The Two-Week Effect: A Friendship that Shaped our Culture

Carl Douglass (00:00):

You’ve been here for two weeks, every year, for the last 10 years.

Justin Hildebrandt (00:03):

Yeah, at least.

Carl Douglass (00:04):

I almost feel like sometimes we are on a foreign planet. You model DI Lab’s values and our Solutionology approach.

Justin Hildebrandt (00:12):

Solutionology, to me, is a constant drive to do better, to focus on what’s important and what really matters and where the gains can be made.

Carl Douglass (00:20):

I think people that look at us from the outside, they’re like, “Man, all you do is work.” But it’s like, it’s not work if you enjoy it this much, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing than what we’re doing because of the experience that we get from that. Solutionology is about being unyielding with perseverance to get to the solution.

Speaker 3 (00:39):

To not give up and to constantly drive for better. So, even when we deliver 100%, I want to deliver 110 next time.

Brian Douglass (00:46):

And for me, the constraints of that project are the most important because that’s what drives us to a solution. It’s all about painting a picture and getting all the details in.

Carl Douglass (00:54):

How do we develop a tool that helps share our journey, educate others, and bring more light to the realities of additive manufacturing? That’s Solutionology Podcast.

(01:08):

Welcome to the Solutionology Podcast. This episode is going to be an interesting one. We’ve got a great guest, Justin’s here joining us. And Justin’s not a customer, he’s not a supplier, he’s not a team member, he’s actually much more than that. He’s been part of the team with DI Labs since the very beginning in two-week segments every year. So, it’ll be an interesting perspective because he’s seen so much and it’s happened so quickly. So, we’re going to be talking to Justin about his experiences, getting some feedback from him, and this is really an inward look at DI Labs, looking at us from the inside and also from an outsider. I don’t want to call you an outsider, but sort of from an outsider’s perspective, someone who’s not in the business every single day. So, that’ll be a great, great opportunity to share some of our culture and just the way that we operate. So welcome, Justin. Thanks for joining us.

Justin Hildebrandt (02:02):

Thanks, Carl. It’s good to be here.

Brian Douglass (02:04):

It always starts off as a two-week segment, but we find every way we can to drag that on to four, six weeks, whatever we can, because it’s always a pleasure to be working with Justin, to have you there with us problem-solving. It’s just such a joy, because it’s part of our core team and the way we do things.

Carl Douglass (02:23):

So Justin, you’re an airplane pilot, an aircraft pilot, and you’ve been in the military, so you’re a serviceman. Thank you for your service. And you also have a storied professional history working with, in some cases, with Brian through various parts of your career before we started DI Labs. And then I’ll let you share a little bit more of it because there’s a lot of history there.

Brian Douglass (02:52):

Yeah, Justin, since we’ve met, we’ve always been pulling each other towards the other side as we’ve found opportunities and as we’ve found places to work, it’s been fun to have that gravitational pull when things aren’t going well for one of us, it’s the other one pulling the other ahead. That’s really cool. That’s where we’ve been able to learn so much from one another, help push each other forward. So, that’s been part of the journey of how we got here.

Justin Hildebrandt (03:20):

And what a journey it’s been.

Brian Douglass (03:21):

Yeah.

Carl Douglass (03:22):

You’ve been here literally since day one of the endeavor that we kicked off. I remember you helping us remodel the horse barn. The very first step was the cleansing.

Justin Hildebrandt (03:34):

Yes.

Carl Douglass (03:35):

And I still remember the visual of you helping with that, but maybe you could share just a little bit about your background, your passions and what you’re doing as your full-time job, non-DI Labs, full-time job these days.

Justin Hildebrandt (03:48):

I’m a crop duster and agricultural aerial applicator. It’s a really fun job. My dad does the same thing and I grew up around it my whole life. Took FFA in high school, got my basic shop skills there and on the farm that my parents have. That really set the foundation. FFA gave me the basis for some leadership opportunities and training. The combination of that and a hunger to learn, born of wanting to learn those shop skills and from my parents really set the stage for who I turned into or who I think I turned into. Obviously, I chose to follow in dad’s footsteps and pursue the flying. It’s been incredibly rewarding. You could say it’s like golf, I guess. You want to have every swing be the same and every swing is a little bit different and the nuance of those are what makes it tough. So, it requires a lot of attention to the fine points and the fine details every minute of every day and it’s exciting in that way. It’s not just NASCAR style flying left turns.

Carl Douglass (04:45):

You’ve had a really wide-ranging experience before your joining the military, after you joined the military and before you got your pilot’s license and became… So, what types of things have you explored in your career? Where did you find joy? Where did you find areas that weren’t a fit for you?

Justin Hildebrandt (05:09):

The senior year of high school, after I graduated, I got what I would call an internship with the local machinist. We’ve got a lot of natural gas driven engine irrigation in our area, and so there’s a local machine shop that services those engines and the pumps and everything else. I called down and asked if they needed a summer employee and they said yes, and that gave me the introduction to precision. Most of that machining was done to the nearest 10,000th of an inch, so three zeros and a one potentially. That was where I got my first taste of doing things right and paying really, really close attention to how it was done and the temperature it was done and if there was grid on the measurement tool. And I really enjoyed that. I went to Colorado State for a year for mechanical engineering and that was definitely not a good fit at that time in my life. I would love to go back and learn some of that stuff, but it’s more fun so far to learn on the fly than it is to sit down in the classroom again. Calculus just hurts.

Carl Douglass (06:03):

It hurts everybody.

Justin Hildebrandt (06:04):

It does. So, after that year at Colorado State, I got a job at a company called Firewall Forward in Loveland, Colorado and applied some of that same engine knowledge I did, but this time to aircraft engines. I was working under someone else’s AMP, I was not an aircraft mechanic in the legal sense, but someone was supervising my work and checking everything and I continued to learn more about how to repeatedly do things right. Knowing that those engines were going to go fly gave me good reason to make sure I did it right, because I didn’t want anything coming back on me or the person whose license I was working under or the business. I mean, there’s many livelihoods riding on that.

(06:42):

When the economy downturned, I was one of the first laid off. I was last in, first out, basically. I wound up working at ENGEL. Some point during this I had Brian get a job at Firewall and he came and worked for a bit. Then he wound up getting a different job at a automotive place. When the economy was downturned the Firewall Forward was struggling to keep me on and some of the measures they were taking meant that I had to look for a different job and Brian was kind enough to help me find that job at the place he was working. I picked up some extra hours there. And then when I was laid off from the aviation job, the automotive full-time was not a good fit. I was not good as a full-time maintenance technician in that way, just hammering stuff out. I was prone to overlooking things. Where I was so used to doing things with precision, I was also used to having time to make sure I did them right and I couldn’t translate that to the automotive stuff very well.

Carl Douglass (07:38):

So, the output and the expectation was really high output.

Justin Hildebrandt (07:40):

Yeah. The expectation was output with accuracy but not being hyper accurate, which is I was used to fixating on making sure I got it right and doing it once and saving time by not having to do it twice or triple check, double checking correctly instead of triple checking later was where I was saving time in the aviation world.

Brian Douglass (07:58):

I think through all those processes or all the opportunities that we’ve worked together, you said it, you’ve got a hunger to learn. And then you’ve got a hyper fixation on high tolerance, high precision operations, and what’s been really neat is if you were to list out the pieces of equipment that you were trained on, you learned and then you optimize through Firewall Forward and through your machining, any of your machining operations, I would guess that there’s, for those companies that you worked for, they were blown away by how quickly you expanded your capabilities in an area.

(08:42):

And I remember very specifically when you’d be grabbing pistons at Firewall Forward in preparation for having them set up for an engine, you’d weigh them two or three times and you’d have them balanced and set side by side, “These go together, we can’t mix them up. These pistons go with these cylinders and we can’t mix these up. And these rings, they have to all live with one another.” It’s like they’re serialized in your mind. And you’ve carried that practice forward with everything you get into. Every piece of equipment that you touch, it’s that same sort of precision and comprehension that you own and that’s magic.

Carl Douglass (09:20):

It sure is, and that’s something that looking back at, you’re at DI Labs essentially two weeks a year, every year, and that’s been a thing that we’ve had in place, that you’ve been doing for how many years now?

Justin Hildebrandt (09:34):

About 2014. Well, 2013, excuse me. That’s when it all kicked off, right?

Carl Douglass (09:39):

So it was the very beginnings. You’ve been here for two weeks, every year, for the last 10 years.

Justin Hildebrandt (09:43):

Yeah, at least. Yeah, there was the summer of ’17, I think I was here all summer.

Brian Douglass (09:49):

Yeah.

Justin Hildebrandt (09:49):

And that was wonderful.

Carl Douglass (09:50):

So, we’ve had some special occasions where you’ve joined us for an extended period.

Justin Hildebrandt (09:53):

Yes.

Carl Douglass (09:53):

Well, thinking back to that and then how you’ve applied your experiences, it’s like, so you’ve been here for a total of 20 weeks. If I did the math right, 10 times two. Yeah, I can do the easy math, not the calculus. So, you’ve been here for 20 weeks and the impact that you’ve had feels like multiples of that. You come here every year, it’s like without even missing a beat, you’re back into the mix again. Automating us, helping us automate some of our DI operation, building out the robot for the automation station, and you’re able to step into those things like that, it’s really special. It’s like I really wish that you were able to be on the team all the time because it’s such a joy working with you and just your tenacity, desire to learn and then optimization is like you are the perfect… You model DI Lab’s values and our Solutionology approach. There’s no doubt about it.

Justin Hildebrandt (10:54):

I liken the snapshots that I’ve had those two weeks, I’ve called it to you guys before, the two-week effect. It feels like I’m gone and I do all of the other stuff that I do throughout a year. When I come back, it feels like that’s been two weeks and so much has changed. I mean, sometimes the whole facility is different. Sometimes the stuff that we’re using, the machines and tools are completely gone, you’ve gone a generational leap ahead. That has been amazing to see, but there is consistency in it too.

(11:30):

Each time I come back, I can expect to find you and your team collectively focused on the next set of goals, the next generation of goals. How are we better serving customers? What are we doing for those customers? It started out with D3D? I think was really my first involvement. It was produce these things, to meet the campaign, to send to the customer and it’s grown so much since then, to where the customer might not even know what they need and they can come to you and say, “We think that this is what we need,” and you guys can derive a solution.

(12:07):

And so it’s a generational change each time I show up and it’s really exciting. It’s intoxicating, might be the right word, like addictive to see how that has changed. And as much as I love my day job and flying and all that excitement and protecting the world’s food, fiber and fuel, plug for NAAA there, I really wish that I had two of me that I could consolidate the brains and that I could stay at DI Labs all year, because the stuff you guys work on, the stuff that I get to work on when I’m here is incredibly exciting to me. I have all this knowledge, this essentially fundamental machine knowledge, the foundation of precision and how to operate precision machines and how to make something new. And then the methodology of doing all that repeatedly, I’ve been able to apply, like you said, to some of the stuff that I’ve come into and it’s really rewarding.

(13:00):

I couldn’t just walk into any job and be able to dive in and accomplish something right away. I can do that with you guys because of the culture that you set and because of the tools you provide and because of the learning you foster. Solutionology, to me, it’s like a hyper distilled, if you can imagine it, version of Lean Six Sigma, which I had just tangential exposure to, but the constant drive to do better, to focus on what’s important and what really matters and where the gains can be made. And then to hone in on that and then execute. That is your Solutionology. The customer might not even know what they need and you’re able to not just figure that out but then drive them to success with it. And I get to watch that in two-week snapshots. I don’t necessarily face those customers, but I see what’s going on behind the scenes to make it happen. See the steps that are taken to make sure that it’s attained and the focus is incredible.

Carl Douglass (13:54):

It’s really difficult to communicate the significance of what that means to others who haven’t experienced it. And I almost feel like sometimes we are on a foreign planet and I’d say it’s a lot like your experience transitioning from the aircraft mechanical focus to the automotive mechanical focus. Where the aircraft, it’s like time doesn’t matter as much as precision, lives matter here and that’s what matters. And then the automotive, it’s like let’s just get them out the door as fast as possible. This is an assembly line. Get them out the door as fast as possible. If they have to come back, we’ll do it again as fast as possible. We’ve got the time component, so we’re working as fast as we can, but we’re really focused on the quality and attention to detail because that’s what matters. And the feeling is that if we can do it right with focused on the solution and do it reasonably fast, that’s better than doing it too fast than having to rework something.

Brian Douglass (14:53):

And our father said, “If you can’t afford to do it once, how are you going to afford to do it twice?” That’s hammered into me. I don’t know.

Carl Douglass (15:04):

Hammered is a good way to put it too. For all those that are listening, not actually hammered, but there was some brute force. So, thinking about DI Labs and your experiences elsewhere in the professional world, what advice would you give to someone who was looking at DI Labs or for anybody that thought they wanted to join the team, what advice would you give them?

Justin Hildebrandt (15:39):

If they wanted to join the team, I would tell them to show up hungry and ready to learn and ready to contribute, to have ideas, to share those ideas. I’ve voiced some things and they haven’t always been great ideas, but they might’ve spawned the next great idea, change the way someone’s thinking, expedite the Solutionology process where instead of having with, I mentioned the Lean Six Sigma before, then my understanding is it’s this very rote running through the process and then you repeat the process and then you repeat the process. This is more like the hyper-expedited version where you are brainstorming rapidly and thinking about the next thing and then something sticks and you run with it and then someone else brings something up and it’s like, “Well, that’s terrible, but that does make me think,” and that’s the next idea that sticks and you just keep iterating until you have the solution.

Carl Douglass (16:27):

I think what’s interesting about the way we approach what we do every day, regardless of what it is, is that we’re always hungry. We’re hungry at our jobs, we’re hungry in our lives, we’re hungry for knowledge and being able to do something newer or better. That’s a distinction that’s really important. It’s like if you don’t have this desire of hunger as part of your core being, it’s going to be hard for you to switch that on when you come to work because it’s just not part of who you are. That’s something that I really appreciate, I’ve always appreciated about you, is just this desire, this hunger, this desire to learn and do better and be excellent and that’s what makes you a great pilot or what makes you a great team member at DI Labs. It’s what makes you a great human and you’re always pushing for things to be better.

Brian Douglass (17:19):

It’s not just a one-way street, it’s just not us saying, “Do it this way,” or, “What about this idea?” It’s the back and forth, because we change the way each other thinks and then that’s the evolution that occurs.

Justin Hildebrandt (17:31):

Yes. That evolution of the way you think on the fly, that that’s probably a better way to say what Solutionology is to me.

Brian Douglass (17:39):

I think a lot of this stems back to and the way that our families interact. What is together time like for family growing up? And I know that every time that I would visit your family out on the farm, it’s always about the project. Maybe I forced it, maybe I didn’t, but it feels like there’s always these projects to accomplish. And the best way for us to engage with one another, with your dad, with your mom, it’s about taking on that project and it’s like you get to work with someone else, you get to learn, you get to talk about the day. And that’s kind of how we operate at DI too.

Carl Douglass (18:16):

Yeah, we see the world, everybody sees the world differently, but we see the world differently with respect to how we look at our contributions and work, for example. And one of the main reasons that we started the business wasn’t to do 3-D printing. It probably really wasn’t to do engineering. Those are things we are good at and we like doing, but it was so that we could be among peers who care, who want to make a difference and can benefit, can grow in knowledge. And that’s why DI Labs exists. And it just so happens that we use that inner power, whatever it is, to do 3-D printing and to do product development, but really we exist so that we could be among team members like yourself, like Brian, who we’re in it to really learn and make a difference. We want to make something with a short time that we’ve got here.

(19:11):

And not to get too philosophical, but that’s really important. It’s not to make money. That’s fuel that has to drive the business forward, but that’s not the endgame for us. We’re not here to have fancy things. We’re here to work with high-performing individuals, to make a difference and have fun. For me, I think people that look at us from the outside are like, “Man, all you do is work,” but it’s like it’s not work if you enjoy it this much. There’s so much learning that happens all the time that it’s like, I think your experience here, you’re having fun. This isn’t a job that you’re going to because you’re looking to get paid. This is something that’s an experience that’s pretty special. And there are tough days at work sometimes, but man, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing than what we’re doing because of the experience that we get from that.

Justin Hildebrandt (20:07):

The chance to go and work with you guys and the rest of the team, to interact with them, to see how they approach problems, what bothers them and like you said, high-performing individuals, that’s exceptional. It is wonderful to work around a group of people who have distilled their surroundings to that point, that it is just an absolute joy.

Carl Douglass (20:31):

Agreed. And that’s a really long way of saying, reflecting on what Brian said, and that is, you make us better. That goes full circle. We all make each other better, but there’s no doubt about it that you make us better.

Justin Hildebrandt (20:43):

Thank you.

Carl Douglass (20:44):

Well, it really is, it’s always been a true pleasure having you join us for these two weeks, every year, for the last 10 years, and look forward to that being many more years moving forward. And your contributions are significant, your approach is very special, and it’s what you do matters. And I appreciate you very much, so thank you for being a part of what we’re doing. It’s all the way back from the very beginning.

Justin Hildebrandt (21:12):

Thank you for having me all these times and teaching and mentoring me along the way. Giving me an opportunity to learn and fostering the environment to do it in, has been a real treat and it’s a privilege to know you both for it.

Carl Douglass (21:25):

And thank you for adopting us additional three brothers through Brian.

Justin Hildebrandt (21:30):

I couldn’t think of better chosen family, not in the least.

Brian Douglass (21:34):

There’s no doubt that all your efforts that you’ve put in, they’ve had a significant impact on the way we do business today. So, it’s like they’re compounding and they continue to grow and that’s part of the magic. You’ve left behind a legacy at DI Labs of the work that you’ve done and put in.