Everyday Business Problems

Most manufacturers did not decide to be invisible. They grew on referrals, landed a handful of customers who covered the bills, and never had to explain themselves to a stranger. Dave Crysler sits down with Curt Anderson, founder of B2Btail and author of Stop Being the Best Kept Secret, to talk about how that quiet approach stopped working and what to do about it. Along the way they get into the part most marketing conversations sk...

In 2009, Dave Crysler was a brand new general manager who had just cleaned up the worst quality problem of his career. He got his boss on the phone, walked him through the investigation, the retraining, the new documentation, and the signed training records. His boss asked four words in response, and Dave didn't have an answer. In this solo episode, Dave breaks down what happened when they finally tested their fix, why it failed a ...

Dave Crysler welcomes back Damon Pistulka, co-founder of Exit Your Way, to cut through the noise around AI in small and mid-market businesses. Damon downloaded and tested more than 50 AI tools before landing on what actually changes an operation, and it wasn't any of the apps filling his Instagram feed. The two get into where AI genuinely expands what a business can do, where it is flat out the wrong tool, and why the lever points ...

Dave Crysler sits down with Mike O'Neill, founder of Bench Builders and host of the Get Unstuck and On Target podcast. After 25 years in corporate HR, Mike coaches senior leaders who need more than a sounding board, and trains the first-line supervisors most companies promote without ever preparing. Together they dig into why the top of the org chart is the most isolated seat in the building, and why the biggest leadership payoff l...

Dave Crysler has walked nearly a hundred plant floors over the last 30 years, and most of them have the ghost of a dead 5S program somewhere: faded tape outlines, a shadow board missing half its tools, an audit sheet nobody has touched in years. In this episode, he breaks down why these programs die at the Sustain step and why the failure has almost nothing to do with your team's discipline. Both the consultants selling cleanup bli...

Dave Crysler unpacks what really determines the price of a business at exit, drawing on years spent on the buyer's side of acquisitions. Two owners with the same earnings can sell for wildly different numbers, and the difference has nothing to do with product, customers, or market. It comes down to whether the business runs without the owner, and buyers price that risk before the offer ever hits the table.

What You'll Discover:

• W...

A client of Dave's had an incredible first quarter, then one of the worst months on their recent record. In this episode, Dave Crysler breaks down what almost always happens the week after a bad month: the panic pivot, where leadership changes everything at once and calls it decisiveness. He unpacks why changing too many things simultaneously destroys your baseline, why constant course corrections read as fear to your team, and how...

Every operator says they want to be more efficient, and Dave Crysler argues that's exactly the wrong goal. In this solo episode he unpacks the one-word distinction that quietly holds most operations back, the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, and why nearly 30 years on the shop floor taught him that the two are not the same thing. He walks through why the localized efficiency we're all trained to chase can look like ...

Every business is already running on a system. The only question is whether anybody actually designed it. In this solo episode, Dave Crysler breaks down the difference between running by design and running by default, and why the problems that keep coming back are not bad luck or bad people. They are the designed output of a system nobody chose. Dave explains how default systems quietly accrete over time, why y...

Dave Crysler sits down with Greg Harrod, a 30-year manufacturing leader and Certified Working Genius facilitator, to unpack a pattern that quietly drains operations teams: the most dependable person on the floor is often the closest to burnout. Because leaders trust their best people, they keep handing them more, until reliable becomes overloaded and the resignation nobody saw coming lands on the desk. Greg and Dave dig into why it...

Before anybody on your team makes a sale, builds a product, or delivers a service, they are logging into tools, running reports, and trying to piece together what to do next. Dave Crysler calls this admin overhead, the hidden time tax of figuring out what the work is before anyone can actually do it. In this solo episode, he breaks down how to flip the model: instead of making people pull information out of your systems, you push t...

Every operations leader has heard the advice: capture your tribal knowledge before it walks out the door, write the SOP, get it out of people's heads. Dave Crysler breaks down why that advice keeps failing, and it is not the part you think. The hard part was never writing the document. It is pulling the knowledge out of the person in the first place, and that is the gap nobody talks about. Dave walks through a ...

Dave Crysler built his own AI email tool. He also tells clients not to build their own software. In this episode, he resolves the contradiction and lays out the honest skill ledger behind a build that costs three dollars a month to run, processes fifty to a hundred marketing emails a day, and required twenty years of self-taught coding background plus the one skill almost everyone underestimates: process clarity.

What You'll Discov...

A couple of weeks ago Dave Crysler sat in on a monthly leadership meeting where a metric on the dashboard was lying. The team caught it in fifteen minutes and changed how they measured. That moment is the entire problem with most manufacturing leadership dashboards. In this solo episode, Dave breaks down the difference between metrics that report the news and KPIs that drive action, why most weekly leadership meetings feel like the...

Most leaders feel capacity tight and immediately start writing a job description. Dave Crysler pushes back on that reflex in this solo episode, drawing on a recent client engagement where synchronizing manufacturing flow more than doubled throughput, cut lead times from weeks to four days, and dropped work-in-process to almost nothing. The team got smaller during this period, not larger, because natural attrition was not backfilled...

Two customers ordered the same bolt. The ERP treated both as custom-engineered transactions, kicking off two full procurement loops that never needed to happen. The team built spreadsheets to compensate. Leadership wanted a new system. In this solo episode, Dave Crysler walks through a real mid-market manufacturing case study where the ERP was doing exactly what it was configured to do, and the configuration was wrong for the busin...

Dave Crysler unpacks why most change initiatives die on the shop floor and the sequence that makes them actually stick. Most rollouts answer one of three questions, sometimes two. Almost never all three, in the right order. Why, What, and How aren't just questions to cover in a kickoff deck. They're a non-negotiable sequence, and most leaders run them backwards.

In this solo episode, Dave breaks down the failure mode he sees every ...

Most of the conversation around owner dependency in manufacturing happens through the lens of an exit. Buyers discount your business, your valuation suffers, your retirement plans take a hit. In this solo episode, Dave Crysler reframes the conversation. For founder-led manufacturers, owner dependency is a today problem first, an exit problem second. He breaks down what it actually looks like up close, why documenting your processes...

Dave Crysler wraps the three-part series with Cody Fisher, President of Concordance Innovations, on transforming the healthcare supply chain. This episode zooms out to the bridge between today's operations and what's next, the leadership mindset required to stay nimble in a landscape changing by the hour, and why the real constraint on innovation isn't capability anymore. It's prioritization.

What You'll Discover:

• Why "can we" is...