MEL #024 | From Magic Tricks to Manufacturing Powerhouse through the Four Cs of Leadership with Jeff Bohanan

BOHANAN (00:00)

When we were confronted with the COVID crisis, we were in this world of, of chaos and a lot of people got really fearful. The CEO of this job really is to be the chief reminding officer to keep everybody focused on the main thing, continually reminding the troops, what the culture is, what we stand for. And so a lot of people were now operating remotely. So I was having to communicate through videos and try toget people, you know, restore their confidence

ADAMS (00:52)

In this episode, I speak with Jeff Bohanan founder and president of Protomet a vertically integrated engineering and manufacturing company that specializes in precision components and systems for the marine industry and other demanding markets. Jeff’s fascination with science began with childhood magic shows, which fostered both his technical curiosity and public speaking skills.

He studied mechanical and industrial engineering at the University of Tennessee and began his career at the Y-12 National Security Complex during the Cold War before launching Protomet. In our leadership segment, Jeff talks about how he led his company through two major crises, the COVID-19 pandemic and a recent marine industry downturn. He emphasized maintaining team morale, modeling resilience, and avoiding layoffs by playing the long game, demonstrating what he calls the four Cs of leadership.

Commitment, courage, capability, and confidence. Jeff encourages aspiring leaders to raise their hands early and often. He believes engineers already have the critical thinking and discipline needed for leadership. What’s missing is usually confidence, which only grows through experience and taking initiative. Jeff is also a published author. His first book titled, Don’t Touch the Marshmallow, codifies Protomet’s core values and articulates five mindset shifts for personal and professional growth.

I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. Without further delay, here is my conversation with Jeff Bohanan.

ADAMS (02:19)

Hi, Jeff, welcome to Mastering Engineering Leadership.

BOHANAN (02:22)

Hi Angelique, it’s good to be here.

ADAMS (02:24)

Glad to have you here. Can you start by telling us how you got into engineering as a career field?

BOHANAN (02:29)

So, you know, I cannot articulate just one specific moment in time, but I do know that from very early days, I’ve always kind of been a little bit of a nerd, always interested in, you know, science. And I had the 101 electronics kits and the chemistry kits. And I even remember back to elementary school, I don’t know if you remember a guy named or have ever heard of a guy named Bob Brown. used to do a science circus in the elementary schools. And so he would come to come to schools and a lot of his stuff was for show, but it was science in, you know, in action. So he would get like, he had like a Tesla coil and you know, he would call up a girl with long hair, put her hands on it, know, get her hair to stand up and do all kinds of stuff like that. And I remember coming home to tell my dad about that and I actually wanted to buy the book 

And my dad’s like, well, I can show you how to do that stuff. You don’t necessarily need to buy the book. But I think I eventually did get to buy the book. a lot of that stuff was akin to almost like a magic show. And my dad had actually dabbled in magic. long story short, we started going to a magic club, a local magic club, started getting into magic. I’m telling you that there’s a, I’ve got a reason for this little detour, but we started getting into it pretty big and we worked with youth in the church and everything. So we’d use magic to kind of as object lessons. And so I got at a very young age where I was going to these magic conventions with my dad and learning how to do that and ended up ultimately in college. was doing magic at birthday parties. And so that, I say that to talk about the, from an engineering standpoint, I’ve tended to be in engineering. I’ve tended to kind of divert into more leadership areas of engineering. I did have a technical stint early on, but that experience, that exposure to just dabbling in magic as a hobby gave me a lot of experience, you know, speaking in front of people. And so at a very young age. So that helped me get over the hurdle of, you know, the speaking, the fear of speaking, which a lot of people say is the number one fear. But then as I got through college, used magic to kind of pay my way through college, I always just kind of knew that I was kind of mechanical, technical in nature. I actually started school a year early, so I was smaller than the average kid. I actually ended up small anyways, but because I was a year younger, being a bookworm, being a nerd was probably more appropriate for what I could bring to the table. So I tended to be really into math and then ended up, entered the College of Engineering at UT in electrical engineering, just because I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. But then kind of started looking at it and realized the mechanical engineering is a little bit more general. And because I really didn’t have a specific interest, I decided to enroll in mechanical engineering. That’s where I landed to ultimately graduate back in the 80s.

ADAMS (05:29)

So that’s really interesting. You’re the first person who’s talked about magic kind of being this sort of entree into engineering, but also, as you said, into public speaking, into being comfortable, even also demonstrating things, I imagine, in front of people and things like that. So that’s just a really fascinating starting point. Are you still interested in magic? I’m just curious.

BOHANAN (05:49)

Well, I did it for a long time after college, but the challenge was that people would be scheduling, you know, they would want to schedule my time six months to a year out. And as a young person, I didn’t really want my, I didn’t want a book date six months to a year out. I to be a little bit more spontaneous. So I had to kind of unwind from that. Still entrance, I love to watch. I think, you know, there’s some sayings about science and magic, you know, and how they relate, but I think…

Part of it is just, like you said, presentation, timing, just the confidence to stand up in front of a group and to have the appropriate pause, to have the appropriate, to allow for the reaction and all that. mean, that’s a big part of persuasive speaking, is to kind of have that ability to interact with your audience and kind of know your audience. And I’ve found out that even you know, telling a joke in front of a group is actually a lot easier than you would think because when you’re, think people, you know, give you, give you a lot of grace when you’re upfront because they know it’s, I know it’s hard. And if you just kind of put yourself out there, um, it’s amazing, you know, how things just kind of get, get flowing.

ADAMS (07:00)

Yeah, absolutely. And then so you started electrical and then you switched to mechanical and then for your bachelor’s and then I know you also got a master’s degree at University of Tennessee in industrial engineering. Can you talk a little bit about about your transition there? Yeah.

BOHANAN (07:14)

I’ve debated doing the masters in business, doing an MBA, and I think honestly, to be quite candid, it was probably one year to get through the masters in industrial engineering and it was probably closer to two years to get through the MBA. I didn’t have a strong preference either way, but I just decided to go ahead and do the masters in industrial. I did go ahead. actually started a career at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant  back in the late 80s. So I hired in full time there before I graduated with my masters. I do recommend if you’re going to get a master’s, try to get most of the way through it before you start a full time job. I mean, I did co-op at Y12, starting in the early 80s, back when Ronald Reagan was president. And we were in a very heated arms race with Soviet Union. So it was a very busy place to be at that time.

Things changed throughout the eighties quite drastically to where we went from making kind of the maximum number of nuclear weapons to almost making no nuclear weapons with all the treaties and when the Cold War ended. But yeah, I actually, for the last, I guess, first two three years of my time at Y-12, I was working on a master’s degree at night.

I got through most of the classwork and then was just working on my project at the very end of that. Okay. It took a while. It took a lot of discipline because there was a lot of other competing factors. I got married and just a lot of other things to think about.

ADAMS (08:42)

Yeah, I can imagine, you can tell me if this is true. I went back to school sort of mid-career and got my executive MBA and I learned sort of this while working full-time, working full-time and getting a degree and I had a young family at the time. My kids were young and it’s like you learn this sort of like next level time management kind of skills that and so people see me now and I was actually talking to some high school students just yesterday.

They came over to Tickle to chat with me and I was telling them, know what I was working on and they’re like, how do you get all that done? And I was like, you there’s a, you, you find this reserve level of energy and, and time management skills. So I can imagine that that’s where you were and you probably, you just kept it, right? I mean, obviously I, we’re going to get into what you’re doing now, but I’d imagine as an entrepreneur, you have had to have that extra level of time management, productivity, kind of energy.

BOHANAN (09:37)

Yeah, grit, whatever it takes.

ADAMS (09:39)

That’s right, grit. absolutely. So yeah, so let’s talk a little bit about that. You worked at Y12 while you’re finishing up your masters and then you work there for several years. And then you started your own business. So can you talk a little bit about your transition into entrepreneurship?

BOHANAN (09:52)

Yeah, I, you know, I’d always wanted to start my own business and I had been at Y12. I’ve gotten, you know, I’ve been mostly in a technical role and had actually been given an opportunity to go into kind of a leadership management role. And I actually chose to stay more technical because I wanted, I know I wanted to start my own business and I knew I would need some of that level of understanding to be able to start my own business. So, and I didn’t really feel like the management at Y12 was very

analogous to the management in the private sector. so I really, obviously the technical side of things is, technically it was nuclear weapons, but it was still the same, you know, kind of the same CAD, you know, philosophy and everything. And so I stayed that direction. I actually was in a two-year rotational program called the Manufacturing Engineering Development Program before I left Y-12. Or I guess I should say,

About four years before I left Y-12, I did that program, rotated out of that and started working on the Sea Wolf submarine program, which was under what Y-12 called the Work for Others program. I was one of the lead process engineers on the shop floor helping oversee some of the assembly We built a propulsor for the first submarine and that…

That propulsor, I think I remember it weighed 300 tons, just a prop hanging off the back of a Y-12 had been involved in quarter scale and third scale building of submarine parts and got contracted by the government to build the full scale when private industry would not bid on the contract to do the full scale. was originally intended for the full scale propulsor to be bid out and for the private industry to do it.

And so they came back to Y 12 and said, hey, nobody’s going to bid on it. So they had us build the first one. Ultimately, that was going to be, they were going to build 39 of those submarines and they ended up, I think only building three or four of them because of budget cuts at that time. then, yeah, so I went out in 19, I started the company in 97, originally founded it, but I actually didn’t leave Watch Web until 98. And started out as just an engineering consultant.

I had another, I convinced another guy to go with me. Um, and so he was more of the, he was more of the guy that ran, would run the shop. Now, originally we didn’t have a shop. It was just two of us in an office. opened up in the tech 2020 incubator facility. Uh, had a little 150 square foot office with one phone line. This was, uh, before cell, really before cell phones became a thing, we had pagers and shared phone line. And so we tried to get engineering consulting gigs. We did some contract work back for Y-12 until somebody realized we were nine months into that contract. And they realized that not Department of Energy, it was actually at that time, Martin Marietta had a policy that you couldn’t contract in the first 12 months. And so we were nine months in, so they ended up putting us on hold for another 90 days until we got our 12 months. that was kind of scary during that time. So we did that.

Ultimately, we came across an opportunity to bid on a contract for Mercedes. It’s one of their seatbelt parts. And it’s kind of a crazy story if you know the automotive industry, because we didn’t even have a shop. And normally to provide product for the automotive industry, you’ve got to have all kinds of certifications, you’ve have a quality plan in place. I think now they call it TS19649. Back then it was QS9000 standard.

And we obviously didn’t have that, had actually never heard of it. But they needed somebody really bad to build this part. We figured out a way to build the part. And we downloaded some pictures off this new thing called the internet at the time. And we ended up not being able to do all the part. had to outsource part of it. Kind of interesting, part of the part that we had to outsource was for a stamping process because the way we redesigned it, the part would be stamped and then machined. Originally it was designed to be a filling machine, but we came up with kind of an innovative way to make this part. And I hooked up with a company called Allred Metal Stamping out of North Carolina. What’s kind of interesting about that is back in that day, this was 1998, the internet would return all the search results in alphabetical order.

ADAMS (13:57)

Okay, right. So it was like an online phone book back then.

BOHANAN (14:00)

It’s basically an online phone book. So, Alred it was at the top of the list. And so, fortunately, very fortuitous, they had the capability to stamp an extremely thick piece of sheet metal that allowed us to do the secondary machine. We went back, made the presentation to… It was basically John’s Controls doing the work for Mercedes and got the contract, got a five-year deal to build these parts. And they never knew that we didn’t have a shop. just rent went out and leased some space, bought a machine. And from there, kind of got Protomet started into manufacturing. Our background coming from Y12 was in CNC machining, programming, designing, manufacturing, really a strong understanding of manufacturing and how that flows into the design, which I think is another point worth making. And I’ll just go ahead and say it so I don’t forget.

Back in the day when I started this company, a lot of people said, you know, we’ve been an agriculture economy. Then we were an industrial economy. We were moving into the information economy and we didn’t need to be an industrial economy anymore. And so a lot of people questioned the wisdom of starting a manufacturing company when all of the manufacturing was going overseas. And so a lot of people thought I was a little bit crazy.

But at that time I had this deep belief that manufacturing had to stay in the United States. That we had gotten really accomplished at agriculture. We didn’t like outsource all of our agriculture. But we were able to do it with a lot less people. And my thesis was that we should do the same thing with manufacturing. may not have as many people involved in actually making the product, but we needed to master the process. And the other thing I think people don’t.

They’ve started to realize it now, but back then, if you do not manufacture a product over time, you’re going to lose your ability to design that product. And I think that’s where the United States has really taken the wrong turn because we’ve basically handed over all the manufacturing processes to overseas. Now they’ve developed not only the manufacturing capability, but they can start innovating and developing new product.

And it’s going to be very hard to catch back up because we’ve basically completely hollowed out our manufacturing base. Obviously we’re not completely hollowed out. we, you know, we’ve, we, we are heavy in the manufacturing and you know, our secret sauce is manufacturing products as we’ll get into, we’re focused in now we’re focused in the Marine industry, but we manufacture products almost exclusively for the Marine industry, but we’re designing and developing those products for our customers. And then also manufacturing.

And there’s a lot of synergy between the main people, engineers who understand how to make things and as well as design them.

ADAMS (16:39)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I’ve been in manufacturing my entire career as well. And there were ebbs and flows about domestic versus international. I always worked, we always did the manufacturing. And so we didn’t necessarily outsource pieces of it. But certainly understand the idea of you need to be able to if you’re manufacturing it yourself, you are a much more informed consumer about all the innovations that may be being developed outside of the core technology that we owned. But when you do that yourself, you can be a much more informed consumer about any of the new automation or things like that that people are trying to sell you. It’s sort of like, this going to work or not? Well, knew firsthand because we were the ones actually intimately involved in building the building the tools and running the machines and also had great, great relationships with our customers because we, you know, we controlled the means of production. And so if they would start to give signals about needing something new, something slightly different, we could, we could absolutely exploit that to come up with whatever new products they might need. I am curious about how you, how you came to be focused on the marine industry. Can you talk a little bit about that?

BOHANAN (17:50)

Yeah, I guess it was back in the early 2000s, mid 2000s, I started doing some contract work for a local company that manufactured towers for boats. And at that time we were just providing them machined parts. And we got a relationship with one of the local OEM boat companies, started building some machined billet parts for that company. so that leading into the Great Recession,

we were probably had gotten our company up to a point where we were about 50 % boat parts and 50 % everything else. mean, and when I say everything else, mean, we’ve done stuff for a plethora of industries. In fact, a lot of times when Oak Ridge National Lab would need somebody to prototype something, they would come to Protomet and we would do a lot of the, trying to help some of the scientists.

commercialize some of their products. And so we were involved in a lot of products that never actually went to market, but they were just trying to get things going. But we started the marine industry there. When the Great Recession hit, there was a local company that did our finishing for us, the anodized process, which is basically putting an anodic coating on an aluminum part. That company hit a really hard spot and as well as us, we were in a really tough time financially when the Great Recession hit because the boating industry went down by 80, 90%. Oh wow. Yeah. So the automotive industry was probably down by 40, 50%. Boating industry was down as discretionary out of 80, 90 % during the Great Recession. And, that company, this anodizing company, they were going to close their doors and we were there at that time, we were their biggest customer. And so the guy said, hey, if you want to buy my stuff, you can just buy my stuff and just take the business over. So I ultimately ended up buying that business or the assets of the business. It was a pretty crude operation at the time, but I bought that in order to keep my products flowing. And so I ended up just getting more synergy inside of the voting industry because now I’m in the finishing operation. I was doing parts for other machine shops in the area and this overtime. And even I got together and put together a strategic agreement with my biggest customer that he would sole source all of his parts through us just to give us enough volume that we could stay in business because everybody was afraid that everybody was just going to go under. So we kind of hooked arms for, we did a three-year agreement. And as we went through all that, we just kept building more momentum in the marine industry. And for two or three years afterwards, after the Great Recession, we toyed with the idea of how we need to be more diversified versus, we need to be just more focused, just be great at what we do. We landed on be great at what we do. It took us a while to figure that out, but definitely has turned out to be strategic. mean, since this time we’ve brought the anodizing process in-house, we’ve bought all new equipment. We’ve actually been through four or five iterations of our anodizing line. 

We’ve added powder coat finishing. And so now, if you come to our facility.

We’ve got, we actually have four facilities. Our largest facility in Wildman is about 250,000 square feet. But you can see in that facility, can see raw aluminum all the way through to the finished product. And, you know, if we send it, if we’re sending product to an OEM, then we may put it in kits, foam kits, and send it to an OEM. They will use that kit to build a boat. They’ll send us the empty kits back. So it’s a very lean process. We do some business to consumer, it’s a very small percentage, but we’ll even package that like retail packaging with barcodes. So it can be put on a store shelf. But most of our stuff’s, more than 90 % of our product gets shipped directly to a boat builder.

ADAMS (21:26)

Wow, that’s incredible going from the two people, I think you said 100 square foot office in the one phone line to where you are now. That’s really incredible. I’m curious how you feel your engineering education and your background, how well has that served you? And let me ask that a different way. What other skills do you feel like you’ve had to add on to your engineering background to kind of help you get to where you are today?

BOHANAN (21:49)

That’s a good question. I we’ve already talked about the speaking and presentation. I think, you know, what I like about engineering is the critical thinking skills and why I love, I just love, I love engineers in general. I relate really well to engineers. Engineers tend to not need a whole lot of small talk. I’m kind you know, I’m naturally an introvert. People wouldn’t know that they see me speak and being, you know, in public settings like that, but I’m energized by just being in silent room by myself, reading a whatever. That’s what gives me energy. But the critical thinking skills and the attention to detail that engineers learn is so critical, especially in a time where a lot of people just do not have basic life skills. The fact when we hire an engineer, we know that that person has had to develop certain basic life skills to get through the engineering curriculum. And so it’s kind of a filter mechanism. I will say, you know, one of our core values is skills be credentials. So it’s not necessarily that engineering degree that we’re hanging our hat on, but the fact that you’ve been through that process and there are, you know, there are people who’ve never had a chance maybe to get an engineering degree who have that same mindset, who have that same attention to detail.

Discipline, critical thinking, and maybe they’ve developed it on their own. We’re fine with that. But if we specifically recruit from the University of Tennessee, we recruit from Tennessee Tech, and we try to recruit or at least put some weight on engineers that have participated in some of these outside extracurricular activities like the Baja programs and the different projects on the outside, we look for a natural interest in mechanical things because we’re a very hands-on organization. And so I think, for me, I’ve got a lot of people who are more mechanical, way smarter than I am when it comes to mechanical design. My skill set is more broad. I love the world of business. I read lots of business books. The common denominator between engineering and business is the language of math. I love math. That is something that’s always been a kind of a natural thing for me. so, you know, the world of business comes very natural as well when it comes to just kind of understanding basic concepts. But I think that’s, you know, if I said I had to add those things on, those things are kind of, they’re just kind of natural. They’re just kind of natural interest areas for me, per se.

ADAMS (24:26)

All right, Jeff, can you give us an example of when you had to use your leadership skills?

BOHANAN (24:30)

I would say recently, it’s hard to believe it’s been close to five years now, but during COVID, pretty big crisis. It’s interesting. had made a keynote speech at one of our industry events in 2020, in February of 2020. And three weeks after I gave that keynote, which was on basically having an abundance mindset, we were confronted with the COVID crisis and I had to basically live up to the sermon that I had preached at that keynote. was basically, and I’ve always enjoyed for an entrepreneur, chaos is a unique opportunity. And I actually did, I mean, legitimately get excited when I realized that there was going to be a lot of that, that we were in this world of, of chaos and a lot of people got really fearful. And to be quite candid, I got, I really got energized out of that situation. Obviously I did have some fears. It seemed like the whole world shut down there for a brief period of time and we didn’t know if we were going to make another boat. But the long story short, it didn’t take that long. We started seeing down in Florida, we started seeing the boating industry taking off down there because it was starting, it was warmer down there during March timeframe. And so we started seeing a bunch of people get out. So we started having this kind of a little bit of an insight is, Hey, this, actually could flip the other direction and this could be a big boom for the boating industry. as it turns out, it was a big boom for the boating industry. Um, but, but I had to navigate all of that, all that chaos and even communication with our team.

We sent our employees home for two weeks. And so we started this, what we called a CRO video, these PTO, I it’s what I call it, Chief Reminding Officer videos, where the CEO is basically responsible for continually reminding the troops, what the culture is, what we stand for. And so a lot of people were now operating remotely. So I was having to communicate through videos and try to get people, you know, restore their confidence because everybody was really nervous. And I just kept saying, Hey, you know, when we get to the other side of this, it’s going to be good. It’s going to be good. And so I just, I just, you know, had to lead through that chaos. You know, more recently, because we had such a boom time during COVID, the industry overstocked. made too many boats because by the time we got our production processes up, to where we could make the number of boats that we thought were being needed, we were overproducing and interest rates started to rise and dealers started building a lot of inventory. And so for the last year, we’ve been navigating through a marine industry downturn. Last year we were down about 20%. The industry was probably down close to 30 % and just navigating through that. Now that required…

A lot of CEOs would have laid off a lot of their employees had that been typical corporate America. But I think I could see that. I knew that it would turn around eventually. And I also know that it’s really hard to hire good people. We chose basically to make zero net income in 2024 so that we could position ourselves to make profit, to maximize our situation for 2025.

So we played the long game and chose not to lay people off. We did allow some attrition to happen, we, you know, having to lead through that process. think a lot of that is just boils down to having the courage to make that commitment. learned. I’ve kind of always operated with this framework, but I had a coach, business coach few years ago actually give this framework some words. And he talked about this.

Four C’s process where you make a commitment, you move forward with courage, courage not being the absence of fear, but moving forward in the face of fear. And when you do that, you tend to develop, you tend to stretch yourself and you develop a new capability. And so I think, you know, going through the entrepreneurial, you know, going through, I’ve ran the business now for 27 years and going through all the trials and tribulations, you just develop this ability to realize that the worst days, are followed by some of your best days. And so when you develop that new capability, you get a new sense of confidence, which is kind of the fourth C. So you got basically commitment, courage, capability, confidence. And then when you develop a new sense of confidence, that gives you the confidence to make that next commitment. And so it’s just this iterative process of learning, stretching, learning, committing, growing, and moving forward. that’s how the entrepreneurial world works.

You know, we’re, you have to basically, it’s really, if you compare it to a military, you know, the organized army versus the special forces, it’s a lot more like being in the special forces. You’ve been wearing different hats, you’re having to react to the situation on the ground. And to me, that’s where you need leadership.

ADAMS (29:18)

Yeah, I love both those examples. So the COVID example and then the damp man leading through the downturn and what comes to mind is that you do a lot of your own kind of personal internal mindset work. Like it sounds like that’s just part of your habit, whether you’re reading books or you’re working with a coach, but you do your own internal work and then that helps you to identify what you need to do in terms of like.

What comes to mind is are these videos you were doing? You’re like, look, I know I need to communicate with my team on a high frequency basis during COVID because there’s all this chaos going around. And I’m curious what you do to try to bring people along with you, right? It sounds like you have a lot of personal clarity, but I could imagine in both cases during COVID and then also during the downturn, everybody around you, not everybody around you is going to have that same sense of calm and clarity that you do.

Now they’re going to see you and that’s going to be helpful, but there’s also, I’m sure, proactive work that you have to do to kind of help bring people along. And I’m just curious how you think about that and if there are any additional tactics that you could share with us on top of what you mentioned about around the videos.

BOHANAN (30:25)

Well, mentioned that the CEO of this job really is to be the chief reminding officer to keep everybody focused on the main thing. We developed a few years ago and this, you know, it really came out of my time at Y12 and why I started Protomet. I actually had one of my employees who, prior to working at Protomet, he was a management consultant and we sat down a few years ago at lunch and he’s like, you know, just kind of, let’s talk through why you started Protomet. So I started kind of delineating all these things and it really bowled down to these five core values. And I actually, last year, actually wrote a book that encapsulate these core values. But the core values are all about this kind of five mindsets that allow you to move forward in the world, in a chaotic world. And even coming out of my keynote speech that I that I did for the first time a few years ago. I basically was talking about the accelerating change that we’re having to deal with in the world. And the fact that, you know, one of the illustrations in my keynote, I show this graphic of, you know, 5,000 years we’ve been on a horse. That’s as far as archaeologists kind of go back. They see evidence that we’ve been using a horse for transportation. And really 200 years ago,

It was, I think it was 1820 was the first passenger train. And so we literally got off, we’ve only been off a horse for 200 years. And you look at the history and you obviously have the car and the plane, the jet, now rockets. And so you get this exponential, and that’s the world of atoms, which you have, if you go from just a course to a jet, that’s a 70X multiple in speed, right? But then you when you tack on the world bits and you talk about how fast things can change in the computer world, then it’s just mind boggling. so having a mindset that can address this changing world that we live in, now it’s AI, know? But it’s still just having a mindset that sees the opportunity, the abundance in all that. It’s not, know, a lot of people think that they’re gonna lose things as a result of AI, but the reality is that’s gonna unlock incredible productivity, just like the internet has unlocked incredible productivity and we’re doing things with the internet. We just take it for granted. We don’t even realize that we do things that we could never do prior.

So that’s how the mindsets were developed and articulated. every six to eight weeks in our company, we have an all-hands meeting and where we, you know, I do a state of the industry. I mean, we go through some basic employee information stuff. I have a director of operations that takes care of the front end of the meeting. And then for the last 20 minutes, I will usually try to pick a core value and, you know, maybe find stuff an example where we’ve lived that core value in the last six weeks. And then just kind of put that out there. You have to constantly remind people, one of our core values is that’s hard, good. And so this industry downturn, this time we went through over the last year, all of 2024, we have not paid a bonus out for five straight quarters because we chose to hold on to people and take a little bit less net income, but we’ve cut our cost and we’re in a much better position now that we’ve cut a lot of discretionary costs out of our systems. And we had grown so fast during COVID that we got very bloated and inefficient in a lot of what we did. So this allowed us, because of the hard times we were going through, allowed us to get better. You know, Peter Drucker, I love to read a lot of his stuff, but he says, you know, a business doesn’t necessarily need to get bigger, but it always needs to get better. And so we use that as an opportunity to get better. And so this quarter, I just literally yesterday announced for the first time, we are paying out a quarterly bonus because, I tried to use that as an opportunity to communicate, hey, you we chose to stay the course during the hard times and now this is your bonus based on executing, you know, continuing to do what you can control. A lot of things were out of our control.

In the economy, but we did what we could control. so just using, honestly, if you do not have the hard times, it actually is more challenging to lead. Because I have found that when things are going pretty well, they don’t really need me to speak into the situation. It’s when things turn south that they kind of look, say, what do you think about this? And so I kind of welcome that a little bit that it gives me the opportunity to speak into the situation.

ADAMS (35:03)

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

BOHANAN (35:07)

Think any time you can take an opportunity to put your hand up and volunteer for a leadership role, doesn’t need to be technical in nature. you can be… I got a lot of my early experience I’ve mentioned, doing magic shows for kids, working with youth. I’ve worked in some youth ministries over the years and a lot of those situations just gave me a natural opportunity to  be in a leadership position. Some people think they have to wait to be asked to be a leader. I have found from high school, college days that people are just waiting for somebody to stand up and be a leader. And I find that the person that has a list, you’re in a group of people and you literally just start writing a list of things that we’re talking about, people will naturally look to you like you’re in charge. And so, that comes from going camping with a bunch of guys who wouldn’t even make a list of things to bring. Turns out I was the only guy that showed up with everything I was supposed to have. then naturally the next time you end up being the leader. So just put yourself out there. I know that a lot of times I’m speaking as a certified introvert. A lot of engineers tend to be a little bit introverted.

It may be a little bit uncomfortable to put yourself out there, but I would advise you just to do it. You know, just do it. You have, as an engineer, your attention to detail and your critical thinking skills are invaluable when it comes to leadership. And so you have a lot of what it takes. The one thing you might be missing potentially is confidence. And that just takes, you know, that just takes reps. And I’ve made lots of mistakes, you know,

I’ve gotten out there, stuck my neck out and, you know, have been embarrassed. I’ve had some very embarrassing situations where I maybe, you know, took a wrong turn, but that’s how you want. Yeah, that’s how you learn. So that’s, that’s what I would say when it comes to, you know, trying to pursue leadership opportunities is take every opportunity you can get.

ADAMS (37:02)

All right, Jeff, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us.

BOHANAN (37:05)

Thank you, Angelique, I really enjoyed it, thoroughly enjoyed it.