Scaling Smart: Jared Probst on Transforming an Industry with Rapid Axis | Ep. 195
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Today we have Jared Probst. And Jared, you are the founder and president of Rapid Access. You are doing some first of its kind things. We were just talking about a launch coming up of something that's going to be game changing. You've

You've also been in business and created this yourself. And I love to hear about your story, your learnings, everything. But you have a quick-term manufacturing company, and you specialize in fabrication of components across various industries. So, Jared, how did you get started with this company, and why did you choose this industry? Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So, I can give you the long story, but we only have 15 minutes, so I'll

kind of reduce it. But, but I was born into manufacturing. My stepfather had a machine shop in Mountain View, California. It was mostly life sciences products. So I took a summer job for him and ended up taking on drafting. After some time, we sold that company to a, to a German manufactured company and I moved into sales and,

not related to the industry. Eventually I was poached by a sales company, a manufacturing company for sales role. And I mean, the rest is history. I ended up becoming an executive. I ended up becoming sales leadership. My last company, I was the head of sales there. So ultimately I always had the idea for Rapid Access since my late twenties. It just took me a while to get the capital together and launch it. So when you transition from having a job

to being a founder, it's like having a steady paycheck or a paycheck, depending on, you know, the sales commissions to possibly not having a check at all. How,

How was that feeling? So I was very lucky in that I married well. I married the love of my life. She was very supportive. She also has an excellent lucrative career. So she was supportive of me in that regard. The capital I had to start the business was money that I'd saved for roughly 15 years because I had the idea for Rapid Access when I was in my late 20s. So I had a long runway also.

There was a period of time though, I won't kid you that, that I was, I think I was seven or eight months in where I drained my account balances with costs. And, and we were very close to running out of money. But at like, like within about a week of that time, after all the stress I had, the invoices started getting paid and we've never had a cashflow issue since. Well,

which I'm happy to say. What you're saying is so common. I've been through it. Other people have been through it. That is why I think it's very hard for everyone to be an entrepreneur.

What traits do you think that you would say somebody needs to have to be successful in business? Well, I think ultimately the major advantage that I had was that I had the sales background. And in this industry specifically, as well as many others, it's not enough to just open your door and say that you're open for business. You have to go out and actually get the accounts, right?

So, um, so I, I have, I'm very well networked in the Bay area with manufacturing companies, competitors, partners alike. Right. Um, the one issue they always have is obtaining the actual opportunity. The, the companies nearby, they don't come to them. They don't come looking for it. Right. Right. So, um, so I had a system that I developed that worked very well for me at other companies. As far as how I sold, I did the same exact thing for rapid access. So we're able to get leads in the door.

Um, the second thing, um, I would say is that you need to pay attention to your books. Your cashflow is everything. If you're not invoicing on time, you're not collecting on time. If your margins aren't right, you have to constantly be paying attention to these things. Right. So, so, um, so while I do have some engineering background because of my experience with my father's company, it's been the sales and accounting side that really has made this company healthy. Sales could be the most important thing that people learn. Maybe you could maybe group marketing into the sales side. Um,

I'm with you. If you don't know sales, I like though that you found not just a problem. You know, many times people are solving a problem and that's the company they start. But if you see a problem in the sales side and you can solve that exponential, what makes you a great salesperson? Oh man. I mean, I don't know. You flatter me by saying I'm a great salesperson. I think really I can be an active listener.

Like, like this is a consultative industry, right? It's not, it's not, it is, it is a commodity. The customer has to buy it from somewhere, right? But they have, they have many options. They could go overseas. They could go to, go to the shop down the street. Ultimately, we, we're very good at listening to what the customer's after, what they want. But, but more than that, like, like I'm not afraid to knock on doors. I'm not afraid to make cold calls.

And that's been a huge hurdle for anybody in sales. Like pick up the phone. You have to. And on the marketing side, can you generate sales for marketing? Absolutely. We do too. But it's outreach. It's not SEO and PPC that's making the money here. It's us actually doing cold hours to people over social media as well as email. So it's got to be done. That's the uncomfortable step, but it is the first step in getting the contact and generating leads. It's so easy to think,

listening, all you have to do is listen to the customer or client and they will tell you what they need. But yet it's so hard for people to do that. So when you're looking, let's say for whether it be in a sales associate, I'm just making up titles, but like, you know, let's say base level salesperson or maybe even a sales leader,

Are there certain things that you're looking for when you're hiring for that position? Yeah, I mean, generally for us, because we do have the technical aspect of the engineering fabrication side, we want somebody who's had a little bit of experience in that area. But outside of that, what I'm looking for is account hunters, right? These aren't people that are used to sitting at a desk and fielding warm leads. Now, our publicly traded competitors, they have a huge online presence. They can spend a million dollars a month on PPC and SEO. We don't have that luxury, right? Like we're still classified as a small business.

So, um, so the people that I hire, it's, it is, it's industry knowledge. They need to know who to call and when to call them. That having been said to my reps that are, that have done very well for themselves, all they had was the cold call side. And that's all it took. You know, they had the willingness to learn the technical side and then the willingness to make the cold calls to make it happen. So, and they've both done very well for themselves. So I'm happy for them. Oh, thank you for sharing that. Uh, not everyone could do it. It,

It's true. Not everyone can do it. Surprise. I'm with you. I came from that background, too. I had an outdoor sales job for one day, 24 hours. I quit. I couldn't handle it. It's a very specific person. But thank you for sharing that. So let's talk about how you are competing with these publicly traded companies. I think a lot of people out there with whatever company they have, they're in that boat.

They have competitors who have been doing it longer.

who have more money to spend, who are larger corporations? How do you compete with them? So the first thing I would say that makes Rapid Access kind of special as an organization when compared to our publicly traded competitors is that we have a real focus on customer service and customer care, right? This might be a benefit of having a company built by somebody who is formerly in the executive side on sales, right? Because it's everything to me. We have to communicate effectively. We have to do it quickly.

So I have a team of project managers that sit in the office beneath me. One of the KPIs we track for them is email response rate. So they typically reply to emails on an average of 15 minutes. That could even just be a confirmation. Your emails received are working on it, right? Technical questions can take hours, sometimes a business day to answer, but at least the person knows they're being taken care of. The biggest issue that we hear from our customers about what our publicly traded competitors are doing is post-service support.

Right. You've you've shipped the components to your customer. They have questions. They might need a material certificate. They might have a question about an inspection or a feature that wasn't that wasn't done perfectly or to their specifications or whatever. Right. Many of our competitors will take days or even weeks or reply.

In our case, they're going to get a response in 15 minutes confirming that we've received the question. And then it might be a business day, but that's much faster than anybody else. Right. So now on on on the economics of pricing, we periodically will analyze our competitor pricing. We're almost always around 30 percent beneath the the the I would say equivalent services. Right.

So, um, so we know that we're, that we're cost competitive. Um, we don't have the pressure of private equity or venture capital dictating how we price things and how we do things. Right. Which is very helpful too. Um, and then, um, and then finally, like, like maybe because we don't have that million dollars a month in PPC and SEO spend, we can afford to do prices like this for our customers. So,

So, yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say that's ultimately it. The final thing is that we don't shy away from complexity. There's whole models out there for fabrication that are focused on just taking easy, quick work, right? As soon as our customers get out of prototype, we support prototype. As soon as they get into low-volume production and they have high tolerance, high technical requirements,

They want material search and traceability. They want finishing certificates, all this stuff. We can support it all. We still can support it all. If we have to do custom tooling, we'll do custom tooling. You know, so it's very much the organization is very bespoke to the customer's requirement.

We have, you know, just as an example, like we do, we work with Rivian for prototyping and we've done some low volume production for them. Their standards and specifications of requirement are totally different than, say, a Thermo Fisher or a Raytheon. Right. So so so we've been able to tailor the customer's experience on the back end based off of what their corporation needs.

Yeah, thank you for sharing. I think a lot of the things that you said can be related to even industries that are completely different around the customer service. You know, there's been, I think, a downtrend in larger corporations, just how people feel with when working with them. It sounds like something like what you do is it's very complex.

So the more touch points, you know, having the email, your requirements of timing. I mean, those are great callouts. So thank you for sharing that. I know you're launching instant online quoting, which is going to really separate you from from other competitors the same size of you. You can compete at a bigger level.

with these publicly traded companies. Can you talk about that? And then can you also talk about how you look at launching new add-ons or launching new changes to the organization? Yeah, absolutely. So the instant online quoting is very exciting for us because we will be one of the few companies that's not publicly traded that offers this functionality. The name Rapid Access is all about speed, right? Rapid, not slow access. So...

So being able to offer our customers same day, immediate online pricing for items that they are hot for, I mean, this should be huge. Our largest competitors offer this as well. So I'm very excited about that. Later down the road, I could see more functionality on the backend. I would like to see

a white glove sign in site for customers where they're able to go in, they're able to see their past orders as well as the current order process, things like that make reordering easily easier for them. So that's something that we've been talking about and considering as well. I'm just a big fan of automation in general. I've adopted the use of chat GPT in my daily work workflow. I'm sure you probably have too, right? And anything I can do to streamline our existing processes by using AI tools is

we're doing it now if I know how, and if I don't know how yet, we're looking at things that we can do, you know? So I just think it's going to get faster and faster and faster. Um, speed to market for customer products is going to be even better and even quicker. And, um, you know, hopefully I'll stick it to the big guys while I'm at it. I'm just an AI avatar created by chat GBT. So there you go, man. Not even human. I,

How are you leveraging these tools? Is there something, you know, whether it's sales or marketing, is there something specifically that you can talk about around how you are leveraging them? And I find it interesting because you're in an industry that I'm guessing doesn't normally take on technology. You know, there's a lot of these industries that don't normally move very quickly into technology. And

And I find it very interesting how they are leveraging AI. There is a lot of resistance, especially in manufacturing. I'm 43 years old and I'm a young manufacturing CEO, right? Most of these CEOs are in their 60s or approaching retirement. So...

So there is a lot of slow adoption. But in our case with ChatGPT, I've at least begun using it for SEO purposes. So we have used it to write some blog, some content for us, which I've gone back and modified to make sure that it's accurate as well as not going to raise any red flags of Google, right? We've used it for creating email sequence threads, which then go get personalized by the rep so that it has your personality in it.

I've also really lately, this has been an immense cost saving for me. I've been using it for legal regulatory questions.

So, so, um, a lot, there's a lot of regulation or industry around aerospace and defense related components. You're able to go ask chat GPT about specific classification codes that are provided by customers, how you can remain compliant and all this stuff. We have gov cloud. We have all these things to keep us compliant, but before we're even entering fabrication or the estimation process, we're able to confirm with chat GPT, what the legal risks are or hurdles around, around a component. So, um,

So, and I'm, um, our expert attorney charges $500 an hour. So that's been a welcome change from Chad GBT. I was just talking to an attorney yesterday about how like the whole, he was showing me an app that he uses now. It's basically like Chad GBT, but for attorneys, um, and it has like all of the data of cases and stuff in his industry in the U S and I'm thinking like, have we

And we were talking, he's like, yeah, my job will probably become obsolete in a few years. Or at least the cost of the service will significantly go down. He's not even doing much work anymore. But no, that is amazing. And thank you for sharing that about how you're leveraging AI and technology. When you look at the next few years of your business, of the industry,

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or business development, something that you're looking to do in the next few years? Ultimately, you know, I have a very specific target for growth, which is 30% year over year for the next three years. That's what we're targeting. We're currently on track for it. So I'm excited by that. I just really want to continue to, I don't have an exit strategy. I have 15 years before my youngest child is in college, right?

So, so my goal for rapid access is to continue to grow the company, continue to grow the capabilities and continue to provide top notch service and quality to our customers. You know, we, we have industry low return rates, RMAs. We have industry high early delivery rates, right? These are all the things that I'm paying attention to and I'm going to continue to pay attention to.

So I just want to keep building a better organization for as long as I possibly can. Listening to you, I can't help but think the quote is,

you know, if you fail to plan, then you plan to fail. I can tell that you have really created, you know, you have KPIs. It sounds like you have some sort of like operating system that, you know, that you work into the business and you really, you know, you have it down to a science. Is there some, is there something that you follow? I know there's a lot of these, you know,

you know, different systems, different business systems, or is there something that you're following? Because you really, it sounds like you really dialed it down to a science. You're more organized operationally around the business where some people are just flying at the seat of their pants. They don't even do KPIs. They're not looking at, you know, 30% year over year. They're not even looking at the future. They're just living it day to day. Yeah. And I mean, I understand that when you're just getting started too, you don't know what the future holds, right? Like,

Now, as a former sales leader, I was always focused on metrics. So the data was obvious to me. Then when we started getting into fabrication as a business, I continued to focus on the metrics, but it's a different context. Right.

Right. So now we now have six years in business. We have a large enough data sample size to where I can I can actually make predictions. I can see where things are going. I can see if there's downward trends on quality. I can see if there's upward trends on quality, all this stuff. So so our tech stack does effectively track all of this. We have an ERP system. It's custom made. Right.

So, so, um, and it's very useful. Um, we use HubSpot for CRM and for marketing, and I recommend HubSpot for any, for any organization that's going to have sales reps or very proactive marketing. I think it's very important. So, um, so the two of these things combined together. And I mean, I mean, I'm able to, to quote like real numbers in real time to my staff, whether they're project management, fabrication, or sales, man, you got down to a science, Jared.

So thank you. I'm excited that you, I got to say operationally, um,

you might be one of the best people that we've interviewed when it comes to that. And we've interviewed, you know, people that have sold a billion dollar company. They didn't even have like the operations down to the science that you do, which I think is highly, you know, it's critical, like for long-term, like you're saying, if you want to have a company and sell it in three, four years, maybe you don't need to, but if you want to have a company that lasts for decades, um,

You have to run it this way. And I super appreciate everything that you shared today. If people want to get in touch with you, they want to find out more, how can they do so? Yeah. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Jared probes is my name. So that's, that's probably the easiest way. Um, I don't want to leave my email address or cell phone number for obvious reasons, but yeah,

But I'm happy to connect. I'm happy to network. I'm happy to talk to other founders and make recommendations around sales for their specific business. So I've been very lucky with my mentors and my coaches in life. So I am willing to pay it forward and give advice for free. Wow. There you go. I'm going to hit you up to be my mentor, Jared. There we go.

You absolutely agree. So people are going to message you about that. But no, this has been really great. Had a fun conversation. Anytime I get to laugh and smile with another guest, I already know it's going to be a fun time. So thank you so much for joining us today on Founders Story. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Take care.

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