem, it’s like not doing something because you’re afraid of rejection that’s the problem. So if you can kind of like turn that into like, all right, well, maybe I was hesitant to do it, but you know what? I’m gonna get myself a gold star if I get rejected. So now I’ll do it.

ADAMS: I like that.

It works as long as it works, right? So that was a couple years ago. do you still like, do you still find yourself doing that as a mechanism or is it kind of like you’ve embedded it now? you’ve just sensed time.

JORDAN: I don’t record… I still do have a list of rejections, but it has to pretty big rejection for me to go bother to put it on the list.

ADAMS: Okay. Yeah. So you went from like, no, I will meet with you to like, oh, I didn’t get that $10 million proposal. So I’ll count that one. know, I don’t know if you’re like, got it.

JORDAN: Like, if somebody hurts my feelings.But yeah, but I feel like that has been very helpful in developing a thick skin, which is kind of what’s necessary. And also, but sometimes people will like reject you, but then they’ll come back and offer you something else. Or maybe they’ll reject you because, it wasn’t ready now or that thing wasn’t right. But like, you know, a customer might come back with a different part nine months later. You never know. So I think that’s also like just realizing, well sometimes it’s just timing.

ADAMS: Yeah, I agree. And I know for myself, sometimes I struggle with being open to the people who rejected me in the past.

I know that’s not a smart thing to do.

All right, Sarah, what advice would you give to engineers who are interested in pursuing leadership roles?

JORDAN: So I would say the number one thing is communication skills. And if I think back, I used to be very terrible at that. I think I used to think it was just like an instinctive thing that people could do. I ended up like, well, whatever happened, so my kid got big into theater when she was like junior high age.

And so I’m taking her back and forth to these things and she was in this play and they’re like, oh, we need, you know, so people to be in the choir for this musical. I’m like, oh, I took choir back in the day. I could sing. I could be in the back with the group of people. That’s fine. But before I know it, I’m in this musical, Annie, and there’s like five costume changes and all this stuff. And it was actually fun.

So from there, I did a couple more things, but I learned about the importance of planning and blocking and these techniques for speaking. And then ended up taking an improv class. So that was also very helpful, I think, for anyone who wants to be an entrepreneur. think it’s helpful if you want to do interviews better.

Because you’re being put on the spot if questions you hadn’t thought about. And then the other thing that is very helpful in communication is Toastmasters. I highly recommend that to most engineers because a lot of people are engineers because they’re good at math. They’re not necessarily good at public speaking, but you can learn it.

ADAMS: Yes. Yeah. In fact, I recommended Toastmasters earlier today. was on a podcast myself on public speaking for engineers and yeah, recommended Toastmasters. 100 % agree with you on that. And when you think about communication, so for sure there’s the presenting to people, whether it’s one person and maybe in an interview or a group of people at a conference or, you know, at pitch, you do lots of pitches as an entrepreneur. I’m curious,

How else do think about communication, maybe even inside your team or with customers, clients, potential clients? Can you talk a little bit about communication in those other settings and what advice you might have for people to get comfortable with those types of communications as well?

JORDAN: Well, guess I kind of, you there’s different kinds of communication, right? There’s verbal. But I think also a lot of, like I always were pretty good at writing skills. One of the things I had to get good at, which has been fruitful for our company for funding, is written communication, because we’ve done a lot of things with government R &D projects. And so those are usually written proposals. So learning how to write them in a way that is expected but also communicates effectively as kind of an art and took a lot of practice to learn how to do that. think I was at some training once and they’re like, look, these people are reading them while they’re watching the Super Bowl and they’re flipping through 40 of them in a giant stack. They’re not reading them the way you think of people reading. These are marketing documents. got to jazz it up and make it easy to understand.

ADAMS: Yeah.

JORDAN: Yeah. I think, again, going to the audience of like, what is it that they need?

ADAMS: Yes. Yep. Yeah, I think that’s great advice. And how have you learned how to do that? Has it been trial and error or did you take some training or is there something that you could point to someone and say, okay, if you really want to better understand what your audience is looking for, this might be how you could approach it.

JORDAN: So a little of both, I’ve definitely been to trainings. Department of Energy has a training online, a thing called Dawnbreaker, if you wanted to get into writing, Sibbers, they have like 130 modules on their website that you can study it. But the other thing, definitely doing things where it’s like, kind of got smacked. We wrote a proposal, or I mainly wrote it for the National Science Foundationkind of the rejections were like, this already exists, this isn’t innovative at all. And I’m like, was super mad at first, because I’m like, how do they not understand? Like they clearly didn’t read it. And then at some point I’m like, okay, this is a failure to communicate. all right, well, I have to get better at communicating, and not get mad at them for not understanding. So that’s kind of part of it as well.

ADAMS: That’s a huge part of it, I think, is exactly what you said. The failure in communication, you have to look at your side of it if you want something different to happen. And so the fact that you are even willing to pause and have that self-reflection and then say, OK, what can I do differently the next time to improve on this communication, I think, is also a really good piece of advice and something that you’re great at. So any other advice that you have? Yeah.

JORDAN: Well, the other thing I learned through getting the Innovation Crossroads program and just general entrepreneurship pitching, So think initially being super focused on the technology and the science, because you’re an engineer, of course, you love the science, you love the technology. But at the end of the day, customers really don’t care about that. They just wanted to do whatever awesomeness thing it is and how is it going to help them and just learning to like…

Okay, tone down the science and like, you know, the grad school ness stuff because at end of the day, you know, maybe you need to explain the technology at like a fifth grade level and just like sell them on like, this is what the thing does and how you’re gonna make their life better.

JORDAN: Yeah, it all comes down to how you’re going to make their life better. think that’s a great point. 

ADAMS: All right, Sarah, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us.

JORDAN: Yeah, great talking to you today.